The Joe Rogan Experience - #879 - Steven Rinella

Episode Date: November 30, 2016

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

No, no, go ahead. He's about to click the button and we're waiting on him. I'd hate for you to drop some awesome knowledge. Hey! And we're live. That's it. Steve Rinella, the only hunting show ever in the history of Meat Eater. Or excuse me, of Netflix.

Of Meat Eater. That's an awesome accomplishment, man. You're the first hunting show. See, I tell everybody that if you want to watch a hunting show, like people watch hunting shows and they go, oh, what the fuck are these guys doing? They're sitting around. They go, well, look at that.

Look at the size of this buck, man. This is amazing. Your show is so different from all those other shows. Like it belongs on something else. It belongs on like the history channel or the discovery channel or something more mainstream. So I'm glad that Netflix picked it up. Oh man, I'm delighted. They picked up 32 episodes.

I'm glad we got to this plug-in part right away right away yeah because if i turn people off and they tune out they'll remember this man this is great i can just walk out the fucking door right now how many episodes how many episodes have you guys done all told you know i don't know really more than 75 way more than 75 i think think. So they're sort of trying to now. I just remember one day we had a little... I remember one day us having a drink to celebrate us having wrapped number 50, and that was a long time ago. So we're way past that now. Wow. That's a good question.

That's a lot of weeks. Upwards of 75. That's a lot of weeks out in the field. Yeah. The 100th, yeah, we'll probably have a little party on the 100th episode. But, no, it's been great, man. I mean, the Netflix thing is really just, I mean, it really, you know, exposed to a lot of people. And it was cool.

Instead of starting with season one, you know, they put up season five and six on Netflix, which is nice because it makes people real curious about the other ones. There's one episode that's probably one of my favorite episodes you ever did where you never shot anything. So one episode with you alone deer hunting, you started talking about your dad. Yeah, Arizona Coos Deer, yeah. No music. A lot of ambient sound, a little loud wind. Who makes those choices, like those editorial choices?

That was, you know, the editor, one of our editors, kind of one of our core editors that's been doing it for a long time, a guy by the name of Guy. He, yeah, he did that. And at first I was like, huh, what? Because he wanted, yeah, he wanted to do one, no music. There's no VO in it. You know, and we're pretty VO heavy sound uh pretty tend to be a voiceover yeah yeah yeah sorry like i do a lot of narrating you know um in fact i was just writing some narration for the the hunt you and i did recently but i do a lot of narrating and then

we just did one where there's no narrating and i think a lot of times it comes down to how talkative i'm feeling in the field, you know. And, yeah, I just, whatever, for whatever reason, I was suffering a little bit of exhaustion or something. I don't know. And I just did a lot of rambling. And then when he started cutting it together, he just wanted to run it like that with no sound at all. We want to do one now with no music at all, no voiceover, like no no narration just all spoken to camera no other people there so everything just like not delivered as dialogue but just like to camera addressing we talked now about doing one that has no words in it

but it's all music maybe I was looking for like excitement to register on Joe's face and I got the opposite. Yeah. Well, that's one of the things that I think is most ridiculous about a lot of hunting shows is how terrible the music is. Some of the music choices just like, what did you guys just go to fucking, what is that I program that you have on your Mac? What is that?

A garage garage band. Yeah. Pick up some beats. I don't know the name of the system that we use, but it's a searchable database of music, like a catalog of music. Yeah. The documentary we're doing, we're beginning now to work on, we're in the initial stages of having it scored, which is fun. So it's not something I've ever messed with. I think very rarely in a television show do you have a television show scored.

You're usually using library music or licensed music. Yeah. I was watching Westworld the other night, which is an awesome show if you haven't seen it, but there was this one scene where this music started playing. I'm like, this is so bad. I hate this. I hate when I'm being manipulated by music during a scene. Like if the music's telling you to, where you're like, where they come up to it and they're like,

man, you're not going to feel like, this isn't making you feel how we wish it made you feel. Perhaps if we played this, you'll feel this way more. Yeah, it's weird that we just accept that. This is the part where you're supposed to feel, you know, kind of like feelings of nostalgia and, you know, and like feelings of nostalgia and and you know and like these remorseful feelings and we have no idea how to invoke that in audiences but this musician did a wonderful job some years ago let's play this it's always like violins and shit piano there's something about that that's just i feel so manipulated. Like I should just give into it,

right? I mean, cause you're already accepting. There's always this acceptance of like, you're giving me a program. You're showing me something in an hour. There's all these edits. We're going back and forth. Why can't I just accept that? You know, uh, there's a, there's a musician I like quite a bit named Micah P Henson and he's and he's out at Abilene, Texas. And he has a song called The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea. And a friend of mine who's a screenwriter, we always have joked about someday writing a movie so sad that you could play that song at the end and it would not feel manipulative.

Like a movie so sad it could earn to have The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea played in the end of it. What's his name again? Micah P. Hinson. Micah? M-I-C-A? Yeah. A-H.

A-H? Yeah. Seems like a young fella. I don't know him. Seems like a young fella. Seems like he's got a background in drug taking. Ah, one of those guys. But, yeah, he's a good musician, man.

Yeah, there's something about music in movies that we've just totally we just totally accept it in television shows and music when there's a scene and they want to manipulate you and they want to establish some sort of a feeling that you're supposed to invoke they just shove it in there the Radiohead album

OK Computer has a song called Exit Music for a Film because I think they just felt like they were trying to send a message to the licensors. Yeah, I wonder who was the first. I guess they did that back in the movies before there was talkies. You know, it was all when movies were silent. I mean, that's how they sort of manipulated you, and then they showed the screen, and they had the words on it.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then like the Peter and the Wolf thing and all that. And then it just carried over. But, yeah, when we're working on the show with music, I have a hard time describing visual stuff, you know? Like I'll often see something, like a visual treatment for something, you know, like I'll often see something like a visual treatment for something, you know, or artwork or whatever. I'm like, I don't know. I can't just see it. I'll know when

I see it. I'll know that I like it, but I can't tell you what I like. And when we're doing it and I listened to music, when an editor is putting something together and I hear music, I never have suggestions. I always just have no, it's like, it's me. It's like no it's like to me it's like yes no yes no and I never can be like make it more you know I don't know I just have to hear it and I'll be like oh that's it's too heavy handed

or not I saw one show where they were deer hunting and there was electronica music playing I was like who chose this well they might be trying to create a weird tension. Yeah, make you upset. That way you want the deer to die. Because they're forcing you to listen to this music.

There's a great compilation of hawks. I think they're rough-legged hawks, maybe. I can't remember what kind. But just bitch-slapping mallard ducks up in Canada. And the guy said it to Hell's Bells. And I always thought that was an obvious choice, but it just has a great effect watching hawks kill ducks to Hell's Bells. But other than that, no, I like it to be,

I always kind of like it to be not obvious. Like, you know, let's say you're doing a show in West Virginia, and someone would be like, oh, yeah, kick it off with some banjo music. You know what I mean? It's like I hate that kind of decision making, you know? Right, right. Cliche. Yeah.

And then I don't like it to be like electronica to deer hunting. Like, you kind of want it to be sort of like not obvious but right yeah like who was it that decided that outer space sounds the way it does like no one shows images of outer space to banjo music it's a good point you show images of outer space like you know or it's got to be like star wars symphony type music yeah like someone decided that outer space feels like a kind of music. So if I was doing something about outer space, I would want to find something that you'd never guess was outer space-y sounding, but in the end, you're like, yeah, you know what?

That's not out of place for outer space. Like a harmonica? Sure. Sure. I'll know it when I hear it. I'll know it when I hear it. I'll know it when I hear it. You'd have to enlist a bunch of the world's best harmonica players to come up with something spacey. Yeah, to watch outer space stuff.

I think a diggory do would work for space. No, you could do that. But all the editors used all that music up for when they got a cut to an Australia thing. That's true, right? They're like, what's Australia sound like? Oh, that's right. The Diggery Doo. But yeah, man, Netflix, it's got a lot of emails from people kind of stumbling out on the show.

And it's funny because you make a show about hunting, and in your head you're like, people that like to hunt would have found it. Like in your head, you're like people that like to hunt would have found it. But then you hear from people who hunt their asses off and you're like, hey, I just discovered this show. And you realize all these people, like all the untapped millions that are out there. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of people like me before I ever started hunting that are interested in it. They think it's interesting. And I think the gateway drug for them is those Alaska shows. Those like subsistence hunter shows, like The Last Frontier and the Mountain Men shows.

They show these people like, wow, that looks cool. Yeah. You know? And then I think the next step is to switch on over to the Sportsman's Channel or something like that and find something interesting. Yeah, that's a good point. But you can get turned off really easily. You could go to the wrong kind of show and it could be boring.

Or you could stumble upon, like, I always say about Uncharted, the Jim Shockey show. Have you seen that show? I have. It's a great show. And to me, it's not really a hunting show. It's a show about cultures. Yeah, travel and culture. Yeah.

It's about a really curious, open-minded guy who loves to go to different cultures. And he goes there, you know, and the premise is he goes there to hunt. But he's traveled to some really, really incredible places and filmed some amazing stuff. Did you see the one where he went to, I forget what river it was in Africa, where these people have a significant problem with crocodiles eating people? Oh, no, I didn't, but I've talked to some people about that one. Everybody in the village was missing an arm. They had a hole in their head. significant problem with crocodiles eating people. Oh, no, I didn't, but I've talked to some people about that one. Oof. Everybody in the village was, like, missing an arm.

They had a hole in their head. Everybody had been jacked. And while he was there, a woman got taken. Yeah. It was crazy watching these people wail and cry and sob. It was really, really intense. You know, when I was in seventh grade, we had a teacher named Miss Merkel. I don't know if she's alive anymore, but I remember she lived down the Muskegon River. She was in the Peace Corps.

And one day, look at this. This is one of those things that happens when you're a kid and you realize later it's weird. of her, I believe it was her fiancé at the time, of his body after it had been removed from a crocodile's stomach. Holy shit. To show us. Whoa. Yeah. Now, to set that, to set the times, I also, when I was in ninth grade,

there was a teacher named Mr. Wright, and he wanted me to re-blue a shotgun for him. You know, the bluing on a shotgun, like the coating on a shotgun? Re-blue it? Yeah. How do you do that? What is it? It's a chemical dip.

You strip it, and then it's like a chemical treatment, bluing. Bluing has kind of fallen out of favor, but everything used to be blued. Anyways, just set the scene for what you could do back then that you don't do now. He gave a shotgun to a kid. Brought the shotgun to school. Gave me the shotgun. I took it home, re-blued it. You know what he paid me back with?

What? He gave me a.25 caliber semi-automatic handgun and a sweat sock at school. I brought it home, and my dad confiscated it from me, and I never saw it again. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So the teacher gave you a handgun. Yeah, this is the old days. And your dad said, what the fuck is this teacher doing?

Give me that. Yeah. Wow. The.25 caliber semi-auto in a sweat sock as payment for balloon and shotgun. The transaction all happened at Reese Puffer. Is that in Michigan? It's my high school, yeah. at Reese Puffer.

Is that in Michigan? It's my high school, yeah. So when I say that she had a photo of a guy's body coming out of a crocodile, it's like just a, you know. That's not that long ago, though. No, I'm 43. How old am I? 42.

Times have changed pretty radically. Oh, yeah. I remember when they instituted the rule that you couldn't have firearms at school. And I remember going down and talking to Mr. Beckman and being like, hey. And he's like, oh, yeah, of course. I mean, you know, you guys are hunting everything. So he allowed you? So you could stick, like, a gun in your locker? No, you could have it in your car in the parking lot, though.

Wow. Now, for our documentary, we interviewed a guy who used to get on his school bus with his shotgun. Holy shit. In Martha's Vineyard, of all places. And he would get on the school bus with a shotgun. Wow. So he could hunt ducks after school. Whoa. How old is this guy? Old. He's a Vietnam veteran. Wow. What happened? What happened to people? People started shooting people at school. What the fuck happened there?

If we could answer that. I've been talking about this on stage a lot. What happened to going postal? What did the post office figure out? How did the post office get it together? Like, why did that stop happening? Yeah, going postal was a real issue. How many cases? Like, was it? It was? Yeah, going postal was a real issue. Like, was it?

It was a huge issue. There was a game called Postal. There was a video game that you could play in the early days of video game called Postal. This is another thing that you probably couldn't do today, but there was a video game based on mass shootings where you'd go to a post office and just fuck everybody up. But was... I don't remember.

I know, of course I remember that, but I don't remember, were there actually I remember that but I don't remember were there actually like more than two Yeah, I was gonna say it's called running with scissors was the company that made it look look This is the fucking game you would just run around and discuss shoot people and chop them up and gun them down I mean, it's terrible graphics because it's the early days of gun or excuse me of video games No, it looks like my six-year-old did the pictures. But this is the game.

I mean, this is like the original Grand Theft Auto. Really? Yeah. How come he could just go over the roof like that? Shitty-ass physics. Yeah, I mean, going postal was a thing that people used to say all the time. But if you said he went postal to like a 20-year-old, they wouldn't know what they were talking about. I think people used to use it as being you got real mad.

I think it's a murderous thing. No, I know, but also once it became in the lexicon, you could say like, oh, yeah, he went postal about me not, you know, sending him the check. But you could say going postal because you're 42. But could you say postal if you're 22? I don't think a 22-year-old would have any idea what you're talking about. Something happened. It ended. The phenomena.

Yeah. What did the post office do? What I'm questioning is what was it based on? Two things? Three? Monotony. Inbox, outbox. Inbox, outbox.

I mean, how many postal? How many mass shootings were there at post offices? Jamie's pulled them up here. Look at this. Oh, shit. There's quite a few. 1986, 1991, 91 again, two events in 93. And it took a 13-year hiatus.

Yeah, and then it came back strong in 2006. Baker City, Oregon, 2006. So 2006, it seems like that was the last postal event. It says that was based around these ones in 1986 is where the term started. So it probably is just a novelty thing. Like one person did it and then a bunch of other people. Well, I wonder if there's a disproportionate amount of mass shootings in post offices compared to other warehouse jobs or other. I mean, because there's been mass shootings at work before.

Yeah. But for some reason, that distinction got put on post office. Said 35 people in 11 incidents. Hmm. That is high. It's fairly high. But when you're, you know, you're dealing with the number of people that come in and out of the post office. Irate.

Yeah. But it's one of those weird things. It's like, why don't you see that about Jiffy Lube? There's no Jiffy Lube mass shootings, you know? Yeah, I can't answer that. I bet there's people who've studied it carefully. I read the book Columbine. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. Did you read that book? No, I didn't. But I just got a book from one of the kids that survived. Met him. He was with Marilyn Manson at this podcast that we did for the election night, the End of the World podcast. And he gave me a copy of his book. He survived.

They came up to him right before the shooting. They said, hey, man, we like you. Get the fuck out of here. Really? Yeah. And he left and guns started blazing. And he survived. That'd be a good guy to have on your show. I'm going to have him on. The guy that wrote Column. Really? Yeah, and he left, and guns started blazing, and he survived. Yeah.

That'd be a good guy to have on your show. I'm going to have him on. The guy that wrote Columbine. No, no, I mean, yeah, him, but I mean the guy that wrote Columbine. Columbine's a good book, man. I mean, as far as the psychology of, you know, the psychology and background and context of shooters, it's a good book. It's an intense phenomenon, you know, that is attributed to North America more than anywhere. I mean, you're starting to see a lot more mass shootings all across the world, but a lot of them are religious related.

But it's a very confusing one to people because there's so many factors involved, you know. And it's one that gets lumped in with the gun culture. There's a tweet that I put on my Twitter page a while back that I said this country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem. Yeah. And I really, really believe that. I don't think you can attribute – there's so many guns in this country and so few mass shootings. There's so many guns. I mean the number of guns exceeds the number of people. The number of guns exceeds the number of people.

And the amount of mass shootings in relative, obviously they're all horrific and terrible, but relatively to the amount of people that we have, it's relatively small. And I think the kind of person that can engage in something like that, there's so many factors. And you can't blame it on guns. It's like blaming forks on people getting fat. It doesn't make sense. I think when you look at the tendency to want to grasp on to somewhat easy solutions for stuff, it's something people go to.

Yes. Because it seems conquerable. So people look at a really complex thing. We saw so much this during the run to the presidential election where you know to make a point really fast. You look at something that's terrifically complex and then it's not just that you want the magic solution, but people kind of go like, well, what could be what possibly could be done? And I think people moved in the direction of moving the direction of the Second Amendment. And there's also this sort of an agreement that people have when discussing it, like, yes, guns are a problem and that guns are a problem because these things happen. And then they all start talking about guns. And then we get lumped into two groups. You get lumped into

people that are pro Second Amendment that go, no, no, no, it's not guns. And then the people that say, well, those crazy people with guns, you know, like Obama, that was one of the famous statements that he said during his administration is how people are so attached to their guns. And the Second Amendment people got so mad. The NRA people got so mad. You know, like the clinging to religion and guns.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, you know, if you just look at the sheer number of people who actually have guns in this country, it is a little crazy. I mean, the volume is very, very high. The actual number of firearms. And the thing that always gets me is they don't, it's not like they stop making them. I mean, they're making guns every day. Yeah.

A lot less now since the election. Really? Yeah. Because Trump won? every day. Yeah. A lot less now since the election. Really? Yeah, I had friends that were so convinced that like most people in the country, whether you liked it or not, were convinced that

Clinton was going to win. They had... I got one friend in particular that went out and bought a bunch of stocks for firearm companies and they said they took a little hit after the election. Because people relaxed. They didn't worry about stockpiling ammunition.

Because people weren't worried about stockpiling. I mean, we were all talking about it. It's like the stockpiling thing is self-perpetuating where, like, when I was a little kid, you know, in our Christmas stocking, we would get bricks of.22 shells. Because we'd hunt a lot of squirrels and rabbits with.22s. It was just like you always had.22 shells. You could go anywhere and get.22 shells.

A buddy of mine, one of our camera guys, he grew up on a ranch. And at the ranch store, they had two items. Chew, so tins of chew, and.22 shells. That you could get on credit at the ranch store. The ranch store had a very limited inventory, but that's how pervasive 22 shells were. Now, when Obama

won, no one's going to use a .22. A.22 is not a go-to caliber for inflicting harm on other human beings. It's just not a great it's a very small, small game around. But the hysteria about guns drove people to gobble up.22 ammo. So all of a sudden then it was, you couldn't find.22 ammo.

And not being able to find it, like I used to just buy these little boxes of.50, right? You go like, oh, it's hard to buy it. And then all of a sudden you got in the need where you wanted to buy all you could get because it was in your head that you couldn't get it. So then you'd see a thousand of them and I'd be like, well, I'm going to buy it because everyone's buying it. And I think it was self-perpetuating. Now I got shitloads of 22 shots. But it's like I had no need for them.

I felt in this thing like there's this thing that I've always had access to and now I won't have access to it. You know, and I don't know where it came from. And I think that now, all through the last eight years, there's been just this great arming of America because I feel like so many people were worried about having their rights infringed. There's like at least now in that community, of which I'm a part, I suppose, There's a sigh of relief, you know? Yeah, there's a great relaxation among sportsmen. They think that Trump is going to come in and, you know, protect the Second Amendment rights.

But a lot of people have to be worried about private land or public land. Yeah, that's a thing that I'm really watching, and I'm curious about it. You know, at this point, you know, the talk's over, right? The rhetoric's over. So now I'm a – whether someone was for it or against it, for or against Trump's victory, I think now, like, the responsible thing to do, in my mind, or the realistic responsible thing to do in my mind is because there's so many unknowns just to approach the administration with an open mind i

mean you know i'm like now i'm like okay talk's over now like what's gonna what's gonna happen like what sorts of things that we're gonna see come out of it and i don't know if anyone really knows the answers to that and like in my outward public facing way, I don't generally talk about politics outside of issues that relate to wildlife issues that relate to hunters and fishermen. Right. Like I kind of focused in because I politically I'm a mess, you know, I'm all over the place. Um, I have no use for, and I, and I know you don't either. I have no use for like classic definitions of conservatives and liberals. It just, that shit makes no sense to me I know you don't either, I have no use for classic definitions of conservatives and liberals.

That shit makes no sense to me. I don't draw my viewpoints from going and looking and finding out how I'm supposed to feel about it in order to be a consistent partisan individual. Last January, though, for people who aren't even, I'm sure there's probably a lot of people that aren't familiar with this. Can I give a quick rundown on public lands? Yeah. So the federal government has, you know, holds, owns millions and millions of acres of land in the U.S., primarily in the western U.S. And there's a handful of different land holding agencies. You know, the Bureau of Land Management manages lands.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages lands through the refuge system. So when those boys in Oregon took over the wildlife refuge there, that was actually U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service land. It wasn't BLM land. You've got the National Forest Holds land, National Forest Service, which is under the USDA. I already said the BLM, right? Yeah. National Forest Service, which is under the USDA. I already said the BLM, right?

Yeah. And then, of course, you have states own public land, but the federal land management agencies, of which there are several, hold deed to millions of acres of land. And it's owned by the American people, and it's represented through, you might think of it as represented through a trust, and the trust is administered by the federal government on your behalf. That's our public lands where people recreate. Another large holder of public lands is the National Park Service.

I didn't mention that one. In the lower 48, you don't hunt on national park land. You fish on national park land, and you generally hunt national forest land, bureau land, management land, refuge land. And there's a push right now that people feel that the federal government should be dumping a lot of federal land. Now, for what reason? Well, yeah, that's what I'm getting at. So people get frustrated with dealing with the federal bureaucracy,

and the reason that is is generally the feds are pretty, I mean, this is a gross generalization, but generally the feds are much slower on exploitation of natural resources, less responsive to demand for exploitation of natural resources than state agencies are. So federal lands, you know, they're, in exercising the will of the American people, federal land agencies are not as easy to deal with when it comes to mining and development and other issues as state agencies are. So people who want to see a more readily exploitable system in place for developers, miners, loggers, others,

they want to see people able to more readily make a buck off the land, they'd like to see these lands, our federal lands, they'd like to see them go into private hands or they'd like to see them go into private hands or like to see them go into state hands. Because they know that either way it goes, if they go into private hands or state lands, they're going to have a much easier time doing extractive industries and development on those lands. So that's like under the surface what's going on. And then, for instance, like the guy, you know, one of the reasons the guys that took

over the refuge, the Malamere Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, one of their gripes was they run cattle on public property. Right. So they pay a fee that one of those families is heavily involved in running cattle on federal land. And they pay a fee far below the going rate to run cattle on public land. So what you'd go pay a rancher if you wanted to run cattle on his land, they pay about 10% of that, by some estimations, to run it on public land. And then when federal land managers don't want to renew those contracts because, again, because people are thinking about other uses for the land or whatever they want to do with it, it causes an intense amount of, like, a serious amount of frustration with people.

So there's people that want to dump lands. Now, I heard Donald Trump speak last January, so almost a year ago, in Las Vegas. And he was standing 40 yards away from me and was talking about that he has no desire to see our public lands privatized. However, one might argue kind of by name only, he's a Republican. I mean, he definitely hasn't demonstrated any sense of being beholden to party orthodoxy. I mean, he's like he takes an issue-by-issue stance on things and doesn't really care for how things are done at the party level. However, his party is very much, you know, it's right in their,

it's one of the planks of their platform. It's right in their agenda to see us dump federal property, to see us offload federal lands, to see us offload American public lands into state or private holdings. So I hope he has luck in resisting that. If in fact he is still standing by that statement that he made. I don't think most people in America understand how unique this situation is. That we have these massive swaths of public land.

No, they don't. It's one of those things where, and even the people that do, even the people that know don't it's one of those things where and even the people that do even the people that know don't really conceptualize like i grew up um i grew up about two and a half miles south of the southern terminus of manistee national forest in michigan uh a significant portion of our outdoor activities took place on that national forest. We took it like it fell from, like our perception of it was that it fell from the sky. It was that it just existed, just had always existed. We took it for granted, like how you look at the sun and be like, the sun's just there.

like how you look at the sun and be like the sun's just there you know so i think that even people who are public lands users don't often don't take the time to be like how is it that i'm able to be on this land right well i never i never considered it at all until i hung out with you no but i but i'm saying i hung out on public lands and it wasn't for it wasn't until i was you know it took me 25 years to start being like, now hold on a minute now, what is this now? This public lands you speak of. Yeah, that you hold deed, like as an American citizen, in most ways, as a global citizen, because our national, our public lands are open to anyone, American or not, right?

But as an American citizen, you hold deed to hundreds of millions of acres of land. Now, there are conditions to your use, like there's things you can and cannot do, but you're free to roam, camp, hunt, fish, look at the stars, whatever. You're extraordinarily wealthy. And

these things that came about, like they came about in various ways, probably the most influential person in creating the public land system we have now is Theodore Roosevelt. And he was controversial in his time for helping to create our public land system. He had the same resistance when he was doing it from industry, from extractive industry. He had the same resistance that we have now to public lands. And then we went and chiseled his face on a mountain. Because everyone, like now everyone, every politician would like to liken himself to

Roosevelt, right? Right. He's like one of those dudes that you can just be like, like Teddy Roosevelt. And people are like, yeah, positive feelings, positive feelings. He's achieved Rushmore. This was a guy who was like a radical. You see a little bit of that with Reagan. Yeah.

During the Reagan administration, during the time where he was actually president, he was a massively polarizing figure. People hated him. I mean, there was so much going on during the Iran-Contra hearings where it's like, oh, my God, who is this asshole that we let run president? Yeah, I think around the time, like, by the time he died, he had sort of ascended to political heaven. Yeah. Where now you can, like, Kennedy enjoys that position. I mean, Kennedy barely won the damn election. Yeah.

It's debated whether he actually won. You know, people say all these votes wound up in Lake Michigan. Well, there's a lot of fucking shenanigans going on with that election with the mafia. That was a big part of how he got elected. So, but later in life, we like to look back and say, now there's a guy, right? And so Roosevelt creating our national forest system, yeah, he was considered a radical.

Yeah. It was like this outlandish idea, like, you mean to tell me you're just going to take huge chunks of land that could earn some individuals an extraordinary amount of money right now. And just set it aside for just Joe Blow future person to enjoy. And he even made a point where he went on to say at one time that he was doing it for those in the womb of time. Whoa. doing it for those in the womb of time. Whoa.

Because at the time people were arguing like, okay, if public land, like, because here's the other thing we haven't, that kind of pertains to this, is wildlife in America is publicly owned. It's not like, most countries it's not like that. Like, wildlife in the U.S. is publicly owned. So if a deer,

if you've got a deer standing on your neighbor's place, you, as not a federal citizen, but you as a citizen of your state, own that deer. That person can control access to it, but it's not his deer. He can prevent you from going up to it because you can't go on his land, but he has no more right to that deer than you do, generally speaking. Speaking. So when people said to Roosevelt, like, how are you blocking industry out of all these lands? And how are you blocking industry from getting at the wildlife so we can sell the wildlife back when we had commercial hunting? He goes, if it's for the people, give it to us.

And that's when he had his line. He's like, yeah, but it's for those still in the womb of time. That's deep. Yeah. That's deep. People. That's deep. People didn't like him. I'm sure. Someone tried to do that today.

Dude, he had a thing one time where he had a timeline. He had to draw. There was an end to when he could. He kept just throwing shit into the National Forest. I mean, for every day that guy was in office, I think he saved about something like 50,000 square miles of land or something. Some absurd amount of land for every day. I could be wrong about that, but an absurd amount of land for every day he was in office. And there's a thing he did called the

Midnight Forest, where he had a deadline that expired. His ability to keep drawing up big chunks of national forest was set to expire at a certain time on midnight. And he was up to last minute of midnight with a couple of aides marking up maps, making giant national forests. Now we celebrate

them all. Wow. Right? When they made Yeltsin National Park, people were pissed. I'm sure. Yeah. Mineral resources in there, man. People are still pissed today. Timber in there. Yeah.

But I'm saying all these big decisions, like, these decisions happen. That we create a public land system in America. Like, the decision happens. Generally, people look and go, wow, what foresight. It's kind of this insane idea that you would have a country as prosperous as ours with our

GMP, 350 million citizens. You'd have this thing as huge as us that would still have an intact suite of megafauna. No one else pulls that off. So we've accomplished a lot, but then now and then people just get pissed

because they want to be able to do stuff. There's like interests that want to make money. And when they want to make money and then someone tells them no, they get a little bit pissy and then the smart ones of them and i will know and i would never detract from their intelligence the smart ones of them um rather than walking away they go like well how is this law why is the law this way and what can we do about it? And right now, those folks, those folks have an idea that that the solution to their problem is that we would, you know, begin undoing the great work of people like Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold and all these seminal American figures that we would we would undo their work and go back to a system where these landscapes are privatized. People who've never been to Yellowstone, and I mean, even if you're not a hunter,

you should go once in your life. Yeah, you can't hunt Yellowstone anyway. Right. That's the point. I have a problem with that. Do you? No, I'm joking. But it's, I mean, just forget about hunting. Just the fact that we have this immense state park that you could go to.

And I took my kids there this summer. And we hung out with buffalo. We were, like, standing there. There was a buffalo that was 100 yards away. We were just looking at these giant, huge, prehistoric animals. Yeah, it's a great place for introductory wildlife viewing. We took a lot of selfies with elk because the wolf population has increased in Yellowstone. The elk have decided, look, there's one spot to hang out, the fucking visitor center. So you go by the visitor center, there's a

Coca-Cola machine, there's a vending machine, and right next to the vending machine there's a fucking elk just chilling, just laying down there. I mean, they have zero fear of people. And it's amazing how they become sort of acclimated. Yeah, habituated. Yeah, they know. Habituated is the word. It's funny. When you look at it, there's a problem I've identified as much as I love Yellowstone.

In my perspective, as a fellow that does what I do for food and enjoyment, which is to hunt, I look at it from a grand wildlife thing. And I look at it as it serves the purpose of being this like fantastic wildlife sanctuary, you know, and everyone like, you know, our mutual friend, Doug Dern, even on his farm. Right. He has established a like a sanctuary area, like on his farm, right, he has established like a sanctuary area, like on his farm, a place where you don't go, that it's always a spot where deer go and they don't get harassed in that area. And it's like a self-imposed sanctuary. And so you have Yellowstone provides that.

But I've identified this sort of thing, an idea I've been working on called Yellowstone Syndrome, though, is where people, Americans, some of them, their only idea about wildlife and wildlife politics and wildlife management comes from the Yellowstone story. That they wind up having a difficult time understanding wildlife and wildlife management in situations that are outside of a national park setting. management in situations that are outside of a national park setting, which is to say they don't have a very good grasp on the inevitable conflicts that are going to arise between wildlife and society. And that's a large chunk of ground where you just do not have those sorts of conflicts. Like what kind of conflicts are we talking about?

Oh, like, for instance, a thing that's been very difficult and very vexing for wildlife managers is what happens to Buffalo when they leave the Yellowstone National Park. Just, I mean, to back up on the Yellowstone issue, just to get a sense for how revolutionary that idea was, you know, there was, the Indian Wars weren't even over when they made yellowstone yellowstone you know we were still battling american indians on the great plains when yellowstone went into effect matter of fact yellowstone was a park when the nez perce were chased through by the u.s army and they actually killed a couple tourists in yellow, right at some of the buildings that are still there. Wow. Yeah. So you went to a park and got shot by Indians who were engaged in a war with the U S army.

Wow. It was like, it was, it was like they hadn't even, you know, the West hadn't even been in some ways that the center West hadn't even been settled. And they were made, you know, and West hadn't even been, in some ways, the center West hadn't even been settled. And they were made, you know, and they made the National Park. And then Roosevelt went there in a, you know, at the commemoration.

Like it was, you know, went there to applaud it. So I just get a sense of like, you know, I mean, just it was just an outlandish idea. It was so far ahead of its time. But with the Buffalo situation, for instance, how it's kind of, how it's sort of colored the broader conversation would be Yellowstone's

one of the few places where they've, where the animal, buffalo or bison, their Linnaean name is bison, bison. Some people say it's bison, bison, bison, as opposed to bison, bison athabacus. Athabascus.

But buffalo. I call them buffalo. It's very controversial to call them. You're not cool if you call them buffalo. Really? No, you're supposed to call them bison. Who are you hanging out with? Old-timey folk. They use coyote?

Yeah. Well, coyote. Let's get to that in a bit. Yeah, we'll call him Buffalo for now. I'm reading Dan Flores' book. Oh, you are? Yeah, I'm almost done with it. Good, good.

No, you know, I'm going to call him bison. What the hell? So, Yeltsin was one of the few places where bison have always existed. Now, at a time, the ones there were fenced and fed, but they've always been there. And the other thing you have there is you have a genetically pure strain, Now, at a time, the ones there were fenced and fed, but they've always been there. And the other thing you have there is you have a genetically pure strain where there's been no cattle introgression into those animals. There's only a handful of herds in the U.S. where there hasn't been some amount of cattle introgression. You can't see it usually, but it's there oftentimes.

There's some in New Mexico that don't. There's some in the Dakotas that do not. And the Yellowstone ones do not. They've never interbred or been interbred with cattle. So they're valuable in that way. And, you know, at various times, there's a few thousand of them in the park and the snows pile up. And one of the things they like to do when the snow piles up is they like to leave the park and they go out at West Yellowstone,

which is one of the primary entrance points into the park, and they'll go out at the Gardner entrance in the late winter. That would be fine probably. Maybe it'd be kind of fine if it weren't for a couple issues. There's a livestock disease called brucellosis, and it's a Eurasian disease. So it's a non-native. We don't normally think of diseases as being native or non-native,

but it's a non-native disease called brucellosis. And brucellosis causes cattle to, it causes heifers. A heifer is a cow that's, you know, with just one young. So a heifer is a cow that's going to have her first calf. It causes heifers to abort their fetus. Now, they've gotten brucellosis eradicated from cattle herds, generally. When a state is getting brucellosis cases, they have to pay for testing. So it's expensive to get all your cows tested, but if you have brucellosis in your state,

then the producers got to pay the testing to get them tested to make sure they're not brucellosis positive. Well, cattle long ago passed brucellosis to the bison. When the bison leave the park, they carry brucellosis with them and could reintroduce it into cattle herds, though there's no known case of that happening yet, I don't think. How does it spread? Well, animals, the primary way it's spread is animals eat their own afterbirth, and they'll eat afterbirth of other animals. That's the interesting thing why they eat their own.

You know, some folks eat their own. I proposed that to my wife. She was not down with it at all. But I've got friends that take their placenta. I got some buddies that had their wives' placentas made into pills. Pills? Yeah, there's some gal that dries it up and puts it in capsules for you. I've heard of people cooking it with carrots.

Yeah, I wanted to cook some, man. But the other thing is, when my wife, I swore up and down that I was going to drink the breast milk. You know, I got a buddy that puts breast milk in his coffee and everything, man. You know? And dude, in the end, I couldn't go near it. Does he wear a diaper, too? No, but he's like, if he's going to have coffee, you know, when women are breastfeeding, they have little bottles in the fridge and everything. Yeah, he'd just go in there, grab one of those, put it in his coffee.

Jesus. Just drink it. I tried it just to taste, but I felt like I was stealing from my kid i felt like i was being a cannibal which is one thing that's my that's where i draw a line that's where you draw the line well you ate a monkey yeah i know and i felt horrible did you uh yeah i felt real bad well not so bad i didn't eat it but it was it was it it was emotionally complicated for me. We'll get back to that. Yeah, the brucellosis deal.

I'm trying to explain Yellowstone syndrome. So the brucellosis deal is a real issue for some people. So conceivably, a buffalo could leave Yellowstone, give birth. The afterbirth could be there. A cow could eat that afterbirth and get brucellosis. Yeah, and like everything worth talking about, there's so many caveats and complications to this thing, such as elk have brucellosis, but elk come and go as they please. Right. So the minute a buffalo or a bison, when he leaves Yellowstone National Park,

if he walks into Montana, now it's not even fenced, right? It's like he doesn't know. Right. But when he crosses the line, he goes from being a wild animal from being native wildlife to being livestock. So he goes from being the property of, like, under

the administration of the National Park Service to the administration of Montana's Department of Livestock. Wow. Native animal. Now, how does that work, though? So if the native animal crosses over onto private property, is he owned by the- He's the only animal that that happens to.

So coyotes, fox, wolverine, grizzly bears, black bears, bighorn sheep, elk, mule deer, white-tailed deer, moose, they leave their wildlife. Buffalo leaves, he becomes errant livestock. Wow. Therefore, every year, there's a perennial story every year where a bunch of buffalo leave the park and get rounded up by the Department of Livestock and sent to quarantine or usually sent off to slaughter. Yeah, they just killed a bunch of them.

They killed like 2,000 of them. Yeah, man, they get a lot of them. You know, that place cranks out a lot of animals, too. So it's like they're always throwing out these humongous numbers of animals they've gotten, and then every year you wind up having quite a few animals in the park. But it's a thing. Now, people point out this, because elk have brucellosis, and elk are calving in proximity to cattle.

And as far as we know, there's not like ironclad cases of cattle, of elk transmitting brucellosis to cattle. People wonder, like, well, why are bison picked on? Why them? And one thing might be to say that we got and this is generally true of wildlife in america i think there was a brief period around 1900 when we had you know maybe about 75 of them left in the u.s people got very used to they're sort of like not being buffalo, bison. And now it's becoming like a player again.

It's like the animal is becoming a player again that we now have. We were down to 75. We got 500,000 in the U.S. now. Ninety-four percent of them are privately owned. But we have a population of a half million buffalo in this country. So, but we got really used to them not being around. and so it was this thing it was like this additive thing like i think if there had been a long period when there were no elk and then all of a sudden someone said hey guess what we're bringing these big ass ungulates back they eat tons of stuff and they're huge and they might have a disease and we're just going to

let tens of thousands of them cut loose across the landscape. People have been up in arms, but they were used to elk because elk were always on the ground. So that's why buffalo recovery has been so hard because it's kind of like you're trying to sell people on this new thing. Even though historically it's hardly new, they've been around, but there was a period of,

you know, a century, not quite a century, when it wasn't an issue. So it's really hard to get livestock interests and private land owners around these areas to unanimously get on board with the idea that we're going to have animals roaming out of the park that has been proven to happen that will get into your corral and kill your horse. Or, you know, take out a school bus if it hits them or possibly transmit disease and the big thing that people don't really talk about but which is a huge issue is um impact grazing rights impact cradle cattle grazing get back to kill the horse yeah they'll gore

they gore stuff they just go into the horse' stable and fuck them up? It's happened. When they rut in June. They just get crazy? Yeah, they rut in the summer and the bulls get very... they get real fired up. And the funny thing there, too, with the Yellowstone ones, you're dealing with animals that are habituated. So it's only been like, you know, it's been 100 years that you haven't been able to hunt in the park,

but animals have gotten habituated to humans. We like to look at Yellowstone and think you're seeing something kind of natural, but you're actually seeing something pretty unnatural because that landscape was hunted for 12,000 years. The last hundred years notwithstanding. People had always hunted Yellowstone. The unnatural thing is these animals being super comfortable.

The lack of being habituated to humans is unusual. But we go there and be like, this is what animals were like. I'm like, not if you draw a line back to when humans arrived in the new world. Well, that was one of the more fascinating things about Dan Flores on your podcast, where he was talking about buffalo, and that at one point in time, the

Indians, or the Native Americans, when they had guns and they had horses, they were on their way to extirpating the buffalo on their own, before the market hunters came into place. That's an incredibly controversial idea. That was a, yeah, that was a controversial idea. And that was put for, again, you know, not, I talked in my book that I wrote,

and, you know, I have a book, American Buffalo, about, you know, the history of the animal. And my own personal experience is hunting for the animal and finding a skull of one that I found and sort of a journey that led me down but in working on that book i spent quite a time reading the work of dan flores and he was a mentor of mine in graduate school and he and he wrote this uh very interesting piece called bison ecology bison diplomacy and what he looked at was he was trying to find was there a period when um when plains tribes, was there a period when Plains tribes, was there a period when Native Americans had actually reached equilibrium with the bison herds? And he argues that they had not achieved equilibrium.

That even if, that one of the points, he makes many points in this thing. I don't want to sell his piece short. It's a very large piece of scholarly work. But one of the things he talks about is just the introduction of the horse had humongous impacts on the animals, on Buffalo for a handful of reasons. Grazing competition. Okay, so enormous herds of wild horses. And the horse was distributed.

So you trace, and Flores explains all this as well, like you can trace horses to Native American tribes on the Great Plains and elsewhere. They go back to the Pueblo Revolt. So, you know, the Spanish conquistadors lost a lot of their animals, and the animals are traded up the eastern face and up the western face of the rockies and then were distributed all around and so you're when you get this idea in your head of a of a plains warrior right mounted on horseback hunting for buffalo that was a very distinct phenomenon that didn't last nearly it didn't last as long as the u.s has been a country

like it did not last long between the introduction of the horse and the indian wars they want to like largely you know removing free roaming um autonomous tribes off off the great plains it just didn't last that long even though it became like the iconic image of the mounted roaming autonomous tribes off the Great Plains. It just didn't last that long, even though it became like the iconic image of the mounted plains hunter. And what he argues is the advent of the horse changed hunting practices so much. Up until that point, you had tribes that were partially or largely agrarian coming out of the Mississippi River Valley, out of the Missouri River Valley, that would grow crops. And they would, during the summer, when the buffalo herds were gathered

into tremendous gatherings during the breeding season, they would do trips. They would do buffalo hunting trips. Once they had the horse, you had all these cultures turn into nomadic cultures that could have a trevoy and a horse and just follow the herds. And it was a tremendous amount of pressure put on these animals to support that amount. You had tribes migrating out onto the Great Plains and fighting over those resources. And I believe it was one of his graduate students who later looked at this piece, where when Lewis and Clark did their big westward journey in the early 1800s,

the places where they talked about seeing the greatest amounts, where they were just blown away by how many buffalo they were seeing, generally fell upon sort of no man's lands areas between warring tribes. So the buffers of zone, the buffers of traditional hunting zones, like where the blackfeet and the sioux met up, the edge habitat there was where you had a lot of animals that weren't getting exploited by people.

So you started to see these regional extirpations of the animal. And then firearms was another big blow. Where even outside of white hide hunters just showing up, but just those European technologies of horse, gun, you were seeing a steady depletion that would have not,

it seems like the resource would not have lasted. You'd have had the same outcome. What was interesting about his paper was that he was saying that the early settlers or the early explorers of the United States in the 15 and 1600s, they didn't talk about buffalo. No.

So when the Spanish, the Spanish would go through places and they would name wildlife. Now, like some of the Spanish came through, you know, they go through into Florida. Some of the first guys to step foot in Florida, they talk about everything they see right down to possums. Okay. They're not describing buffalo. into Florida, some of the first guys to step foot in Florida, they talk about everything they see, right down to possums. Okay? They're not describing Buffalo. Though they're describing everything else. The English go in there 200 years later, and they're talking about Buffalo.

So there's sightings in what's now New Orleans. Cabeza de Vaca ran into Buffalo around what's now Houston. There's sightings of Buffalo in what is now Washington, D.C. Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone, figures like that, were hunting them around the site of Nashville and Memphis. They were all the way to the East Coast. It seems there were only a handful of states that at some point in time didn't have any.

My home state of Michigan doesn't seem like there were any. For a long time, people thought that there had been buffalo in New York. But it turns out the evidence for them in the paleontological and archaeological record is two skulls. Both the skulls have cultural markings on them. And it seems that they were the same way that me and Joe here will hunt an animal and bring the head home, that they might have been just things someone had, trophies that were traded or whatever, because there's no other faunal remains from the animals in New York. But most places had them.

Now, the mound builders, so you have all these Mississippian cultures along the Mississippi River and Ohio River valleys called the mound builders. They made these giant effigy mounds that people didn't even realize they were there until we had airplanes to get above and see the snakes and like serpents and deer and all these creatures they were building out of earth mounds that were so big that guys would like live around the mound and never recognize it for what it was until they could look at it from above you can see these things with satellite imagery they never built buffalo mounds but But once we emptied, and this is one argument. It's kind of a two-pack argument. Once smallpox and other diseases carried off 90% of Native Americans. 90?

That's an estimate. Jesus. Many people say that. I mean, I think it's a, I think like the scholarly consensus is that it's in that ballpark. What are the numbers? Do they estimate the actual physical numbers? You know, I've seen it, but I don't know what it is. I think that there was a number that was floating around for a while, 10 million.

But I remember a lot of people criticized that number as being high. I don't know what the fashionable number is now. But 90% approximately wiped out by diseases from the Europeans. Yeah. is now. But 90% approximately wiped out by diseases from the Europeans. Yeah. And that this was primarily responsible for this explosion in the population of the

buffalo. So that's why when the Spanish would go into places, this is a theory now, the Spanish would go into places, first contact, like first people's traipse through an area. They would go into places and they would describe village after village after village after village.

Okay. And they never talked about Buffalo. The English, a while later, they'll go down, some guy will go down the Mississippi River. He don't see shit for people, but there's buffalo crawling everywhere. Wow. So, and another issue, another thing people talk about is changing agricultural practices, that slash and burn agriculture was becoming used. And slash and burn agriculture was conducive to spreading. It was conducive to Buffalo because it created open spaces for them.

That's another thing people look at is slash and burn agriculture. It's proposed that the apex of that species was at the moment we found it. The fashionable number used to be 60 million, and that was put forth by a guy named Dodge City. Dodge City, Kansas. It got its name from a guy named Colonel Dodge. Colonel Dodge, if you're interested, I could explain how he came up with it. But Colonel Dodge is the one that floated the idea that there were 60 million buffalo. Now the fashionable number is, you know, 32.

You hear 32 million, you hear 40 million. And people say that that was an extraordinary amount of those animals, and we witnessed it at its apex and that other times in the history of the continent and other times of the natural history of our continent there weren't nearly that many of the animals that's such a fascinating concept and i never had heard it before i'd only heard that there was giant numbers of them and that the europeans came over and americans wiped them out because we wanted the skulls and the fur. We wiped out the tail end of them.

So if you get to the end of the Civil War, at that point, there's maybe 15 million, and that's when it was in 1871 and 1872 that what you might call the commercial scale harvest of the animals happened. And it happened in the south, what was called the southern herd, around 1871, 1872, in the area surrounding Dodge City, where there was a large population of them. And then it took 10 years. By 1882, you couldn't find one.

So the last big slaughter happened around Miles City, Montana, and it happened when the railroad made it to Miles City. The Northern Pacific made it to Miles City and provided a way to get hides to market, and they did the last big kill there and killed about a million of them up there. And then a year later, Roosevelt came out to Medora, North Dakota, thereabouts, hired a guide and scoured the countryside. Hunting through the carcasses of rotting animals, trying to find one last one.

Wow. So they could save him. No, he wanted to get one. It was his epiphany. To think about that guy, he kills one and does a war dance around it. What kind of dance is that? I don't know. I've always heard it described as a war dance.

Hooting and hollering, dancing around like a hunting show. Wow. Right? So, but then whatever kind of effect it had on him, he then went and became the most influential conservationist we've ever had in this country. So it struck him somehow. But as a young man, yeah, he was like, man, I missed it. There's got to be one left. So he found one.

He caught one, killed it. Wow. The Montana, North Dakota border there. And then, you know, went on to do all these kind of amazing things. But that was the big slaughter. What's cool about that, the time that worked out, is photography was just coming out. People were starting to have portable cameras. And there was a photographer named L.A. Huffman who'd been sent out to Miles City,

and he actually took a lot of images of those hide hunters working the last big herd, the last big shoot. And then shortly after that, there was some number of animals left, and they allowed a bunch of Plains Indians to leave one of the reservations, and they went and did a little bit of a mop-up. But yeah, then shortly thereafter, there was a guy named Hornaday who was kind of writing letters around trying to find out who had one of these things laying around because it had all fallen into private hands. You know, there was guys like buffalo hunters would kill them and they'd be like, holy shit. There's like none left.

And some of these guys actually went out and caught a couple. There was a guy named Buffalo Jones down in Texas that went out and lassoed a couple calves, raised them on cow's milk. And that's why we even have some now. Now, it turns out no one knew this. But it turns out there were several hundred in Canada that no one knew about. Really? They didn't know about them until much, much later.

And how'd they get to Mexico? Oh, they probably always roamed into Mexico. Now, the first buffalo that a European ever laid eyes on was in what's now Mexico City. But it was in, who was the emperor there? Jamie, what was that dude's name? The Aztec leader in Mexico. Tenochtitlan? Was it?

Hmm. What year is this? What year are you talking about? Oh, in the 1500s. Cortez found one in Mexico City, but it was in a zoo. Wow. Montezuma. Try saying that.

The city of Tenochtitlan. Oh, okay. So it was Montezuma. Tenochtitlan, which is now Mexico City, he had one in a zoo. That was the first one described by a European. Wow. But he was hundreds of miles away from their native range. They just had one as, he had all kinds, he had a menagerie. He had all kinds of animals that he'd collected

from throughout their domains. So that was the first one described by a European, but he didn't realize at the time that it was from far north of there. But they did stray down into Sonora, and they strayed well up all the way up. Still today, we have them all up by Great Slave Lake. They extend well up into Canada. So there's a number of them. Some people call them wood buffalo.

Some people accept the idea that there's subspecies. Remember I was talking about bison, bison, athabasca, and bison, bison, bison, plains bison, wood bison. There's morphological differences. They look different. In the boreal forest, there were hundreds that we didn't know about. And some of those populations are

still in now in Canada. So we have, you know, like in all things with Americans, we have an American centric view of everything. We have an American-centric view of everything. We have an American-centric view of wildlife where we'll say there's only 75 left. And I feel like our Canadian neighbors are oftentimes being like, you know what? We didn't quite handle it quite as badly as you folks did. So, yeah, it was, you know, it's a long, bizarre picture.

I can't remember what the hell we got, what even got us on the subject. Dan Flores. I don't remember either. Yeah. Public lands. Yeah. Oh, Yellowstone syndrome. Yellowstone.

Bruce Losis. Yeah. So there's a tremendous background to the Buffalo story as we just explored. buffalo story as we just explored and if you follow wildlife politics it's a conversation happening in places alaska which is a whole other long story about how it's happening there it's happening in alaska it's happening in montana it's happening in wyoming it's happening in the dakotas um which would be do we welcome are we going to welcome this animal back onto the landscape as a free-roaming wild animal like all of our other? Earlier I mentioned how this country, we have an intact suite of megafauna.

We haven't lost, we might have damn few of some things, we haven't lost any of our large mammals. It's kind of mind-boggling. During the colonial period, Western Europe, I think, lost five or six species of large mammals. The oryx, many things. We haven't lost any large mammals. We came pretty close, though, right? Damn close.

With the buffalo in particular. Yeah, and we've lost birds. We lost the passenger pigeon, and we lost the ivory bill woodpecker and you know we lost many things of many kinds of many not many but we've lost substantial numbers of things we haven't lost any large mammals extinction is terrifying for us right that's that's one expression that uh extinction man-made extinction yeah that uh that's terrifying for us. To me, it's a moral sin. It just is like, you know, we have all these conversations in bioethics and other things about playing God.

I think that extinction, like human-caused extinction, it's terrifying. Do you support, if there is evidence of human-caused extinction, if there is the opportunity to bring something back through scientific methods, through like some sort cloning, do you support that, or do you think it's gone? It's gone, it's gone. Man, I'm on the fence about it, and my understanding of the technology is probably too limited for me to really speak to it with any authority, but the most interesting aspect of that is when you get into the Pleistocene extinctions

where, you'll notice that I could just, just to kind of bring people up to speed on what that means is if you just look globally at where we lost where we lost, where and when we lost pachyderms so elephants, including

the woolly mammoth, you know, mastodon on our own continent. If you look around like where we lost pachyderms, we always lose pachyderms right around the time humans show up. You know, like we lost like we lost them. You know, humans arrived in the new world. It's a hotly debated number, 14,000, 15,000 years ago, and kind of contemporaneous with the extinction of woolly mammoths. We know that to some degree humans were preying on woolly mammoths

and preying on mastodons. There's context of hunting equipment in context with woolly mammoth remains. There's butchering sites. There's all kinds of stuff, And they vanished right around then. Yet, we didn't reach an island out in the Bering Sea until 4,000 years ago, and there was a woolly mammoth on that island until

4,000 years ago. And then dudes show up, it's gone. So some people will look, there's a thing called the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis, which holds that all these large mammals, nine genera of large mammals that went extinct when humans arrived in the new world that they were somehow human caused extinctions now other people argue that it was you know other things climate change

issues randall carlson is a guy who i've had on my podcast before and he argues that it's due to asteroidal impacts yeah i hung out with a guy who was doing research on that. There's a lot of evidence. A lot of evidence of massive impacts. This guy was looking for nanodiamonds. Yeah, they found nanodiamonds. The nanodiamonds. I think you say it's called tritonite, but it's nuclear glass.

It's the same exact glass that they get on sand when they have nuclear explosions when they do test sites. They find that all throughout Europe, and it's all around 12,000 years. And there's also more somewhere around 10,000. So it seems like somewhere between 12,000 and then another thousand years or so later, there's another series of impacts. And it has to do with this asteroid belt that we pass through. And it was fucking fascinating, but terrifying conversations. I went with a guy that there's a, there's a famous, uh, paleo Indian site North of Denver called the Lindenmeyer site. And the Lindenmeyer site was one of the few, not one of the, the only place that we now know where large gatherings of, of the Folsom culture, uh, large gatherings of the Folsom culture where you had perhaps hundreds of Folsom hunters in one place at one time.

And the site is marked by a large, like an easily recognizable escarpment. And it's presumed that it was just a place that you could describe and people could meet up. But the Lindenmeyer site has been studied extensively and tons of radiocarbon dating has happened at the Lindenmeyer site. And I was with a guy there who was looking, who was working on that theory, the theory with the asteroidal impact and the nanodiamonds, because he was able to go draw samples from strata that had been tested and studied so much,

which is an expensive, laborious process to get datelines, and he was there drawing those things out. And then I had other people who worked professionally in this space talking about how sort of ridiculing the idea and saying it's just like one of these ideas that never dies and never quite lives but never quite dies. But, you know, when you look at it, it's just so hard to believe they hunted them to extinction so quickly. Well, the massive amounts. Especially so many things. 65% of all the North American mammals died really quickly.

And it wasn't just big stuff. Yeah. That's the other thing. It's like, we used to, because when we, when they used to do digs, right, they used to do like archaeological digs. You know, they would use high pressure hoses and shit. And they were, they only had, they were only looking at the big stuff. But many, many things went extinct. Did you see that species small species you know yeah it's it's it's kind of hard to picture it's just so hard to picture what exactly happened it's just i don't know especially people killing them with atlatls yeah those goofy things which i mean how

far can you throw an atlatl how did people kill stuff out 40 yards i think that's a real crazy that's a reach to be like the hulk but then the thing they say is you know we talk about wildlife and yellowstone being habituated um that wildlife probably would have been the other extreme they probably would have been like uh the elk and yellowstone when wolves showed up, was it like, oh, what's that cute dog? Right. So, and then they have very low fecundity, you know, pachyderms. But we're not just talking about, that's the problem. We're not just talking about pachyderms. We're talking about like short-faced bears,

the American cheetah, giant ground sloths, on and on and on and on. Did these guys really hunted all to extinction? It's hard to imagine, but it's also hard to imagine all that shit going to extinct for any cause. Well, it also coincides with the end of the Ice Age, so something happened, something radical created the Great Lakes. Yeah, but the end of the Ice Age is just an idea that we've created.

Right. Like, you know, there were interglacial periods. Like, if you look at the Ice Ages or the Pleistocene, right? There were interglacial periods where the water was much higher than it is now. There were interglacial periods when the water would have been up over the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Really? And then shit froze again. But the idea that the Pleistocene-Holocene transition is just just a point we divided in our heads.

You know, there was many glaciations. Right. Time will only tell if we ever see another glaciation again. But I don't know. And that's one of the things that makes, that emboldens people who contradict, one of the things that emboldens people who contradict human-caused climate change is that we've been through so many cycles, they'll often point out and say,

well, how do we know this isn't just another warming trend between Ice Age periods? And then a lot of people point out and go, because there's no evidence that they ever happened this quickly. This is like radically fast. These are things that played out over 10,000 years. These aren't things that played out over human lifetimes you know an interglacial period being a 10 000 year thing interestingly interglacial periods um are really important to understanding

all these issues because interglacial periods and glacial periods mark moments when wildlife could have come into the new world when wildlife such as you know buffalo and then later elk and other things when they would have had the opportunity to come from asia and cross the bering land bridge and come down into our onto our continent and when it would have when they could have not done that so when you look at like when did humans show up when did these other things show up like when did the horses disappear when could they have come down when could buffalo come down how did elk get here you're sort of always looking at assuming they didn't come down when the entire north was swathed in 40 feet of snow and ice presumably they came down when it was an ice-free corridor and so you can kind of fine-tune all these comings and goings by looking

at moments when there was an ice free corridor to come down in. So it's beautifully intertwined, man. It's so complex and there's no way to really lock it down yet. There's no way to really totally figure it out yet. But it's so fascinating when they find these animals still. They just pulled a big giant skull with tusks out of a ranch in Montana, like really recently. I think I tweeted it. I think it was, see if you can find it on.

My buddy found a jaw with the molars in it, but it went to a museum. Wow. Where? He just found a couple years ago. He found it in the tongue. My friend John, his buddy owns a ranch in Montana, and he was talking to some sort. This might be the same guy. Do you know where it was? No, I don't know.

I'm talking about a dinosaur. They found a dinosaur on his property. He said the archaeologist came, what was it? Paleontologist? Paleontologist. Paleontologist came to his property. He said he went for a walk up the hill. He stopped. He found something on the ground.

He looked around. He made some calculations and he came back to him. He goes, congratulations, you got a dinosaur on your property. He goes, what? They came back. They have a fucking T-Rex on his property. No way. Guy got a million and a half dollars because they pulled a fucking T-Rex from his property. That's what he got for it? The paleontologist found it and literally found it in five minutes. He said he started walking around the property.

He found a tooth or some sort of chip, a piece of bone. He recognized it immediately as being a dinosaur, made some phone calls, called some people. And next thing you know, like within weeks, they had started excavations. No shit. Found a fucking T-Rex on his property. And because it was on private land, you could sell it. A million and a half dollars. Because on public land, once something's fossilized, a half dollars yeah on public land once something's

fossilized you can't touch it yeah that's interesting but do i agree because i don't want to escape your question about undoing human caused right extinctions what i was getting at is the the animals that i'm most interested in just just from a boy, in a very boyish way, are those Pleistocene critters. And if I knew, you know, if I had the diamond bullet, right, that would tell me that, yes, absolutely, we lost the mammoth because of human hunting behaviors at the place of seeing Holocene transition, I would be like, let's bring them sons of bitches back right now. Wow. If you could prove without a shadow of a doubt that human hunters created that problem. Yeah.

And I knew the technology, like let's say the technology was just fail safe. You want to talk about some controversy. You think people are up in arms about some buffalo running around. You cut loose some short faced bears or, you know, that would be a giant issue. Yeah, you think the wolf reintroduction was shaky. Well, the short-faced bear is a scary goddamn animal. It's a huge bear. Very fast.

Really? Yeah. Yeah, they were a fast runner. And they're bigger than polar bears. Yeah, and you know there's the American cheetah. Yeah. Well, that's the reason why antelope are so fast, right? That's a theory.

The antelope are ridiculously fast for any predator. Their speed doesn't make sense through the context of what's chasing them right now. Why do people call them speed goats? They haul ass. But why goat? speed goats. They haul ass. But why goat?

Because they're, I think there's a dumbass reason and there's a taxonomical reason. And I know dear friends of mine on both sides of that spectrum where if I put it to my brother who on occasion calls them goats, he'll talk about how taxonomically they're distinct. Like they're the only thing in their family, right? They don't have any close relatives. But they're a horned animal that sheds its horn. Now, antlers shed elk, moose, deer, all the cervids. Like, antlers shed. Horns don't shed.

Animals carry their horns for their whole life, like a krat and a sheath. But antelope shed their horn. But it turns out that some people like to point out that they're like close to a goat. That the goat is close. Other people say they kind of look like goats. I don't know. I think it's a derogatory

term. I don't like it. Really? I don't like derogatory animal terms. But why is goat a derogatory term? Well, goat is what people call the greatest of all time. It's the goat. Now, a mountain goat is a noble, majestic animal. A barnyard goat I don't think is noble and majestic. And I don't think they're equating it to a mountain goat.

Right, the mountain goat being those beautiful, white, fluffy goats. Well, being a wild animal. Those are awesome. Yeah, it's a wild animal. And to be like a speed goat, you're saying like, oh, it's like a goat, a lowly barnyard goat that hauls ass. I was just in Hawaii. I feel like this is derogatory. This is a minor issue I'll point out, but it does bother me.

I don't think it's derogatory to call it a goat. But I do think that an animal for whatever reason. I haven't met anyone who does think it's derogatory except me. It's just you? Yeah. It's so funny because mountain goat, you agree, is a noble animal. Mountain goats are gorgeous. I don't want to interrupt you. I was in Hawaii and goats are everywhere. It's just you? Yeah. It's so funny because mountain goat, you agree, is a noble animal. Mountain goats are gorgeous. I don't want to interrupt you.

I was in Hawaii and goats are everywhere. It's bizarre. Yeah. Driving down the road, there's fucking goats everywhere. Yeah. Wild goats. And they're like a wild animal. Yeah.

Man, you want to talk about wildlife politics. Hawaii. Hmm. If you ever want to get into that. Yeah, it's crazy. That's interesting shit where you have your whole suite of mammals is uh your whole suite of mammals is all non-native yeah all of them but here's the here's where it's interesting so polynesians colonized the hawaiian islands like the first people the first humans to colonize the hawaiian islands polynesians who carried with them rats Rats, dogs, pigs, right? We have native Hawaiians, right?

Like Hawaiians, indigenous Hawaiians people carry native rights. They regard themselves as native Hawaiians. Yet people are always telling them that the wildlife is non-native. So you've got people that showed up with pigs. And now the Nature Conservancy will get chunks of land in Hawaii and eradicate the non-natives. And the native Hawaiians will be like, but we're contemporaneous with these animals. How am I native? Right.

But you're telling me that the thing I like to hunt is non-native and needs to be gotten rid of. It's ridiculous. They sure think it is. Well, I don't mean to say they, like it's a unanimously held viewpoint, but people who hold the viewpoint that they hunt pigs, their father hunt pigs,

their grandfather hunt pigs, their great, great, great, great, great grandfather hunted pigs. Now, what's the pressure coming from to eradicate them? Is it from agriculture? No, it's from people who are worried about losing yet more.

And we've already lost a dozen, you know, speaking of regional extinctions or extirpations, and in some cases extinction extinctions, we've lost dozens of species of Hawaiian flora and fauna to, considering a wide range of ground-nesting, have been lost to rats and pigs. So now it's not so much focused on the animals, but flora. So there are people who are trying to, who would like to, and I get where they're coming from, who would like to restore large areas of native plant communities in the Hawaiian Islands. Because when you go there, all the fruit you see, the coconuts are not native.

Papayas, mangoes, breadfruit, none of that stuff's native. Wow. It's all introduced. That place is a Petri dish, man. They're hunting turkeys, pheasants, chukar. They're hunting all- Axis deer. Axis deer.

They're hunting everything there, but none of that shit's from there. So there are some people who look and they say, we have an ecological responsibility to try to salvage some part of this, but meanwhile another perspective would be like, we made this place bloom. This place oozes with

life, and there's people who they're able to glean all of their food sources from the island from things that their ancestors have established on the island and it's offensive to them do you you know about uh darwin visiting the galapagos islands and that it's one of the ways that he sort of formulated his theories about evolution and all the various variety of wildlife. Through visiting the Galapagos Islands, unintentionally, people have had seeds

that they brought with them on the bottom of their shoes. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Which is really crazy. And all these animals, plants rather, are growing that are non-native. And this debate pops up as to what to do with them. And then there's all these turtles that live there. And this debate pops up as to what to do with them and then there's all these turtles that live there and this debate pops up as to like how to protect these turtles and they brought in goats to eradicate some of the some of the plants now they have a problem

yeah and they some people brought goats over there like some sailors brought goats over there as a food source who left them on the island figuring hey we'll stop back when we need food and now they've got goat problems. So they're trying to figure out how to eradicate the goats. And there's a great radio. You know the Judas, the idea of the Judas goat? Talk about that. That's good.

Well, they take one goat and they sterilize that goat. And so that goat can't breed, but that goat will find all the other goats and hang out with that goat. And they put a radio collar on the little fucker. And then he lets them know where the other goats are. And then they gun down those goats and let this with that goat and they put a radio collar on the little fucker and then he lets them know where the other goats are and then they gun down those goats and let this one goat live. And he goes, well, I got to go find some other goats.

And he goes and finds the other one. They're like, oh, we found him. And the thing is, the poor guy don't even know. He's like, man, am I lucky. They show up in his helicopter. I mean, they're taking them out like platoon style. You know, the writer, Tom Robbins, is he still alive? Skinny legs and all.

I think he's alive. Jitterbug perfume. Yeah, I think he's alive. You know, he was talking about, in one of his books, he talks about Hawaii, how Hawaii had a rat problem. Then they brought in the mongoose, and they had a mongoose problem. And he makes a joke that we had a crime problem and we brought in cops well that's sort of what australia did right i mean australia brought in fox to deal with the rabbits they brought in rabbits the rabbits got out of control they

brought in fox to deal with the rabbits the fox started eating ground n nesting birds. Yeah. And they brought in cats as well. They have a huge feral cat problem in Australia to the point where their hunting magazines are really bizarre. Because people hunt cats. Holding up cats. Like, what? Like, my friend Adam Greentree lives in Australia. And, you know, it's a crazy place because it's similar in a lot of ways to Hawaii is that a lot of the animals they hunt are non-native but their hunting magazines are filled with fucking dogs and cats and shit it's just really weird to look at really shaking america if you left one of those on an airplane so the next

passenger to find well i was looking at it on an airplane and i got to the part where the guy was holding up the cat gripping grin and i just turned the page real quick. I was like, fucking Jesus. It's heavy. Yeah, the non-native thing is it amazes me our inability to anticipate I guess it's, I'm going to say something

that's weirdly contradictory. Our inability to anticipate unintended consequences, which doesn't entirely make sense, but you see what I'm getting at. Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, there's no forethought. To bring in foxes or cats and say, well, they're just going to eat the rabbits that we left behind.

Yeah. You had your fucking mind. They're going to eat everything. How do you not see that coming? Don't you know what a cat does? Cats kill things. You can't even throw a ball of yarn in front of a fucking cat. It kind of doesn't end. We're doing

it now. Something. We won't know yet. In 10 years, or 20 years, we'll be goofing on something we're doing right now that we think is a good idea. Probably, right? We'll be like, can you believe those dumbasses

in 2016 thought X? I have some theories about what those things might be, but I mean, you know, we're not done making big mistakes. Commercial large-scale agriculture, in a way, is not only just really, really recent, it's completely unnatural. To have these giant swaths of land that's filled with corn. Like monoculture stuff. It's very unnatural. So people that think about like, oh, I'm eating vegetables, I'm eating natural, I'm not a part of this whole factory farm system.

What the fuck? You're not. You're part of factory agriculture system. If you're eating corn, if you're buying corn, you're eating corn on a cob, thinking you're all healthy. That shit is coming from a really unnatural place. It's coming from this ground that has been filled up with all this nitrogen that's been sucked out of the air through the Haber method. They've dumped it into the earth because the earth's been depleted with minerals to the

point where it no longer supports growth of plants unless you add stuff to it. And then you have these large scale machines that you need to tend to this stuff. And there's nothing natural about large-scale agriculture. No. We just don't consider it because we consider factory farming when it comes to living animals as being horrific. Whether it's pigs or cows or chickens, that disturbs almost anybody with a conscience. Yeah. But we don't think twice about the consequences of large-scale agriculture on actual wildlife and the wild ground.

When you picture that we have, I mean, much vaster than this, but that we have entire counties that support a single species. Of plant. Of plant. Oftentimes, a single species of a non-native plant. And kill everything else. Like corn is, it's kind of a native, you know, it's derived from maize. It's like kind of a native plant. And kill everything else. Now, corn is kind of a native. It's derived from maize. It's kind of a native species.

Sort of. But oftentimes, it's like entire counties given over to a single non-native plant. Well, isn't corn sort of like looking at a domestic dog and saying, well, that domestic dog is a wild animal? Yeah, really. I don't even know. And saying, well, that domestic dog is a wild animal. Yeah, really.

I don't even know. Like, if you took someone from pre-Columbian times and showed them a corn cob, I don't think that they would probably recognize that. They wouldn't know what the fuck that was. They were dealing with a corn that was smaller than when you are making a stir fry and get the little baby corn things. Were they that small? Small little things, yeah. Wow. And they can't even Small little things, yeah. Wow. And they can't even tell, like, they can't tell how it even came to be. Some people have a theory that it was bred from a grass.

It's like, I guess, like, the lineage of corn is hard to track. Wow. So was this Native Americans that did this? Were they figured out how to splice these plants together and tie them together? There's a book. I can't remember the name of the book that gets into it. But just trying to track down sort of the history of corn and how it came to be. They oftentimes point to a domestication of animals and plants.

Sometimes it was sort of an accidental domestication. You'd go out and gather something, right? And you bring it home. You process it near your home. You're scattering seed, right? And eventually you're creating like, creating these things. But, yeah, corn's difficult to track. The lineage of corn is not clear.

It's just so bizarre what kind of a foothold it has in American culture. It's everything, man. It's everything. It's crazy. I recently interviewed for, you know, I was talking about the documentary project we're working on. I interviewed an animal. He's from California. He's an animal rights activist,

and he teaches animal ethics. And he has a brand of veganism that I think would be refreshing. You should have this guy. I keep telling people you should have him on your show. What's his name? His name's Robert Jones. He has a very refreshing sort of veganism.

I'd have this dude over to dinner. Really? Yeah. But he doesn't hold out ideas that he's pure because of what we're talking about. Right. He's educated enough about agriculture and educated enough about the inherent struggle, the inherent life and death through all food production, that he doesn't think like, oh, I have all the answers.

I am the gentle, kind one. Because he's seen cornfields. Right. He knows you're violently churning the land with equipment. Things are dying when you grow vegetables. We're enmeshed in a cycle of life and death that is inescapable. His point, and I don't want to totally steal the guy's point. He'd do a better job of explaining himself.

But his point is that if we agree that we should minimize suffering, right, there are steps we can take to minimize suffering. Not saying that I've got it answered and I've got it figured out. But if we want to minimize the suffering of sentient beings, then that's a conversation we should have. The best thing that he said, the best thing that he said in explaining the animal rights movement, which I've always been a little bit baffled by is he gets into this idea of,

he uses the term speciesism yeah i've heard that one yeah so you know we had we've dealt with and deal with racism we've dealt with and deal with sexism and we are he would argue i think he would say we're on the cusp of tackling our problem of speciesism. And he would say, like, if you went to someone, like, you know, if you went to the Mississippi Delta, you know, in the late 1700s and said to someone like, hey, you know, have you ever thought about the fact that, you know, you kind of like own and abuse these people? Have you ever thought about how they're like people too? You know, they're like you and me. He was saying like the guy wouldn't be able to cope with what you were saying. He'd be like, oh, clearly. I mean, come on.

Any idiot could tell you that that slave is not. I mean, come on. Right? Right. He says that's where we're at right now with animals. Hmm. He's like, when I say it to you, you're like, well, clearly we're so. Does he aim to stop animal on animal crime?

You know, I asked him about that. And that was one of the things. At the end of our conversation, I even said to him, I'm like, you got a couple of things you need to work on because he didn't have a great one for that another one that he didn't have a great one for is he had not that he didn't have a great one

not that I was trying to stump him because he's a very intelligent well thought person, very respectful to people he's talking to even people that disagree with him I have nothing but admiration for the guy. But we had a conversation that I was not totally satisfied with, where he has a deal of reverence, it seems, and again, at the risk of putting words in his mouth,

he has a reverence for indigenous hunting cultures, right? That they had this sort of respect. They had a respect for animals that we don't have, and somehow that made it okay for them like they had a spiritual connection and so that made that okay and we don't have that so we're not okay and I asked him about are you able to identify the point in human development and cultural development what is the point when you're supposed to give up the chase? Like at what point do you have a responsibility to stop hunting? Because you're saying that it is okay for some people. It's absolutely not okay for us now. When should we have made the jump? Because earlier we were talking about like the Spanish. There's a situation where the Spanish had gone into the American Southwest

and were trying to, as they called it, civilize Southwestern tribes. And they were building homes for them, trying to instruct them in religion, trying to create schools for them, trying to provide them with the tools of the agrarian lifestyle. And they would write letters back to the king complaining about how these people refuse to

stop go hunting like you give them a chance and these sons of bitches take off to go hunt and here we are giving them everything they need to be sedentary and they just won't get with the program so there is this struggle where people are like you you're supposed to be like, I think some people expect you, like if you're a human, they think that the end result of humanness is that you like wind up not hunting. That it's sort of like the goal of civilization is to make you not a hunter. And I think he's a little bit guilty of that because he thinks it is okay for some people. And where he runs into trouble is he talks about that I asked him about ethics.

He says, but the animal doesn't care about your ethics. To him, he's dying. If he dies and you have a good feeling in your heart, or if he dies and you have a bad feeling in your heart, he's dead. It doesn't matter. They don't know what trip you're on. They suffer the same, regardless of your motivations. Which leads me to want to point out okay, but the indigenous cultures that you

say it's okay for them to hunt, their animals are suffering too. The animals they kill don't know that they're being killed by indigenous peoples and therefore it makes the suffering more palatable for them. They're dying. So there are some traps there that to me weren't answered in a satisfactory

way does any of that make sense yeah absolutely it's a very messy situation if you want to try to confine behavior that way and you want to impart moral judgment on people because what do you do with people with pets what do you do with people that have cats i mean he has he has companion animals he has some very good he has good stuff to say about that. Really? Yeah, he has very interesting stuff to say about that. What does he have to say with those animals that are mistreated and confined and ground up into cat food? Oh, no, he wouldn't like that. But, and I don't know if he feeds, I would imagine, I feel kind of like that.

You can feed your cats a vegan diet. No, I would imagine. I've got a whole bit in my act about it. Because I got into it. Because I found, I got harassed by someone online. and I went to their Twitter page, and it said, hashtag vegan cat. And I went, you've got to be fucking kidding me. And then I found this entire community of people that feed their cats vegan food.

The problem is the cats go blind. Oh, is that right? And they die. Robert Jones didn't like that. He wasn't that interested in that argument. And I was saying to him, do you feel that we should separate predatory animals from prey and put them on like a soy diet and he just thought i was and i understand why he felt i was being like ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous well it is but how you're gonna feed those cats it's a real question

i mean why you you're you're you're taking this cat and you're putting this cat above the animals that it eats you're deciding that these chickens and're putting this cat above the animals that it eats. You're deciding that these chickens and the fish and all the different things that you need to grind up to make cat food, that's okay. Because you love this cat. You have a hierarchy of animal life. And we all have a hierarchy of life. Vegans, I've seen vegans slap mosquitoes. I've seen it.

I've seen that. I've seen them kill ants. There was a lady, I used to live near an ashram. The lady that ran the ashram was spraying bug spray. What's an ashram? It's a Buddhist temple. That's okay. And she was-

You used to live in an ashram? Next to it. Oh, next to it. Next to it. Sorry. And she used to spray bug spray on the ants. And I was like,

what the fuck are you doing? On the ants? On the ants. She killed the ants. She was killing them. And I go, what are you doing? She's like,

well, we don't like to, but they get into our food. I'm like, holy shit. Like you're a vegetarian who's committed to a Buddhist life of do no harm, but yet there's no way around this. You have to poison these fucking ants with death from the sky that comes out of these containers, these metal containers, these aerosol containers of death. Yeah. This is bizarre lines that we draw. But as long as I am taking the liberty of putting myself in Robert Jones' position,

I think that he would have some interesting stuff to say about this conversation we're having where we're like because some harm happens then let's just say fuck it and we'll open up the gates well no but let's talk about life is is life in a small form more insignificant or less significant than an elk like who decides that an ant is less significant than an elk if i shoot shoot one elk, I can eat it for a year. That's one life. One life for a year. You don't like ants getting on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich. So you spray a whole colony of these fuckers.

You've killed thousands of life forces. And even ruling out the insect thing. I remember a guy that wrote a pretty scathing review. I think he might have been in the Wall Street Journal or somewhere. This guy wrote a pretty scathing review of my third book. And there he's like, just the number of animals this guy has killed about me. Right. And I remember thinking, if you go and get a 12-pack of McNuggets, how many chickens, and you sorted out the parts,

you're probably eating hundreds of chickens. Probably. Yeah. Because it's all scraps. It's emulsified scrap. Yeah. They're not like, okay, we're going to take this chicken here and we're going to produce 30 nuggets. Well, my problem is they never turn that force on themselves.

They never turn that high-powered vision of the consequences of their actions on themselves. If someone's talking about, like, if this guy's a vegan and he's a vegetarian, and he's talking about how many animals you've killed, how many animals are you responsible for for your fucking whole wheat pasta? But he wasn't even? He wasn't even. He wasn't even. So he was a meat eater. Yeah.

Well, that's preposterous. No, no. That's Ricky Gervais. Ricky Gervais constantly talks about hunters and hunting. The guy eats meat. Yeah. There's so many weird laws. And I get it that he doesn't think people should hunt animals just for trophies.

And I agree. But it's very rarely do these animals get hunted just for trophies. Like, if you shoot a fucking elephant, the village eats the elephant. You're feeding hundreds of people with that elephant. And I'll point out, too, and I do all the time. Not that I'm pro-elephant shooting. It's illegal. No, I, like, we got to talk about Yellowstone Syndrome.

I almost have, I'm almost having a personal, I'm almost, I'm taking a couple year long break from discussing wildlife in Africa. Really? It's such a black hole. Well, I should point out that your article that you wrote was one of my favorite on that subject. And it was right around the time that the Cease of the Line thing was going down. Yeah, yeah. subject and it was right around the time that the cease of the line thing was going down yeah and it also referenced uh that kendall jones girl who uh got a lot of hate online because she had she's a texas cheerleader and she was really cute and i think yeah people hate a good-looking woman hunting in africa with a big smile on her face they do not they do not like if some dude like

did real good and heating and cooling yeah winds up going to Africa a lot, people are like, yeah, that's fucking cool. As long as hot girls, hot American girls don't go there. Well, and it's also like, what are you shooting? If you're over there and you're shooting a kudu and you're going to eat it and you feed the villagers, everybody goes, well, it is an antelope. That's okay. This is traditional something that we eat.

Oh, yeah. I was going to talk about the hierarchy. Because we spend a lot of time at work when we're out filming meat eater we spend a lot of time talking about the hierarchy because for instance um we have a camera guy we work with rick smith um has a long professional history and working with wildlife and filming wildlife and uh didn't grow up hunting um he's he's coming around he's curious about it but he asks a lot of good questions and we were looking we had killed a moose

and the next day we were up in Alaska and we killed a moose and the next day we rolled out of our camp and happened to go near there and there was a wolverine dragging off moose parts you talked about this on your podcast it's a great story

Rick was like in that area between September 1 moose parts. You talked about this on your podcast. Yeah. It's a great story. Rick was like, and you're allowed, in that area, between September 1 and March 31, you're allowed to kill, you're allowed a wolverine. And my friend Buck Bowden,

you know, he has eaten and enjoys wolverine meat, and the hides, as we all know, are phenomenal. I don't think we all know that. Well, traditionally, people listening to this are like,

we all know. Traditionally, park to this are like, we all know. Traditionally, parkas are trimmed with Wolverine because Wolverine will not freeze up when it's got frost on it. By trimmed, you mean around the hood? Around the hood, yeah. When you're exhaling, stuff gets frost. Wolverine doesn't frost up. Wow, why is that? I don't know why.

It's a hollow hair, but I don't know what it is about it that it resists frost. So anyways, we're kicking around. I'll tell the end first and say we didn't shoot the Wolverine, but we were just talking about, you know, we legally could have gone and take a crack at it. Did you have an opportunity to do so? Yeah. You would have had to have acted quickly, but yes. Or you could have staked it out and just waited for him to come back. He's a little thief.

He's stealing your moose. But we already butchered it. Right. He was taking the hooves. Oh, okay. Guts, right? But you're a marrow eater, so he's taking bones. He actually stole two of our marrow bones because we then-

Motherfucker. Because we took the four big marrow bones, and he wound up getting over on another night at dark and stole some of our marrow bones out of our cache. But we didn't see it happen. Anyhow, Rick's pointing out, I don't think you should mess with, like, he's like, that's an animal that I think is off. And we're like, why is that? He's like, well, they roam one of the things he was talking about. He's like, man, they cover so much ground, you know.

They'll have a home range, you know, they'll go 250 miles. It's like, yeah, but cover so much ground. They'll have a home range. They'll go 250 miles. It's like, yeah, but we just killed a caribou, and caribou go 1,000 miles, hundreds of miles. So it's not distance traveled. No, it's just something. It's like, it's just something. Well, people are that about bears, of course, the way you describe it, charismatic megafauna. Yeah, that's not my term, but it's a great i've hats off to whoever did i'm sure you

can find out who invented charismatic megafauna you always attribute it to you so i'm gonna leave it with you no i didn't come up with it i heard a linguist one day you could find it i heard a linguist one day talking about uh he was interested in tracking where things come from that would be an easy case but you know what he was interested in tracking was waitresses saying, are you still working on that? Because there was a time when no one said that, and then all of a sudden everyone said it. And he was interested, where did are you still working on that come from?

The one mouth that it first came out of. So, yeah, charismatic megaphones, great. And I think that there's some things that are so charismatic, wolves and grizzlies, that, like, New Jersey cat ladies know about them. Did you see that, the billboard that they had up, we're all Cecil? There was a lion hugging a bear that was trying to stop the bear hunt in New Jersey. No. You never saw it.

I know that guy, someone, you know, pedals the bear. Yes, someone shot pedals. How rude. Like, whenever something like that happens, man, I remember reading it. I read it right when it came out, like the Fish and Game Agency there. Just a little background.

There was a bear. It was kind of a neighborhood bear in new jersey and he had had some kind of injury or uh uh possibly birth defect where he wasn't able to he spent a lot of time walking bipedally yeah um which is not uncommon which is probably where he had his he come from. No, but he had obvious injuries in his front section, so would walk. Yeah, definitely not uncommon, and probably it could be a lot of the things we have about hominids, like large, mysterious hominids could come from, obviously, bears walking around on their back feet. But New Jersey, I don't want to have this mean too many but they have an exploding

population of black bears. I'm always reluctant to say something's overpopulated because you always got to ask according to whose definition. Is it like the automobile insurance industry? Because they'll say everything's overpopulated that you might run over with your car. Agricultural interests have a different definition of overpopulated.

They have a shitload of bears. That's fair statement they had a hunting season turns out some guy comes into a check station and he had shot this bear that walks around on his back feet and they'd given them the name petals because he'd taken to scavenging bird feeders and stuff around a neighborhood and um so i can't remember the magazine one of those one of those dip shitty uh new york online magazines that just basically co just basically steals shit out of the New York Times and writes its own interpretations of New York Times articles. It wasn't Gawk or something like that. It said that pedals had been assassinated. Yes.

I read that. One of those websites that all they do is hack on traditional media, but then they just write articles commenting on traditional media stories. They're not generating leads. Look at this billboard. Ban the bear hunt. They are all seesaw. Oh, they're crying.

They're crying. They have cartoon tears, like literal. And look how the bear is hugging, or the lion, rather, is hugging the bear. Poor babies. Yeah, that's a nice billboard. What about petals? Oh, the charismatic megafauna thing. Because another thing we talked about on our podcast recently,

we had a biologist on who works for the Kalispell tribe, an Indian tribe that historically were were in you know idaho portions of washington portions of montana and they're very involved in caribou mountain caribou recovery in the u.s so most people do not know that um traditionally you know that traditionally we had a caribou population that drifted down from drifted from Canada down into northern Washington, northern Idaho, northwest Montana. We don't have that now at all? Well, there's about a dozen of them.

Right at this moment that we're talking right now, there are a couple miles from the U.S. border inside Canada. But there used to be, the last legal one to be killed was back in the 1920s. What happened to them was just disturbances to habitat. There was always a small, like not a large number of them. And we had a lot of things that messed with their travel corridors, development, road construction, logging activities. And now they rarely ever drift down into the u.s

but there's an active recovery area there so we got about a dozen caribou that are contenders to be in the u.s and that sometimes will actually cross and come into the u.s in the selkirk mountains no one gives a shit about mountain caribou. The amount of like energy, the amount of mental energy that goes into people's favorite animals at the expense of other good projects we could be, other good wildlife projects we could be working on kind of boggles my mind. Black bears, you have, we have enough black bears. We have black bear hunting seasons in, I think, 36 states.

Wow. Rapidly expanding population of black bears. And people will expend enormous amounts of energy and resources because it's like, I don't understand it. And they're just, and And they just are willfully ignorant about other wildlife issues that are much more important because it's like it's not cuddly. It doesn't look fuzzy. Well, they don't have a stuffed one.

I don't know what it is. Stuffed teddy bears. There's a lot of it. I mean, we've gotten accustomed to thinking of these things as our friends. It's Yogi Bear. Yeah. You know, we've done these anthropomorphizations with these cartoons and television shows. And it's ingrained in the consciousness of a lot of people.

No matter what you do, you can't get it out of there. There's some legitimate differences between animals. You know, we were talking about that yesterday. We were talking about the differences between bears and deer, like how a deer looks at you and a bear looks at you. You know, about how, when I was talking before the show about whitetail deers, like catching one. He looked at you in a way nothing's ever looked at you.

They look at you, they're electric. Their eyes are like, they're like, no, you're there to kill them. And they're like, oh, that's a fucking person. I got to get out of here. Yeah, yeah. Or a bear looks at you like, hmm, what's going on here? Can I eat you? Can you eat me?

You know, there's like a weird sort of relationship that people have with bears. Like they look at you, but they don't look at you with the same sort of intense fear that a game animal looks at you. Yeah. There's this blurring of the lines there. And I think that when we think of animals that we eat we have very distinct classifications you tell people you eat bear they go oh god yeah and I did you know one of the first hunts that you tried to take me on was a black bear hunt and I was like man I don't want to go yeah it

takes some getting used to yeah now I'm like when when we going let's go get some blueberry bears yeah I yeah I have I you know i have the same i have the same problem i do i do create a hierarchy but i also try to like question where the hierarchy has come from comes from and to suss out contradiction but the only problem to me where it gets problematic for me is the way that in which it seems that you can get some Americans so excited about preventing any kind of exploitation of a handful of species, yet they remain completely uninvolved with the issues and politics and recovery efforts of other things that need it right now. Yeah. You know, the fact that with wolves and certain populations of grizzly bears, certain populations of wolves have reached recovery objective, yet we still cover them under the Endangered Species Act.

Because people want to use the Endangered Species Act to save things from any threat of exploitation at all. Like nothing to do with what the legislation was meant for. It's become the Favorite Animal Act. And if you want to initiate something called the Favorite Animal Act and try to get it passed by Congress, feel free. But don't steal the ESA and take it away from its intended purpose in order to protect your stuffed animal animals. You had a very important point on one of your podcasts where you're talking about population

numbers, population objectives. And you were saying that, well, like if you look at elk, for example, in some places elk are extremely common, you know, in Colorado, for instance, there's more elk in Colorado than I think any other state. But yeah, by, by, I think I think almost like a factor or two. There's a lot. So if you tell people in Colorado that elk are endangered, they're like, what the fuck are you talking about? If you go to Florida, there's no elk. Yeah. Elk are gone.

Wolves, same thing, right? Elk are gone from 90% of their historic range in the US. Wow. 90%. Yet no one has a problem with elk hunting seasons. Right. Right. Exactly. But we eat them. That's the thing.

Who's eating wolves? Well. That's the problem. A wolf looks like your dog. No, I don't think it's. Oh, an Arctic explorer is his favorite wild meat. What? Loved it.

Oh, he's a psycho. Dude, you know what he ate too? Carpaccio? Carpaccio? He ate. carpaccio he ate uh they found a oh a desiccated um whale beached and it had been like in the in the salt and his tongue was dried out and he cut the tongue out and he said how they boiled it repeatedly repeatedly to try to get the salt out and eventually ate it. And then they ran into some Eskimo hunters who said that thing had been laying there for three years. Jesus Christ.

He was hardcore. How the fuck did he eat a three-year-old tongue? Like you said, he just kept boiling it and reboiling it. Dude, anyone, like, if you want to, too bad you can't have that son of a bitch on your podcast. Wow. He made, Stevenson, he's got a book, My Life with the Eskimo. So he made first contact with a's got to book my life with the eskimo so he made first contact with a lot of people in the high arctic they knew he was meeting people who knew about whites

but hadn't met any yet and what was funny about this dude is how frustrated he would get with uh trying to show him his shit which he thought they'd be blown away by so he'd like get out a gun All right one day. He's one day. He's explained to people that you know we can do he's like my people You know we can do surgery what year was this he was making first contact in the early 1900s Up like like coronation goal Victoria Island. What happened the Canadian high art it again? They knew they knew that there was Whites they hadn't met any whites yet, and he'd come to them, and he'd expect to blow them away. Like he showed some guys his firearm, his gun.

And this dude's like, yeah, that's cool. But I know a guy that can shoot his bow, and his arrow will travel to the far side of the mountain and kill a caribou that he can't even see. Or he was saying, we can do surgery on people and do an appendectomy. And he says,

I know a guy that can take your whole spine and skull and brain out and put it back in again. He was talking about telescopes. And he's like, you can see the moon craters. And they're like,

I know a guy that's been to the moon and hunted there. That's one up in shit. No, dude, it's the greatest book, man, how frustrated he gets. But one of the cool things he describes is he describes how they would kill, when they killed a polar bear, they would bring the head back and put in their lodge. I don't want to push this too far, but much in the same way you might bring a head home and hang it on your wall,

they would bring it home and put it in their lodge. And the thinking, as explained to Stephenson, was that I'm bringing him home so that he can observe me and my family and see that we're good people. And when he goes to the afterlife, he will tell other bears, if you've got to get killed by somebody, not a bad guy to have it happen. That guy's okay.

And I often point out about the animal skulls and hides in my own home that I feel like, you know, I don't want to make myself seem too spiritual in some ways. I think of that. I think of that with the animals I have in my home. Just a concept that you run in your mind. Yeah, that I run in my mind. I think about him.

Why was I talking about stuff? Oh, loved wolf. So he ate every damn thing, like muskox, caribou, walrus. He ate everything and talks repeatedly about his preference for wolf meat. Preference? Above all. I'm telling you, reading my life with the Eskimo. Well, you ate a coyote.

Yeah. What was that like? Didn't like it. But here's the problem that I've run into. Because in Vietnam, I ate a fair bit of domestic dog i coyote and i monkey monkey red howler monkey those are my big my big transgressions of me you know we all like i said i admitted earlier to having my own animal hierarchies and those are the times when i've sort of strayed into uncomfortable ground for myself. Canines and hominids.

Are they a hominid? No, not a hominid. Primate. Primate. So, yeah, I get like a, I get where I can't really tell what it tastes like. It's difficult to tell what it actually tastes like because you're feeling, there's so many other things going on. Emotions, thoughts, contributions. And I get like a hot, a hot guilty feeling.

But when I was in Vietnam, they described dog as a hot food. And I kept asking what that meant because I didn't really understand, but it does. It like makes me sweaty. I thought it was like a guilt thing. But people would, they would eat it and serve it around the tet holiday so the lunar new year it was auspicious it's auspicious to eat dog meat in the days leading up to the lunar new year and it's a game it's a food that you have it's like a risky enterprise in some areas of vietnam it's kind of a risky enterprise to eat deer.

To eat dog. I'm sorry, to eat dog. These restaurants open up that are only open that time of year. There's people coming in to bring in good luck. Risky enterprise, how so? A guy told me that

one of the guys I interviewed told me that he was unable to get his, he was unable to have children. And they determined that it was on him. His wife was fertile, he was infertile. He ate dog. And it changed his fortunes, it changed his luck. And he got his wife pregnant.

Now, he says, I will not eat dog again for fear that i would undo what i did it's a powerful food this is a sentiment held more in the north than in the that held more like i spent time in hanoi and i spent time in saigon or ho chi minh city is the sentiment that was expressed more like in more of a semi-spiritual way in the north than it was in the south now a translator that i had hired uh told me i don't need dog uh he said i don't need dogs i have a dog i went to his house to see his dog i I come in, and the dog is in a small cage. Probably, I'm not exaggerating.

I say it was probably maybe two feet by three and a half feet. And it's a wire mesh cage, and there's like a drip pan below it, basically, to collect the animal's waste. Whoa. And there's a bowl of rice. to collect the animal's waste. Whoa. And there's a bowl of rice.

And the dog just goes apeshit when we come in. And just like looking at the dog, it just was not, it just did not seem like a well dog, okay? I said to him, and he lives like a very busy street in Hanoi. Like you walk out and it's just full Vietnam mayhem, you know, scooters. It's just like insane insane and I said to him so you just take them out you can just go walk them

here and he kind of looks at me like he doesn't understand what I'm talking about and it turns out that that dog hadn't been out of that cage since he brought it home that was his pet dog which he kept like a parakeet Jesus Christ he said i wouldn't eat now conversely in the trang i went out to a farm where a guy has a small plot of land he's

they have like a basically there's a system there where the you have very poor farmers who don't own the land but it's state-owned land, government-owned land. But they have subsistence farms. And this guy raised sugar cane. He had an air gun. He can't have a regular gun, but he had an air gun, and he would hunt various arboreal marsupials and things to eat. And he had some water, river flowing through his place. And he had a small amount of livestock and raised some crops

and peppers and various things. And he had a bunch of dogs running around on his place. Just pet dogs. He was explaining to me that now and then when the dogs are bred up to a number that's hard to support them, the dog buyer comes

and the dog buyer will give you some cash for your excess dog population. And those are the dogs that go into the markets of Vietnam. Other countries actually have places where they're like breeding and rearing dogs for slaughter, but that was the Vietnamese system. So it wound up being like of many interesting things about this whole thing is about being like

comparing like this guy's pet to this guy's livestock you sort of got into this thing as which is the more enviable which is the more enviable position livestock i'll take that life over than living in the cage and shitting onto like a great And I went to visit a guy that actually, a wholesaler, who buys the dogs from farmers out in the countryside, and he comes back and they fatten, they would fatten the dogs

on beef stomach, beef trim. Basically the stuff that in the U.S. we send to rendering plants. When they slaughter cattle, most everything, once the meat's gone, everything goes to a rendering plant. Like when they slaughter cattle, most everything, you know, once the meat's gone, everything goes to a rendering plant. He would buy basically what U.S. production facilities

send to a rendering plant and that's what he would fatten dog on. And you'd go to the markets and they'd have dogs stacked, like just dog parts stacked up in pyramids

at the market. It was bizarre to see, man. And I'll tell you, I went out in different places and with different people and different things. I went out for seven nights in a row and I could never get beyond, I could never get beyond my own biases about what's food and what's not food. It was just like very difficult for me to, to eat it and fake my way through and it was it was hard so i do

understand when people come to me and they're looking they're like hey man a bear like and you know i'm a hunter i've hunted great i've hunted and eaten hundreds and hundreds of pounds of black bear meat um when people come and they're like dude i just like i don't want to act like that they're coming when people come to me and express disapp, dude, I don't want to act like that they're coming. When people come to me and express disapproval, I don't want to act like I can't understand where they're coming from because I had the same thing I felt there. I remember making the argument, and I never fact-checked it, but I feel like there are more people in this world who live in a country where it's socially acceptable to eat dog meat than not. I haven't formally fact-checked that, but I remember looking at some basic figures and thinking that that was true. Well, it's interesting that we choose to not eat pigs,

but pigs are probably as intelligent, if not more so. Choose to eat pigs. Choose to eat pigs, rather. Yeah. Probably as intelligent or more than dogs. Yeah. And dogs are probably more dangerous when they're feral than pigs are. Yeah.

When pigs are feral, they generally avoid people. When dogs are feral, no one always. I mean, there was an instance a couple years ago outside of Atlanta where an elderly couple was attacked and someone was killed by wild dogs. Yeah. where an elderly couple was attacked and someone was killed by wild dogs. The Australian dingo traces back to being a dog who owes its ancestry to human activities. Does it really? So it used to be a domesticated animal?

Yeah, it was a very early form. Wow. Check that out and make sure I'm right about that, what the genetic history of the dingo is. What's their wild dog called? The dingo, right? The dingo, yeah. It's the dingo, yeah. Yeah.

I think it's some kind of, it's a dog breed. You'd probably find Adam Green Tree holding one up by his ankles with a fucking bow hole, arrow hole. It says it's a wild dog. It says wild. But what's its ancestry? Just Google dingoes were once domestic dogs. Dingo

domesticated animal. I'm looking at the genetic status, origin. Here, I'll just pull it up so you can see it. Indian wolf and Arabian wolf. Where did it evolve from? Hmm. Here.

Man, I don't feel like I'm wrong. Hmm, interesting. Widely held that dingoes have evolved and were bred from the Indian wolf. Yeah, right there. 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Bred from. Was assumed for all domestic dogs. The theory was based on the morphological similarities of the dingo skulls and the skulls of these

subspecies of wolves. However, genetic analysis indicated that a much earlier domestication. Huh. Oh, so there is a domestication. New studies suggest dingoes may have originated in South China. Okay. So yeah, they were originally have originated in South China. Okay. And arrived with humans. Interesting. So they were originally domesticated and then cut loose. Yeah.

I mean, I've told you. I mean, I had my own thing about bear, and then I hunted bear and ate bear, and then that thing went away. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what it is. But it still doesn't seem the same to me as like a deer. Like if you gave me a choice, hey, would you rather go hunt axis deer, which I've never hunted, it seems so much more natural to me than go hunt black bear.

Yeah. You know, I have such a complicated set of feelings about black bears. feelings about black bears. Um, and as a hunter, strangely, I've gotten to the thing where, um, maybe before I even say that, I'm going to say why it's not quite strange. I have found that a lot of big game hunters will do some amount of bear hunting, Some amount of bear hunting, get a couple bears, and then drift away from bear hunting. They still respect how difficult it is and how much you can learn about bears, but I find that a lot of people who've gotten some bears are always excited to go on a bear hunt if it's someone's first bear hunt. They're like, you know, I have no desire.

If you want to go, I would love to go along. Right. But it's something that happens. But whereas something like elk, the more you get and the more you eat, the more you want to get and the more you want to eat. Right. But don't you think that's a public pressure thing, though, in a lot of ways about bears?

Because I've described even to my friends about hunting bear, and they just put their head back. They're fine with me hunting deer. They're fine with me hunting pigs. Everybody seems to be in support of hunting pigs. Yeah. You know how my brother put the bear thing? Here's the conundrum for him, and it's pretty simple.

A bear has a very beautiful, very usable hide. So deer hides, you know, like deer hides, you can, through a process, you can get like a buckskin from it. You can get, you know, some deer hides, you can get a pretty good usable leather that, you know, they used to use to make apparel. In fact, everybody knows Daniel Boone, right?

Daniel Boone was, much of his life was spent in the business of trading deer hides. Daniel Boone was a commercial hunter. He would go out and shoot white-tailed deer in the summer when their hides were thin and sell them. And it was used for industrial workwear. It was used for work apparel. Like basically the 1750s version of Carhartt clothes was Was made out of deer hide. Summer deer hide. I'm not familiar with that term.

Carhartt? What does that mean? Like Carhartt workwear? Carhartt jackets? Carhartt pants? Jesus Christ, yo. No. I know Dickies.

Yeah, same thing. Okay, I never heard of Carhartt. Yeah, same thing. Have you heard of it, Jamie? Kind of, yeah. You know, like work pants. It's got a little holster for a hammer and shit on the side of them. Yeah, okay.

So they used to make them out of buckskin. Yeah, like work apparel in his time was made from buckskin. I bet those things smelled great at the end of the day. Oh, dude, my dad saved a lot of his deer and had a sport coat made out of his own deer. And, dude, I think it was amazing. It smelled good. Really? Oh, dude, it was the nicest jacket.

I should steal it. He's dead. I should go dig around and stuff and find that coat. It was dyed black. It was a beautiful coat. How come you never had He's dead. I should find, I should go dig around and stuff and find that coat. It was dyed black. It's a beautiful coat. How come you never had one made? You've shot a lot of deer. Well, that's what I was going to get at.

It's like, yes, you can do stuff with it, but it's not really, in today's age of other fabrics, it's not practical. However, a bear hide has timeless beauty and timeless application. Have you ever thought about making a jacket out of bear hide? Yes. Did you ever do it? Yeah. Well, no, because what I was doing for a long time was saving up my bear hides and I wanted to cut them into like nine or 10 inch squares and have a very large comforter made out of many different bears cut into squares. Stitched. I haven't given up on that idea. But I give a lot of my bear hides away to people who really like them.

Anyway, when you get a bear, it's like no one in their right mind gets rid of a bear hide. Right. So you get one, and you get it tanned, and then you got a bear hide. And once you got a bear hide, and it's, like, on the floor, and then you got a bear hide over the back of the couch, and you got a bear hide hanging on the wall, bear hide and it's like on the floor and then you got bear hide over the back of the couch and you got a bear hide hanging on the wall you get to a point where um you don't need any more bear hides you you eat the meat and you have the hides but you don't need more bear hides and when you get

a bear there's an expense to getting the hide prepared but you feel wasteful not using the hide so it's very hard to shoot a bear just for meat right because you feel like you're wasting something that people really want and it's beautiful and people like to use to decorate their homes and use it as a totem of the wild as opposed to a white-tailed deer where very few people do anything with the hide yeah so now like one day danny was like the last bear he got he got up to the bear and and and found himself just kind of, he goes, I just don't, I don't need, you know, like I look at it and I'm like, I have like a set of obligations to this animal now

and I'm not excited about it anymore. I don't want another bear hide. It's an expense. And he just, he never killed another bear. Wow. He's got some bear hides that he loves, but he just, he just got to where he's got enough other stuff to eat. He's a moose snob. He kills a moose every year.

Likes to eat moose meat. Feeds his family moose. Feeds his family salmon primarily. Well, if he kills a moose every year, the other problem with that is you're talking about like 600 pounds of meat, right? Yeah, he's got a family of four. He burns through a plus. Wow. I mean, it's all he eats.

Yeah. But that's just kind of like where he got i knew a lot of people for whatever reason i used to hunt bears and my other brother and then he don't he like when he's out at his his when he's out at his wife's ranch he'll see bears running around during bear season he doesn't even think about going and hunting for him and he used to hunt bears it's just like something happens and you just quit you just quit wanting to hunt bears. One of my favorite episodes of yours was on the Prince of Wales Island where you had a bear in your sight and you just decided, I don't want to shoot this bear.

Yeah. It's just like, I really, I enjoy watching them. I enjoy hunting them. I enjoy making smoked black bear hams out of them. But it's like I... Would you ever do that with any other animal, though? Do what? Look at it and say, I don't want to shoot this.

Like if you saw a mature mule deer, 180-inch mule deer. No. No, right? Mm-mm. Right. But I could picture it like with, you know, there's a handful of animals that, you know what it is? You can't, one of the things is this. I can't help but watch a bear.

If I'm out and I glass up a bear, you know, when I say I'm out glass up, I mean like if I'm sitting on a big glass and tit or a glass and knob up somewhere, I have a commanding view of the landscape. Glassing meaning use your binoculars to look at the landscape. The way I generally hunt, I hunt a lot of open country in the American West and Alaska and things where you have good visibility. The bulk of the time I spend hunting I spend on a good lookout point, I spend hunting, I spend on a good lookout point, a high point where you can see, you know, a good 180 degree view, or maybe not always 180, sometimes 360, whatever, a commanding view of the surrounding landscape. And we generally hunt by sitting there and observing with binoculars and just watching,

watching, watching to the point where sometimes we'll spend days doing nothing but watching animals through binoculars. And when you get good at this, you find animals that people would never in a million years find. That other people would never in a million years locate. When I'm doing that, and I find a bear,

and I'm observing a bear, I would never leave that bear to go do some other thing. When you find a bear, like when I find a bear, I watch him until he's gone. You can't turn away from him because I always feel like at any point he's going to do some amazing thing that would blow your mind. Like what?

I don't know. Like crush something's skull. I don't know. They're just up. They like are always doing weird things. They eat a vast array of things. My friend John Dudley was watching a bear through his binoculars and he saw a bear run up on a moose and smash it on the back and crush it.

That's what I'm talking about. He saw a grizzly smash a moose on the back and break its back, literally hit it so hard that it snapped the moose's back and then he tackled it once it was down and started eating it. I haven't seen that, but that's what I'm looking for. So you watch them and there's a sort of anticipation with seeing them. Right. So you watch them and there's a sort of anticipation with seeing them.

Deer, they're very interesting. And the more you watch them, the more you learn about them. And the thing that I've always been fascinated by and was talking about with some friends of mine recently was how interested I've become in interpersonal relationships among mule deer, like the body language they use and how you can locate deer that you can't see just based on body language of deer that you can see that you watch them and you become aware of things they're aware of. And you learn where other things are that you, that are out of your view, just by how,

just by what it's doing, both male and female. Generally it's what it's doing. Both male and female? Generally, it's doe. Sometimes. In general, the most obvious one is does that know there's a buck around. You took me for a- In their body language there. And then does that are encountering another band of does have a body language they use. And you just get used to this and you sort of have it in your database?

Yeah, and then once you see it, you go like, oh, he knows about it. There's a deer somewhere that's not in that group, and that deer is aware of the fact that the deer is not in the group, and it's like wondering about it. And you just see that. So I'm interested in that kind of stuff. But I can walk away from deer. You know, I can like see there's some deer,

and I can just go look in another direction. Something about me makes me stare at bears. Wow. I can't give up on them. Like I just, I'm watching, I'm watching, I'm watching them. Do you have the same feeling about wolverines? That was the first wolverine I've ever seen in my whole life. That was the, that was the thing on my checklist. Like as far as like, if you, large land mammals, that was the one I was missing. So you'd never seen one? I mean, yeah. Large, like American land mammals. I, that was the one i was missing so you've never seen one i mean yeah large like american land mammals i that was that was the one missing from my list do you think you'd feel a feeling of remorse if you shot the one that you the only one you saw that's why i said i wasn't gonna touch

that really because of that yeah i even said right then and there i said i'm not gonna shoot the first one of something i saw that's i feel like like when i was talking really about the black hole of africa i always imagine like guys to Africa and being like, no shit, that's what one of those shoots look like. Bam! That's what it is. Yeah, so I hadn't built up a context about it. So then we were talking about it.

So if you see another one, yeah, I'd reconsider. But no, I didn't want to shoot the first Wolverine I ever laid eyes on. That's why I was trying to get a, you know, Giannis has seen, you know, he's been out caribou hunting and watched wolverines scavenging caribou carcasses. And so I was like, you know, he's not the first one you saw. And we just dilly-dallied. And so he could have shot it because it wasn't the first one he saw. Yeah, but no one was feeling any.

It was just one of those things. No one was feeling anything. I felt, you know, great to see one. I remember watching my, you talk about the way a whitetail deer looks at you i remember watching the first links i ever saw and and um i feel that uh i'm anthropomorphizing a fair bit here but he was the first links that i ever saw and i just had a strong feeling that I was the first person he ever saw. Wow. A look of sheer uncomprehension for what he was seeing. Wow.

And he's like, is this good? Is it bad? What does this mean? And you see him kind of run through all these calculations in his mind and then just drift off. After a while, he's like, eh, something about it. This thing's got its eyes, him looking at me. His eyes are centered on his face. Right, like a predator.

Maybe. Yeah, and it's standing straight up for some weird reason. And that tells me something. He's looking at me very intently. Maybe. Yeah. And it's standing straight up for some weird reason. And that tells me something, you know? He's looking at me very intently. He's not trying to act like I'm not there, and therefore he can't see me, you know? And you just see him kind of run it through his head and just be like, yeah, nothing good's going to come out of this. And then go off the other direction. But just based on where I was, yeah, I mean, it's very safe to say he'd never run into a person, and I'd never run into a Lynx.

I was, yeah, I mean, it's very safe to say he'd never run into a person and I'd never run into a lynx. We just had this moment of, um, you know, I, I carry a, a, a, a cultural awareness. So I at least knew about what I was looking at, but, but he was in this point of, um, just, you know, processing and unlike the Whites Hill that you encountered who damn sure knew what that, that thing carries with it yeah we talked about it before the podcast started but uh i was uh hunting with my friend john dudley and we were in the tree stand and we were supposed to get down at 1 30 and at 1 25 i'm like what do you want you want to call it we're gonna go eat lunch he's like yeah so i climbed down first and that you know 1

25 like five fucking minutes before we said it. And this big, mature whitetail walks through. And John signals to me, does the bow-winkle thing, putting his thumbs on his head. And he starts pointing. And then I realize there's a deer coming down the path. And so I kind of hide behind the tree. But there was all these branches in front of me. Anyway, you've already heard the story. But for the people listening, the deer locked eyes with me.

And there was this intensity, like immediate intensity in his eyes that i'd never experienced an animal looking at me like it was it was very tuned in he knew exactly that i shouldn't be there and i just froze i was wearing camo he's looking me right in the face like right now and his eyes were bulging out of his head bolted but it's like an electricity to them like they know i have very vivid memories of when i was 12 and had just hit legal hunting age in michigan and i was sitting on the ground hunting squirrels on a farm owned by a man named uh alanerlot, and leaning against a tree and having a four-corn whitetail coming through the woods, and, you know, like a buck like that, this isn't always true, but generally a four-corn whitetail is a year and a half old.

Even at that time, you start hunting squirrels September 15 in Michigan. So, I mean, that deer was, was you know he could have been as little as 15 16 months old um he locked on to me saw me and knew looked in my eyes but didn't know what the hell I was I remember him coming at me and coming at me and coming at me and getting so scared and I I had always known like, you just like, there's a thing you just like, you don't yell in the woods. Like you don't make noise in the woods. You try to be quiet in the woods. I remember grabbing sticks and trying to snap them to make a noise to make that deer spook

off, you know, but being like conflicted between just being scared shitless and doing the thing you don't do. Like as a hunters, you just learn, like like don't make loud noises in the woods. When people make loud noises in the woods, it makes me cringe, man. Well, what's interesting about this mature deer that saw me and freaked out when he saw me is that literally a minute before that, because I was down, when I was down, that deer came through with two other deer. And one of them looked to be like maybe a two-year-old deer and one of them was baby one of them was like one year old and the one year old got within 15 feet of me yeah i just pinned up against the tree and the one year old walked right by me had no idea i was alive

the other one that was younger deer walked by me didn't look my direction at all the old one looked right at me he's like fuck this he knew. He knew right away. He'd seen people before. They're in Iowa, and Iowa's really different because Iowa's a great state for bow hunting because they have a very short gun season. It's only shotgun. Oh, yeah. You don't get a big rifle harvest. Right. So a lot of what

they're dealing with is bow hunters. So he might have known that I had a bow. I mean, who the fuck knows? He might have saw a bow and said, I've seen that fucking thing before somebody shot me in the ass with one of those a year ago that's one of the things i like about big bucks i you know i think that culturally in this country we're kind of getting where it's almost like this like accepted idea that you're supposed to like hate trophy hunters right but um i eat everything i kill and i will even talk about there's like meat bucks and shooter bucks right and meaning like there's like big huge bucks that are cool and meat bucks that

you eat but i always eat my shooter bucks it's not like you like course you know like shoot big buck it's elite one it's illegal two i love them you can pepsi challenge them i can pepsi challenge a five-year-old deer and a two-year-old deer, and you can't. Well, you can because you're really good at cooking. Yeah, but I'm saying if you know how to cut it and trim it and stuff, they're great, right? Yeah. So point being, I do like to look for big animals, okay? If I have two deer and I can go after a small one or go after a big one, I like to go after the big one. I have two deer and I can go after a small one or go after a big one.

I like to go after the big one. One of the things I like about going after the big one and the challenge of it is that they are harder to get. And the reason they're harder to get is because they have learned from mistakes. You know, a big buck to an experienced hunter, when he sees a big buck, he sees more than the antlers. The antlers wind up kind of becoming like symbolic of something of a very worthy, challenging quarry because he hasn't made any mistakes yet. Right. You can have big bucks in areas that have very low predation and low hunter pressure, and he could get big and still make some mistakes because he doesn't have as many mistakes that could be made.

But a really big buck in an area that has a lot of lions, a lot of coyotes, wolves, human hunters, he's big because he hasn't messed up. He hasn't fucked up. Doesn't fuck up. He remembers stuff. We had an occasion to watch. We were hunting in Colorado, hunting mule deer this year. And we watched. I glassed up a pretty nice buck, and they went up into an aspen grove.

He was traveling with a bunch of does, and they all go into an aspen grove. Later, Giannis was looking above there, and he said there's some coyotes rolling down into that aspen grove where all the deer went it's now the middle of the day and it's rifle season has been rifle season on and off through a couple of weeks of hunting season the coyotes go into the aspen grove all those deer come pouring out of that aspen grove i at the time commented how it seemed like someone like squeezing a tube of toothpaste the way the deer came shooting out of that aspen grove and ran out across a large sage flat exposing themselves the one deer out of the group that didn't walk out of that sage that didn't walk out of that aspen grove was the big buck never budged because he ran a calculation in his head where he's like, I get it.

Y'all scared of those coyotes. I'm afraid of the unknown. I would rather stay in here in my little thicket. And he stood up. We could see him stand up in there. That son of a bitch would not move. And that's during the rut. So everything in his body is saying chase those does and breed those does.

That's all he's thinking about is breeding does. His body is saying, chase those does and breed those does. That's all he's thinking about is breeding does. A dumb buck would have chased those does, if not for fear of the coyote, he would have chased the does just for fear that another buck was going to go breed them. But he resisted that, right? He resisted the fear of the coyotes. But he's like, I know that there is trouble when you run out in the open, shit shoots at you or whatever he knew.

Wow. And he just sweated it out. You know? Wow. So it's like he didn't like, and he lived. He didn't mess up. Well, a big buck like that is also kind of threatening to a coyote too. Yeah, I'm sure that's part of it.

Yeah. I'm sure that's part of it, but it's just like he, there's a threat and instinctively or whatever, because here's the thing, they weren't chasing, they were not interested in those deer. They weren't chasing them. I think they know because they see, they lose fawns to them all the time. Right. I mean, they see stuff die from them, but it's like, you know, right now there are a

couple of coyotes at that time of year isn't going to drag down a healthy fine mule deer. They weren't even chasing them. But he just, like, he knew, you know. And that's one of the things I admire about, like, the old ones. If you can go into areas that have heavy hunting pressure and consistently find those deer, it's, you know, it's like it's the highest challenge. Yeah, man. I respect it. Yeah. I respect it. Yeah.

I respect it. Well, it's a very difficult quarry. And when you're eating that animal, I mean, there's a completely different sense of not just accomplishment but connection to that animal than buying some steak in a store or shooting some button buck. Oh, yeah. some butt and buck. Oh, yeah. It's such a, that's the thing is it winds up being like such an obvious conversation that it's, that you sometimes feel like it's, that having that conversation with people who don't get it is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Right. It's like so obvious and so easy that you almost feel like a little bit, like almost unfair to bring it up. Well, you probably do. Yeah, well, I do because I'm like, you're telling me. For the same reason

why you're challenged to chase after big bucks. Yeah, but it's like, you're telling me that somehow you, like if you eat meat, that somehow the system by which you go about

getting meat through farms and stores and shit like that is somehow morally or aesthetically or ethically or somehow superior to me eating an animal that I've hunted myself from a sustainable population that's well-managed and that I've decorated my home with its parts

that will be there until I die and then will decorate the homes of my children. If you're telling me somehow that I'm depraved. For that, I have a hard time engaging in the conversation. Because I just don't understand it. Well, with other meat eaters, it's a ridiculous conversation. It's a very short-sighted conversation. And it's part of the problem is that people have so many things going on in their lives.

If you have a job and you have a family and you have some sort of hobby, you've eliminated 90% of your time. Yeah. How much time do you have to actually immerse yourself in wildlife and understand the politics of it, understand what's really going on out there in the world? How many people have actually seen an overhead view of the Pacific Northwest and looked down at all the forest and just done the calculations in their head about these animals and how many of them there are and how much of the Wild West is filled with animals? But that doesn't stop people from having opinions on shit. Of course.

Of course it doesn't. They're just not educated. It's the reason why. And it's the reason why after all these years, I still have no opinion on Obamacare because I do not understand it. So I'll point out like I have no opinion. Now, I'm trying to have this infectious result on people where people will stop talking about shit they don't fully understand. No, people have these knee jerk opinions. They're just they lock them in. Like this is as a left wingwing person i think this as a right wing person i think that i think as we pointed out you and i both believe that that's a ridiculous perspective can i close with a bit of flattery please um it didn't occur to me till i was coming down here today but i i've been railing a lot on uh the the the echo chamber that we all live in um and i think that if anyone goes and

you look at your uh you look at your facebook feed or any number of things like we surround ourselves with uh people who tell us what we think you know and it's kind of become very obvious and i think that this presidential election cycle really brought it out where you had just two vastly different narratives playing out and people on each side of it feeling like so absolutely certain that not only were they right, but that everyone felt the way they felt. Okay. Right. And it's just been a big part of the national conversation, like the echo chamber thing. like the echo chamber thing. What I have found with people that listen to your show,

who come up to me and be like, oh, I heard you on Joe's show the times I've been on there, is that you've somehow managed to defy that, where you have the right-wing nutjobs and the left-wing nutjobs all listening to you at the same time in the middle of the rotors. But like when someone comes up and says, I was listening to Joe Rogan podcast, I'm always thinking like, like,

what does that make you? And it doesn't mean anything. It's like, I don't know. Just the fact that you listen to it. I don't know. That doesn't tell me anything about you other than that you'd like to wrestle with ideas.

Because this is one of the few places where people are talking about shit and you talk about stuff and bring it up where it's like people are willing, because of you and the way you handle it, they're willing to subject themselves to disparate views for a minute. And I don't know what it is, the formula, if you've even thought about it, but it's

a nice invention. It's just how I look at things, I think. I don't, you know, I have my rigid lines that I won't cross, you know, where I think something is evil or something is ethically wrong, but I'm willing to entertain ideas and I'm not, I'm not rigid. Like if someone comes to me and they tell me that I'm wrong about something, I'll go, really? Like, how am I, how am I wrong? And if they tell me I'm wrong, I'm like, Oh, I'm fucking wrong. I didn't know it was wrong. Like I'm not married to my ideas. And I think that's, that's a real problem that people

have where they define themselves by their knowledge. They, they think they're smart or they're, uh, they, they think they're smart or they think they're valuable because they have a certain amount of information in their head. And I think that's crazy because especially as you start getting into more things or exploring new subjects and new topics, you realize it is impossible to know everything. It's not possible. So for you to define yourself by the knowledge that you know or the knowledge you don't know, it seems kind of crazy. I think you're far better off defining yourself, not even defining yourself, but far better off approaching the world by searching for the truth and not being connected or married to any ideas. It's far too often people get in these discussions with people and it becomes a game of trying to win, you know, trying to one up the person with information or data and then coming off of that with a victory.

Yeah, no, I'm with you. Yeah. I mean, that's what you're seeing on all these news shows, man. You're seeing one of the things that I did during the election was while the debates were going on and post debate, I would bounce back and forth and spend an hour on Fox News and an hour on CNN. And I was like, what is the world? This is so baffling because these are just enforced narratives from one side and the other. And I think the country suffers because of that. People suffer because of that.

It's a tribal inclination that I think we have to support one side or the other or to adopt these predetermined patterns of behavior, predetermined belief systems. Or that it's shameful to switch positions. Yeah, that you're a flip-flopper. Like, how the fuck do you not learn? I mean, you can't be right all the time, and you can have preconceived notions that turn out to be incorrect,

and you have to be able to recognize those. Yeah. It's good. I enjoy, like, I enjoy talking to you. I enjoy talking to you too. Thank you. It's always fun, man. We should definitely do this more often. But I think, yeah, I mean, I appreciate that perspective that you have too, that you are willing to say, like, I don't have an opinion on Obamacare because I really don't know enough about it. That's really healthy and really important and for some reason really rare,

especially with a well-read person like yourself. And it makes you sound a little bit like a dumbass. It does. I sound like a dumbass all the time, but I'm willing to say it, you know? You know, oh, I would be remiss if we ended this podcast without discussing The Revenant because you fucking crushed me on that.

I loved that movie. I thought it was badass, and I found out it was all bullshit. I only have a couple minutes, so I got to leave, but I'll – okay. Explain everything that was bullshit about The Revenant. First, I want to say my dear friend and colleague Mo Fallon loves The Revenant. I love Mo. He was out of town. He was hoping to come by and say hi, but he's in, where is he?

He's in the Middle East somewhere. Is he doing parts in Oman? No, he's in Oman right now in Jordan. So he loves it because of cinematography. And that's the end of the conversation for him. But he's a cinematographer. Right. Now, as a student of American history and someone whose favorite era is the Mountain

Man era, which ran, a way to define the Mountain Man era, it began kind of like the moment Lewis and Clark made it back to St. Louis after their expedition, and a man named John Coulter turned around and went back out west to trap beaver the mountain man era began one could argue that day and it ended when the last rendezvous was held for the free trappers which was in the 1840s very short period in time that's my favorite time period in american history is the mountain man era and. And it was the great escapades and discoveries and adventures of the mountain men played out in the arid west. In the willow-lined riparian zones of the American Great Plains and intermontane valleys. and intermontane valleys.

By taking the most famous story from the mountain man era, which was the mauling by bear of, why is his name not Colt? What's his name? Glass, Hugh Glass. By taking that story and setting it in BC along the edges of the boreal forest in a soppingpping dripping landscape of conifers was a,

was just a distortion of, of everything. It'd be like, if you were making a movie about the people who came when, when Washington and Franklin and everyone came together to draw up the American constitution and you set it like in the jungles of Thailand. Okay? It's like instead of Philadelphia.

It just struck me to the core. The other thing, Hugh Glass did not have a child. He did not have a son who he was avenging. Hugh Glass got mauled by a bear, and they left him in the protection of Jim Bridger, a very young Jim Bridger who was a teenager and another guy and Hugh Glass through much struggle

crawled his way back to a fort and he later confronted Bridger and said just so you know buddy next time someone leaves you to watch a guy die in the woods don't leave him laying around by himself and that was all he did. That's it. It's a story of forgiveness. Whoa.

Now in the movie, he does forgive Bridger who cowers, but then he has to go after the guy that killed the son he didn't have. And it's like, if you love the story as it exists, to me, it's like the Bible. It'd be like, if you were going to go film a movie about the Bible, but change real big parts of it. He added aliens. Yeah. Or like, it was how people felt when,

uh, it was how, it's probably how people felt when last temptation to Christ came out. Hmm. And they had, you know, the, the Christ figure lusting for,

I can't remember. Yeah. You know, people were like, it was an abomination, right? So for me to take parts of a story that demonstrates sort of the American landscape and American grit and turn it into a British Columbian, a Canadian farce. It just was insulting to me. Well, how about the fact that he fell off a cliff and landed on a tree? A lot of that stuff was upsetting to me.

That's all fake. None of that happened. No, he did a lot of crawling. I think he ate a rattlesnake. He did come across, he stole the, he came across a wolf kill and scavenged some parts from it. And most of what he was doing was crawling. Could he walk at all? I don't know at what point he started to walk,

but he started out crawling. It's a great story. I would have done a damn movie like that. I would have called it The Crawling Person. Sort of like Tom Hanks in Lost, right, when he's on the island. It's a lot of struggle, right? It's not like he makes his own teletype machine

and starts sending messages to the rest of the world. And I can see how it went. Like, you know, I've been around in business enough where I can see that there are forces at play where they probably went and they were saying, you know what? I get all that shit, but you better put a love interest in this thing. Well, isn't that in a lot of ways similar to your experiences in hollywood when you were doing your first show yeah you know i mean uh what was it the wild within wild within yeah when i when i saw your first show and then i spoke with you about it and you know they were telling me like they were trying to like let a moose loose and

then you would shoot it they had like a captive moose well it's just it was an early conversation i had where i was trying to explain i'm like you know hunting's pretty hard like a lot of times stuff doesn't show up and a guy who i later became friends with and have a lot of respect for uh but he was new to hunting and was not was not new to television was new to hunting and he was saying well that's why they have animal wranglers and that's just one of the you know one of the early conversations we had i wound up liking quite a bit but yeah it was uh i think that one of the things that gets reality television in trouble there's a fake anecdote i often tell about about two kinds of producers right like a there's a producer who would say to you how how would you do that whatever you're doing

and you'd say well i'd take this really small little knife and i'd very carefully make a really delicate little incision right here and they would say great i'm gonna film that and then there are ones that would go but could you use a machete and i think that um you know and those are two types of – and luckily in my career, now I'm able to surround myself with people who like that little small knife. Well, you got very fortunate in that you went to the Sportsman's Channel, which gives you essentially free reign. Yeah, they don't mess with us. I just have loved working with them in the way that

they've just allowed us to make a just allowed us to do our own thing um there's a lot of trust there and there's a leap of faith there and i like to think we haven't let them down but um well you all you definitely honor that trust and i think that's one of the reasons why your show is the first show of its kind to be on netflix and uh i think it And I think it's educating a lot of people. It's not just a show that's a show preaching to the choir. It's not just a show for enthusiasts. It's a show that gives you an insight and a perspective into it. And I think you're the guy to do it too, because I think the ethics that you carry, here's an important distinction. Like even though it's legal to use walkie talkies and certain things in some places, you don't want to use them. And I had this thought the other day because I was listening to this podcast and these guys were discussing different lenses for optics.

They're comparing spotting scopes and they started talking about walkie talkies. They're comparing spotting scopes, and they started talking about walkie-talkies. It became this combination of things that guys love, because guys love gadgets and tech things. It became tech talk and gadget talk mixed with hunting. And I started thinking, I'm like, well, when does this end? Does it end with drones? Does it end with, I mean, what end, you know, does it end with, I mean, what if we come up with something far superior?

It's ending with drones. Yeah. It's ending with drones. But it does, knowing absolutely what's, sending a drone up in the air, it flies over. Okay, the herd of elk is, you know, a mile to the left. We can't see him from here because there's a ridge over us, but we can we know where the wind is. We can hook around this way and get those animals. That is

in your eyes, that's cheating. Well, categorically at this point, it's illegal. Is it illegal in every state? No, but every state where it matters. The states where it matters because of having open country, it is,

or is becoming, and it's not, you're not going to be, it's just not going to happen. I mean, so many states are out in front, I think 13 or 14 states have banned drones. It's great that they got out in front of it because it sort of came out of

nowhere, right? Two way communications is something where a lot of, uh, you know, some states, and I'm not talking like liberal, softy states,

man, Montana, Alaska, you can't use too many communications to hunt. Because they've decided that that's where you draw the line. Yeah, because they might not even discuss an ethics thing, but it's something that goes back to the great conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold, where he had said, we spent a lot of energy

improving the pump, but not the well. So we have a resource, we have a lot of energy improving the pump, but not the well. So we have a resource, you know, we have a resource of wild animals. And if you just work on improving ways to pump them out without also working on ways of improving the well and having there be a stable population of them, you're going to drain the damn well. So when we're looking at as emerging technologies come out well you have to constantly ask yourself

with increased efficacy like if we get it where technology it means that every hunter is always successful what will that wind up meaning for wildlife populations it's not going to mean a diminishment of wildlife populations. It'll mean a tremendous diminishment of hunter opportunity. You have a lot, like a lot of over-the-counter public land elk hunts in the American West are about 10 or 20%

success rates. So you give out 100 licenses, you're going to kill about 15 elk. This is a generalization, but it's a generalization. You're giving 100 guys an opportunity. If you have success rates at 100%, how many tags are you giving out? 15. Right?

Yeah. Big difference. So it's like you're talking about ethics, but you're also talking about access and privilege. But for you personally, aren't you also talking about the way it makes you feel? Yeah. Because, well, I think everybody feels that way. Guys that shoot stuff behind high fence, the fence is never in the picture.

And guys that radio hunt, the goddamn radios are never in the photographs. Right, right, right. You see a guy standing there with 10 people in the photo, and you know that nine of them were up on glass and tits with radios radioing the guy in but they sure shit aren't wearing the headsets in the picture so they kind of get to that they're not proud of it right like i would like one way to ask to look at things for

me is i'm like you know is it something that you kind of tuck away when it's all over is it something that's celebrated? Yeah. A guy kills something with a bow. That's some bitch and bow is laying on top of the animal. Yeah, that's true, right? Because he's like, oh, yeah, I did it with my bow. Yeah. A guy with a gun, maybe, maybe not.

Who knows? He doesn't really care. It doesn't matter. Yeah, he's like, you know, I might put my gun in there. I might not. That's not the point. A guy who never lays out a walkie-talkie on top of a bowl. That's very.

And takes a photograph of it. That's very true. All right. I got it. That's very true. That's very... And takes a photograph of it. That's very true. I got it. That's very true. That's it. All right. Meat Eater, it's available on Netflix. 30 how many episodes?

32. 32 episodes. Meat Eater on Instagram, Steven Rinella on Instagram, and on Twitter. Yeah. You can also go to themeateater.com and buy all kind of downloads of episodes. And next time we go hunting, we should probably bring rifles. I love them. Bang!

Let's make something happen. Bang! Calen has been itching at me. We got to get together. We got to get together again. Thank you, brother. I appreciate it. Take care.

Bye, everybody. See you tomorrow with Jon Jones. Holla. Bye. Bye. Thank you.