The Joe Rogan Experience - #1738 - Ben O'Brien

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Ben O’Brien is a writer, editor, and member of the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Board of Directors.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Oh, hi Ben O'Brien. Hey, Joe Rogan. Good to see you, man. God, it feels really comfortable in here. It's been a while. I know.

I missed you. Oh, this is so appropriate that I'm mixing this with a nice little Benchmade knife. We're making rye brains. This is a... We are. Well, we figured out a couple of different drinks one time on a hunting trip in Lanai, and one of them was the Cat Lady.

That was John Dudley's creation. The Cat Lady. There's no way to know. Do you remember what was in the Cat Lady? The Cat Lady had Red Bull, Red Wine, and I think it was tequila? Tequila, for sure. Yeah.

There's no way to really recreate that. John Dudley's everybody's uncle. He could put them away. Yeah, he knows how to put them away. And we did a podcast. Podcast in Paradise. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Who was on that?

Remy was on that one. Remy. Sam Soho was on that one. Yes, yes. Shane Dorian. Shane Dorian. Oh, it was a classic. And we had a giant dinner table in my hotel room just covered with bottles. And you emptied the mini bar. You're like, guys, guys, let's have a podcast.

We literally opened up the mini bar. Yeah. And I don't even remember what equipment we used to record. I was employed then as a marketing person. I was like, this is it. Was that when you were working for Yeti? Yeah. I was like, this is the end of my career.

I think I might have even told you guys after. Like, that could be it for me. That could be a problem. We got a little wild. But I don't think it was that bad. No, no. I don't think we said anything that was too crazy. I think we did just fine.

We created the worst drink ever. And people actually, to the discredit of the American public, people actually made that and drank that. Star-drained cat lays? They did. They weren't that bad. Which is the surprising part. Yeah. The Rye Brain, which is what we're making now, that was your creation, I believe.

I want to say dudley was also involved but rye brain is uh alpha brain instant the the uh delicious alpha brain is like a memory yeah well it is normally like it's just a supplement but we have alpha brain instant you add to water it actually tastes good this one i'm drinking here is uh lemon no pineapple this one yeah i was stirring my drink. I didn't have a spoon, so I was stirring it with a packet. Coconut lime flavor. Oh.

With a little rye whiskey. Benchmade gave me this sweet little knife. Oh, look at that. I feel how light that is. Yeah. You done any? Ooh, it's got like a little design on it. You done any work with this on animal parts?

No. No? That's just a little carry one. They gave it to me when I was in Portland. I did a show up in Portland and they gave me that. Just don't fly on a plane. Oh, you probably fly private. Don't fly on a plane with that. They gave it to me when I was in Portland. I did a show up in Portland. Just don't fly on a plane. Oh, you probably fly private. Don't fly on a plane with that.

They'll take it away from you. No, dude. Jocko gave me a big-ass fucking knife, and I had it in my fanny pack. I went straight through security, no problem. And then I sent him a photo of it from my hotel room. I go, hey. I go, look who's protecting your air. Fucking TSA let me fly straight through. I think if it's in a fanny pack, though. Oh, hey. I go, look who's protecting your hair. Fucking TSA.

I think if it's in a fanny pack, though. Oh, yeah. They figure this guy's safe. He's not going to do anything. He's wearing a fanny pack. He's a good guy. It's leather. It's shiny.

Don't a lot of people use fanny packs for concealed carry? Yeah, that is popular in a concealed carry world. Have you seen those Velcro ones that they have that you just pull a tab? No offense, concealed carry world, but it's not the most fashion forward. Whatever. It isn't. If you're not worried about getting laid, it's a practice. But you can defend yourself.

You can defend yourself. Mine's in my truck. What do you need? My car, rather. My fanny pack. Carry it everywhere. I don't fuck around with it. No, I mean the first time I met you, you had one on.

I fucking really wear one. I know, you really do. I often tell people, they're like, how's Joe Rogan? I'm like, well, he wears fanny packs. I don't know. You take, what are we doing here? What's your, so you put it in the water. So I put a little bit of there.

So we got a little water. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, whiskey. We need the whiskey. Since we're in Austin. What kind of whiskey are we going to go with? Is Jamie, you going to have one, Jamie? He's going no.

Got a couple different choices. I feel like, you know. Who gave us this one? Someone gave us this one. He had three of them. So what do you got there? Buffalo Trace. That's delicious.

Is this the one that Sanjay Gupta gave me? Might be. Could be. I think it is. And then Buffalo Trace. Which is pretty good. But then still Austin. Since we're in Austin, probably have a little local flavor. Did you see this guy yesterday go viral because he played the security guard guy on the left? Look at him, knee pads and shit. What's stuck in his pants? A hatchet?

I think it's a sword. That looks like a hatchet. He's a real security guard? It says on there, it's Agent Wolf security. I don't know. I was trying to look at the picture. Wesley Snipes. I'm going to go on a limb and say that guy lives alone. Right?

He's one of those dudes. Small apartment, just a couch. Or maybe like a trailer in the woods. Yeah. You know, and he's out there doing karate and fucking moonlight.

Shirtless in the moonlight. This is going to be, this is going to taste nostalgic, I feel like, Joe. Yeah, this will bring us back to hunting and land. Better times. Not better times.

Not better times, different times. These are perfect times. How dare you? These are good times in this little time machine you got here. Yeah. This is, I was telling you,

this is my third studio. Yeah, you've been to all of them. All the studios. Well, yeah, I've been to the one that was in my house. That was the first one. That was the early one. So I don't want to overhype my podcast. That was before

I knew this was a job. That was a bad go. Cheers, my brother. Good to see you, my brother. It's good to be here. Yeah, that was the one in the house was like, this is just for fun. Yeah, you guys filmed it or like live streamed it.

Didn't you? Yeah. Well, we, we had a, um, uh, I guess my office that we set up and I just put a table in the office and put like a little webcam on and it was, it was just for fun. It was all just a goof. Well, I tell people like my biggest regret in life, although there are many, one of them is when I first met you, we went moose hunting. The time, we had a fucking hell of a time.

I didn't laugh more in a truck my whole life. That was fucking fun. And you said, you should do a podcast, man. I'll help you out. Do a podcast. And I was thinking, I'll work for a magazine. That's the real media. Joe Rogan's over there in his basement with his buddies doing live stream.

That's what everybody said. Everybody said that. And I didn't listen to you. It took me a while to get there. But if I had listened to you when you first told me, I think it was seven years ago this month. This might be like the seven-year week anniversary of that, huh? Or seven or eight years ago. Yeah, something like that.

Yeah. So how long has this been going? 12 years. 12 years. Yeah, this is a 12 year old podcast now oh shit yeah the only ones who were doing it before me were corolla uh marin um there was a couple guys that were doing it before me yeah you had the guy on that was the pod father what's that guy's name lives here yeah adam curry he's the og he's the he's definitely been doing it longer

i mean he fucking invented this shit and he's i love that guy he's awesome he's definitely been doing it longer. I mean he fucking invented this shit, and he's I love that guy. He's awesome He's so fucking smart and so tuned in and he does everything like completely independent You know he's got one of them fucking Linux phones like he only uses signal You know like everything's blockchain. He's one of them guys. You know mmm Like, everything's blockchain. He's one of them guys, you know? I don't know how to smoke a cigar, so for the people watching, you probably... You just do it. Just fucking go. You figure it out along the way.

But he's fully dialed in. Like, Adam Curry's the most dialed in guy. Like, he's the one who's always alerting me to fuckery. Like, weird shit that they're doing about with, with voting or with the internet or with the digital rights. And you feel like you have kind of a, uh, a,

a back alley inner, like information group of people that are just sharing stuff with you all the time. Yeah. Well, a lot of information comes to you. Yeah. A lot of information comes to me because people want me to get it out and I usually butcher it. So it comes out all fucked

up. It comes out through my meathead mouth. And then it goes in my ears. I'm like, yeah, got it. Got it. All right. Let me tell everybody. And then I got you, bro. I got you, bro. Yeah. And then I'll tell you, I always, I'm terrible like that. And you think of the important points of history and things that you want to, ideas you want to articulate to people about things that are very important to you. Yeah. And you almost invariably fuck it up. And we could all just do a little bit better to acknowledge that with each other.

Like, this is hard. Well, you know what it is also? It's like, we have many interests. And that is, that's my main problem. I have so many interests. If you want to talk to me about very specific things that I've studied for most of my life, I can give you a very detailed. Like, you can wake me up at 2 o'clock in the morning and ask me,

what martial art's the best martial art? And I go, okay, well, this is what we know. And then I can give you, like, a very detailed, nuanced perspective on what we've learned about, you know, hand-to-hand combat. Yeah. And everybody has like one or two of those subjects that they know really well. And that's when you get into like public speaking or doing stuff like this, where you can go all day about that stuff. The rest of it, you have at best ancillary knowledge of what you're talking about. Right. Exactly. Especially if you're a person that has many interests because there might be multiple

things that you're really fascinated by you know i i always say that i wish i had many lives that i could live simultaneously because i would have a bunch of different occupations and you've gone deep on many things just in your life like pool when i first met you still addicted to pool and then we got you addicted to hunting archery yeah everybody got you deep into that and you find like especially going outside you find that there's so many crafts but even even in the outdoor world that i live in there's so many little crafts that you can you've got the archery one yeah the bow hunting one is a is a big one because there's like hunting which is a fascinating really difficult there's like hunting, which is a fascinating

really difficult pursuit and people don't understand how difficult it is, especially on public land. You know, it's a very hard pursuit. It is. And especially if you want to fill your freezer up on a regular basis and you want to eat mostly wild game and if you, especially

those do-it-yourself guys, I fucking give all the credit in the world to those dudes. I tell you a story. When I moved to Bozeman, I had killed big elk, right? I had killed, if you came to my house, you might say, this big elk killing guy. This guy has the bona fides to tell me how to kill elk. But I had never really done it on my own.

All with guides? Yeah, most of it. I did, I had one, I killed one big elk on public land. But again, it was a rifle hunt and I had a buddy helping me. I didn't gather the intellectual property in a way that I felt was appropriate to say, this is

the thing that I did. This is a craft that I can now say I'm a part of. I'm a craftsman in this thing. And so that idea stuck with me. And so when I moved to Bozeman, I thought, I have to understand the most difficult version of this elk hunting I'm gonna go figure that out and that's by yourself on your own find where elk live learn their habits learn how they talk and then be proficient enough with a bow in

this case to get close to get close enough and kill one did you do scouting online I did onyx maps? I used Onyx maps for e-scouting. I went deep. And I'm also a young father. I got a lot going on. So I'm like, I want it to be close to my house. Right.

One, I want to be able to include my friends in this. There's a lot of things I want to be able to do. And so I wanted to just understand the craft deeper. Because I'm sure you know with hunting especially there's no bottom to how deep you can go in terms of learning there's no you could never get to a full breadth of knowledge ever so many layers possible so i said i'm gonna go on public land of montana i'm gonna learn to call i'm gonna be i'm already proficient with the bow but i'm gonna learn everything i don't want anybody to tell me their spot i don't want anybody to tell me where

they all hang out. And it took me two years. Wow. I had a lot of shitty days in the woods where I thought I was an idiot. I was like walking around going, maybe this will never happen. Did you, like when you started out, did you remember anything that you'd learned hunting with guides? You weren't starting from scratch, right? So you probably.

No. No, I wasn't starting from scratch. I had a lifetime of hunting knowledge, a lifetime of understanding how to, so I don't want to understate my abilities, but understanding kind of how to work a landscape, how to understand where animals want to be. It's pretty simple a lot of times. So I had all this knowledge in my head, but what I didn't really have was the application of that knowledge. I've been i've been in the industry hunting industry since i was 22 and so i had this base of knowledge but i hadn't carried it out and in my mind it was always in when you get in the industry you get handed experiences they're like hey go hey this is gonna be cool so you get a suite of experiences that don't exactly add up to skill and craft.

And so I was like, started from scratch, sounded like shit as an outcaller. It was been about three years ago, three and a half years ago. Sounded like shit, but just went in my truck. And when I was driving around, I'd be calling. And when my wife got pissed at me, I'd go sit in my truck in the driveway with the heat on and just blow this alcohol. You'd blow a cow call or you'd blow like a bugle? A full bugle to in the car in my driveway that's why your ears are ringing man it's not tinnitus yeah but that was it so for me that was it was it's a craft right bohemian is a craft but learning to talk like an elk is itself kind of this immersive craft so i went along that path I found a spot where elk hang out.

I got a lot of stories about that particular spot where I learned when the elk were there, when they weren't, where they'd like to be, how they'd like to use the landscape. We had a lot of grizzly bears, a lot of wolves in that area. Did you see any? Oh, yeah. A lot of grizzlies? One grizzly.

Yeah? Big fucker. Did something happen? This would have been last year. Me and my dad are in the spot where I killed my elk this year in September. And I was struggling through the season. My dad comes to town. I'm like, Dad, I'm going to show you how to.

Let's go get an elk. I'll show you. Little does he know, I don't know what the fuck's going on at all. I got it, buddy. I got it. So we go up to my spot. If you picture, it's like a bowl like this. You know, the elk lives in the bowl.

It's a drainage. We go to the top of the bowl, and I hit the call, and I look up the ridge, and above us is this big bull elk. He's going across the ridge above us. And so I know how to use this ridge where he was on. He was going to come down, hit the spine that we were on, and then come down the ridge towards us. So I said, Dad, get in front of me.

I'm going to go back here and call, and we'll draw him past you and get a shot. So I start calling, make a little elk cow call. I didn't want to bugle. He was dominant. I didn't want to get run over, but I wanted to kind of entice him this way. So I was just cow calling, and it was a little bit after the rut so it wasn't full rut and he starts coming i see him look over and he starts coming down the ridge so i get all set up and i look back to where he came from and this big brown flash goes down the hill i thought it was him so i said daddy get

ready he's coming down he's running he's coming in oh jesus and i'm i'm looking this way and the bottom of the drainage is behind me and i knew the longer story is that i knew a buddy of mine had killed his brother-in-law had killed an elk in the drainage to the day before i had a trail camera in that spot that trail camera had picked up wolves literally probably 500 yards from where we were standing at that moment i had that trail camera had picked up wolves literally probably 500 yards from where we were standing at that moment i had a trail camera that only weeks before had picked up wolves killing cattle chasing cattle i got videos on my phone wolves killing cattle and so i had talked to the game warden i said hey man just want to let you know

if you're still a landowner his cows are getting whacked up here and he said listen i said well he said are you gonna hunt the carcass of the cow that was killed i said no i'm not necessarily interested in that he said well good because there's a grizzly bear in this there's a big boar grizzly bear male grizzly bear in this zone and you know how they are they can smell a smell a carcass from five seven miles away he said he'll probably be over i said okay noted and he said if if you kill an elk get it out of here so my buddy kills an elk it snows when he kills this elk this is the day before we were there he said there were wolf tracks on his tracks he had one pack out to the truck with half the elk went back to get the other half there were wolf prints on his tracks in the time it took for him to go back to the truck

and then come back for the rest of the meet. How long is the hike out? I can't imagine it was more than 45 minutes. So they were waiting. They were waiting. They probably, did he rifle hunt or bow hunt? Just bow hunt. They probably know.

They know. When they see you, they're like, oh, this guy's going to go shoot an elk. That guy over there? Yeah. Look at that little, look at that silly little bitch. Yeah. Just prancing around in his camo. Not only that, they leave behind the best part for a wolf, the liver.

Like, a lot of people leave behind the guts. You've been taking livers lately? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Dude, I eat it all the time. Yeah. It makes you feel good. Remember we ate that moose liver?

I do remember. I remember because Mike was like, no, I'm into it. We were drinking peppermint schnapps or something. We were drinking everything he had. Oh, that was awful. I remember getting on the plane the next day and being like, if somebody could smell,

they probably could. I think I have a photo that I was just looking at us. I have a video of you describing my moose kill. If we could find it. Let me try to find that video. People would be entertained. That moose was amazing. Cause you're like,

I was just running and I don't know why. Well, it was going, as it went down, as your moose went down, I started running towards it. I'm like, why am I running?

But I just kept running. I was so excited to see it because it was so big. You're like, let me explain to people. You're like. Let me explain to people what it looked like. The first time I saw it. Shout out to our friend Mike Hawkridge. The best.

He's the best. He's an awesome guy. The man. And he lives up there in BC. And he's got some wild stories about wolves. He's got some wild stories about wolves. Wasn't there like a bunch of wolves that took out someone's cow like right outside of his house? Yes.

Yeah. And there was, man, I can't even remember. If he was here, he would regale us with so many of them. But when you're in, he spends so much time outside. He has horses and he has cattle and he spends time on the res up there. Yeah. Reservation up there. And when you're in that environment, and I'm an East Coast kid. When I was 15, you'd be like,

hey, one day you'll be living in Grizz country. Fuck that. That's not real. I'm going to find this video. We're going to go back to this grizzly bear story, because people are like, what are you doing? They're used to that.

They get used to it. So we found a wolf kill. Do you remember that? I do remember that. Jamie, see if you can find that. Because it's on my Instagram. It's on my Instagram from seven years ago. It's like when I first got an Instagram.

Yeah. I mean, Everlast. There was a Everlast? Everlast from the House of Pain. He's the one who talked me into having an Instagram. He's like, you should have an Instagram. I was like, I already got a Twitter. Well, I got a thing on my Facebook

Like a 7 year anniversary of the Moose Hunt So 7 years ago It was this video that I'm about to find Okay I don't know This is going to be shitty audio We're having a time laughing joking All of a sudden Mike goes

Holy shit two bulls. We stopped the truck. You jump out. Within 10 seconds, the first shot goes off. Boom. The moose drops. I don't know. I might have yelled, shoot him again or something.

Who knows what happened. The moose dropped. You've got this. I have an Elvis t-shirt on. Yeah. Elvis doing karate. The worst podcast audio. This is my favorite part. I didn't realize I'm running. t-shirt on. Elvis doing karate. It's the worst podcast audio.

This is my favorite part. It was so big, dude. When we saw those Let me explain the first time I saw a moose live It was like Jeff Goldblum In Jurassic Park Where he like pops his head out of the jeep Like what the fuck I'd never seen

They're so big They're so big I had seen deer before But when you see a moose on the hoof, I mean, back then I had never seen an elk. I saw it. This is early in your hunting career. Yes, very, very early. Yeah, this is super early.

This is like the second or third hunt I'd ever been on. You got to pull up that cover, Jamie, that we did for Peterson's Hunting. Yeah, so it was me carrying the moose. And I was making a cardinal sin. I was wearing some First Light stuff and some Sitka stuff. You were a man of the people. What are you doing? You're bringing people together.

What are you doing? That's the thing in the hunting world. You have to be committed. There it is. I'm wearing a First Light shirt and Sitka pants. There it is. Yeah. And so Ben and I met because Ben was working for Peterson's Hunting Magazine.

That's right. And he contacted me and said, do you want to go on a moose hunt? And I was like, fuck yeah. And I had just gotten into hunting back then. It was a completely new endeavor for me, but I was obsessed. Like right away, early on. Yeah, this was early, early in your evolution. There's a video right there of Joe Rogan.

I'm not very good at hunting. I'm not. Who is, though? Well, I mean, I've been hunting now for nine years, and I say that I'm like a purple belt in hunting. Yeah. That's how I describe it. And, you know, Cal, Ryan Callahan likes that analogy.

I like it, too. Because it's like, if you're honest, like jujitsu honesty is like, you know, like there's white belt, blue belt, purple belt, brown belt, black belt. So I'm like a purple, like now, all these years in, I'm a purple belt in hunting. And even, as I was saying earlier, you could pick lanes there. Yeah. You know, because I'm in kind of like hunting knowledge and overall i spent 12 years reading articles writing articles thinking about this podcast yeah this so like maybe i'm

a black belt in kind of being able to talk about it but that doesn't mean you have the physical ability the mental stamina right you know really to put the time in and that's really a big part of it too you have to be immersed and put the time in and you have to sacrifice other things in your life and go outside and suffer and you have to get a feel for like how things work like there's there's choices that you make when you're hunting when you're in the field like do you go left do you go right do you try to cut this animal off do you wait it out yeah like what what do you do do you like do you try to play the wind or do you try to take a chance while things are swirling? There's so many. And even to this day

you talk to Cam Haynes who's an absolute black belt in hunting. 100%. Nobody would disagree with that. Probably I would say he's the greatest bow hunter alive. That's my feeling. I'm with you. That guy makes mistakes. He'll tell you. he's like i took

a chance i try to do this i try to shoot him slightly quartering towards i try to do this i try to do that and it's it's one of those things where you try to describe it as there's a bunch of topics here all mixed together but one of them is that why do we hunt in the modern sense right what are we out there doing we'll get back to the story two things we're getting meat and we're also having a like a transformative experience. Yeah. But bring that back a little bit. Think about game theory. This is the most immersive, real, in a real sense, game that you can play. Yes.

And it's a three-dimensional game because it has, you go play a video game and what do you get at the end? You get the dopamine kick, you get the kind of critical thinking that it takes, you get the muscle memory, whatever. You get all those things that are beneficial. But in the sense of hunting, and we tend to focus on one part of the game or the other, but the game itself is

understanding an animal, understanding the landscape it uses, understanding its ecology and biology and the history of the landscape. And catching it while it's horny. Catching it while it's horny. It's weak. It's so dirty. It's such and biology and the history of the landscape. And catching it while it's horny. Catching it while it's horny. It's weak. It's so dirty. It's weak as fuck. It's such a dirty game because you catch them in the rut while they're making bad mistakes

because they're trying to get some fuzo. There was probably some Pleistocene hunter thinking about when to mammoth fuck. When are the mammoths in the rut? And when can I take advantage in a very similar sense to what we do with whitetail deer and elk and the things that we pursue? So you're like, well, I'm going to take advantage of this thing. But the game theory I think is in a modern sense, because we could just get meat at the store, game theory is what draws us in, but what keeps us there and what becomes kind of like what I always think of is a side benefit of hunting, not the reason we go, is the meat and what that provides for you.

Because if you were, you think about the activity of hunting, you would reason we go, is the meat and what that provides for you. Yes. Because if you were, you think about the activity of hunting, you would do it holistically different if you were just after meat. Right. You would do it holistically different if you were just after antlers or horns. Right. You would do it holistically different if you were just out there for exercise. Yeah.

It's the package of the game of hunting, the game theory, that makes it attractive. That's very well put. Yeah. Yeah. And then the byproduct of that game is real. You can taste it. You can smell it. You can fucking feel it.

And it sustains you. It does. And I really, I'm like, dude, I'm 54. And, you know, there's a lot of supplements and hormones and all sorts of other things that go into why I still can work out and do things like I could when I was 34 and even 24. But I think game meat is a part of that. I really do.

It's fucking super healthy. I have a picture of my dad. I was just down yesterday. I'm like fresh out of the woods. We were cichodier hunting in Maryland with my dad. He shoots this hind hind which is a female seeker deer and we hung it up had a few beers went to sleep woke up next morning skinned it cut it up and ate the back straps and i did the french cut back straps you remember on the

line yeah bone in yeah and as you're going through this process you get to see the transformation from a thing that walks around to a thing that's on the plate and in that case it was like microwave you boom done it's on the plate and you see it and you can see the redness of the meat we're used to this like bullshit marbling that we've created in beef yeah this is just just flesh it's the difference between lebron james and a gamer yeah Yeah. Like a fat Twitch gamer. That's the difference. It's like the difference between like a super athlete, a Brock Lesnar thigh steak.

You know what I mean? That's what it is. It's pure and it's, you know. Thick. It's thick and pure. And it's just the redness, the richness of it. Nutrient rich. Dense.

And even the muscles that are used quite often in the animal, like if you think of shank meat or things that are muscles that are used a lot so they become really tough. They got a lot of sinew, a lot of tendons, a lot of things you got to work through to get the meat out. When you slow cook them, you still get to, you almost get to taste the effort of the animal. Yeah.

Like it's so beautiful to peel off the meat from a shank. But, you know, I'm starting to change my opinion on tender meat. You know, there's a thing about tender meat where it's easy to eat and everything, but that's the reason why people have like bunched up teeth and small jaws. Do you know that? Like that's what's happening to humans. There's a, I believe his name, is his name John Mew? There's a guy who has a theory about this who created this technique called mewing. And it literally changes the structure of your jaw.

And it's like a stress technique. You're doing things to like stress your jaw. Like I think you put your tongue in your palate and you stress. But the idea is that the reason why people develop these like small jaws and the reason why people are um their facial structure is changing and their teeth are getting bunched up his thought and it's not just his it's many people that understand uh human beings and i guess evolution is that we're eating soft food that doesn't require you to have a strong jaw. Like we used to have to have during the caveman days,

the paleolithic days. Yeah. And that, um, like strong, like tough meat is what we're supposed to be eating. Like that's, that's what,

that's what made our jaws. Like, like when you look at a person and you're like, look at that guy with his fucking strong jaw. Strong jawline. That's a human characteristic that- It's an admirable character. That's an admirable one.

Yeah. That's what makes a strong jawline. It comes from eating meat, like tough meat. You don't get that from mashed potatoes only. That's true. You just don't. But I'll tell you that backstrap from that Sika deer was like melt in your mouth. It's delicious.

It's delicious. But I think those flank steaks and the different cuts off the shoulder iron steak shoulder yeah chewy meat you're supposed to eat that stuff it's supposed that's that's like a part of the reason why your jaw is supposed to be strong and the the thing about this mu guy is that for the longest time people thought that it was genetics that shaped and structured a person's face. But what he's showing through his exercises, and other people are showing through similar things, like I have a device that I use.

I forget what it's called, but it's basically like a half of a rubber ball that I put in my mouth and I bite down on, and I do reps with my face. For your jaw reps? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where do you do this at? Do you do it in the truck? I do it in my mouth and I bite down on and I do reps with my face. For your jaw reps? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where do you do this at? Do you do it in the truck? Do it in my house. Okay.

Like in my office. It sits in my office. I put it in there and sometimes when I'm scrolling things online, I go like this. Yeah, I'm crazy. No, you're not crazy. I've got problems. Well, you've got problems.

Yeah, that's true. That's my problem. I try all kinds of other things. No, your problem is you're always trying to better yourself. Yes. And that's annoying for people. So I try to better my face. I try literally kinds of other things. No, your problem is you're always trying to better yourself. Yes. And that's annoying for people. So I try to better my face. I try literally like my jaw has gotten stronger because of this.

I've been doing it for years. What can you use that for, you think, as an application? It's good to take a punch. Yeah. You need to take a punch. Your jaw will be stronger. If you need to bite things, you have more bite power. Like I chew right through tough meat.

I'm used to it. But yeah, I appreciate all cuts of meat now because of that. Yeah. And that appreciation comes from every, like, you know, exactly. And I, as a hunter, also went a long time not knowing how to butcher a full animal from nose to tail. I don't want to overplay what that really is, but it is when I open my freezer, and I know you've probably talked about this before, but when I open my freezer, I get this comfort. Mm-hmm.

Especially during the pandemic. Right. Whoop. Oh, yeah. And I look in there. That is, and I look, oh, that's, oh, my gosh, that's the sirloin tip that comes off the hind quarter. It's wrapped around the bone.

I know I'm going to make a roast out of that. I know that came from an elk that lived right up there. I know he was three and a half years old. And I turn around, his head's on the wall. I'm like, oh, that's cool. I know he was three and a half years old. And I turn around his head on the wall. I'm like, oh, that's cool. I get a lot of satisfaction out of feeding my friends too. Feeding my friends with the food that I have. And that's the best.

Because we get into this in my world. We get into this like, how do you promote hunting? Because not everybody can do what we're talking about. Because it's not sustainable. There's not enough animals. That's a weird argument that vegans always use. Not everybody can hunt. Well, not everybody's going to.

Not everybody's going to hunt, but that's- Not everybody's going to do anything that's hard. Not everybody's going to factory farm either. I mean, these are, yeah, that's a straw man in so many ways. It is, but if you think about most of the people that are eating meat, they are eating it from these factory farms. They are. And we have, I was thinking about this at some point in the last couple of days where, because I was out with my dad, he's the person who taught me to do this. I don't know if my life would have been different if I had not gone the path that I went on getting in the hunting industry

and making it my life. I mean, I think if I died tomorrow, three quarters of my funeral would be people in the hunting world that I've met and gave relationships with. And it's been my life in the large part. And I was thinking of if that hadn't happened, where would I be? But I'm, I know that I have shaped and will continue to shape my life around it. My life will follow it. And I moved to Montana to, to have the lifestyle that I wanted to give my kids an opportunity at the very least to just see what that is. And I've watched, I've, there's not, there's never been a person I've taken hunting that didn't come out of the experience completely obsessed or completely addicted to it. And they just, there hasn't been anyone.

There's nobody that's been like, yeah, it's nice, but I'll do it on the weekends. I can remember very clearly me and Brian Callahan and Ranella and Ryan Callahan eating meat from a deer that I killed over a fire in the Missouri breaks in Montana. And then, um, Ranella asked me, so what do you think about hunting? I said, I'm going to do this for, so what do you think about hunting? I said, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. This is what I'm doing. And it's like I said, not everybody has to do it, but they have to understand that it's an option and all, you know, so many really smart people you've had on this podcast. When you start thinking about what's

our culture do for us? Like what's, what's the really useful thing that our modern culture does for us? I can tell you, I don't know, but I can tell you what it doesn't do. It lays up all these kind of acceptable addictions. I'm acceptably addicted to fast food. I'm acceptably addicted to my phone, to a sedentary life. I'm not saying honey is the only solution for some of those issues, but it is one of them. Yeah.

It's one of them. It's a healthy addiction that can substitute some of the unhealthy ones and it's endless and it like i said it's a it's a way to hack into what i think you really are what you're supposed to be in the shit you're supposed to be doing and so at some level you know i've committed my whole life to telling people about that and saying like it's not for everybody, but if you do it, you're going to find some kernel of substance that will help cure the cultural woes and societal woes that you're experiencing. with people is trying to put myself in their mindset and try to examine and understand various experiences that they've had, whether it's someone who's lived in a monastery or someone who is an ultra marathon runner or someone who's a mathematician, trying to understand them. And over the last 12 years, it's radically changed the way I view the world because it's

allowed me to have this really comprehensive understanding of people that I do not think would have ever been possible. No, this is like a hive mind you got going here. Yeah, and it's also a massive education. I've had a 12-year education talking to some of the most brilliant people I've ever met. And in all sorts of walks of life, like Snoop, like having Snoop on the podcast and seeing his perspective and seeing that guy is a black belt at living life.

He's so good at living life. He's so good at living life. He's so comfortable. He's so kind. First of all, my whole family met him, right? And my daughter has a dog named Snoop. And Snoop had to meet Snoop. And it was the moment of Snoop meeting Snoop was amazing. He, like, you know, he calls himself the dog father.

That motherfucker loves dogs. Dogs love him. He saw that dog and he, he like likes gently slow he's a small dog it's a dog that's part chihuahua and part whip it yeah so he's like petting snoop snoop's my buddy by the way snoop love snoop when he sees me runs full clip to me and jumps and i pick him up like this is my relationship with my daughter's dog so like to see snoop with the real snoop and i said this must be what it what it feels like if a dog with his limited understanding of the world meets a god. You know what I mean?

You've heard legend of this thing that I've been named after, this god. Now here I am in his presence, and he's so kind to me and so benevolent petting me and touching he loves me He loves me. Yeah, it was amazing But he was in here and I was watching I only watched the first little bit of it But it was pretty clear that a super stoop and he probably was like that from the beginning Well, I think learned, you know, he talked about it during the podcast He's talked about learning how to be like a peaceful kind person and learning like from his mistakes and you know the early days of gangster rap and getting caught up in all that east first west and stuff like yeah there was that was a big part of the

conversation that we had i really enjoyed his company man i really really really really enjoyed that's what the beautiful thing about sitting down with somebody for that long locking yourselves in this room and just exchanging ideas. There's no hiding. No. There's no hiding over three, four hours, whatever it was with me and him. But at the end of the day, it's like I'm getting this education in people. I'm getting this human education.

I always appreciated that because you have that education and you kept hunting because you could have I know you described from the first moment you knew I remember you telling me a story of being at dinner with your wife's friend that was a vegan or something like that and you were saying I'm hunting

and they were appalled at the fact that you would go out and do something like that while they're just cutting into a nice T-bone steak yeah it wasn't he was they weren't a vegan yeah it was they were just yeah it was a it wasn't i wasn't there it was my wife was having a conversation with her friend and one of her friends friend from england was this guy who was uh eating a steak saying that it was appalling that i was hunting while he's cutting into a steak she goes do you do not see what's happening here?

And his rationale was that this animal was raised to be killed, and you're going out there killing wild animals. It's just pure ignorance and a lack of understanding about conservation, a lack of understanding about conserving, protecting, and paying for the conservation of wild animals through the Pitt and Robertson Act. Well, you get to a point where you love the game and i think for me as a kid you don't understand what the game is you just understand you love it and for me when i was a kid i followed my dad in the woods it's this immersive game where my dad shows me the the structure and the rules and he says

this is how we do it and you're just kind of following in my case at least following him and you're just kind of following, in my case at least, following him. And then you start to go out on your own, and you start to explore the myriad of things you can do in hunting, and then you start to find your own way, right? You find your own value system, and if you're lucky, it helps structure your life in a better way. And so then you get to the point where I can say for sure that I know,

I've sussed it all out, I understand exactly what hunting does for my life. And then I can then understand there's a structure for why this matters for society. And there's a structure for how we pay for this. And there's clear evidence that it has done good for wildlife in this, on this continent, let alone this country. And it's, it's all that is is very clear when you look at the evidence. I have, I know you know this, spent some time with vegans. Like I've had podcasts with vegans. Yeah. Not just your regular run of the mill vegan.

I'm talking activist vegans, people that are probably in federal prison right now. I went to the Dingo Den one time. There's a group called Direct Action everywhere i believe dxe and i went to um berkeley and had lunch with a couple of the activists i won't say what their names but i had lunch with them at a vegan restaurant and and just asked like what's it like where are you from who are you how'd you get here right because it one guy was like from a farm in kansas those are good podcasts by the way.

Oh, thank you. Tell people how to get those. The Hunting Collective is a podcast that I don't do it anymore, but I did it for Meat Eater. You can go to Meat Eater's website and listen to the Hunting Collective. And what episodes are those with those vegan guys? Because I really enjoyed them. There's a bunch of them.

I'd have to look. If you look for Direct Action Everywhere, I did one. I have a good friend who I'm hoping to start a podcast with at some point soon. His name's Dr. Robert C. Jones. He's an animal ethicist and he's a professor in California. He used to be at Chico State. I think now he's at a different college, but he's an animal rights guy and a vegan. Good friend. I've been talking to him about how do we do a show together and just take these issues on together because him and I have the best conversations. So if you I have the best conversations.

So if you look for the best example of this is Dr. Robert C. Jones. So if you look for that podcast and look for Dr. Robert, you'll get some good discord. And it's healthy. He's a philosopher, so he takes me on some of these philosophical journeys and tries to convince me that animal rights has some validity, which I often say, I've always said to him, I said, listen, me that animal rights has some validity, which I often say, I've always said to him, I said, listen, imagine if we, animal rights and veganism and hunting, you're a vegan, I'm a hunter. We start back to back. We start at the exact same place.

And over time, we walk away from each other. After a while, we forget where we started. And all we are is we're separated and we're yelling back at each other and that's what veganism and hunting is to me because i think vegans and hunters start from the same place vegans and hunters ethical hunters are way closer than people that just eat meat yeah and people that have no thought whatsoever i feel more connection to to somebody that actively looks at how they consume than someone that actively avoids. Right, someone who just is willfully ignorant.

Yeah, so I always tell them, I'm like, we're, and this is many, many, many issues in our country right now, we talk past each other. We don't have to because we start with the same idea. We just get to a different place. And by the time we're so separated in this walk away from each other, we're just yelling back at each other with with no context of how we started. There's also this

lack of Appreciation for survival itself because we've gotten to this point where it's so easy to consume food Consuming food is like we're like one of the rare moments in history where poor people are fat Yeah, it's so strange cell phones, but it's just food just just sheer calories It's not nutrient dense calories, but it's just sheer calories and poor people are often fat right now Which is in history if you looked at the moment Like if you look at all the moments of human history that during a time where poor people are fat this is the only one like literally the only one no if you go back to the civil war

days every man weighed 120 pounds you know like people were tiny you know you go back to like napoleon they made fun of napoleon because he was short but he wasn't short napoleon was tall for the day for the time but he was like five six because he was short, but he wasn't short Napoleon was tall for the day at the time But he was like five six because everybody was tiny because no one had food he was way taller than homo was a homo floriensis Yes, well, that's a weird one. That's the hobbit person that lived in the island of flores That was a that was a different totally different branch branch of a homo We're gonna say way away from this grisly story. But have you seen the new skull that they found? I believe they found it in China.

It's called the Dragon Man. See if you can find that. Dragon Man? Yeah. It's an enormous skull with a human-sized head, and it's a completely new branch of the human species. You know, like there's, was it Denovian? How do you say it?

How do you say it? Denovian. Well, obviously there's Neanderthal. There's Homo sapien. Denisovan? I forget which one it is. The one they found in Russia. I've listened to that sapien's audio book like 20 times, but it escapes me.

It's really good. It's in my brain somewhere. It's good to go back to over and over again. But this dragon man is this new skull that they found. It's a massive skull. Now, this skull was put in a well. It was wrapped and put in a well. So, okay, here it is.

The dragon man is a specimen represented a human group that lived in East Asia at least 146,000 years ago. It was found at Harbin, northeast China China in 1933 but only came to attention of scientists more recently the analysis of the skulls been published in the journal the innovation one of the UK's leading experts in human evolution professor Chris stringer from London's Natural History Museum was a member of the research team and this this creature was a completely new animal it's In terms of fossils in the last million years, this is one of the most important yet discovered. What you have here is a separate branch of humanity

that's not on its way to becoming Homo sapiens, but represents a long separate lineage which evolved in the region for several hundred thousand years and eventually went extinct. But if you see what these things look like, go back up to that skull again. Look at the fucking brow bone, man. I bet that dude

could take a punch. He probably wasn't chewing on anything for his jaw. He probably got hit by a lot of shit. But that's what, when you listen to Sapiens and you understand that book, they're saying, like, the branches of the tree, we were just one branch of the tree. We happened to keep growing while others died. Homo floriensis and this dragon man because we were the ones where the aliens came in that's right fuck with our built the pyramids yeah but if you

look at uh the the bones of i think the dragon man is on where is it um dragon man is on the far left so that's the one look at the fucking eyebrow brows man the brown bones are why the crown of the skull is kind of elongated I mean imagine running into one of those dudes in the woods you like hey buddy I want one time I went to the Smithsonian what's up Jimmy's as ancient human on the far left may evolved into the dragon man on the far right oh the far right is oh oh I see so oh the far right is even bigger much bigger but the ancient human on the far left has a massive brown bone as well, but it's not as big as the one on the far right. You're right.

Yeah, skull is- Go back to that other picture. Size is increased. Yeah. Oh, no, it's the same picture. I'm sorry. You just made it smaller. The one on the far right, that's the dragon man, right?

Yeah, look at the fucking brown bone. Dude, that looks like an alien man that looks like a dude i would recruit for the ufc i'm like listen dude you just got to learn some he's got a good ground game you already got power he's got a good ground game you can take a shot harry knuckles big game but that is it's interesting it's interesting to kind of think about how i think it's just a little bit misleading to say that we are tapping into that holistically in the modern sense of hunting No, not really. I mean we aren't really we are and we aren't I mean, we're a little bit. We're surviving playing at it Yeah, right. We're lying

But that's where the game theory but if because if supermarkets do exist and they do you know You can go to Whole Foods and buy a bundle of kale and a grass-fed steak. Delicious. Yeah. Yeah. To me, so we're trying to recreate something that was once essential to human life. You couldn't separate hunting and life for millions of years. But during the pandemic, it occurred to a lot of people that this may still be essential. Yes.

And this was one of the things that really changed. During the pandemic, let's Google this. The percentage of changed like during the pandemic let's google this the percentage of hunters increased during the pandemic and I think it increased by a large percent so we've seen it across the hunting space we'll pull up some actual numbers but it happened during turkey season and in almost every state

you saw an increase in hunting license sold that's how we track that obviously some states you would saw 5% increase in hunting license sales. Okay. It says the Council to Advance Hunting and Shooting Sports, that's lots more than I thought it was. The Meteor. Released the report this month. Is that from Meteor? Yeah, it is. Okay. Found a 5% increase in hunting license sales between 2019 and 2020 among the 40 states it surveyed. It includes

a 5.4% increase in resident licenses and a 1.6% increase in non-resident licenses. This is what people need to understand. This is probably the first year in the last couple decades where hunting licenses increased. Yeah. That's the big change.

Since the 1980s. It's been declining rapidly every year. Now, you want to know the big one? The increase in bow hunting. Yeah. Now, Google, what is the increase in bow hunting? By the way, look at this.

Somebody gave me that. Oh. Where from? It's from Texas. I've got some friends that pull these out of the ground. An actual arrowhead from some Native American tribe that someone pulled out of the ground here. You can see like the napping.

I mean, you just can picture somebody sitting in the dirt, chipping away at this. Trying to feed their family. With a real use for it, right? And that was a person who, that was people who we were descended from because those are people who survived. Yep. Didn't die. And here we are, years later, trying to struggle with why we should do that thing. But this article came up first, and this seems like better information than what I just told you for the last time. It says more than 545,000 hunters in Michigan had bought licenses through November 11th, nearly 10% more than the same point in 2019.

Significantly, the number of getting licenses for the first time in at least five years, if ever, has jumped 80%. 80% is crazy. Now, this is, again, something that had been declining and up until- Since the 80s. Yes. And people had been trying to figure out how to make people more interested in podcasting. And I think there's a twofold answer to that question.

Hunting. Hunting. Well, how to get people interested. What did I say? Podcasting. Podcasting is a big one. Yeah. I think that's a big one. I think that's probably

the most significant, whether it's Meat Eater, yours, mine, Dudley's. There's a lot of great, Remy's, Cal's. There's a lot of great podcasts out there that cover hunting that are really interesting. And then the pandemic. The pandemic opened a lot of people's eyes to the possibility that like, my friend Duncan sent me a picture of his grocery store and the meat shelf was completely bare completely bare he's like dude there's no meat and and i'm like whoa you know this is and he was in north carolina at the time and you've talked about this before it just took away the thin veneer of safety yes that that we are sometimes like we are somehow beholden to the people that put the meat on the shelves, the proxy executioner that whacks the cow on the head, and the industry that goes and creates that cellophane-wrapped beautiful piece of meat for you to purchase. And these people that don't have this understanding of our place in the actual ecosystem, these Beto O'Rourke type of individuals that don't have-

You're hot on Beto. Yeah. or work type of individuals that don't have... You're hot on Beto. Yeah. These humans that are protected in this way, that they have this undue confidence in the system. Yeah, and the system itself is made up of individuals, right? And when you have a toilet paper shortage or a meat shortage,

I don't think it's that a certain subset individuals are buying at all i think that's it's that every single person buys more than they need right and then you then you have a shortage you have a shortage of paper thing is it takes up so much space yeah if you have a thousand people and they need to buy these giant fucking things of charmin like there's a lot of fucking space that those big toilet paper packages take up. Yeah. And you only have like one aisle, this toilet paper. That shit gets filled up really quickly.

Quickly. Yeah. Yeah, but that's where I, and a lot of people I know came to you, it came to me. Like, what do I do? Right. I need some meat. Can I borrow some meat? Sure.

Did friends ask to borrow guns? Yes. Yes. That was weird, right? Or like, where do I buy guns? Or what do I do? Or what's the process scared and uneducated is how i would and i don't want to call my friends and family

uneducated but i think they would probably admit that when shit when shit hits the fan and you're the person you're calling is probably the lifestyle you at least want to partially emulate next time this shit goes down did you guys have lines in montana outside the gun stores not that i can remember. Everybody already had guns. Yeah, Montana, we got guns. In California, there were lines. Fuck me. Like food lines. Like Russian

in the middle of the fucking collapse of the Soviet Union. Put some ammo in this bowl. I'm not bullshitting you. I know, I know. It was wild. Me and a buddy of mine were driving and it was in regular Southern California near my house. We were driving and I pull of mine were driving, and it was in regular Southern California, near my house. We were driving, and I pull over. I go, stop, stop.

Look at this. Look at this. That's a line where people are scared, and they need to buy guns for the first time. And what's a gun? I carry a gun quite often. I carry a gun definitely in the woods in grizzly country, which may bring us back to the grizz story. I obviously didn't get mauled because I'm here. But I carry a gun, and I understand the feeling i get it i understand the safety i

understand the feeling of not even not even the internal feeling of like i'm taken care of if somebody comes at me i at least have a tool to get to use i also understand like the externality of like you're not afraid of people anymore right you're not afraid of somebody rushing you you know that you have the capability to defend yourself right and that feeling once you have it once you understand it and then you take it a couple steps further to getting meat for your table and somebody comes up to you be like i don't think you should have that gun or i think that gun is unsafe you're like like, look, I promise you, if you could climb in my head, you would understand how beneficial these firearms are to my life and how kind of

core they are to who I am. Not only that, like if you were in a situation where you needed one and you didn't have one, you would be so goddamn terrified. Versus if you're in a situation where you needed one, you had one, you had training in one, you would be protected. And I've never run a gun counter, but I bet if you had somebody in here that did, they would say there's a large percentage of people that come in after some life-changing event where they were robbed, where some kind of violence or crime was committed on them, and then they decide to go get that thing that'll give them that extra safety when some people don't get a chance to go into the gun counter because they're dead.

Right. And you're seeing, and this is not in support of Kyle Rittenhouse, right? But you're seeing in the trial, if you paid attention to this trial, the guy who's prosecuting him doesn't know jack shit about guns. Finger on the trigger. Because this fucking dummy, finger on the trigger, pointing it at the jury. You got to pull that up, Jamie. The picture of him. It is goddamn crazy that this guy's doing

this. That he's in the middle of a trial about the use of firearms. Deadly use of firearms. And he's got his finger Why do you have your finger on the trigger? What are you doing? You don't ever do that. This is rule number one. You don't point do that. This is rule number one.

You don't point a gun at people unless you're trying to shoot them. And you certainly don't put your finger on the trigger. This guy doesn't realize that by doing this, he has validated everything that the pro-Second Amendment people have said about these anti-gun people. They are ignorant fools who don't understand what the fuck they're talking about. This guy with his finger on the trigger pointing this gun at the jury probably put the fucking cherry on the sundae. He broke like pretty much

the entire NRA gun safety four point rules. Fuck the NRA not fuck the NRA but I mean forget about the NRA. Common sense. Everybody that ever trains anybody in gun safety tells you not to do that. Whether it's the military, someone who trains you because you want to get a concealed carry permit or whatever. You don't do that.

And you don't know because the action is closed whether he's got a round in the chamber. Fucking, he doesn't know. He doesn't fucking know. Do you think he knows? If he puts his finger on the trigger like that, I guarantee that guy probably doesn't know jack shit about guns. No. And I think that goes back to't know jack shit about guns. No. And I think that goes back to me podcasting with vegans in the dingo den. It's like people that feel like I feel, that guns are so useful in my life, aren't that different from that fucking guy.

Yeah. That guy just doesn't know. All he would have to do, like you've done in your life with Terran Tactical and the stuff that you've done, is take a little bit of time to learn and understand and ask questions. That's fucking it. Right. Go and say, you know, I don't really understand these things. I think they might be a little scary. I've heard some shit and my first reaction is to be a little bit afraid of them or to denounce them or see them as tools of violence and not tools of utility. Why don't I go across the table and try to learn a little bit more and see if I'm wrong? Well, the problem is that prosecutor's

playing a game, right? He's trying to win. He's trying to put that kid in jail and he's playing a game in the highest, highest of high stakes. Yes. Yeah. He literally, yeah. The highest of high stakes, like the end of your life or now you're free. And Matt Taibbi has an article. Matt Taibbi, by the by, is God. I love that guy. On earth. Yeah. He has an article about kind of this trial and how it's being played on both sides of the coin.

And then, oh, by the way, our corporate overlords, the aristocrats, are having record profit that no one's talking about. aristocrats are having record profit that no one's talking about. He has this whole article about how while we're focused on this one trial and kind of the ideological polar opposite approaches, our corporate bettors are making lots of money. Snoop joint. Oh, that's a snoop joint? Oh, baby. A snoop joint. You know, what's interesting, too, is a lot of people that are ideologically progressive and very left are also honest and waking up to the fact that they had a very distorted idea of what happened in that case.

You know heavily left-leaning people like Anna Kasparian who is you know in the Young Turks She wrote a whole thing about how you know she had a perception of it She wrote it on Twitter, and you know some people attacked her She's basically saying she was wrong, and she made a correction which is brave. Yeah, and he's this day Yeah, and and she's right and Glenn Greenwald has exposed a lot of this And there's many other people There's many many many journalists Who said okay I did a deep dive on this And I thought I understood what was going on And I'm incorrect

When you look at the people that attacked Rittenhouse Again it's not a defense of Rittenhouse They attacked him Also he showed up with a fucking AR-15 Which is crazy He's a 17 year old kid He's kind of LARPing a little himself, right? Yeah.

I mean, he's showing up in a place where I guess his grandparents had a business, and he showed up because there was rioters and looters. And these people are not these noble people, these people that he shot, are not these noble people that everyone wants to pretend they are. If you look at the record of the people that he shot, first of all, one of them, pull this up, because they dismissed all his charges right before the trial. And this guy had like a fuckload of charges. All the charges of one of the guys he shot?

Yeah, different stuff that unrelated to the trial. See if you can find that. Unrelated to the trial. Before he took the witness stand one of the guys he shot was I think he was a pedophile I think I don't want to step out of line but I really think that that was like one of the we'll figure this out it doesn't matter if he was an astronaut like when you're coming after him with a gun yeah and one of the guys hit him with a skateboard tried to take

the gun away from him and he shot the guy guy. Yeah, it's all on video. And it's like, why the feeling to paint, you know, to attach him to a narrative? Dude, I don't know. Get scared. Try some of that Snoop weed. It's a Snoop Dogg blunt. Yeah. He has his own brand of weed. That's how you know you made it in my world.

I'm not going to inhale too much because I'll go off the fucking rails. But the reality of this is, like, we're... What is that? Oh, that's Snoop's... Let me see. What does it of this is like we're – what is that? Snoop. Oh, that's Snoop's – let me see. Snoop. What does it say? Premium nutrients?

Is that what it says? Snoop's premium nutrients. Growing science. Nutrients. Higher knowledge. Hand roll with glass tips grown with Snoop's premium nutrients. Snoop has his own fucking nutrients. He's got nutrients.

Yeah. Maybe one day I'll have my own. I'm not wasting my time with Alpha Brian. He's going straight to the mother. He's like, I'm going to own the nutrients. He's got nutrients. Yeah. Maybe one day I'll own them. I'm not wasting my time with Alpha Brian. He's going straight to the mother. He's like, I'm going to own the nutrients. But the point is that we separate ourselves into these ideological categories, these groups, left and right and right and left. And I'm a weird one because I'm a part of both in a lot of ways.

Me too. But I'm more left than I am right. I'm very open-minded in most things. My parents were hippies and I grew up on welfare. I believe in social services. I believe that we have to have some sort of a safety net for folks when they're down and out and single moms and people that are poor and people that are escaping abuse and bad situations. And I think there's a place for that. I think it's important. And this idea that everyone needs to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, when people say that kind of shit, I'm like,

you don't know the hardship that some folks go through. It's not a fair game. Put a little empathy on the situation for a minute. It's not like there's no room for empathy. It has to end at some point because it turns into some of the crazy shit we've seen. But, yes, you have to at least start there and then bring common sense in when shit starts to get wonky.

You need discipline. Eddie. So I'm both. I'm an empathetic person who believes in discipline. I force my own discipline on myself. And I think that that puts me, in a lot of people's eyes, in the right for some reason.

In the pro-gun thing. I'm very pro-Second Amendment. But I'm very pro-First Amendment too and for some reason and the pro-gun thing the very pro second amendment but a very pro first amendment too and that used to be a left-wing thing and now that's not anymore it's a left-wing thing if you agree with what i'm saying you know if you don't agree with what i'm saying you want to silence me this is the same thing as prison reform there's so many people who are you know we need to be like we need to have less people in prison. We need to, like, fix people and rehabilitate people. And then those same people, like, lock Kyle Rittenhouse in jail and throw away the key. He's a kid.

He's 17. Like, showing up at a fucking riot with an AR-15 when you're 17 years old, that is not a wise move. Yeah, I mean, you live in the same world I do. I walk around this city, other cities where I live, Bozeman where I live. I've lived in different places. Most people agree with you. Most people are well-meaning. They want to live a safe and happy life and they don't want to be beholden to one ideology or the other. They don't want to have to march in line. And one of the things I learned mostly from your podcast is the death of skepticism inside of these kind of tribal groups of left and right, or it doesn't matter. It happens in my world, the hunting world as well.

Yes. And in the second amendment world, the death of skepticism is a problem. Like you should be skeptical of every politician. You should be skeptical of every politician. You should be skeptical of every institution. You should live a life like, what's my religion? Skepticism. You should be skeptical of yourself. Of yourself. Yes.

And you should be able to see when, and like I said, I always take it back to being able to go into the dingo den with the vegans and ask them, who are you? Right. Where did you come from? How did you get to this place in your life? And how can I learn from you and teach you a little bit? And how can you teach me maybe too? Like you've got to be open-minded. Dude, I was on the verge.

When I went hunting with Rinella, I had reached a point where I was like, I'm going to be one or the other. I'm going to be a vegetarian or I'm going to be a hunter. We're going to figure this out. That's not in the world isn't binary like that. You could in the situation where I went to the dingo den, there was a bunch of kids. They're not kids. I mean, they're adults. They're younger.

And there was this celebration of federal indictments. Federal indictments. Like they would be rushing up on stage with Jeff Bezos or breaking into some factory farm with ag-gag laws, breaking laws on purpose. And in that community, there was a celebration of a federal indictment and maybe even going to federal prison for your beliefs. Street cred. Street cred. And one of the things I thought is, man, that's a rough, you have to really believe that everyone that you're like, Jamie, you, me, we're all murderers. You'd be walking around as a vegan activist, as an animal rights activist, looking at everyone as if you live in a world of murderer, of people that have no feeling for sentient life,

as people that don't understand kind of the society that they live in and function in. They don't understand kind of the mass of death that they cause in this proxy executioner world. This is what's in their minds. But let me put it in their perspective. Let me play devil's advocate here for a moment. Yeah. Imagine if you're them and that is what you believe. That's what I mean.

That's what I'm saying. But you were saying it as almost as if it's ridiculous. But if you're them and that is what you believe, you are almost under an obligation to get arrested. Yeah. What would you be willing to do? Right. So that's how that ideology carries out.

It carries out in this, what I believe is an unhealthy way. Yeah. But it's not all unhealthy. It only gets that way when it gets to be extreme. Well, it's a perspective, right? And it's a perspective that we can all lean one way or another. We really need to be aware of this. We all can lean left or right, depending upon what feels good. And you get a lot of confirmation bias and you get a lot of confirmation bias, and you get a lot of community involved in this ideology that you adopt. There's a supportive group of people that are also adopting that ideology. But human beings are so susceptible to cult-like thinking. It's so fucking dangerous.

I know. We all are. All of us are. We had this. So on my podcast, we were making of um this idea of what do we call ourselves are we the nation everybody has kind of every podcast you don't have right right you don't have like the roganites or anything like that like this kitschy marketing i can't even believe people are listening so i am not willing to have any kind of hundreds of millions i can't believe anyone listens so you don't want to call them

something because you're not even sure that they're there when i do ads and they say my listeners i always change it to the listeners of this podcast i'm like i don't own anybody there yeah i don't want to own any i mean it sounds ridiculous like i'm being silly but that is literally how i think of when i read i'm like ick that's gross and so in my way of kind of making fun of this idea i'm like we're gonna call ourselves the cult Didn't Jared Leto start a religion and call it the cult. I think he did yeah, we should look that up Yeah, no no, but it's he's not let me be clear. It's not really really It's him having fun with the idea of him starting a religion. He's not he doesn't really started a cult

Yes, he seems like a fun guy then big animal rights guy. Is he? Oh yeah. That's okay. He seems like a fun guy and he does these things where he has like a bunch of his fans and I think they go to an island or something and they do all these activities and dance around and have a good time. I remember I read something about it. Have you read anything about it? I have not read anything about it.

But it seems like totally friendly. He's just having fun. And that's like the time, cult has a bad connotation but what I was doing is like, let's call ourselves this because why do we have to call ourselves anything? Might as well just, let's take back the word cult and do something good with it.

And so long story, this is a very long story, but I was on my show and again that no longer is on the air, but I was on my show and we had a guy named Juan Carlos. This guy. He had a rye brain. Yeah, I got to get another.

I'm just going straight whiskey now. Okay. I've become smart enough. Can you overdose? There's Jared Leto. There's Jared Leto. See, dude, I'm not bullshitting. Everybody's wearing white.

30 Seconds to Mars and Jared Leto have a cult on their island. Yes. Why do cults always have to be on an island? And look at him. He's sitting. That's the only way to get it off. Why can't we do it on the mainland? No, no, no.

You got to do it in a place where people feel like they're literally on an island, so they're separate from the rest of the world. Look at him. He's walking around on this stone bridge. You could be, you have enough power that that can easily be you. I am so not interested in that. All you would have to do is want it. I'm interested in the exact opposite of that.

I wish I could hang out with those people and not have anybody be weird with me. Yeah. Like sometimes people be, they're weird with me and I'm not ready for it. He looks a lot like Jesus. He's having fun, man. Dude, he's a beautiful man. He's got long hair. He's having fun.

He's on an island. Yeah. Why? No one's getting hurt. Why have an island if you're not going to do shit like that? But here's the thing. I don't think he has an island. Do you think he's just on an island? I think it's a leech. After Epstein, islands have really got if you're not going to do shit like that. But here's the thing. I don't think he has an island. He's just on an island. It's not his own island.

After Epstein, islands have really got a bad rap. It's in Croatia? It's in Croatia. A lot of tough motherfuckers come out of Croatia. It's not a short trip, though. Tough fucking people. Croatia? It's big in MMA.

Oh, yeah. Mirko Krokop, one of the great all-time legends, is from Croatia. Pat Miletic, the Croatian sensation. He was a champion in the early days of the UFC. Pat Miletic is a beast and also founded Miletic Fighting Systems, which is one of the top gyms in the early days of the UFC. They were one of the first top professional gyms, and they produced killers.

Matt Hughes, one of the all-time great welterweight champions came out of the promotion. Big Hunter. Yeah, Big Hunter. Tim Sylvia, another Big Hunter. None of those people are at Jared Leto's club yet. They've run it. They're behind the scenes. Tim Sylvia, the former UFC heavyweight champion, he's a big-time bowhunter. Loves bowhunting. I remember seeing him at shows

and whatnot. Well, you know, he lives in the Motherland. He lives in Iowa, right? That's like whitetail heaven. Right now it's whitetail season. Yeah, you know, he lives in the motherland. He lives in Iowa, right? That's like whitetail heaven. Right now it's whitetail season. Yeah, that Dudley character, he's up there in a tree trying to play tricks on a deer. Let me ask this question. I'm going to ask this question to everybody that's listening. What other thing, is there another thing, somebody tell

me, that where you sit in a tree all day, other than whitetail hunting, or hunting in general, where you're in a tree. You sit, I've done this many times, where you sit, you climb up in a tree. You have to be a murderer. I mean, that's what you would be doing. You'd be waiting to sneak up on someone.

Just waiting on somebody. Yeah, if you're a guy like Dudley, Dudley moved to Iowa just so that he could hunt deer. That's all that matters. To me, it's so mind-blowing. I'm into Bozeman. The amount of time that he puts into... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You live in Bozeman. But let's be clear about the difference here. Let's make sure that we're clear. Let's be really clear. Here's the thing. Whitetail deer are like a religion in the Midwest. It is not as simple as an animal. It is a part of the culture.

People take school off on opening day. They let kids off school in some places. Where I grew up was like that. So then you have like the actual opening day itself of rifle season sounds like World War III. It is the wildest shit I've ever heard in my life. As soon as you start seeing the sun peak out, you start hearing boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So you have that animal. It's an iconic animal.

It's like if someone invented baseball today, people would be like, get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here. This takes too long. A little white ball with the stitches. It takes too long. I don't give a fuck if a guy hits the ball. NFL much better. But because NFL's clearly exciting to anybody that watches.

That's right. They're trying to get that ball across. Giant super athletes are smashing into them. People that you can't even imagine running into. I took my five-year-old son to his first NFL game, and he didn't even say a word for like three. Because you're stunned. Yeah, stunned. If you meet those guys, like quite a few of those guys have wound up fighting in the UFC.

Former NFL players. My buddy Brendan Chobb. There's a lot of these NFL players. Big dudes. Giant guys who make it to the UFC and when you meet them, you're like, what in the fuck are you? You're like, barely a person. Why are you so big? What is happening here?

You saw that guy at Dunkin' Donuts and he was just like, would you like the chocolate covered or the glaze? You're like, dude, you ought to be doing something different. I've told this story before, before unfortunately but we were in Phoenix and we were waiting to get into this place and there was a guy in front of us that was like all these other people in here and this guy was

like up here above the clouds and he was giant he was at least 300 plus pounds just fucking huge corn fed white dude from like the middle of the country where you know this like leftover Viking DNA from when they showed up in the fucking yeah thousand

years ago whenever they came here dudes are so big they're so big they're big they gotta be playing football these guys well you know there's a that's a weird thing about the UFC is that there's a weight limit well you gotta be I wrestled in high school no no but no, no, but at heavyweight. Oh, at heavyweight, you can't beat it. 265. It's the biggest you can beat? Yeah.

There's guys that are too big. That's a breakthrough. There's a guy named Tom Erickson who is one of the best heavyweights in his era. He was a really unusual guy. They called him the big cat because he was 300 pounds. I mean, a natural 300 pounds.

A big giant wrestler who knocked people dead. He was like – but he was at a time – he came along at a time where there wasn't the kind of coverage of the UFC that there is today. Not even close. He came around and he fought. He fought all over the place. He fought a lot in Japan. And I don't know how invested in he was eventually because it was hard. There wasn't a lot of reward back then.

It was very difficult to make. Now fighters can be rich. They can make Conor McGregor's extremely wealthy. Kamaru Usman makes, I don't know what he makes, but I'm sure he makes a shitload of money. The top people that draw in the style bender, they make a lot of money. But back then they didn't. And you had to be a champion a shitload of money. Yeah, the top people that drawing the law Stylebender they make a lot of money But back then they didn't and you had to be a champion to make any of it and Tom Erickson He never broke through in like neither pride, and I think it was too big for the UFC Once they put the weight classes in because I think fucking Brock Lesnar top

But just show you what this dude looks like this guy Tom Erickson these photos of him bro Let me show you what this dude looked like. Let's see this guy. Tom Erickson. Let me get photos of him. Bro. In his prime. How is he the big cat? The fact that his name is the big cat. Well, it's because he moved like a fucking cat, dude. Look at him. I'm telling you.

This guy was gigantic. Gigantic, awesome wrestler, but moved like a cat and knocked people dead. I mean. He was just a giant human. He looked like his head was made to be punched. If there's like a Wikipedia on him. Pride. Oh, there he is.

Oh, this is a video game. That's so weird. There's a lot of good fights in this. There's a lot of good fights. Find one where he wins, though. Don't be mean. He was, okay, find Tom Erickson versus Kevin Randleman. Rest in peace. See if you can find that one. I don't know who Matt Skel versus Kevin Randleman, rest in peace.

See if you can find that one. I don't know who Matt Skelton is, but yeah, put this on. So this guy, and this is probably many years after he was, I don't even know if he was in his prime back then. I guess his prime was during this time or maybe slightly before that. It's hard for a lot of these guys, dude, because this sport is so hard on the body. How fast. That you don't get a lot of time.

He was such a good wrestler, too. What a shot. He would just grab guys and manhandle them. Like, look at him. He's just gonna manhandle this dude. This is not a small guy that he's wrestling. Dude, look at the way he just threw that guy to the ground. Animal. When you get a grip when some fucking wrestler like this, like this kind of high level wrestler

gets a grip on you it's terrifying because you realize well he's stronger than me now I'm fucked and now he's got this dude mounted

his full mount and it looks like he's going forearm to neck he's tapping him he's just gonna choke his life out oh he's going

behind his head okay he's just smothering him that's what he's doing let me ask you a question how much if he wins this how much would you guess that he would make from this? I don't know because this was Pride, and Pride was pretty wild back then.

I don't know what they got paid. It was very controversial. Was it a lot? You mean it was a bunch or not a lot? Pride was run by people that were... He taps right there. Oh, he tapped into like a... He looks so desperate. He grabbed his

with his actual fingers He just choked him out with his hand. Yeah He grabbed his neck and smashed his throat Look at that, there's the Bro, I'm telling you, that guy was a straight gorilla and he fucked a lot of people up It's good to learn about this Yeah, he was one of those

guys, but there's a few of these guys that are are in between eras of the sport. Like, if you, like, if Tom Erickson came into his prime during, like, certain moments of the UFC, I bet he would have been the heavyweight champion. It's like,

with fighters, it's like, when do they come along? Like, when is the sport exciting enough to get them to fully commit? Like, because if you're not making much money, there's a lot of guys that they have to do other things. So they have, like, full-time jobs maybe. Well, I'm sure injuries play a huge part in that. Giant factor.

So you can only compete at his level for a certain amount of years. So, like, when you see a guy, like, a top-flight guy, like, did you see the fight, fight the Iair Max Holloway fight a few days ago one of the greatest featherweight fights of all time it was insane how good it was the only way you get a fight that's that good over five rounds you have to have two men or two women that are insanely dedicated to what they're doing because it was a crazy war for five rounds. It's so hard for you to do that. It's so hard for you to get your body into the kind of condition where you can maintain a war for five rounds.

I always think when I go to an NFL game or I go to a UFC or I go somewhere, I start to think of what it must be like for that person, what it must be like to run out on an NFL field or run out into the octagon and understand that you are yeah the center of the attention but you still have like it's all about performance and in a way it's the best kind of meritocracy because the lights are on you and you have a chance to earn you know by being more skillful than the other person you have a chance to earn it it's one of the bravest athletic pursuits for sure. I can't imagine it. I can't imagine it.

In terms of risking your physical health and playing this super complex game. I think I'm going to be able to take this guy down and smash him. He thinks he's going to be able to stand up and kick me in the face. Who's right? Sometimes you are in the middle of a fight and you realize this is not working. And you have to figure out a way to regroup and re-strategize and adjust. And some guys can and some guys can't. And you see it in the moment.

You see these changes and these shifts. You see people rise. You see their emotions boil up inside of them you see them you know like try to push through adversity and exhaustion and try to figure out a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and when they do they don't always and because it's hard it's hard to win when you're losing but when guys win when they're losing it's one of the most glorious things in all sports because where's that come from well i want to be too people that love mma are loving this for sure. But when you're talking about it, and this is going to

be probably cheap on my part. When you're talking about it, there's an element in hunting when you're by yourself. It's fucking like that, man. Yeah, there's something to it. I don't want to cheapen. No, no, no. Maybe not a great analogy. The thing is, you can get eaten and killed. That's for sure.

We'll go back to your grizzly story. That's a real thing. Did I tell you about that? Oh, I didn't tell you yet. Sorry, everybody. This is like the fourth time I've told this story. When I was in Utah, I saw a big mountain lion. Oh, like a big guy? A big one.

Big Tom? Like big, like a buck 70 plus. Bro, he was giant. My friend Colton stops the car. This is on the ranch where we hunted together before yes, yes He stops the car, and he's like what the fuck there's a mountain lion right there. He's like mountain lion mountain lion There's the 30 yards from us. There's a giant cat under a tree. I have never seen one I've only seen like you don't see it

I've only seen one run across the street and they were small like i saw like a maybe a 70-ish pound one in uh montecito outside of santa barbara and i saw one in colorado that was about the same size i'd never seen one like this i never saw i've never saw a real one this is a real mountain lion and talk about how have you ever felt the intense like the real emotion of fear and helplessness? Dude, it's a wild feeling. And first of all, be real clear. Inside a truck, I'm being a pussy, right?

And we're armed, okay? I've got a bow on me. But what you're doing is imagining, like you're connecting with the animal and imagining what it must be like. This is not to say my life is in danger. I don't want to overstate this. No. I was completely safe. But I was in this position where I realized that I was sharing this land.

I was sharing this space. I was walking around with a primordial killer and looking at things. Like, you have an idea what a mountain lion is based on seeing one at the zoo or seeing one in a video. You have this idea of what it feels like to be in the presence of one. or seeing one in a video. You have this idea of what it feels like to be in the presence of one. But I was looking through my binos at this thing 30 yards away under a tree. So I am right on it, right?

30 yards through the windshield, clear as day. 30 yards on the truck. It is wild. You're looking in these fucking demon eyes, and it has this huge paws, dude. He was a big tom. He had a pumpkin head, big ass. These are all the muscles for crushing bones and tearing throats apart. That's what that pumpkin shaped head is.

It's all muscle tissue. This is a meat processor on four legs. Good Lord. The feeling of being in front of that thing was like a jolt of fear went through my... You get a little snoop nutrients in you and then – No, I didn't have anything in me. Oh, me now? Yeah, now.

But it takes it back. I will tell you this. I went to Yellowstone a couple of years ago. It would have been 2020. So it would have been last year. There's a guy there named Dr. Dan Stahler. He is the predator biologist, one of the predator biologists in Yellowstone. We went on, he had collared a male mountain lion. I want to say three or four months prior to that. This is a big Tom. I have video of it somewhere. This is a big,

what you're describing is a big mature Tom. Length, body, kind of sway in the belly. Muscle. Muscle. I mean, just gait when he walks. They had video of him, trail cam videos of him walking and just his collar on. He looked like Matt Hughes in his prime. Think about this. He had killed over, I believe, a 90

day period. I want to say, no, 60 day period. He had killed 17 what they call neonates, which is fawns or calves and elk or mule deer. I want to say most of them were elks or calves and elk or mule deer. I want to say most of them were elk. A couple of them were mule deer. And what was interesting about that is they often say that predators

like a mountain lion will, they need about, maybe a neonate every couple of weeks to survive. What's the clip at which they're preying on? It's only every couple of weeks to survive, but if they have the opportunity, they'll do it more often. So when he said, he said 17 and 60 days. And again, I hope I don't have the numbers wrong. Apologize to Dr. Dan if I do. But suffice to say the clip at which this mountain lion was killing neonates was much higher than it should have been and so what you might think of immediately is this is an aggressive male lion he's going around pleasure killing and he's just doing his

thing right he's living his life he's a more aggressive tom or or he's surplus what they would call surplus killing but turns out what was happening was he was getting displaced by grizzly bears mostly and wolves on the on these kill sites so what he would do is he would come to a kill site he would kill uh you know pretty fresh at that time of the year it was in the summer so it was a pretty fresh elk calf or mule deer fawn he would drag it up in some brush we went to a kill site and found the elk calf and kind of looked around for evidence like csi yellowstone and so what he said is is when you're tracking via collar you can see the movements of these at intervals you can see the movements of these animals what what this particular time would do is he would kill an elk calf stash it and then go a

mile away roughly sometimes or maybe half a mile up above it and watch out because he was getting displaced by grizzly bears that often and displaced by other bears and possibly wolves as well. And so you start to think of how impressive is this predator a mountain lion? But there's something out there that is, that is dominant over that. This, this mature male mountain lion who is,

he is, his, he is, all he is is a meat processor on four legs. That's all that he is. We look at this situation with predator and prey and us and them through a filter of the human being. So we look at it through the filter of living our lives, being on the internet and communicating with each other

and getting a map of what reality is. But we look at it through this lens. If you looked at it through, like if it was just everyone had a number, everything had a number. If mountain lions had a number and deer had a number and wolves had a number, this is like a math problem that's being sorted out in real time. That's what it's like. It's like you have more mountain lion if you have more deer. If you have more deer, you have a lot of mountain lions, and the mountain lions start killing the deer. Maybe they kill too many of the deer if you don't kill the mountain lions.

So if nothing kills the mountain lions, then you have less deer. Then the mountain lions start to kill people. That's what the fuck is happening in Calabasas. A five-year-old just got attacked by a mountain lion the other day. The mother chased these mothers, bad motherfuckers. This happens all the time, right? If a mother, if her fucking animal is attacking a baby, if it's a mother, The mother chased These mothers Bad motherfuckers Mothers This happens all the time right A mother If her fucking animal

Is attacking A baby If it's a mother Mothers go crazy Doesn't matter what it is So she attacks This fucking mountain lion This bad lady

She scares the mountain lion Off her kid Rescues her kid The cops come Shoot the mountain lion Mountain lion's still Hanging around They shoot the mountain lion

And then two more Mountain lions Exactly the same size show up They're starving they've eaten all the deer and there's no management of wildlife when it comes to predators Yeah, like if you in in California They almost banned the bear right they were gonna ban bear hunting and people would you want to be tried listen to me? You have to because if no one does then they get out of control and they start there's to fit they get Cannibalize each other there's diseases and starvation like we have to play a part in the system

And we have to trust these wildlife biologists that have done these assessments Yeah, this is so this is where we get to a bunch of very important concepts that I hope everyone Can can start to understand from this show or wherever they can get the information. And this is where I go back to where when I'm a hunter and I see this game theory and I understand why I love it so much, I also then get to understand the structure in which it thrives and has thrived since the turn of the century in 1900, roughly. There's a guy named Dr. Valerius Geist. He was a wildlife biologist, a legend. He was one of the authors of the North American model of wildlife conservation. I've talked to him. He

recently passed away. Wonderful man. He, him and I talked a lot about this idea of how do you intervene? He was, he was very staunchly anti-wolf in a way that was surprising to me as someone who had spent his entire life around animals, studying them, and as a biologist, understanding how they acted. Was he staunchly anti-wolf naturally or reintroduction of wolves? He was reintroduction. He called them predator pits. He had, at least to his point, and again, he's passed away, so I don't want to get too far down the road and let him speak for himself. But i've interviewed him and talked to him about this idea of how predation works and he has seen he explained to me kind of how he'd seen wolves act and with surplus killing and what

he calls a predator pit when when a a group of wolves a pack of wolves takes over an area they surplus kill and they're not really worried about carrying capacity of the land. They are killers. That's what they do. He met a lot of flack in his later life in the wildlife biology and kind of wildlife management communities because of that view, which was seen as anti-wolf. One of the most profound moments of my kind of professional life is when I had a conversation with him and I pushed him on this a little bit. of professional life is when I had a conversation with him and I pushed him on this a little bit. And I said, look, there's a lot of people that think your theories on wolves are a bit outlandish,

that wolves are a blight on the landscape. They should be controlled. And he brought it back a little bit. And he said, you know, I'm for intelligent intervention. And if people can really think about that term and what that term might mean. Intelligent intervention means that we have the cognitive ability and the ability as a species to intervene in these wild places and intervene in these landscapes where we kind of belong and don't belong at the same time. But we can intelligently intervene and make sure that we can strike a balance. And in the case of wolves and in the case of bears, it comes down to carrying capacity of a landscape. How many elk can be on a landscape? How many bears can be on a landscape?

How do they work together? How do you understand kind of the ecosystem as a whole? And recognizing the cruelty of what happens if you don't manage that. They attack each other. There is no easy way out. No. There is no easy way out. No.

The cannibalism aspect of bears can't be ignored because most people don't understand it. One of the things that happens, and Ronell has talked about this before on his podcast, The Meteor, that there's a possibility that these bears are actively hunting cubs when they get out of hibernation. Yes, they are, and they're trying to get the sows back into heat by doing this. But there's that. Whether or not they're doing it because they're hungry and they think of them as meat or whether or not they're doing it to control the amount of males and control the population and control the competition, they don't know.

I imagine there's a mixture, but you don't know. But it's a big factor of it is overpopulation. Now, here's where it gets wonky. Ready for this? The most amount of bears in this fucking country by capita is New Jersey. Black bears. The most black bears. Well, I think most bears, period, if it's the most black bears.

Yeah, I mean, yes. Right? Yes, bears as a species, yes. Brown bears are less prevalent except in certain areas of Alaska, right? But when you look at the overall continental United States. Bears are in every state in the lower 48. Yeah. And when you look at bears in New Jersey, it's extraordinarily dense.

And you can't hunt them. You can't hunt them because they have a guy who is an ideologue, the guy who is their governor. Phil Murphy, I believe is his name. Governor Phil Murphy. He ran on banning the bear. That was one of his things. He wanted to ban the bear hunt. It's not a scientifically wise thing. Yeah. Shout out to the Sportsman's Alliance, which is a group in our space that battles these kind of state-by-state legislations that are meant to end hunting practices in different ways, whether it's trapping or whatever. Right, right, right. They're an important group to know about.

And they often run afoul of HSUS, Humane Society of the United States. And they're often against each other, which is a strange dichotomy, but that's the way it is. And in New Jersey, it's been a while since I've been immersed in this, but in New Jersey, the first thing that Phil Murphy did was try to ban black bear hunting on state lands, right? So they had a black bear hunt. And how this happens, and this happens with wolves and grizzly bears and everything. There is, with the Endangered Species Act, you want to get to a threshold, a healthy threshold. The wildlife biologists will set a healthy threshold. And if you take a few steps back, the North American Wildlife Conservation, one of the main things it was founded upon, and this goes back to the 1800s,

is the public trust doctrine. This means that wildlife isn't owned by anyone. Back to Snoop Lion. Wildlife isn't owned by anyone. It's held in trust by the states. All right? It's not owned by the landowner. It's not owned by the governor.

It's not owned by any fucking buddy. It's owned by all of us in trust. Right. This is an important thing to understand about our model of conservation, and this is an idea that led to the renaissance at the turn of the century where our country went from extirpating many of its wildlife species to saving and conserving them so the public trust doctrine doctrine bleeds right into our north american model of wildlife conservation which in and of itself says that we will enact wildlife

laws and legislation based on science and wildlife biology. So that means we are going to, we have state game agencies who are, and we can get into this too, are mostly funded by hunters and anglers through American System of Conservation funding that you've talked about a lot on this show. Pittman Robertson is one of them. Dingle Johnson is another. Explain that to people that don't know what we're talking about. you've talked about a lot on this show. Pittman-Robertson is one of them. Dingle-Johnson is another. Explain that to people that don't know what we're talking about. It's a lot.

This Pittman-Robertson was interesting because one of the things I learned from Manila's podcast is that a large percentage of that money is actually coming from people who are into the shooting sports. So here's... Most of it, right? Isn't it most of it? Most of it. I mean, it's hard to say year by year. I don't have a knowledge.

So many gun nuts. If all guns and all ammunition contribute to wildlife, that's fascinating. That means that gun nuts, the craziest fucking people- It's pain for them bears. They're paying to keep all the animals alive. Main is those bears. Right? So let's, yeah, you take it back to 1936.

America is kind of in the throes of the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt's the president.es of the Great Depression Franklin D. Roosevelt is the president They have the first, you may be googling this Jamie The first North American wildlife conference At the urging of many conservationists Of the time Ding Darling is a wildlife artist

Imagine your name is Ding Darling He's awesome dude, you can go to Ding Darling Ding, you know Either you're a clown or you're a stand up comic Or you're a politician that no one trusts This is a wildlife artist guy Ding darling Ding darling

That's only a name that could have happened in the 1930s Nowadays it'd be like ding fuck you Like if you were trans and your name was Ding Darling People are like bro Come on that's so in the head So listen Ding we're sorry to take a left Ding Ding My name's Joe it's one of the head. So listen, Ding, we're sorry to take a left, Ding. Ding. Ding.

My name's Joe. It's one of the most boring names of all time. Ben, Benjamin. This is nothing. Yeah, Ben and Joe. We're jealous. We got nothing. I wish.

I was Ding Darling. I don't think that was Ding's real name. He probably was like Charles Darling or something like that. Bro, but then it was his real name? JN Ding Darling. So what was his real name? Right, that's a weird thing. J Norwood Darling.

So he was a boring name. So if your parents name you and then you rename yourself, is that okay? Can you hang with people like that? Yeah, well, it's like... That's what you're... Yeah, could you hang with people that just changed their name? I mean, Snoop's not Snoop's real name. Yeah, it is.

No, he's got a real name. It's been his name more than it's been not his name. What's his name? He's been Snoop since like fucking 1990. That's a long time. Is there a threshold for how many years you call yourself a certain thing? In history, Ding Darling. It's not Jay Norwood

Darling. I've been very fortunate to never have any other names. Very fortunate. I feel very fortunate for never having the desire. But my friend Aubrey, he used to be named Chris. He changed his name to Aubrey. Aubrey Marcus?

Yeah, yeah. His name was Chris when I met him. And he just went, was that a middle name or just something that he went to? He tripped his balls off and he just like rethought his life and said I want to be a different person in one of the best ways. Here's a, yeah. I think he was naming himself after his grandmother or his grandfather.

Which is fine, right? I'm sorry, Aubrey. I don't remember. We're sorry to ding and ding. I've only known him as Chris for a couple years and Aubrey is like eight years. Shout out to Chris Aubrey. But it's like if my mom

named me Julius, I'd be like, God damn it, Mom. Maybe I'm Joe. I can't do Jules. In terms of name changes, some of the name changes have got to be corrective. Like, eh, I'm not liking this. Others have to be kind of declarative. Like, I'm this guy now. Yeah, I'm Snoop. I'm King Rogan.

There he is. What is it? He was friends with Disney. He was friends with Disney. Smoking a pipe. Got that bow tie. Ding Darling. His real name was Jay. But what was Ding back then? Because gay was awesome. Back then, they're like, we'll have a gay

old time. Ding Darling. Remember the Snoop? Or the, rather, Flintstones? Back then, gay was festive. And then somewhere along the line, it shifted to homosexual. Right?

Like gay was like this fun thing. This is the best conservation history lesson anybody has ever received. Ding Johnny was an important fellow. You can go to a wildlife refuge named after him. Maybe back then Ding had a different meaning. You know, like you could be Dick Nixon. Did it say, Jamie, what, Ding, how he got his nickname? Yeah.

He was the editor of his college yearbook and started signing his work with the contraction D-I-N-G, and it stuck. D-I-N-G. Darling. Ah, he was making a short for darling. How lazy is he? How lazy?

He did a lot. Can't write all the other letters? He did a lot. I'm going to get to this conservation fact. We're going to get to the grizzly story, too. Oh, yeah. That'll be the very end, like the flourish of the podcast. We know what we're doing, folks.

We've been doing this for years, me and Joe. You and I have been doing this for years. For ripping this shit for years. Yeah, for years. This is our third. This is our third. How many hours are we in right now? That's the dangerous part.

It's only, yeah. Two-ish. Let's not talk about it. We still got two or three more to go. So Ding Darling, he's out there dinging it up. And in 1936, a bunch of folks like Ding and conservationists of the time were challenging and pushing Franklin D. Roosevelt to kind of, they'd already had the renaissance of understanding

what conservation needed to happen in our country. Why are you looking at me like that? You're looking at me as such a- I'm taking giant hits. You're just fucking going- Snoop Dogg weed and going, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Continue, sir. I'm learning. I am learning. So anything, anyway. Yeah. 1936, we've already gone through a bunch of the legislation, Lacey Act, a lot of the things that would lay the foundation for this idea that we needed to conserve wildlife in this country. In 1936, there was this first wildlife conservation gathering.

2,000 people come. I've read reports anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people come to Washington, D.C. And at this point, conservation was an idea that was kind of shared across party lines. I remember reading that garden clubs and other bird watchers, all these people came to the table for conservation. It wasn't like a bunch of hunters and that was it. It was people that cared about wildlife. And they saw over the last decades how we had degraded and extirpated many of the wildlife populations that were important to this nation.

Mallard duck, elk, deer, everything you see a lot of, turkeys, all of it. In 1936, they have this wildlife conference, and what comes of it is a lot of things. But the first, one of the things that comes from it is this idea of the Wildlife Restoration Act, which is termed Pittman-Robertson. There was two senators, I hope I get this right, Key Pittman and Absalom Robertson. Imagine your name's Absalom. Go to that, make sure I got that right.

It's like Absalom or Absalom somewhere. My name's Absalom. Meet my friend Ding. He's always hanging out in the back. Dude, you should have been a comic. He's always hanging out in the back. Dude, you should have been a comic. He's always hanging out in the back. That was great timing. He's hanging out in the back drawing stamps.

Duck stamps. Fucking weird. I like to collect coins. There it is. That's him. Look at him. He looks like Absalom Willis Roberts. He was from Virginia.

And Keith Pittman, I believe, was from Nevada. That looks like the type of guy who would slap you if you told him. If you were your son and you told him you were gay, he would slap you. He would smack the shit out of you. He would slap you right in the mouth. That's right. God damn it, not my boy. Look at his early picture there on the left.

People were not even people back then. That's a staunch. They were like a trained monkey. You're not friends with that guy. You know of that guy. Yeah. He shows up. He's a state senator. Anyway, those friends with that guy. You know of that guy. Yeah. He shows up. He's a state senator.

Anyway, those are the two guys. They introduced the bill. And so, incense, Pittman-Robertson. So Pittman-Robertson is a thing that basically took at the time. This was a very popular thing at the time. It was called User – too much Snoop Lion. It was a user – too much Snoop line. It was a public – User Pays Public Benefits model. So, like, I'm using a road.

I pay for it, the public benefits. And this is around the time where we really had to understand how to pay for all this conservation that we wanted to do. We have national parks now. Yellowstone is already a thing. The National Forest Service is already a thing. Stone's already a thing. The National Forest Service is already a thing. Henry Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt has already done a ton to forward conservation in this country.

So now it's 1936. All these people get together, and one of the things they wanted to achieve is how do we pay for this shit? Because we've got to pay for it. And they decided, and there was, I think, five or six things that they wanted to achieve,

and one of those things was to pay for it. And they decided that we're going to create this bill and take a current excise tax on the sale of ammunition and firearms, 11% excise tax on sale. It was already there. And they're going to take that and they're going to put it into a bucket to pay for many of the conservation programs that we have in the United States at the time. That legislation was put forward by those two cool-ass motherfuckers that we talked about. And those folks, I think it got to Roosevelt's desk in nine days or something like that. It was so popular. It was like, boom, done.

Let's pass this shit on like today. Nothing would ever be done that quickly. But there was such a gathering around this that it went to Roosevelt's desk in nine days. He signs it. It becomes law. The Wildlife Restoration Act. That means that the manufacturer, so today, the manufacturer of goods and services. So you're talking about Rinella?

Yes. What he was talking about, about tactical shooters and people that just go to the range and shoot a bunch of ammo. The manufacturer of those goods pays that excise tax. For people who lost our train of thought, this is where the percentage of the Pittman-Robertson that goes... 11% for ammo. How much of it is from hunters? And how much of it is from shooters? I've never read any real clear statistics on that because it would be hard to say. You would have to go to the actual place where they're buying it.

And it's the tax on the manufacturer. It would be conservative to say like 70. You could say for sure. Oh, Jamie's got something. Jamie got it. Jamie's the shit. One source, hunters spending around $10 billion a year on everything they need for their hunting trips. A different source found that hunters spend between $2.8 and $5.2 billion a year on taxable merchandise.

This generates $177 and $324 million a year in PR money, which means Pittman-Robertson money. Just remember that because anybody that thinks that that kind of money is coming from any other source is delusional. Well, we can get to that too too, because that's a huge... Please do, because... That's a huge part of it. If people think that that kind of money is coming from people that are just philanthropy, it's not, right? It's not, and not in this way. This is one of the more...

Not for wildlife, right? Yeah, this is one of the more beautiful kind of... This is the thing that I discovered after I was always in love with hunting. I'm like, oh, look, there's a structure that is really nice, too, that I really admire. And it's a government structure. And I hate government, and I hate its structure. But this one I like, man, and I'm taking part in it. So Pittman-Robertson is, it started out as, at the time, because there wasn't a lot of archery hunting at the time, if any.

Very, very few. There wasn't a compound bow. What year is this? 1936. Take a hit of this. Maybe it'll refresh your memory. Snoop. You only have very few moments in life where you can get high on Snoop Weed.

And then talk about... Legitimately from this motherland. This is kind of like the Snoop Weed and then taking a test on history. No, this is perfect. You're doing an amazing job. Thank you. It seems to be helping. 100%. It's interacting somehow with the alpha brain?

Yeah, and the whiskey. All of it together. Yeah. And the fact that we're in Texas, the free place. The fishbowl. We just keep this going. You talk freely here. We keep this going for hours.

But explain. Keep going. So 11% on guns and ammunition. This is an existing excise tax. Right. So they decided that this was sort of a compromise and also like a good faith effort to try to preserve all the things that

were missing during the whole market hunting problem. Yeah. And there's so much more that goes into this before this moment. But since we're talking about PR, we would then need to say that this 11% already existing excise tax was funneled into a fund. It's called the Wildlife Restoration Fund.

I'm not sure if it was called that back then, but that's what it's called now. Over time, over the next 70 years roughly, we would go on to then add archery products and ancillary archery equipment to this. It's a 10% tax on that.

In the 70s, we would then have a similar addition called Dingle Johnson that would add that similar excise tax to fishing equipment. And so now you have this kind of bucket of money that is earmarked and goes towards that from the purchasers. It's kind of amazing. It's driven by the hunting and fishing economy and shooting economy. But let's compare it to anything else in society. User pays public benefits. But imagine if there was a thing, like if you bought an iPhone and 10% of it went to social justice.

And imagine if- But you know what I'm saying? I know. But imagine if this is- and the duck stamp's this way too. We can talk about that. But the duck stamp and this tax, if they were to come to the hunting community, the fishing community, and say, we want to raise this excise tax to 12.5%, I would guarantee. They would say yes.

There you go. Hand up. How about 13? How about 13? It's fine. Because they know they benefit. It's recreational activities. It's a part of the lifestyle.

And if you have to pay a little more, but you know that that money is going to a good cause and that everybody feels good about the transaction. All good. All good. And so this is a constituency that not only happily pays this tax, but would support whatever we need to do for that tax to pay for the thing that we love. It's kind of a perfect governmental. This is my thought. It is. And it's not that known. It's kind of a perfect governmental... This is my thought.

It is. And it's not that known. And I think if we can implement that same strategy for everything, for law enforcement, for education, for everything, for everything... It's a value system thing. No bullshit. I know. I understand.

But look at it that way. Look at the amount of money that's been generated by people who love wildlife and live off the land, whether it's 100% or even 5%. If you have 5% venison in your diet, you know. Yeah. So there's a bunch of more beautiful things that are built into it that kind of buttress what you're saying. And one of them is. I love the word buttress.

Whenever you can use it. Whenever you can use it, I'm like, respect. I'm going to buttress that shit, baby. I've never said buttress ever really you've never said buttress? I don't think I have we should make a t-shirt I mean it's just by accident somebody out there listening will make

you fuckers drank cat ladies you'll make a buttress t-shirt god damn it yeah but it's not like I'm like I said I've never said it what I mean by that it's like it's not like I'm above it. It just fucking never came up. I'm a man of the people.

I'm not saying I'm above it. I'm not being elitist here. That's why. I just never said that word. That's why the term buttress is now something. I mean, I might have, but I might have been like 14 experimenting with new words. Jamie, where are you at on buttress? Have you ever said buttress?

Jamie's never said buttress. Jamie? I don't think you've said it. No, it's too close to waitress, but. Jamie with the one line. Yeah. Yes, Jamie. That's too good.

Now back to the story. It's a good word. Back to buttress. Back to, I can't. I'm never going to be able to be serious about this with you over there it's fine just come up with another you know to to connect the two waitress butts buttress um so what's happening is we're now so we're paying people in the modern modern sense are calling it the american conservation system of conservation. And there's more than just Pittman-Robertson, which is wildlife restoration fund. So what happens is we take 11% excise tax. This is again,

paid for by the manufacturers. It does not show up on a receipt. You do not see it when you purchase a product. You do not really, unless you're listening to this or have read about it or been introduced to it, know about it. It's not something that when you look at your receipt, oh, look, 11.5%, I just paid that and that's going to go here. You don't really know about it it's not something that when you look at your see oh look 11.5% I just paid that and that's gonna go here you don't really know about it and and is which I think is one of the great failings of the fucking place right the community that I was the problem is that there's the amount of people that are involved in that world in the hunting world in the in the general it's it's too easy to get food so most people think it's frivolous or it's sociopathic or it's evil.

They have this distorted perception of what it means to want to be engaged in that world. That you're doing this almost as an excuse to kill things. You're not correct. Yeah, it's a danger. It's a slippery slope in that way. But you are correct sometimes. That's the problem. Because it's not like hunters are all pure.

There's not a fucking single group of humans that are 100% pure. I always say, like, do campers litter? Yes, that's a good way to say it. It's beautiful. Campers aren't shitty. That's great. Do cigarette smokers throw their fucking cigarettes out the window? That doesn't mean all people that camp are assholes.

Right. It doesn't mean that all people that throw cigarettes out the window of their fucking cars are arsonists, but a lot of them are. Yeah. A lot of them are, man. That happens all the time in California. For sure. Dude, during fire season, I've been evacuated three times, okay?

One of the reasons why I abandoned California, I was tired of being evacuated from my home with fire. There was a moment during the last one where I came home from the comedy store. There was a fire that was like a mile and a half plus from our house, and I came home from the comedy store, and me and my wife were like we got to get the fuck out of here I think it was her idea first she was like I think we should just leave

now like why wait I go you're right why wait like everything that matters is right here right you me let's go the kids our our dog let's get him in a car and let's just go and i knew that like i'm like we can escape like danger in this one moment if we act now but if we get stupid and and i don't want to say stupid because people made bad decisions based on the fact they never had to encounter a wildfire before so stupid is the wrong because i remember the first time i saw a fire a real wildfire in my neighborhood was like i moved to my neighborhood in 96 and the first time a real fire came around was like 97 or 98 i was like whoa i'll go, this is real. This can overcome an area. You feel powerless.

You also feel like, wow, it's amazing that you can just buy a lighter. It's amazing. Somebody ought to butcher his fires. There's so many disenfranchised, angry people and so many lighters. It's kind of shocking. Why would you live where it's Confucius says why would you live with Joseph says Joseph? Joseph Rogan says get the fuck out of the dry spot stop smoking cigarettes. It's getting too dangerous It's all grass you're counting on morons Yeah, so not throw cigarettes out their windows and is a thing that people do when they smoke yeah throw cigarettes out their windows. And it's a thing that people do when they smoke. It's a

cultural thing. They don't even realize they're doing it. They smoke their cigarette and they throw it on the ground and they stomp it out and they leave it there. They litter. It's the one time you're allowed to litter. It's a weird thing, man. It's weird. I've never been a smoker. I never picked that up. It is weird. I have

conscientious, intelligent friends that I love and respect. Comedians in particular. They smoke and they put their cigarette on the ground and they stomp it. Men and women. I'm a big fan of Ron White. He smokes. Well, like Chappelle.

Chappelle smokes like a fucking chimney on stage. Do you want to smoke one of Ron White's actual cigarettes? Yes. Don't you feel weird? I wouldn't feel weird at all. This is like a fucking menagerie of drugs and alcohol here. Yeah, those are, it's an actual cigarette that he's made. I should light it first.

That he smokes, though. He's around here, huh? He didn't make it. Is he around in Austin? Yeah, he's around. Yeah, we're doing a show tonight. You want to come? Fuck yeah.

Exactly. Is that real? I was bringing it on you. Did you just say that? I got other plans. You fucking guy. Multiple plans for this evening, ladies and gentlemen. Before we get to that, let me get to...

This thing fell apart on me. Just smoke it. I will. Before we get to that, let's get to the history of conservation in America, Joseph. Oh. Ding, darling. This motherfucker might have... Ding, darling.

A motive. Not really a motive. More like I want to finish a story. We have this deal deal We make a deal 11% guns and ammo 10% archery What year? 1936

That is amazing This thing has lasted a long time Hundreds of millions of dollars going into this fund This goes into a wildlife restoration fund which is managed i believe by the irs and it's given the irs takes the money to say hey here u.s fish and wildlife service here's this money fucking make it happen and then the u.s fish and wildlife service takes that money and they go to from state to state and they use a um uh equation that says think it's the land mass and number of licensed

hunters. And they take that equation and they give the money to the state. The beautiful thing that said, and this is often in politics, I think something that happens, they say, hey man, if you don't use this money on what it's earmarked for, which is hunting and fishing, money on what it's earmarked for, which is hunting and fishing, access and education. We're going to take away your license funds and put them into another, I think they put them into the Migratory Bird Act or Migratory Bird Fund, but basically says, if you don't use this money for what it's purposed for, you'll lose it. It goes somewhere else, bitch. Sorry about your luck. So now you have this thing where hunters, shooters, fishermen are paying into a system that many of them have no idea about. It's so ingrained in our system, in our minds as hunters and anglers,

that we know that the American System of Conservation Funding, which includes Pittman-Robertson, but also includes license sales. Can't forget that. You pay for a license. You pay for the privilege to go hunt wild game. You pay for a license. You pay for the privilege to go hunt wild game. All of this goes to fund state game agencies that are appointed by us that are there for the public trust doctrine.

We don't own these animals. We all hold them in trust. And we take that money and we say we're going to pay for a bunch of wildlife biologists to work for the state. And those folks are going to be the ones, for the most part to enact legislation to keep these animals around and that's that's the a huge part of the north american model of wildlife conservation that we that is unique to this continent and that kicks fucking ass as a person i agree it's a it's a if you if you look at it as a system in comparison to a lot of the other systems that are combating, whether that's like community violence or drug addiction or crime, if you look at problems and solutions, it's one of the great problems VS solutions in our country.

For sure. I don't know why I said VS. Never said that before either. There you go. Buttress. Hashtag buttress. Put that on a shirt. But it's like, I didn't want to be pretentious, but I had to be. No, you're not. It's one of the great systems. It really is. If we could have that same sort of ethic into other aspects of our life, I think we could do amazing things. If you think of the amount of money that has been generated willingly and also like happily by

hunters and fishermen and people in the shooting sports and knowing that it's all going to good, but it's sustainable. It's not too crazy. And there's results. There's an ammo issue right now. Well, sure. There always is. It's cyclical. But that's like a pandemic thing, right? That did really happen.

Pandemic. That's a whole another thing. right? That did really happen. Pandemic. That's a whole other thing. But let me just say this. You pull up, maybe, Jamie, pull up John Oliver did a thing on the duck stamp. It'd be cool for us to watch that. That was wild. Another person, two days in a row, that's quoted John Oliver as a source of history. John Oliver, if he's listening to this, is a shitbag.

What? How dare you? Not a big fan. Oh, he's a good guy. He's a comic. Has he been in here? No, but I'd have him. His show sucks. Oh, how dare you? Not a big fan. Oh, he's a good guy. He's a comic. Has he been in here? No, but I'd have him in here. His show sucks.

Oh, how dare you? Do you like his show? I've watched some funny elements of his show. Shitbag, I apologize for. That was a low blow. He's a comic. His show is, man. He's making fun of things, and they have a very left-wing theme to it.

I don't like it because it's so obviously left wing if you show up and I'm not defending him but yet I am if you show up and you're working on a show and I don't know how much say he has in how they sculpt those

those monologues you don't know I don't know but I think some of it's funny it's funny I'm not saying it's not funny sculpt those monologues. You don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But I think some of it's funny, even if I don't agree with it. It's funny. I'm not saying it's not funny. I've watched it for a long time, and I guess I should say the backstory is I was a big

fan of it, and then it started to turn to something. He's great in community. I've never seen him in that. He is. It's really funny. He's probably a talented guy. He's 100% talented. I shouldn't call him names.

No, no. He's funny. He's just very left leaning it's trying to normalize these ideas that aren't that trying to make these left ideas and this happens quite often in other mainstream media

it's trying to normalize these ideas that we should be talking through like this is how it is guys right you're absolutely right we should be talking through it I'm not saying you're wrong but but I'm saying you could be. But in his defense, he's doing it for entertainment and humor. So it's like, I give you a certain amount of license. The problem is not what he's doing.

But at least John Stewart. The problem is not what he's doing. The problem is the way it makes people feel. So you can either decide, I don't like to watch him because he's very left-leaning, so I'll watch something else. Or you can decide, that's what I'm looking for. And then you watch him and he

becomes as popular as he is. See? It's like we have this idea that everybody on television or everybody who has a podcast or everybody who has a YouTube show has to share your ideas. That's it. But they don't. You, Crystal and Sager, Bill Maher, let me name, Jon Stewart, people that challenge-

Kyle Kalinske. Kyle Kalinske, people that challenge these narratives. Tim Poole. All of them. But all of them. Sam, I mean, Sam Harris. Intellectual Dark Web, everybody. Brett Weinstein, Heather Hying.

These are people that are skeptics. Challenging ideas that need to be challenged, not people that are promoting narratives in kind of a disingenuous way. The label's the problem. The label's the problem. Whether you call it the intellectual dark web, or you call yourself progressive, or left wing, or right wing, these ideologies, these labels that we put on ourselves, they sort of are like, they're like the lattice work of cults.

It sets it up, and then the cult grows inside that little fence, and it takes root. And before you know it, you've got a cult. I have a matrix target. You know what a matrix target is? You know those archery targets? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have one in my backyard that has v vines have decided to grow around it it's like they are unaware that lethal darts are going fucking 300 feet per second

slamming into that that's not a place to grow but it's for them it's not enough disruption that they it stops them from growing because because it rains here in texas and shit grows crazy nothing lights on fire everything just fucking grows yeah i mean i would i apologize to john oliver but i think the frustration for me is just a normal dude that watches a lot of stuff is that i want to really like him and and sometimes i can see through it you gotta let it go see through the narrative stuff so apologies you gotta let it go and he's gotta let it go too that was unfortunate everybody's gotta let it go, and he's got to let it go, too. That was unfortunate. Everybody's got to let it go. Everybody's got to realize we have more in common than we do in difference. We all want our families to be safe.

We all want to have fun with our friends. We all want our children to grow up and have a great education. We all want to live in a world with no war and no pollution. We don't want to have a problem with environmental contaminants leaking into our water. We can all agree on those things. We're being separated by ideologies more than we are about what we agree on or disagree on. What we agree on is way more numerous. Most people who are good people who are happy people want everybody to have a good life.

Yeah, and that goes right back to public. We're paying money so we can go do things. I would apologize again to John Oliver. That was not – I went way off. You stepped out of line, you son of a bitch. I stepped out of line. Sorry, John. He's a fucking comic.

He's a comic. He's doing his job. He's doing his thing. Shouldn't have said that. The thing is like it's his point of view. Yeah, it's his point of view. And he may challenge me on hunting one day. That would be fun.

But if you agree with the First Amendment, like you want him to have his point of view. and he may challenge me on hunting one day that would be fun but if you agree with the first amendment like you want him to have his point of view and you really do and you want to have him his show and you want to be entertained by that's where the problem with social media comes in because there's a lot of people that don't think that way there's a lot of people that don't think like whether it's john oliver or whether it's donald trump or whether it's fucking a lot of the right- people or a lot of left wing people. There's an ideological battle. And if you've got control of the switch, you're like, fuck that guy. He doesn't think you should have a seven month old abortion.

There's weird, you know, there's weird like decisions people make. Like, fuck that guy. He doesn't believe that this is more than that. And that is what you should use these pronouns. You should say this instead of that. You should let these people control this because they've never been in control. And you should let Marxists and Leninists try to run the country because we've been run by capitalists. And it's obviously unfair and racist.

And then you try to figure out your way through the mess. Let me let me offer a solution, Joe. You have one? Yeah. Wow. Ben O'Brien. What's today's date? I'll wait.

November 16th at 3.47 p.m. Central Time has figured it out. Let's take a moment of silence before I start. Now, everybody good? I'm stretching now. Okay, let's go. We have, we'll start with Pippin Roberts, which is what we're, and we'll eventually get to the grizzly bear story.

We're going to get to that fucking story. I feel really bad about that. I feel we should just shut this thing off before the story. It's just like the end of Sopranos. Exactly. Exactly. Just be like, that whole thing about John Oliver is the end. Sorry, John.

What the fuck did that guy just try to explain the end of the Sopranos recently? I got mad because someone kept asking him, I think. Bro, why would he answer any questions? No, I don't. So. Anyway, go back. This is the most fun I've had in a long time. Me too.

I, I'll say this. We have, so we talk about the American System of Conservation Funding. You have, let's, I think we've mostly covered Pittman-Robertson. Yeah. So people understand that we're paying money and that that money is going towards the thing that we're taking part in. Yeah. User pays, public benefits. It's not, like I said, there's a large part of our populace that shoots for fun.

They go out. We call them, you know, tactical shooters or range aficionados. And they call people like you FUDs. FUDs, yeah. Probably FUD. For Elmer FUD. Yeah, Elmer FUD. Like Rinella would be a FUD.

A FUD. That's probably true. Elmer FUD. People call me whatever they want. Right. Remy Warren's a FUD. Is he? I would say so.

I love him. I love him too, but he's a FUD. If he's got a rifle, it's for hunting. He doesn't have time for anything else. That's true. Yeah, maybe. I don't know where the delineation of that is, but at some point, yeah, you're a hunter or you're a shooter. There are different communities. I've lived in both.

Yes. Yes. Hopefully they like me. I like them. I know but isn't that funny? This is what people need to understand. There's that much division inside people who believe in the Second Amendment. There is. There's people that are like just tactical people who have like bulletproof underwear

on right now. And there's people who want to shoot a white-tailed deer for dinner. That's right. And everybody's trying to convince each other that their way is the right way. Right, right, right. There's people that just want to protect their family

from an armed invader. And there's people that want to start a militia. They both have similar... These people both exist. This is a divide. It's not a militia. They both have similar... These people both exist. This is a divide. It's not a real divide. We are fractal is what I'm trying to get at. It's not a real divide.

We're all together. No, we should be all together. Especially in the Second Amendment world. This is my feeling with everything, with the left and the right. I think most of our decisions that are really polarizing are based on ideologies rather than like shared goals right like our shared important goals and that's that's what you see when the pandemic hit a little bit in the beginning you saw it after 9-11 there was you're a younger fella but during how old are you now 35 yeah so you're a little baby. What are you, like 12 when 9-11 happened?

How old are you? 13. I was in high school. I was in SAT prep class. What the fuck is wrong with you, boy? Hey, don't degrade the educational system of America, Joe Rogan. So when that happened, what was my point? Completely forgot my point. Let me get back to the history of conservation in America.

I had a whole thing to solve our culture. What was I just saying? I don't know. Jamie? He's off it too. Jamie has no idea. That's when you know the podcast is going to a good place. I can't do calculations in the middle of a rant.

All right. Let me take it back to my solution for all of our culture. We know now that we pay for a thing that benefits us. Now, I would encourage everyone to look up the duck stamp. I would encourage everybody to look up the Land and Water Conservation Fund. We don't probably have time to get into those things, but those are things that act in a very similar way as do licensed sales in a similar way to Pippin Robertson.

These are things that help fund the things we love to do. We take money from particular areas and we place it back in the public trust and we create access and opportunity across this country in amazing ways. And all in all, with all the different organizations, how much money are we talking about? You can look it up in terms of PR money, but most of this money, we have to then separate this in a lot of ways from conservation groups within our space. We have Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, of which I'm a part.

We have Rocky Mountain. I have a lifetime membership. You are? Yes, thank you. Love it, buddy. I got a free canoe. You and Don Jr. I got a free pistol.

Kimber. Congratulations. I'll shoot a bear in the face, which we'll talk about. This is the longest story ever and so we have conservation organizations and I think this is just in the spirit of this user pays public benefits

how it is in hunting we have single species organizations like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Wild Sheep Foundation Pheasants Forever Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Wild Sheep Foundation, Pheasants Forever, Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance. I mean, go on and on and on. And all the fishing organizations. All the fishing species, Coastal Conservation Association.

I mean, you could go on and on about associations that are kind of entwined and ingrained in our community that help to fund hugely important access. Hugely important access. I mean, the duck stamp itself as a piece of legislation has supported wildlife refuges in America for decades and has opened up access to hunting in millions of acres. Similarly, the RMEF. I've hunted conservation-eating ducks.

Ducks Unlimited. Ducks Unlimited. Trout Unlimited. Delta Waterfowl. Trout Unlimited. I met a dude who was a member of Trout Unlimited When I was 13 Yeah, for real

I had to talk to this dude What are you doing? He was like recruiting you Trying to help the conservation of trout And so this is like the people that are Using these resources We call it the sustainable use of a natural resource Sustainable being the important part there We're using it but we're we're not overusing it. And to go back to my friend,

Dr. Valerius Geist, the legend of our model of conservation, we're intervening intelligently to make sure that these populations flourish. And this is debated, right? This is discussed by wildlife biologists. And this is a part of our model of conservation. And again, this is all intertwined. And the point I guess would be to say that all of this says that the hunting, fishing community is paying a lot of money and a lot of time to conserve and to give up access opportunities through public lands and other programs. The thing that they are consuming, right? Sustainable use of a natural resource. We see this thing as a natural resource,

and we want to use it sustainably while also affording the population. We have never had more whitetail deer in this country than today. Since Columbus landed. Columbus. But that's because of GMO farms. No, I'm going to cut you off so I can finish my story. Because I'm solving all the problems in America, and you're trying to stop me with Columbus talk. So here we are in this kumbaya world of hunting where there is a user pays public benefits ingrained.

I once, when I was writing an article for about Pittman Robertson some years ago, I did a straw poll of 100 people in my orbit that were hardcore hunters. I asked them, what is Pittman Robertson some years ago, I did a straw poll of a hundred people in my orbit that were hardcore hunters. I asked them, what is Pittman Robertson? 97 of the hundred people didn't get it right. Would they get wrong though? They didn't either didn't know what it was. They thought it paid for some random shit it didn't pay for. They thought it was part of the duck stamp. They thought it was, they didn't know what it was three people of a hundred and this clues like Family members people I grew up hunting with it wasn't ingrained enough in our in our own communities And so how could we expect the people outside of our community to then understand it on a side note?

That'd be a great side note. I'm great great grill name Pippin Robertson Robertson grills. Yeah, Yeah. A nice pellet grill. Butchers should be. Cast iron. Butchers should be. Made in America. Go ahead.

See, I always do this, Jamie, and I'm trying to tell the history of America. It's a long history, but keep going, please. Eventually that grizzly bear is going to... You got to saunter across that drainage in Montana. Saunter. Another word I'd never use. You ever use saunter across that drainage in Montana. Saunter. Another word I'd never use. You ever use saunter? Sure.

How many times? I mean, like once. Ever in your life? Yeah. More than 20? Okay, if you had all the money that you've ever earned, and you had it on the table. I've been writing books set in the 1930s, but...

Would you be willing to push all the money you've ever earned in your life 10 to 1 odds on you having said saunter 20 times? 20 times? No, absolutely not. Unless I was reading a book. Imagine the saunters just start racking up in his memory. No! Saunter!

And he realizes it's 17, 18, no! That song I wrote called Saunter? 23. Oh, and he realizes it's 17, 18. No! With that song I wrote called Saunter. 23. Oh, and he realizes it's going to hit the number. Oh! How many times have you sauntered, Jamie, into a place? Because I've sauntered a lot into a room.

Sauntered. Bro, I sauntered in a movie. How different is sauntering from, I don't know. Oh, it was in that movie. Strolling? Sauntering, I imagine, would be like strolling with confidence. Oh, isn't that movies? Strolling? Sauntering? Sauntering, I imagine, would be like strolling with confidence. Strolling, you're just not really, no care in the world.

Sauntering is you have a mission. Yeah. And you're about to put it out there for the world. It's actually a leisurely stroll, so same. Sauntering. That's fake news. According to people with low testosterone. Yeah.

A slow, relaxed manner. What is the difference between the way a woman walks in a sexy manner? What is that called? Sultry? That's like the adjective. Is there a word? Saunters seems like relaxed and confident. Well, there's a noun and a verb for saunters.

Oh, what's the noun? The noun is a leisurely stroll. But the verb is a saunter. Wait a minute. a leisurely stroll. But the verb is like- What's the verb? It's a saunter. Wait a minute. A leisurely stroll is in motion, you fucking cowards. A quiet saunter. I mean, it's like a quiet- Bullshit.

You go on a walk. He's moving. You walk or you go on a walk. That's a verb. Well, the verb is walk in a slow, relaxed manner. But why is it different? In 1936- It's describing.

Okay, so it's a noun describing a type of walk? Yeah, it's a very descriptive type of walk. That's why I was going to call it a stroll. Imagine growing up learning Chinese and trying to figure out American. Did you ever think of the time when Ding Darley? First place in American. John Muir. Signature there. There it is. That's Ding's signature. J There's a John Muir signature there.

There it is. That's Ding's signature. Jay Norwood, Ding, darling. Wow. He's got a National Wildlife Refuge. That actually looks like Disney wrote that down in the old swamp. It does look like Disney. Look at that one. Right, that's totally Disney-like.

Here I come, Joe. You ready? Grizzly bear. You got pretty broad shoulders. This is going to hit you hard. So we've established that we have this wonderful system that is buttressing uh hunting and fishing in the outdoors in america right no we've established this there and we've also established earlier in the podcast about three or four days ago that there is a solution buried deep in hunting to most, if not all, of the cultural woes that you've talked about on your show

and you've had very smart people talk about on your show. Sedentary lifestyle, kind of too much information of social media, all these things are kind of baked in, and I believe hunting has some solution to all of those things i really believe that i do as well it is backed up by a structure that pays for itself and also that structure bakes in a value system that i believe in wholly and the people that take part in it can opt in to believe in holy and it is it is a unifier for our folks i have um a long way to say that i have a group that i've helped create for my podcast there was a guy that is no longer on the air it's over there in meat eater there was a guy named juan carlos

juan carlos was down in virginia blue ridge mountains of Virginia. He wrote into my show and said, hey, man, I'm brand new to hunting, need a mentor. Because as you all know, you can't hunt. Sounds like a psychopath. Fucking vegans. So we helped him. Then I read the story on the air, and about 30 or 40 people wrote in.

I'll help hunt Carlos. I'll mentor him. I'm kidding about him being a psychopath. He's not a nice fellow. Just joking around. Nice guy. We got him a mentor. And the next episode I made kind of a joke.

Hey, you know, this is the first regional chapter of our podcast. Ha, ha, ha. funny we've we've helped one guy get to hunting that really wanted to get there it's hard to get there as you well know as somebody who came from a non-hunter who was steve cam yeah it's really hard if someone doesn't have any friends that do it and so we so we endeavor to figure out how to create an organization from that and this just came very organically from the podcast. People love it. They want to share it. So my proof that hunting is good for you and good for kind of the culture is that the people

that want to do it also want to share it with other people for nothing. But here's the problem. Okay. The problem is the people. It's not saying like the people that hunt are all awesome. That's not true. No. People are people. That's not true. No. People are people.

That's true. The real problem is the perception that people have of hunters based on the people that are not nice. Right. or going into people's private property or all the bad guys in movies that are hunters. Remember the movie Wolverine? I do. There's a bunch of really evil guys that are trying to kill a grizzly bear. Do they kill a grizzly bear?

Do they poison it or something like that? Beauty and the Beast, Gaston. Yeah, but it's something crazy where it's not what hunting really is. It's the worst possible example that's put in the biggest possible platform. Pop culture. Buffalo Trades. I agree, and I've thought about this a lot. Right.

And when my first reaction was, probably the first couple times I came on this podcast, I was in the realm of, like, we've got to fix hunting's image. And that was what I thought was the thing that was needed. And then at times I thought, that's not a real useful idea on a grand scale. It's really just not. Because you end up looking down upon people that are just trying to do what they've always done. You look down upon other hunting traditions because you're going to tell them, well, that's not the best for today's pop culture.

Pop culture wants us to be a certain way. What do you mean? I mean they don't want us to hunt in Africa. They don't want us to use dogs. The Africa conversation is one of the weirdest ones, right? It is one of the weirdest ones, but there's also hunting with dogs. There's also, oh, man, black bear hunting. And I support almost all of that all of that and so it's been

thought out long past the place where a lot of people that are casually intervening with this subject uh have brought it to yeah this is a conversation that's been thought out and it's way deeper right so i i took it away from this broad level. Like how do I fix hunting's image? Hunting's image will be fixed. And we would maybe fix it by using a very localized, very slow burn of just taking the good things that we've already talked about, teaching people the structure, teaching people the ideology of hunting and the values that it purports. Teaching people how to love an ecosystem, the one that you live in, how to learn about it, how to learn about natural history, how to learn about wildlife biology, how to learn about the North American model of wildlife

conservation, how to learn about our history, and then how to go find an animal, find where it lives, learn about it, then kill it, and then eat it. This is a process that's repeated many times over millions of years, and it's very useful in today's day and age. There's a lot of people, I think, that want to do it that are adults that don't know how. They don't know where. They don't know where to go. They don't know, like, is there an area that's close enough to them where they can live their normal life and escape for a couple days i always describe it as like the grand canyon there's i want to hunt and then the other side of the grand canyon there's hunting right and there needs to

be a bridge built and i want to build that bridge to say that you need as much as i can explain to you all the great stuff about hunting you need to to experience it, experience it locally, I feel. I feel like experience it in your own community. But it's hard for people, right? Imagine if you're in a city. You live in Brooklyn, and someone says you should start hunting. I'll tell you how to do it. I'll tell you, you've got to find somebody that hunts,

that lives near you. That's not that easy. And follow them. You're like, I've got a plan. Just find gold. All right. Dig a hole and find your gold, and then you're rich. So inspired by this thing that happened on my podcast, we started a group called, I sound like a fucking promoter,

but we started a group called The Hunt in Common. And this is a group that hopefully, and this was started by people that listen to my podcast outside of me. They said, we're going to do this. We experienced this from your show and we're going to do it. We're going to figure it out. One of the guys involved is a biotech startup

guy in LA. His name is Nuri. We have another person that's a big part of our group. His name is Jordan. He's a former NFL player. We have people from across the country that want to share this shit. They just want other people to see it holistically for what they've experienced. And they're willing to

donate their time and their money to make it to make it work to like localize mentorship to be the match.com for is that scalable like i believe it is scale yeah we have already 40 or roughly 40 chapters there on facebook but like 40 chapter pages so how does someone find out about this? So right now we have thehuntincommon.org. You can go there. Thehuntincommon.org. You can go there and there's like a little form that these guys set up and you can say, I want to be a mentor.

I want to be a mentee. I want to learn to hunt. Put your name, your email. Is that a word? Mentee? Mentee. Oh, for sure. Just like buttress.

Have you ever heard mentee? You ever said mentee? That's definitely for sure. 100% have never said menteress. Have you ever heard mentee? You ever said mentee? 100% have never said mentee. Have you said it? Said it, used it, wrote it. 100% never said mentee. Here's the thing from this podcast you could do.

Try to make a sentence with buttress, mentee, and saunter. While under the influence of a cat lady. Words that Joe Rogan has never said more than once in a sentence.

For sure. For 100 Alex. All of them. Saunter, saunter's a problem. Mentee is that a fucking thing you said? Oh no, no.

Mentees never come out of these lips. That's something clear. Somebody's gonna figure that shit out. Your whole life has been recorded. You're going to have to own up to this. I don't see mentee ever being. I don't think I've ever heard that.

Smash cut five uses. Yeah, you probably. You can probably find it. You don't think, Jamie, that he said mentee at some point? But let me tell you something. If it pops up, I'm going to go, well, I didn't know I said it. I thought I didn't say it. Oh, you're giving yourself an out already.

I know. I'm being honest. I'm being honest. I really genuinely don't think I've said it. It might be one of the rare words in the English language that gets used every day. Not like thy. Like, if you...

Fucking out? Thy shalt... Thy shalt tellest one. I've had enough. That was so good. Yeah, if you say thy, and you're serious, I'm like, listen, crazy. That was so fucking good. Listen, crazy, I gotta get the fuck away from you before you go back in time.

You can't say thy. Mentee is not thy. Yeah, it's right up there. It's not up there at all. Jamie, no. Is there any way you could confirm this, Jamie? Mentor and mentee? Who the fuck's a mentee? What are you, a little bitch waiting for someone to tell you what to do?

No, you're menteed by the mentor. Yeah, if you have mentors, you've got mentees. Yeah, you've got mentees. You've been menteed before. I'm sure I've been menteed. I menteed you one time. But I never said it. I fucking menteed you more than once. More than once. But I never said it. I never said the word. Jamie, can you help me out with this? Yeah, I just said it. I fucking menteed you more than once. More than once. But I never said it. I never said the word.

Jamie, can you help me out with this? Yeah, I just said a bad joke. What'd you say? They have mentees on golf courses, but it's a different thing. Oh, men versus women tees? Mentees. You son of a bitch. Do you guys have sound effects?

Do you have like a sound effects board? I'd be a horn. No. Fill it in. A rim shot. Like, pow, pow, pow, pow. Anyway. Use your imagination.

Fill it in. Rinshaw. Like, pow, pow, pow, pow. Anyway. Use your imagination. Anyway, I feel like a salesman guy, but I really do feel this is true. Just for clarification, I went to the huntandcomment.org. We're working on it. Don't worry.

It'll be up there by the time this airs. Oh, you got a bullshit fake-ass website. Just making sure. Oh, bitch, it's coming in. What kind of fucking show is this? This will... That's not even a GeoCities website. It's not.

This is going to make the suspense even better. Or not. Actually, at the Hunting Common... Or fail miserably. At thehuntingcommon.org, we'll tell that grizzly bear story. No, we're going to get to that story. Anyway, we're working on that. I was actually talking to the folks that were doing that today.

So have confidence in me, people out there. Yeah. Or don't. People that don't know Ben, trust me. Trust Joe. He's going to be fine. You help me out? Yeah. Yeah, you got me? Okay. 100%. So my feeling is after all this experience that I've had, that there is an opportunity to localize this thing to say, look, man, this is a hard thing to do. It's very beneficial. And I think because it's hard, it can help you with a lot of the problems you might have in your life. It also is backed by a system and a model that has helped us get a whole bunch of wildlife. But we have to acknowledge it's not for everybody. Just like marathon running or CrossFit.

No, it's not for everybody. A lot of things aren't for everybody. I think the big thing for hunting is not that people need to participate in it. It's that they need to understand it. Just say, look, I appreciate it's not for me. I don't have any real problem with someone who says, I appreciate hunting, but I'd like to buy my stuff at the grocery store. Listen, there's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong.

This is what we have to understand. We have to have space for everybody. We have to have space for people who write novels. We have to have space for people who build bridges. We can't expect the guy who engineers a fucking bridge to go hunt a whitetail. Stop it. He doesn't want to. No expectation.

He wants to figure out how to make a fucking bridge so you can drive across the river and you don't die. Okay? Leave him the fuck alone and give him some meat. Right? That's the point, right? That's the point. The point is like we're not in competition with each other. No. Literally 95% of the population of the

planet Earth eats meat. Let's figure out a way to do it where it's ethical. Well, let me just say this. I don't want everyone to hunt, but I want everyone to have an open access to the information that's appropriate to make the decisions. To make the decisions. Making the decision. That's everything.

That's all I want. I want them to know the history. Make an informed decision. I want them to meet people in our community that they respect that also hunt and not look down upon them. I want them to understand that this is a thing that's useful to a lot of people, may not be for them. I want them to understand that there isn't two polar opposites, vegans and hunters. There is a great middle ground where we can all understand the good here.

And like I said, I've never taken a new person hunting and not have them really fall in love, I would say, was some aspect of it. Not all aspects of it. I've had many people, I take them hunting for the first time, they shoot something and they really don't want to see it struggle for its life. Yeah. That's a deep and abiding human feeling that you don't want to watch something struggle for its life at your hand. Dude, the first time I ever killed anything, it's on video. Yeah. It's on Meteor. Yeah the first time I ever killed anything, it's on video. Yeah. It's on Meteor.

Yeah. First time I ever killed a mammal was on Meteor. Yeah. Or I shot a mule deer in Montana. Yeah. You can find it on YouTube. I'm very happy that I live in the generation where we can have these conversations because when I was coming up, I think there was enough bravado and enough kind of we don't talk about this where I could say, hey, man, I really sometimes –

and I'll tell you this story and be very honest about it. I was squirrel hunting with my son recently, and I shot this squirrel in the spine. And this squirrel was fucking – he was paralyzed, but he was running for his life from me. This shit was not fun at all. We ate that squirrel in a squirrel pot pie two days later, and it was delicious.

But it was not at all fun for me to watch it struggle for its life. At my hand, nonetheless. But it's crazy that you need to say that. Of course it wasn't. Of course it wasn't. That's not your intent. But to your point, and to somebody like Cam Haynes' point, now we get back to the craft, where if I learn to talk to an elk better,

if I learn to shoot my.22 better, if I make my whole life about this craft, then that makes me a more ethical hunter because I now know where that arrow will land. I now know where that.22 bullet will land. And I now know I better understand the outcome of what's going to happen. That doesn't ever stop a wounding or a gut shot or, in this case, a spine shot. That doesn't stop the shittiness of kind of like the finality of what you've just done but it does put you right next to it and it

makes you realize who you are what you are and why you're here and like your impact on the things around you way better than someone else whacking a chicken over the head and serving it to you in this wonderful cellophane wrapper. I'm now, I have a side of like, I don't want to say I have a side of guilt with my squirrels, Slippery Pot Pie, but I do have a side of understanding. Like I have a side of, I know what that thing is. Did you say Slippery Pot Pie? You don't know what that is?

Go to my Instagram immediately. Jamie? Jamie. Any knowledge of Slippery Pot Pie? You say it so casual. Jamie. Jamie. Any knowledge of slippery pot pie? This is a- You say it so casual. Like everybody knows. Oh, slippery pot pie.

This whole podcast is about shit that you don't say. Go to my Instagram. But come on. It's a Pennsylvania Dutch. Slippery pot pie to most of planet Earth. Now you've offended Pennsylvania Dutch. I'm not offending anybody. Slippery squirrel pot pie? Yeah planet Earth. Now you've offended Pennsylvania Dutch. I'm not offending anybody. Slippery Squirrel Pot Pie?

Yeah. Okay. There it is. Right there. Okay. Oh, what a coincidence. It's Ben's fucking Instagram. I told him to go to my Instagram.

No coincidence. Where else? You won't find that anywhere else. There's a bunch of eggs in there. No, that's flat noodles. That's flat noodles. What are those little yolk-looking things? No, it says the slipper pot pie was the best game dish I've ever had.

Slipper pot pie is basically a chicken soup with flat square noodles. It's popular in the Pennsylvania Dutch community. What are those little yolk-looking things? Oh, yellow corn? That's corn. Oh. Lime of beans from the garden, corn from the garden. Squirrel there on the right.

And then there's flat, there's noodley looking things. Yep, you circle the squirrel there. So you have fake eggs with corn centers? What? That's a noodle. That's a noodle to me. It's like an egg. I bought that at a store.

It's a noodle. It's called Ann's Square Dumplings. If you just said slippery squirrel pot pie, how many people would, oh, yeah? Good number of them. What's the number, Jamie? Jamie? I've been in that area once for food, and I mean, I was 15, but we didn't have that,

and I've never heard of it being from Ohio. Of course you haven't heard of it. It's nonsense. Well, I grew up in a different place than Joe Rogan. This guy's just making shit up. Stop putting down my culture. He wrote it on his Instagram. It's the only Well, I grew up in a different place than Joe Rogan. This guy's just making shit up. Stop putting down my culture. He wrote it on his Instagram. It's the only reference online.

Google slippery pot pie. I'm looking it up. I feel like I've heard of people eating squirrel roadkill more than I've ever heard of slippery squirrel pot pie. The roadkill thing is weird because it should be 100% legal for you to eat roadkill. Many states it is. It is. Not all, but many.

The problem is this crazy notion that you're targeting deer with your car. It's so dumb. Squirrel is still the meat of the pot pie, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Now search slippery, take squirrel out Slippery pot pie What makes it slippery?

Quiet Joe It's my own show Pennsylvania Dutch chicken pot pie What makes it slippery? Slippery is that the noodles are slippery And it's not the crust of an actual pot pie I'm not a Pennsylvania Dutch This is just my mother, my grandmother, my paternal grandmother, Lucille O'Brien, made

this as I was growing up. Is it good? It's delicious. It's the best. If I had it right now, you would be flipping out on how delicious it is. I only had squirrel once. It's like a chicken noodle soup with a flat dumpling. And in fact, if you go to the store, maybe you search Ann's Flat Dumplings.

Why wouldn't you just call it dumplings? Why you got to be so needy and connect yourself to the pie world? I'm just... Seriously, that's not a pie, bitch. You know what a pie is. I'd like an apple pie. What's this noodle soup, you motherfucker? But that pie is slippery.

It's hard to get a hold of. It's slippery squirrel noodle soup. I wanted a pie! It's delicious, Joe Rogan. That's not a fucking pie by anybody's estimation. I feel attacked. Right? That's fa.

You with me, Joe? That's actually a good point. That's chicken noodle soup. Jamie, who do you side with here, me or Joe? I'm with. Right? That's far. You with me, Joe? That's actually a good point. That's chicken noodle soup. Jamie, who do you side with here? Me or Joe? It's in a pot. I'm with Joe on this one for sure. Thank you.

Holla. He pays your bills. Well, that has nothing to do with this. He's my friend. We agree. This is pie. Pie is pie. You can eat that bread.

That's not pie. You can eat bread of some kind. You think I'm in a slippery pot pie cult? 100%. That's a bowl of soup. Who the fuck, if you just said, hey, is this a pie? Yes or no, all your money's on the line. Yeah, there's no slippery apple pie. Who the fuck?

Who the fuck? Maybe we should start. Google it. Jamie, Google it. Hold on. Hold on, please. Yeah, any of them. Click on any of them. I won't have it. Okay, stop for a second. Now, look at that image to the right. Yep. No, no, go to the one that's actually in the bowl so you can see the whole fucking bowl. Okay, now here we are. Imagine if I said, hey Ben

O'Brien. Yeah. Hey Joe. I'm gonna give you an opportunity to multiply your money by ten. Okay? So everything you've ever learned, ever earned in your life, you can make ten times more than that. If you're correct. If not, you're indebted to me for everything you've ever earned. But if you're correct, you make ten times more than anything you've ever earned.

Is this a pie or is it fucking soup? Is it slippery? is it a pie I feel like corn rams would be the soft walking is that fucking soup let's stop playing games son it's soon look it that's right you're correct so you're correct And all you people that said pie Go outside I want you to exercise I want you to jog a mile That's what I want you to do you fucks

I want you to deadlift your body weight ten times That's soup Let's look at slippery apple pie That's not a fucking pie See Apple pie has pie crust That's not a fucking pie. See? See? Apple pie has pie crust. That's right. Jamie comes from Ohio.

They're not crazy in Ohio. I almost feel like if you don't have crust, you ain't got pie. That's right. All you squirrel eating pie talking motherfuckers. I'm not going to let this get to me. I'm going to stay strong in the face of this. You ain't doing shit. I'm going to stay strong.

That's nonsense. You believe in nonsense. That's soup. I don't believe in. I of this. You ain't doing shit. I'm going to stay strong. That's nonsense. You believe in nonsense. That's soup. I don't believe in. If that was soup, I'd say it's quite watery. I hope it's tasty. I believe in the delicious slippery pot pie tradition of the Pennsylvania Dutch and my grandmother Lucille O'Brien.

Rest in peace. Being sullied by Joe Rogan. They came over here eating shoes. They ate shoes. They boiled shoes here eating shoes. They ate shoes. They boiled shoes to stay alive. Lucila Bryant would have never boiled shoes. They ate pine cones.

They're not even using the word slippery here. They're just saying it's a Pennsylvania Dutch chicken pot pie. Slippery is not the word we're talking about. Pie is the word we're talking about. Don't change the fucking rules. They can't read. How can they not pie is the word we're talking about. Don't change the fucking rules. They can't read. How can they not read in Pennsylvania? Those people who called that a pie, they never saw a pie in their fucking life.

They've been eating pine cones. At this point, at this point. There's a fucking pie right there. They've been eating salamanders and pine cones. Is that pot pie slippery? Would it slip out of your hands if you tried to pick it up? That's a pie. If someone says, hey,

for all the money in the world, listen to me, bitch. If someone looks at that and says, hey, for all the money in the world, is that soup? I go, that is a fucking pie. That's not soup. Imagine if you said, hey, you want some fucking apple soup? And someone brings you that?

You'd be like, hey, fuck you. Is that pie slippery? Call it a pie. That pie's not slippery at all. It probably stays right in your hands. Listen, dude, it's not a pie. It's not going to slip anywhere. Ham pot pie right there.

That says ham pot pie. Can you eat that slippery pot pie with a fork or do you need a spoon? Fork you can do, but a lot of it slips through the fork. Bitch, you ain't eating any of that with a fork. You need the amount of liquid that's in that pot pie. Alright, I'm going to come back in January and I'm going to make you. I'm going to change your mind. I'm going to change my number.

Because I'm not interested in this conversation. Alright, so I was out in this trainage, this grizzly bear. This grizzly bear, my dad's there. And I'm cow calling, okay? And you think the elk's coming. I think this elk's coming.

But it's not. It's not. I see the elk go across this ridge, right? It goes across this ridge. And then I see this brown flash go down this hill in front of me, and there's a bit of a, you know, if you look like this, this brown flash has to go down this ridge

and then around the corner of the spine of the ridge and stay down in the valley. I know that above me is an elk carcass freshly killed yesterday. So I'm calling. I'm waiting for this big bull elk. I'm looking this way, and I turn around. I look down below me, and 100 yards below me, my dad's here, I'm here, and I turn around below me, and there's a giant and 100 yards below me my dad's here I'm here and I turn around below me and there's a giant bear 100 yards below me

I turn all the way around I'm like dad there's a bear there's a bear I have my pistol right here does your dad have a pistol? he's not he's a bow only I have a pistol and bear spray does your dad have bear spray?

he does not so luckily I'm between him and the bear Have a pistol and bear spray. Does your dad have bear spray? He does not. At this point, he does not. So luckily, I'm between him and the bear. The bear goes down the drainage. I remember, as a hunter, mostly I'm worried about is this a black bear or a grizzly bear. I didn't know at the time. It was kind of shadowed in this ravine as it was going up. And I'm looking through the binos.

I'm like, I don't know what this is. I'm not sure if it's a black or grizzly bear. Grizzly bears have a distinct hump that you're looking for that's different from a black bear. And this black bear is sauntering down. At the risk of making this a longer story, explain why it's way more dangerous if it's a grizzly. A black bear, you and I have experienced this in Alberta together, a black bear is not as aggressive, not as predatory. Black bear attacks are very less frequent than grizzly bear attacks.

I don't know that I could explain kind of just the nature of a grizzly bear. A black bear is an omnivore in many ways. A grizzly bear is a carnivore. And in this scenario, if it was a black bear I would be looking to shoot it rather than being afraid of it because I love black bear meat, it's delicious and black bear fat you've had clay nukem on, you make bear grease

it's one of the best things that there is so I guess that maybe explains the difference for people in comparison it's like a golden retriever versus a wolf pretty much that's a pretty good comparison it's a completely different animal i wish there was a wild apology just to kind of really lay it out there but you'd probably say german shepherd wolf yeah something like that that's a fucker i'm trying to be like more comedic right this

this yeah it's a different animal it It is. And I would say that you've seen it when we were hunting bait in Alberta. Yeah. When a black bear comes in, you're willing to stand your ground. You know, we were on our way. We saw a grizzly in Alberta. When we were on our way to where we were hunting, looking eye to eye with a grizzly is wild. It's a wild thing. And when a grizzly bear comes through a stand of timber or a mountainside in this case, things go quiet.

And we didn't even, when I was in Alberta, the one I've seen in the wild was not that big. But the one you saw was big. This is one of the biggest bears I've ever seen. I'm talking big hind end. Give me a roundabout. I have no idea. I would guess it at 6.5 to 7 feet. I don't know how to guess how much it weighed.

300? 350? No, it fucking weighed more than that. 450? 700. 600 pounds? We later found... 700 pounds.

We later found the track on the road where... We later found the track on the road where we walk in every morning. So the drainage, this little two-track dirt road where we walk in. We found this thing's track. So it is sauntering up this drainage. And there's a moment where my mind's not in the right spot. It's in the place of, is this a grizzly bear or a black bear? And now that I look back on that moment,

that bear was about two seconds away from ripping my face off. Oh, my God. I'm cow calling. To that bear, I'm a cow elk. And to me, I wasn't scared. I wasn't pulling for my pistol. I was watching it as a hunter might watch any game species that it comes. Thinking an elk's going to come over the ridge.

Yeah. And a grizzly bear. How many pounds? Maybe 700, 800 pounds. I don't know. I hope I'm not wrong about that. Let's be nice. It's a big one. Let's be nice. It's a big one.

Let's be nice and say 600. Imagine a 600-pound super predator. One swat. One swat. Full clip towards you. I've interviewed many people that have had their face ripped off, their testicles ripped off. I know the pure carnage that a grizzly bear like that can do.

And I also know in my pack is a tourniquet and all the medical supplies a man might carry. And I'm pretty close to town. My dad's there. We have our cell phone service. We're not in the backcountry. I know at this point when I determined it to be a grizzly bear, it's already walking up the drainage away from me. I determined it's a grizzly bear. I know then that if it turns back to us, we got a problem.

But if it keeps going up the drainage, I know where it's headed. It's headed to that alcarcus that was there. And so luckily for us, it goes up the drainage. It heads over towards the alcarcus and ducks into the timber. And that's, I mean, it's not the end of it, but that's the end of that encounter. And you're carrying a pistol? I have a pistol. What caliber? 44 Magnum. and that's, I mean, it's not the end of it, but that's the end of that encounter. And you're carrying a pistol? I have a pistol.

What caliber? 44 Magnum. Taurus 44 Magnum Ultralight. And I have a chest holster that's from a guy named, it's Razzco, a guy in Bozeman makes this chest holster that attaches to the bottom of a chest. Is this a revolver? It's a revolver. And I have bear spray on the hip uh belt of my so you

can get off six six shots i get off six shots six shots and i know again having been in the industry and talked to a lot of people that have had encounters i know kind of how this is going to go and likely how it goes is is the only way you get out of it is you get mauled and the bear loses interest or the person that's with you saves you in some manner. Right? Yeah. There's a pretty face.

But your dad doesn't have a gun. He doesn't. He has a bow. And you're in front. I'm in front. So I'm between these two. And again, this is... Is your pistol in... Is it, you have to open up a snap to pull it out? Or is it a kydex or something? It's fully in a molded holster that I can pull out and present. Right.

Easy. It'll be double action because I don't have it cocked. And do you have a thought when that's happening where he might run away, but if I shoot him, he might attack me? Yeah, I mean- as he's walking. It's like a calculation, right? Yeah, and again, as a hunter, I'm more interested in what is this thing doing? Why is it here?

Then I am like, I should run away. Right. And that is, I think, both appropriate and also probably not the best thing to be doing, man. Like, he should probably be. Can you remember what you thought like what went through your head when you realized it wasn't elk and it was a giant grizzly bear finally finally yeah because you are in the country where you know dude i've been out in june setting a trail camera and heard a wolf howl.

I told you, I talked to the game warden. He's like, there's bears around. And so the thing that you do is you prepare for the worst and you really, really prepare for the worst. And I did it knowing that there's folks that I've talked to, like I said, that have had really life-changing experiences. One of them in Kodiak, a brown bear ripped off his testicles.

One of them in Alaska, a brown bear, I think grizzly bear, ripped off his face. And so I know these stories. I know them all too fucking well. There's a video of that one guy. Yeah. Pretty recently. Glenn Bond. Yeah.

How many? Four or five years ago? Right? That would have been back in, yeah, roughly. Whatever.

Give or take a few years. Yeah. That one is available online. It's horrendous. Kind of, yeah. They keep pulling it offline. They put his face back together again.

Pretty good. I have the full, I talked to that guy, I know that guy very well and I have the full, I talked to that guy. I know that guy very well. And I have the full story of that. You can listen to it on The Haunting Collective. There's a podcast with Brett Vaughn. Yeah, I listened to it.

It's amazing. It's a whole other show probably. But it's like that's one of those conversations where like a vegan or an animal rights activist would be like good good some people might say that some people might say that like I'm I don't I'm glad that fucking and people said that about that back Brett Vaughn and his father Glenn yeah there was a lot of people saying like because they were hunting bears at the time and they were hunting bears in their den on the Denali Highway in Alaska yeah and so the people like good hunting bears in their den on the denali highway in alaska yeah and so people

like good hunt them in their den that's what happens and again and that's where i where i come back to the emotion of finally because so much of my hunting life in montana has been anticipation of those encounters and that was the first ever with a bear with grizzly bear yeah well not the first ever my life first ever montana grizzly bear, yeah. Well, not the first ever in my life. First ever in Montana. I was once on a caribou hunt up in Northwest Territories. They helicopter you out into the middle of nowhere, and then you have, I think, a 12-hour delay before you can hunt

once you've been helicoptered into the wilderness. I think it's 12 or 24 hours, but you have a delay before you can hunt. So you literally have to sit there and wait. And we were there at a time in August when there was no darkness. It was literally light pretty much the entire 24-hour day. And so we sat on a ridge line, and we were glassing for caribou in the period where we couldn't hunt. And here comes this sow grizzly bear down this drainage.

Every bush that she went by, whack! Every piece of moss she's back this crush she was upset she's having a bad day whether her cub got taken or she was just in a predatory mood it was i remember glassing her with a spotting scope going like hope she doesn't come over here and we were sitting on kind of a is that normal normal behavior when, like, a cub gets eaten by a boar? I don't know if that's normal behavior. I imagine it to be. For folks who don't know, that happens a lot. The females try to fight the boar off.

I imagine it to be. I imagine them to be aggressive in the times that they need to be. But I don't know enough to know if that's, like, every time a cub gets eaten, she goes out and whacks the shit out of the next thing she sees't i don't know enough to know if that's like every time a cub gets eaten she goes out and whacks the shit out of the next thing she sees i don't i don't know that but in this case this sal was alone she was not uh she didn't look all that mature but she was going down this drain it's just everything she saw she was hitting and i thought well if she comes by me you're fucked i'm fucked yeah and we were kind of on a what we would call a glass and tit which is kind of a raised up ridge

and glass and she got at some point below us where we couldn't see her. What a terrifying idea of a mad grizzly. Like a road raging grizzly. You're like, dude. That's what that is. It's like someone just fucking fuck

you. And where do grizzlies live? The grizzlies don't live by the urgent care. Right. They live in places where if they whack you- You're fucked. You're fucked. Unless your friend knows how to- If they break both your legs, you have to crawl to safety if you can.

So in the examples of Brett Bond, who we were just talking about, he saved his father. His father got his face ripped off by a grizzly bear. He comes running down the hill with a.454 Casull, shoots this bear. Bang, bang, bang bang bang bang bang kills it it actually i was reading some of the his accounts of the hunt he measured five and a half feet from his bootstrap to where the bear died when he was defending his father's life his father had been attacked god how much did the bear weigh the bear is now in Glenbon, who's 70. He's probably in his 80s now. It's in his living room.

He got it mounted full, standing mount, and it's in his living room. I bet that bear weighed 800 plus pounds. And again, apologies for getting that wrong if that's the case. it ripped his... You could probably try to find it. Don't show it. Don't show it.

You don't want to show it? Folks can find it if they want to. So Brett's Instagram is at BBB Alaskan. You go there, you'll find this video. If folks want to see it, but it's hardcore. It's one of the most gruesome... His dad's face is... It's one of the most gruesome things that you'll see.

If you want to see it. If you want to see it. And so I know that video, there was another Marine who was on a Fog Neck Island, which is similar to where Rinella and crew got attacked.

He was attacked by a bear and it ripped his testicles off. They were since put back on. Congratulations. Yeah. And so when I've... They were off, then they're on. So when this bear pops out, finally is like kind of a way of thinking,

like this is going to happen. If you take the chance to go outside in a place where you know there's grizzlies and think about this. This happened to me this year. I shoot this elk this year. This is a year later. I shoot this elk. This happened to me this year.

I shoot this elk this year. This is a year later. I shoot this elk. And now I'm in the dark by myself for roughly three hours until my buddies get there with a giant dead animal that I'm now skinning and removing the meat from. Do you have a gun? Yes, I do. But I'm in the dark with a headlamp only.

And I'm in the dark. Literally, this last September, probably 50 yards from where that grizzly bear walked through the year before, and now I have a giant elk that's dead in front of me, and I'm by myself in the dark. I killed it at 7 p.m. It got dark at 8 o'clock. Before my friends got there to help me pack it out, I was three hours, roughly, of skinning it and courting it by myself. When it's totally, completely dark and quiet.

Do you ever think that this is going to be it? Yeah, of course I did. This is where it ends. Of course I did. I was like, I really, I remember thinking, this year I remember thinking, this isn't the over-dramatized thing. Like if you live in where I live, this is a common occurrence. This is what happens. You kill an elk.

You're in Gears of Country. You fucking deal. But I remember thinking, man, I know people this has happened to. This is not. This is a rare occurrence, but it happens. And I'm in a position where every stick that breaks, I'm turning my little headlamp over there hoping that my black diamond headlamp can

can LED its way into seeing what's there and so and I know that there's been literally you know 12 months prior to that a grizzly bear standing right there I know it I've seen it I know that fact and so it's scary man and yes having a firearm strapped

to my chest and my holster helps a little bit. But I know from knowing that the stories. It's just the vulnerability, like knowing what that animal is capable of. Yeah, and I go back to like what hunting is in itself. It's the game theory we talked about earlier on, but it's also the vulnerability of those moments that helps me understand who i am as a man and then also in the moments where i think man you know modern society is kind of the sedentary lifestyle is getting to me i want to get outside like i get to go drive 30 minutes from my house

and challenge myself against what could possibly be a big fat fucking grizzly bear right but you don't want that i don't want that but you're not. Let's be real. You're not. If there was no deer and elk out there, you wouldn't be out there like, let's hope I don't get killed by a grizzly. No. That's a side element. I'm not playing at it. I'm saying that it's a reality of the thing I love to do.

Yes. And so here I am loving this thing that is elk hunting. The craft we talked about eight hours ago is real i mean it's a craft i learned jason phelps is you know part of meat eater and and he's a huge um advocate for i mean he started an elk calling company and he has all this information and i want to learn it and i want to learn how to archery hunt i want to learn from cam haynes and john dudley how to make that arrow go where i want that fucking thing to go and i want to learn how to pack as light as possible and how to be prepared for the back country with with my medical kit and my kill kit which and i want to go take that meat home and

pack it out and then butcher it at my house and then and show my son how what muscle groups are what and what are what's a roast and what's a steak. And I want to take that and then I want to put it in the freezer and I want to pull it out and I want to cook it for my family and go, hey. And also, I want to boil the elk skull. I want to whiten that skull. I want to hang that on my fucking wall in my garage. And I want to go, hey, this whole thing, this entire thing is interactive.

It's real. And it challenges everything that I know about the world around me. And it makes me learn what an ecosystem is, how an elk relates to a wolf, how a wolf relates to an elk, how I relate to elk and wolves. Terms like trophic cascade, things like intelligent intervention. It leads me to those real deep thoughts. And then when I'm worried about whether I'm doing the right thing, then I look back at the structure of Pittman-Robertson, the structure of the duck stamp, and the structure of the public, you know,

the user pays public benefits system. And I look back at that and I go, shit. All these personal experiences are backed by a structure that's pretty beautiful i would say if it wasn't i'm not a big i don't love government i'm a big government guy but as far as government goes this is pretty good pretty damn good i would say that i'm a libertarian in my but then this is what i keep getting at i think this this structure could be applied to a lot of things we do. I agree. I really do.

I agree with you. I think if you look at the sportsman structure, the fisherman, hunter, and then Second Amendment advocate that's out there shooting a lot of just rounds of the range, those folks are contributing so much to the greater good while allowing them their freedom to pursue the things they enjoy. greater good while allowing them their freedom to pursue the things they enjoy. If we applied that to other stuff, like I said earlier, if we said every time you buy an iPhone, let's say 11% of that goes to like prison reform. Yeah. 11% goes to like education. 11% goes to some sort of a reinvigoration of impoverished communities, investment into

communities. Think in the communities. Think about the public trust doctrine inside of our North American model. Public trust just basically says no one owns this. We all own it together. That's all it says. It's no more complicated than just that sentiment. It says like you own land. You don't own the elk on that land.

And it works. It works. If that could be applied to other parts of our world, I really think we gotta, I think there's something real there. I think it's almost like there's a thing that happened during the pandemic where people realized there was this gap

between people that hunt and people that use guns and the people that never would conceive of it. Like I have a friend of mine, his wife was like, you're not getting a gun, you're not getting a gun. Pandemic hits, George Floyd riots. You got to get a gun. Like it was fucking immediate. It was immediate. And I'm like, that's what happens. Without being a mean person, you got to consider the fact that this is a possibility. And this gap, which used to be pretty wide when the pandemic hit, it all closed in.

And then what we have to do collectively as people is abandon these groups, abandon these ideologies and these teams, and instead just look at what is the reality of the math? When it comes to wild animals, when it comes to humans When it comes to habitat When it comes to like sustainable resources Like what's the math Because when it comes to the math of animals You want to start bringing in wolves Like have you done the math Like what's the math on wolves

Wolves are the only animal that work together They work together Other than coyotes But coyotes can't put a dent in a moose population. Wolves can fuck up an elk population. They would fuck up elves. Elves, they're slow with the shoes. They would trip and fall.

Those bells, the wolves can heal them. They have bells in their toes. Dr. Dan Stahler, the guy from Yellowstone, told me that you think that wolves are efficient. Wolves are opportunistic in a lot of ways, as well as coyotes are opportunistic. You start looking, then you start going up the scale to mountain lions and grizzly bears. Their predatory behavior is less opportunistic and more just straight predatory. Grizzlies. Grizzlies.

Because they're so big. Yeah. And they're different. That's the thing that, like, why is there a grizzly and why is there a brown bear? Like, people really don't distinguish. A lot of people think that, like, Alaska, those are grizzly bears. Yeah, there's different brown bears, too, coastal. Yeah, I think.

But it's the amount of food they have available to them changes their behavior. Changes their behavior. Because, like, genetically, isn't a brown bear super similar to a grizzly? They're interchangeable. They wouldn't be a hybrid, right? I want to say no hybrid, no. But they're similar genetically. Like a polar bear and a grizzly, when they mate.

I want to say Ronell is. It's a hybrid. Ronell is the one in his Fog Neck Bear Attack podcast. They go through this in pretty good detail. He knows it better than I do. That's right. And then Remy came on this podcast and told his version of the story.

I don't remember what episode it is, but it's worth reviewing because Remy tells a horrific story of them being attacked. Okay. Let's just, Ben was talking about a bear that was horrifying. What would you say? Six and a half, seven feet? It was a big bear. They thought it was 11. They thought their bear was 11. And the bear's

on a fog neck. And again, like you're on an island in the archipelago off the coast of alaska i was like i could have went to target in 30 minutes i was bro so i'm not like let's not say those dudes were in what we might call the shit they're in the shit they're in the shit and they went to uh an elk carcass that they had shot that they had shot earlier and so they were retrieving it in uh stages so they went and they took some like i was talking about coming exactly they hiked it out they went to their camp and then they went back to retrieve the rest and they found some grizzly bear shit and they didn't think too much about it. And they sat down to eat lunch. And while they were eating lunch, unarmed, a giant bear ran up on them.

And just murked them. Nobody died. So that's why it's a good story. And these are experienced outdoorsmen. Giannis Petellas, Franny Warren, Steve Rinella. It's a fascinating, fascinating story. Yeah. And again, I would say the stories that I've covered and understand about grizzly bears

tell a particular thing. They tell a particular thing that we are living in this time where, as you've said, there's monsters out there. That's a monster. If that was a werewolf, you'd be terrified. And we don't understand them. We wish to understand them. Grizzly bears and wolves have been politicized in our time along the lines of the Republican and Democrat ideologies in a way that I just hate. And I think that's just a big part of how enigmatic they are.

Well, look what's going on in the Pacific Northwest, like in British Columbia. In British Columbia, they used to hunt grizzly bears because they wanted to sustain the population. They wanted to figure out how to get it to a manageable level because otherwise then the grizzly bears because they wanted to sustain the population. They wanted to figure out how to get it to a manageable level because otherwise then the grizzly bears would attack a lot of the fawns and a lot of the calves and all these different animals. But then the city people, the people from Vancouver, those were the people that voted against it because that's the largest population.

Well, they don't see it. They call that ballot box biology. Right. And it goes against the model of conservation we've talked about. They don't have any understanding of what it means to live in a place where like hawk would dribs. Well, think about this. So Colorado had this ballot box biology, like, hey, we're all going to vote for the

reintroduction of wolves. This happened in the last ballot measure here in the last election. Sounds like you're very green, eco-friendly if you say yes. Well, think about it this way. I always think of it in both of these terms, and I've seen it in reality. You have a person as a rancher who owns land, who runs cattle. Their life is off the land. They have a relationship with the land that can't be repeated. Then you have someone

living in Denver or Boulder who doesn't have that relationship. Or Vancouver. Yeah, or Vancouver in the same analogy. And that's why in our North American model, we don't, we cede these decisions to wildlife biologists and scientists in an effort, not a perfect effort, but a holistic effort to not allow public sentiment to override the realities of wildlife management. And that's what when we talk about vegans and we talk about some of the struggles with animal rights, we talk about a public sentiment that's easier swayed in that direction. When you say to someone, there's a complex system of checks and balances and cause and effect in the outdoor world that might allow us to kill some wolves but not all wolves, that might allow us a carrying capacity where hunters are a tool for wildlife biologists but not the only tool. But this is very complex.

This is hard to manage. We're going to have to sit here for a while. To explain it, it's much harder than to say wolves are friendly, they have families. If you shoot them, that's bad. It's easier and it's always been easier. But that fits in with the Disney narrative. It's always been easier to spin that narrative. And I don't blame anybody for believing that.

The people that have these narratives in their head, they have them from media. They don't have them from direct interactions with actual wolves. I have to pee so bad I can't talk anymore. So we have to hold this. If you want to keep going... We've been... This is four hours or five...

How long we've been there, Jamie? Three hours for sure. Three hours for sure. Three hours. I have to pee so bad. So do I. We go together. So let's pee.

We'll come back. We'll wrap this up with a nice bow. We'll be right back. And we're back. And we're back. So much relief. I was about to pee my pants. I was really close.

I was like, I'm trying to be strong. I'm trying to David Goggins slash Jocko Willink. He does one of those things where when you said I had to pee, I beat it. He was like, yeah, me too. What different? Three hours. I hadn't thought of it. How many minutes in?

Where are we at, brother? 305? Yeah. Oh, that's not bad. That's not bad. I thought we might be five or six hours at this point. That's manageable. That's a manageable podcast.

We always tend to go there. Yeah, they all go that way. But's manageable. That's a manageable podcast. We always tend to go there. Yeah, they all go that way. But you were saying there's a time machine. There's a time machine that happens with good conversations. Dude, I fucking love you, man. I love you too. I'm not scared to say it. I love you too. It's not something I'm embarrassed of.

You're a good guy. You're a smart guy. You're a fun guy. We have a lot of fun together i fucking love it we've had fun together for as many years as we've known each other like from we never had a bad time ben o'brien i never had a bad time with you i never had a bad time with you i know a lot of people have been in this seat saying the same shit but i don't care about how many times you and i have been out together hunting together bro Bro, so many just... Fun times. So many fun times.

Yeah. I want to say that I think maybe hunting is a part of that, but I don't think that's true. It's a part of it, but it's all connected together. It's like the thing about hunting is you're all agreeing that you disagree. You're all agreeing that you disagree with the standard model of how to get meat. You all agree that you're willing to go out... Let's go with it. Yeah, you're willing to go out and get your own deer and that eating a deer is really better for you than eating some sort of weird processed cow meat.

You put your hand up and say, hey guys, getting food should be hard. It's been hard for a million years. Yeah. It's hard and the difficulty of getting your food leads to the thing that makes you value the food itself. And when you're eating it, it tastes better. I can't explain it, but it does. It does. But here's where the problem is.

This is where people get real weird, where people get like real conspiratorial when they think about the elites that run this country, like those weird world leaders. Yeah. How many people can we sustain? How many? The reason why we have so many people is because someone figured out how to supply those people with food. It's not you and me. Most of those people are not supplying food for themselves,

but in turn, by supplying food to people that don't supply their own food, those people are allowed to innovate. And they make airplanes and computers and cell phones and satellites and all those things that you don't make if you're a fucking hunter or gatherer. So if you're a person with an iPhone and you don't like hunting, you're a fucking hypocrite. You're missing the point. We need everybody. We need soldiers we need nurses we need doctors

okay we need teachers we need a fucking everybody we need everybody to figure this thing out yeah and I think I've interviewed people from plant based burger companies like the big ones

hold on keep going is there any of them that taste good? No. We had a taste test one time in our offices at Meat Eater about this, and it was not great. We could easily figure out an elk burger versus a plant burger. But I think what you're saying is the scariest thing about that is that we're

able to quickly, when we look holistically at what farming is, what land use is, and what wildlife is, and what ecosystem health is, and we look across the space about what sharing the land might look like, how about sustainable use of land might look like, the version of the plant-based burger feels good, and it's kind of the veneer that it paints across your consumption. But when you dig down deep, you look at monoculture crops,

and you look at how what this world would have to be to sustain this kind of veneer of your plant-based burger. Narnia. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. It's not good for you. It's not good for you. Most importantly, it's not good for you.

It's not good for the land. It's not good for the wildlife. Listen, good for you. Most importantly, it's not good for you. It's not good for the land. It's not good for the wildlife. Listen, if you want to eat vegetables, eat vegetables. Those are good for you. Look into regenerative agriculture. Don't eat some crazy fake meat. Yeah, shout out to like Rome Ranch that I've been to and that's close to here. Yeah.

It does that. There's so many things that are connected to hunting that I've found myself. That's the complicated conversation. Yeah, I'm not on, like, I don't have a podcast right now. I'm not on the air, but I'm very excited about the future of conversations because all this shit is interconnected. All this shit matters, and we can have an honest conversation about how close we are to each other.

There isn't vegans and hunters. There is one group of people trying to figure this out and it's so complicated than anybody trying to generalize it is probably lying to you yeah and this this um the idea to collect everybody into these groups vegans versus hunters right versus left and it's it's not good for anybody i very much hope in the future that i'm able to to get off the ground a podcast with my friend. Why don't you just have a podcast? What the fuck are you talking about? You're talking about it like you're starting some kind of

crazy infrastructure where you have to dig tunnels into the city. Make a fucking podcast, bitch. Why are you complaining? I will. Right? Thank you. Jamie agrees. I'll do it. Thank you, Joe Rogan, for the direction there. I hope I can do it one day. One day I'll breathe underwater. I'll have a podcast and i'll

have a slippery squirrel pot pile throw it in your fucking face fucking pie it's a soup i'm gonna all your money on the line with most of the world betting here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna get there's a world of vote the whole world has a vote is that a pie or a soup no it's coming guess what bitch it's a fucking soup the realness is coming to you. I'm going to hire a whole troop of Pennsylvania Dutch people. They can't read. We're going to come outside your studio and we're going to throw slippery noodles. They don't know where they're going. They ride horses.

That's the homage. That's the homage. Oh, it's chicken and dumplings. Fucking hacks. I can't imagine. If you're Pennsylvania Dutch And you're just tuning in I don't mean any of the things I just said

I'm just fucking around Ben and I are friends We've had a lot of fun We're talking a lot of shit We're drinking a little whiskey To the Pennsylvania Dutch And to John Oliver We smoke some

Snoop Dogg Nutraceuticals Whatever the fuck you call them Nutraceuticals This has been fun dude I'm having Fun times So much fun man

But I think There's a thing that you brought up That I really believe might work. And this is the thing, that this Pittman-Robertson Act, the amount of money that goes from the taxes that helps conservation, that goes to wildlife habitat, the amount of money that's generated by that is really substantial. Imagine if we had something similar. It doesn't have to be as much, but if it was like normal consumables. If you're looking at things like hunting goods, what percentage of people are doing that? Not that many.

What percentage of people even buy an ammo? Not that many. It's probably not even close to. What's the number? Do you know what the number is? I don't know what the number is, but I would tell you that part of my work on Pittman-Robertson in the past has been to look at a thing called the backpack tax. You ever heard about that? Yeah, that's a... Is that enacted?

It's not. It's not currently. They proposed it, right? Yeah, in the late 90s, the senator enacted a bill that would do the same for outdoor goods. When I say outdoor goods, I mean there's an $887 billion economy around... Outdoor activities. What we call non-consumptive outdoor activities. Right. You might call fishing and hunting a consumptive outdoor activity. You might call hiking or ice climbing, which I support fully and totally.

Right. Non-consumptive. Non-consumptive. The idea is that this land is all of our collective, as a culture, as a civilization, United States, it's all of ours. It's public land. And for the sustainability of our state game agencies and the agencies that are put forth to manage these species in this land, there's the Bureau of Land Management, there's the Forest Service, National Forest Service,

there's federal and state agencies that manage this land, they manage the wildlife, all in trust, as we've talked about, all within our model of conservation, as we've talked about, all within the funding system that we've talked about. talked about, all within our model of conservation, as we've talked about, all within the funding system that we've talked about, there's this idea that if a backpack tax, which just means enact the same Pitt-Moravison taxes, the excise taxes, and enact those on all the gear that's sold at, say, REI. And that would be 11% as well? Call it 11%.

Whatever it is. So it's tents, coolers. Anything. Everything. There was legislation in the late 90s. I'll forget the senator that the Department of Interior head and the senator that put it forth. That called it the backpack tax and said, we want to, this is, it's way, there's way more. The economy for outdoor recreation is way bigger than the hunting and fishing economy.

Let's call it that. I don't know what the numbers are, but I know that it's much bigger exponentially much more right and so the idea would be like hey the hunting and fishing manufacturers are paying this excise tax on behalf of the public and this is going into the wildlife restoration fund and all the things we've talked about that why wouldn't we do that also with um you know in the user pays public benefits model with other users that are also using these wild places. They're not using them in a consumptive manner, but they are also consuming them in terms of trails. You know, they're using these places.

Yeah, for sure. And so there's a group called the Outdoor Industry Association that was formed around a lot of things. But one of the things was an opposition to this backpack tax. What if there could be some sort of agreement? Like, a consumptive tax should be more than a non-consumptive tax.

That would make sense. Yeah, because a non-consumptive tax, you're not removing a resource. You're not taking salmon. You're not killing a deer. Hiking on a trail. Camping in a campsite. Just having fun. You're not removing a resource, right? You're not taking salmon. You're not killing a deer. You're just camping. Hiking on a trail, camping in a campsite. Just having fun. You're not really taking much out. You're just like kind of, it would be nice if you put a little in to make sure it's there for everybody.

Yeah. So let's cut it in half. Yeah. The Outdoor Industry Association argues, and again, I tend to think that they're wrong, but this is their argument. I tend to think that they're wrong, but this is their argument. Hopefully I summarized it correctly, is that they feel that there's so many taxes on goods and services these days. And we have to move this to the manufacturer side of the coin because that's where this tax comes from.

You're asking for these taxes to be levied on the manufacturer of the goods, not necessarily the public, although the public who purchases the goods are the ones driving, you know, kind of the tax itself. And so what their argument is more like, hey, there's so many taxes on the small businesses in the outdoor community. There's so many taxes on many of the activities in the manufacturers. Why add more taxes?

Why add more taxes. Right. And to some level, I agree. So I just want to set that up as the backpack tax has been argued for a long time. Yeah, but here's the manufacturers. Why add more taxes. Why add more taxes. Right. And to some level I agree. So I just want to set that up as the backpack tax has been argued for a long time. Yeah, but here's the point. It's like, where does that money go? If the money goes to the standard things that buying anything,

you know, like if you buy a clock, what does your taxes go to? If you buy a tent, what does your taxes do? If it goes to the same shit, that's one thing. But if every time you buy a tent, it goes for habitat renewal, if it goes to the same shit, that's one thing. But if every time you buy a tent, it goes for habitat renewal, it goes for wildlife conservation, that's a different thing. That's what the Pittman-Robertson does.

Well, and also, yes, absolutely. And also the duck stamp. When you buy a duck stamp, the money that goes from the duck stamp. And the duck stamp is required to hunt waterfowl in our country. Right, but we're talking about these people that sell tents, like the duck stamp. And the duck stamp is required to hunt waterfowl in our country. Right, but we're talking about these people that sell tents. Like the camping people. Like if you're saying that they don't want to participate in this, they have to look at it this way.

Like, what if it was just something that contributed to the thing that literally supports your business? Yeah. The fuck are you doing? Yeah. Let's negotiate. Make it 3%. I hesitate to paint the whole industry the outdoor industry itself is very much um the conservation is a buzzword they're very much

environmentally friendly they very much want to give back they have been hesitant to enact attacks like this in the past i don't know where it is right now but in the past they've been hesitant and that's the truth. Yeah, because they want to make sales. But it's almost like we have to come to some sort of a reasonable conclusion. Because, yeah, of course you want to make money. You want to keep making money. You want to make more money every year, blah, blah, blah.

You don't fucking make any money if there's no woods. So it's a good faith effort. You generate a certain amount of income every year by donating. Everybody agrees, donating a small percentage. Let's take it back a little bit. Let's make it better for everybody. Let's take it back a little bit too. If, in the example we gave earlier,

1980s hunting populations have been dwindling. I want to say around 14 million to around 11 million, give or take any estimate. Even our estimates are kind of shoddy in the way we gather them, but hunting has been going down. Hunting license sales are a big part of the way we fund state game agencies and other agencies that provide for wildlife management, wildlife biology,

and access to state and federal lands. And is that only the hunting licenses or is pitman robertson like part of the ammo yeah does that go to that as well it does so we um we call that the american system of conservation funding and it has all those elements in it and i've read you know it's confusing because i've read about 17 different things about this that say different percentages but i've've read from anywhere from 40% to 80% to 90% of state game agencies are funded by the American system of conservation funding, which includes the things we talked about. And that is state game agencies manage this wildlife. And that's what they do.

And so here's a point to be made. You don't want, as much as I love hunting, you don't want one constituency within a myriad of user groups to dominate the funding of these agencies. We need that funding to be sustainable and diverse. We need that funding to come from all kinds of different areas. as we discovered when the the hunting numbers in our population drop in millions and they recede we have less money to fund an increasingly expensive endeavor of managing wildlife native and non-native game species and non-game species we have to spend money to manage them public land and private land we have to spend money to manage wildlife in those corridors. So that's what we, when we get back to the backpack tax itself and kind of the diversity of funding where we might say also, as much as I want the constituency of hunting and fishing to have a seat at the table, it really can't be one of the only seats at the table. We need to have other people pitching in,

and I feel as though the backpack tax is something that should be revisited. I don't want to generalize the Outdoor Industry Association or companies like Keene or Patagonia that care a lot about the environment, but I do think this is something that they should all publicly address and they should talk about and they should have a dialogue about because I think it's important. Well, it's interesting. We were talking about taxes and about the idea of the Pittman-Robertson is very clear where that money goes. And if we had that with other things, like if you had every time you purchased a computer in the United States,

you knew that there's a certain percentage that goes to education. And we radically upgraded the school system in this country because of that. Think of the amount of money that could be generated by that. If there was a similar 11% style tax to computers. I mean, I don't want to diminish people's struggles with buying equipment and computers and shit like that. But if there was a small percentage, the amount of money, if it was proportionate to the amount of use, right? Yeah. Like the hunting thing, like it's 11%, not a lot of hunters.

The computer thing, it doesn't have to be 11%. There's so many, that would be abusive. If it was 11%, people would start showing up in fucking fur coats, driving Bentleys and Rolls Royces and shit. Go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Pippin' hoes in a mansion. Right? Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was an existing excise tax that was funneled into an account

to then go to. It was like deciding it, instead of going to this, it would go to this. It wasn't creating a tax out of nothing. I think, though, if you look at the sheer amount of money in consumer goods, 11% would be bananas. It would give too much power to whoever's in control about how that money gets distributed. Yeah. Even though there's a shitload of money through hunting and firearms, overall GDP is not... 11% of the fucking computer market would be bananas. Yeah, I would love to get –

Computer, electronics, cell phone market, that's too much. I would love to get in a room with – and I have done this through Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, which is a group I serve on the board for. Like get in with some really influential politicians and just talk this through and say, look – It's not just the politicians. It's the people that pay for them. That's the problem. It's the manufacturers as well because that's the thing that really- It's the people that make the stuff, the people that generate the finances that fucking sponsor these people to be in office and they're beholden to those folks once they get in there.

That's the big problem because you're dealing with a fucking corporation that employs X amount of people, like thousands of people or whatever. Many, many locations all over the world. They have all this responsibility. There's a lot of momentum behind that. I'm going to raise my hand and say, hey, look, man. We're all in this together, bitch. We're all in this together. At the turn of the century, we had no ducks.

We had no deer. That's a wildlife, but it applies to everything. It really does. It applies to everything, right? It really does. If you would allow, it's a value system proposition. It's like if we all value a thing in this way, it could be wildlife, it could be computers, it could be roads, it could be anything.

But this discussion, like no bullshit, we might have tapped into something. And this is what I think we might have tapped into. We might have tapped into the idea that a certain percentage of anything that you really enjoy certain percentage of anything that you really enjoy should be donated to help conserve and improve that thing that you enjoy. Whether it's if you like to go fishing, wetlands. If you like to go duck hunting, wetlands. If you like to, whatever the fuck you like to do, man. Public lands, yeah.

Anything. Whether it's hiking, you want to go hiking, clean up and making sure that there's park rangers that can accept emergency calls and help people when they're stranded. Anything and everything. We should all contribute a certain amount to this and it would enhance the experience and make it more available to everybody, which would enhance everybody's life. And it would be barely noticeable to most folks. If you had a 1% tax, just 1% that didn't exist before and now exists, it would have a significant impact.

And it has had an impact in the example we're giving, which is an admittedly narrow example. It has had an impact on a very, very, very important thing for our country that doesn't exist elsewhere. It just doesn't exist elsewhere. The continent of Africa, it just doesn't exist elsewhere where we're able to say we pay into a system where everyone in this country, every person that might sit down in this chair would say, I want there to be elk. I want there to be deer. I want there to be mallards, mallard ducks. I want there to be wild turkeys. I want there to be elk. I want there to be deer. I want there to be mallards, mallard ducks. I want there to be wild turkeys. I want there to be bison. I want there to be wild animals. I want to be able to see them at Yellowstone. I want to be able to see them

in national forests, like the Gallatin National Forest where I live. I want that. This is a universal value. That universal value in turn is supported by the user group who goes out and takes part in the use of that natural resource. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. We can do that with everything. We could. I think we can do that with everything. We do that with a thing called the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which takes offshore oil royalties and puts that in a fund that helps pay for parks and access and fishing docks and shit all across this country.

Who paid for the BP oil spill? I don't know. Hopefully BP. That one was nuts. No. When you watch that one, you're like, how many millions of gallons every day? Where does that go?

Where does that go? It certainly doesn't help wildlife. And I think people might be surprised to know that I hesitate to call myself this, but this is the real truth. I'm an environmentalist in the way that I think about shit. You son of a bitch. I know. I know. You're upset.

Who wouldn't be? Who the fuck wouldn't be an environmentalist? Environmentalist means you want to preserve the thing that keeps you alive, your environment. Everybody's an environmentalist. This idea of conservation and preservation and where will we stand and how do we do this. And I'm pretty invested for my whole life to live in a place and put my life into this idea that this complex, I go back to my buddy,

Dr. Valerius Geist, intelligent intervention, man. Intelligent intervention. We have the ability to intervene. Right. But we have to agree on what the intelligent choice is. And that's where we don't agree. Yeah. There's a lot of people that don't think we should make any decisions in like the California model where you don't do anything to manage predators like mountain lions and they kill all the deer. Like good luck finding a deer in California. Like, where I live out here in Austin, there's deer everywhere. You have to be careful when you're driving at night. But where I used to live in California, when we saw a deer, it was an amazing occurrence.

Like, oh, look, there's a deer. It wasn't in the mouth of a... Oh, my God, he's getting dragged away! He's getting dragged away by a panther! Turn the car around. Yeah, you didn't get that. There's plenty of them. There's too many of them.

I mean, when a mountain lion attacks your five-year-old, then two more show up after the cop shoots them. How many are out there? Are you guys looking? Are you fucking counting them? Too, too many. This is a thing that people have when they get locked into ideologies, right? This is a thing that people have when they get locked into ideologies, right? I bet that lady, when that mountain lion attacked her kid,

all of her preconceived notions of what a mountain lion is were out the window because she realized, oh, Jesus Christ, by being sensitive, kind, caring people, we have allowed monsters to live near our children, monsters that would eat our children face first and that's that's when i get by the fucking head dude that's when i hang out with vegans and i talk to people like that i said dr robert c jones when i hang out with these people i understand that the middle ground is the strongest place there's there's so much of their ideology that i agree with and so much of of without knowing it, my ideology, they agree with. In the middle is the fucking place where wildlife, the complex wildlife biology and management happens and it's on the poles where it doesn't happen.

We got to wrap this up. But before we wrap this up. Yeah. How does that bear story end? Is that it? Yeah. The bear leaves and goes to eat that elk carcass. How close were you at the closest time?

80 yards. Toward death. How many seconds would it take for a bear to sprint at you from 80 yards? Two. Do you think you'd have time to pull the gun? Well, we did a whole thing with Clay Newcomb. If you look on the old meat eater YouTube where we tried to figure out how quickly you could draw your bear spray. Not so quick.

Not so quickly. I probably would have gotten mauled. Figure out how quickly you can draw your bear spray or your pistol. Not so quick. Not so quickly. Not so quick. I probably would have gotten mauled. But again, that's the reality of the world in which we live, Joseph. That's a nice thing to say if you don't get mauled. If you do get mauled, you should say, I should take up roller skating. Yeah, if you don't get mauled, you're like, ah! If you don't get mauled, you're like, I am going roller skating from here on out. I'm going to take up crochet. If you got mauled and you had the opportunity to't get mauled, you're like, ah! If you don't get mauled, you're like, I am going roller skating from here on out.

I'm going to take up crochet. Like, if you got mauled and you had the opportunity to not get mauled, you're like, yeah, I'm going to do something else. I'm going to keep my face. Yeah, keep your chest cavity intact. I'm going to keep my testicles in the scrotum. Yes. Ben O'Brien, you're the shit.

Thank you very much. Love you, buddy. Love you, too. Thank you for having me, as always, every time I come here. I'm a fan of the show. I'm a fan of you. I'm a fan of you i'm a fan of you too i'm not gonna keep saying it but it's true do another podcast bitch all right bye everybody