The Joe Rogan Experience - #540 - Steven Rinella

Episode Date: August 26, 2014

Steven Rinella is an outdoorsman, author, and television host. He currently hosts MeatEater on the Sportsman Channel.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Brian Cowan was going to try to make it here today. Oh, really? But he had some podcasts he scheduled in advance. I tried to get him to cancel, but he couldn't. That's too bad. But he's very excited to come with us to Alaska,

and that should be a nice, silly trip. Man, I'm excited about that trip. It really is. When you get up into that, when I say that, when you get up into the alpine zone, like the above timber line in Southeast Alaska, it really like, you know, it's cooler looking than like the Ewok forest, you know? I mean, it's just as amazing because you have this, like you go from old growth stuff where you could, like the three of us could all stand around joined hand hand-to-hand, and you couldn't reach around these trees.

You climb a little higher and it's like, boom. It's just wide open. There's really nothing like it. You can't fathom the beauty of it. I've seen it on your show. This is the same place where you went hunting black-tailed deer, where you land on a float plane and then you go up into the uh into the the upper regions yeah that was where the fog rolled in and you had that nice deer in your scope and you had to wait you know that that time when i was up there there was a windstorm the wind was so bad it made the front page news in town

and um 70 they they kept saying like 70 some mile hour winds, blew down a bunch of foam poles. The next day, a pilot came up to kind of fly over to see if we were still alive and everything. He just kind of cruised around to check. That's the thing is the weather. So when we go on this trip, we could either have the worst time or the best time depending. I mean, just depending on the weather. It can be so just uncomfortable and miserable, or it can be just beautiful. And there's places back in there. Prince of Wales Island is huge.

I think by some definitions, it's either the third or fourth biggest island we have. What's interesting about that island is it has half the surface area as Hawaii, the big island in Hawaii. Wow. But it has like three times the coastline. Whoa. It's just a crazy like fjords and inlets and bays. But there are places in this island that you can't really – there's no road system in a lot of it. And there's places you can't fly to because there's

no lakes to land and it's really hard to walk there so sometimes you're looking at there's mountains there and you're like i guarantee that no one you know you can't guarantee but i mean like for a hundred years it's probably no one has stepped foot on that thing because you really had we would have to get to one place and you'd have to get a boat and carry it through and go across to another place and then climb up. Well, it would be mostly just climbing. If you fly over some of those mountaintops and you look around them, there's just no way. I just know that no one's been there.

Unless you can land up there on a lake. We'll land in a spot, and I want to just walk from there. And I think we will walk up into stuff that that people haven't walked there i mean there's always some crazy thing you didn't know about but we're gonna walk into some stuff where people just have not walked well you know you can stand around places there and say i like you know i feel very certain that i'm like definitely the first guy to ever have his feet sitting right here i can't discount something that happened you know hundreds and hundreds of years ago but there's just some wild stuff in there wow it's it's a you know right now i got mixed feelings

about it too but they just the forest service up there just announced they're gonna be uh opening up a cut up there six thousand acres000 acres of old growth for clear cuts. Wow, that's kind of fucked up. Dude, I understand every single argument. For and against. I understand every single argument. What's for? What's the good aspect of it?

Economics. I mean, that's it. You used to have a thriving logging industry based around Tongass, you know, Tongass National Forest. And it's just atrophied, right? So it's a job creation thing you know i mean that that's the four the four is just people that live there having access to like a good paying job the downside is we have just a minuscule fraction of old growth left you know yeah just i don't see why anybody would allow that i mean i i understand the economic thing but i always feel like there's got to be another way to make money what's weird too is Yeah, I don't see why anybody would allow that. I mean, I understand the economic thing,

but I always feel like there's got to be another way to make money. What's weird, too, is Tong has just said recently that over the next decade, they're looking to phase out old growth logging at the same time that they are announcing and pushing forward with plans to do a big 6,000-acre clear cut. So they're sort of acknowledging on one hand that they want to get out of it or need to get out of it or can see into the future they need to get out of it, and on the other hand being like, but we'll have one last hoorah, I guess. One last party.

And you're dealing with how old do you think these trees are? I mean, I can't speak specifically to that particular area, but I mean there's like dog furs that are much older than the birth of this nation out there in cedars. I mean, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old. That's huge. Huge giant trees. It's fucked up to chop them down and make what? It's sad, man.

Paper? But you know, like everything gets so weirdly, we've talked about this before on the show, how things get so convoluted. Like one of the big, just to bring it back to us going on a hunt for sick of blacktail deer like those sick of blacktail deer when we're going to look for them we're going to be looking for them up in the alpine which they'll be leaving so they'll be leaving around the time we're going there that stuff still has snow like where we're going to be looking for deer we'll still have snow in june okay then it melts off and there's long days and it turns like beautiful and it gets very vibrant and green there's

all kinds of succulents and deer come up out of the timber to feed around there and then in october it snows so you have like a couple snow-free months in october it snows and those deer will all split traditionally what those deer want to do is they want to go down and spend the winter down in old growth. Because the old growth canopy allows for kind of a snow-free sheltered understory where they're down on the ground. And they'll hang out in that old growth timber. So an argument against the cut would be that we need it for deer. the cut would be that we need it for deer and a further argument would be the reason we need to protect deer habitat is because we need to protect the wolves out there and some people right now are trying to make a push to say that the wolves in the alexander archipelago of which prince of

wales island is a part that those wolves are genetically extinct and they therefore deserve a level of protection like their own level of protection that they would get endangered species act protection out on these islands when other people are arguing it's just the same wolf man i mean it's like you got wolves all over it does like that population doesn't deserve any specific thing so it winds up being that people who might be pushing against the timber sale might wind up also be angling for protecting wolves out there from hunting and trapping and then you're left to be like well i'm not really comfortable with the timber sale but i'm not really comfortable with you using biological lumping and splitting in order to like close down

certain sorts of hunting seasons so it winds up being that all your friends aren't necessarily, you know, like the enemies of your enemies aren't necessarily your friends. Wow. How complicated. Wildlife management is very complicated. Oh, dude, it's wild. So anyways, we're going into that area, and we're going to hunt some black-tailed deer.

And there's a good healthy population. You know, it's still good. Even a non-residentresident you're allowed two bucks and do they um do they have bear up there is it black bear yeah but the thing about the bears you'll see some bear droppings or bear scat or bear shit here and there but those bears out there are so tuned in on the salmon runs that they really don't spend a lot of time um i think some move through but they really don't spend a lot of time feeding in those areas because they're down 2,000 feet. Timberline there is like 1,800, 2,000 feet.

They're down 2,000 feet lower in the river mouths feeding on salmon. And we like to have, you know, that image of the bear grabbing a salmon out, and he's all silver and shiny and healthy and floppy. grabbing a salmon out and he's all silver and shiny and healthy and floppy but long after the runs are kind of done they're down there just they're down there just feeding on rotten fish laying around i've watched wolves they're eating dead saying i watched five wolves one time eating dead salmon that were the consistency of pudding whoa just mopping it up they must have unbelievable stomach bacteria man you can't even imagine. There's not a lot of bears up there.

You see some berries around, but I think that so many of the bears are focused on that stuff. One thing you find, some people say, in those islands in southeast Alaska, they tend to be either a black bear island or a grizzly island. And it changes. So you'd be on one island, and it's black bears. island or a grizzly island and it just and it changes so you'll be on one island and it's black bears another island's grizzlies and it's sort of this weird phenomenon that they don't readily mix you get an interior areas on the mainland where you have grizzlies and black bears coexist oftentimes the grizzlies will dominate the salmon streams and you'll have more black bears up high so you could be standing on a mountain a couple thousand feet above sea level

and it's just black bears everywhere on top of the mountain feeding on blueberries. And you're looking down at primo salmon streams, but just big brown bears, big grizzlies down there. And they kind of hoard the spot and the black bears don't get in there. They just can't. You know, they're kind of enemies, yeah. They'll eat them too, right? They'll eat them.

Grizzlies. Yeah. The place that I was up in Alberta when we went bear hunting, they take carcasses after they cut the back straps off and the hams. They'll take the body cavity and they leave it in certain areas where they know grizzlies are to keep the grizzlies coming to that area. Oh, is that right? Yeah, because they don't want the grizzlies coming to the other baits,

the baits they have out for the black bear. No kidding. Because if they do, they have to abandon that bait because it's just too sketchy. They have some photos, some camera trap photos of these fucking enormous grizzlies wandering in. Just feeding up on black bears. Yeah. I got a buddy who saw one time, he witnessed a grizzly kill a black bear, disembowel it and eat its liver whoa yeah

and there's a there's a very well-regarded hunting guide in alaska who's written some good hunting books about alaska named tony russ and i was reading his book on hunting kodiak or he's got he's got a book on hunting brown bears and grizzlies in alaska and a lot of his experiences around kodiak and the alaska peninsula and he was saying he's never seen and and just to back up for a minute on kodiak a sign like if you map out a bear's diet okay a bear a boar bear a male brown bear grizzly you know brown bear on kodiak if you map out his annual diet what he's tuned into in the spring are brown bear cubs yeah he's like males he's like wakes up and he's hunting brown bear cubs and that's fucked up it's a sniffing part of his diet but what tony ross has said in all his years of guiding he's never seen where when you kill a big mature boar brown bear he's

never seen where another brown bear will come and scavenge that carcass. Wow. Even with the thing skinned out and butchered, right, they recognize through smell or whatever they will not mess with that thing. That's weird. That's what he says. Black bears do. Oh, yeah, and this guy's seen a lot. But he was saying nothing will touch those big boars, the body animals.

Is he too scared of them? I don't know. Even with something about them the smell or something they just know that they don't want anything to do with it wow when we were in alberta one of the guys shot a bear late at night and they didn't want to retrieve it because there was too many bears in the area it was just getting sketchy they shot the bear like right at the moment where it was getting dark out and the bear ran off and they said we'll come back in the morning so they came back in the morning and a big boar was eating the other black bear.

Oh, really? So they were taking selfies, like smiling, while there was a bear behind them eating a bear carcass. That happened to a buddy of mine where he got one and trailed it. He shot one with his bow and tracked it in the morning, and it was just gone. It had been consumed. So crazy. Yeah. Yeah, that's the morning, and it was just gone. Had been consumed. So crazy. Yeah. Yeah, that's the wild, man.

When we were up there, one of the bears, one of the boars, had attacked a sow, killed its cub, and left half the cub's body, and then the sow came back and finished it off. She ate her own baby. Really? Yeah. She ate her own baby in front of them while they were in the stand. I've heard competing theories about that that on one hand the boar just is doing it because he wants

to eat but there seems to be this upside where there's an additional upside besides caloric intake that a boar will kill a sow's cubs and she'll come back into estrus yeah so when a sow like a sow's gonna she'll have her her cubs in the den in february march okay they're just little hairless she don't even know she had them probably just these hairless little things and she'll take care of them she'll emerge from her den with these little fur balls she'll stay with him all summer long she'll den with him again she'll come out again and usually at some point that summer she might get rid of him and so she's going to be off like she won't cycle again potentially for two years so if a boar has in his area he hangs out he's got a half dozen females. Apparently it's worth the risk to him that he might be,

I'm talking in a genetic sense, it's worth the risk to him that he might be killing his own offspring, which he probably has no idea whether it is or not, kill his own offspring in order to have that female go back into estrus and then breed her. Wow. Or whatever kind of calculation he's probably not me obviously he's not making that calculation he's probably just going like i'm hungry but an added benefit of it is apparently he get he might double back

around and you know and get her again make love to the woman whose children he consumed well dolphins actually have a strategy against that because one of the things that a lot of people are not aware, we think of dolphins as being really sweet and kind and they're nice to people, but dolphins, they eat their own babies. I didn't know that. They don't eat their own babies, but they eat dolphin babies. And when a male dolphin finds a female that he has never had sex with and she has babies they'll oftentimes kill the babies and they'll kill the babies to force the woman to back to breeding again because she'll go on a seven-year cycle so when a female dolphin has a baby she will not breed again for seven years while that baby is being raised and growing yeah because they put a huge investment apparently so the strategy for female dolphins is they are sluts,

and they fuck as many dolphins as they can, so that when the male comes around and he sees her with the baby, he's like, that might be my fucking kid. All right, I'm not going to kill that kid. Because that's what keeps them from killing the female's babies. Because they're thinking. I mean, they're really intelligent animals. They have a cerebral cortex that's 40% larger than a human being's. As a matter

of fact, anybody who's listening to this, check out Radiolab. Radiolab has an amazing podcast. The one that's on out this week is called Hello. And it's all about John Lilly and John Lilly's work with interspecies communication. Oh, okay. You know who John Lilly was? No, no, I don't

know that name. He was a maniac. Crazy man. And these other scientists that worked with him actually wound up taking his research and bringing it to some new place because Lilly, he was also the inventor of the isolation tank. He created a sensory deprivation tank because he was a pioneer. Which you're a fan of, right? Yeah, a huge fan. Yeah.

Lilly would take acid and set up a tank next to the dolphins. And he would take acid, go in the isolation tank, and try to communicate with the dolphins. So while the dolphins would make all these weird noises, he would try to decipher those while he was on acid in his tank. And he eventually went off the deep end with like really getting like heavily, heavily into ketamine and all these weird tranquilizers and drugs and became actually addicted to ketamine. And that's when he lost all his funding. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him when it came to this dolphin research anymore because they knew that he was doing that. And one of the women that he had hired to live with a dolphin, they had like an apartment set up where it was underwater like it was essentially to her it was like waist high in water and she had a dolphin that she lived with for like six months in this and she wound up like jerking the dolphin off is that right because the

dolphin would like hump her leg all the time and it'd be really distracting because he was a young dolphin so she's like let me just take care of that for you and she would just jerk this dolphin off and then you know to her it was like look he's got an issue and it's getting in the way of work so i'll just take care of that but everybody else is like whoa whoa whoa whoa you're doing scientific research by jerking off dolphins like okay yeah i can see that yeah she might need a couple minutes to explain herself but the the the podcast sort of focuses on dolphin communication and the difficulty that they have. They know that the dolphins want to communicate with them, but they have that blowhole, and that's how they make their noise. So it's really hard for them to make noises that mimic human noises because they don't really have the ability to make M's and T's and all these different kinds of sounds.

Yeah, it's a completely different apparatus so in the in the podcast you hear her talking to the dolphin and the dolphin trying to imitate what she's saying it's crazy all right it's amazing you get into like when you get into animal communication so much of it becomes semantical or an argument of semantics where you'd say like, well, we're the only thing with language. And people would be like, well, you know, actually, X, Y, and Z has something. Okay, well, I mean we're the only thing with complex language.

And you'd be like, well, you know, some animals are actually able to convey, you know, fairly complex things like there's, you know, a predator above us. And they're like, well, what I mean is they don't have syntax right you know and you kind of like wind up running out it's like the verdict's still out man there's some like animals do convey some complicated stuff and my two brothers are ecologists you know like phd scientists and and

they kind of hate the conversation you know because they really resist not resistant to but they have a hard time with trying to use our terminology use our language to describe what animals are up to right you know like to say for for you to say that the dolphin eats the bait or doesn't want to eat the baby because it might be his baby someone might argue that that animal probably has no comprehension of that. Or even that they are not able to equate sex with reproduction. They're so intelligent, though. I don't know how they wouldn't be able to equate that.

I don't either. I don't think they eat the babies. I struggle with this all the time because I- I really should have said killed. They kill them. I don't think they eat them. They might. They really might, but they kill them. They bite them. I don't think they eat them. They might. They really may, but they kill them.

They bite them. You know, I struggle with this stuff all the time because, you know, as a hunter, I'm always weighing out, like, well, what is it? Like, what are the things that we're after and what are their capabilities, you know? I don't want to fall into some trap where I just act like, oh, it's just like corn with legs, you know i don't want to fall into some trap where i just act like oh it's just like corn with legs you know so i do i am curious all the time about like the the capabilities of animals and i tend to be open to the idea that there's there's like different sets of experiences that different animals have you know that some have more perhaps more of an awareness than others yeah you know there's like a there there's a hierarchy, if you will. And I think that the consensus is that dolphins are pretty high on that hierarchy.

Yeah. Dolphins and orcas, of course, orcas are very high up on that. And they eat dolphins. That's what's really fucked up. You know, I've been going through this with my kid, man. He, um, we just moved to the Pacific Northwest. And so I keep talking to my kid about everything's got a killer whale on it you know like like stores grocery stores whatever just like a common motif and um i kind of tell him that's a killer whale it's a killer whale and i know that a lot of people

like to call them orcas you know and orca is some greek word i think just means cetacean just means whale it's a pretty generic term and some people say that killer whale, killer whales used to be called whale killers. Yeah. And whale killer became killer whale. So I'm always telling my kid, oh, it's killer whale. And one day my kid comes home and he's just madder than hell because he learned it's not a killer whale. It's an orca. And I'm like, listen, man, I know what the person who told you that is trying to tell you and i already know

that but i told you killer whale not because i wasn't aware because i was trying to circumvent you know i was trying to do a to come back around against what you would inevitably learn about its pc name oh i see you know you were like planning it wasn't that I didn't know. I was just trying to fill you up with just to open you to the idea that, that there's the animals get new names all the time. And it's just a PC. It's like a, it's like a, um, what do you call it? It's like a marketing term.

Yeah. Cause it's a marketing term. It's not a whale. I mean, it's not a whale. It's a tooth whale. Is it? Yeah. But a dolphin's a tooth whale too, because it's a cousin of a dolphin.

I thought, pardon me. I thought you were saying to someone wasn't a mammal or whale. Is it? Yeah. But a dolphin's a toothed whale, too, because it's a cousin of a dolphin. Oh, I see what you're saying. Pardon me. I thought you were saying that someone wasn't a mammal or something. Oh, no. It's a cousin of a dolphin, right? You know, I don't know. Like, taxonomically, where is it at? Yeah.

I'd be curious. I'm pretty sure. I'd be curious to know. Yeah, because I'm pretty sure there's a crazy video of one. They're killing a whale while it's alive. These killer whales are biting. That's how most killing happens. Yeah, but a whale while it's alive these killer whales are that's how most killing happens yeah but i mean it's it's a i should say they're eating it while it's alive they're biting chunks of its face off and it's just so hard to watch because we think of these

whales as being these beautiful creatures and we think of why we have this weird idea of killer whales as being like these really noble creatures you know because i always think of killer whales as being like the friend of man and that's why when one does freak out at sea world it makes sea world look so horrible because in the wild there's almost no evidence whatsoever that whales have ever killed anybody yeah but he's probably after a while he's like what am i supposed to kill then yeah well yeah i'm a killer exactly i mean whale well and and the instincts that they have you know i was the way I always equate it, one of the things I have a problem with zoos in general is that they don't allow animals to do their natural thing. I really think that what zoos should be is get all those motherfuckers together.

You should have a giant piece of land. If you're going to fence it in, let them in there and let them run wild. And if people really want to see animals, what they should see is jaguars killing monkeys and the whole gamut. And it sounds fucked up, but that's really what the wild is. Because what we're doing by taking these animals and putting them in these weird cages is we're creating these closed-in ecosystems where these animals never have to compete. Their food is given to them, and we're ruining their genetics. I mean, those animals that are in zoos they're completely

incapable of ever being reintroduced into the wild unless you take them and it would have to be some really exhausting effort to try to reintroduce them to the idea of hunting their own food or gathering their own food but those fucking dummies that you have in the zoo you've created these welfare monkeys yeah you know these monkeys that just i shouldn't say welfare i should say like they're pets they're like dogs it's like expecting your dog to figure out how to go hunting when he's just sitting there wagging his tail waiting for you to open up a can of alpo they don't know any better but what zoo is using their defense and you know some people we've kind of gotten away from a lot of people have gotten away from aesthetically so like the bear in the cage kind of display.

But what zoos are always able to use in their defense is that with cases like the panda, Florida panther, they're a genetic reserve. So maybe they're not ensuring behavior. They're not like protecting behavior, but they're at least protecting the genetic reserve. Yeah. There's a good argument for that. So it should hit the fan for some species. You have that. And there's many, many examples of things,

of wild populations that have been supplemented through the zoo stuff. But I know what you're saying. I don't like... When I take my kid to a zoo, I remember we were sitting there looking at this, I mean, just a pathetic example of a grizzly bear. I remember just kind of wanting to look at my son and be like,

listen, dude, you're getting the wrong idea. These things are badass normally, you know. It's just kind of sad. Have you seen that show, The Hunt, that I told you about? No, no, I didn't see it, but I remember you talking about it. Pretty interesting. I don't think it's on anymore. I read about it after i told you about no no i didn't see it but i remember you talking about it pretty interesting i don't think i read about it after you showed it after you told me about it because the guy from metallica was narrating it and then he got their band got punished and weren't allowed to play at a music festival they were trying to ban him so that never happened i

don't think it what the fuck is his name because he narrated a show headfield right yeah james headfield yeah he's a good narrator. It's interesting. And he's a hunter. He hunts a lot. And there's a photo of him with this fucking giant bear. Holy shit. I mean, it's a perspective shot. You know, they always put the bear in front of the person.

Yeah, where you get way back, yeah. But this fucking bear is huge. I mean, it's like a nine-foot bear. It's enormous. And it's just the shoulders on this fucking thing and the head on this thing. And he's standing in front of people like, oh, my God, disgusting, evil. What they don't understand is if you truly love bears, you got to kill that bear. Because if you don't kill that bear, that bear, those big giant bears are responsible for decimating the population of cubs.

That's what they do. And if you don't trim the big ones, if you don't kill some of the big ones, there's a photo of him with the bear. And that is a fucking big bear. Oh, that's a giant, yeah. Where was that? Was that Kodiak? That's Kodiak. Yeah, he shot one up there while he was doing that show, apparently.

I mean, they are enormous, enormous beasts. Yeah, you're not, you might see, like, someone might see that you killed a big male bear and be upset by it, but you're really not impacting the bear population you know you're impacting that individual bear but you're not having any kind of real long-term deleterious effect on the bears of that island which are very you know it's a very stable well-regulated population of bears out there i put in for that tag i think as a non-guided non-resident so like if you want to go the guide you can go to kodiak and hunt you know you just go book a trip and go so you just have to pay them and they have a certain amount of tax they out yeah it's like

i don't know what it is you might pay 25 30 grand for the hunt it's interesting watching but a non-guided non-resident that's always put in for it there's a very limited number of tags for non-guided, non-resident, which means that I would have to go in lieu of a guide. Because my brother's a resident of Alaska, I don't need to use a guide when hunting animals that you normally need a guide to hunt. So I can go with him and hunt there. And so every other year, they do a thing where you can apply for the spring hunt. I always put in for that hunt. And then when you told me about that show, I was bummed because I was like, now the odds of drawing that tag are probably going to, for a long time, go way, way, way down because there's probably going to be a ton of dudes putting in for the permit now. Yeah.

I could be wrong. Probably. But I feel like it's going to increase interest. And now I'm trying to think of a new place to start putting in. I've never killed a grizzly bear i i want to i really want to one time well you also have a weird thing where you want a grizzly bear to scratch your chest and leave scars why would you say it meant a lot more to me when i was single that just seems like one of the worst requests ever. Like a fucking giant bear.

I mean, what is a full-grown grizzly way? What's the way? I mean, there's a magical number that gets thrown around a lot. When people want to say that a bear was huge, they say it was 1,000 pounds. Right. But those, I guess, are like if you put a lot of 1,000-pound bears on a scale, they're 800 pounds. They're 750 pounds, 800 pounds. Again, that Tony Russ guy that wrote those books I was talking about, he's had an immense amount of experience.

And he kind of has a passage in there where he talks about the 1,000-pound bear. And there just aren't a lot of them out there, as much as you read people getting like 10-foot, 1,000-pound bears. You and I laughed about this before because everyone that sees a mountain lion in the wild always says, big fucking boar, 200-pound boar. I remember I laughed because you saw a lion and you said it looked like a small one. I was like, you're the first guy I've ever met that saw a small lion. I've seen two of them. They were both around the same weight. The first one i saw was like a dog size like 60 70 pounds

and the second one it was a much quicker view of them but again i thought it was a coyote until i saw its tail and then i noticed it had this big bouncy tail it was in santa barbara i was in montecito driving through a residential neighborhood and we're like my wife said it saw it first she goes coyote and i go oh shit look at its tail and we're like that's a mountain lion it was like so it was like in that time we saw it in the headlights couldn't have been more than 70 pounds yeah that's you're discerning individual to not have seen a 200 pound tom so there's a thousand pound bear but that like that bear we're just looking at is a huge bear i don't know what he weighs well did you see that video that's been going around lately of a bear that was walking around on two legs and people were saying is this bigfoot is

this what people are seeing because it's absolutely a black bear and this bear just for whatever reason that's how he likes to get around he walked like a long distance on two legs like it's a crazy video no i haven't pulled that video up jamie because it's the one in the neighborhood right yeah yeah yeah it's like walking in this suburban neighborhood, and this fucking bear is on two legs like a dude in a bear outfit, like Yogi. Really? Yeah. And I mean, he walks 30, 40 yards like this.

So if you were in the woods and you saw this bear doing that, you'd be like, I saw a fucking Sasquatch. I know what I saw. Especially if it was like dusk. Look at this bear. Look at him. You gotta be kidding me. No, check him out, man.

Pull it from the beginning so we can see the whole thing. Do it from the beginning. Look at this. Oh yeah, man. I mean, if you didn't know any better, especially if it was thick woods and you saw that thing, you would fucking swear that that's a Bigfoot. Because you know what? The shots

you're looking at right there are often about as long as you see a bear. Yeah. Look at him. I mean, look at that. Look at that. That is fucking crazy. That's pretty wild that he likes to get around like that. You would assume that that is a monkey.

That's an ape. That's a fucking bear. Now, does he have a normal gait when he does get down on all fours, or is he screwed up somehow? No, he was running. Oh, he was? You saw him down on all fours Or is he screwed up somehow No he was running Oh he was You saw him run on all fours This is his paws are injured

Oh His paws injured Oh he might have got caught in a trap No No No Not both paws But it looks like his right paw

Looks like his right paw is missing What state is he in I think New Jersey Yeah I mean if he got caught in a trap It's because someone illegally set I don't think that's the cause I mean you can't trap bears In New Jersey. Yeah. I mean, if he got caught in a trap, it's because someone illegally set. I don't think that's the case. I mean, you can't trap bears in New Jersey.

But just the fact that a bear has that ability. Can you trap at all in New Jersey? I don't know. Yeah, there's some fur trapping there, but I don't know to what extent. But there's no bear trapping there. But isn't it possible that he got caught in another animal's trap, and that's how he's still alive? Because he only has his paw?

There's no trap that would be used for fur bearing animals now that would cripple that thing to the point where he would do that if he got caught in a in a foothold trap or leg old trap he would pop his foot out of there really i mean i can't like i can't rule out everything if that's what happened to that bear and i have no reason to think that it is, if someone came down and said, absolutely, that's what happened to that bear, I'd be like, then someone was doing an illegal trapping activity because that's not something that would happen. Is it much more likely because we're looking at a residential area that he stood on something? But I could put my... I used to do this. When I used to trap, I used to do this all the time, is, you know, I can snap my hand in most traps.

Really? Yeah. Because the trap has more of a function of, I mean, this is going to get all, you're going to probably hear from all kinds of your listeners, but it has a holding function. So it starves them to death? No, not if you're, no, because you have to check your traps. Oh, so you go there and it's still alive and then you have to kill it. Yeah. So when I used to fur trap, I would check my traps every 24 hours, usually in the morning.

But anyways, what the trap largely serves to do is hold something. And the way when you rig them, if you do things right, you rig them with a lot of swivels and things. And so what you're trying to do is really limit any kind of damage to the animal. And this isn't altruistic. The reason you want to limit damage to the animal is the animal is less likely to fight the trap. If you have a trap that causes nerve damage, bone damage, numbing, it's all the more chances that that thing is gonna be working harder to get away and the thinking is you the in the ideal case you're just trying to hold it with a foothold trap so it would try to chew its way out does everybody they yeah people always say chew but what what they will do and i've you know i have i've seen it happen particularly with muskrats which have very very thin bones thin bones. There's one that only has one paw.

I wonder what happened to him. Where's that? I have no idea. I just typed in bear trap. National Park Service. What do you think happened there? Well, that's too high on his leg. To be a trap?

Yeah. So maybe that's a shot, a gunshot or something like that? Could have been. He could have got shot. He could have got shot. He could have got hit by a car. He could have got shot. He could have got shot. He could have got hit by a car. He could have got... I mean, things meet such weird ends and injuries.

I've seen bears that I'm fairly convinced, on Prince of Wales Island, I've seen bears that I'm fairly convinced had been shot just because of the sort of wear on the shoulder it happened. Right, like it looked like someone just kind of hit its vitals. I could picture how that would happen. I can't say that that didn't happen there, but that's not a trap thing. What I have seen with muskrats anyways, muskrats have very, very, very thin bones.

And you'll see where you'd get muskrats that would, in trap or parlance, they'll say it would ring out. So it would just twist and get away, you know? Oh, okay. So it just keeps spinning until people say like a chew out but it's weird because people who you know people defending trapping will like to clarify that's not actually a chew off it's a ring off but they're still cutting their own arm off yeah by spinning around until the tissue i never saw it i saw saw it on muskrats.

I never saw it on larger animals. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. But, again, like everything, there's a sort of, there's good practices. Okay. I don't trap anymore. So I'm not, I don't have like a, when I tell you what I'm telling telling you i'm just telling you this from being a guy who likes to be clear about factual matters i'm not i don't have like a real dog in the race on this so to speak right now but when if you follow good practices on trapping okay you it's in your best interest to not have these sorts of things happen, that you would set in a way that you don't have incidental catches or bycatch.

You check your traps on a very tight schedule. You rig them in such a way that you don't cause damage, that if you did get something else into your trap, you would be able to release that thing unharmed. But there are people who, for lack of caring, and there are people who just for lack of technical expertise screw these things up you know and oftentimes you could get violations like what would be like a trapping based violation from someone who wouldn't self-identify as a

fur trapper but who just got mad about some bear or whatever getting into his dumpster and then he takes matters into his own hands, completely outside of the law, and decides to fix that bear and expertly set a trap for it. Now, there are bear traps, right? Those big traps that you see in those movies that catch the bad guy in his leg and he's screaming, ah!

Those are real. There used to be a lot of black bear trapping. People used to trap black bears all the time. There used to be some grizzly trapping at a time people would trap them to sell fur they'd trap them to get them for you know scientific purposes they they'd trap them to just catch them for pets they'd trap them to mitigate livestock risk you know there's a lot of trapping going on right now bear trapping um isn't a thing that goes on. There's not like...

There's a bear trap right there? Yeah. It was funny now. There used to be a lot of bear traps, antique bear traps on the market, but people still manufacture what would be a bear trap in order to sell it as a piece of false memorabilia. Oh, like a flintlock gun? Exactly. You would sell something like that?

Yeah, so there's a lot of guys that make reproductions of old bear traps. No one's intending that they're going to go set it for a bear, but people want to have a lodge. You've got your cabin, and you want to have a big bear trap hanging up in it. Right. So there's a lot of bear traps, and you'll see where a dude will think he has something awesome, and he's trying to sell it for a thousand bucks and you look at and be like i you can go buy those all day long for 150 it's just like it's not old there's a comedy club in

town called the improv in the front of the comedy club at one time they've abandoned it but it was a barbecue place and the barbecue place they tried to make it it with old tools in the wall, like an old saw. Like, you know, those wooden handle on each side. Crosscut saws, yeah. And you could look at it, and you're like, I know that shit is two years old. I'm looking up. It's all rusty and everything. But I know this is not a fucking antique.

They had one of those sickles that, you know, like the death dealer. What do they call it? Grim Reaper. Grim Reaper. Grim Reaper was always supposed to have. That was on the wall, too. They're trying to make it like some farm house. Oh, yeah, they call it? Grim Reaper. Grim Reaper. Grim Reaper is always supposed to have. That was on the wall too. They're trying to make it like some farm house. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Old-timey. Old-timey wood walls, like a stained, you know, they made it look like it's old and weathered. Yeah. You know, the wood. Which some of it, this is actually from a 100-year-old farmhouse, the wood that we have here. This is reclaimed oak.

This is nice. Yeah. I specifically went out of the way to get old wood because I felt like it'd be kind of cool, you know, because there's probably some weird energy in some old farm wood. This is like real old thick wood. Oh, yeah. No, I like it.

Me and my old man cut down. He's dead now, but when i was in high school he was building a pole barn and we cut down oak on this piece of property we owned across the road from our house this little corner lot and we cut down oak he built the barn and i took that oak the logs and i took them down and put them on a flatbed trailer and had them milled into lumber oh wow and took all that lumber and years later he's been dead since i think 2002 2003 i still haven't finished this but then i laminated all those pieces together into like what looks like chunks of a bowling lane ah i'm still trying to make a damn desk out of these things oh wow it's like and i'm actively engaged right now i'm trying

to move one of these slabs from miles city out to washington now so i can continue my now 12 year long project of trying to turn me in the old man's tree so anyways i'm a sentimentalist when it comes to wood just like yourself oh that's cool so you're gonna make it like a writing desk like where you do your writing i think so i think i'm gonna make a wraparound desk yeah that's a great idea yeah but all the pieces i have together aren't as big as this desk we're sitting at but it's's still a nice, you know, big chunk. I have a desk that I bought in 1993. It's a writing desk.

And it's got two levels. Like one level, it's old. It's oak. You know, but it's like, there was a place called the Writer's Store. And it was a store in Hollywood that was just all writing stuff. It used to have, like, script programs for old school Macs. Like, you know, the oldest computer. It was 1994 that I got this fucking thing.

And I've written everything I've ever written on this one desk. Still now? Yeah. I won't ever get rid of it. My wife's like, let's get rid of this piece of shit. I'm like, get the fuck out of here. This desk is going nowhere. It's solid as a rock.

It's all oak. But it's just, there's stains on it. She said, it's disgusting. It's got coffee. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This shit's perfect. As long as it's in my office, you fucking leave it here. It's got the patina of your sweat and labor on it she said it's disgusting it's got like coffee like yeah yeah yeah this shit's perfect no like as long as it's in my office you fucking leave it here it's got the patina of your uh sweat and labor everything good i've ever written is all from that desk this is one desk i've had and i'm never getting rid of it i just got this one oak desk that i've had from the

beginning of my time here in la and i'll never get rid of that fuck so when you say that you've written do you sit down and write yes stand up well I sit down and write this is what I do most of the time I write like I used to keep an active blog on my website but um when I started writing a book I got a book deal a few years back and I started writing a book I stopped writing the blog and then when uh the publishers were just fucking trying to they were essentially trying to get me to write it like stand up i remember you talking about this yeah so i gave them their money back which you felt like doesn't work for a book well i don't like it like i've read i've read like george carlin's book which is essentially just his stand-up in in book form and jerry seinfeld did a similar thing

i don't like that if i'm gonna if i want george carlin's writing like that i want to see it i want to see george carlin do his stuff i don't want to read it you know i don't there's some benefit i guess in reading it there's some it's good it's better than nothing but it's not as good as when i when i write i'm writing stuff because i know people are going to read it you know so the descriptives are very different the way it's spaced out is very different. The way I set things up is different. And so what I do now is I write as if I was going to write a book or a blog entry,

and then I go over it, and then I extract ideas that come out of that. Because I feel like I do both. Like I'll write down specifically. I'll try to write as a joke, like thinking I'm standing on stage and set up punchline or beginning premise and then add in the jokes. But more often, I just write. I'll write about something.

And then along the way, usually I'm baked. So I get silly. As I'm writing, these new ideas will come in. You don't mean writing with characters and stuff. No, no, no. Just writing as you're talking. But I do that sometimes too. But you write as you talking i yeah i write not even as me talking i just write like i'll write like uh like i'll pick a subject like um whatever amphetamines speed you know

adderall and i'll start writing about Adderall. Yeah. And then along the way, I'll have a really funny thing will come up in the writing. Like I'm laughing as I'm writing it, because it just came out of nowhere. Don't you feel like, you're a really good writer, man, by the way. I really love Meteor.

It's a really good book. Oh, thanks, man. I mean, I knew you're a smart dude and you're you're you're obviously very articulate but the writing was very it's very descriptive it's very interesting it's very fun to follow and when you um when you write stuff like that don't you feel like sometimes like as you're writing like it's almost like it's not even you that's writing like these ideas just sort of like it's almost like it's not even you that's writing. Like these ideas just sort of like pop into your head like out of nowhere and then you're putting them down?

No, for me, I'm so aware of the process that there's no surprising thing to me. One of my mentors, what I regard as one of the best american non-fiction writers out there alive now is a writer named ian frazier and what's his uh work he's got several books one of the books i hold up is just like one of the in my opinion one of the finest books ever written is his book great plains great plains which is about the great plains um but he's he's a stylist you know he's also he was a humor writer for the new yorker for a long time it was i i had great fortune to you know he i don't know if he would use his term i think he like mentored me in somewhere i read his stuff and had the opportunity to hang out with him a handful of

times and he was saying that when he was growing up and he wanted to be a writer he pictured that writers would be that you're sitting at a desk kind of chuckling to yourself as you you know have all these fantastic ideas but when i write i get so few words written every day and every sentence that i write takes i have to write it and rewrite it and rewrite it so many times that there's never a thing where i feel like um there's never a thing where i feel like holy smokes i nailed it because it's it's so i almost look at like if you're building a house you know maybe when you get all done with the house you can stand outside and be like wow there it is i did it right but there's never like there's never a shocking moment because every nail on every board you know there's never a chance for where something jumps ahead radically really quickly in a way that can

startle you now the other night i wrote my brother's getting married this weekend, my older brother, and I sat down to make some notes about my best man speech. After I wrote my best man speech, it's funny because this just happened to me last night. After I did my best man speech, I felt like, why can't I feel, I had it where I got, I was talking about some funny stuff in my head and kind of writing down notes. And I thought of some way to actually, like you're supposed to do in a best man speech is you're supposed to make it like hit right, like hit the right note, right? It's funny and you're dogging on them. And then all of a sudden you turn it, you know, and it's sweet and nice. Okay.

And I found that turn to make it sweet and nice. And it's so, and it just struck me as being like perfect, you know? And I was like like why can't the regular writing i do feel that way that's interesting where i'm like ha you know i kind of want to like pump my fist in the air do other people that you know that are writers have those moments with those those uh those moments that i'm talking about where things just pop to you i feel like they do i i you know one of the things i follow on twitter is this thing um john winneker and it's just i don't know how he does it but six or seven times a day he's got quotes from great writers

about writing how do you spell his name j-o-h-n w-i-n oh my john winneker it's like writers on writing and i learned more about writing and writers from reading this thing because it's like really cool writers talking about the writing process i'm sure he's probably hit one just within minutes oh at advice to writers advice to writers had you like here right now just a couple minutes ago um or a couple hours ago when i write i don't think of the audience after the fact i think well i hope they like it so that's like a writer talking about writing. Right. And this Twitter feed hits these quotes all day long.

So I learned more about writers, even though I went to writing school and everything, I learned more about writers following that guy's Twitter account. And I do gather that some writers are blown away and have fun writing. To me, it's agonizing. I can't stand it. That's the weird thing about doing tv is i love having written you know when i write a book i'm so it's just like a

deep deep satisfaction okay i love having done it when i die if they will if they chisel writer into my tombstone you know i'd be very happy right but i hate the act of writing making tv is so fun just in the moment it's very fun right i love going out and doing it you know but when it's said and done i don't get that that feeling like i slayed a dragon like i would get from writing a book i know exactly what you're talking about you know yeah you're when you're doing a television show also it's very different than most tv and that you're out there doing something you enjoy anyway exactly and there's a lot of people coming in on it so writing is like me i mean sure you know you have it i don't mean in any way

discount the role of an editor and i don't know if you do something similar with your stand-up you show other comedians and stuff but you have like a role of an editor and i don't know if you do something similar with your stand-up you show other comedians and stuff but you have like a role of an editor so i don't want to act like oh it's just all out of your head you know my agent i work closely with he influences things i do my editor but in the end it's like kind of it's your thing right tv is a whole bunch of people so you could go out and have a great thing and then you turn it in and the editor nails it so i can't go like i made this amazing tv show because it's like there's the guy that produced it the guys that shot it the guys edited it right all that kind of stuff and so your sense of ownership becomes a little bit different you're like a stakeholder and not like the dude that owns

the thing yeah there's so much going on there's music that's the way it's edited oh yeah extremely it really has a massive impact on how it comes off as a as a piece yeah i think like as a host you know as a host as a person who has like a a lot of sway and the kind of things we go do i still feel like um you know i'm kicking in 10 or 20 percent and interesting and 80 90 percent is you know a handful of other people who are throwing in on it nobody works harder than people who work on your show like those camera dudes like dodie and mo and all those guys who have to fucking sleep in tents and in the back of that fucking van where the llamas piss and i mean i really kind of love it i love those guys it was nice we just had this guy we wound up liking him we had a camera guy come out with us for the first time

and um and he was just getting beat up i mean he admitted it you know and it kind of became the joke where he's saying to doherty he's like man you guys got to do a better job of explaining what this is and dan's like i feel like i said it's like rigorous hiking you know he's like yeah but that like that's not this i thought like like walking on a trail or something you know it's like but there's no language to explain it i don't know why those guys i do know why i think one could look and be like i don't understand why those guys would I do know why. I think one could look and be like, I don't understand why those guys would subject themselves to that level of treatment. Because I've had the opportunity to work very briefly in what would be like network television, mainstream television. And I'm telling you what, it's not typical.

What you do. What those guys do and the hours they do it is not typical. Not at all. No. I was shocked to hear, like, one time some guy was coming out with this, and I knew it was going to be trouble because he's coming out with this. He's asking about what the hours are. I'm like, I don't know.

I think, you know, we usually will sleep at night. I mean. 24 hours a day are the hours. It's like, what do you mean? When you're sleeping on the ground in Montana and it's zero degrees outside and you're fucking huddled up in your tent you're kind of working still oh yeah because you would never be there unless they were paying you to be there like even though you're off i mean still you're subjecting yourself to sleeping on the ground in montana in a tent you're freezing your dick off yeah you know like you have to like flex and squeeze under your

sleeping bag to generate some warmth before you can pass out. You're kind of working. Yeah, like, Doty, Giannis, Moe, they just, they like to be in some way tortured a little bit, I think. And they also just like to be working, you know. I don't think that they, but the other thing is, I don't think they really, they're at work, but I don't know how much think that they but the other thing is i don't think they really they're at work but i don't know how much they think about it being at work

i see what you're saying i think they just think of it as like existing whoa do you mean i don't think they go like oh now i'm going to work i think that they think of their lives more their lives don't seem to i don't think they think of their lives as having like it's like now i'm at work now i'm at home at work. No, I'm at home. I think like at home, they're thinking about work stuff. And, uh, okay.

Do you know what I mean? I feel like more there that they don't look at it. Like, you know, punching the old clock is my guess. They sort of, well, it was funny because Mo and I had a conversation once about another show that he was working on.

And one of the guys that was on the other show, and, uh, he was taking great pride in describing what a coward this guy was and it was not even great pride but he was enjoying it he's like he's yellow he was talking about it but it was like here's a guy that's been working on your show for several seasons and he's fucking undergone some horrendous locations and climbing to the top of fucking mountains while carrying a 50 pound

camera and the whole deal i mean these fucking cameras are no joke and hiking just carrying a gun hiking is difficult yeah there's all this sliding of the ground underneath you and you're constantly going up up up and you're you know essentially like you're doing like little mini squats all day long and it's exhausting and these guys are doing it with one arm holding a fucking camera backwards backwards like that old joke about ginger rogers and fred astaire you know like day long and it's exhausting and these guys are doing it with one arm holding a fucking camera backwards backwards like that old joke about ginger rogers and fred astaire you know like she did everything fred astaire did backwards or something yeah right heels or whatever it was right right yeah most too good though man like like we can't like most too good you know he's like oh

he's off doing other stuff you know it was like a treat it was like a treat to have him but no he's we always try and do and but he's just in such demand you know i mean he's been he's nominated for all these emmys all the time yeah he won he won an emmy he's nominated for an emmy this year well your show stands out at all i mean there's there's hunting shows and then there's your show and the only show that i've seen recently that does that as well have you seen uncharted the jim shocky show no but i know a lot of i know his stuff i haven't seen that but i know that that that show is a highly respected show it's really good yeah i've heard dodie was telling me he said it's phenomenal i watched it the other day for the first time and he was off in pakistan and it was really intense because one of the guys that goes with him all the time his wife didn't want him going to Pakistan I mean she was like really scared and

she was like you know it's so dangerous there please don't go he's got a wife and kids and so he stayed back and you know Jim Shockey went by himself and they followed the guy who stayed back going on this trip um to hunt deer uh and when he went on this trip at home in texas to hunt deer you know he was talking about his dad and like a real scene like crying and it was it was really intense that's great it was very very very intense but in a way that you you know like a lot of those shows are so fucking bad long before i got involved in tv and TV, it was like a thing you would always hear is friends of mine, guys I respected, would kind of be sort of dismissing outdoor television as a genre.

But the thing was always like, but Shockey's legit or some such thing. I mean, he's been around for so long. Yeah. But he's a highly respected figure. There's this annual thing called Shot Show, and I see him.'t miss him i mean the guy's huge and you know he's kind of like the last great white hunter you know and um cowboy hat all the time yeah i see him and i you don't know i always think i'm gonna go up and say something to him i never have you never have no really oh i would i would force myself to no i want to meet that guy and there's there's an

amazing thing some uh i mean there's just some good clips of stuff he's done. And he's an articulate guy and goes to some cool places. And you can tell his heart's in the right place, man. I think he has an honest affection for wildlife and wild places, for sure. Yeah, for sure. He also enjoys the roughing it aspect of it. Yeah, for sure. He also enjoys the roughing it aspect of it. Like he enjoys going to these ridiculous remote locations and hunting these very odd animals, very exotic animals. He did something when they flew into Russia and they took these fucking weird SUV things. I mean, I shouldn't even say SUV, these weird all terrain vehicles that look like these military vehicles, deep, deep, deep in the mountains, like 12-hour drive.

Yeah, he's been to some wild places. To get some fucking weird ram. It was really intense. It was unexpected. I just was flipping through the channels, and it came on, and I'd seen his other show before. And so this Uncharted thing, I'd seen all these ads for it, but man, they were in Pakistan, and they had armed guards with them everywhere they went. Was that right? Guys with AK-47s, and it was pretty intense because it's a fucking dangerous, dangerous place.

And he's out there wearing the traditional Muslim garb. He wears the clothes that those people wear. Oh, no kidding. Really? You don't want to stand out. You don't want to stand out as being a Westerner. Guys like the Green Berets, man. Yeah. So he's wearing their outfits as westerner. He's like the Green Berets, man. Yeah.

So he's wearing their outfits as he's hunting. It's really intense. And they're off in the fucking middle of, I mean, deep in the middle of nowhere hunting some ram. That's great. I'm glad you like that show because it's good to hear something out there that caught your eye. It's really well done. It's really well done. But there's like that show, your show, and then the rest of them.

Some of them look like they're made with a home movie camera. It's like a guy who's never even thought about making a show. Sometimes that's true, man. There's a guy I was talking to who makes a hunting show. One day we were talking and I was shocked to hear that

he's a registered nurse. He has a full-time job at a hospital. Whoa. And he makes a hunting show. Yeah, he just burns it nurse, has a full-time job at a hospital. Whoa. And he, you know. And he makes a hunting show. Yeah, he just burns it up, man. He's like, it's just something he wants to do, and he just finds a way to make it happen.

Yeah, it's fucking hard. Some of them, too, it's like, there's some of them that are the same show always, which is so bizarre. Yeah, that's the thing we have a conversation about, is I wanted to go back and and film next spring um i have a black bear permit for this regulatory year which extends into next spring for prince of wales i wanted to go back and and dodie was saying anything that

you know we did a show out there i'm interrupting my own story we did a show out there. Interrupting my own story. We did a show out on Prince of Wales last spring and went and found a lot of bears. In the end, I could have shot a bear. I didn't because I just have this strange feeling sometimes. Not strange. Sometimes I just want to watch bears rather than shoot at them. So we did a show about that. And I wanted to go back this spring, and Doherty was like,

I just feel like anything we could have done out there, we've done. And on one hand, I'm like, yeah, that's right. We probably shouldn't go and do a show, an episode in the same place doing the same thing. But on the other hand, I'm like, Bahamut, because some shows, all it is, they don't do anything but hunt some lease they have for white-tailed deer every single time yeah yeah the whole show is looking at camera photos from camera traps and them you know talking about the different stands that they have set up and then them up in the stand with a bow and arrow waiting for a fucking deer to come by i mean that is every goddamn show it's always white tail it's always

in the tree stand it's always in the same sort of farmland on the edges of these cornfields and it's the same show every goddamn week and i guess people just like watching people hunt deer do you enjoy it i watch i watch them you know every now and then i like you know thinking like oh i wish i saw that deer and i was that close i'll shoot the shit out of that deer yeah yeah i have to feel like you'd learn a bunch of stuff eventually watching it yeah you definitely learn stuff you learn stuff about wind and placement and trails they walk and their behavior like how they you know how they can kind of anticipate where they're coming through and how to how to pay attention to their trails and one of them uh it was interesting uh it was uh how to recognize the difference between the doe trails and the the buck trails

the doe trails were the buck trails. The doe trails were going straight across this riverbed area where there was a lot of mud. You could see these does, large populations of animals going this way. And you see these animals that are crisscrossing. Those are bucks. Oh, is that right? They're catching the scent. They're catching the scent of these does. I hadn't heard that.

Oh, really? No, that's interesting. I don't know a ton about whitetails. I mean, I grew up hunting whitetails. We grew up hunting whitetails, not probably using our heads as much as we might have. Well, the time that we went. We didn't need to, I guess.

We got deer. Yeah, the time we went at Doug's Farm in Wisconsin, man, there's so many fucking deer. They're everywhere. It's crazy. And there you're not playing. This is the distinction I always make in hunting is, farm uh in wisconsin man there's so many fucking deer they're everywhere yeah it's crazy and there you're not playing this is the distinction i always make in hunting is i try to find those places where you're mostly thinking about animals and not so much thinking about hunters well you

focused on that on your show too though the difference like the one time that you went and you were elk hunting in montana and you know you were on your way after an elk and you see another fucking hunter that's doing the same thing multiple times everywhere yeah so you spend most of your time wondering about what other guys are doing and trying to capitalize on that or trying to anticipate the response of animals to that pressure you know i so much rather just be like in a one-on-one thing next week we're going up to hunt moose up in the brooks range you know and it's one of the you know absolutely the most one of the most remotest places the most remote place in north america and um up there is like there's really no you don't you don't have to factor in effects of other individuals you're

just thinking about the animals, which is fun. And it's very rewarding, but it's just not what most people are up against. Like when I was a kid and we were hunting whitetails, we really planned on people. It was very important about where other guys were, what other guys' hunting schedules was like. There's certain guys we knew that, there's certain guys we knew that you know there's a guy we knew that would always say like if i see your guy's truck coming down the driveway to the farm i always go over to such and such place because i know that the way you guys move into your blinds you're likely to bump a deer down such and such fence line so this guy's thinking

about deer sure but he's thinking about through the context of of human activities so deer being scared by you yeah he's like you guys got that blind down in that area and i know every time you go in there you don't realize it because you're a dumbass but when you go in there you're bumping deer and they're going down that fence line so if i see your truck coming i'm gonna run over there wow that's interesting which is a kind of thing and like elk when i lived in montana we would make like our opening day plan was generally find out where elk are where they've been for a couple weeks and so the people will know they're there how are they going to leave that area within three minutes of legal shooting light on opening day, and what saddle are they going to use when they pass out of that valley?

And you would pretty much plan that would be your thing, is I know where they're at, I know that they're going to get bumped probably before legal light, and where are they going to go after that? I got a friend who has for the last 20 years been killing elk by. He knows the spot that elk move into when they get pressured. And he knows that some people can find these elk with spotting scopes and they'll find these elk on his mountainside. He knows that there's no way to approach these elk on his mountainside

without spooking them. When he sees the elk have moved into this area, he'll watch them with his spotting scope, waiting to see someone else try to climb up and put a move on these elk. When they start climbing up, when he goes, that guy sees them, he's going to go try to put a move on them. He'll go down and ambush those elk three miles away from there. Wow.

And he waits until someone sees them because he knows where they're going to go. Because he knows the path they always take when they get scared and he calls it the laundry shoot because he said they come spilling through their like laundry through a laundry shoot he's been doing it for 20 years wow i really enjoyed that episode that you did this year in kentucky yeah when you went elk hunting in kentucky because the situation is very it's very unique in that they've reintrodu've successfully reintroduced elk into Kentucky. And instead of what you're looking at a Western hunt, where you look at these great wide open spaces and timber,

and you can see them in the distance, instead you're looking at incredibly dense southeast kind of forests, where these elk are like, you were kind of creeping up on them. And it was hard for the camera guy to get a good view of some of these elk, like the elk you shot. There's so many goddamn trees there. Oh, yeah. You're just seeing little portions of them.

It's funny because in the beginning of that show, we're standing there in the pre-dawn darkness. And there's like the eastern forest, there's sort of like the cacophony of noise in an eastern forest that you lack in the west you know bugs and yeah i mean the biodiversity is so much higher you know not on large mammals but the biodiversity of just stuff that's that because of moisture i don't know quality of soil moisture probably yeah, I would guess moisture has a huge part of it. And probably the fertility of the landscape, like how nutrient-rich the soil is at some base level probably is what's at play.

Because the Pacific Northwest doesn't have those sounds. And it's very moist. Yeah, you're right. That's why I was confusing. I know guys that would be able to answer that. I don't know. I know that, for instance, I keep coming back around. You can tell I'm so excited about our hunt on Prince Will's Island.

I know my brother, who is an ecologist up there, that elevation band where Prince Will's Island is, is sort of the richest marine environment of anywhere. Really? Yeah. So that latitude band is an extremely rich marine environment there so the fishing there must be incredible yeah and just i mean it's just everything it's like it's just a buzz with life are we gonna we're gonna fish there we're there we're there too no no no if we get maybe there's a possibility but probably not so it gets a little bit late like fishing peaks like j, August is phenomenal.

It just kind of. Halibut? Yeah, but halibut's so much better in July and August. I mean, we were just out there for my brother's bachelor party and did phenomenally well on halibut. Yeah, Doug was sending me pictures. Yeah, we got some doozies. Enormous. Yeah, some nice ones.

They're like tables. So in the beginning of that episode, just kind of standing there and to hear that noise of the eastern forest, you know, and then to have it be that you're looking for elk is so, it just feels weird for anyone familiar with that animal. Jamie pulled up a clip. Pull up a clip so people could hear it because it's pretty cool. It's you in the forest, like on your show, where you were explaining it and talking about it the smell of where elk used to be and the smell of where elk are are right now the smell of elk right now seems to have like a warmth to it it's hard to explain but you just kind of get a sense

you like you'll smell and you're like that's, that's elk. That's not, we're elk word, it's we're elk art. Here's a spot where Gabe's been bedded. Little bed's all over here. It's hot, it just makes sense. Let's go, bull frayers, bull. Yeah, those things are cool, look. It's like a ghost in the forest just shows up there they are man it's so different so enormous too so those things got wiped out of that area by 1820 um you know like daniel boone uh used to cross over to get down into the kentucky hunting grounds he

would cross over to cumberland gap which is very is very near there. And then he would go to, you know, what was, we call the Bluegrass Hills. And that was a more open environment and had a lot of elk and people would hunt and he would hunt the Bluegrass Hills for elk. They'd hunt them for deer and hunt them for black bear, selling the meat and hides. By the 1820 or thereabouts, the elk herd is gone. Okay, the buffalo got shot out. Elk got shot out. Deer remained. Black bears remained.

Mountain lions were shot out. Wolves were shot out. And then they were gone for over 100 years. And then they did all that mountaintop coal mining in Kentucky. And after the reclamation process you know they had chopped down in the construction of these mines they destroyed a lot of of hardwood forests okay like deciduous hardwood forests hickory beach oak all kinds of stuff but when they reclaimed they left all these flat mountaintop areas that they just did in in um you know grasses and other stabilizing vegetation not

timber and it created sort of this open savannah like environment and people recognize it'd be a good place to put elk and there wasn't a lot of resistance if you went into an agricultural area and decided you know we got a great idea we're going to bring in thousands of seven eight hundred pound herbivores and cut them loose out here you would get a ton of resistance but the area is rural enough and in the reclaimed coal country there just wasn't a huge interest in not putting them there so now they've got the biggest elk herd east of the Mississippi. There's 10,000 plus elk

running around in Kentucky. But even still, elk are like 90% not recovered. I mean, they were everywhere. They were everywhere. And the weird thing about it is, we could have as many back,

we could totally bring back way more than we have now. But you have a handful of interests that don't like that. Auto insurers generally don't like it. Agricultural interests don't like it. But it's one of those things that we could fix, like that and the buffalo. The only thing standing between us and restoring buffalo to more of their native range is popular conception, popular perception of the issue. The only thing standing between us and reintroducing elk

to more and more of their native range is just selling it to the public. Other problems we have, you look at something like acidification of the oceans, people are like, geez, I have no idea. I don't know. There's no way. It's impossible to fix this. It's too expensive. Whatever. We don't know the science. We don't understand what, there's no way, right? It's impossible to fix this. It's too expensive, whatever. We don't know the science. We don't understand the science of it.

But some stuff, like when it comes to bringing big animals back, oftentimes it's just a matter of do we want to or not. And in Kentucky, there was enough people that wanted to where they made it happen. And now it's a thriving herd. They're even using that herd. They pulled animals. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation spearheaded this thing and provided much of the money and labor for it. They pulled animals from, I can't remember, from 17 or 20 source sites, moved them into Kentucky.

Now Kentucky's a source site for other reintroductions. So they're pulling animals out of Kentucky now and using them to reintroduce herds and other places where they were extirpated from. What other places are they planting it now? They've got some going into i know in virginia they're bringing some in um i'm not sure if they brought some into north carolina but you know north carolina had native herds it was just an amazing animal so the meat is so incredibly healthy it's really like a a breast a pound of chicken and a pound of elk the elk will have less cholesterol yeah it's healthier for you, less fat,

more protein. It's the best meat out there, man. As far as eating, the taste of it? There's no bad elk. They're just good. Even the big giant ones? Yeah, they're just good, man. My brother killed one one time.

It was just tough. He hadn't aged it. You need a nice facility to be able to consistently age stuff. Because if the weather's against you, you can't age it. Like where, you know, no one's got, most people don't have a walk-in cooler where they can go hang 400, 500 pounds of meat. And that is what an elk is. So if you get one and it's hot, oftentimes you got to get it into a freezer and it'll age a little bit in the freezer. But anyways, he killed one.

Flavor was great, but it was just a tough tough tough bowl to chew on just a big muscular animal and it's just tough and um it was funny because he uh he started the the only vegetable he was interested in eating i'm going to tell you this was boiled cabbage because he's like I only have so much muscle power in my jaw, and I can't waste any of my jaw muscle power on anything but chewing my elk up. So he would eat boiled cabbage and his elk. Until he got done with it, until he ate all 400 pounds of it. Let me tell you a funny story about this guy, too. His aversion to waste.

me talk about this guy too like his aversion to waste his a buddy of ours got married one time and and his bride's neighbors were out of town for during the wedding ceremonies the bride's neighbor says well i'll open my house up if you got some out of town guests who need a place to stay because i'm on vacation anyways so they give this house where it's just like for the groomsmen to hang out. I mean, my brothers were in the, you know, with the groomsmen and some other guys. And so we get to stay in this house during our stay. He has occasion. My brother, Matt has occasion to peek in the guy's freezer and season his freezer that he's got an elk he killed four years ago it's dated from four years ago and he he has a moral crisis where he's like is it worse to steal or is it worse to allow such a beautiful animal's flesh to go to waste when this guy inevitably

will declare this freezer burned and throw it away like if he was going to eat it he would hate it right three years ago three and a half years ago so when we left he had a bunch of that in his duffel bag and went home and ate it because he couldn't stomach the thought of that animal going to waste like his reverence for it is so high that he can't have some he can't allow someone else to to trifle with it how many years is an animal good in a freezer i'm telling you what man it depends on the animal lean stuff like elk if you trim away okay lean stuff like hooved animals who have game animals if you trim away the fat which we don't call fat we call tallow it's waxy

if you trim that stuff away and you either seal it with a vacuum sealer and then don't mess with the bag like don't poke any holes in the bag so that the seal stays good and treat it very gently so that the steel stays so that the seal stays intact or you wrap it in saran wrap and then wrap it in wax freezer paper you could not pepsi challenge that stuff if it was a year old against stuff that was a month old what about two years three years i've done it at two two is for me personally the longest out i've gone is two i've heard of people going more and And at two, when you thaw it and you look at it, you can tell something happened to it. But you can trim it up and have it be. And I've served old stuff like that to my wife.

And the only time it happens to me is if I wind up having something get kind of lost in my freezer. If you don't practice good freezer management. Like I try to do what would be last in, first out, right? But now and then just something happens and you lose track of something and you find some old thing. I've served stuff to my wife that was two years old and she didn't flag it while eating it. You'd like to use her in an experiment? No, just do it. Because, I mean, she'll call me out.

She eats more wild game meat than most people. I mean, she eats wild game meat every night. That's all you have in your house, right? When we're at home, yeah, we just wild game meat than most people. She's wild game meat every night. That's all you have in your house, right? When we're at home, yeah, we just eat game meat. Lately, we've been eating salmon and halibut, which you can't really complain about. She's eating tons of it. She recently, I'm trying to get this overturned, but right now there's a moratorium on bear meat. In your house?

Yeah. Because you got trichinosis. Yeah, so her and my kids, she said that you will not serve bear meat in your house yeah because you got trichinosis yeah so her her and my kids she said that you will not serve bear meat to my kids oh wow because of you getting that i got the one i got but you only get that illness if you undercook it it's like 150 degrees right yeah what it is and i tried to explain that so we this spring we hunted black bears. We hunted black bears in the Alaska range.

I took a guy hunting who you should have on the show at some point. A guy named Rourke Denver. He's just leaving the service now. He's a Navy SEAL commander. And he wrote a book called Damn Few, Making the Modern SEAL Warrior. And you remember a few years ago that movie Act of Valor came out and it was all active duty seals? He's one of the stars in that movie. I took him out bear hunting.

He grew up fishing and liked to fish a lot. Hadn't done any hunting, but definitely grew up in the outdoors. Obviously, over the last 13, 14 years, he's been just consumed by training and being deployed again and again and again to you know Iraq and Afghanistan so he hasn't like messed around outside even though it was very important him growing up he just like I say he's leaving the service now I took him out on a hunt and uh we went up black bear hunting and in the end we got on this big black bear and called him with a predator call. And he killed the bear. And we walked home.

It's a big boar. It's like a six and a half foot boar. And I said, and we're cutting it up. And I'm saying to him on camera, I'm like, I'm telling you what, man, if a bear is going to have trichinosis, it's going to be him. And what I'm talking about was Montana used to do free, they used to do free testing for trichinosis so you could send in a they asked for specifically a golf ball sized piece of the tongue and you could send it into the msu and an msu would send you the results on your bear the first bear ever sent in for testing was from a 17 year old black bear whoa and that bear meat came back positive besides

steaks and roasts i had 83 pounds of ground meat off that black bear it was a big bear so i said anything and it comes back and it's positive and once it's positive you are excused from wanton waste law so it's illegal to waste game meat. Okay. They spell out in great detail what you're obligated to retain on an animal and use. There's some areas in Alaska, for instance, where, you know, if you kill a moose, you have to bring the liver home. It's specified, like legally you're obligated to salvage the liver. So they send a thing saying, we're not going to give you a new bear tag, but you're excused. And if you want to discard the meat, you can discard the meat. And I was like, there's no way I'm going to do that.

The only thing worse to me than getting trigonosis was throwing away this bear meat. So I just got a meat thermometer, a nice one, and ate the whole bear. I never got another bear tested. And they told me, I read this thing, they did this study in Montana where these two counties in northwest Montana that have really high bear populations. It's Lincoln County and Sanders County. And they said that they've never tested a bear from those counties that was over six years of age that didn't have trichinosis. So trichinosis is just something like you're not born with it, right? You eat infected meat and you contract the disease, and then you wind up having those little cysts, the larvae in your muscle tissue,

and it just is passed along through consumption. It's the reason you're supposed to cook pork to well done. And now it's not really that way anymore because they've gotten it out of domestic pork so much because when they stop feeding pigs restaurant slop they really cut trichinosis out what they realize is when they're feeding pigs restaurant slop you're inadvertently giving them rats and mice that are sort of caught up in the cycle of restaurant slop right and rats and mice are big carriers so once they got rid of then once they made it illegal and they had like only the USDA inspected pigs are feeding on controlled sources, not stuff from garbage pails. I used to wash dishes at the summer camp when I was a kid. And every day a pig farmer came and got all the

food scraps and he fed them and he was selling inspected pork. So you can't do that now. So now 90 some percent of the black bear cases or 90 some percent of the trichinosis cases in the U.S. come from bear meat. I'm explaining all this to Rourke. And the next day, I'm explaining another interesting thing about black bear meat, how there's a lot of variability in black bear meat. Some are great, some are not so great. So I'm talking about when I kill a bear, I'm always really interested to get a taste of it to see if we're dealing with, if we got gold or bronze, right? And we start a fire and it's raining.

And we start a little fire and skewer up just some pieces just to sample it. And it's raining and we're feeding it the firewood and everything's wet. It's just a pain in the ass trying to get it cooked. And eventually I kind of peel this piece apart in my hands. I'm like, yeah, you know, we're cool. We're cool. So there's six of us. We eat it.

I never think another thing about it, right? So the next day we cooked some shanks, but we cooked the piss out of these shanks. Like we make Asabuco braised shanks and cook them for five or six hours, right? We eat a whole bunch of that. Eat some grayling, eat some rainbow trout, go home. A month goes by and I get the shits real bad.

So, and it's like a weird kind of the shits. So I sent a text message to the guys that work with saying, does anybody have like a weird kind of the shits? Cause I'm worried that we got giardia or something or cryptosporidia from from water contamination and um one of the guys writes back and he says no but man do i got like some bizarre muscle aches you know now yeah well never mind that i'm worried about my shits you know i'm not worried about your problem so a couple days later i remember i'm like crossing the street and i'm like god that's a weird feeling in my back you know and it just got worse and worse and worse and i eventually texted this guy

and i'm like what were you saying about muscle aches dude and it wound up four of us all had it and when we started put it together i was like we all have the same weird thing intense muscle pain in our calves intense muscle pain in our necks fevers and we haven't seen each other for a month and we all got sick on july 5 so it was like this isn't the common cold so there's an incubation period a month what happens is you eat the only thing that can liberate those larvae from their cysts is stomach acid. So when you consume the meat, your stomach acid dissolves the thing and liberates the larva. And you got boys and girls in there.

And it takes them forever. It takes them weeks. They build up their numbers. They get kicking ass. Then they get into your bloodstream, the larvae do. And then about a month into it, the larvae do and then about a month into it the larvae start burrowing out of your vascular system and getting into your muscle tissue when they start setting up shop oh my god so

the cdc gets involved in this um i was now in kings county k they sent me a thing recently where no one in kings county has had well like last year in the whole country there's like 11 or 12 cases of trichinosis in the whole country no one in kings county had it in four or five years the last guy that had it um i think a guy and i think a guy in 2007 or 2011, I can't remember which. Where's Kings County? The Seattle area. He had it from making homemade mountain lion jerky. Like the only guy. So they're all excited, and they want me to give them a piece of the meat. And I give them a piece of that meat.

They come in a car, and I go down and hand them a shank off this bear. And I told her, I said, if you eat that, cook it. And she tests it and they get back to me a while later and that thing had 868 larva per gram which is something like 460 000 larva per pound oh my god there's these blown up images of it and it's just like it's just larva so the whole meat is just it's just infested with the whole meat is just infested. It's just infested with larva. That bear must be in misery all the time. I don't know what he's thinking.

But I'm fine now. So out of the four of us that get sick, I go down and they say in severe cases, if it attacks your pulmonary system, if the larva attack your heart, there's a medication you take. Well, I said, well, I'm just going to take the medication. And they're like, well, you might not need to.

I said, well, I'm going to go take it. I go down, and that medication is $2,400. Even with health insurance, it's $1,100 to buy the medication. So the other guys are like, well, I'll just wait and see what happens to you. We all get better at the same time. And that medication only kills them in your stomach, right? So for six to ten years, depending on your source, if you were to eat me undercooked, you would contract trichinosis.

Whoa. So I don't know if that means I have 868 larvae per gram. I just have a hard time fathoming that but we're all positive like we're positive carriers wow so you right now have those things in your muscle tissue that's my understanding i read a lot about this as you can imagine like you get i was very curious about i didn't know i always thought when you got trichinosis you died kind of i didn't know i thought i don't know what i thought i've been writing about this and talking about this on tv for 10 years telling people and by the way make sure to but you know they say like familiarity

breeds complacency you know i thought it was contempt is that what it is yeah no well then that's my new saying because i felt like i don't know why i can sit here right now and picture the piece of meat that i'm sure got me sick wow so i don't know what i was thinking man so that's my wife my wife's like it's so embarrassing she's like you're supposed to be like the meat eater and i'm like i'm like you know what though and i was embarrassed and it's embarrassing right but at the same time like you know what where do all the mountaineers die they die in the mountain you know so it's not like oh you should be the last guy to die in the mountain you claim to be this big mountaineer it's like well you know what exposure i don't know you know living on it that's just my way

of hiding the fact it was like really stupid it was a stupid thing to do and i wanted i remember dodie saying are you sure you want people to know that this happened to you? Because isn't it kind of embarrassing to you? And I'm like, yeah, it's embarrassing to me, but I'm just going to talk about it. Cook your bear meat. So, yeah, my wife's like, no way. We're just done with the bear meat thing. And my brother, at my brother's wedding, at his rehearsal dinner, we're doing an all-wild

game for his rehearsal dinner. So, I had smoked up a ham off this bear that I'm going to serve at his rehearsal dinner he says don't tell anybody about the worm deal because it'll turn them off to the whole damn meal and i said well i gotta i feel now like i'll have to say this has been cooked but fyi i got trichinosis from eating this bear uncooked and he thinks that he's just like, I'd rather you not serve it than serve it and bring it up.

Whoa. Because I think you should serve it. And in the end, I decided not to serve it at his wedding. I would have eaten it. As long as it's cooked to 150 degrees, especially smoked. I know, but people aren't like that, man. People aren't like that. I smoked that ham from that pig that we shot.

And I did it. Cooked it to finish. In your method with the brine. Oh, my God. It was some of the best tasting meat I've ever had. It was unbelievable. I'm telling you, man. And that son of a bitch probably has, I mean, not probably, but there's a very good chance he's got it.

They eat meat. Yeah. Yeah. It was so tender and delicious. But I've cooked a bunch of it. Just put it on the grill. Just seasoned it and put it on the grill, and it's amazing how tough it is. Yeah, it can be tough. You got to chew through that shit, but it tastes good.

Did you get a grinder? Yeah, I got a grinder. Yeah, I got a grinder for the venison after Wisconsin. Callan and I, we made buckets of hamburger meat. That's good. Oh, it's so good. And you can grind up that wild pork, too. Yeah.

I'd be curious just to take a piece of that wild pork and send it in and see if it has trichinosis or not. Do you want me to? I'll send it in. I don't know. I mean, what is that? I don't know. What would you do with the information if you knew?

Make sure I did what I'm already doing, I guess. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, when I cooked it i cooked it the smoked ham i cooked for like fucking 10 hours or something yeah it took forever and you get it up to the right temperature yeah some people even say like harold mcgee's science and laura the kitchen or science and laura cooking whatever it is it's a great it's like the science of food and food cooking and ingredients it's a phenomenal reference book and there he says

it seems to be i think it was in his book he says it seems that there's evidence to suggest that freezing kills it though the usda still sticks that guideline of cooking temperature but that like prolonged freezing kills it but a couple years ago a couple guys got trichinosis from walrus meat in alaska fucking walrus yeah so however that son of a bitch got it but he's the walrus had it and they think that there might be that this worm is trichinella spiralis i think is his name i got pictures of the thing on my phone what the worm looks like so um that there's nor that they think there might be some northern varieties in walrus and polar bear that are less susceptible to freezing. And that perhaps that freezing is not to be relied on when killing these worms.

That it's a different northern variety that's just got more tolerance? And again, man, this is just something I read. Who the fuck is eating polar bear and walrus wow people like walrus i'm when i there's a guy you know it's funny i've never had it but i've been arranging to have some because i drew um a muskox tag for nunavak island this winter and when you hunt nunavak island if you draw that tag you have to hire what's called a transporter because the only place to land is in Meekaruck on Nunavut, and it's a native village. It's an Inuit or Eskimo village. And your transporter can't do guide services.

He can't tell you where an animal is, but he provides transportation. So you rent snow machines or however you're getting around, and he'll give you a place to stay when you're on the island. It's called a transporter. The transporter that I'm using is a walrus hunter. So they're protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So white guys don't go hunt walrus. But natives who aren't administered by the Marine Mammal Protection Act have their own self-governing body called the Walrus Commission. And I think the Walrus Commission, I can't remember if it's Meats and Gnome or Kotzebue.

And the Walrus Commission will make decisions about what walrus harvest different coastal villages are allowed to have. And out there on Nunavut, those hunters out there will periodically go and hunt walrus. And the guy I'm using as my transporter goes on the walrus hunts. So I've been encouraging him to make sure to have some because I'd like to eat it when I come out, and I'd like to do a thing about that and hang out with this guy and eat walrus meat. And he says he's going to make sure to have some on hand. And are walruses, like when you hunt a a walrus like you're allowed to eat the meat

but you're not allowed to hunt it so but you someone could give it to you could you bring it back i don't know about you can't bring the ivory back i don't know about transporting the meat that's a good question but yeah i could go into his home and i don't even know the extent of it but i can go into his home and he can serve me a meal just like people might go up to gnome or whatever and sample muck tuck from whale you know yeah um but no i don't i i know i'm fairly certain that he could not give me the ivory you know because there's like the the ivory band so ivory has to have a cultural marking on it you know you're supposed to turn to artwork so a lot of times you know like sea otters were nearly extirpated in some places like regionally extirpated by the fur trade particularly when the russians were had a strong presence in

alaska and now sea otter numbers are you know really recovered in a lot of areas but still for natives that are allowed to trap sea otters they can't just sell the pelt as a pelt they have to do something to it to make it a cultural item at which point they can exchange it for money so if a native hunter kills a walrus he can do scrimshaw on that tusk you know and and that puts that tusk in a different legal framework than it would as raw what they call raw ivory. Hmm. That's fascinating. So I know, but yeah, he can serve me a piece of walrus meat, but I don't know what, I don't know what laws govern me walking away with some, I have no idea. Now seals, they eat seals as well.

Yeah. And they're allowed to hunt and eat seals, the natives and the Inuits. Again, it's self-governed. I watched Bourdain's show and he was with this Inuit family they were eating a seal, and they butchered the whole thing. Yeah, that was in northern Canada, right? There's like an autonomous zone there. The name escapes me right now, but yeah, I know what you're talking about. And they were eating it raw.

Yeah. That doesn't have trichinosis. I have no idea. I don't know if people were surprised to hear that walruses had trichinosis what does a walrus eat well they eat a lot of you know clams crabs they lost i i just don't know enough i don't know enough about how that thing got it i don't know enough about whether what kind of sea animals have that stuff i mean was he eating a chunk of polar bear that he found frozen on i have no idea i would love to know when i had lyme disease i did tons of i could have gotten an honorary phd in lyme disease after having lyme disease and then when i got trigonosis i started reading everything i

could find about trigonosis but that just got better one day that's wild so i quit reading about it just you just felt better just went away seven days. One of the guys that had it, he was running 103.9 degree fever. Whoa. For six days. And they're checking him for like dengue fever, West Nile virus. He had no idea he'd even bring this up. One of the dude's girlfriends is a doctor. And she says, finally, I think you boys got trichinosis.

I go into a doctor. I'm like, here's what I think I got. And they didn't know what the hell I was talking about Well you said 12 cases a year in the entire country Yeah they never see it And there's 4 of you One of them asked me how to spell it One thought I was talking about a venereal disease called trichomoniasis

But I eventually convinced them man Just like when I had Lyme disease I walked around having to convince people that I had that Well Lyme disease is really common though having to convince people that I had that. Well, Lyme disease is really common, though. Super common. That's what I don't understand. But it just depends on what that particular, I'll use the term, what that particular healthcare provider has run into. And you go in and say, oh, I'm not feeling so hot, and this and that.

I think I got Lyme disease. It's just not. They just didn't believe you. Yeah, I think if you're in Hudson Valley, New York, you're going to walk in and they're going to be like Hell yeah, you got Lyme disease But in some places they're going to be like I don't know what you got Is it weird when you talk to some Doctors are dismissive of things

Like real dismissive And then it turns out that you were right That's got to be infuriating That's what I ran into And I've told this story a thousand times But when my boy Thank God he didn't get trichinosis. He got Lyme disease.

He and I got Lyme disease at the same time, fish and bluegills. And he, I was at my mom's in Michigan. My mom comes up. She was swimming with the boy. My mom lives on the same lake I grew up on, and she was swimming with the boy down on the lake. And she comes up and says, why is his belly button all red like this? I'm like, I can't tell what happened there, and it turned into one of those bullseye rashes my wife i send my wife a text image it's like a text message picture of this thing and my wife

right away is like i wonder if he's got lyme disease looks like one of those bullseye rashes they talk about lyme disease so she tells me send it to his pediatrician because I had him at my mom's. You know, she wasn't there. She's like, send it to his pediatrician. I sent it to his pediatrician and be like, we're worried about what he's got Lyme. She's like, well, just keep an eye on it. But you don't keep an eye on those things because those things just go away. Like they don't last forever.

Right? So all of a sudden then it's gone. But clearly he had it. And so then we wind up going down there because then he gets another one somewhere else and we go down and we're like we're really concerned he's got Lyme because he gets this bullseye rash and they're like well where is it I'm like well it's not there now but it was there and he keeps talking about this that and the other thing different symptoms he's having we take him in three times each time bringing up I fear that this is what's going on with him when we pull him out of the

bathtub for whatever reason in the hot water, he's got these damn circles all over him, but they kind of go away. Eventually he's got Bell's palsy. He'd take a sip of milk and his milk would run out the corner of his mouth. And we'd go in there like, holy shit, he's got Lyme disease. And at this point it's been going on for weeks. And what's funny is this place his pediatrician has a newsletter and they had a newsletter article that was about Lyme hysteria

about how everyone's so hysterical about Lyme being like don't really need to worry about it you know everybody's getting hysterical about Lyme like it's the new bogeyman you know so in this altercation we have with the pediatrician i'm like i feel that your lime hysteria thinking and your lime hysteria article kind of colored your impression of what i'm telling you and when we're coming and you're telling you we had to self-diagnose our child at which point they said i want to have someone else in the room during this discussion they said that because we were pissed well you easily could have sued the shit out of them if you were so inclined oh yeah listen and you know i don't want around thinking that stuff but i mean i i was like i entertained all kinds

of ideas if he didn't get better but he he responded so quickly to medication the uh but it was unbelievable and meanwhile i had all the same stuff and i thought it was psychosomatic i wound up having to do the intravenous stuff. You know, Doherty, he was in the hospital with Lyme meningitis. Well, when I ran into you last time we went hunting together, you were really skinny, and I was like, dude, you look like you lost a lot of weight. I lost a ton of weight during all that. You told me the whole story behind it.

I was even trying to drink milkshakes and stuff. I was down at GNC trying to do stuff. Weight gainer, all that stuff. Yeah, I had the guy, some wilderness athlete, sending me, like, I was just trying to do anything I could do to put on weight. Wow. It knocked my dick in the dirt bad, man.

I bet. I've heard nothing but horror stories about people getting Lyme disease. Nothing but horror stories. And then not only that, your body doesn't really ever get rid of it, right? No, it's unclear. You know, and if you, like the medical, the established scholarly consensus on Lyme, I think it's still this, that there's no such thing as chronic Lyme.

That's what they'll say. When I say they, I mean like the medical establishment will say that chronic Lyme doesn't exist, that there's Lyme disease. And when you go through treatment, like when I did the 28-day intravenous deal, they put a line that goes in your arm up to your heart, and you inject these syringes in it. When you get done with that, you do not have those bacteria in your body anymore. If you go to a Lyme specialist and you tell a Lyme specialist, I have chronic Lyme, I met one.

I tried to get in to see one of these Lyme specialists. And she said, category, I don't see Lyme, chronic Lyme patients. I see acute Lyme patients. And I had already done one round of antibiotics and I got worse during the round of oral. And she's like, oh, you're chronic Lyme. Meaning like, oh, it's all in your head. What? So I go to another infectious disease person. I was talking to them and they said, well, it's like, it's all in your head what so i go to another infectious disease person i was talking to them and they said well it's like it just seems kind of it's an urban chronic lines an urban legend my finding wound up in some way bearing out what she said would happen where i finished the stuff i think i got done at some time in september and by november my symptoms were gone that's me my boy

got better but i've met i've since then met other people who are very credible individuals, you know, who are not hysterical people who've been through various rounds of treatment and they're not getting better.

The arth, like the arthritic stuff. And Lyme's such a weird thing. Like with my kid, you can't argue with Bell's palsy. It's just right there. But other stuff like, But folks who don't know

what that means, if it's paralysis. Yeah, facial paralysis. there. But other stuff like... For folks who don't know what that means, if it's paralysis... Yeah, facial paralysis. I mean, he had like bad facial paralysis. So you can't argue with it, right? It's just like glaring. And that's one of the key...

That's one of the bullseye rash, Bell's palsy. But there's all these other things like arthritic pain, okay? Fatigue. They don't think... A lot of people think that all the time

they were diagnosing chronic fatigue syndrome Was people with Lyme People with Lyme disease My friend's dad got it From the From getting vaccinated They used to have a vaccination

Against Lyme disease But the problem with it A small percentage of people That got that vaccination Would have some genetic marker That would make them predisposed To getting fucking Lyme disease From this vaccine So this guy was terrified vaccination would have some genetic marker that would make them predisposed to getting fucking Lyme disease from this vaccine.

So this guy was terrified of getting Lyme disease, gets a vaccination against Lyme disease, got Lyme disease from the vaccination, and then they stopped making the Lyme disease vaccination. So this poor guy has fucking Lyme disease, and he's still fucked up. He's an old guy. It's her dad. And he's jacked from this fucking vaccination. I haven't checked this from multiple sources.

I just heard this or read this. A couple of interesting facts about Lyme is when my son and I both got it, I remember being like, what are the odds? Because you'd read that 1% or 2% of ticks carry Lyme. lime so i'm like we would have had to have been covered in hundreds of ticks for both of us to have you know statistically for both of us to have gotten it without even seeing any ticks like how could this be i later read that in that area in new york and that area in hudson valley they've done some stuff where 60 or 70 percent of the ticks have lime and they used to chronicle 30 000 confirmed cases you know every year i think last summer they were close to 300 000 it's just blown up and it's not so much that it's blown up in new places it's just

it's becoming like much more common in other places and isn't there a direct correlation between over the population of deer and and these ticks some people say that because it's like in that thing's lifespan you know it gets on deer but i've heard other things that even just like rodents you know so like like smaller furred animals i'm not really clear on that man i don't really know i know that that when you look at places that have it you're looking at places that have a lot of deer but i don't know if if you had a third as many deer if you'd have higher or lower if you'd have necessarily lower infection rates.

I can't answer that. But Doug Duren, who you know, I think last summer, twice he got put on the immediate antibiotics. Because right now, when you find one of those ticks buried in you, if you go into a doctor, and if you're not weird about medication, the doctor's just going to give you a super heavy dose of antibiotics that kills it before it gets a hold of you. If wait like i did it gets into your nervous system so i even had uh i even had for a day i had amnesia where i'm sitting at my desk and i get up to do something and i sit back down and i didn't know who wrote what's on my computer whoa i started i knew i had to write about a subject because i knew that before the amnesia kicked i lost the whole day i lost

like eight hours of time and i knew that i was supposed to write about a subject and here was a thing on my computer about that subject i started taking sentences and at first i took a big block like a paragraph of text and put it into google to try to find how i cut and paste how i managed to cut and paste an article on the subject i was supposed to be writing about into a word document but there's no match. Then I just start taking little blocks of words in quotes, and there's no match. I'm like, this is not from online. Then I start thinking that one of the guys I work with, I thought this guy, Jared Andrew Canis, who was near there, who works at ZPZ, I started thinking that he somehow was playing some joke on me where he came and wrote about what I was supposed to write about. On my desk, I also have a book, one of my favorite hunting books called Hunt High by Duncan Gilchrist. And on it, I had written Mark Boardman Vortex Optics. I look at the book, I know the book. I know who Mark

Boardman is, but I can't imagine why Mark Boardman's name would be on a sticky note on that book. And I look at my other hand, and on my hand I have LOP written. And LOP is a term, length of pull. It's a firearm term. And a guy wanted a length of pull off a firearm, and I wrote LOP on my hand. I looked at my hand. I'm like, I didn't know who put that there, how long it had been there,

what it meant. And I tried to get home and couldn't get home. You couldn't figure it out? I got on the wrong train, got off at the wrong spot. We were living in Brooklyn. Got off at the wrong spot, came up, recognized a sporting goods place called, I can't remember, it doesn't matter what it's called,

like a sporting goods place, and called my wife and told her that's where I was. And then all of a sudden, things started making more and more and more and more sense. Wow. Dude, it was wild, man. I thought I was dying. That's scary shit.

I thought I was dying. We did an episode of that Joe Rogan Questions Everything show on Morgellons. Morgellons is this disease that most doctors dismiss. They think that the people that are saying they have this, that there's something wrong with them psychologically, that they have some sort of a psychosomatic issue and that what they're really doing is scratching themselves until they create these abscesses and then sometimes even putting things in their skin and then claiming that these things have been growing out of their skin because they found like carpet fibers and stuff in their skin that these people sent in.

But then when we went to these conferences where these people would meet that have this Morgellons issue, he realized you're also talking about some seriously educated people and some of them that are doctors. And one of the doctors that we talked to said there is a direct correlation between Morgellons disease and people who have Lyme disease. Oh, is that right? And what he said is, very intelligent guy, he wasn't a nutter, what he said is that he

believes that there's a neurotoxic effect that you get from Lyme disease, from some strains of Lyme disease. Because the way he said was, if you look at Lyme disease, he goes, you're not looking at, like, if a tick infects you, you're not looking at just Lyme disease, but it's possible you might have gotten 10 different things from that tick. Oh, yeah, man. I learned about a lot of that stuff. Yeah. And that one of those 10 different things is causing this neurotoxic effect that literally is making you go crazy.

Yeah. So when these doctors are examining these people and they say, oh, they're crazy, they think that carpet fibers are growing out of their skin. No, they have lyme disease and the lyme disease along with all this other shit is causing this neurotoxic effect and that is what's making them think that there's something wrong with their skin so it's not that they're just crazy he said they have a disease that's making them go crazy and that was pretty illuminating because this guy was talking about like seeing things like seeing seeing worms underneath his skin of his eyes when he was looking in the mirror. And he goes, and I knew it wasn't there, but I'm seeing it anyway.

And he goes, I could feel it moving across my eye, but then there was nothing there. And he's like, and it was pretty clear to me as a doctor that there was something going on with my mind that had a direct correlation between this disease. So all these people that have this Morgellons, they also have this Lyme disease. You know, I don't know if Dan Doherty told you about this, but he all of a sudden has this excruciating neck pain and he goes down to an emergency room. This is the same time this is going on. He goes down to the emergency room. It's like, oh, he got like, they gave him some muscle relaxers or something.

And he comes back home when it gets worse and weirder. He goes down to another place and they tell him the same thing. He's got a pinched nerve. We're text messaging about it. I was like, hey, what's going on? How are you feeling? I remember that when I was finally talking to a person who knew about Lyme, they kept telling me to move my neck and see if it hurt.

I told Doty, I said, you know what? When I was down there, they kept asking me to move my head, and does my hurt and i told dodie i said you know what when i was down there they kept asking me to move my head and does my neck feel weird go down to that place so he just leaves his one doctor takes a cab down to this place where i had gone and they admit him and he had meningitis was spent i don't know how you know four or five six days in the hospital wound up with the pick line and meningitis. And meningitis from Lyme disease? Lyme meningitis. Whoa. Because in your, you know,

like an infection is in your spinal fluid. I have a friend who died from that. Died from meningitis. He went to the hospital, went into the emergency room, and he was a comic. And he was one of these, he was real busy.

He was like, fuck this place. They're making me wait too long. I'm leaving. And he got out of there, got on a plane, flew to Hawaii. When he got to Hawaii, he was dying. Is that right? By the time he got there, it was too late. I was, yeah, I'm leaving. And he got out of there, got on a plane, flew to Hawaii. When he got to Hawaii, he was dying. Is that right? By the time he got there, it was too late.

Yeah, I was scared because I remember, but I guess there's different forms. But anyway, it's his. They did a spinal tap, and he was all messed up. Man and Johnny's is some scary shit. No, he's fine. I've had some of the weird, in the last three or four years, I've had just some of the weirdest like freaky health things but they're

parasites like almost everything that you've had giardia yeah or something i got a colon infection from water and that was from the other show right that was from like the wild within no i was doing meat eater so i had i like i got really bad poison oak was on steroids for that but also got some kind of waterborne parasite and then the steroids combat your ability to fight infection i went up in the hospital went up like shitting my own couch my wife's like my wife's like listen you know there's nothing now she's like i felt bad about like having you be there when i was having babies she's like you got i got you got nothing on me now that's hilarious shit your own couch so i couldn't even tell when it was happening you know wow i thought oh man again i thought

i was gonna die so anyways i just had like just the weirdest stuff and i keep i keep bringing up doughty but doughty's like you need to go to a shaman because he thinks that there's something like i need to have like like there's some sin i committed against the universe or something and it's like he thinks i need to go to a shaman to get right doty did too much dmt he did too much dmt trust me you can do too much you gotta be careful with the fucking ayahuasca yeah that's hilarious that whole shaman thing is just is a real trip you know the whole going to the jungle and taking that medication and having these spiritual experiences it'll get you convinced that everything's all tied together and that somehow or another you've committed some

sort of a sin against the universe i gotta let you talk to him i can't even i don't want to speak for the boy i'm already talking about him too much i Doty? Yeah. Well, Doty and I had a long, extensive conversation about his ayahuasca experiences. Yeah. And I've never done ayahuasca, but I've done DMT many times. I did it again recently. I did it last weekend. And the DMT experience is essentially what ayahuasca is, is an orally active version of DMT. Okay.

Because the Amazon shaman and the people that- But it's derived- It's from two different plants okay well what I don't know the first thing about this stuff DMT is dimethyltryptamine and it exists in thousands of different plants and the reason why you don't get it but you don't get high when you eat it is because your stomach produces monoamine oxidase so monoamine oxidase what you need to do is take an inhibitor so that you could get it in an orally active form.

So most of the time, when most people get DMT, what they're getting is the synthesized version where they've taken cochlear viridus or all these different plants. They've extracted it down to the DMT, and then you smoke it. And what they do in the Amazon is they- It's regulated in the U.S. or not? It's illegal. Schedule one. The issue with schedule one, with it being a drug though, is that it exists in so many different forms, you would have to make grass illegal. I got you.

If you had phalaris grass growing in your front lawn, you essentially have a schedule run drug growing on your lawn in massive quantities. So it can't be enforced. It's a weird, but if they find the powder, if they find it synthesized and turned into a powder that you could smoke and freebase, then it's illegal and then it's a Schedule 1 drug. But it exists in your own human neurochemistry. It's like making saliva illegal. Yeah, I'm with you.

Literally that ridiculous. The Amazon shaman have figured out a way to take the vine of one plant and the leaves of another, and they boil them together. So essentially, they use harming, which is a natural MAO inhibitor, and they combine it with this plant, and they boil it You drink it, and you have what's close to the smoked DMT experience as you can get, but not quite as potent. But there's not a synthetic version. Of ayahuasca? No, no. It's all extracted from plants. DMT, they don't produce it in labs.

I think you can produce it in a lab. I think you can, but the precursors of it are very tightly controlled by the DEA. Yeah. Like, if they found out that you were buying a certain amount of this chemical that you would use to make the synthetic version of it, they would flag you. Gotcha. But the plants are legal. So you could go online.

There was a guy that got arrested, and they took all of his money and locked him up in jail. I think it was called Happy frog or something like that one of the name of his company i don't remember the name of his company but he sold all these legal plants but the plants were all totally legal but he sold them with the pretense that you could take these plants and extract dmt from them and then he was he was arrested for that because he was putting a and b together for you yeah well he was putting A and B together for you. Yeah. Well, he was allowing you to find the source to do it yourself.

Yeah. But even though what he was selling was legal, I think he got off. I'm kind of speaking out of school here because it was a few years back, and I didn't totally pay too much attention to it. But it is in so many different sources. And it's a hallucinogenic. Yes. Well, it's a human neurotransmitter and an incredibly potent drug that's also the most transient drug ever exist or one of the most transient drugs ever observed.

So if you get, like if say if you smoke DMT, like I did it, like I said last week, you're blasted to the center of the universe for about 15 minutes and then you're back to baseline like you're completely sober in 15 minutes because your body knows exactly what to do with it yeah your body knows exactly what to do with it because it's it's such a normal part of your chemistry that your your body can bring it back to baseline within minutes it's weird it's the weirdest shit ever and the weirdest aspect of it is while you're blown out like blown out in this intense psychedelic state you immediately think i'm here all the time i've been here before oh i know what this is it does it's not unfamiliar it's completely alien but yet familiar at the same time so dodie in all those ayahuasca

experiences that he had when he's talking about all these flashbacks, all this craziness, what happens is you open up this, it's a weird effect where if you do DMT and you have these powerful experiences, you open up this door. And I don't know what the chemical effect of it is or what the mechanism is,

but something happens when you open up that door where you can open up that door again even in a dream and so the speculation is that what what what happens when people have like near-death experiences when people have alien abduction experiences when people have these crazy things they say happen to them most likely what it is is some sort of a weird endogenous dump of DMT like you know something can happen to you and you get this crazy adrenaline rush yeah they believe that it's possible that something can happen to you and you get a crazy DMT rush and then it's it's it's very difficult to access but that it's a function of the brain and it's causing

you to for lack of a better word it's causing you to trip yes but you might perceive it as a memory you could perceive it at well it feels as real if not more real than reality itself because it's intensely colored and brightly lit and the the there's no borders to things but yet there are it's very very very difficult to describe i'm doing a terrible job describing it and all around you it's alive with entities and these entities are communicating with you both with sound and with visual cues it's a very very very weird trip if you think in a negative way or if you try to control it they're like literally shake their finger at you no but then if you get it right it calms down like it's it's like a lesson in how to think it's a very very bizarre bizarre trip the most bizarre

out of all the psychedelics by far the way i describe it is mushrooms times a million plus aliens yeah it's the mandala it's the center of the the of the mandala of all this is how mckenna described it the mandala of all the different psychedelic experiences the center of the mandala of all. This is how McKenna described it. The mandala of all the different psychedelic experiences, the center of it, literally the fucking point zero, the event horizon of that is DMT. So do you feel like to do it, do you feel like you're being recreational or constructive? Constructive. I try not to do anything recreational. I smoke a little weed recreationally have a drink recreationally but i think psychedelic experiences they're so beneficial i've gotten so much benefit out of them that i don't i don't like i feel like

it'd be it'd be a waste do you mean like personally or as a performer personally personally yeah well as a performer you know eventually personally first as a performer? Personally. Personally. Yeah. Well, as a performer, you know, eventually. Personally first. And as a performer, I benefit from the, you know, whatever I get out of it personally. Yeah, yeah. Because it's all tied together. I'm with you. But you don't think of funny jokes or something?

No. The people don't tell you funny jokes that you can put into your act. Nope. Nope. Nope. No, it's all about correcting your bullshit. It's almost like, all right, you haven't been here a while. Come on in.

It's like going to the dentist. Have you ever been to the dentist in like two years? You're one of those fucking guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, sit down, sit down. And they find all kinds of stuff. Oh, you got this. Why are you thinking about this?

Don't think about that. That's just stupid. You're wasting your time thinking. It's like they sort of explain to you the wasted paths that you're taking with your thinking and your mind and then even with your actions. So how long do the 15 minutes feel like? Well, I did several in a day. So I did three or four 15-minute ones in a row. So, you know, like just blast off, come back to baseline, to baseline hit it again would you be like man that

was just 15 minutes or would it feel like you were gone like days no it doesn't feel like days it it it's it feels like it's when you're in the state itself it almost feels like time doesn't exist like you're not seeing unless you think about it too much like sometimes i'm thinking about like i don't want this to end so quick and then they're like stop thinking all this stupid shit like you're wasting all your time it's like imagine enjoying a great movie and being like man this movie's gonna end soon yeah i know that feeling this movie's only 10 minutes in and i i know it's only got an hour and 50 minutes to go shit i wish it could go on forever that's a wasted thought like why not just be in the moment and enjoy it so it's you know that that expression be in the moment is like so overdone and hippie

and fucking yoga like so many people say things like that it just makes you moan like oh you shut the fuck up because it's like it's so cliched and annoying when they say it but i know you're saying there's wisdom in it unfortunately there's just so many of these fucking fake spiritual people that clog up all these words and they ruin some of these definitions because you know oh just be in the moment find your center oh fuck you okay i'm not listening to your like i used to take yoga from this guy that was a total bullshit artist he was a good yoga instructor but he was he was intoxicated by the fact that he was teaching yoga and that all these people came to him and his ego would feed off of this this yoga class to the point where he would say all these things and you would

see people roll their eyes like my wife used to hate him because he was so cheesy and he would like kind of hit on the ladies that would be there and he wanted to fucking some dude's wife and it was like a disaster left his wife and she left her husband and now they're miserable together it's like he was like a fake spiritual guy and these fake spiritual people they have this way of ruining a lot of like really wise notions yeah one of them is because they use that they're using it as a tool. Well, you know, it's like, or they're claiming to be enlightened when really they're just a student on the path. And maybe they have some good ideas along the way to enlightenment, but they're not quite there. Yeah.

You know, there's a lot of that, man. It's like, there's a lot of people searching, like these new age type people that are searching for some sort of a meaning and if you find the wrong shaman you find the wrong yogi you find the wrong guru you could go down a bad path i mean the guy who's the head of bikram yoga has got like all these rape allegations sexual assault allegations he drives a fucking bentley everywhere he's loaded he's got fucking gold crusted rolexes and he's like clearly not a spiritual enlightened guy but he's the head of this whole beaker movement which is like filled with all these pseudo spiritual people you know i was sitting there one day reading a um a book reading al sharpton's most recent book why would would you do that? It's a long story. Is it written in crayon?

No. My agent, my literary agent, represented Al Sharpton and did a book with Al Sharpton. So I'm reading an Al Sharpton book. And I'm sitting there and a guy is coming down the road walking a dog. And he looks like a yachtsman. The guy walking the dog is clearly a yachtsman. That's his world. And he comes up and says to me,

you know, I had a meeting with him one time, and he came up in a chauffeured car, and he had a Rolex watch on, and he proceeded to tell me how he lives on a $23,000 a year salary. It's like, wow. And he proceeded to tell me how he lives on a $23,000 a year salary. Wow. I don't know how old that story was. I don't know how true that story was. He was sort of like pointing out the, you know.

Well, there was a guy once. Like an apparent discrepancy. Oh, there's a massive discrepancy. There was a guy once that was on this radio show that I was listening to that was the head of a corporation that was approached by Jesse Jackson. Because there was some, something had gone on, something where the racial insensitivity was, you know, was hire my company to give seminars on racial sensitivity. And it's going to cost you a quarter million dollars a year. And if you do not, we are going to protest you. We're going to make it miserable.

We're going to cost you far more than you would spend to have my company come in, the Rainbow Coalition or whatever the fuck it was. But isn't that extortion? Is that illegal? it's not illegal oh it is and it isn't i mean it is illegal if you call it extortion but what he is essentially saying is it's within your best interest to align yourself with it's an out-of-court settlement yeah exactly yeah an out-of-court settlement that they profit from in an incredible way but he had like all these crazy demands like he wanted to have shrimp cocktail like like jesse jackson had all these like very specific demands as far as the the kind of food the amount of food that he was to be given what what was supposed to go on you know what kind of car he's supposed to be picked up in and you know you look

at reverend jesse jackson he's a religious man oh where's he getting all this fucking money yeah he is a wealthy wealthy guy and he's wealthy by being what they call a race pimp and that's how this guy was describing it he's like he's a race pimp like this guy finds these scenarios where something goes wrong moves in and then extracts money from the situation i should send you my l sharpton book i won't read it you won't read it because it's a really good chapter there's one really good chapter in that book where he talks about um how people's positions on things evolve over the years and i thought that was good then there's a really horrible chapter where he talks about how his role in comforting michael's family upon Michael Jackson's death,

where he sort of presents himself as the great hero. Oh, God. He's a fool. I think my agent was like, you're the last guy in the world I would expect to read a Sharpton book. But I told him, I said, well, here's the thing. That's probably why I'm reading it. Because all my life I've heard about this guy, I really don't understand who he

is or what he does. It's just one of these names. He's almost got a name like PETA. Where people hear it and they roll their eyes. Do you know what I mean? It's almost become like, he'd cringe to hear someone say this, but it's almost become like he's almost the

punchline. Yes, he is the punchline. For so many people. You know, so many pundits and commentators. Yeah. But I realized that I was kind of a victim of that. Or not victim of that, I was like doing that. I couldn't tell you what the guy did. I couldn't tell you what he stood for. But you thought of him as a punchline. Yeah, I just knew that of him.

Well, you know the Tawana Brawley? The case that got him famous? Yeah, he talks about that yeah it was just hilarious i mean he represented a woman who made up a fake allegation of being raped by white people and wrote things on her body and it turns out none of it happened she just made it all up and he was demanding you know justice and all this crazy shit and he was you know on every television show and all throughout you know the the news cases and all this different shit and it turned out that what he was doing was just it was based

on nothing was based on all lies it was based the the entire scenario jet jetted him into the public eye it was a fake scene yeah i can't tell you whether i read that in this book or whether one of the many people who saw me reading the book and had to come up and give me their two cents on the subject told me well it's amazing that the guy became famous for demanding justice for something that never took place but it's a perfect analogy or it's a perfect representation of who he is i mean and also how bizarre our sensitivities are to race that with this fucking clown is on MSNBC or CNBC or whatever the fuck he is, giving his opinions on all these different things. And his opinions are brutally dumb. Like, his way of communicating, when he has to communicate and he has to debate people who are intelligent or have nuanced opinions on these subjects.

Like, his clear and obvious bias and his cookie cutter idea of racism in America. Like racism is a real issue without a doubt. But having a guy like that represent the black community almost fosters racism. It's almost like if I was a racist and I wanted to make sure that people had a negative opinion of black people, I would take the most clownish cartoon versions of black leaders and feature them prominently on television in order to reinforce reinforce these ideas of these cartoonish figures being this is what represents the black community isn't the black community silly you know and that's what happens instead of getting a neil degrasse tyson a cornell west instead of getting these super intelligent very articulate people with broad broad perspectives you get this goofball with a fucking conked hair and you know a stapled stomach

and he's a goofball yeah and he's many thousand dollar suits on television demanding you know reparations for slavery it's like come on man like this is it's almost a setup it's almost like to engineer racism jesse jackson barely can speak english i mean he's obviously an educated guy he obviously is articulate but his if you're a professional speaker which essentially he is his ability to enunciate words is so sloppy and so confusing. It's like, do you know how you sound? Yeah.

Like, you almost sound like you're doing this on purpose. You know, when this is, when you talk, this is good. Like, you listen to him talk.

It's almost like he's too lazy to say the words in a way that everyone can understand them. Or he likes the cadence of it in some way.

Yeah, they used to do... Does Neil deGrasse Tyson ever speak on... Does he ever... have you ever heard him speak on race talk about race i never have heard him so i mean i only hear him talk about what he talks about professionally yeah he's talked about some other science-based things not just uh astrophysics i've heard him speak on genetically modified foods and some misconceptions people yeah yeah i've heard him speak on some other things that people have some misconceptions of you know just sort of science-based stuff but i haven't heard him speak on race he's an interesting guy he's a fun dude man yeah there's

that thing um the incomprehensible universe that series yeah it's an amazing series i think it's like i think it's what's called have you seen the cosmos? The new version of it? No, I haven't. It's great. It's great. Because it also, he made it very accessible. This version, like the story of Giordano Bruno, I think that's his name, the guy who was burned at the stake for suggesting that the universe is infinite. Yeah. And that they were like, why, you fucking crazy bitch?

We're going to light you on fire unless you repent. That there's a brick wall. Yeah. There's a brick wall out there. There's a ceiling out there, and behind that is a door, and God's out there. And he was convinced that it wasn't the case, but he did the whole Giordano Bruno thing, he did it in animated form. He made an animation of it, which is fantastic.

He also made an animation form, which you'd be interested in, showing how wolves became dogs. And over the course of human civilization evolving, how these wolves who had become friendly with people had eventually gotten to the point where the people were feeding them and the wolves stayed close. And then those wolves had slowly but surely morphed into dogs. That's on Cosmos? Yes.

Yeah. Amazing. There's so much wild stuff coming out of... you know about those Russians that were taking foxes? Yes, yes, yes. And doing selective breeding on them? Just how fast you can change stuff, man. Yeah. Yeah.

Amazing. You can, yeah. I mean, all you need to do is look at what they've done with dogs you know the the time that human beings have been i mean what is the established timeline for agricultural civilization is what is it 10 000 years yeah 10 11 000 years anatomically modern here like you pick your number but 100 000 yeah so in that time which is a blink of the eye you've made a fucking poodle out of a wolf yeah man you've made a chihuahua when for when americans first first passed into north america there weren't like breeds of dogs it was just like the dog they had that's crazy you know they didn't have like that's

1400 1400 1500 no no no 50 probably some i, it's a hotly debated number, but sometime between like some, our oldest sites are 14,000 years. But people think there has to be sites we haven't found or we'll never find that are older. Maybe 20,000 years. But when like, say when like Daniel Boone came across America. Oh, no, they had breeds. They had breeds.

Oh, yeah. When did they start having, like when is it established? I have no idea. I have no idea. That's so fascinating. There's probably, like, I'm sure there's great stuff written about it. But, you know, like, they had, so when the first Americans migrated into North America, they were traveling with a domestic version, you know, something that had been domesticated for quite some time,

a domestic version of the eurasian wolf and then they came down and here you had a number of wild canines you know wolves which the animal they were traveling with could breed with wolves you now find that in certain cases wolves and coyotesotes, I don't think they always put off viable young, but they do think that there are hybridization events between wolves and coyotes. So at some point, these guys came down with this Eurasian wolf. Almost certainly there had to have been some inbreeding of wolves, and then out of that stock created lord knows what all you know because by the time lewis and clark like you know when lewis and clark were out and they were eating dogs of plains

tribes they hadn't those dogs weren't showing like there hadn't been dogs that came from europe from colonists hadn't put dog blood into the dog blood and they came and they had a dog that looked like you know what they call it like it looked like what they now call in vietnam like a meat dog like just like a mutt dog you know multi like with multiple colors on them there was a recent thing um where they've done a genetic study on certain um hybrids where they found a hybrid that's part coyote part wolf and part domestic dog is Is that right? Yeah. It's really recent. Really recent.

That kind of surprised me because one of the things people look at is why are, you know, coyotes in the east are just different. They're bigger. Mm-hmm. You know, they feel that there was hybridization events of wolves and coyotes that gave you kind of like a bigger coyote in the east and you have smaller coyotes in the west. Yeah. This is from the Washington Post.

Coyote-wolf hybrids are prowling Rock Creek Park in D.C. suburbs. What the fuck, man? Really? Yeah, this is a coyote-wolf hybrid in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Isn't that nuts? Coy wolves. And they've recently established that wolves have returned to California. The first known wolf within X amount of years.

Coming out of where? I'll find out right now. Is it like the red wolves coming out of Arizona, New Mexico? I'll tell you right now because it's a totally new thing that they've proven. It's from, yeah, it's where they've established it. The Wolf's Controversy will return to California. It's on Popular Science Magazine. Popular opinion is divided on how to manage the gray wolf.

So it's a gray wolf. 2011, a male gray wolf called OR7 left his pack in Oregon and traversed 1,200 miles to California. Whether sore travel isn't atypical for gray wolves, the terrain OR7 covered set him apart from the pack. He became the first confirmed wolf in California in almost a century. No kidding. Yeah. And so- Had he been collared in almost a century. No kidding. Yeah. Had he been collared in Oregon? He must have been.

It's a good question. They must have, right, if they figured out where he is. You know, a guy in Missouri one time killed one outside of his chicken coop. He thought it was a coyote. That thing had come from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Well, there was a guy. Across the Mississippi. They killed a mountain lion in Connecticut that turned out to be from South Dakota dakota yeah you hear about that fucking thing i'm telling you i was like i don't mean to say like i

was on this story long ago but you know my entire life this debate about where mountain lions that turn up in the east or werewolves that turn up in weird places. My entire life has been this battle between people who'd be like, oh, it's escaped pets. It's escaped pets. And now it's becoming clear in so many of these cases, it's not. Things just leave now and then, and they have a very clear sense of purpose, and they travel tremendous distances.

Yeah, this is or7 they actually got a trail cam photo of this thing in california yeah and it used to every time someone saw something like that people be like oh you didn't see it or you saw an escaped pet and you'd think that like every household had a mountain lion pet to account for all the lions the guys would be like it was a damn lion like i found where something had killed a deer i went back the next day there's a lion sitting there like it's an escape pet this is pretty proficient you know it's my whole life has been going on and now finally i mean the guys have been pushing for this forever finally got to feel a lot better when now that through tracking devices we're

able to go like yeah a wolf decided one day you know to leave there and go down there's a grizzly that one day decided to mosey out of the rockies and made it out into eastern montana you know there's an elk that did a many usually it's you know it's usually these wide range and predators they got wolverines that i was just reading the thing about they had a wolverine back up a little bit because this one's being interesting they did a raid they're doing a radio collar study in alaska about a road they're doing a radio collar study in Alaska about a road they're thinking about putting a road in

into the Juneau area so they've been doing a study on animal movements in that area to try to anticipate how this road might impact wildlife just to see about their migration patterns and movement patterns they went in and collared a bunch of stuff they had a

radio collared moose of stuff. They had a radio collared moose fall into a crevasse in a glacier and then a radio collared bear tried to go in there and get him out

and fell in and died. And I think that was then scavenged by a radio-collared wolverine. They also had a wolverine. That's so crazy. They had a wolverine collared there get caught by a trapper 250 miles away in B.C. Wow. 250 miles it walked.

Wolverines are really rare to find, right? They're rare to find. really rare to find right they're rare to find like tony that's one of the last things of large you know like north american fauna that's one of the last things i'm looking for you're looking for a wolverine i have not laid eyes on one my friends that uh bjanna saw one caribou hunting uh my brother danny was hunting spring bears one time and saw wolverines digging through the debris field at the base of an avalanche looking for critters that got swept up in the avalanche i got a handful of friends i've seen when i haven't seen one yet those just badgers and wolverines those types of animals are so bizarre dude i was driving

i was driving down the hall road the the trans alaska pipeline road and you know you're up like if you go if you're on that road like the pipe the road that parallels the alaska pipeline dalton highway if you're on that road and you go west you're not gonna you know you depending on your line of travel you won't hit another road till you're in europe you know in russia and then you go the other direction you're gonna get way into canada before you hit a road i mean you're out Europe, you know, and you're in Russia. And then you go the other direction, you're going to get way into Canada before you hit a road. I mean, you're out in the middle of nowhere. Not in the middle of nowhere, but it's very remote relative to anything we can comprehend down here.

Driving down that road one time, out steps the Lynx, okay? And it looks like, it's like a cat with a baby's face on it, like a human baby's face on it man and all steps the links and like it's level it's just like to be to have an animal look at you like that and it just with utter lack lack of comprehension like i can't say it's for sure but more than other animals you feel that he had never seen that before never seen a person it's just like usually like you'll see an animal he cuts out in the road right and he sees

a car and he gets that like oh shit you know this ain't good you know based on whatever experiences he's had or responses that he's witnessed from his mother okay or like some sort of like they kind of get tense they're gauging risk but just this thing steps in the road and just looks kind of like like this look on his face and i'm anthropomorphizing here but look on his face is like now what in the hell is that followed by utter lack of interest and just like left he's like he looked i don't know what that is i can't see this bringing anything good to me. And then wandered off, and it was one of the weird, like, that's the only one I've seen.

Look at that thing. They don't even look real. No, man. I'm telling you what. It's so freaky looking. They are so tall. Like how tall? This thing is like this high, man. So like two feet high?

Yeah, leggy though. Huge feet. Just a weird look. You know, they're like snowshoe hare specialistsists man, they like to hunt snowshoe hares So it has big feet so they can get through the snow Walk on the snow, quiet hunters Yeah, they're snowshoe hare specialists Cameron Haynes was telling me about bears that

Come out of hibernation And as they come out of hibernation Is the same time where the moose Are stuck in the snow And that it's just So the moose are like plodding and these bears come out and they haven't eaten anything in months because they've just been hibernating but they see these moose and they can't help but kill them so they just go on these rampages

killing every moose they find and just leaving their carcasses because they can't really handle meat yet yeah and i got they but they they like to have the opportunity at it well they just their instincts because when they come when they do come out you know they'll come out eat grass for a while eat vegetation but they do spend a lot of time um following that they spend a lot of time looking for you know what we call winter kill um just scavenging you know carcasses they can find and then they hammer hammer, hammer fawns. And that's something people used to not realize about black bears is the high rates of fawn mortality

you get from black bears on elk, moose, deer. It doesn't seem like they really go after the adults, like healthy adults under normal circumstances, but they really find now that black bears just turn up and hit calves and fawns in a way that no one ever thought before.

They smell that placenta. Yeah, we used to have this idea of them as being kind of like the kindler, gentler bear, you know. But they know these spots. They turn up in these spots before things turn up there to drop fawns. The second mountain lion or third mountain line i ever saw i saw cutting through a bunch of elk calves in a calving area you can just imagine how much the thing like that can clean house yeah god damn when we were uh bear hunting i got to watch bears fight we watched a

fucking no holds barred brawl between this female bear with her two cubs oh really male who had come into the bait. She fucking went to war, man. The bears, the babies climbed up the trees. They were way the fuck up the trees, to the point where we were worried. One of them got real squirrely. He was kind of upside down on the tree. He was way up there.

And they're really young. And the adults can't climb because they get too heavy. And this big male had come in, and it was a big female. And first, the babies ran up the tree, and the female took off. She left. And then she just thought about it. So, you know what? Fuck that.

And she turned around and attacked him, turned around and challenged him, and they both went up on their back legs, and they were just going at it. Just, rah, rah. And we were sitting there on the ground because Cameron's fucking nuts. he likes to hunt on the ground he likes a bow hunt no tree stand so we're just there's like a tree that's fallen and we're set up behind this tree and we're watching these fucking you know six seven foot brown bears going to war right in front of us i mean no more than 30 40 yards away they were duking yeah you gotta be wondering like in the middle of this fight all of a sudden he comes rolling over and

there's your ass sitting there yeah well i was knocked up man i had an arrow knocked and you know but i've never been i've ever been like such a little kid one of my earliest memories not earliest memories but i remember being a little kid and my dad got a phone call one night one of his hunting buddies had was sitting on a bear bait with his bow and a sow came in with cubs and smelled them and shooed her cubs up a tree but they went up past him in the tree and then they started squealing and bawling up there and she came up and mauled his legs yeah he went up in the hospital fuck yeah So she was small enough that she could make it up the tree. Well, she's up enough to get at his boots.

But, I mean, most of them, I don't know. I've heard that some black bears get too big to climb. I mean, they can climb pretty good. And I don't know to what extent. But, I mean, your typical black bear can get itself up a tree she went up a tree the one that we saw she went up a tree a little bit but only like maybe five or six feet where her kids went like shit they were 50 feet yeah i'm sure it depends a lot on the circumference of the tree and whatnot but yeah for sure yeah but grizzlies don't i mean they

when they're young but when they get older they can't get up that tree yeah that's what they were saying they were because they had tree stands there but he likes to hunt on the ground. But he said, if you see a grizzly, then we go up the tree stand for sure. Yeah. Yeah, there's a bunch right there. It was kind of like that. That's cute. But it was crazy to watch them duke it out right there in front of us.

I mean, it went on for a while. And then he would come back, and she would chase him off again, and then finally he gave up. But then as it got darker, she took off, and then a bunch of bears came in. When it's dark, that's when it's really crazy. They start coming. Alberta's flooded with bears, man. They said that there's between, depending on who you ask, between three and eight per acre. And they're dealing with 8,000 acres.

No, not acre. Per square mile would be super high. Not acre. Per square mile. That's what I meant. And they're dealing with 8,000 square miles., not acre. Per square mile would be super high. Not acre. Per square mile. That's what I meant. And they're dealing with 8,000 square miles. So he said, there's just bears everywhere. And so the first time I got there, we sat down and we waited.

I'm like, where are all these fucking bears? If there's so many bears, you think you would see one. And then when you see one, and then you see another, and you don't hear them, that's what's crazy. Because the ground is thick with leaves and pine needles and stuff. literally all of a sudden there's a bear like he's there on looking at you you know from 70 80 feet away you know just you didn't even see him coming all of a sudden he appears because it's so dense and there's so many trees up there i was calling turkeys one time and had a bear come behind me um you know like predators when you're making when you're calling turkeys in the spring you're making hen noises to track males um track

the toms but predators will come to that noise and uh i had a bear come in behind me that i never heard until i heard it breathe it sounded like a dude and you're on the ground sitting i'm sitting on the ground and i hear i mean this thing was i mean right there like five feet i heard it breathe over my shoulder how many feet yeah like from i don't know five six feet i'm just there but i when i turned i was scared but that thing was more scared when i turned he like turned himself inside out man just took off oh yeah it was amazing wow you know it's funny we're talking about like bears climbing trees black bears and grizzly bears um i wrote about this at some point but we're my brother and i were laying on this ridge one time hunting elk and like

during the midday when it's warm like nothing happens you know just go sleep somewhere and wait for the elk to come back out. Cause they go into black timber just to feed, to bed down. So there's really no sense and there's nothing you can do. You just sleep. And at one point I wake up cause I hear a noise and I wake up and there's a black bear standing there and he goes off down this ridgeline and I'm sorry, just goes down off the ridge down toward the valley floor.

That night we headed out to go hunt elk, and we happened to go in the direction that the bear went. And my brother still had a bear tag. I had filled my bear tag, but he still had a bear tag. And as we're walking, I hear the noise of its claws on the bark, like real loud, you know, like barks falling and scratch you know you imagine like what a cat would sound like or something scratching up something i'm like that must be that black bear so we go hauling ass up the tree thinking that we'll maybe get the bear

up the tree and be able to check it out but we run up there's not a black bear it's a sow grizzly standing there and she's got two cubs that are about four or five feet up this tree and she's standing there at the base of the tree and she woofs at us like a dog like a woof barking you know and those cubs come down the tree and we're just standing right there man it's like you can't you never say it was close to getting scratched unless you got scratched because you don't know what's in the animal's head. But reviewing it in my head, that was a very sketchy moment. As that bear, because the last thing you're supposed to do is mess with their cubs.

And here we are just running up on there. And when she got those cubs down out of the tree and they started going up the hill away from us, she was taking her paw and moving the cubs with her paw wow pushing them ahead of her wow like the same way like you know you're like trying to get your kids to go where you want your eyes put your hand your eyes i got your hand on their head or you're somehow trying to guide them you know yeah she's like get going get going wow that was wild man but she could have spun around just scratched us well they say that's the big reason why a lot of people, hikers, get attacked, right? It's a female with their cubs.

Just coming across something. Yeah. Like, this blew my mind. I just read that not a single bowhunter has been killed by a grizzly bear while bowhunting, even though bowhunters get scratched up all the time. Like, every year there's some guy getting scratched up. Not a single bowhunter has been killed by a grizzly bear in at least 20 years wow you know last year there was like three grizzly bear fatalities in montana wyoming well that was one of the things

you saw on that hunt show was how difficult it is to bow hunt for grizzlies because they first of all the kodiak island was very windy like these guys were like they were taking shots and the arrow would just just take off and yeah i missed the windy and yeah it's just miserable and wet you gotta get so close with the ball that's the thing it'd be it's one thing like being a stand and waiting for a white tail to walk underneath you but to creep up on a fucking giant nine foot bear that's outside you gotta get within 30 40 yards of this thing to get an accurate shot on it. And it's windy and everything there. Now, in that show when they're doing that, this happens a lot.

But I know that shows don't show it. And outdoor writers don't write about it. But oftentimes, very often, I can't say it's the majority of the time, but a very common practice when a guy's bow hunting brown bears is the minute that arrow makes contact with that bear, the guide's lighting it up with like a.375 H&H. So they'll shoot it with a gun right after that. The minute that arrow hits.

Yeah, that's probably smart. I mean, I saw that on a show. It was a bow hunting show where this guy shot a fucking elephant with a bow and the elephant turned and he like fuck you and the elephant starts running and boom they shot him in the head yeah with a rifle and like he's gonna call that i hunted an elephant with a bow like the fuck you did all you did was piss an elephant off and it charged you and these guides shot the elephant in the head they killed the elephant yeah i'm not i'm not diminishing the balls it takes to get in

there like i watch the thing like you know i watch the thing where uh tom miranda you know kills like a big grizzly with a bow and by no i mean by any means like he it was like he got a great hit on that bear that bear ran and fell over i'm not saying that's what i'm saying you hear about it so often you talk to guides so often and they even do with rifles right you know even a guy hits with a rifle he's gonna start pumping lead yeah because it's so hard to anchor them and then they go in those alders and you don't want to lose them you don't want to go in there after them take the initial shot they consider you shot that bear and then everybody else and the guide you know or whoever can can do a follow i really didn't like watching them shoot the elephant there's

something to me about shooting some animals where it's like i don't get it like why i don't know why you would travel all the way to africa to shoot an elephant with a bow while these people behind you rifle it and you're calling that bow hunting i wouldn't shoot it i don't i couldn't shoot an elephant just because i don't like i don't have i didn't i don't have like a context with the animal a cultural context you know i'm saying like with north american animals i find that generally when i go hunt something i like to have it have an experience with it and understand sort of you know understand it and it would for for african hunting for me to like enjoy it hunt africa i would probably want to go there just to have a look around and be there right and then maybe go

again just for me personally then go again and i might enjoy hunting more once i sort of felt like i understood the animals you know or i understood like more about the biology and sort of like i just understood the area better it would make me feel more like like a like a like to what i want to have in a in a predator prey relationship we're going down to film this year uh we're going down to bolivia and we'll go out hunting with amerindians or go along on a hunt with Amerindians and um you know they go out and do meat hunts for capybara paca they bow fish for fish a lot one of the things they like to hunt is they like to hunt spider monkeys you know and I've always vowed like I'll never eat a monkey you know I used to always say that I'll never eat a monkey but now I'm gonna be down there and these

guys you know presumably they're gonna get a a monkey. They're going to cook it. And you're going to try it? I can't decide, man. Yeah, I'm not into eating primates. I just feel like I can't decide what I'll do when I'm sitting there. I'd have to be starving. I ate dogs and didn't like it at all. Well, you ate a coyote, which is crazy.

That didn't bother me in an emotional way. But I'm saying I tripped out emotionally about eating a dog. Right. So I can't imagine what I might suffer to be chewing up a primate. I'm not into it. It's just like, I remember reading one time, and this explained this to my brother the other day when I was talking about this conundrum I'm in, where I was reading about a guy who was describing the hunt for the hunt for monkeys and a dude hit a and he was observing he was observing south you know south american tribal hunters or americans he's observing them hunting monkeys

and the monkey got shot in the back and the monkey with a dart. And the monkey reached around and grabbed the dart. Whoa. So that image is so burned in my head. But I think, like, I don't know what I'll do, man. I'll be curious if the guys I work with, if they want to eat the monkey or not. Yeah. But there's so many weird things that you go like this, though. These guys are indigenous hunters, okay?

They hunt. They make their own bows. They live in the jungle. jungle like any kind of thing like if you went out and surveyed a hundred americans a hundred would say like by all means if anyone can justify hunting to be these boys right um they're gonna be they're hunting whether you're with them or not so it's kind of like you look at well monkey's dead now yeah Yeah. I guess I could see that. What I couldn't see is going there with a purpose to go shoot a monkey. I guess if I was there experiencing what it is like for them, and also if they offered me, like if it was part of like you're taken into their home

and they're cooking you a meal and they ask you, you know, they serve you what they eat, maybe then I would eat it. Yeah. No, there's no way I'd shoot a monkey. Yeah. And by saying that, I don't think that one shouldn't be allowed and whatever. It just depends on the consensus of biologists in whatever area, whether they can warn it or not.

But no, I wouldn't. It's just like I couldn't. Yeah, I couldn't either. But I know that they have issues with baboons and people dude in africa it's just like i guess i can't get it but in africa you get the sense that people view like baboons almost like how you might like uh i hate to say it almost like you might look at like raccoons and opossums that are getting into your dumpster. Yes, but they'll kill a baby. They'll kill a human baby.

Is that right? Stolen human babies. I don't know the first thing about them. Yeah. Cameron Haynes, who just got back from Africa, he shot a fucking baboon over there. Shot a baboon with a bow and arrow. And I'm like, why don't you shoot a baboon? And he's like, they actually encourage you to shoot as many baboons as possible because they're overpopulated and they're really dangerous.

That's a friend of mine who told me, man. Do the guys in Africa eat the baboons? No. They don't eat the baboons and they don't eat man. Do the guys in Africa eat the baboons? No. They don't eat the baboons and they don't eat the hyenas. They don't like the hyenas? No. They kill them.

They kill them whenever they can because they're so overpopulated but they don't eat them. But he ate a kudu. He shot a kudu over there and ate that and he said it was amazing. Yeah.

He said kudu is similar, I guess, in a lot of ways to deer, elk and the way it tastes. The word overpopulated is such a weird word and it's such an abused word whenever i hear that i always get like according to whose perspective

right because again and again we're told like deer overpopulated like yeah i mean from the perspective of some agricultural interests deer overpopulated from the perspective of auto insurers you know deer overpopulated from the perspective of lyme disease activists you know deer overpopulated from the perspective of Lyme disease activists you know deer overpopulated but from perspective of a dude who likes to eat a lot of deer you might be like now's the good old days man you know it's like this is perfect if I lived in some areas uh there's some areas of western Massachusetts that are so flooded with deer I would definitely have one of those crazy bumpers on my truck yeah you know they have those crazy big steel brush guards yeah well they make them specifically for deer to withstand a deer hit yeah there was one of them that they uh we were pulling up photos over the other day of

18 wheelers that they have these giant ones they put over the front of their trucks because deer you know are so common and in a lot of these areas where they're transporting stuff and they had one where this deer had just it hit it hit it and the guard did its job, but the fucking entire truck was just painted with blood, you know, because it was doing 65 miles an hour and you hit an animal, it's basically a bag of blood. It vaporizes in such a disturbing way. I recently wrote a thing about this on the meat eater show website where I was talking about these recent controversies where someone will go and kill an African animal.

Kill a lion, post a picture of a lion. By the way, tell people where they can get that because I loved your perspective on it and I loved one of the things you pointed out about you've seen all these things where people are getting pissed off, these pretty girls that are going over there and shooting these animals

and a lot of it is sexism. Oh yeah, man. For a girl to go to Africa and hunt pisses off people way more than for a dude to. And also for a wealthy person to hunt in Africa pisses off way more people than a middle class person hunting in Africa, which is just weird. It's so beyond the biology. It's just weird sexual stuff. It's weird envy class envy however you want to think like whatever you want to determine about the legitimacy of hunting in africa should really

have nothing to do with the gender of of the hunter yeah but this this thing like one point i try to make in that thing that i wrote you could you could find if you just go um you could probably even type in like uh steven ranella african hunting controversy or go to the to the meat eater.com you'll find the article but but a point i make is when people look at someone posing with an african animal like a lion they they i think people look at and they feel like they see a dead movie star because they don't know like all you know of that animal is sort of wildlife documentaries and then cartoon versions and the lion king it's like you feel like you're looking at that but in america we drive down the road and we see just like contorted pulverized deer carcasses,

you can't escape it. Yes. Yeah. And so I feel like it's never going to be as offensive. When someone sees a dead deer, it's not as shocking to them as being like, it's the animal from the movies. Right, right, right.

And they killed it. The anthropomorphizing of an animal is a real issue when it comes to that. It really feels to people more like, I remember a friend of mine who worked in the environmental movement. I shouldn't say that because she was a conservationist. She worked in the conservation movement. And she complained about, half-jokingly, about charismatic megafauna. So much mental energy of Americans gets tied up in the preservation of charismatic megafauna.

And those things become such money sinks that we miss opportunities to understand this vast suite of other creatures out there that doesn't make it onto calendars. creatures out there that doesn't make it onto calendars and she was if i remember i think she was speaking um of the amount of research dollar and dollars and public interest and things that go into wolves like understanding wolves you know and there's all the other animals that she calls like non-charismatic megafauna you just can't get someone to like care about them yeah you know and i think that's that's one as far as conservation goes i think that's one thing that that conservation organizations that are based off of specific animals wise tell you is that they're looking at like apex or keystone cornerstone species so like a group like the national wild turkey federation or the rocky mountain elk foundation they'll point

out they'll be like yeah this is about elk we have elk on our symbol you might think that we fetishize elk but i can tell you this what's good for elk is good for everybody yeah you know it's one of the most demanding like least tolerant things and so if you preserve elk wintering habitat you're also at the same time preserving the habitats of so many other species and you might not say the same thing about if you went and preserved the habitat of you know some animal with a more restricted home range or something it might not blossom outward to offer protection for all these other things so that's one way in which like the charismatic megafauna thing winds up playing out is people go like yeah but by helping him i'm helping everybody so i'd like to have something on for my calendar people have that aversion to uh trophy hunting

that's one of the other things that drives people nuts about africa is that people going over there for bloodlust they're going over there just to kill they want to stuff it and put on their wall this beautiful animal that should just be observed and appreciated for what it is yeah i that's something i struggle with and earlier i made a turn about something being like a like like a semantics thing because if you go and hunt and you keep something like you have uh right here in your studio you have a a deer antler you got like a deer skull right by really any definition you'd say like you'd be like well that's a hunting trophy you know does that make you then a hunting like a trophy hunter even though you ate the deer to be a non-trophy hunter would that mean that you should have thrown that deer

head in the garbage in order to be more pure or is it more pure that you'd have that you'd maintain that emblem and pay respect to the animal in perpetuity by having its head here so it's like you kept a trophy you kept the meat and kept trophy but when people hear trophy hunter i think what the what that means in our culture is that someone that just hunts for that purpose like he just wants to go kill that thing and this comes from guys never hunted in africa but so much of the controversy about africa is that people are going there and killing animals just for the head and bringing them home. And that way you're probably trivializing the experience, but you're also not really looking at the broad picture of how game gets managed there

and the importance that the commodification of wildlife plays in Africarica where here we have public owned publicly owned wildlife you know so and we have a really strident system where stringent system where we can protect legally protect stuff but in africa there's a great argument to be made for if it wasn't for the value of those animals to westerners if it wasn't for the hunting industry those animals wouldn't be in those places where they are yeah there's they literally didn't have those animals there before. There's way too many forces and factors that would have led to those being like ravaged ecosystems, hunting from people who are starving or who are wanting to graze livestock in those areas. And the fact that you bring in a currency and you monetize them enables people

to preserve these large tracts of land and have animals on there so you can look at like what is joe blow's motivation joe blow's motivation might be he thinks it'd be sweet to have a zebra hide on his floor and you can condemn joe blow for thinking that but you really to be fair you have to look at the impact that that money that he spent to get it has on the broader economy and on the wildlife politics of that place so it's way more complicated than what any one individual's motivations were you know and it's just i just caution people and i and i i'll tell you what i've had my share of looking at pictures of guys hunting in africa and being like dude you just went out and paid someone and he showed you that and you're like well that's what one of those is and shot it

i've felt that a thousand times looking at those pictures but it's one of those things that the more i've learned about it and spoke to people who've gone there and read about it, the more I've come to admit that, you know what, what's going on in Africa is vastly more complicated than what you're going to get from reading about internet controversies and people posting pictures. You really need to study up on that stuff before you condemn it, because I think you'll be kind of shocked by some of the stuff you learn. If anybody's interested in it further, we're just about out of time, but Louis Theroux has a documentary.

Theroux? How do you say his name? Theroux. Louis Theroux has a documentary about African hunting camps where he kind of goes into great detail with these guys that run these camps about how these animals, they essentially wouldn't be there if it wasn't. They would be extinct. We're out of time, right?

Okay. All right, dude. Your book. The Buffalo book's published. Oh, no. You know, my first book, which never had a chance in the real world, Scavenger's Guide to Old Cuisine. It came out a long time ago, but I got the rights to it back.

Right. And I published it digitally as the Scavenger's Guide. I hope people go read it. It never got read when it came out Not like my other books did man And like I said they just gave me my rights back How can they get it? How can someone get it? Oh it's on every place

You can buy digital books Okay we'll put a link Amazon everywhere We'll put a link up to it after the show And I also put a link up to the Daniel Boone thing that you did The animated thing Oh sweet man that's great That was just up

Dude time flew It's over Hey thank you for having me on Anytime man anytime Wish you lived closer We do it all the time Well you are kind of closer now And we're going to be real close That was just up. Dude, time flew. It's over. Hey, thank you for having me on. Anytime, man. Anytime. Wish you lived closer. We do it all the time. Well, you are kind of closer now.

And we're going to be real close when we're sharing the same tent. Pretty close. All right, folks. Thanks to our sponsor. Thanks to Blue Apron. Go to blueapron.com slash rogan and get two meals for free. Thanks also to MeUndies. Go to meundies.com forward

slash Rogan. Get 20% off your first order and go to Rogan.Ting.com and get $25 off of any Ting device. Alright, you fucks. We'll be back soon. Tomorrow in fact. See you soon. Bye. you