The Joe Rogan Experience - #1716 - Steven Rinella

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

Steven Rinella is an outdoorsman, writer, and host of the television series "MeatEater" and its companion podcast. His new audiobook, "MeatEater’s Campfire Stories: Close Calls," is available now.

the Joe Rogan experience the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day do you eat meat tobacco? we're up and rolling I was just telling this story the other day when I was in

I was just telling this story we had a bunch of the guys I work with and this other dude, Jared Outlaw, who are all big dip guys. We were having a conversation about dip. Is Jared the flip-flop flesher? No, no, no. No, that's Seth. That's a guy named Seth.

A lot of the guys I used to work with, or not, a lot of the guys I work with did and do, you know, they're horrible tobacco addicts. Dip. Yeah. Because they're all workers, so they don't smoke because it keeps their hands free. But I was explaining to them my version, and I feel like it traces to when I was in fifth grade, we had to make agricultural maps of the United States of America. And you had to glue the product, so you get to South Dakota you glue like a little corn kernel right yeah put some wheat you know yeah for whatever reason like for Virginia we had tobacco and someone had brought in I can't remember what it

was like must been loose leaf or plug and me and buddy uh i don't know if this dude remembers me my buddy stanley johnson um eight we took it out the playground and ate something and dude i was i was i hallucinated twice as a child once on once when i had to get a root canal um and once when we ate that tobacco i mean i was i was no i was hallucinating what were you seeing i can't remember my mom had to come get me she had to come fetch me from school how old are you a fifth grade oh wow unbelievably sick when i was in i guess it was uh grade, sixth or seventh grade, I really got into Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Yeah. I read all his books. And they were always chewing tobacco, so I bought some. And I tried it and I got very sick, just drool pouring out of my mouth. You know, like you get that that drool yeah that set me off from chewing tobacco i don't know so you were a mark twain fan oh yeah yeah yeah do you have you had your kids read mark twain um no i haven't no no i would though it's a conversation starter it certainly is yeah i mean when you when you find out about i, I don't know how into history they are, but when you just get into the history of people and the history of people in the United States, those books are fascinating books in that regard.

You know, Mark Twain is widely regarded as the first stand-up comedian. Oh, I'd buy that. Yeah, because he used to read his books that were humorous in front of people oh and and people think that that kind of started out the idea of stand-up comedy yeah he was quick-witted too yeah that's good uh and then there's the name mark twain which i learned from you what it meant yeah we covered this all the time yeah it's uh should i share yeah sure share for so well recently there's been some controversy introduced into this, but Mark Twain had worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi.

So he had a very informed perspective for all his characters. A riverboat required 12 feet of water. You know, the big paddle wheel riverboats required 12 feet of water for safe passage so there would be a guy up on the front of the boat who'd have a rope with a weight on the end and every fathom a fathom is a nautical turn for six feet he'd have a knot tied in the rope every fathom and he'd throw the weight out weight hits the bottom and you see how deep the water is. So Mark Twain is second Mark. Which is 12 feet. 12 feet.

So he describes like you're going through the fog or in the dark, and there's some guy up front going, Mark Twain. Some other guy, we recently, someone sent in to us, because we were discussing this on our podcast, and a guy sent us in this book i can't remember who the hell wrote the book but he was saying the real thing is mark twain when he was out i think when he was out visiting one of the silver mines in nevada maybe he took to go into a bar and the bar would log how many drinks you had on a chalkboard okay so it's like your tab in this book this guy was saying what happened was twain whose name was whose birth name is samuel clemens twain would come in and order two drinks by saying mark twain meaning put me down for two marks.

So Twain means two? Two. I'm going to start throwing that around. Yeah, I've never heard that used as two. Have you ever heard anybody use it as two? Is that like a forgotten terminology? I don't know, but I bet Jamie's looking it up right now. I am.

Here it goes. I've been on this show before. That second one came out. That rumor came out. I guess he was still alive, so I guess he responded to it according to this article. What did he say? It's the nom de plume of Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write River News for the New Orleans McCain, and he died in 1963, and he no longer needed that signature. 1863.

So Twain sold it from Twain, from Captain Isaiah Sellers. and he died in 1963 and he could no longer, he no longer needed that signature. 1863. So Twain sold it from Twain, from Captain Isaiah Sellers. He said, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor's remains. That is the history of the nom de pluribere. So he stole it. Interesting. He no longer needed it because the guy was dead. So he took it from a dead guy you die i'm gonna be

like my name is joe rogan interesting interesting so i wanted to tell you i had a legitimate real life mountain lion encounter oh a big one a huge one i saw a real huge mountain lion up close it was about 30 yards away we were in a truck and, and we were driving. It was right by a creek. And on the other side of the creek, there was a tree, and underneath that tree was a fucking giant cat. Yeah. The guy I was with, my friend Colton, he saw it first. He goes, holy shit, look at that cat. Look at the size of that mountain lion.

We stopped the truck, and I see the eyes glowing because it's about 7 p.m. It's just starting to get dark. And I get the binos out. And I got them like close up, big old pumpkin head, giant paws. Was he staring at you? Staring at us. Well, just staring at the truck. We knew that there was things inside the truck, I'm sure, moving.

But enormous. That's cool. Because I told you I'd seen one before, but it was small. The one I'd seen before was like 60, 70 pounds like a dog size this thing was fucking giant that's giant it was terrifying see if you've had two sightings that's a that's a lot so that they're few and far between man yeah this was the first time i saw one clearly like not moving stationary looking right at us the whole encounter lasted 30 seconds it was like a real view of one like a holy shit it was so big man that's good it enormous forearms that was the crazy i was looking at its arms it's standing there like big ass paws and this giant fucking head.

All I was thinking is like if I wasn't in this truck, if I was out on the road, if I was out walking and I saw that thing from that close. Scared the shit out of you a little bit. Oh my God. Oh my God. In Utah, you can get a tag for them over the counter spot and stock for 50 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to get a tag with hounds oh it is yeah okay yeah yeah it's draw it takes yeah i think they even the states that um

the states that like washington used to have a hound season and they lost it to the animal rights activists um but they still maintain their regular hunting season. Texas treats them like coyotes. Yeah. You just whack them. There's a happy middle ground. Yeah. There's a happy middle ground. I think the states that manage them as a big game animal are on the right track.

Yeah, the states that don't do anything about them, like California, then you get a case like a couple weeks ago a 5 year old kid got bitten by a mountain lion in Calabasas his mom had to punch the thing in the face and you know kids in the hospital you think bit his fucking head yeah it was weird

90 pound cat two summers ago you and I might have talked about this two summers ago Oregon Washington had it's first mountain lion fatality in state history in the same summer Oregon had its first mountain lion fatality in like 98 years yeah in the same summer

and how were they managed up there like I said Washington used to have they had a howling season but you can still just get a tag I was communicating with a guy who was developing a mountain lion hunting strategy that's pretty ingenious. He goes out the same way a hound hunter will go out.

When there's a fresh snow, he'll go out and drive roads, drive logging roads, whatever, and cut a track. But instead of setting his dogs out on the track he'll just start tracking the lion just walking yep and every time he gets to like a good piece of bedding cover like a clear like a grown-up clear cut or a canyon he gets to a good piece of bedding cover he stops and turns his predator collar on oh jesus and he was writing us in saying how he's been trying it. I'm like, that's a pretty genius idea, right? Explain to people what a predator collar is.

Oh, so you can – a predator collar is a pretty broad term. It just – you can do a mouth-blown predator call, which mimics the sound typically of a dying animal. So the most – if you just went into a sporting goods store and walked up to a shelf and bought a mouth-blown predator call, it would probably mimic the sound of a dying rabbit. You can get like jackrabbit, cottontail rabbit, and it's just a horrific sound. It's like, whee, whee, whee, you know.

Then they have electronic callers that have these massive libraries. So I have an electronic caller. I think I have a Lucky Duck electronic caller, and it's got a library of dozens and dozens of sounds. So it's like you can have it play woodpeckers in distress. I mean, anything imaginable. Oh, yeah, it's like house cat noises, which is attractive to urban coyotes. Oh, wow.

Yeah, a vast library of sounds. So he would go and turn a predator caller on. And a lot of times, like fawn distress calls. It's just like loud, excitable noises that are attractive to predators. And eventually he wrote in that he said said he sat down turned his collar on and you know i actually say turned his collar on i don't know if he's using electronic like a battery powered collar or a mouth blown call but either way he said you know within a minute there's the line and he got him did you see the guy who was uh trying to scare mountain lion off? He's telling him, get the fuck out of here.

Fuck you. He's got a Glock pointed at it. And then he shoots it. Uh-uh. You didn't see that? No. Nor did I see something that's floating around of a dude with a machete killing one off his dog. Oh, my God.

I haven't seen that one. Well, we were going to publish it. We were going to publish it on our website because it hadn't been widely distributed. Is it brutal? I guess it's just too much. I never saw it. We were going to publish it on our website because it hadn't been widely distributed. Is it brutal? I guess it's just too much. I never saw it. I was away. I just came back and heard that we had decided not to do it because it's just like, yeah.

And you didn't immediately watch it? I still haven't gotten around to watching it. Wow. Your willpower is better than mine. Yeah. So one of my colleagues, Spencer, he and I share an appreciation for those kind of sordid videos. And yeah, I got to ask him for it. Watch this because this is pretty crazy. Oh.

Look at it. You get back. You get back. Back. He's practicing a lot of restraint. Yeah. No. Oh.

Motherfucker. I just had to shoot this mountain lion. They f***ing pounced at me and I popped it in the f***ing face. Hmm. Holy s***. That's wild. Holy f***. I I mean that is close what do you think that is 10 yards if that

it's close yeah see he'll report himself probably and they'll do like an investigation and he'll definitely get off for sure look how close that is that's not even 10 yards

I mean that might be f**king 5 yards. That's not even 10 yards. I mean, that might be fucking five yards. No, it's feet. You know Yanni had a- That's a big one, too. Look how big that thing is. See, I disagree. You don't think that's 90 pounds, 100 pounds? Oh, yeah, okay, yeah.

It's not big. The one I saw was like $1.60. Yannis had several of them come into his turkey call this year. Yeah, had a three-pack come in. Jesus. A female, two of her kits came into the turkey call what did he do you don't know what he did he didn't freak out he kind of i think he shooed him off or started talking to him oh jesus yeah because he was calling to a turkey and the the lions were

kind of coming from behind off to his right side, and he's not certain whether they were going to pass by his right shoulder on the way to the real turkey or if they were going to him. What else is funny that just happened to him this spring? He has this on video. He shoots a turkey. Well, he has the Lions on video too. He's got them on his instagram but he shoots a turkey and all of a sudden i mean no soon as that turkey get hit that a coyote has it and is running away trying to grab it wow or since they run away

trying to like wrassle the turkey. So did you shoot the coyote? No. But he's just standing there. And the coyote was, because they'll come into the turkey sounds. So shoots the turkey, the coyote comes out, and then the coyote doesn't run off until he kind of goes at it to spook it. But it stayed right there while he shot the turkey. They are so fucking bold, those things.

Yeah. They're so clever too they come in um one of my buddies seth i think they called in three coyotes turkey hunting in one day this spring i've had i've had bear black bears bobcats sorry black a black a black bear a bobcat many coyotes come in to turkey calls but i have never had the lion thing but i got a few friends that have done lions and i feel that that is like the greatest that's a good achievement did you were you the one who told me the story about turkey hunting where you you heard something behind you and it was a bear yeah yeah i heard an exhale i didn't know it was there until

it exhaled in my ear how far away i mean inches me to you oh no i'm not joking man like exhaled in my ear it was like he got there and couldn't figure out what was going on i was on her and go and i turned and just yeah whoo how big was he i don't know i don't know i honestly didn't it was so like freaky disconcerting and he was gone so fast. But yeah, I wouldn't be able to say. I think that all these people that vote against mountain lion hunting and have this perception of mountain lions need to be around one. They need to experience that just to understand that those things need to be managed or they will kill your kids. Like you really need to see it. I don't know that they, I mean, it's so seldom that they do.

No, it's not going to happen.. No, it's not going to happen. No. Like, it's not a realistic adventure. I think that, I just think, you know, in my view, if they're well managed, I just, in my view, they, like, they should just, they need to be managed as a renewable resource. Right, but see, that term,

renewable. What's with the shooting star? This guy, it just came with the setup. Well, we bought these star panels they they have the option for a shooting star we thought it'd be cool oh yeah one shot over the death but you the look the look that people get when they're not sure what's going on you know twain was born in the year of haley's comet and died when haley's comet came back and he predicted that he would die whoa he came with the comet and left with the comet wow yeah that's intense back to mount that term renewable resources like that's a good term like you use that term as a hunter and as a conservationist but most people the problem is like the people that vote right like like a good example is british columbia right because

british columbia bans grizzly hunting because they think grizzly hunting is trophy hunting. Meanwhile, they're like overrun with grizzlies. They have a lot of grizzlies. And they would manage them by controlling their population. It would keep people from getting attacked. It would keep livestock from getting attacked. And the encounters were frequent. Like my friend Mike lives up there and he's like, there is no shortage of grizzly bears.

Like they're all over the place up Here he goes and now what they've done is they've stopped people from managing them because the people in the cities Who never have any encounters with them whatsoever? Think that it's unsightly to hunt them Yeah, but they allow black bear hunting because black bear seems to be Something that people actually do eat, But then you can't gut them. Because if you gut them, they're worried that people are shooting them just for their gallbladders. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's wild. Yeah, for a long time you couldn't have a gallbladder in your possession. Isn't that crazy? You couldn't even use your own bear's gallbladder. But here's the problem that I see. Your own bear's gallbladder. But here's the problem that I see. If you, okay, ducks don't kill people, generally.

I'm sure someone somewhere. Oh, you know what I was reading the other day? This state has more animal deaths, by far and away. Texas has more people killed by animals than any other state well there's more tigers in captivity in texas than in all the wild of the world you know winds up being dogs dogs kill people here are the number one really yeah domestic like feral dogs domestic dogs feral dogs yeah dogs killed so you like North Dakota and Rhode Island had like zero animal deaths. Very low populations because one's small and one has a very low population density of humans. And one's just small enough to not have that many citizens.

But yeah, Texas, number one. California is a distant second. Wild pigs, dogs, rattlesnakes. But here's the thing. thing ducks don't kill people far you know generally if someone if you're going to go around and determine what we should be allowed to hunt based on what might kill you if we don't hunt it i would be worried about the future of duck hunting. Well, no, I wouldn't say that. So I just, I'm more inclined to be like, if you have, like, just in my desire to make, in my desire to sort of bracket things, I would say if you have sustainable, harvestable populations of wildlife and you have a public interest in exploiting that wildlife, and

it can be exploited without long-term detriment to the species, that should be allowed. That's very reasonable. But ducks are on menus in restaurants. Grizzly bears are not. The difference is people don't think of grizzly bears as something that you would eat. That's correct. Ducks are at, you know, Peking duck, it's a common dish. Ducks are in a lot of restaurants.

No, I was very sad. I was very sad to see what happened in BC, and I think it's emotionally charged. I think you're seeing the same thing. You see routinely the same thing around wolves. Just this morning, someone shared an article. Montana just rewrote some of their wolf hunting rules and expanded some areas. And they used to have, outside of Yellowstone National Park, they had hunting districts that had these very strict quotas.

They liberalized wolf hunting in Montana because we have a lot of wolves. And there's a pack of, in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley, there's a pack of 24 wolves. And three of those wolves this year have been killed outside the park. So now you can expect renewed calls for the park's jurisdiction to extend further away from the edges of the park in order to protect that because people routinely call them Yellowstone's wolves rather than Montana's wolves. Yeah, that is an interesting situation, right, because you have this park that everyone visits. And, you know, I went there and I took a selfie with the elk. They're hanging out in front of a Pepsi machine because it's so bizarre.

Did you get a bunch of social media backlash? No, I didn't put it up. No took it just took the picture because i just thought it was so strange that we're all just standing there and there's elk just lying down on the ground yeah completely habituated humans yeah they've done a great job of restoring natural predators to the landscape but they overlooked one which is the human predator so you had i don't know 9 000 years at a minimum this is just based on direct uh archaeological evidence you have 9 000 years of human hunters on the landscape in yeltsin national park the last hundred years notwithstanding we've gone through great effort to restore natural

predators that ecosystem but um not humans not that one not that we don't have a very heavy hand in yellowstone we have i mean humans have an enormously heavy hand you know yellowstone what i used to what i wanted to do when i retired i used to want to campaign this is not going to make a hell of a lot of sense to people but i wanted a campaign to make hunter's orange laws standardized around the country not like not with a federal law but just get all states on board yeah because like uh in some states you have to have 400 inches of blaze orange when you're hunting with a firearm some states is like 500 inches of blaze orange some states is no blaze orange wyoming you gotta have an firearm. Some states it's like 500 inches of blaze orange. Some states it's no blaze orange. Wyoming, you gotta have an orange hat. I was gonna be like, I was gonna dedicate

my life to making it be that all states adopted the Wyoming rule. Only hat. Orange hat. You think that's enough? Yeah, I do. If you wanna wear more, wear more. Is orange, does that work if you have color blindness? I have no idea. That's interesting, right? I wonder what that means. I don't even

know what they see. But let me tell you what I'm gonna do now when i retire okay no i'll get back are you gonna retire you're not gonna retire no but when i do retire i'm gonna campaign i'm gonna campaign i'm gonna make it my life's work to have yellowstone national park turned into a wilderness area really yeah all the infrastructure i'm gonna fight hard i need i need a slogan for it that's as catchy as make America great again. But isn't the problem that those animals are so habituated? They're so used to humans that it's almost like it would take a long time. Remember when-

It'd take about a year. Yeah, about one year? Yeah. And then they'd figure it out? Yeah. I don't want to mess up travel. So the highways that cut through there would stay open, but most of the infrastructure would go.

Wildlife management would go to the states of Wyoming and Montana, and it would become a wilderness area. And then it's very, it's like, that's a great designation. Because in a wilderness area, it would enjoy greater protections than it has as a national park. How so? Federally designated wilderness is non-motorized. Oh, I see. But wouldn't that cut down on tourist dollars? Oh, yeah.

We'd have to figure something else out. Listen, weed's going legal in Montana. Is it? Yeah. So there's a bunch of money. I'll figure that out. When I retire, I'll get all the details sorted out. But I just think it's time to restore the human predator.

It's time to do what's right on that landscape and protect it. That's an interesting way of looking at it. So protect it from vehicles too, because that is an issue in that area, right? Yeah, just quiet, just mellow things out, quiet things down, and restore the human predator. I just got to think of a sweet uh slogan it's such a massive place for tourist dollars i mean so many people visit yellowstone every year just to look at the animals and occasionally get knocked through the air by a buffalo those bison videos where people get too close those are fucking hilarious because they happen

every year yeah people go flying through the air and flip and land on their head uh to return to hunter's orange yeah you had a question about hunter's orange about being colorblind yeah i don't know but um um the the whitetail hunter oh here it is can deer see an orange well that's deer yeah listen here here's the thing. God bless you, Jamie. But a lot's been written about what deer see. It's just speculation. Because their eyeballs function very differently. Yeah, it's just different. So what they see and how they respond to it. But interestingly, Mark Canyon, who's a very avid whitetail hunter, he can't blood trail.

Because he can't see blood? Yeah, because of colorblind issues. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's crazy. What if he has, like, what if he uses, like, a black light? I might be messing up. Maybe it's his dad.

No, I think it is him that can't. Yeah, he's got to use various tricks or bring someone in, but he can't clearly pick up blood. Huh. And blood trailing, for me, now that my eyeballs are going bad short range. Do you use glasses? Reading glasses. But when you blood trail?

I hadn't thought of it. Why not? Because my eyes get worse every day now. Like, not every day, but I mean, it's like it's noticeable. So with this year blood trailing, I had a younger person with me, the flip-flop flusher, Seth. And he was spotting 10 drops to my one. And I realized it's like I'm used to looking for blood up close too much. And I got to back up or get my damn glasses on because it's

getting it's getting harder to blood trail have you taken any supplements for your eyes like there's like no because it's only right now no i'm ready to do anything man it's only right now becoming a thing for me where i'm starting it's starting to uh we've been talking about it for a couple years i know but now now it's a real issue listen you see this yeah what's that oh you got glasses in the back of your fucking case for your phone yeah bad well let me see them let me see them glasses i hit a point where i couldn't order in a dark restaurant and i had and my friend lent me those so i could order these are hilarious dude those great you look cool in too. Do I? And I had to use his to order, and then I used his to order a set of those. These look like you've had Vaseline on your fingers, and you've just been trying to polish them.

I haven't cleaned them yet. Oh, yeah, but anyways, blood trailing is getting hard. Hunter's, yeah, Hunter's Orange, I think, is, you know, I think it's a good idea. Some states don't require it at all. The state we're sitting in right now doesn't have a Hunter's Orange, I think, is a good idea. Some states don't require it at all. The state we're sitting in right now doesn't have a Hunter's Orange law. Right. Did you hear about that? The guy who got shot, Archery Hunter, got shot by a muzzleloader hunter in Colorado this year?

This year? Yeah. I haven't heard that. I know it happens every year. I hadn't heard that. Yeah. I mean, you just got to wonder, how the fuck does a person think a person is an animal i mean how does how does that ever happen not only that he thought he was uh an animal and he

thought he was aiming at his lungs yeah it's crazy yeah i mean i think the uh archery hunter was in full camo and this guy oh you know my friend robert uh abernathy got shot turkey hunting um really yeah i i know a handful people all been shot turkey i know one guy's been shot turkey hunting twice it's the same jesus christ in the same spot did he what did he have uh like was he using some fan in front of him or something like that? He was doing something that's pretty taboo, which is he was mimicking the sound of a gobbler. He was mimicking it. So when you're hunting turkeys in the spring, you have to kill males. Right.

And you usually make a sound of a female to draw a male in. Well, he, you can really, you know, it can be effective to mimic the sound of a male. It's like a challenge. A challenge, right? So, you'll appreciate like cow calling at an elk, but a little bugling at an elk can get his

blood boiling. He was, had pulled all out of the stops and started mimicking the sound of a male and got shot. Then he's hunting the same spot years later, mimics the sound of a male, gets shot by a different guy.

Jesus Christ. And very different attitudes of these two different people. The one guy that shot him wanted to fight with him and blame it on him. The other guy that shot him felt so bad that he quit hunting and he had to uh befriend him and make him comfortable to go hunting again so one person took an adversarial approach to the man he shot and one person was deeply repentant to the point where he gave up the discipline i was watching a video yesterday of a woman who rear-ended this guy in a Lamborghini

and then got out and started screaming and yelling at him that he hit her car. And the guy was laughing. Did you see that video? They show the video from the gas station. The guy's like, what the fuck are you talking about? And then she gets mad at him for being white. But she's white. Isn't she white?

Kind of white? I don't know. She looked white. But I mean, it's like a literal crazy person, like maybe just trying to make up an excuse for why she was in a car accident But she clearly takes a turn Slams into this guy's car the guy pulls over to the gas station She gets out and knocks on his door you hit my fucking car and screaming screaming and yelling at him people are nuts like you Shoot a person you should definitely fucking apologize because you didn't even look.

I mean, did you think that guy was a turkey? The guy that got shot twice, his name is Preston Pittman. What was the story with the first one? So that was a good friend of mine, Robert. Who shot him? No, no, no, no. Oh, the guy that got shot twice? Yeah.

Who shot him the first time they wanted to fight him? I don't know a lot of details about the guy they wanted to fight. But that's a crazy person. The guy shot him and then got mad at him for making a gobble. But he didn't even look. That's what's so crazy. Saw movement. Listen, man.

You know. How bad did he get shot? 20 gauge? I can't remember. But yeah, he got bad. Penetrated his skin. He got bad. Like in his skin my friend robert that got shot he was saying to me he was saying we're talking about we're talking about what size shot like what size shotgun pellets you used to hunt turkeys

robert abernathy was saying to me how he's like man um i don't i can't remember what size it was there's like a large pellet, maybe twos or something. And he said, you shouldn't be able to use those. Those things hurt. I'm like, what do you mean those things hurt? He goes, that's what I got shot with. He was hunting, and he was sitting there listening for a gobbler, and there was a stump in front of him.

And he said that he lifted his foot up and put his foot on the stump and all of a sudden bam someone shoot him in the foot yeah and in in conversation with the man that shot his leg the man said to him when you lifted your foot up on that stump it looked like a gobbler going into full stride oh my god that guy's blinder than you no listen man i'm only blind up close it's just yeah so god it's just so crazy that people just pull the trigger on a movement yeah you know i can't listen i like i definitely can't like i can't condone it but i don't i don't condone it um i i i don't condone it. I don't condone it. I don't condone it.

When I hear something like that, though, to be honest with you, one of my first, I have twin feelings. One of condemnation of the individual and one of like some level of, you know, like a level of sympathy. Didn't one of your friends get shot through the backpack by a rifle hunter? Yeah. What happened there? He was deer hunting in Washington and got shot through his backpack. That guy got in trouble. The guy that shot him through his backpack got in trouble.

He fucking should. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I probably told you. My dad got shot in the guy that shot him through his backpack got in trouble he fucking should um jesus christ yeah i probably told him my dad got shot in the foot not on he just got shot in the foot rabbit hunting um but that was an accident right that wasn't a mistake in identity that was just a guy thumbing with the hammer on his shotgun and shot him in the foot well you know you know what you and i were talking about but you said you want to talk about it now? Yeah. Is the COVID in deer. Yeah, the deer are testing positive for COVID. And they don't really understand why, right?

Isn't that correct? No. And I mean, they've done hundreds of deer in multiple states. I think it was Michigan had the highest, like 68% of the deer they checked. And they checked over 100 of them. Isn't that incredible? Because that's more than any population of humans.

At any point in time, what's the population of humans that test positive for COVID? I mean, it can't be more than a few percent. Just how they're tested. They're positive for the antibodies. No, I mean, oh, positive for the antibodies. Oh, but not positive for COVID. Not positive. And they don't know that it has any effect on them.

So when I first heard that, a wildlife biologist in Arizona named James Heffelfinger sent me some information about that. named James Heffelfinger sent me some information about that. When I first heard it, I was like, yeah, man, but maybe it's something that was always there, but you weren't looking for it, or there's a false marker. And he wrote back with a bunch of information on it, and they had all these serums that they've banked from over the years. Serums meaning like blood samples? Yeah. That they've banked from over the years.

Serums meaning like blood samples? They have like banked blood samples from deer. Probably just for this sort of thing, right? Right. And when they go back pre-COVID and look at all these deer samples, it's not there. Wow. And now it's there. That's so fascinating.

We're laughing that it all comes. I was joking that it's either like a really good hunter who gets very close to deer. That's one theory, probably not right. I had a theory that it comes from Doug Dern's urine. Did he have COVID? Buckman juice. I don't think he's had it, but I know that his urine is very attractive to deer. But he hasn't had COVID, so that doesn't work.

Yeah, and I thought maybe it came from Doug. My whole family got COVID. He's like a deer man. He's around deer all the time. But I don't really get it. And I have no way of knowing. Another thing I could picture, I don't know that this is true one if i was in charge of examining this a thing that i would be curious to look at would be captive

servants uh which are in very close proximity to people which is also how they spread cwd yeah cwd can be spread that way um they just had another deer farm that had shipped, you know, 100 and some CWD positive deer around the country. You could see that that would be a case where you had captive deer in very close proximity to humans. And then those deer are rubbing noses through the fence with wild deer. Like that would be a thing I would look at. I have no idea. Yeah, that makes sense. Or just, I don't know, man, you walk out, you know, you're in the suburbs somewhere where you got deer hanging

out in your yard, like deer hang out in my yard. Yeah. And you walk out to your car in the morning and sneeze and some freaking deer walks by. I don't know. Yeah, but that's highly unlikely. It sure seems like it. Outside contamination of people, people getting COVID outside is almost unheard of. Yeah.

And it shows up in like zoo animals close proximity humans shows up in like fur farms like all the mink they had to destroy in norway close proximity to humans i heard tigers like in the zoo they've caught tigers in the zoo my uh whole family got covid and uh i was i was curious to see how my dog would react like whether he would get it because you know I didn't like shy away from him. Like a lot of times I watch TV and he like on the couch, he likes to hop up on the couch and cuddle. So like while I was home all day sick with COVID, he just hopped up with me and hung out with me. So I'm like, should I be fucking petting him like this?

Oh, yeah. I'm like, he seems all right. We had that argument where when I had COVID, I was out in our guest house quarantining. I was gone when I got it and got home. And before I went in to see my family, we have a little guest house. I went out there and eventually got my test back and had COVID.

And I let the dog in. Oh, and then into the house too. And then we had to do all the, my wife's like, I don't know what happens now like does the dog supposed to quarantine i think the dog should quarantine probably we didn't quarantine my i was the last one in my family to get it so i wasn't worried about them getting it because they already had antibodies yeah but i'm like what about the dog but i'm like i think he's probably already had it i mean i don't want to test him because i don't put him through a fucking blood test.

Yeah. No, it's funny about dogs. The weirdest thing about quarantining with it, at first, man, my kids are upset. They're crying, you know, like very confused. Oh, because you can't come in the house? Oh, yeah. I'm out in the garage. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

Oh, wow. Because then, you know, if you come up to me, then you're not supposed to go to school. And I'm going to go out there. And they're like upset. And they're, like, upset. And they're making artwork for me and bringing me food. And after a few days, they're just like, the fuck's that guy? They got used to it. It was like I ceased to exist after a few days.

Wow. Kids adapt. That's funny. That's funny. Oh, yeah, man. It was like they forgot all about me. And I was out there, you know, taking naps and stuff like that. It is interesting about the zoo animals because the zoo animals may be close proximity,

but all of it outside, and then also no real, like, physical contact with zoo animals. What are you talking about no physical contact with zoo animals? Like tigers? Oh. I read that tigers had gotten it. Like big cat. See if you can find that. I'm pretty sure that's what I read, that these tigers had gotten the zoo unless maybe they had to handle the tiger.

If you're talking about 15, if the new, not the new, there's this sort of like weird rule of thumb that, you know, the rule of thumb like 15 minutes, 6 feet. Yeah, it's nonsense. Nine lions and tigers at the National Zoo are being treated for COVID. So through the fence or cage or whatever. Wow, that's a couple weeks ago. Of course they're spending that amount of time. You know what? At my kid's school, you know what they do that's really interesting?

You know the whole like 15 minutes, 6 feet thing? Mm-hmm. They limit their, my boy, my older boy, they limit his lunch time To 15 minutes Oh, well that doesn't make any sense Because then they're like No one's gonna With the delta variant

Which is the predominant variant now That's not real, because now it's like 30 seconds Yeah, he likes to shoot the breeze At his buddies too, so it's hard for him to get his lunch eaten That's silly. You know, remember when we were kids, we had chicken pox? You'd go over to your friend's house so you could get chicken pox. If he had chicken pox, everybody would go and get chicken pox.

Let's get it over with. Now we're scared of something that doesn't even harm kids. Zookeepers first noticed last week that the animals were displaying symptoms, including decreased energy and appetite and coughing and sneezing. The animals are now being treated with anti-inflammatories, anti-nausea medication, antibiotics, the latter of which is intended to address a likely secondary bacterial pneumonia. I didn't even do any of that stuff. No, that's pretty crazy though, that it's presumptive positive. Oh, interesting. Tested presumptptive so they didn't have an actual maybe they don't have an actual animal covid test or something i don't know what that means that's a good point good catch jamie you know when uh when the pandemic started uh when it when shit really

hit the fan i was in baja with my family and i got back and i called my friend uh chester floyd and i said um this is the most prophetic thing anybody said about COVID to me. I said, Chester, man, what do you think about all this that's going on? And Chester said, man, I think a lot of people got a lot of opinions. And holy shit.

Holy shit, was he right? Dude, he was on to something. Oh my God. I wonder how much, if you could get a gauge of the overall anxiety of the world, how much it decreased yesterday when Facebook was down. Mm. You know, if there was like a, you know how you go by those trails, and it has like, here's your fire warning for the day.

Yeah. You see the green? It has like all these different colors. It was like an anxiety meter. And you could go by and see like, what was it like with no Facebook? I bet that, and Instagram both,

you know, I bet that shit would be pretty light. Twitter's still up, which is probably like 50% of the anxiety is Twitter, but 50% of it might be Facebook. It might, yeah. It's probably good.

And it's funny that- All social media anxiety. You know, I use social media as a you know, I use it for work and have fun with it, but yeah, it blows my mind that for a long time

it would be that you were supposed to regard those individuals responsible for social media platforms. We were supposed to regard them as these heroes. It was like, oh, the Arab Spring. You know what I mean? Oh, right.

And it was like, you know, bringing the world together. Yeah. It's like, holy shit, dude. Well, the algorithms. What changed is algorithms. You know, if you watch the uh the uh social dilemma the documentary the social dilemma yeah that guy uh tristan harris has been on the podcast and sort of explained a lot of it to us and you know he's going to come back on again we're going to talk to him some more

about it because it's uh it's very disturbing because that what they've done with with these algorithms and they knew what was happening while they were doing it is they've accentuated arguments they accentuated all the division between people and that it's kind of like an unstoppable domino effect. And it seems like at this point in time, there's a clear division in our country that didn't exist in 2007. If you go back to the invention of the first iPhone and when social media started coming about,

if you go from there to now, the change is palpable. It's very, very real. And then when you add in the anxiety of a pandemic and real adversity, which is what people have encountered over the last 18 months, now it's through the roof. Now people are literally fucking insane. They're unrecognizable. I hear that, but I know YouTube's not a social media platform, but I had a rare moment of just nothing going on this morning because I woke up in a hotel and I wasn't at work or messing with my kids. And so I was just dicking around on YouTube.

I was kind of pleasantly surprised to be like, did YouTube understand that I like to watch Norm Macdonald videos and I like to watch stuff about catching bobcats. Yeah, that's true. It's like they really – Their algorithm. Yeah, they weren't trying to serve me something that's going to make me mad. But see, that's because you're healthy.

See, this is the thing about it. People think that they do it because they want to make you mad It's not they do whatever you're interested in like my friend Ari He did this experiment we went on YouTube and only looked at puppy videos and all would show him as videos of puppies Like every time you went on YouTube, it's puppies. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but when you get into the comments That's when you find out that YouTube is a social media platform Yeah, because you know, well also not just that, but creeps have used comments. Like they've gone to certain websites, and this is like how they've caught people for like sex trafficking.

And there was a bunch of these weird fucking kid videos. I don't know if you're aware of these. They don't understand what was going on. They don't know how these things were made or why they were made. But there was a bunch of kid-friendly looking videos. So it would be like Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse. But then they would get drunk and like fall down and bust their head open. It was really weird.

But these videos would show up in like like, if a kid was looking at cartoons, and if you're one of those parents that just, like, gives your kid an iPad and just go ahead, your kid would watch normal cartoon videos, and then all of a sudden in the feed, because of the algorithm, it was like Spider-Man was a bunch of them. Here's a, for instance, screenshot. Oh, jeez. This was, like, Elsa Gate stuff. Oh, yeah. I'm not showing this online. Here's a, for instance, screenshot. This was like Elsa Gate

stuff. Oh, yeah. I'm not showing this online. It's just for you guys to see. Yeah, Elsa Gate was one where Elsa from Frozen, there was a ton of these videos where kids were looking up Elsa videos. So because they were looking up Elsa videos,

all these other videos that were also Elsa videos showed up in them. And apparently what was going on is like inside the comments. Am I wrong about this? Inside the comments, there was like people who got arrested for doing. Yeah, that's where I don't know. I'm not going to say that didn't happen. I don't know.

Yeah, there are FBI investigation. Yeah, they got crossed over into like the pedophile yeah so pedos using code words and stuff yeah they were using these comments like they would meet up on certain videos and they would communicate inside the comments of those videos with code and that's how they got away with communicating got it publicly about certain things and i don't know if they were child porn or whatever what they're involved with but i remember there was a lot of people that got in trouble for that and you know then youtube's trying to figure out like what are these videos and who the fuck is making yeah because there was what's the motivation they don't know like the theme was weird like we watched a bunch of them one day. The theme was weird. It was always the same thing.

They seemed kind of normal, and then the cartoon characters would get drunk, and they would always wind up getting busted in the head with a bottle and blood everywhere, and you're like, what the fuck? So it goes from being like, yeah, weird shit. You don't let your kids just cut loose on YouTube, do you? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Luckily, one of my kids, all she likes to watch on YouTube is like there's a girl named Sniper Wolf who's very funny. And she does like these reaction videos to stuff, but it's very G-rated.

And she loves watching her. And, you know, there's, you know, but I keep an eye on what they're doing. And I don't allow them to just start going crazy. Yeah. Because it's just, you just, you know, you never know. I mean, one day you just stumble upon an ISIS beheading video. Yeah. And now you have, you know, your kid's fucking waking you up in the middle of the night

crying and screaming because they can't get this image out of their head. It's terrifying. It is. To be on the other side of it, too, because when you're young, all you want to do is throw off the chains oh yeah and then all of a sudden you're like in the position of putting the chains on yeah you gotta it's like how much freedom do you give them like how much do you talk to them about stuff how much do you let them figure that stuff out on their own you know it's uh it's tricky and it's a weird world

because it didn't exist previous like it's not like we're dealing with something that we went through when we were children. There was no Google when we were children. There was no LiveLeak. You ever go on LiveLeak? No. Fucking horrible. I know about it, but yeah. Horrible videos.

You can watch a lot of car accidents and animal attacks and just wild shit. Yeah, yeah. That's not- Oh, no, I have been on that. Yeah, I have stumbled into that. But that didn't exist. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch something fucked up, you had to plan for it. I have been on that. Yeah, I have stumbled into that. But that didn't exist. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch something fucked up, you had a plan for it.

Like when we wanted to watch Faces of Death, somebody had to get the video. One of our friends had to watch the door. So we were in the basement. One of the friends had to watch the door, make sure the parents didn't come down. And then we put it on the VCR and we were ready like if someone came down you'd pop that fucking tape out and hide it these kids today all they have to do is just have a phone you know and a lot of times kids are 11 and 12 they have phones and 12 year olds with a phone I mean they're gonna start googling people

fucking people getting killed they're gonna see the most crazy shit have you seen this your friends gonna say have you seen that and And then you're going to look on your phone. There's no way to stop it. There's no way to stop it. Kids have wild fucking workarounds for little restrictions. My sneaky little fucking kid, you know what she did? She screen recorded my wife when my wife went and put in a password for her screen time. Yeah.

Nice move. Very nice move. She handed her phone over to my wife. My wife goes in and puts a password in for her screen time, so she can only get an hour's worth of screen time a day. And then my wife checks, and she's like, how the fuck do you have four hours of screen time? What's going on here?

And then she figured out how the fuck you have four hours of screen time like what's going on here so she and then she figured out that the really the little monster yeah did you guys have public access when you were growing up my public access tv i used to see some of that shit that's my first exposure to faces of death was after 10 o'clock they could show whatever the fuck they wanted for whatever reason really not blatant porn but porn really i saw that's what the bud dyer dyer video of him shooting himself in the face you saw that on tv to the 21 gun salute when i was going to bed and i was like 10 years old what yeah huh no way and then this guy ended up i was talking with some of my friends when i was back at home in my reunion this guy was we all knew about him when we were like 12 13 years years old. Had a show.

Painted up like an insane clown posse type character. And would have like blood, girls, vaginas, lips, all sorts of wild shit. Really? Wild. And it was just like the government was putting it on technically because of public access. So in public access, there's no restrictions like there are with the SPS? That's what I was asking. I don't, you guys didn't have, that's

like what Wayne's World was. That's my only thing I knew growing up was like Wayne's World on the SNL was a public access show, but then we actually had public access and that's where wild shit was happening after 10 o'clock. I had a friend of mine who had a public access show. My friend Larry Rapucci, who's a stand-up comic

in, I think it was Larry's show, but he was a stand-up comic in Boston. We all did a public access show when we were, like, struggling comedians. We all went on this. You did it, too? Yeah, I wore a dress. I wore a dress and a wig, and I was, like, we had, like, a dating show. This is the wild guy that I would, this is from the 90s, I think.

I found it on YouTube. It still exists. It's, like, very David Lynch-ian, man. It's just so weird to watch now. Damon Zeks. Oh, so that's him on the right and him on TV? Yeah, yeah. Oh, so he really planned this out.

This was some weird shit. Wow. This is 96. He's doing coke. He's the tampons. Again, I was a kid when I was seeing this stuff. Wow. To me, it's not that strange.

Looks like Robert Smith from The Cure, man. Someone found him. I don't know. I'm sure he's on Facebook or probably doing this stuff still. Let's find him. Well, he's going to find out now. Oh, Jesus Christ. Wow, yeah.

Hardcore. So he got away with this? This was all on? Yeah, but he wasn't even the only one. There was a clown called Angsto the Clown. I'm sure Red Band knows about this stuff because he was a little bit older than me in the same area. That's probably why he was probably watching the same show. This is why it might make sense now.

Where were you brought up? Columbus, Ohio. Weird. And then looking back into some of the stuff that was happening there, it kind of makes a little bit of sense, but if this wasn't going on everywhere, that's sort of strange to me. I never saw it in Boston, but I might have been out of the loop. It might have existed. I just wasn't aware of it.

But I thought the regulations were across the board if you were broadcasting. I didn't think that public access was different. Is it because it's local? Maybe. And then there's like free speech laws that we're getting into. Again, I was a kid, so I have no idea. I was excited to see it. I just – it's not – it won't be available until spring,

but for the last couple of years I've been working on a book. You know, like this is the thing I thought I'd never do. I used to be annoyed by people who thought about their kids before I had kids, but I have a book that I just finished called Outdoor Kids Inside World, and it's about, you know know kids in nature raising kids and yeah man if you'd asked me dude like 10 years ago i'd have been like no way i would do something like that but it's just harrowing man it's like scary what is scary having kids oh okay yeah yeah worried about them and just like what yeah yeah and like trying to guide their experience, you know.

And for me, I don't know. Yeah, I've found that exposure to nature, experiences in nature, understanding nature is like winds up being an avenue of approach that I have with them that works for both of us. It's like a common language, you know? But yeah, man, it's terrifying. And then the feeling of hypocrisy that you get of things that meant that when you were young, things that meant a lot to you

and felt very authentic to you, like freedom, freedom to consume what media you wanted, freedom to talk to who you wanted to talk to, freedom to go where you wanted to go, that later you're in a position where you're denying someone something that you really wanted in an honest way when you were young. Yeah. I had a conversation with a conversation it's a push and pull man jonathan hate about that you know he talks about the the concept of free-range kids

about he lets his children wander it was jonathan hate right was right the coddling of the american mind um he lets his kids wander around new york city like he lets his kids walk home from new york city and you know he's talking about one time his uh his kid got a little lost and they he lets his kids wander around New York City. Like he lets his kids walk home from New York City. And, you know, he was talking about one time his kid got a little lost and they were really, really scared. You know, it was like they were trying to find him and it's like a terrifying feeling. But that ultimately the development that the child receives from being able to navigate the world on their own is very valuable,

but there's a risk. And so you, like, have to weigh this risk versus reward receives from being able to navigate the world on their own is very valuable but there's a risk and so you like have to weigh this risk versus reward and the opposite of that is people do helicopter helicopter parent and we know how that turns out right that's not good when you overly coddle your kid and your your your kid is not exposed to any sort of adversity or any sort of danger or any sort of adventure or any sort of danger or any sort of adventure or any sort of independence that it can be stifling. And then it takes a long time for the child to develop outside of that parental environment. Once they become free,

there's different kinds of kids, right? There's kids that grow up in bad neighborhoods with very little parental guidance and they're 18. And then there's kids who grow up completely coddled and completely protected and insulated and they're 18. And there's kids who grow up completely coddled and completely protected and insulated and they're 18 and then they run into each other totally different life experiences yeah and i was the former you know i was the kid that didn't have a lot of guidance when i was a kid and i was a kind of a lock key a latch key kid i'm glad you just used that word yeah it's common word right common phrase apparently it's a common word, right? Common phrase. Apparently it's not. No? I grew up with that word. I was commenting

on how my wife in her early years was a latchkey kid and she's like, I haven't heard that word in a long time. I'm like, that used to be a word, dude, like latchkey kid. Yeah, you got a key. You got a key and you came home and no one was home. You know, when I was 12 years old. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't like five days ago someone was

pointing out to me that that word doesn't get used anymore. Yeah. Well, kids don't, I mean, it's kind of a different thing. You don't really see 12 year old kids walking home with a key and opening up their front door anymore. I mean, I think about my children and how young they are and I can't imagine them doing that, but I did that. and i think that the independence that comes from being a kid who walks home from school by yourself and opens your door by yourself and you know and then my parents didn't come home till you know whatever it was they worked till five and they were home i was out i would go places no one knew where the fuck i was there was no phones there's no cell phones you know yeah i could leave a little post-it note or

something like that it's it's been interesting to watch um as a parent the way that you that different parents find what dangerous things they're comfortable with um friends of mine like my friend Kelly lives in New York right and she'll talk about and we have similar mindsets um about exposing kids to risk and her kids will take the subway right or whatever home and to me where i where where i live and having not had kids that age in the city like i can't picture what she's getting at you know i mean i go like wow that seems just kind of like crazy yeah how old are you responsible uh i'm trying to think how 14 and 9 or 10 somewhere in there um and i don't know they've been at it for a while but either way like things that some people would regard things that people from the

outside would regard as like hard to picture you know yes or but at the same time, I expose my kids to danger that I have decided is an okay danger to court. I'll expose them to being, they can be around grizzly bears. They can be unescorted in areas that have a lot of mountain lions and bears. We take small boats out in the very big water. We do all kinds of things, but it's like things that I've decided are good risk, healthy risk. Have you been around a grizzly with your kid? Yeah.

My older, my boy I have. Yeah. Where at? In Alaska. Yeah. Yeah. And then a lot of other,

and then, you know, a lot of very up close exposure to black bears. Very up close. Yeah. And living in Montana living on and i see that like at our fish shack in alaska it's like a daily occurrence but i see that and i'm and i'm thinking man i love being able to expose my kids to like this and to have them be not jumpy people you know but then other then see that, that I hear that they were at their friends on YouTube, like unfettered YouTube access. And I'm like, Oh my God. Oh my God.

Right. They're going to believe in Kuanon. You know? Yeah. It's just like, we all find our ways to be, you know, we all find our ways to like, try to find some way to be comfortable and try to find some way to not be overdoing something or underdoing something. Well, I think kids for sure need some form of adversity to work through, and I think sports are really great for that for kids. You need to learn how to lose. But, man, I know some stunted people that played a lot of sports. Yeah, it's not a 100% guarantee,

but it is a guarantee that if you've never encountered any loss at all, you're fucked. Any challenge. Yeah. No challenge at all. No adversity at all. You know? And then dependent upon the kind of parenting that you received. I mean, it's not that it is a deal breaker.

Like, you have to have sports in your life or you'll never be good at things. I think you have to have difficult things that you're attempting to do. And I think that's really beneficial for kids and for adults. I mean, I think that's a key part of my life is lessons learned through adversity and trying new things is a very important part of that because it forces you to really be a beginner. One of the things I found like in martial arts, like when you would uh get like guys who are like world champion kickboxers they start entering into mma they're really good at one aspect of fighting which is like kickboxing and then they would have to learn wrestling and

jiu-jitsu they didn't like it because the wrestling and jiu-jitsu the problem was they were getting fucked up a lot oh they were losing so they're used to being like dominant and then all of a sudden they're losing or they've been for years good at something now they now they suck at some part of it exactly so they would avoid that aspect of it so their development as a mixed martial artist was always limited they always always get to a certain level and they could never pass that because they never really developed the skills required to excel in the overall thing. There was always like this hole in their game. They'd never go live in that.

They'd never allow themselves to go live in that loser space, right? Yeah. To excel. That's where all the lessons are. The bad feelings, where all the lessons are. It's like someone who's never experienced heartache, right? And then they experience. It's like death.

It's like you lose a part of your life and you know I remember the first time I got my heart broken when I was like I guess I was like 17 or 18 I couldn't believe how bad I felt it was like God's the worst feeling ever do you ever go look her up on Facebook or anything no but if I did but you know I'm sure I'd be over it but But the point is, like, you have to experience that to know. And then I think, like, how am I going to live without this girl in my life? And then, you know, years later, I'm like, how would I have lived if I kept that girl in my life? Oh, my God. It would have been horrendous.

I have such a hard time picturing you being heartbroken. I was heartbroken. Yeah. When I was 18. Yeah. I know this isn't a parenting show, but a friend of mine, he's an attorney. It's a show. A friend of mine who's an attorney, and he deals with, deals a lot with like, what do you call it?

Custody. Child custody stuff. Mm-hmm. We're talking about all these like, you know, theories about what kids need and how to do it. And he said, man, I only know one kids need and how to do it. And he said, man, I only know one thing that really fucks up kids. He says it's when they know that no one gives a shit about them. He's like, that's the thing that, that's in my view, that's what does it.

Yeah. You know? That's the hardest. When you see foster kids, you know, that don't have love, they don't have a family, they don't have real parents, or maybe even worse, they know their parents are out there, but their parents don't give a fuck about them and someone else is raising them. Oh, it's damaging. Oh, it's so devastating. And it's like, how do you fix that ever? How do you, how do you, I think once a child has gone through a really bad emotional development and childhood development, it's like so difficult to somehow or another get out of that space and become like a normal person, become a person who's balanced and who just gets their shit together. It's so fucking hard.

I mean, you can't imagine the emotional pain that some of these children go through. It's so fucking devastating. And we do this thing. We get Christmas gifts for these foster kids. And the thing about it is, though, you get, like, this sheet of paper where you get, like, a rundown of these kids and their life.

And you're like oh fucking christ it's so then you make a selection of gifts yeah that's nice you do that it's nice but it's so hard because you want to just adopt them all you want to just go and you know my wife's not having that but i mean like i'm that way with dogs like i can't go to the pound if i go to the pound i'll have a hundred dogs i can't do it. I'm that guy. I fucking love dogs. I wouldn't be able to go home. I like that you call it the pound. I still call it the pound.

Isn't it still the pound? No one knows. Like latchkey kids, there's a whole generation of people that don't use that word. No, no, it's the dog pound, man. That's what Snoop Dogg calls it. It's, I don the dog pound man. That's what Snoop Dogg calls it It's uh, I don't know man, it's it's not fair life's not fair, you know It's that's a that's an important lesson to like people want fair in this world. It's that's not a real thing You know, there's not fair in looks there's not fair and intelligence

There's not fair in the way you were raised and sometimes not fair is beneficial because sometimes when you get a shitty hand of cards you develop adversity and determination that a person who's been coddled doesn't have and that allows you to excel wildly beyond anything they're capable of which is a hard thing for me as a parent because all of my favorite friends are fucked up. Like, they all had fucked up childhoods and it made for the most interesting people. But, you know, they're horrific.

Like, my friend Joey Diaz, one of my favorite people that's ever lived, found his mom dead on the floor of the kitchen when he was 13, high on acid. Hmm. Yeah. I don't want that to happen to my kid. You no one wants that to happen their kid but that that was his existence that's who you gravitate toward oh yeah always grab yeah I grab I gravitate toward people who had like

pretty scrappy upbringing yeah they're more fun reliable yes yeah reliable also they have a thing that you like to use a term they have a lot of girl yeah but i i bet you'd look and you'd find that they were deeply loved but scrappy yes and well joey's a perfect example of that because he's a deeply loving person he's like if you're in his inner circle you know you're loved like he calls you he tells you he loves you he's like if you're in his inner circle you know you're loved like he calls you he tells you he loves you he's like he's very affectionate very loving you know because it's valuable to him he knows what it means to not be there you know to not have someone there for you yeah it's a tricky thing man it's like with all things in life there's a balance that can be achieved but sometimes

through imbalance you develop spectacular abilities you know like some of the greatest fighters like mike tyson is a great example right literally didn't experience any love in his life until he was like 13 years old he was adopted by this guy custom auto who just happened to be one of the great boxing trainers in history and through this guy's mentoring and also through hypnosis the guy hypnotized him to be this like assassin inside the ring like he got his love through destroying people and obviously that worked out really well i mean you don't have a Mike Tyson. You don't make a Mike Tyson. If birthdays are all on time and everyone's buying you a nice Christmas gift and you never run into bullies at school, and you don't get a Mike Tyson. But everybody worships Mike Tyson. When we were kids and Mike Tyson fought, Jesus, that was a big deal. I guess I was in my early 20s when Mike Tyson was in his prime.

Holy shit, was that a big deal. When you watch a Tyson fight, I mean, everybody knew when Tyson was fighting. It was like you were going to see a public execution. Yeah. You don't get, you don't create a person like that unless things go badly. My kids have to pack their own lunches and their own snacks you know so they be self-sufficient and every morning my wife basically makes them dissemble it in her presence so she can check oh that's funny what do they try to smuggle in no it's just like you're

talking about you know being like i don't just you know that's how you make a mike tyson, I don't know, just, you know, that's how you make a Mike Tyson. Like, I don't know. I don't know if we're going to wind up with any Mike Tyson's. I don't know if you want to be, you know, you don't really want to raise a Mike Tyson, really. Not that Mike's a bad guy. He's a great guy. But he's a great guy because he figured his way through all that shit and became this guy. But that's's you know yeah there are so yeah there are there are definitely um celebrated individuals who uh adversity like adversity now and then creates

these like spectacular yeah people um can also break them though yeah and i think that to go into it planning on if you went into it thinking you were going to manipulate that system to produce a spectacular child it would be like ripe for backfiring it's johnny cash a boy named sue oh yeah yeah there's a whole damn song about it yeah i mean it's like i knew i wasn't gonna be around so i named you sue that's right i'm trying to get all like uh yeah he already yeah johnny cash already thought all that. Yeah, he figured it out. I mean, it's a fucking hilarious song. But it's very tricky. It's very difficult.

But I think your friend that pointed out that the worst thing that can happen is a kid that doesn't feel loved. That's true. I think that's probably where a lot of psychopaths come from, unfortunately. That's old expression, hurt people hurt people. Hadn't heard that. You never heard that one? No. Really?

Hurt people hurt people? No. That's pretty common. That's more common than latchkey kid, I thought. What is it like raising kids in Montana? I mean, it's really cool because you're in this super rural environment a lot. it's really cool because you're in this like super rural environment you know a lot you know you're in this this area where you're in a nice town but you're also surrounded by this like gorgeous landscape of mountains and wildlife yeah it's pretty fucking cool place no i think it it works

well um having like having that level of immediacy to be able to take them out to experience things that we care about. Yeah. We did a family walk on Sunday and we went and caught grasshoppers so we could throw them in the creek. Watch fish get them? Watch fish get them. Yeah. Stuff like that. And fish a lot and hunt

mushrooms and we camp a lot in the summer um i like it man i'm gone a lot for work so uh i try to have it i travel a lot so i try to have like very when i'm home i try to have to be very like try to keep it impactful that's and try not to be lazy. Yeah. And I'm not lazy, but I make sure to not be lazy and I make sure to like really that we're just out doing stuff, doing stuff, doing stuff. Right, right. And make that a thing for them so they get accustomed to it. Yeah, like there's always a plan, always going, doing something, always a plan. I it's it can be relentless for people around and

i've had and i've had people lobby complaints about that system of living but um that's how i like to that's how i like to run the program well for what you do and you know for the company meat eater and for first light like there's no better place for you to live i mean montana is just an amazing place yeah i enjoy it run a company like your company you know that makes netflix shows and videos and writes books and you know it's like it's couldn't be better yeah it's a good and then you have a we have a very good network of folks there um yeah it's great man uh and then bozeman you know where i live it's it's it's uh it's it's a big it's big you know it's bigger than where i grew up right how many people is bozeman like 300,000 400,000 no it's not i mean because there's like the town and there's

the sort of like greater valley area. I don't know where it's at. Jamie, find out. What'd you guess? Lickety split. For like in the town, 70 or something like that in the town? 70,000 in the town? Yeah, maybe I'm way off.

Oh, wow. But then the greater area, I'd have to look up. I could be totally wrong. What's the greater area? Like two? All told? 200,000? Yeah.

Well, I don't know. Let's find out. Yeah, find out for me will you either way it's uh yeah yeah 114,000 much bigger much bigger than where i grew up yeah but still very small you know like people kind of know you um there's a story i've like haven't had a couple times where um well it's so small you feel observed yeah you're observed well i feel like that in austin you feel observed here i can bet you do much different than los angeles there's also um uh and they're much more uh accustomed to famous people in los angeles it's not a big deal you know here it's uh it's

more of like hey there's that fucking guy you know it's like they make a a thing about it where it's like in la it's just normal to see ben affleck or whatever the fuck yeah normal yeah you feel observed i got this years ago i got this i did some ads for subaru and got this car for free like the way it worked like for some reason it was it was it was these like branded history things okay so i got to pick like 13 things around the country that i thought were interesting and one was like uh did this thing about this guy that um there's this mountain range and a town and a path and a national forest all named after this dude and all all that's really known about him is he got killed by a grizzly bear is that bridger no his name is lulu or lolo oh so there's the town of lolo

there's lolo creek there's lolo pass there's lolo national forest and all they know is there's like a dude that lived on a tributary to that creek and he got killed by a grizzly that's like really all i know about the guy anyways i did a thing about where they think he might have been buried and all these other things it was like this thing it appeared on it was like these like ads that were on history channel um and i would go and check out whatever something that was interesting but there'd It appeared on, it was like these like ads that were on History Channel. And I would go and check out whatever, something that was interesting, but there'd be like these driving shots, right? Where you like drive there in a Subaru.

So the way that stuff works is you have to buy the car just for insurance purposes. Like you buy the car from them and like invoice them for the car purchase oh okay i don't know how common this is but anyways i got to keep when it was all said and done i got the car so we're gonna sell it but my wife started to drive it and now we've had this thing since we've had this car since 2009 they're bulletproof yeah Yeah, my wife drives that. Those fucking things. And my wife's like very, when it comes to vehicles and stuff, like has no, she's very pragmatic. Joey Diaz drives nothing but Subarus. Yeah. Forever. She'd be like,

why would you buy a car if you got a car for free? Yeah, is this your little ads? Oh, yeah. Young, fresh-faced Steve Rinella. Dude, I was about like four years old. Look at you. Yeah, I was like four. Who's the guy with the hat? He was the guy I wrote a magazine profile on that he hunts for old denim.

So this is 2007? Look how young you are. No, no, no, 2009 maybe. Fine. I saw some old homestead cabins down here. I can't leave any stone unturned. I have to check it. So yeah, that dude would,

I wrote a piece, I did that one because I wrote a piece about that guy. He would go, um, I want to get back to this thing about this car, but this is interesting. So, you know the earthquake in San Francisco and the big fire? Whatever the hell year that happened.

Late 1800s. What was that earthquake that destroyed San Francisco? Levi's? Levi's lost their own catalog. They lost their own library of their clothes they made. So like Levi's denim. 1906? They made, in that fire, Levi's lost their sort of history. Wow.

So Levi's knows they made clothing that they know from advertisements that they have no physical representation of. Wow. clothing that they know from advertisements that they have no physical representation of wow so i wrote a piece about these dudes that would start they would go hunting around in mine shafts and stuff and find old ass denim and the the coolest thing to find was you would find a very old pre-1906 pair of levi's and these things would sell for like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000. Really? To collectors. They're all these like buckle back jeans. They had buckles in the back. A couple buckles in the back and that's how you'd cinch them up. In the back?

Yeah. So collectors would call them buckle backs. Yeah, there you go. So this dude. So was this before they figured out belts? Yeah. Just how they used to tie them, man. Like buckle backs. dude. So was this before they figured out belts? Yeah, just how they used to tie them, man, like bucklebacks. Huh. So this dude, he got into that vintage denim stuff, but he also would find old, old clothes and sell them to collectors,

sell them to people making films, looking for period clothing. And I drove around with him in Nevada and wrote a profile on him. I think it was called The Brotherhood of the Very Expensive Pants. It was when I was a writer for Outside. Wow, look at that. Yeah. The coolest thing I found in the week I spent with him was a pair plugging up a –

there was an old cabin on a ranch, and it had two chimneys. And at some point in time, someone had moved his wood stove from one end of the cabin to the other and plugged the old chimney hole with a pair of jeans. Wow. And we go in there. So he'll go in and he'd strike a deal with ranchers. He'd be like, listen, man, I'm going to. And a lot of times he'd be like, I'm going to look around in your old buildings and stuff

and I find something, I'll buy it from you. They'd be like, bullshit, get out of here. And just to turn him on, he would all of a sudden look and whatever he could see, he would look and give him an insane price for nonsense just to butter him up really oh yeah like how much is like it's like we went to this guy and this guy had just junk everywhere and it was like he had a lot of junk and also be like there's the old cabin where grandpa lived there's the old rundown house where my mom and dad lived and here's my house and everything was exactly they just would move across the property and build a

new structure and leave the old ones in place so he's dying to get in here and look around and this guy had a t-shirt like his father this guy's uh had an outdoor spigot that was dripping for whatever he tied like a t-shirt around it to prevent to deflect the drip you know or whatever to prevent erosion underneath there i have no idea but a t-shirt tied around a drippy thing he and he goes like that t-shirt for instance and gave him like 25 bucks for the t-shirt no desire to have the t-shirt but he just had to grab he had to point to something so let the guy know that he was he's got possible windfall here. Yeah, and then the guy's like, well, damn, son, let's have a look. And he'd be in there buying saddle blankets and boots, hats, anything.

The jeans that plugged up the hole. So we're on this place, and I was with him, man. He went through all the channels and talked to the ranch manager, got a hold of the rancher. The rancher's like, have a look, let me know what you find. Goes in there and pulls out. This had to be a very old, I can't remember what kind. It was like some other kind of gene.

It wasn't old Levi. Pulled out a set of pants that had been plugging that chimney up since the early 1900s. Whoa. And you know how the sun, how often does the sun shine down a chimney? Straight. Yeah.

Like not very often. Yeah. Okay. So there's like three feet of pipe above these pants. And it looked like tie dye because that part that was up just being exposed to the rain and whatever limited amount of sunshine ever shined straight down that chimney, it like bleached those pants white. But he pulled those pants out and there they were.

And they find stuff like people used to make log homes and chink, you know, chinking between the logs, shirts and pants and shit. Really? Oh yeah. He's got a whole damn place full of that stuff. Hey,

I haven't talked to him in a long time. And all that stuff is very valuable. If, because he like, he, his place was called Carpe Denim, and people knew to go to him. So he would have designers,

like clothing designers, would want to go to his warehouse full of all this crazy old shit he found to get inspiration. Wow, look at all that stuff. To get inspiration for whatever, like Dickies, Carhartt, whatever, like different designers would go and look around his stuff to get inspiration for it. Jamie, send me this guy's Instagram page. It's Original Indian Jeans.

Yeah, that's him. Original Indiana Jeans, sorry. Brit Eaton. I think all those old jeans were made out of hemp. I think before the 1930s, before a hemp became a problem when they made marijuana illegal, then you have like a stamp to grow hemp and then it become phased out with the, um, the cotton gin, you know, well, the decorticator actually was what brought it back. I think that was in the 1930s.

But all before that, canvas itself came from cannabis. Like canvas was actually made with hemp. Like even like the Mona Lisa was painted on hemp. It's a far more durable fabric. And if we had hemp jeans, they'd be so much more durable. It's a weird cloth. Have you ever fucked around with hemp as a cloth?

I bet he'd be able to tell you a lot about it. I bet he would. The fibers are really insane. I had a friend of mine, my friend Todd McCormick, used to grow marijuana. He was one of the first guys ever to be arrested for it when they had medical

marijuana, but they were still charging people federally because it was medical in California. But when you would go to jail, you would realize once you went to court that you couldn't bring up medical marijuana because you were in a federal trial. And the federal trials, they wouldn't even recognize it. You were just a drug dealer to them. And he was like, oh my God, this is a crazy racket. I'm getting railroaded here because you couldn't even say no i was growing it for medical purposes in the state where it's legal medically so he had a stock of this stuff and you would pick it up and it would be hard like oak but light like balsa wood it was the wildest shit like you'd realize like there's nothing

like that fiber on earth and when you take that fiber and break it down the paper like they would make hemp paper and it's crazy like you can't tear it but it feels like paper it's so superior hemp clothing is insanely durable like so much more durable than cotton yeah and then all the hemp rope i'm not from i mean i'm familiar rope. I'm familiar with in the pioneer and frontier days, they used the hemp for rope and other fabric. Parachutes. Yeah, like the parachute that George Herbert Walker Bush parachuted to safety with in World War II.

That was made out of hemp. They used to make all the parachutes made out of hemp. This is far more durable than cotton. Look at this car. Subaru. Yeah. And all of a sudden one day, where our offices,

like my wife drives a car, and all of a sudden where our offices is all these bumper stickers that say like Rinella drives a Subaru on people's cars, but not my car. And so it's like someone like observing you know someone in this area like observing what my wife drives and like printing a bumper sticker just like weird that's weird yeah like small town stuff you know but i had to choir around

it was some dude that works at it was some event like it was like these dudes that worked at sitka and then eventually found out which one of them did it and he'd like try to get a job with us and that was like his like vengeance thing which is like bizarre man and make you feel just observed he tried to get a job with you and he couldn't get a job so then he made a bumper sticker that said the kind of car you drive yeah and pasted it on people's cars in our parking lot, but not my car. Whoa. Thank God you didn't hire that guy. Well, it just winds up, it's just weird, man.

That is a problem with hiring people, right? Like, you never know. No. So there is an observed quality, but i but you know my i mean i hate to be negative but i mean i have so many wonderful wonderful friends and it's a great beautiful great place to live but there's yeah there's like uh the good with the bad yeah yeah you're gonna get both yeah yeah it's just yeah and when people get rejected, I mean, imagine being a woman, you know, experiencing like some guy tries to hit on you and you reject him and then this guy's stalking you.

Oh, yeah. Social media. Yeah. Sending you evil letters and that's a very common thing. I'm sure for guys too. Yeah. It's horrible. Yeah.

People are fucking crazy. A good percentage of them, you you know one out of a hundred out of their fucking mind you run into them you zig when you should have zagged boom you got a problem and you got to be real careful gotta have a good filtering system to keep those people out of your life and i would imagine when you have an organization like yours where you have like you have a lot of employees there's a lot of people there yeah meat eater man we have uh 100 people that work for us because we have you know we have uh an apparel company so first light is underneath meat eater yeah in meat eater yeah so so you keep it and catch them they stay there and catch them i mean we have a we have a ton of um you know a ton

of overlap and all they're they have like person to catch them that runs that program. And they have a bunch of people. Phelps Game Calls. They're in Washington. Oh, that's right. You guys are a part of that too. Yeah. So Jason, he's been on our podcast a bunch.

We just were filming with him. He sent me one of his new bugle tubes that has the built-in read. The built-in thing, yeah. Yeah, pretty nice dude i'm telling you what man uh i have never he wants to go with you real bad um you'd love that dude he's like his whole family's been loggers for a million years he's the first one to not be a logger and um in western washington you know and he started he's like trained as an engineer but started out making game calls and he's just an incredible guy but i hunted with him this year and i've never seen you know i've been like i used to think yanni was like i used to think yanni was like god when it came to elk holland and yanni hunts with phelps and yanni's like dude i'm like i felt like an idiot

like a child well he is a real wizard i mean i've heard videos of him online oh my god that guy's amazing he'd be like no that bull's gonna come and look over right here that uh thing that he made is so good that i had my daughter my uh 11 year old make a bugle call it was pretty fucking good i'm seeing if i can find it because i filmed it because i just thought it'd be oh her ripping on it? See her first ever attempt. Yeah. Phelps is great. He's a good dude.

He lives there. And then we have another company that's with us called FHF. They make the vinyl harnesses and all kinds of- Oh, you guys are with them too? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jesus. Yeah. What are they?

They're in Belgrade, Montana. You guys are like the Facebook of the outdoor. You just keep gobbling up all the competitors. Well, no. Yeah, the government needs to step in and break you guys up. Paul, FHF Gear was built by a police officer, Paul Lewis, still runs FHF Gear. They do this all-American made. He's still in there.

I have one of those. They're very good. His wife, Jen Lewisis they work together um phelps is still at phelps game calls um me and him are doing a project where we've been filming this where we went to kansas and we cut down a black walnut tree and there's probably a thousand turkey calls hiding in that black walnut and we're doing a thing about turning that black walnut tree into a thousand turkey calls. Oh, that's pretty cool. That'll be cool.

I'm trying to find this video and I'm not going to. Oh, your daughter ripping on the metal bugle tube? Yeah, because it's funny. Because it's not bad for like a first ever attempt at blowing a bugle tube for a child. Yeah. Pretty fucking good. Phelps, he holds the patent on aluminum bugle tube for a child yeah pretty good phelps uh he uh phelps that he he holds the the patent on uh aluminum bugle tubes yeah it sounds great he's it's interesting that everybody else was making them out of plastic and then he figured out there's a different sound

oh it's different yeah yeah um so yeah he's there and then and then we have our our our media you know kind of like the media end of our business is based out of bozeman but we have content contributors like you know you've had clay nuke him on yeah he's in arkansas he's a fucking interesting guy oh yeah daniel pruitt is here and she's in texas um mark kenyon's one of our what is that what does she do she's she's just a content contributor whether she has a brand that she built up called Wild and Whole and does... Is that a podcast as well? No, she doesn't do a podcast, but

she does a lot of hunting and fishing stuff, a lot of culinary stuff. That's her particular area of interest. So she's there and we work very, you know, she works with us. We work very closely. She's in Houston. Mark Kenyon's out in Michigan. So we have people all over, content contributors, very closely. She's in Houston. Mark Canyon's out in Michigan. So we have people all over, content contributors.

But we're based there in Montana. Do you ever feel like you get spread thin with all that stuff? I know you have a lot of podcasts under the media umbrella, and there's just a lot of stuff. Do I feel spread thin? Does it fill the company? Do I feel spread thin? Yeah, does it feel the company? Do you ever feel like it's difficult to keep track of everything and make sure that the quality is up to standard?

I haven't felt that because I feel that primarily it's been able to sort of like – let me speak to it in the way of what I'm involved with. I mean, I'm involved in everything everything i have awareness of what goes on but i have you know i'd be lying if i didn't say that i have like a team of people that i work with on producing things that are like my my primary day-to-day responsibility being that we just launched season like just a week ago i I think, we launched five new episodes on Netflix, right? Season nine? So that's our half. Season 10, part A just went live on Netflix.

So I'm heavily involved in making that. We do a lot of books. I'm heavily involved in our book projects. I'm heavily involved in certain stuff. By having a team of people around um that i work really closely with it's just like you're able to like greatly amplify what you put out yeah i'm able to do more um and i had and that means a lot to me because i had spent my life up until we started a company i'd spent my life a lot of it just as one writer and it takes a couple years to write a book

you know and so i would my output was constrained by just like what was one person capable of doing. When I wrote my Buffalo book, I researched it for two years and then spent nine months writing the book. And I wasn't doing much else then. Now I'm able to do a bunch of projects and have stuff going out. So there's a cost, there's some cost to it, but mostly I view it as a tremendous amount of gain to be able to do all those things. In terms of getting into working with brands that we love, so far it's been people that, like the companies we work with are people that, First Light, for instance, was one of the first sponsors we ever had for our show. Vortex Optics

and First Light were sort of the first two people that ever got behind our show. I knew Phelps for a long time. I've been wearing an FHF vinyl harness. I mean, I remember, like, my late friend Eric Kern turned me on to FHF stuff, like, a bazillion years ago when Paul was just stitching away in his, like, basement or whatever, you know. like a bazillion years ago when, when Paul was just stitching away in his like basement or whatever, you know? So to have it be that those relationships matured and we kind of like came together under one company, it all seems like very natural to me. It all seems like just things growing and getting better. So I have never felt like too spread thin. Um, and then we have, I mean, like I said, we have a lot of people that kind of know what they're doing I have to be pretty careful to I've had to learn to know what I don't know

you know yeah to learn what I don't know you know I had to learn what I don't know and to not and and to give people like faith to do the things they do right so that i don't know how to do become like a manager yeah man i'm such a bad manager man that became clear through the pandemic and stuff but no i'm i can't manage i can't really manage people i i mean i can why is that why can't i manage people because that's kind of hard to explain um i i i only have one way like um that's a good question i don't i i don't think i have developed multiple ways to interact with people huh i sort of have like one way in which i can interact like i have one way in which i can interact with people how in what way what do you mean by that

uh obviously you have different way you interact with your kids and you do with your wife okay that's fair when dealing with people um when dealing with people in my age bracket, I can't step into a role. I can't step into a position of being able to not have it be very close and very personal. I think a large thing is that you've met some of the people I work with. Some of the people, we spend an enormous amount of time together.

We travel together. We're like sleep in tents together. We're together all the time. It's that I just, I can only interact in the way that I've learned to interact with my peers through since I was a kid. And I, and, and, and in that proximity,

like I can't be that I'm going down to work and I need to put like my, my work way on. Um, I think that I probably, uh, over like I, I probably share too much information. I probably don too much information.

I probably don't conceal my annoyance. I probably have very like I have high expectations. Yeah, I don't know. And when I see people who are like actual people managers, they have a more calculated approach. And my approach, I guess, is very emotional. Or more authentic. The problem with those calculated people managers is they probably cut loose somewhere. And some, you know, they probably put on a dress and get a bunch of hookers or do something nutty. That's the thing about CEOs, right?

They're the ones who always like to go to dominatrix and get kicked in the balls. Because they're being so calculated all the time. Yeah, it's like they're so wrapped up in this thing that they're doing. Like if you're a person and you're running a company, you're essentially performing all day long, right? Because you can only be a certain amount of yourself. Like most people like to tell jokes that are maybe inappropriate or use language that's maybe inappropriate or say things that everybody's thinking, but you really shouldn't say. Yeah. They like to do that occasionally. Well, if you're a CEO of some major company,

that would come with enormous financial consequences. As some of them have found on this very show. Yes. Well, that was nothing. He just smoked a little weed. He made the money back the next day. The company went down like 6% and went up 9% the next day. But everybody wants to talk about the 6% and went down the first 10.

Everyone wants to talk about the 9%. Yeah, 9%. Everybody's no one wants to talk about the nine percent yeah nine percent the net everybody's like look it's a fucking giant company it's gonna go great but like uh i was reading about uh someone from bezos's blue origin company right just got fired for something it's like you you you're you're the way you're allowed to behave if you're a big wig in some sort of a large corporation. It's very narrow. There's a very narrow, acceptable way that you're allowed to behave and you're scrutinized extremely closely. So if you want to be that guy that makes all this money and gets all this stock and has all this responsibility, you also have to behave in a way that's kind of unnatural. It's not just that you're not allowed to do anything inappropriate, but you have to have a

very measured and unemotional tone. You have to be very conscious of how people are going to perceive or even distort what you're saying. Look at it and take it out of context. I mean, it's got to be an incredibly pressure-filled thing to do, and you're doing that every day, eight plus. I mean, no CEO really works eight hours a day, right? You're working nine, 10, 12, whatever the fuck it is. They've got to do that every day. I mean, how many of them die of heart attacks?

How many of them die of heart attacks how many of them die of cancer how many of them like the pressure gets to be too much and they can't take it yeah uh maybe better the way you behave maybe so yeah and maybe some of my terminology is not wrong i i'm interested in um i'm interested in in to me the word leadership feels a lot different than the word management yeah yeah well leadership through example is uh is always uh an interesting thing because it's like there's certain people that you admire and the way they they live their life like they're they're like jocko willink is a great example right he he shows leadership through example like the way he lives his life like very disciplined very fair very smart very

open-minded and objective doesn't have any weaknesses in his like social game but also you know just like a a real like a prime example of discipline you know and through that you go well that's a leader you know you see yeah i got you yeah yeah i i wind up um in in in working with people i wind up having a lot of love for people that will shovel shit uh that have that grew up and and know what that's all about. That probably more than any other thing means a lot to me. Like someone who will jump in and shovel shit when it needs to happen. I like people who will take a bullet for what they're working on,

who can articulate their perspective on something, but no one to give in. Yeah. But can fight just to the right moment, right? And they're not doing it for the fun of it. Yeah. But then in the end it's like okay now we gotta move we gotta go well haven't been on your show a few times i've always

admired the amount of work that's involved like for the cameraman um and uh the the folks that are running the show behind the scenes sound sound, all that stuff, because those guys are there 24 hours a day. Like if you're on a trip and that trip is a seven day trip in the back country, it's not like you're doing an eight hour a day job. That is a 24 hour a day experience. And your responsibilities, obviously work wise, are from the time you start hunting to the time you're done hunting. And that is, like, from dark until dusk. You get up when it's dark and you don't end hunting until it's—unless you're successful—until it's dusk. You're filming the entire time.

So these folks are working long hours. And then there's no hotel to go to. The hotel is a fucking thin foam thing that's over rocks. And then you lay your sleeping bag over that and you're sleeping. And oftentimes you're freezing your dick off. Like when we were in Montana, the first time, uh, first time I ever went with you, I like wow this is a job like imagine this job where your job is all day there's no there's no like I'm punching in I'm punching out there's none of that the job is constant it's all day it's it's a very unusual job because if you looked at like the hours that those guys work it's it's hard to quantify because you're kind of working when

you're fucking sleeping on a rock that's not just it's all the time yeah and i uh in that management thing i guess some i have to remind myself to think like they're at work yes because i'm more like we're just in it yeah we're in it and you have to be in it but then i'm like holy shit these dudes are at work and why in the world would they do that it's not like any other jobs like say if you're filming a television show an adventure show right and you're filming an adventure show and you you know you're you're looking uh you know mushrooms specimens in the woods you know you're gonna have a shooting schedule like at 8 a.m we're gonna have breakfast at 9 30 you know paul's gonna go out and examine all these different

mushrooms and show everybody. And then we're going to have dinner at 6 PM, you know, and then, you know, we're going to wrap it up for the day and then we're going to start up. And there's none of that with you guys. You guys are out there. Plus you might be seven, eight miles from camp and then you got to huff all the way back with fucking headlights on in the middle of the night. And then you're looking at your watch like, jesus christ we got to be awake in seven hours you know and you haven't even eaten yet and then you eat and then you crash and then it's like all right everybody up it's five like fuck yeah we have a lot of what we would call death marches um and when they were trying to define what a death march is and yanni uh feels that it's not a death march until there's a fight that breaks out.

People are arguing? About what way to go. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, no, I love it, man. You develop very, you know, intimate relationships with people, man. Yeah. You develop intimate relationships with people. relationships with people man yeah you develop intimate relationships with people and it's hard and and for that professionalism and all that it's doing that you know months for months

to being together all the time in whatever like in tents or in a rental house and in cars and just like yeah right you you you can't stay you can't stay buttoned up quite like maybe how you're supposed to right like if you were a ceo yeah yeah it's a different it's a different kind of experience and it's also an experience that i think is really lost in translation in all of hunting media i think you do the very best at sort of well first of all your show is fantastic because of your narration and because of the the the you have a very clear love of the wilderness and of animals and of the experience of hunting. But it's hard to encapsulate a seven-day really rigorous experience into an hour-long show. And it's lost to people that don't experience it. To me who's done it with you, I can watch one of your shows and I can go, man, I wish I was there the whole time where I would really get a sense of like how hard it was to find the bulls.

And then you hear them in the distance and then you got to walk three miles through this valley and try to get to this other ridge and then you glass them up and then they're already gone because they caught your wind. glass them up and then they're already gone because they caught your wind. And there's so much the seesaw ride of the experience of trying to navigate your way through the woods and hunt and then the wild thrill of it being successful or the failure. All those things are, you know, the worst thing that's ever happened to hunting, I think, is hunting shows and that not yours but a lot of them there you know there's like shitty music and bad writing and it's like it's all about the kill and to people that don't have any experience doing that they're watching and it's sort of encapsulated into this very brief moment of people

laughing and hooting and hollering because they shot a deer like why is why are you happy like people don't understand it like what what is happening here like why are you happy yeah because yeah you feel the experience hasn't been it hasn't like teed that up yeah it's you're missing everything you know it's like if all of romance was uh boiled down to an orgasm it's like jesus there's so much more to human experiences and relationships there's so much more to hunting there's like it's like everything else like there's so much more to like if you only if you see a fight and you know uh like that this guy punches that guy and that guy falls down if that's you see, if you're just like a highlight of a knockout, you're missing so much.

And the struggle and the people that are in the camp with them, they're the only ones that really know. If someone is in a camp with Roy Jones Jr. in his prime, they see all the training leading up to the fight and then the fight. Those are the people that get the real experience. And I feel like no one gets the real experience of hunting until you do it it's it's uh and it's one of the reasons why it it's so misrepresented and misunderstood in in the general public in in the people that don't hunt in our in our culture hunting has gotten this very bizarre bad rap and even amongst people who eat

meat and i think a lot of it is because of that i think your organization and what you've done with meat eater with your writing uh particularly with your show is the best thing that's ever happened to hunting in the modern era because it explains it and displays it in a well-thought-out, intelligent way that's filled with emotion. And it's filled with introspective thought and articulate discussion. And in a way that people get a chance to see, oh, maybe I had the wrong impression of what this is. We made many of our episodes that were they were 22 minutes long um and we still on on you know on sportsman channel outdoor channel um 22 minutes that that when you watch a half hour show you're watching 22 minutes of stuff yeah it's

and it's in you know traditionally we would produce it in a four-act structure so you had an enormous amount of constraint on how you put this thing together um premiering episodes on netflix you're not held to that you don't you're not held to like the act structure you can kind of make them their own natural length but we had a lot of training early on and making that happen and that was the um that's where the, the, the skill of the editors is how do you take hours? How do you take maybe, I don't know, a hundred hours of stuff and compress it down in 22 minutes in some way that was true to the experience. There's stuff you don't show, there's stuff you do show, but yeah, it's, it's tight. It's 22 minutes.

Uh, it's hard to, it's hard's tight it's 22 minutes uh it's hard to it's hard to capture it i think that the the key in doing it is that um i'd always i'd made the show with a lot of people who were like very key and you know mo right you know mo you know nick brigden like people early on that were like very involved in making the show it was making these people these weren't hunters they were people who were very interested in story you know they were very interested in sort of like the rhythm of the story how a story got captured how a story got laid out and so they weren't coming from a lifetime of watching hunting media they were coming from a lifetime of of how do you do this thing which is take people on an emotional like like create an emotional journey for someone doing something right and they applied that skill set with me who

had a level of subject matter expertise and had my own understanding of narrative that I developed as a writer but like come in and apply that universal storytelling principles um to this thing that other people might have felt was beneath them but they had the generosity of spirit in those early days they had the generosity of a spirit to take this thing and see some kind of beauty in it and help develop it into a thing where they were like applying their expertise to it. And kind of the only time it's ever been done before. I don't think before you, anybody had ever done it that way.

I mean, for context, like Mo Fallon went on to direct Parts Unknown with Bourdain. He was an assistant to the film director Michael Mann. Yeah. I mean, the dude went, I mean, you know. And he's a brilliant, an assistant to the film director Michael Mann yeah I mean the dude went I mean you know he was a brilliant brilliant like making you know he went to Africa and worked on Ali yeah right like yeah uh yeah an incredibly interesting person in his own right um and for him to and and then eventually became a hunter which is interesting interesting too, right? Through doing your show.

What's funny about some of the guys that come on to work on the show is they wind up having, they might not have hunted, but they wind up having quite an education. Yeah. And they get where they have well-earned opinions and they're good at spotting stuff and like they gotta develop where you know like mo's modest right so he'd be the last guy that ever be like he wouldn't call himself a thing but but mo's been exposed to during those years that he

worked with us um you know mo was exposed to kind of like more action than most people that hunt are ever going to be exposed to he's just exposed an enormous amount yeah and processed it in an interesting way when you see the the landscape of like hunting media like have you seen the the level of it come up since uh meat eater i mean you guys it was like 2012 you came around it's like been about nine years yeah we just this our 10th year our 10th season um i've seen enormous changes and uh and it's hard to it's hard to untangle um what like you know the impacts of digital media right because during that time we were we were undergoing all the stuff with like distribution channels changed so much and and uh you had um sort of the gatekeepers melted away um you have people producing a lot of stuff like our company

we do a lot of direct to youtube series you know so you're able to have you're able to put material out so people that wanted to make good material might before they they hadn't fallen into they didn't like line up with what what people felt should be broadcast yeah and now they're able to put out what they want to make so it's hard to like it's hard to untangle what might have happened in in outdoor media from what is just happening in media with the ability of like of with the ability of creative individuals to come out to come out make a thing and then have the thing be seen by other people without it needing to be something that someone decided on yeah and we're seeing that you know you're seeing that in all aspects of everything but so have i seen big

changes in hunting media absolutely because even in our own ability to put out material i've seen enormous changes um we do tons more and we're able to do stuff without having someone say that it's okay to do it yeah that's such an important point because uh without that point i mean without that ability podcasts would have never existed and it's all that no one would have ever let you do something like this yeah you wouldn't have gone and you wouldn't have gone and pitched it and had someone say yeah but i i do a lot changed i think that they're you know the the think that the celebration of the culinary aspects of hunting and fishing, absolutely. They're far more represented now than they were 10 years ago. Yeah.

Far more represented. Never saw it. You just saw the kill. The first time I ever saw anybody cooking was on your show. And the first time I ever cooked any kind of wild game myself was on your show. Yeah. When we shot that mule deer in montana when i'm very like i never would so much has been done like you can't you can't come

in and ever claim to have you can't claim to have invented anything because there's so much stuff out there but yeah there's a there's a mix there's a mix of things covered that uh we we cover a a sort of recipe or a formula of things that hadn't been covered quite the way we cover them is there an issue now with YouTube where I know they have new guidelines for hunting where you're not allowed to show the kill? You're not allowed to show like the impact of a bullet or of an arrow. And I don't think you're allowed to show any kind of suffering. And you may not be able to show butchering. I'm not sure.

I don't believe that has not been a thing that we've encountered. There's a new thing about demonetization. Have you seen these new rules? See if you could Google this. You might not even be aware of it because I think it's very recent. As a matter of fact, I think it came out last week. Oh, well, then that might be something that will come. If that's a demonetization issue, I haven't been.

Yeah. Well, YouTube has been very heavy-handed with this concept of demonetization. And it's sort of a way of encouraging self-censorship. Sure. And we found that out in a weird way when we stopped doing – when we were moving from YouTube to Spotify. All of a sudden, all of our shows that used to be demonetized were no longer demonetized like maybe 25 of our shows would be demonetized yeah i mean 25 of them would not be eligible for any sort of income that all changed as soon as we went over to spotify then 100 of the shows got monetized. Upon closer inspection, the YouTube ad-friendly content guidelines was found that in July of 2021,

the policy was updated to make it clear that footage of animals in distress induced by human intervention may not run ads. Naturally, the hunting and killing of animals fall within the new guideline, meaning that hunting content as we know it can no longer be used to make money on YouTube. The exact policy reads as follows. You can turn on ads for this content. Hunting content where there is no depiction of graphic animal injuries or prolonged suffering. Hunting videos where the moment of kill or injury is indiscernible and no focal footage of how this dead animal is processed for trophy or food purposes, which is crazy.

Well, it says, while they don't go into much detail, it seems clear that any impact shots or footage of an animal after it's been shot is no longer acceptable to make ad revenue. So the thing is, like, how far? This is from bowhunting.com. Yeah, I don't know, because I was watching. I really don't. I can't comment. I don't know because I was watching – I really don't. I can't comment. I don't know how – I can't comment.

I don't know how it's being interpreted. I was watching things this morning, not our own material, but I was watching things this morning that were monetized that would not conform. Here's where – they might not have put that into effect, but here's where it gets squirrely. We've seen things that were not monetized meaning the people who created them do not get money but there's still ads on them oh yeah so i don't is that that's real right yeah correct where things were not like they're serving ads on their platform but they're not sharing exactly yeah whereas like the creators don't get

money but there was an ad on it hasn't that been a complaint that people have levied before i don't necessarily think that's happened to us but i do believe that has been a complaint that uh people said hey my video is demonetized but it still has an ad on it oh i see what you're saying that's real right i'm sure let's google that just to be sure. And in fairness to YouTube, I mean, I always say this, and it's an important point. YouTube is managing at scale in an impossible volume. The amount of people that are uploading videos to YouTube on a daily basis, to even hire people that are supposed to watch all that shit as it's being made is impossible.

Yeah. There's no way you could do it no you have you have hundreds of hours hundreds and hundreds of hours of content uploaded every minute yeah i mean just imagine assigning someone to listen to this fucking show to watch every episode three fucking hours every day this motherfucker he takes up half my day yeah but that part of the thing thing of having a media company, you know, is where we put a lot of focus

is I'm very interested in, I'm very interested in a broad distribution. Yeah, here it is right here. YouTube will put ads on non-partner videos but won't pay the creators. Yeah, YouTube set an update

to its terms of services this week that it has the right to monetize all content on its platform. As such, it said it will start putting ads on videos from channels not in the YouTube partner program, which shares ad revenue with creators. So, yeah, that's it. That's what Facebook does, though. I mean, did for 15 years or whatever it was for a long time. Well, that was the crazy thing about YouTube right was that YouTube in you know a remarkable fair move

Decided to share revenue with the people that are creating content encouraging people to create content Yeah Because I feel like if they didn't do that people would still have created content like they really didn't have to do that Well, yeah, and I remember when they first started doing it, when we first started making money, we were like, you can make money. Yeah. We had a pot. We had a podcast episode the other day with a early YouTuber,

a dude named Jared outlaw, like an early YouTuber. And he talked a lot about that being a major transition point. And like, as an early YouTuber, it was when monetization became possible that it just really transformed the YouTube community. And he was,

he like identified as a YouTuber but in with media a thing that i remain very interested in is this like diversification of distribution because you are so vulnerable yes all the time yeah um we put like we we publish with random house um we produce podcasts we distribute as free material podcasts but then We publish with Random House. We produce podcasts. We distribute as free material with podcasts. But then we just recently released a very high-grade audio original thing through Random House. And it was not even – we released a book that never had a book version. So it was our project Campfire Stories.

Released it with them them do stuff on social uh release material through traditional we still work with sportsman channel right everywhere all the time so that you don't feel like someone's gonna like unplug you all of a sudden yeah yeah we were in this situation before the spotify deal where i was very nervous because we would have controversial discussions, you know, discussions on controversial subjects and subjects that where you would get removed, even if what you're saying was correct. Like a perfect example is the lab leak theory, like the lab leak theory for COVID-19. Oh yeah. You used to be, yeah. You used to be a nut job for thinking that that was plausible. Exactly. But I had people on the podcast in April of 2020 saying that,

and I was labeled a dangerous conspiracy theorist by these different left-wing media platforms that had decided that there was only one narrative, despite the fact that I had evolutionary biologists that were explaining in detail why, when you study these viruses, it appears they've been manipulated. I remember it being very naughty. Very naughty.

Very naughty to think that a place that studies coronaviruses would have it be that someone would catch a coronavirus. It's hilarious, right? At that place. I mean, very, yeah. And the fact that it broke out. What are you, some kind of right-wing nut? It broke out in the very exact town, in the exact neighborhood where this fucking level four lab is but that was part of the problem with having a president like Trump who is so fucking polarizing that anything that

he agreed with people immediately disagree with it yeah I mean he could have agreed with some of the most amazing inventions in the history of the world. You'd be a racist if you agreed with them because of the fact that Trump was a proponent of them, that he was promoting them. So I recognized. I always fantasized about a quiet version. Of Trump? Yeah. Oh, like someone who wasn't bombastic. Yeah, you would have.

Many policies. He could have pursued many policies. Or let me put it this way. Obama could have sold many of his policies and people would have been like, oh, yeah, it makes sense. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, sure, yeah. Well, in fact, he did, particularly the stuff about the border. When people talk about how Trump was so horrific in his border, like there's speeches where Obama is talking about how we can't have porous borders.

We have to protect our borders and people like oh yeah you know it makes total sense yeah this is outrageous today but no he could it would have been interesting to pursue many of his policy positions in a way where he would come be like you know i see both sides but you know after careful consideration what's it's hard right because the guy's entire career he he had this one persona, this fuck you, pay me, I'm the man, you're fired. He was always like, Rosie's gross. He always had Rosie O'Donnell's disgusting part.

He would insult people openly. And that was part of his thing. And he did it while he was president, which was wild. It was wild to see a sitting president talking about a woman he had sex with and calling her a horse face. I remember seeing that on Twitter going, this is crazy.

He's not changing at all. But that's what got him to the dance. But that's what got people excited about him. Oh, he's real. He's PC. But it also really fucking polarized the people that were in opposition to him. And so because of that, everybody kind of lost their mind. And it became where you couldn't even discuss things with actual experts that were experts

in the field that you were discussing. People that had no education in it whatsoever were deciding that these subjects were off limits and now would be demonetized and I saw that coming I was like that's a real problem for me because I'm not going to change how I do this show I'm gonna I'm I can't there's no reason I wouldn't do it I wouldn't enjoy it I'd hate myself if there was subjects that were taboo that I found profoundly interesting and I didn't discuss them because I thought I would be demonetized I would be fucked I would be like why am I doing this then? Why don't I quit? Because I want it to be just

like if you and I were having a conversation, if we were sitting across a fucking dinner table or we're hanging out at your house and we just start talking about stuff and it's interesting, I want to just talk about it. I just want the cameras to be on it so other people could be in on the conversation, but I'm not going to change how I do this. I'm never going to change how I do this. So we were in this situation where I was like, okay, well, should we start putting stuff on? We put stuff on Vimeo for quite a while. I'm like, should I start expanding and looking for other online video platforms?

Would that water us down? Would that help us? Then I started thinking about all these other social media platforms. Maybe I should join them and start posting them, But a lot of them are like you get labeled a right-wing kook if you're on these. And, you know, there's all these QAnon folks on there. And, you know, it's one of those things where we're in such a strange time when it comes to media because everybody is sort of making the rules up as they go along and the amount of censorship that these companies are allowed to employ with no real regulations in terms of like the First Amendment or-

Yeah, they're privately held companies. I know they are, but they're so big that they're not really, it's not simple anymore. Like Twitter is responsible for an enormous portion of the world's discourse. And to say that that's just a private company, then these people that run this private company, like who are they? Like they're the arbiters of information. They're the people that are allowed to decide based on their own policies, which is based on their own ideologies,

what is and is not acceptable. But you're one of the country's biggest media personalities. How odd. Well, I'm just telling you, I don't know if you don't know this, you are. That's what I heard. Okay. Are you willing to have someone come to you

and say that you need to be more fair to everyone because you have outsized influence it's the opposite i i would like want other people to be able to talk freely the way i'm able to talk freely i wouldn't want to restrict their ability to do a podcast just because i'm doing a podcast yeah if i yeah if i have an opinion on things i think i always think that the answer and i've been wrong before, and if I'm wrong, I always try to correct myself if I find out that I'm wrong. I'm not one that tries to bury an incorrect statement. I will try to expose it and try to explain how I was incorrect.

I don't think anybody would trust you if you don't do that, especially when you're doing something like this where we don't talk before this. There's one subject that we did talk about before this we what the deer the deer thing no you told me not having covid i was like let's not hold that let's talk about it on the podcast because i knew it was interesting deer having covid but there's we don't have like a set agenda so when you don't have a set agenda there's oftentimes you're going to come across things and thank god jamie's the best one-handed googler in the business. Mm-hmm. Very good. I don't know what the fuck we're gonna talk about while we're talking.

That's part of the fun of the show is that it is just a conversation. As soon as I micromanage that and change, it's like it's gonna lose whatever appeal it has to me. Because the appeal it has to me is like to be able to have conversations. I want everybody to be able to do that. The problem with people that have rigid ideologies that also have the power to have conversations about the subject that are important because you have to say, well, why do you believe that this leak hypothesis is probable?

And then you have an evolutionary biologist on or a virologist or an epidemiologist and they start explaining things or debating it in a way that it seems like it's not possible. And you can't have those conversations if someone has an ideological opposition to an idea based on a person who's a proponent of that idea like Donald Trump saying is the Chinese virus and then all sudden everybody says well if you discuss it having leaked from a lab that you're a racist and then you know you you've got to be able to figure out what's right and what's wrong the only way is through discussion. The only way.

It's the only way. You can't have a person who decides you can no longer talk about this subject because this subject has detrimental effects on X, Y, or Z. Well, it says who? Because some people would say it doesn't. And some people would say, well, X, Y, and Z are problematic because you can't have that discussion. So they're these sacred topics that you can never really get an understanding of.

Then they're like a religion. What are they now? You're not allowed to take the Lord's name in vain. You're not allowed to talk about the Wuhan clinic. What are we doing? Are we talking or are we under this weird censorship of these people that really don't have any expertise in the subject at hand. You can't have expertise in every subject. So as soon as you have people that are ideologically opposed to certain discussions, you've got a real problem with free speech. argument could be made with all these social media platforms that they're so fucking big now that they can influence so much of the world's discussions that we have to figure out where we stand in terms of free expression because if you say to a person you can't talk on twitter because uh you don't believe in uh that a man can be a woman that's a good example right because that's one of the things that gets you banned from twitter if you don't believe a man can be a woman. That's a good example, right? Because that's one of the things that gets you banned from Twitter.

If you don't believe a man can be a woman, you know, like a trans woman, or if you use some, this is one that you get banned from, if you decide to become Stevina Rinella, and I keep calling you Steve, little old Steve Rinella, like I'm dead naming you.

That's called dead naming. And that's a ban for life. I hadn't heard that word. You get banned for life. Really? This is crazy. Because, like, that's your name. Yeah.

Right? It's been your name for 40 plus years. Why can't I call you that anymore? That's so offensive. But I can call you a cunt. I can call you a dope. I can call you a stupid piece of shit, and that's fine. But if I call you by your old name, I'm dead naming you. Well, now we're in a weird ideological thing, right? Because we've decided

this is a protected class of people and that you can't even have this offensive discussion about this protected class of people. So you've set up almost like this religious barricade to free expression about this one very, in your ideas, sensitive subject. That's nonsense. about this one very, in your ideas, sensitive subject. That's nonsense. That's a crazy way to dictate how people can and can't talk. And you develop this, you know, you're going to have these people that are going to say things behind closed doors and be terrified that other people are listening. And that shouldn't be that way on the internet, especially when you're dealing with, you know,

I mean, fuck most of the people on Twitter. They're not even using their name. they have some fake name in their profile yeah to challenge orthodoxy um you either have to get really good uh if you're going to challenge orthodoxy you have to be so good that you can do it in a way that you don't like set off the alarms. Certain comedians are able to do it. Yeah. Yeah. It's comedians are probably the best trained to do it.

Yeah. It could wiggle, you could wiggle your way, but it has to have like an impact. But oftentimes like people will take what you're doing out of context. Oh yeah. That happens to me. Oh,

for sure. Yeah. I see that happen to, I see that happen to comedians. I think like a lot of comedians. I've even I've brought this up that I think that you do this whether you mean to or not. There's a you build a sort of balance in it. And what makes it okay to laugh about stuff is you're willing to laugh about yourself

and you're willing to laugh about your own opinions. Oh, I mean, you're willing to laugh about your own history. Okay. That gives that gives people some room to play. Yes. But when you strip out certain portions, you can make someone look terrible. Sure. Out of context, in quotes, in an article.

Yeah. I have a whole bit about it, about some of the stuff that happened to me during the election with Bernie Sanders, because it was so hilarious to read these articles where they're taking jokes and they're just taking a small snippet of a bit. Yeah, I saw some of that material. Hilarious. This is a problem with a lot of discourse in today's society because people are being dishonest in doing that.

They're being dishonest, and if you can't reply to that, if somehow you're banned from Twitter or you're banned from YouTube or you're banned from Facebook or something like this comes up and you have no recourse. There's no way you can defend yourself. Like that to me is a real issue because I've seen so many people mischaracterized misquoted taken out of contest or even lied about Like I've had fucking CNN say I'm taking horse dewormer. I've seen that. When I've got ivermectin prescribed by a doctor that's meant for humans and a medication that actually won the Nobel Prize for its use in humans. And CNN lies about it. And they do it on purpose and they know what they're doing. So it's like if you if

you can't defend yourself or there's no where you can say the truth like what are we doing like what are we doing we just allow do we have just sanctioned bodies that are allowed to manipulate reality for their own financial benefit or to to promote whatever narrative that they think is either beneficial or sanctioned? Is that free speech? That's not free speech. So if you can't defend yourself on Twitter, if you can't defend yourself on Facebook or YouTube, if you don't have a podcast, those are your options.

And if they remove you from one of those options or all those options, like that was one of the crazy things that the White House press secretary said, is that if you get removed from any social media platform for misinformation, you should be removed from all of them. Well, what about if you're right? That's what she said, which is so crazy. That's not your position. Your position is to be saying what the president will do or won't do, what is the policy, answer the reporter's questions. Your job is not to dictate what social media companies do or don't do in terms of misinformation.

To even think that this is your place to manipulate or suggest is fucking chaos. It's crazy. It's crazy that we're in a position where a person would say something like that. We should ban more people for misinformation. Well, define misinformation because you give a lot of it yourself. Like the fucking White House press secretary is responsible for the occasional misinformation. Well, define misinformation, because you give a lot of it yourself. Like, the fucking White House press secretary is responsible for the occasional misinformation. Yeah.

Like, what happens there? Should you be banned? Because that seems like, you know, if we're going to hold everybody to the same standard, we should be really clear about this. Like, what does that mean when you say misinformation? If someone fact checks you, and they find you to be in error, and you do not correct it publicly, what are we supposed to do about that? Should you be banned from being a White House press secretary? Should you be banned from being able to speak on social media because you've been proven to be incorrect, possibly willfully? I think we need free expression.

We need free expression to sort it all out. And it's very convenient for people to just want to silence people who say things that they don't like or say things they think are inappropriate. It's not healthy. The only way we figure out what's right is you let everybody talk and it's messy and it's complicated. And a lot of times people say things you don't like, but that's how you sort out how you feel about things. It takes a long time. It takes a long time to gather up a true opinion on a subject. And one of the only real ways is to get a view of it from all sides.

In history, we typically, after a period of 50 years or so, look back and condemn any occasion where we have suppressed dissenting views. Yeah, I think we're going to do that here, too. Black-listing people from the Red Scare. Yep. Issues that came around civil liberties for certain minority groups during World War II. This just winds up being like a theme, and later we'll look and be like, ah, you know. Yeah. We got a little carried away there. People after the terror,

it hasn't been 50 years by any stretch, it's been 20 years. People after the terror attacks at nine 11 who questioned certain orthodoxy about what we should do militarily. Right. We're put in a certain place and now it's like, we're dusting off and kind of like re looking at these early whistleblowers. Yeah. You know, place and now it's like we're dusting off and kind of like re-looking at these early whistleblowers um yeah i you know it'll be interesting to see how the history of this stuff gets written um particularly around questions about like when you dare question covid orthodoxy yeah um i've been on

you know i've been i've had it i got the vaccine i was kind of misled because i thought the government was gonna try to take my brain over but i wanted to get in the ring i wanted to get in the ring with them and fight it out but nothing happened you know what do you mean oh just i'm making a joke about the different people's concerns about the vaccine and i got the vaccine and i feel like nothing happened to me oh some people thought it had mind control agents yeah i've heard i've heard all manner of things i've heard magnets i've seen people you see people like there's hours and hours on youtube or at least there were of people putting magnets on their uh injection site and they think that somehow i know to draw the chip

in there to draw it back out no no they think there's a chip in there like the magnet sticks oh not even try that i mean i don't know why it sticks i mean i don't know if it's bullshit i don't they're making things up. Yeah. I guess my primary point around that is that I have, through this, I have been on many sides of issues and have largely tried to just like roll through it and not have people tell me what to do. Right.

So, and looking at travel restrictions,'m like oh i want to avoid travel restrictions even though i already had covid right like i'm gonna go get the vaccine because i don't want to have any kind of travel restriction which one did you get moderna did you have any side effects because that's the strongest one no yeah for a couple hours i felt a little weird how many um months was it between your infection with COVID and then getting the shot? I think I got it as soon as, I think you had to wait. I think I got it as soon as I could. So like three months or something? Yeah, whatever the hell they told you.

Yeah. I was concerned about, like I said, I was concerned about travel restrictions. And I just was kind of like going along with the program. And did you get two shots or did you get one? Two shots. Two shots? Whatever distance apart. Yeah.

And nothing really happened. I didn't really get that. I got sleepy when I had COVID. I got achy when I had the vaccine. But I've held all these different opinions, like deep frustration. I went from being that right away, I was like,

oh, it's just a thing we're going to have to live with. Everyone will wind up getting it. Then I got really hopeful that maybe it'll somehow go away and everybody get vaccinated and it'll go away. Then the vaccine came out and people i know that got vaccinated got covid then i was back to thinking that everybody's just going to wind up getting it so i have sat on so many sides like like i've sat on every possible side of this thing yeah and at this point now i just you get to

a point where you it's kind of like throw my hands up in the air, and as I've thrown my hands up in the air about not understanding it, losing faith that anybody really understands it right now, it's been now difficult for me to see people getting punished for challenging the orthodoxy when everything has changed so much. It's like, how could any person sit right now and act like you have the authoritative view on what's going to happen? Yeah. And this is coming from someone who's played along with the program every step of the way. And when I come out the other side of it,

I have a deep skepticism. And not that I feel that there's a, I don't feel that there's some grand master plan. I just have a deep skepticism. Not that I feel that there's some grand master plan. I just have a deep skepticism of anyone coming and being so positive about something that they're going to punish someone for having some different view. I think at this point it's pretty fair for people to sit and hash out what they think is going on. In terms of where you're getting at with just like the the social media climate and and how it has been used in that way to sort of like punish

dissenting voices or exclude dissenting voices i think that i have a perhaps an unusual perspective on it because for my entire career i've dealt with a set of ideas that are inherently controversial. I'm a firearm owner. I support Second Amendment rights. All my material involves guns. We kill animals and eat them, right? These things all existed. Like this set of ideas and set of interests that I had existed pre-social media.

So as social media came to be a thing, I've always lived within the context of how do I take things that are, that the people that hold distribution channels are probably going to have a semi-adversarial view of? Probably going to have a semi adversarial view of, um you know like like a spy kind of like living in this other world in some way like I'm used to feeling like someone's gonna come and take my shit away from me you know yeah I see what you're saying like when we you know when we first started to run shows on Netflix I even told I couldn't even get excited about it. I was like, that shit won't be there a day. It won't be there a day. I remember having this conversation with you because it was like one star.

You guys had like one star. Because back during the star days, people were attacking your show because it was the first show that Netflix had that showed actual hunting. I wanted to talk to you about that. How did that come about like what was the the conversation because they that's a brave move for them to decide to take something that's traditionally been on the sportsman's channel with the outdoor network and then to put it on netflix uh we worked with uh we worked with a company that handled distribution and this is years ago now we worked with the company that handled international distribution and the company that handled international distribution had some

connections in netflix and netflix purchased what was called a second window um were they hesitant at all did you have conversations about content or anything they may have been hesitant, but they didn't tell us anything about the hesitancy. In fact, I have never, and this is after years, I have never had a discussion over there that even alludes to it. Interesting. Yeah. And you saw their response when people were getting up in arms about that cuties thing. Well, that was crazy. Right?

Like, the degree to which, there's a thing like the degree to which you stand by producers and the degree to which you stand by your ideas. It just hasn't been a thing. But I assumed, I wake up, I used to wake up every day thinking that, oh, there's no way we're going to be able to stay on Instagram. There's no way we're going to be able to be on YouTube. There's no way we're going to be on Twitter. Oh, there's no way we're going to be able to stay on Instagram.

There's no way we're going to be able to be on YouTube. There's no way we're going to be on Twitter. And then at the same time that I'm worrying about that, we have our material gets outward validation from a large streaming service. We publish with Random House. So we have certain people who are very, very intimate with our material being okay with it and distributing it and allowing us to monetize it, at the same time feeling like someone at any minute is just going to drop it out

because we use firearms. The funniest thing is through all this, it's like you'd imagine we get attacked from the right more than the left really oh far yeah always good always like i mean we get attacked from the left and the right but we get attacked from the right more than we get what you know i think it's kind of like it i think that that so a lot of what we do makes people uneasy that there's sort of a new like there's this kind of like new emerging thing that has maybe disrupted some traditional that has disrupted some traditional monopoly they held on certain audiences. somehow, even though everything we make, virtually everything we make has firearms in it,

every show we put out has firearms in it, it's that you don't love firearms enough, which is just like, it's always confusing to me. So when... I mean, we get attacked from the left. Like, we get attacked from the left some. It'll always be like a little bit of a... It'll always feel very nuanced when you're attacked from the left, but we get a lot of heat.

Most of the heat we get would be from the right. Wow. Oh, yeah. I would have never expected that yeah it'd be that you um like you do something it's like you're too woke uh you're not woke enough you uh you know it'd be like you glorify guns but then the louder voice be like but they don't glorify them enough really oh dude all the time it's crazy but i think it's because i think it's from being you know it's from getting getting to a position where uh people you know there's some people that probably feel like a little left out yeah that's probably it you know they feel a

little left out and it's like a little bit like, I had a guy explain that to me. It was really interesting. He said, you have to be careful because you give off the impression that you're having a party inside of a walled garden. And he said, people on the outside are like, well, fuck those people.

And that's, he goes, you're getting a lot of hate in that way where people misconstrue you purposefully they do it on purpose because they they don't like the feeling that they're not invited to this thing and some of them might even be your peers yeah like wow i never thought of it that way he goes you have to be like you have to reach out to those people and try to like try to welcome them oh and then they'll tell me but i don't want to reach out i want they've already been an asshole yeah i feel like you could find it i've

looked at another thing where i've seen um in my life where i've seen that that um that a that a christian might be deeply troubled by a mormon okay and they might be very fixated on the threat of Mormonism. And you'd be like, man, I feel like you'd be worried about devil worshipers. Yeah. Like that to me seems like I would have a

I'd be after the devil worshipers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're like, no, I'm after this thing that's a little bit different than me, you know? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. the people that are a little bit like, it'd be like if during World War II we had decided to go and bomb England because they weren't totally on board with our plan rather than staying focused on the freaking Germans. And so I think that a lot of that,

like a lot of that heat is coming from people who, you know, they're looking and like, you're a lot like us, but maybe you're a little bit different maybe and it also could be that you're getting all these accolades that they're not and so then they try to find reasons why you suck yeah sure there's a lot of that yeah plenty of plenty of reasons why yeah it's uh it's interesting and that's one of the more interesting things about social media, right?

It's like a lot of the things that if people have said sort of behind closed doors, now they're said in sort of an open forum. And it just shows you how petty. Also a lack of emotional development that some intelligent people have. a lack of uh emotional development that some intelligent people have like they're they could be accomplished and intelligent and successful and they still act like fucking babies like they're still this is like like why do you care like if there's a show and you you don't think they glorify guns enough and you're angry at them like are you doing enough shit in your own life to focus on like oh yeah why are you why are you focusing on that it's usually because you know you're you're probably at least a little jealous unless you've done something egregious like you've actually campaigned against second amendment rights which of course i know you would never do but if you did

like then they'd be like well this is crazy this fucking show they use guns and then they campaign against guns so hypocritical but that's not the case no no so for you saying that you're getting a lot of hate from the right that means there's a lot of dummies on the right that's what i think yeah you know i i do wonder about it and again it's uh you get like you you experience this all the time you get in trouble for having and talk about getting in trouble from the right and the left you get in trouble for having conversations with certain people yeah you know we had a um we had a native american historian and activist named taylor keen in our podcast so um he said some things that people view as controversial around um like you know around things like picking up a arrowhead,

picking an arrowhead up off the ground or the land back movement. Right. So, uh, people are pissed. Yeah. They're pissed that, you know,

he said the things he said. Yeah. You deal with this all the time. Yeah. Um, Tucker Carlson came on the show and people are then mad about that you talk to him yeah they're mad you we had um you platformed yeah we had a woman named room app on from um outdoor afro okay so she talked about her experience as a black woman

in the outdoors right uh great conversation people get really pissed they're like pissed they're just mad that she came on and she said well not only what i'm talking to her rue pointed out to me that people are gonna be mad at her for talking to me yeah after we got the recording she's like you know you're gonna get in trouble for talking to me and you know what's funny and you'll never you probably don't realize this i'll get a bunch of shit from coming talking to you guys yeah meanwhile it was an interesting conversation i enjoyed it a lot but the the the right they get um as much as people on the right right now are against cancel culture you know and i'm glad they are um they seem like oftentimes representations of that

perspective seem to be guilty like they seem to be guilty of their own crime by being very eager to restrict certain voices that don't conform to them and i do um try i do try to invite a variety of voices and represent opinions that I think are interesting. And not every opinion that comes out in my material is necessarily my opinion. But I try to do it, and it just makes people mad because people want you to be their thing. Yeah. Yeah. I experienced that with Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee.

You know, he was experiencing some weird cancel culture shit from the right online. And I was like, what the fuck is going on? I called him. I go, come on the podcast. I go, we got to talk about this because this is so ridiculous. Like this is, these are the people that have been rallying against this for the four years that Trump was in office and rallying against this for the year that Biden's been in office or less than a year. Now they're doing it.

They're doing it. They're doing the same thing. It's almost like, well, they get to do it. We'll do it too. And it didn't make any sense. No, they weren't going after the devil worshipers. No, no. They were going after people that were very similar to them,

but also wildly successful. That's part of the problem. Like Black Rifle Coffee is a wildly successful organization. I watched that with great interest. I'm friends with Evan. We have a hunt together coming up. I watch with great interest. I feel like how, like how, yeah, like the friendly fire incidents. Yeah.

How is anyone justifying that? Yeah. It's nonsense. We're fighting people. We're definitely that. In this country. Yeah. Well, people love to talk shit too.

And, you know, they get caught up in petty bickering do you know what though i gotta say this man um all the divisiveness it's like the thing that blows my mind though is when i go about my daily existence um if i didn't know it wasn't all going on from the news and social media and stuff when i wrote about my daily existence and just the interactions i have with people yeah fuck i would never know what was happening yeah how is that possible because that environment is i just think that like oh you know hey because the environment of social media is a terrible environment for human communication.

The environment when you're going about your daily business is normal. You're talking to people. And most of the time, like sometimes people have like a weird opinion of someone and then they talk to them like, oh, he's a good guy. Like this happened to me a couple of days ago. Someone told me that there's this business thing

that I'm doing and like this guy he's a real problem he's just he's very full of himself you're you're not gonna enjoy it i'm like wow shit okay well i'm just gonna put my best foot forward and see what happens i meet the guy and he's wonderful he's friendly he's nice and then i'm like oh maybe that other person was a fucking pain in the ass and they met this guy or maybe that guy had a cold that day. I mean, I don't know. When he met that other person, maybe. Who the fuck knows what it is?

Like, people are different on different days for different reasons. But I had it in my head. But then I met him, and he was great. Had a great time. So something about human interaction when you're together, the way we're supposed to. Look at each other in the eye. Have a conversation. Be close to each other., like physically in the room with each other. That's how humans are meant to communicate. When we're communicating anonymously through

text messages or arguing about things on Facebook and these fucking long, verbose passages, it's not normal. It's not a normal way where you get to just fucking expand upon something for paragraph after paragraph where no one says, well, that's fucking wrong and that's not true. That's not what I said and this is not what I meant. And you're changing this and taking this out of context. People get more angry with each other when you don't get to respond. When someone says something and you're like,'re like well that's not me fuck you and then they it's designed in a way that is not compatible with human emotions with normal human

interactions with social cues and reading each other's like like Louis C K had a bit about this once about kids and kids doing things online that kids like to be mean online because it's like fun and they don't feel anything. Like if some kid is in front of you and they say something mean and then the other kid feels bad and starts crying, they go, oh, well, that doesn't feel good. Yeah. But they say it online. They're like, oh, fuck him. Hey, you fat fuck. And they say it and then they don't feel anything because there's no one there.

But the impact on the other person is real. It's a terrible way to communicate. And this is the way that a lot of ideas get discussed. A lot of people are communicating that way. And as detailed by these documentaries like The Social Dilemma and, you know, there's different books that have been written about this problem. And that woman who just testified, which is kind of crazy, right? The day the woman's testifying about the problems with Facebook is the day Facebook goes down.

And there's a lot of conspiracies about that, right? But this is an issue. It's an issue that they're aware of inside the company and that they chose profit over rectifying this issue. They're like, well, this is what we do, though. They're like, we're making a lot of money doing this. And I think that in the wild, when people are just running into each other, we're still just people. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but isn't the inception of that app like the what they were fixing to make was they're fixing to make a way you vote people up

and down i think it was just a dating app wasn't facebook originally a dating app to vote so yes to who you wanted to be like yeah yeah there were other pop uh apps around the same time where like that where you would find someone hot and you'd click, yeah, they're hot and they'd get like ranked higher. So it's like maybe it hasn't drifted too far. Maybe. Yeah. Well, the thing about Facebook is I think when they do their prognosis on the future,

it skews so old. Like it's young people are dropping off of the use of facebook pretty radically and they see if that's true pretty sure that's true i read something about it today but i was only like gave it a cursory examination but i think what they're saying is that facebook is kind of doomed and so they're in this sort of desperate even though they're making billions and billions of dollars yeah the end yeah you can see the end in sight with your age thing. Yeah, whereas TikTok is the opposite. It scales very low.

Like, my fucking kids are into TikTok. A lot of people, young folks, are into TikTok. You know, Instagram is kind of like the middle ground. Twitter is where people go to throw shit at each other. Yeah. You know? Here it is. Facebook misled investors about shrinking user base.

Complaint to SEC, Facebook mishandling of duplicate accounts was extensive fraud. So what is it saying about user base? Facebook misleading investors about shrinking teen and young adult user bases and about the actual number of Facebook users. Former employee Francis Haugen alleged a whistleblower complaint. Facebook stock valuation is based almost entirely on predictions of future advertising revenue.

The company cites evidence showing that Facebook has for years passed and ongoing violated U.S. securities laws by making material misrepresentations and omissions in statements to investors and prospective investors, including through filings with the SEC, testimony to Congress, online statements, and media stories.

Facebook has misrepresented core metrics to investors and advertisers, including the amount of content produced on its platform. What does it say about single users, accounts, old people? What does it say? Fraud against... Oh, here it is. It failed to disclose internal data showing a contraction of the user base in important demographics, including American teenagers and young adults.

The company is also hidden to the extent of which content production per user has been in long-term decline. The complaint said, but obviously these are allegations from a whistleblower. We don't know if they're true. That's a good little bit of news thing there. You put that in the end? Yeah, you got to. Because who the fuck knows? She might be crazy.

And apparently she's donated a lot of money to AOC and some heavy-duty left wing. And she was upset that if you are a young woman, this is a very good complaint, a valid complaint that you, if you're a young woman, Facebook won't, it will say if you have issues with anorexia, Facebook will send you anorexia content your way,

which may exacerbate someone's predilection towards anorexia. It's fucking terrifying. They're the people that get it the worst apparently is young girls young girls get Social media they get the impact of social media worse than anybody They are the court that Jonathan hate in the coddling of the American mind He talked about that that higher suicide rates self-harm All that stuff the bullying bullying, online bullying. Young girls are the victims of that more than men.

Yeah, I read a statistic of teenage girls. I can't remember. A pretty staggering majority of teenage girls go to sleep at night with some level of anxiety about social media. Yeah. I can only imagine. But our kids now, they're not on social media, and they don't read the news, so they don't know that everybody hates everybody now. And when they see someone coming down the road, they wave. And their head is like, this guy's probably not bad.

Let's go talk to that guy. Well, that was like we were saying. They're totally cool with everybody, you know. No one's really let them down yet. down yet the amount of things that facebook has influence on having owned have they own whatsapp they own instagram they own facebook and this gigantic multimedia empire it's enormous there was an argument but you have to sell in some way you have to sit and be and acknowledge that they made a thing they made a thing that's useful yep and for me as like a as a content producer me as a a media personality i'm able to use the tools they made and reach

people that i otherwise wouldn't make yep so it's like i can't i have i can't be like unbridled in my hatred when but i didn't come up with the thing. Right. Someone else came up with it and it's very useful. Yep. Yeah. There's a real good argument there, but there's also an argument that it needs some sort of regulation because in

other countries they've used it to have people murdered, to lie about, to overthrow governments. They've used it to put out, like political rivals have put out false information completely unchecked that's led people to kill people and overthrow. Sure, but you could make the same condemnation

of our First Amendment rights. You could, yes. You could say like, people use their First Amendment privileges and it creates riots. They use their First Amendment privileges and it creates riots. They use their First Amendment privileges and it radicalizes people. It's just gotten too far. It's too much now.

It's too much influence. The idea is that, first of all, Facebook comes on phones in a lot of countries. In a lot of countries, they make deals with cellular providers so that if you buy a phone- It was like when U2 was able to put that album on all those iPhones. Yeah, remember how mad people got? That was probably the worst thing that U2 ever did. Oh, dude. That thing's still like, yeah, like now and then when I turn my truck on, it somehow like finds that album still.

Like, what? Stop that. When the Bluetooth syncs up and just randomly plays a song. Yeah. That's not on my fucking playlist. Yeah, that was a, well, boy, what a fucking bad PR move that was. Yeah, I mean, look, these conversations are interesting. And you're right.

There's no definitive yes or no, good or bad, because they're new. They're really new discussions. There hasn't been 100 years of social media influence where we get to have an understanding of what kind of impact this has on our society yeah and i still feel like i'm like a a mouse in someone's kitchen man like that i'm able to be in there doing my shit and haven't been found out yet get thrown out i get it so too especially with your line of business and then when you see these new regulations that youtube's putting out and you realize like oh well this is this might be a real fucking problem oh yeah it's when i look at people who their livelihood is built strictly around youtube it feels uh my, does it feel vulnerable to me? Very.

Unless you're on there showing how to make crochet or make bead bracelets and shit. I don't know. Or you're doing those videos like Sniper Wolf does where you're reacting to things. Like, oh my God, did you see that? Oh my God. She's funny and she's silly. It's G-rated. Yeah, so maybe you're not.

Yeah, but I think there's a lot of people that I look and I'm like, man, you being in the, you being what you're into and that you're only doing it there. Yeah. I'd have a hard time resting at night. I would feel like someone like the man was coming for you. That influenced my decision to leave and go to Spotify for sure. I didn't trust anybody. I didn't trust, I didn't even trust Apple. I didn't trust the, cause I knew that there were certain episodes, like when Alex Jones came on my podcast once, the ratings went down. Like there was no, they had no update in the ratings for like a week. And when I tell you it was my biggest podcast at that point in time, I think eventually Elon Musk became bigger and a few other ones became bigger. But at that time when Alex came on for episode 9-11, it was not just the biggest, but it was the biggest by far.

But that wasn't reflected. Not only was it not reflected, there was no ratings. The ratings stopped. And then when it came back, that episode was ranked like, you know, number five or six or something like that. Where other episodes where I knew what the downloads were, were number two or one. I'm like, how is that? Well, they're doing some shenanigans. They didn't want that episode. I think somebody, I don't know if it's true. I might be wrong, but I think somewhere, someone didn't want that episode to be number one because the numbers were crazy it was like 16 18 million

downloads it was nuts and it was because it was a wild chaotic you know alcohol and marijuana fueled conspiracy ride with the maniac yeah well at a certain level of influence you know that people do they're at a certain level of influence there are people that are able to pay detailed attention to very specific things. I'm sure like I wouldn't be shocked to hear that, that, that your show drew some special level of attention the same way that there were people at Twitter assigned to Trump's tweets. For sure.

Yeah. And then all the other, you could write insane stuff that would never get discovered. Yeah. And then all the other, you could write insane stuff that would never get discovered. Yeah. But at a point, you're like, someone is forced to pay attention.

It had gotten to the point where the show was always number one. So the episodes were always number one. So if it was always number one and then he came on and it was number one, that became a problem. And then the numbers were so high.

You know, it was number one that became a problem and then it was the numbers were so high you know it was uh it was a it was an interesting moment but it was also like i mean they were great they never really they never censored me they never told me what to do or what not to do no episodes ever got taken down i mean apple apple is essentially they're just an aggregator right they're saying apple never took your episodes never never once never censored anything never gave me a hard time never uh never gave any sort of uh criticism or anything they were great but they're they did a weird thing where they never really got involved financially in podcasts i think it's a tremendous business mistake

tremendous business well they're trying to rectify that now in a way that won't be so, maybe so great for producers. Yeah, what are they trying to do now? Oh, just like move away from, move away from applying that it's just like a random distributor. Like if they were to do

some kind of paywall situation, what it would do to download numbers. It's hard to get people to pay. There's too much shit that's out there for free. You know, there's so much good content today. There's a million podcasts, a million. I mean, if you go back to the day where Friends was the number one show in the country or Seinfeld was the number one show in the country,

how many fucking shows were there? Was there 20? I mean, how many fucking shows were there? How many shows? I mean, how many fucking shows were there? How many shows, what's like number one? I mean, what is in prime time? I mean, Jesus Christ, you have seven days a week and you have three hours every night or whatever prime time is. And out of all those shows, that's not a lot. You know, we got 50 shows and then you got, you know, cable networks, which don't, you know, really get the same kind of numbers back then. And then you have a show that's number one.

All these things are sanctioned. Everything is on a network. Everything is on a network that's broadcast through the government's pipes. Everything is all censored and there's advertising that's inserted. And this is a wild west of content where anyone can have something and anyone can put and a lot of them are good so if you have a

million shows which is really what there is right now for someone to come along and say i want you to pay good fucking luck good fucking luck i, even if you have a really good show. Yeah. Even if you have the best show. Like if this show, if I did that with, I'm not saying my show is the best show, but if I did,

it's very highly rated, right? If I decided to make people pay for it, I would lose almost everybody. You think so? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Almost everyone, unless I was the victim

of some sort of censorship and I was a martyr. And then I put it on my website and I had everybody download it from there and make some sort of a contribution. And that's the only way we can keep it alive. Then you could get people to realize like, fuck the man, man. And they would probably jump in. What is this? There's 2 million. 2 million podcasts.

Wow. I'm wrong. I'm wrong by a million. As of 2021, there's over 2 million podcasts and more than 48 million podcast episodes. Holy shit. This is pretty startling growth considering there was just over 500,000 active podcasts from just three years ago in 2018. That's what's nuts. These podcast statistics are completely in line with the fact that podcasts are slowly going mainstream.

Bitch, that's mainstream. That is mainstream. That is not slowly going mainstream. In fact, it's estimated that 78% of the U.S. population is now aware of what a podcast is from 64% in 2008. They're slow playing this because the reality is 75% are listening. There's a lot of people listening to podcasts. We regularly get episodes at 10, 11 million downloads. It's normal.

It's like the number of people that are tuning in to shows is crazy. It's crazy. But it's still just a tiny piece of the population. You're going worldwide, there's 330 whatever the fuck million people there are in this country. And then worldwide, you're dealing with 8 billion. Really, 11 million is just like a tiny little drop in the bucket. Do you imagine you'll be doing a podcast in 10 years, if you had to guess? I don't think like that. I never thought I would be doing this 10 years ago. I'm inviting you to think like that. I never thought I would be doing this 10 years ago. I'm inviting you to think like that.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm wondering. I don't know why not because I do enjoy it. When I stop enjoying it, you know, I mean, I don't want to mention any names, but there's certain people that do shows where people feel like they're phoning it in. If anybody ever really feels like I'm phoning it in, I'll stop. Yeah. If I feel like I'm phoning it in, I'll definitely stop or I'll stop phoning it in, I'll stop. Yeah. If I feel like I'm phoning it in, I'll definitely stop.

Or I'll stop phoning it in. But I don't think I'm ever going to stop wanting to have conversations with people. Yeah. Like, if I can have you and you and I just talk, I always want to talk to you. You're an interesting dude. If we get a camera on us and other people can get in on it and they enjoy it, like, there's someone out there on a treadmill right now enjoying the shit out of this. That's what I like.

I like it. You're providing something that people actually enjoy yeah as long as it's enjoyable to me i think it'll still be enjoyable to other people because enthusiasm enthusiasm like genuine enthusiasm is contagious you know and i find that if i watch someone that's cooking on tv or someone that's making things or someone that's talking about something they're passionate about even have zero interest in it if it's a genuine enthusiasm that's cooking on TV or someone that's making things or someone that's talking about something they're passionate about, even if I have zero interest in it, if it's a genuine enthusiasm, which is why when I do this show, I don't do it based on famous people. I don't do it. I don't try to get people that I know will get big ratings. There's zero consideration of that.

I've always appreciated that about you. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Because I'm only a little teeny bit famous, but I get to come on. Well, I'm always interested in talking to you my interest is in my interests you know so if i i don't and i've had that was one of the interesting conversations in the beginning like with netflix like who are they going to be the episodes who's going to be the first week like what are the big names for the first week i'm like there's not that's not happening yeah there's not gonna be any of that there's not gonna be any of that we're gonna try to set it up and make I don't think like that and because I don't think like that it stays I hate the word organic but it stays organic

because it's just I like talking to people I like talking to interesting people and as long as I think they're interesting I want to talk to him whether it's a fucking author that no one's ever heard of that has some book that's interesting or a photographer that covers wars or whatever. Whatever. A comic that no one ever heard of, but I think they're talented. That's what I want to do. So I'm going to keep doing it. As long as I keep – I mean maybe it won't be interesting to other people or maybe way less people will find it interesting because the medium will have shifted and it will have moved on.

But I didn't do it in the beginning ever thinking it would be the number one podcast in the world. I did it thinking like, oh, it'd be good to get high with my friends and talk shit, you know? And here we are fucking how many thousand? What are we? 1000 something? 17, 17. I think I've told you this every time I've been on your show, but you know Helen Cho. Yes, very well. The first time I ever heard the word someone say podcast was Helen Cho in reference to you. Yeah. I could take you and show you where she was sitting and where I was sitting.

I think that was 2011 when we met, right? I was like, what? She's like, just listen. Just go. I was like, what is that you know probably said something about how it sounds like a stupid idea i don't know whatever yeah it's funny you were you were in it early early yeah 2009 yeah and i wouldn't have gotten into it without your encouragement i knew you should get into it right away the first time we ever did one i'm like wow that guy's

interesting because uh i enjoyed your show the wild within before you ever did meat eater I remember watching you make a fucking boat out of some moose skin and going down a river and the whole deal I was like wow fucking cool show and interesting kind of subjects and and before you had ever taken me hunting I'd always had this fascination with hunting. I always watched like ted nugent spirit of the wild and watch a bunch of these hunting shows because i would be like but that's probably the best way to eat like to get the meat yourself that way you really understand where it's coming from versus this weird sort of separation between you and the act of the animal dying where you don't really understand what you're doing. You're just eating meat.

One of the two times I thought my career was over was when that Wild Within show on Travel Channel didn't take off. What's the other time? When my first book didn't take off. The Buffalo book? No, no. My first book was called Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine.

Oh, that's right. But that book's still in print, man. Yeah? No, in the end in the end no but when it came out it didn't um i had all the i had tons of media around it just no one bought the damn book man i thought i was over you know there's like this i don't know if he actually said there's this thing that's always attributed to woody allen and maybe he said it all like something to the effect of like his movies are always good enough that they let

him make another one yeah yeah yeah and i felt for a minute that my book hadn't done good enough to get to make another one but then someone took a bet on me again and i was able to make a book a successful book but yeah that doing that while with an untraveled channel dude we were it was we they ordered eight episodes they ran them all but we were I mean we just wrapped the eighth episode okay I mean I was in the we were like getting in a car to go to the airport

from the location where we were filming in West Texas and I got a call that they were not it was effectively cancelled even though they ran they ran some sum through. And I thought that somehow you were done. Yeah.

You were done. We could have been. But in that year, too, you still had to jump through all the hoops. Yeah. And I just didn't realize, like, emerging into a thing where, like you said, like the Wild West or you're in the open ocean or whatever the hell. Like, I was just emerging into a place where, like,

the time lined up that you didn't need to be. You could still do things. Yeah. You could still do things yeah you can still do things otherwise like I don't know a decade earlier 20 years earlier or something you'd have to go crawl into a hole man yeah well I was a part of TV that decade earlier when you had to get cast on a sitcom or you know Fear Factor I had to get cast on that and that's the only way people got to know who you were you had to do something else you had to do something i could never even believe that those dudes i was kind of shocked when the guy bought that show how come because he could like came in he came from an unexpected background didn't last long bought some shows none of them

took off uh we we didn't know what we had no idea what that show was about. It was kind of a mess. It was fun, but it was kind of a mess. And then when that was over and we started making Meat Eater, I was like, I had learned enough from that while with NBS to understand very well what I wanted to make. And it was going to be extremely stripped down. And it was going to be like, and i was going to have a very high like a

a you know very high level of influence over everything that happened well i remember i learned i learned enough to know that i remember a conflict that you talked to me about where they tried to release an animal so that you could shoot it like they wanted to guarantee that you got a moose so they were oh yeah well that yeah it was a conversation where someone we were talking about we were talking about how much time it takes and i remember it was early on before we started to film and this i'm not gonna name who it was but this producer said um i was like well you know you don't know it takes time and all this and he's like that's why there's animal wranglers

and your show is the opposite of that now because some of your best episodes are That's why there's animal wranglers. And your show is the opposite of that now because some of your best episodes are unsuccessful episodes. One of my favorite ones is the one that you're talking about your dad. There's no music and you're on the top of a mountain just discussing things. Yeah, Sky Island Solitaire. Some play on Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.

Yeah. Man, I used to be worried sick about those ones. Those are some of the best ones. Yeah, they were. Some of the best ones. We call them skunkers. Yeah, but they're some of the most realistic, too, because that's really what happens. It's part of the thing.

It's one of the reasons why it's so interesting, because it's difficult. That's like I said earlier. I think that's one of the things that's hardest to convey when you're just seeing a success. And the success is always towards the end. It's like it's all like you expect it, like a movie. You want the good guy. The good guy is going to win. He's James Bond.

He's going to survive, you know. And sometimes, no. I feel like I should get all circumspect about media right now, but I don't know. You know, media reflects the culture at a certain point in its ability to express itself and the culture has shifted its ability to express itself radically because of the internet. You know, this podcast is a great example of that. There's nothing could have existed like this 20 years ago.

Your podcast is another great example of that. Like you found your niche in that stream you know you caught that wave and you know you wrote it out like perfect timing like from the wild within the meat eater to podcasting to the meat eater empire now it's all internet based all influenced all you know all of All of it with these different streams of distribution. It's fascinating. Oh. Yeah. My oldest boy, my wife said the other day that he was saying that he hopes Meat Eater sticks around long enough for him to get involved.

And we had a good laugh about it. That's great. But I was like, oh like oh man i don't know buddy i bet it will you might need to i bet it will yeah i just i i keep encouraging him to join the military really for discipline just you know yeah something i think i think i have i have a guilty count i was very close my dad served um i I was very close. My dad served. I was very, very close to going in the military. And I feel like I have a guilty conscience.

And this thing happened to me where years ago I was invited by someone to go down to give a talk at Fort Bragg. It was the third special forces group. It was in Fort Bragg. And I went down to give a talk at Fort Bragg. It was the third special forces group was in Fort Bragg. And I went down to give a talk. And it was interesting. I call them kids or not kids. They're all guys about a decade younger than I was. 30, early 30s.

And I'm sitting there in front of these guys talking to them. And these are people that had come out of high school. They came out of high school post 9-11 and went into the military, did all their training, became Green Berets

and had spent their entire adult life either training for or in Afghanistan. In Iraq. Since they were 18. Wow. And one of these guys at one point, he opens up the Fort Bragg phone book, like an actual physical phone book. We got to talking and he opens it up and he's like, goes to the divorce attorney section in that phone book and just pages and pages, you know what I mean?

And you realize just the enormous, like the enormous cost and the enormous sacrifice. And yeah, I've always felt like I was so close and didn't do it it's always bugged me like i feel little like like chicken shit that i didn't do it and i feel like other people had to do like a thing that that uh didn't happen for me and so yeah maybe in some way i want you know i i would like him to go set the record straight for the family but my old man he was one of the biggest voices against he didn't understand why would you enlist when there's no war what are you going to do that was his that was his take on it because

he enlisted during the war right right he's like well if there's a war you enlist but i mean if there's no war i mean what what are you gonna mean, if there's no war, I mean, what are you going to do down there? And I just listened to him, you know? But yeah, man, I don't know. I mean, he's a little kid. I'm not going to lean on him too hard about it. But I feel like he would be setting things back right again. Do you feel like you're worried that you might want him to do something that maybe he wouldn't do otherwise because you didn't do it and you feel guilty he's young he's of age where i could kind of say i mean if he was 17 i'd probably

handle this conversation differently you know if he was 17 and going for it then um you know but when he says like what he's going to do or whatever, for whatever reason, my instinct is to encourage him to go into service. Let's talk. Figure it out. Figure it out in a few years. He's got a while. Maybe he'll wind up with you. I got to wrap this up.

Yeah, for sure. I got to end this. I got to get out of here. It's always a pleasure. Tell everybody where they can find meat eater it's themeateater.com you guys still haven't bought meat eater.com dude it's such a long weird story man

no themeateater.com is a great place to go I'm on Instagram at Steve Morinella if you go to you know wherever you can buy books go to Apple Books or whatever. And get the American Buffalo audio version because you finally do the voiceover for it.

Yeah, do that. But mainly right now, go get Meteor's Campfire Stories close calls. And then also, we're doing a fundraiser right now at TheMeteor.com where we're doing a fundraiser right now at TheMeteor.com where we're doing a fundraiser for our land access initiative where we raise money to improve and enhance places where you're hunting fish. And we've got a big auction going on right now. We've got a signed guitar from Luke Combs. We've got all the kinds of like a raccoon hide, antelope skull and stuff

all used on the episodes, all up for auction. You can buy Giannis Patel's first pheasant tail knives uh all kinds of stuff and we're gonna use all that for our land access initiative all right awesome all right beautiful thank you thank you bye everybody Thank you.