The Joe Rogan Experience - #886 - Hank Shaw

Episode Date: December 15, 2016

Hank Shaw is a former restaurant cook and journalist, Hank Shaw is the author of three wild game cookbooks as well as the James Beard Award-winning wild foods website Hunter Angler Gardener Cook(http://honest-food.net/). His latest book "Buck, Buck, Moose" is available now.

So I've never been to Woodland Hills. It's a rare land. The land of wood. It smells like money. Does it? Yeah. Out here? Yeah.

Really? It smells like white people, where white people come to breed. Hank Shaw, ladies and gentlemen, we're live! Hank Shaw said Woodland Hills smells like money. It does. You gotta go to Beverly Hills. It smells like diamonds. They don't let people like me in Beverly Hills, no.

Come on, man. You look respectable. Barely. You look fine. You're a chef. How do you go from being a political blogger? They don't? No. Come on, man. You look respectable. Barely. You look fine. You're a chef. How do you go from being a political blogger? You were a political blogger. Well, I was a political, I was a Capitol Bureau chief in Sacramento and in other places and covered Congress.

So I was a bit more than a blogger. You were deep in. Oh, yeah. I was in the room several times. Watching this thing go down now, this atrocity of justice and voting and chaos and everything that's going around, the Russians are attacking, all this stuff that's going on right now, what does this feel like to you? It feels so good to not be doing this job anymore. So good. I feel like anybody that has any sort of intelligence that is a political blogger that's involved in it for any length of time or not

political blogger or you know a columnist an author after a while you got to realize you're you're fucking writing about pro wrestling this is a rigged system you're writing about a rigged system and then occasionally something like this happens it used to be i mean what got me into i did for 18 years wow i got into it because when I got into it, the essence of politics was people of different kinds of backgrounds and persuasions or different regions would all meet in a room, i.e. the Capitol, either it's a state Capitol or Congress, and solve a problem somehow. So it was all about compromise and debate and wheeling and dealing and that kind of stuff, which is inherently fascinating when you're a reporter. Like, who's ox is going to get gored? Who's going to win this? And like, you know, Joe needs this and somebody else needs that.

I got to give him this thing. Otherwise, I'm not going to get his vote. And then at the end of the day, you'd have this bill, this transportation. I mean, I could go on about some hilarious congressional stories and state government stories. Please do. So there was a transportation bill. God, it was a T-21 bill in Congress in 98. And one of my guys, a guy named Frank Wolf, he was a lawmaker from Northern Virginia. He's not there anymore. He's kind of a Duggar, you know, kind of a reformer Republican guy, you know, Dudley Durek kind of guy. And he wanted he hated pork and want to get rid of all the earmarks in the transportation bill. But as you probably know, the transportation bill is what they call a Christmas tree.

So everybody gets a little bit of an ornament on top of the tree so that they can go home to their district and say, look what I got. So Bud Schuster of Pennsylvania was the head of the Transportation Committee back then. So Bud would shut the door and anybody in the Transportation Committee was one of Bud's boys. You want a Republican, you want a Democrat, you want a Bud's boys. And so they all play a game like this. And so, except for my guy, my guy would come out and hold press releases saying, you know, this is terrible, you know, this is corruption, blah, blah, blah. Nah, that's not how the game is played.

You know, everybody gets a little piece. So it comes out, and the bill passes over Frank's dead body, basically. And he holds a press release or a press conference talking about how terrible it all was. And I'm coming out of this press conference and one of Bud Schuster's aides comes and says, hey, check out page, I can't remember, it was page 123 of the bill. So I did. And in there was a line item that gave the residents of Bud Schuster's congressional district a free pass to drive the Pennsylvania Turnpike for X number of years. So basically anybody who lived in Bud's district didn't have to pay tolls for, I think it was two years. Awesome. That's ridiculous. Well, there was a reason because the road that most of those people took to work was being – there was going to be construction on it for like the next two years. Oh.

Well, that's fairly reasonable then. You could justify it in front of a court of law as not being completely. But, you know, I mean cases were like, yeah, check out page 423. We stuck something in there. It's still going on too. I mean that's what's so bizarre that even in this age of transparency, they're still, like, stacking stuff in, sliding things into bills. And there's very few people to watch them now. Yes.

And there's too many things to look at anyway. Even if there is something. Yeah. Even if something does get in, there's going to be some new scandal tomorrow. Kanye West is going to be visiting Trump at the Trump Tower. And they're like, you're not going to think about the bill anymore. Exactly. There's too much to pay attention to, Hank Shaw.

Which is why I find it fascinating that you went from that world to much more of an artistic pursuit of being a chef. And that's something that I've really come to appreciate over the last, say, 10 years or so. And I credit the initial push to watching No Reservations when Anthony Bourdain's show was on the Travel Channel. Because I always loved food. I like eating. Everybody does. But I never really thought of food. Dietitians don't like eating.

Which ones? Registered dietitians. They don't? They don't like eating. Well, they don't like the pleasure aspect of it They want everybody to just say like if there's a fucking guy that I know is like I don't need for taste I eat for performance he eats like oatmeal with water, and he doesn't heat it up get the fuck out of here you asshole His people that just you're missing the point you could do both stupid, but the point being that I

missing the point you could do both stupid but um the point being um that i didn't think i thought of food as being like great like oh this is this tastes good i like this i didn't think of it as an art and then when i watched anthony bourdain show when he would have this like great reverence for these people that he would visit who were these real artists and they would put together these amazing dishes and the enthusiasm and the passion that he had for describing it made me super excited about it. And then I started realizing, oh, wow. I never thought about it like this. This is an art form. This is just an art form in a way that you would make a sandcastle.

You know it's not going to last forever. You're making a meal. You can take a photo of it. It is not unlike stand-up comedy. In a lot of ways. It's performance art. It lasts for as long as you're in the restaurant lot of ways. It's performance art. Yeah. It lasts for as long as you're in the restaurant or as long as you're in that comedy hall.

Yeah. Like, you couldn't record comedy where, like, you could record a meal and film it, like, on Anthony Bourdain's show. Sure. I can't appreciate it at home, but I could watch you. If you did stand-up and I laughed at home, I don't have to be there. That's true. It serves more people, but in the sense the same way. Like if there was no recordings, it would be kind of very similar in a lot of ways, but shared with larger groups of people.

Right. And in cooking, when you bring it up to that kind of a level, and I still hesitate to use the word artist with cooks and chefs. It sounds pretentious, right? We're artisans we're craftsmen where that's an artist too like what's the difference uh well okay so there are some people who will say that my cooking leaves you with a deep feeling of whatever you know on we or happiness or joy or farts or whatever and and like no we're cooking good food. We are buying product.

We are making product in a way that will make you interested in it and will delight you in some way, shape, or form. And, you know, there's a very famous old Spanish chef whose name escapes me. He said, the end of every Michelin-starred meal ends with good shit. That's a great way of looking at it. I just don't want to take myself that seriously. Well, good for you. But that's the same thing as comedians.

Like, my comedy changes worlds, changes minds. I'm an influencer. I think it's important to get my message out there and use my platform. No, dude, you're joking. You're making people laugh, ultimately. Well, comics are freed from that today in this very unique form because of the internet and because of podcasts. So because of podcasts, comics, if you have actually something that you want to say that is not necessarily funny, you can do that now.

Because podcasts are so open-ended, there's no real structure to it. You could do that now because podcasts are so open-ended. There's no real structure to it. Whereas if you go on stage, and people did for the longest time, they would go on stage and rant about the government or about abortion or about crime or whatever. And it would be not funny. And they would feel like it was something that was important. So it had to be discussed, even though it was discussed in this weird forum where people go to pay to see comedy and you're not giving them comedy you're ranting and it was almost like respected under like some snobbish sort of sect of stand-up comedy fans and

practitioners it was a real weird time i blame bill hicks do you know you know bill hicks is yeah bill hicks did it perfectly but the way he did it he's fuck, a lot of people imitated it to the point where there's a famous comedy club in Georgia called the Punchline that went under. And it had a back room, the green room where the comics would hang out and everybody wrote on the walls. And one section of this wood-paneled wall said, quit trying to be Hicks. And Jamie, the owner, says he's going to get me that because they tore it down. They saved those pieces. Yeah, I mean, it's— I'm going to put it up in here somewhere.

You can, by all means, make a statement, but make it funny. Yeah, man. That's where it's hard. It's hard to do that. So some people took the shortcut and they just wanted to be self-righteous. It's hard to do molecular gastronomy and make it actually soulful. Ooh, molecular gastronomy is what he's calling cooking, ladies and gentlemen. No, not my cooking, but that's tweezers, foams, spherification, calcium lactate, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, what is that all about? Like some people go too deep, right? Yeah. Well, you're kind of the opposite. You're like one of the things that I've really enjoyed about seeing some of your dishes, that you like to cook things. You like to cook things, like say if you're cooking like a wild pork loin, you want to use a lot of the ingredients that are in the area where that animal lives. Yeah, I'm not the first person to do that, but it's one of the things that I do a lot. What goes together in the field or in the water or in the seashore or whatever, almost always will go together on the plate.

So, I mean, I've done such weird stuff as, you know, when I go grouse hunting, well, what were the grouse eating? You can tell what was in the crop. And, like, I'll never forget there was this moment in, we were in North Dakota hunting sharptail grouse, and the grouse had all been eating rose hips. So I'm like, yep, got to make a rose hip glaze on these sharpies. A rose hip glaze. What does rose hips taste like?

They're a little bit like, well, they're loaded with vitamin C, so they have that kind of acidy twang to them. But they're, like imagine a cross between a watermelon and an orange it's something like that that's what rose hips taste like why don't we just buy rose hips at a store and eat them uh because the center of a rose hip uh is what they used to make itching powder out of that's what it looks like jamie oh look at that that's that's a rose hip it's a fruit. It is. It's the end of the rose. And, I mean, that's what a rose becomes. Really? And there's a variety called, yeah.

How the fuck do I not know this? I have roses. Well, they don't always get pollinated. Oh. So when they get pollinated, the best one is called a rugosa rose. And it's a coastal rose. It lives in beaches and dunes. And the rose hip there is like the size of a cherry pepper.

It's like that. Wow. Yeah, it's like a solid, you know, half-dollar size. People remember what a half-dollar looks like. It's that big. And it's juicy like a sweet pepper. But you don't eat the center because the center is what they used to make itching powder out of. Itching powder?

Oh, Jesus Christ. So it's like one of those- So you kind of eat around the edges. Blowfish that can kill you, like that kind of a deal? But it just sucks. Not that bad, but it sucks. Oh, no. But the outside's yummy.

Yeah. Wow, how fucking, how bizarre. Put that photo up again. I literally had no idea that they looked like that. Yeah. So that center part is nasty. Right. So you eat around it.

It looks nasty. Now, if it dries and you- um, so what I make a rosehip puree. So I'll get these, that kind of rosehip and dry it. And, um, and then you rehydrate it and then you boil it just to get soft. And then you run it through a food mill. So only the red flesh comes through and all those seeds stay in the food mill. And you get this incredibly amazing looking paste that looks exactly like tomato paste, but it's like concentrated rosehip flavor. Oh. And it's ridiculously good.

Wow. And that's, what is that back there? Back that up one, Jamie. That's like a puree or something. Is that like how they would make that? You would grind that up in some sort of a way? Yeah, it's probably the extract. I mean, they make jellies out of it a lot.

And the Swedes and Norwegians make fruit soups out of it. How do I not know this? I really thought rose hips were somehow another, like, a rose leaf. I thought you'd take, like, the... Because I know those things must taste good because deer eat them like crazy. Oh, yeah. Like, my friend's wife was like, oh, I love animals. It's so cute.

We have deers in the yard. I know where this is going. They all go the same way. They started planting the roses. The deer can't beat the roses. She's like, these fucking cunts need to die. Kill them. She's out there with a crossbow.

Kill them all. Yeah. So his wife literally wants to murder these deer because they're killing her flowers. It's funny. It's like, honey, we need a tag. Yeah. She's going to try to get a tag from Malibu. Oh, Malibu.

Lots of luck. I know. Malibu just granted a stay, a pardon on that mountain lion who's been killing all the alpacas up there. I don't know if you heard that story. No, but it's awesome. It's a fascinating story because there's a mountain lion. His name is P45. He's actually been collared and they know who he is. They know he has an active radio collar on him, so they know it's him. And he's just murking these alpacas. He killed, what is it, 11 alpacas and one goat? That's the stupidest, slowest deer I've

ever chased. They're in a cage. He just hops the fence and has a slaughter fest. I mean, he's not even eating them. He's just fucking them up. I think he's plenty of food up there. He just hops the fence and has a slaughter fest. I mean, he's not even eating them. He's just fucking them up. I think he's plenty of food up there. He just decided to eat them or kill them because they were there. And so they decided that they could pass a depredation permit on him. So they're going to kill him. And so then there's this outrage. And the woman who owns the alpaca farm apparently was like really scared because she was like,

I just wasn't prepared for the vitriol. And so now she doesn't want it killed. She's not going to use the depredation order. She instead wants someone to somehow or another take it away and put it somewhere else. Probably up in NorCal where I live. I've seen five mountain lions wandering around in the wild. I mean, they're around. Oh, there's a lot.

There's one today. Big kitties. There's one today, a video they put up of this guy in his home looks out on his front porch, and there's a fucking mountain lion killing a deer on his front porch. It was just put out today. Did you see it, Jamie? Did you see that one? It's crazy.

I mean, it's in a suburban neighborhood. It's a big cat, too, and it's just dragging this deer on its front porch. Like, whoa. Jesus Christ. Here it is. Like, this is this guy's security. The mountain lion was caught on camera Thursday attacking a deer in a residence front porch in San Francisco. San Francisco?

Yes. Look at this. Whoa. I mean, this is fucking San Francisco. San Francisco. Yeah. And it's dragging the deer away. This is crazy San Francisco. San Francisco. And it's dragging the deer away. This is crazy.

Okay. That's amazing because, I mean, both of us have been to San Francisco. That thing must be living in Golden Gate Park. Well, the crazy thing is- Or it came up from the peninsula where there's a fair bit of habitat for it. It's very strange what they're able to do and how they're able to move around. They're just so smart. Oh, the deer had been eating roses. Well, fuck them.

Sometimes you gotta pay rent. The mountain lion's hired by the fucking rose owners to jack the deer. Yeah, it's amazing how they can get around. They killed a giant one in Santa Monica in someone's backyard.

Santa Monica, which is like deeply populated. And this guy called up, I don't know, the police, I guess, and said, hey, there's a fucking giant mountain lion in my yard. And they couldn't figure out how to get it out of there, so they killed it. It was, you know, 150-pound cat in Santa Monica just wandering around. That's pretty big. They get bigger. Do they? Really?

200. Do they get two? Oh, yeah. That's a giant one. Big kitty. Do they get bigger? 200. Do they get two? Oh, yeah. That's a giant one. Big kitty. You see them in Utah. Well, I was listening to this podcast yesterday where they were talking about spotting jaguars in Arizona.

They're spotting them more and more lately. Apparently, they've spotted a couple of them now. And in Texas, too. Really? In the very southern part of Texas. It's so interesting. It's like part of you is like, yeah, that's cool. They're coming back here. Part of them is like, wait, it's cool

as long as there's only a couple of them. You don't want too many jaguars running around where the kids are playing, folks. It's like sea lions. I have nothing against sea lions, but there aren't enough great white sharks to make the sea lion population kind of normal. So we're just blitzed with sea lions up in Northern California. Have you ever seen the video that they took of people right on Fisherman's Wharf? The man that took his mahi-mahi? No, no, no. They're killing seals or sea lions. They're killing seals on Fisherman's Wharf?

Giant, huge sharks. Oh, sharks. Merking these sea lions right next to the Fisherman's Wharf. So these people are there filming. I did see that. While they're hanging out. here it is, right? Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, this is New York.

Yeah, these people are hanging out. They're like, yeah, yeah, well, you know, we're just going to, oh, shit, boom. And look at all the blood in the water. I mean, and they all come to the side of the edge to look over, over the edge of the dock. And I guess this is a security camera that's on this boat that's filming this. But I mean, look at all the fucking blood. That is crazy.

Well, you know, they're warm-blooded mammals. Yeah. This one's rapidly cooling. So I've caught all kinds of sharks. You see where that powerboat is in the background? Go about 150 yards towards Alcatraz. Or actually, that's towards Angel Island. And there are seven-gill sharks. big, big, big seven gill sharks

that live in that channel right there. What's a seven gill shark? Is it a different type of shark? It is. It's a really, really primitive kind of shark. They're actually quite tasty. And you'll have one a day. And they cruise the bottom in the deep channels in San Francisco Bay.

It's actually one of the best places to catch them outside of New Zealand. How deep is that? It can be over 100. So you just troll at the bottom or you just drop a line down? You either anchor up or you bounce bottom off. Oh, wow. What a cool looking shark. Yeah, they're crazy looking.

Wow, they do look really primitive. You know, it's interesting. Sharks, because of the whole shark fin soup controversy, this- Which is not good, by the way, if you've ever had it. I have had it. I've had it once and I'm like, no, thank you. It was okay. Yeah.

I mean, it wasn't anything that I think you should slaughter sharks for. Precisely. Especially not just the fin. Like, it's so bizarre. It's the worst. There's so much meat on a shark. It's the worst, you know. But what I was going to say is that there's this new sort of liberal knee-jerk reaction to sharks that now you're not supposed to kill sharks.

So there was a, I think it was the mayor of New York City, or was it the governor, that caught a thresher shark. And it's not an endangered species. It's a totally legal fish to catch. And you'll see him at fish markets. And he caught it and cooked it. And people just jumped on the outrage train And started getting angry that he was killing endangered sharks, and it was like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa this is not Not making shark fin soup. We're not some gigantic Chinese commercial fishing vehicle right here

It is New York governor in hot water over shark photo, and that's a little fresher, too. It's totally legal. Yeah, it's a fish I mean, it's not a fish, it's a shark, but it's no different. I mean, that's what it is. I mean, I get that a lot because I fish for leopard sharks in San Francisco Bay and Tomales Bay every year. They're delicious. They're fantastic.

And everyone gets, I get the same reaction, but I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. First of all, they're a species of least concern if you look at all the fish monitoring things and whatever. And we're keeping like four for the whole season. Because they can get reasonably big. And it's the common shark that lives up there. And everybody, I think that when you get down to it is Americans are not really good at nuance. Right.

And, you know, it's like, oh, well, one shark's endangered, so they all must be endangered. I was like, no. Well, there's a very cursory glimpse at the facts and what they're going to get outraged at before they decide to pull the outrage chute. They're just like, pull it. Pull it. He's got a shark. Pull it. Yep.

Outrage. They just, they don't i mean there's not enough time in the day to really pay attention to all the different animals that are being consumed and how you what you should be concerned with and whatnot so you think i think i read somewhere that sharks are endangered and he's got a shark hey man fuck you and they just precisely meanwhile they have a fillet of fish in their stomach. You know, they were eating fries cooked in beef fat as they were on the way over there. Which are good, by the way. Yeah, they're great.

But these leopard sharks, now what is the difference in, like, I've had mako. It's the only shark I've ever eaten. What would you say a leopard would be? It's pretty dramatically different because makos and threshers are much more like swordfish. a leopard would be... It's pretty dramatically different because makos and threshers are much more like swordfish. So if I were...

Swordfish, sturgeon, makos, and threshers all kind of are in the same culinary bucket. They're like a steak. Like a thick meat. Yeah. I like that. A lot of people don't though, right? Some people don't,

but it's no accounting for taste. But a leopard shark, which you have down here in SoCal, leopard shark is super, super white. It's very dense. It's a little bit more like grouper is how I would describe it. Interesting. It's an amazing—now, I mean, there's a trick to it.

So if you're going to fish for these fish, you need to have ice on board. And you need to basically catch the fish, you kill the fish, and then you gut the fish right there, and then you get them on ice. Because sharks, skates, and rays effectively pee through their skin. So if you don't gut the fish right after you kill it, you get this buildup of uric acid in the meat, and basically your fish fillet is going to smell like ammonia, which nobody likes. So that's interesting. Skates and rays are the same as well, huh? So all three, I think, if I have to remember, they're elasmomorphs or something. I forget what the scientific name is, but it's the cartilaginous fish.

Now, the variations in sharks, that's a very extreme variation, the difference between like a grouper and a swordfish, which is like a real thick, meaty. What accounts for that? Diet. Diet. Yeah. Leopard sharks like crabs, crustaceans, shellfish, that sort of thing. Although they actually really, really dig this nasty little fish called a midshipman, which is, it looks like the ugliest catfish you've ever seen. And here's a pro tip for you.

The best bait to catch a leopard shark is what was ever in the previous leopard shark's stomach. Just bait your hook up with whatever was in its stomach, and then you will absolutely catch another leopard shark. Huh. And this is the... That's the midshipman, yeah. Midshipman. Yeah.

What a strange looking fish. And well, the other good thing about them is not only do the sharks love them, but they stay in the hook forever. Do they have a thick outer shell or something? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. And see the luminescent dots on the bottom?

That's pretty cool. Oh, wow. What a cool looking thing. How big do those things get? Well, about like that. That's it? That's about as big? So they're essentially just little tiny bait fish.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they can get maybe 10 inches long maybe? What a cool looking fish, though. That's so prehistoric looking. There's a little ray. Actually, yeah. I mean, they can get maybe 10 inches long maybe. What a cool looking fish though. That's so prehistoric looking. There's a little ray. Actually, it's a skate. Yeah, go back to that other thing again.

Yeah. Look at that thing. That's so bizarre. Yeah, there's little bioluminescent dots underneath it. So in deep, deep water, that thing,

that's all visible? Yep. Wow. It's like racing stripes on one of those tricked out sports cars. Like this on Maxima. Like my sneakers.

Like if you ran, these are, like if these things, like you see them at night. Oh, they glow? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Oh, perfect. They reflect. Yeah. So that's, well, that actually is like luminescent though.

It's not that it reflects light. Yeah. It actually exudes light. Right. Wow. That's a trip. See, that's, I am as fascinated by the ocean as any other part of the world. And I just think it's so incredible that we've only explored like 90, I think...

2% or something ridiculous like that? I think 90 something percent is unexplored. That's so strange. Yeah, there you go. Look at that thing. But it's funny. I mean, I'm known as the game guy, right? But I've spent most of my life dealing with fish and shellfish and seafood. And I only started hunting when I was 30.

That's interesting. Yeah, adult onset hunting, as many people call it, right? Yeah. Now, when you cook something like a shark or anything that's controversial, anything along those lines, do you feel like you have to preface it with some sort of an explanation that this is not an endangered species and that it is a giant misconception and this is no different than eating a tuna or? I usually put a paragraph or something in there to say.

When you're writing something. Yeah, yeah. You be like, you know, hold on people. This is not, you know, it's not a white shark. It's not, you know, it's not a white shark. It's not, you know, it's not an endangered species at all. I mean, there's this, you know, and I'll usually put a link to the, where it says, it's IUCan, it's the International Union of Concerned Whatever's. And it's basically, it's the marker that shows what's endangered, what's threatened,

what's a species of least concern. And, you know, even then, if you think about it, our bag limit for leopard sharks in the San Francisco Bay is three a day, and we typically do a self-imposed limit of only two a day, and we almost never keep females. When you say we, meaning you and your friends? No, meaning most of the commercial fishing fleet. So if you take a charter in the bay. You mean commercial, like recreational? Yeah, so if you could take a charter in the bay. You mean commercial,

like recreational? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like charter boats. They'll typically like, do you need three fish? Like you can have for three fish, but it's sort of

strongly encouraged just, you know. Oh, that's cool. Just take the two and we're going to throw these big giant females back because a lot of times, especially this time of year,

they can have pups because they give birth to live young. Yeah. And nobody wants to, you know, open up of year, they can have pups because they give birth to live young. Yeah. And nobody wants to open up a shark that's got little pups inside. That's just wrong. Have you ever seen that, is it an X-ray or a sonogram of sharks with the baby sharks in their stomach? No, I've never seen it.

Well, most people don't know probably that sharks do what you say, have live young inside of them. But they're like these, I put it up on my Instagram because it's so crazy looking that it looks fake. It's like they're little monsters living inside this other shark's body. See if you can find it. Well, if you look at a human fetus in like four days. Look at this. Look at that. Look at his mouth going open.

Oh, yeah. But there's images of it that's better, Jamie. There's some, yeah, you can get a look at what it looks like. I mean, that's fucking crazy. I mean, that's what that, and some of them eat their fellow brothers and sisters inside the womb. Like, they'll eat the weaker ones. That's why you shouldn't have more than five kids. But what the fuck?

How do they eat, and they're eating inside a womb? Like what kind of a monster is a shark that they can eat while they're in the womb and they have teeth already? They have fangs Well, you know, human babies have teeth when they're born Don't they? No No, that's right, they don't You don't have kids, do you?

Nah, none that I know of He skated through, he passed the breeding point I'm pretty sure I have No, that's right. They don't. No. You don't have kids, do you? No. None that I know of. He skated through. He passed the breeding point. I'm pretty sure I have. He got through. How old are you now? 45 or 46.

Did you come close at any time? Not that I know of. No? No. Good for you. There's plenty of fucking people. That's one thing people with kids will try to tell you, like that everybody needs kids. Like, I have kids.

Let me tell you something. Everybody doesn't need kids. Like, I have kids. Let me tell you something. Everybody doesn't need kids. There's plenty of people. You can be a wonderful contributing member to our culture and society without reproducing. Yep. It's nonsense. It's not everybody's path. But one thing about babies is they don't eat other babies while they're in the womb.

That you know of. They do absorb them, though, don't they? Like some weird twins. Oh, weird. Like these weird Siamese twins Where one twin will absorb the other one And then they'll find like a tooth in the baby's head Oh yeah, I've heard about that I think that's called a dermoid

Ooh, that's a good name for it It'd be a good name for a kid What's your name? Dermoid But there are a lot of meals now That people look down upon And that's becoming one of them, right? Sharks. Squirrel?

Squirrel's another one. Squirrel's mostly, that's mostly urban people like to make fun of rural people for eating squirrels. It's a sign of like, oh, you must be a hick. Well, if you go to, there's a park in North Hollywood near where I used to live, and you can go there and feed them peanuts. It's kind of cool. They come right up to you. You just lay down. I used to live and you can go there and feed them peanuts.

It's kind of cool. They come right up to you. You just lay down. As long as you're laying down, the squirrels will literally lay down and hold up a peanut and the squirrels will literally come up to you and take your peanut. And people feel bad about that. Like we have weird rules about what animals we like and what animals we don't. Because if it was a rat that came over and took your peanut, you'd be freaking out. And there's not a whole lot of difference between a squirrel and a rat.

It's the tail, dude. Yeah, the tail's so fluffy and adorable. And it sticks up. It looks like it's talking to you. Tree rat with good PR. Tree rat with good PR. And something about fuzziness will let them in. Come on in.

Come on in. As long as you eat just plants. Which is not true, apparently. There's a video of a squirrel they caught eating some sort of a mammal, like a mouse or something like that. They eat eggs all the time, too. Do they? Mm-hmm. Like ground nesting birds' eggs?

No. They go in a tree? Tree, yeah. Oh, wow. There it is. Look at this. Look at this fucking squirrel eating this mouse like it's a sandwich. That reminds me of that Monty Python rabbit.

This is so crazy. How often does this happen? You know, ground squirrels in California, there are guys, I haven't done it, but there are guys who will go out and shoot ground squirrels. Keep that up. Like, when you shoot Louie, Joe comes out of his

hole and grabs Louie and eats him. Oh, Jesus. It's a little horrible. Instantaneously, they just start eating him? I never liked you anyway. It's just horrible. There's a ranch that I go to, Tahone Ranch. Oh, yeah, yeah. And Tahone Ranch, one of the guys who's a guide there told me that the biomass, this

is a morbid scene. It kind of is. We're sitting here talking while this squirrel is eating intestines from this mouse. It's pretty much eating the entire mouse. Oh, my God. He's going off, too. The biomass of ground squirrels. Is he a ground squirrel?

He must be, right? He looks like it with his little squirrely tail. He does look like a ground squirrel. Yeah. Squirrely little bastard. The biomass of ground squirrels is more than any other animal on the ranch. It's 270,000 acres with mountain lions, deer, elk, pigs, and there's more weight of ground squirrels than anything else.

I would love to be able to tell you that, yeah, they're delicious, but they tend to carry bubonic plague, which does not make them good eats. Yeah, you can eat regular squirrels, but you can't eat ground squirrels? Tree squirrels, yes. Ground squirrels, no. What is the difference in the species? Are they interchangeable? Are they hybrids ever? No, they're totally different species. The western gray tree squirrel is really, really big. He's over two pounds, and he's kind of a very cold slate gray.

And it's actually quite a quite good good eating squirrel um there used to be a very high limit on them here in california but um when southeast asian immigrants the mong came so the mong um are very fond of squirrel hunting and so it was a big thing what they did back in southeast asia and so when they caught here, they're like, Swaite, they're all these squirrels. And I guess they shot them out because the limits were 10 in the 70s and early 80s, and now they're just 4, which is fairly low. You know, for example, in some of the Appalachian states, it's 10. Hmm.

So that's interesting. The Hmongs, I've heard that before. They're a big hunting community. Of the recent immigrants to this country, the two most hunting groups are the Hmong and the Russians. Hmm. Interesting. And when I say Russians, I mean sort of very, you know, Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans. Right.

Do they have a preference for like what they go after? Well, I know the Russians have been putting a herd on our sturgeon up north. Sturgeon? Yeah. Interesting. And it's mostly poaching and fish and game is having a hard time getting a handle on it. Now, do they like sturgeon for the caviar, for the meat? Yeah, for the caviar. Oh, wow. But that would have to be a female. So how do you differentiate when you're catching them? Well, you can. You can? They're pretty slow. They're pretty calm, slow fish, so it's pretty easy to determine if it's a male or a female.

And if it's, I mean, it'll look sort of, they call it gravid, but it looks pregnant if it's a big female. Okay. And the other thing is they're almost, almost always oversized fish. So we're allowed three a year in California legally, and they have to be,

oh, I'm going to forget this. I think it's 40 to 60 inches from the fork of the tail. That might be a slight layoff, but that's basically the size. The legal size. How hilarious is that? Legal size is 40 inches. Oh, yeah. You have to catch something 40 inches. That's a big ass fish. State record's, I think, eight and a half feet long. Wow. In California? Yeah. It's either eight or 10. It's huge. The state record

was caught by a dude in Vallejo. He caught it in the Carquinez Straits in like, I want to say the 80s, judging by the haircut. Now, where are they? Are you catching them in deep water? How do you catch a sturgeon? Not necessarily. You can catch them in Sacramento. You can catch them in Colusa. You can catch them in the Delta.

Are they in rivers? What are they in? Yeah, they're in rivers, and then they go out into the Bay. Wow. But the, the general place you're going to fish for them is going to be the Delta out of Antioch, out of San Pablo Bay, that kind of area. Now the sturgeon are, are they biting hooks or are you snagging them? No, they're, they're biting hooks. What do they get? What do they feed? So depending on who you talk to, there's a friend of mine named Jay Lopes who runs a guide service. He's a specialist in sturgeon. He really loves cured salmon roe.

Ah. And he's got some special thing that he does with the salmon roe. But some people use ghost shrimp. Some people use caught herring. They'll eat all kinds of stuff. The largest freshwater fish on record for California is a white sturgeon caught by Joey Pallotta in 1983. Yep, Joey Pallotta.

I knew it was the 80s. You knew it. The huge fish weighed an amazing 468 pounds. Whoa, that's a big fucking fish, man. That's amazing. The story of that fish is pretty hilarious, too, because he was working. He was cut off work. I think it was in June or July.

Yeah. So it was still light out late. So he caught this fish after work, and he couldn't get the damn thing in. So he's like, it's dragging him all around the Carcanes Straits. And I guess he gets on another boat mid-catch, and it was a bigger boat that could actually control it because the sturgeon was just dragging him up and down. And it's just the story, if you can find the story of it, it's just hilarious. Is that it?

Wow, look at the size of it. And it is a story that will, and that fish will never be broken because that would be an illegal fish right now. Why is it illegal? Because you're not allowed to land anything bigger than 60 inches from the fork of the tail. Oh, well, how the fuck are you going to measure that?

Like, what if it's like, you're like, hold on, get the fish close. Let me get out the ruler. Oh, if it's close. You just cut the line. Well, now, if it's close, they're really survivable fish. They don't die easy. So I think you bring them on board, measure them, and then throw them back. Huh.

Now, is that a good fish to eat outside of the row? I love sturgeon. How do you eat it? Sturgeon, again, I would say if you've never eaten sturgeon, imagine swordfish. Oh. It's a lot like that. No kidding. It's a signature dish of Sacramento cuisine, actually.

So if you go to restaurants in Sacramento, you will see sturgeon all over our menus. People don't know about Sacramento. Sacramento, you will see sturgeon all over our menus. People don't know about Sacramento. Sacramento is so different than California in terms of how LA people think or San Diego people think. Sacramento might as well be like Iowa. I don't mean it in a bad way. I mean, I love Iowa.

I mean, in terms of the hunting and fishing and the outdoors people. It's more like the Twin Cities. Okay. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. Like Minnesota. Yeah. Yeah.

That makes sense. So here's a stat for you that I just, my girlfriend Holly just told me. She was doing some research for a piece that she was working on. 95% of Californians are urban. 95% of California is rural. Ooh. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. Wow.

And over a third of this state is public land. Really? Mm-hmm. Wow. It's remarkable. And it's, you know, it's why I stay here. That whole public land, private land thing is something that I had literally no knowledge of, no interest in, never discussed until I met Rinella. And when Rinella started, Steve Rinella started explaining to me the difference between public land and private land and how it was all put in place by Teddy Roosevelt and all the conservation that was done in the 1800s and how much resistance was behind it. And he actually talked about it pretty in depth in a podcast we did here a couple of

weeks ago. And I just, I can't believe it took me until I was like 45 until I heard about that. It's, you know, actually Steve's got a really good example of why you might not necessarily have to. It's because he was talking about country hunters and anglers and he had, he used to live in Brooklyn, weirdly. Yeah, well, his wife was working there. Right, I know.

That's when I met him, he was there. It's still kind of odd. It is. Because he's about as Michigan as you get. Yeah. And so he's like, yeah, well, everybody in New York City knows, can cite you chapter and verse, the subway lines. No one who doesn't have reason to has any reason to

know about the subway lines. So when somebody who lives in rural Montana or whatever says, why haven't you ever, you know, this issue with public land, blah, blah, blah. Well, if I live in New York City, I don't have to know. It's just like we were saying at the beginning of this, it's like there's too many things to look at. There's too many distractions in our world right now. And it just makes it hard to do anything anymore. There's no quiet at all in our lives anymore. Most people's lives, yeah. Yeah.

Steve's got a real good way of breaking things down like that. He's got a good way of providing you with examples that you go, oh, yeah, that's a good one. Because, yeah, if you lived in Montana, you wouldn't give a shit about the subway lines in Brooklyn. And if you lived in Brooklyn, the infringing on public lands or Paul Ryan's plans to sell them off to corporations so that they could pay off the debt, it doesn't even register. Well, here's a good one for you. So depending on where you live, like most of us call it public land mm-hmm other people call it government land mmm we have very different connotation yeah because the government land means it's not ours but it's really ours right so

if you call it government land seems like well if they sell it it's not yours anyway right but it actually is yours which is, that is a weird one that takes a while to absorb. Like, the land is actually the own, the people of the United States are the owners of the land. Right. So if you go hunting on public land, you're like, you know the backcountry hunters in angler shirts they have that says public landowner? Yeah.

I love that shirt. Because we're all public landowners. You pay taxes, you live in America, you own public landowner. I love that shirt because we're all public landowners. You pay taxes. You live in America. You own public land. Similarly, all the game on. Everybody's land, public or private, belongs to either the people of the United States or, if it's migratory, the people of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Or if you're in Texas and it's a high fence. Well, yeah, that's legally livestock. Yeah, that's real weird, right? That's a strange distinction, the difference between public land and private land and the animals being on it. Even if it's private land, those animals are owned by people. Right. By the people. Right.

Which is why we actually have deer. Yeah, that's the only reason why. Well, that and large-scale agriculture, the populations are higher than ever before and all that good stuff. Well, that and large-scale agriculture, the populations are higher than ever before and all that good stuff. Actually, there's a great book called Deerland that talks about why, if you go to the northeast, they're overrun with whitetails. Because whitetails like the edges between field and forest. And suburbia is their perfect habitat for it. Yeah. And the problem that goes with that is, of course, deer ticks and Lyme disease, which is run rampant through the Northeast.

Steve has it. Yeah. Steve has it. His son has it. And they are amongst two people out of, I don't know, maybe 10 that I've ever met that have been misdiagnosed. I had this guy, Steven Kotler, on here the other day who was misdiagnosed for a year, for one fucking year.

And because of that, it got so deep into his system that he was in bed for three years in the hospital. Oh man. He was hospitalized for three fucking years from Lyme disease. Unreal. It's a horror story. It's so scary. You know, and you talk to people that have had it. And one of the really fascinating things about Steve, he's really smart. Stephen Kotler. And when he was discussing it, he was talking about the neurological aspects of Lyme disease, that it really wrecks havoc on your cognitive function to the point where one time when he had it, before he was diagnosed, he didn't know what was wrong with him. He was at a green light and he couldn't figure out what green meant. Oh, wow. Then he couldn't figure out how to drive his car.

He had a stick shift. He could not figure out how to do it anymore. He didn't know how to drive his car. Like in the middle of driving, he forgot how to drive it. And he was like, oh, my God, I'm going crazy. There's something wrong with me, like bad. And that's like right before, I believe he said it was right before they checked him into the hospital. I bet.

Pumped him full of IV antibiotics and figured out exactly what it was. Well, I had plenty of ticks on me, but knock on wood, I've never had Lyme. Yeah, man, I wish there was a way to stop it. I wish there doesn't seem to be any. I think it's in California in particular, it's misdiagnosed a lot because it's not here yet. It is. They found it in Mendocino, but it's not in mass. Not like, yeah, right.

Not in mass. Yeah. Yeah. In the East Coast, they think something like, I think they were talking about, I think they were talking about Long Island where they were saying some absurd number, like 50% of the ticks have Lyme disease. There's something crazy like that. I went mushroom hunting two summers ago with a fellow chef friend of mine named Anita Lowe. So we were out mushrooming by her place in the eastern end of Long Island.

And we cooked some mushrooms, had a good time, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, we cooked some mushrooms, had a good time, blah, blah, blah. So I get back like 48 hours later and I find two tick nymphs right in the band of my boxers. And I'm like, oh, shit. And so I immediately rushed to the doctor and I got that. Basically, they give you a three-pack of Cipro and you go boom, boom, boom and try to knock it out. And it seemed to work. You got to get it quick, huh?

Yeah, you got to get it really quick those little fuckers we did I did this show for sci-fi called Joe Rogan questions everything and one of the things that were we investigated was this weird disease called more gel ins you ever heard of this and up by that name well it's a weird they think it's a psychosomatic disorder where these people believe there's something wrong with them but there's not and they have these parts of their body where they just itch incessantly and they can't stop. And then they believe fibers are growing out of their body and they'll get like carpet hairs in there. And they think that it's growing out of their body, you know, carpet fibers, and they're convinced. But one of the guys that I interviewed was a doctor who also had Morgellons. And he had a really unique insight to it because he said that as a doctor, one of the things

that he found is there's a direct correlation between people who have this disease and Lyme disease. They almost all have Lyme disease. And he thinks that what's really going on is that people, and this is a guy who was talking about his own, his brain malfunctioning on him. He was saying that people who have Lyme disease, that there's some sort of a neurotoxic effect of Lyme disease, which distorts reality to the point where these people think these fibers are growing out of them. And he was talking about himself, like he saw something moving around in his eye,

like saw something wiggling around on the surface of his eye, and then it wasn't there anymore. And he realized, okay, this is not real like I'm seeing something that's not real and then as he got deeper into it he found that all these people that had this bizarre more Jones thing also had Lyme disease makes sense I mean if you you know you know about the symptoms of toxoplasmosis yeah where which it makes mice really Yeah, well, it makes them sexually attracted to cat urine. People don't know what we're talking about. Google Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University in Northern California.

I've been trying to get that guy on for years. He's just so not a publicity whore. He just, I can't get him on. I'm like, I'll fly to you, dude. He's like, I'm busy. I'm like, fuck. He's an expert in, well, he does a lot of primate work, too. He does a lot of work with baboons and stuff, dude. He's like, I'm busy. I'm like, fuck. He's an expert in, well, he does a lot of primate work too. He does a lot of work with baboons and stuff too. But he's like the foremost

expert in the United States of toxoplasmosis and the effects of it. It gets them horny for cat urine. It literally changes the sexual hard wiring of a rat, gets it horny for cat urine. They literally get erections and they go running around near cats. They're not scared of cats. Takes away their fear. The cats eat them. And because of that, it gets into people. The cats around doesn't seem to affect the cat's behavior. The cats are just carriers. And then it gets into people, makes people more aggressive, makes people more prone to get in accidents. Disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims, motorcycle crash victims have toxoplasmosis. That's what Sapolsky pointed out when he was doing his residency.

He was doing some work in emergency rooms. And one of the surgeons was saying there's a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims that have toxoplasma. So when a motorcycle victim would come in, they would test them for toxo. Interestingly, toxo is one of the few diseases you can pick up from deer. Really? How do you get it from deer? I'm not entirely sure. I think it's contact or eating undercooked venison, but it's very rare. It's actually, I think there's only been like six cases in the last 20 years that the CDC reports. But ironically, there's a guy who is on the Facebook forum that I run was one of the six. Oh, wow. Like, what are the odds, right? And he's like, well, you know, I'm one of these guys. And it messed him up pretty bad.

Like in what way? What did he say it did to him? A lot of the same symptoms that you were talking about. Risk-taking. Risk-taking. Aggressive behavior. There were some blood problems, too. I can't remember for the life of me, but his blood pressure spiked. It was significant.

Well, it's what people, when they talk about crazy cat people, that literally is what they're talking about. Probably, yeah. Oh, 60% of France at one point in time had toxoplasma because of all the cats roaming around. They think they've gotten it down to as low as like 35%. Same as Brazil. Brazil is somewhere around 40%. 40% plus of people that live there have toxo. There's also a disproportionate connection between toxoplasmosis, rates of infestation or infection, and successful soccer teams.

They're risk takers. Yeah, risk takers, more aggressive. It's very strange. You should test MMA people. They also, I know, it would be off the chain. It would be a real problem. I love my kitty. I'm fucking cat crazy, bro.

I think there's also some sort of a connection between sexual promiscuity in females yeah there's a lot of weird stuff they're working on to try to figure out what exactly these fucking parasites are doing to people's brains well you've heard of the cordyceps right yes yeah like the zombie ants oh yeah yeah well there's

good there's good strains of cordyceps you want to climb to the top of that leaf well they this is if you people don't know what you're trying to. Well, there's good strains of cordyceps, too. You want to climb to the top of that leaf. Well, this is what people don't know, what you're trying to talk about, is there's a mushroom that infects the spores, infect an ant, convince the ant to go somewhere high so that these cordyceps mushrooms grow inside the ant's body. And then it explodes and sprays spores through the air, infecting all around them. It's so gnarly, dude. So crazy. Nature's so nuts, man. Have you watched the movie Alien?

So I don't know if this is 100% true, but I've always heard that the creature is a mashup of real insects. Is that the bug? Okay. So is this a dead one that has it already? Is he about to blow? Yeah. You see it's time-lapse? So in the time-lapse, this mushroom is growing out of the back of this ant's head. This ant has been killed by this fungus and it's now manifesting itself in this growing form that's not really a plant. That's another thing that people misconstrue about fungus. It's actually closer to an animal than it is to vegetation.

They breathe oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. So this is some fucking freaky-ass alien life form that's growing out of this ant's head. Look at the size of that thing. It's huge. That's so gnarly. Kills the ant. And it grows mushrooms out of it, and then the spores blow up.

Oh, my God. That's a cool one. That's so bizarre. Look, it's popping through its exoskeleton. That's so creepy. Now you know where Ridley Scott got it. Oh, yeah. Well, do you know about that aquatic worm that infects grasshoppers?

No. Oh, this is a great one. This aquatic worm. I love how focused and direct our conversations are. Yeah. So every one of them I do. I don't have anything focused and direct in my life. But these aquatic worms or what is it? Yeah, it's aquatic worm, right? Is it aquatic? Yeah, it's aquatic worm, right? Yeah.

It gets inside a grasshopper. And this is one that's infected a praying mantis. And this one's going to burst out of the praying mantis. But when this aquatic worm gets inside, oh, because you get it wet, that's when it'll come out. But the aquatic worm that gets inside grasshoppers, when it reaches gestation, when it's time to be born, it rewires the grasshopper's brain and talks the grasshopper into committing suicide. So the grasshopper jumps into a lake and drowns, and the aquatic worm comes out of its body and swims away. Look at this thing.

That's so nasty. Look at the size of this fucking thing that was living inside this praying mantis while it was alive. So it takes over the mind of these beings. I mean, look at the size of this thing. I mean, it is a solid 30 to 40 percent, maybe more, of the mass of the body of this being. Wow. That's so gnarly. It's hard to believe when you look at the size of this thing

because it's continuing to come out. The grasshopper, let's just, if we had a scale, the grasshopper's maybe two inches long. Well, that's a mantis. That mantis is probably a solid four inches long. Yeah, I'm sorry, mantis. So whatever length that is, the aquatic worm is three times that.

Yeah. Which is just nuts. And it's living in its body. And it's still coming that yeah which is just nuts and it's living in its body and still coming out as we're talking it's a fucking huge man and it's trying to find water that's gravitating towards the water but with grass that thing on fire I know right that's evil we're lucky they're little if if you find the grasshopper there's one where it talks the grasshopper to jump the grasshopper just jumps in the water and just starts drowning, and then it pops out of its body. It's like nature is such a creepy, creepy thing in a lot of ways, like the parasite world in particular.

Somehow or another, predators to me are less disturbing than parasites. Oh, yeah. Here's one that's coming out of it. Was that a cricket or something? It was a grasshopper. Could be. Look at that creepy-ass thing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Here's one that's coming out of, was that a cricket or something? Could be. Look at that creepy-ass thing. Yeah, aquatic worms.

Yeah, not good. I wanted to talk to you about more bizarrely edible things that maybe a lot of people don't think of. Sturgeon is one of them. I didn't know. I knew that people eat sturgeon eggs, but I really wasn't aware that sturgeon was that delicious. I also wasn't aware that it was legal to catch them. Like I, for some reason thought that they were endangered. It's weird, which is one of the reasons why poaching is such a big issue is because we're one of the last recreational fisheries in the country for sturgeon. Really? Yeah. Because of populations? Yeah. Because the East Coast sturgeon was fished out around 100 years ago. And they're only now coming back in the East Coast.

And there's still no fishery for them. So all of the sturgeon you see in restaurants in Sacramento is farmed. Oh, that's interesting. So how do they farm a sturgeon? Slowly. I would imagine. I think they have to be seven years before they can get to market size. So it's like making bourbon. Yeah, because I was reading like what was another commercial fish.

They were talking about the amount of time that it takes to grow a commercial fish to the point where you can harvest it. And it was some insane number, like two inches a year, where it takes forever to grow these things to the point. I think it was catfish they were talking about, like large catfish. That's what it was. They were talking about what's going on in the Ohio River, that they're putting these catfish in lakes and they're taking them out of rivers. They're putting large catfish in lakes, but they can't survive. They can only live in these lakes for so long, but everybody wants to catch a big catfish. So they have these commercial catfishing businesses where recreational catfishing, where they'll take these people

and they'll have them fishing in these lakes. And they use some sort of chemical in the lake that forces the catfish to bite. Yeah, and this chemical... It's like a catfish bordello. Yeah, and this chemical. It's like a catfish bordello. Yeah, it's really gross, man, because it causes these legions on the catfish's skin. So these people catch these catfishes, and they have catfish, rather, sorry, and they have these red sores all over their body because some chemical's been introduced into the water, which I guess the irritant causes them to, like they're biting out of frustration, I guess, maybe? The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.

But it's just so bizarre. Like what a strange choice that people have decided, let's take this animal. There's one with legions on it. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. See, another issue arises when bigger catfishes are introduced into pay lakes.

Yeah. Pay lakes. Yeah, they, another issue arises when bigger catfishes are introduced into pay lakes. Pay lakes. Yeah, they have these lakes. I didn't even know there was a pay lake. Look at all the spots on that one. Look at the fucking spots on that thing. And see if you can find what it says that chemical is that they dump into the water, Jamie. Just go to the Rappahannock River in Virginia.

You'll catch a nice one. I've caught 70 pounders. Well, in a river? Really? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, how many of them are out? Which fish do you catch?

Is it a blue catfish? That's a white cat. A white cat because it's a big one? White cats, blue cats, channel cats. But yeah, blues and whites are usually the biggest. Did you- Flatheads get really big too, but they don't live in Virginia, I don't think. It's called juicing.

Okay. Chemicals they put in the water make the fish bite. In the pay lake industry, it's called juicing. Okay, chemicals they put in the water make the fish bite. In the pay lake industry, it's called juicing. Whoa, weird. Look at the fucking lesions on that thing. Scroll up a little, Jamie. Back up. Look at that poor thing's body. That's just wrong. It's bizarre. It's not just

wrong. It's bizarre. I tell you, I don't really understand how that ever got passed. How people are accepting that. That's a natural one. The one below that seems totally healthy that some got passed, how people are, like, accepting that. Like, that's a natural one. The one below that seems totally healthy that some got caught from a river. So these pay lakes is, like, I guess it's, like, a private land thing. Somebody owns them

and just keeps dumping these fish in there. And apparently they don't live there very long. Yeah, well, it's the fishing equivalent of those little teeny high-fence places you see in the east. You know, go hunt elk on 40 acres. Do they have those in the east? Yeah, the east coast.

So in Texas, a lot of the high fence places are thousands and thousands of acres. But they have them in the Midwest and in the east. And sometimes they're painfully small, like tens of acres. Ooh. Where effectively you're shooting something in a pen. I saw one that was 10 acres. Right. It was on eBay.

Yeah. Or Craigslist where this guy had put up this hunt in quotes. I'm doing air quotes for this enormous buck that they had used for breeding on this commercial deer property. for breeding on this commercial deer property. See, if you own a piece of land in Texas or in any place where they allow this, you can buy deer and then have these deer released onto your land and then you can, air quotes again, hunt them. So they raise these things to maturity

and they give them this massive protein- rich diet and then they also have great genetics on top of that so these deer have these insane antlers frankenbuck oh they're so strange looking it's such a weird thing when you see them and you know that is what a regular wild colorado mule deer looks like it just looks normal it's like that's what you see. Everybody recognizes it. That's what it looks like. When you see one of those bizarre farm raised bucks, it looks like they have bushes growing out of their heads. It does. It's really bizarre. I don't even think it's attractive. It's gross. It doesn't have that classic line of a deer that is kind of, I think, is imprinted on our brains. Yeah. No, I agree. It's some weird thing like double E fake boobs.

Right? Like, okay, what are you doing? Like, you went crazy. You went too far. Like, you did something that doesn't make any sense anymore. Yeah. Another fish that I wanted to ask you about is, what are you going to, what's up? I found out what the juicing.

Okay. What's the chemical? Copper sulfate. Oh. It says that it forces them to feed and move excessively. And then it also is used to treat vegetation and algae and other lakes. You mean kill. Kill, yeah, but then used in excess, it can kill fish, too.

But it says it's designed to kill unwanted lake vegetation. Yeah, when you look up just copper sulfate and fish. And it also used to be put in canned green beans to keep them green. What? Oh, my God. I wonder if it made people move around a lot after they ate them. How fucking strange, man. God, what kind of a monster pours that into a lake to get the fish to eat more?

I want to talk to you about gar. Have you ever had gar fish? I actually haven't. I know guys who have. I know you have to pretty much clean it with a hatchet. Yeah. And I know that everybody I know who's eaten gar says it's awesome. Yeah, I've heard smoked gar is awesome.

Jamie, that's a little tiny one. Pull up. Yeah, look at that. There you go. Jamie, that's a little tiny one. Pull up. Yeah, look at that. There you go, yeah. That is a crazy fish that's been around for what? How many millions of years has that thing been alive for? Like over 100, I think. It's totally primitive.

I mean, it literally looks like some kind of a fucking dinosaur fish. And those are in Texas. Yeah. Natural. Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas. Yeah. Louisiana. And can you catch those on a hook or do you spear them?

You can catch them on a hook. What do they eat? They have wire. Yeah, you better have a lot of wire, right? Like those teeth. If I remember right, they like live bait. Oh, okay. What an enormous fucking crazy weird animal.

Yeah, there's a big one. Okay, that's a perspective shot. That's still. That's probably an eight foot gar. What's a world record gar? Let's take a guess. I'm going to say. I'm going to guess 12 feet. 12 feet? Really? That's going to shot, though. That's still. That's probably an eight-foot guard. What's a world record guard? Let's take a guess. I'm going to say... I'm going to guess 12 feet.

12 feet? Really? That's going to be my guess. Wow. I'm going to go with 10. You're probably right, though. New world record. That doesn't look like 12 feet.

Let's find it on the web. What is the world record? 279 pounds. Wow. How big is that? How long is it? 279 pounds, Wow. How big is that? How long is it? 279 pounds, caught in 1951. That's the world record?

Yeah. Whoa! That's not from 1951. Look at the size of that thing. A big ol' alligator gar. Now, is there a difference between an alligator gar and a regular gar? Yeah, I think there's a couple different species. Oh.

And you can eat them all? As far as I know. See, that's another animal. I didn't know that you can eat these fish until I watched one of those crazy reality shows where people live in the mountains. One of those subsistence shows. You didn't make people eat them on Fearfactor?

We made people eat animal dicks. We never made people eat gar. It literally has an armor plate on the outside of it, right? It's like you need a hatchet to get through it. Yeah, I've seen people cutting through them with what looks like- Sawzall and stuff. No, what they were using was something you would trim branches off a tree with.

Yeah, loppers. Crack, crack, crack. Just try to cut through that stuff. 47 inches in girth. Eight foot five. Oh my God. That's a giant thing. But that's not a world record, right?

That's just a giant one. Hmm. What a weird animal. I know. And it's just strange to me also that some animals figured out how to stay alive, like alligators and crocodiles for, you know, X amount of million years. Well, all these other things like largemouth bass are so much more recent. Mm-hmm.

And these things swim amongst them. These strange remnants of a much more savage past. Like the coelacanth. Yes. That's a great one. Because that one,

they thought until they caught one, it was like the early 1900s. They thought it had been extinct for millions of years. Yep, off the coast of South Africa. Yeah. Now, apparently, you can catch them. How weird. There apparently, like, you can catch them.

How weird. Like, there's a place where you can catch them. And it's legal? Well, I think it's catch and release, but it's not that, you know, oh, coelacanth. It's not like they're super common, but it's not like a news event when they catch one anymore.

Oh, there's one right there. Wow, what a strange-looking prehistoric creature, too. Actually, I think, honestly, I think the gar is more impressive. That's bizarre looking, but the coelacanth, if it's, is it a deepwater fish? Yeah, it's a deepwater fish. Now, when you catch and release a deepwater fish, aren't they fucked,

though? Not all of them. Just bringing them up through the top? Like rockfish are in the Pacific. They certainly are. Their eyeballs pop out of their head. Right. That's weird, man. But lingcod don't. Oh. So if you catch a lingcod, you can bring them up to Right. That's weird, man. But lingcod don't. Oh. So if you catch a lingcod, you can bring them up to the surface. Is that a coelacanth that someone caught on a hook, Jeremy? Yeah, looks like it.

And so when you catch a lingcod on a hook, you can just throw it back in the water, even though it goes 500 feet to the surface? I've never seen a lingcod with the bends. Really? And rockfish always get them. So it's just a matter of the frailty of the- It's just the way the fish is built. I think, you know, in here I'm just guessing.

But lingcod will come from the bottom all the way up to the top to hunt. Beautiful fish, too. Whereas rockfish, yeah, there's bucket mouth. God, what a cool-looking fish and delicious, too. Yeah, big old bucket mouth. Yeah, lingcods, that's another one that looks like it's not supposed to be alive anymore. They're so awesome. They're so awesome looking, man.

My biggest one I ever caught was a hitchhiker. It had hit a rockfish. Wow. And so I brought the rockfish just to the surface and the lingcod wouldn't let go. No shit. So we gaffed the lingcod. Wow. That's interesting.

23 pounds. Whoa. It wouldn'ted the lingcod. Wow. That's interesting. 23 pounds. Whoa, it wouldn't let go. Nope. Wow. It'll let go if you let its head break the water, but if you keep its head in the water, it won't let go. Oh, so when its head comes out of the water, it's like, oh, this is bullshit. Right.

He's like, huh, that's peculiar. Let's go. Look at the mouth on those fuckers. Oh yeah, blue one. Wow. So cool looking. How'd you like that to be the last thing you saw? Yeah,

that would suck. It would be like tripping in hell. Sucked into that vortex. Yeah, that looks like something from that movie The Event Horizon

when the demons had taken over the spaceship. Or Dune. Sucked into that, yeah. The teeth on that fucker. It's a hard ass world that thing lives in.

Don't lip him when you catch him. Oh yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah, you gotta grab that thing lives in. Don't lip him when you catch him. Oh, yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah, you got to grab that thing around the gills or gaff or something. What is all that we're looking at here? He's gutting it. What a strange stomach looking.

Yeah, they turn blue like that. It's, oh, I used to know. They turn blue because of what they eat. And I think it's- Like salmon. When you buy commercial salmon, they have to dye the skin because they're not eating the same kind of bugs. Yeah, well, farmed Atlantic salmon, yeah. Well, they're eating...

The red is from krill. Excuse me, I'm blue cod. Okay, so this is hilarious. So I've seen this article. Extremely rare blue cod caught in Australia, which is... Okay, so it was explained to me that they are extremely rare in alaska does that say alaska or australia alaska alaska alaska but they're incredibly common where i live oh i once i once hooked into 13 ling cod in one fishing trip and six of them were blue

whoa so and this is all off the northern California coast? Yeah, this is off the Marin-Sonoma coast. That's a great area to fish, right? It is, but it's not extremely rare. But apparently up there they're rare, but it has to do with their diet. Okay, so maybe did it migrate from up there all the way up to Alaska? Well, they're native. They're native all the way up to Alaska.

The really biggest ones are if you catch them in Alaska. Oh, really? Like 50 pounders. Ooh. Yeah. The ones that would eat a toddler. Well, Alaska has those goddamn halibut that are like... Barn doors. Giant.

So I was sort of sad because I went up there because I wanted to catch a giant. And then I was reading about it before and I realized that every halibut over about 125 pounds is big breeding female so it's a bad idea to land it because actually the halibut stocks in alaska are not doing that well so get it to the surface get a picture of it so your ideal halibut apparently is like an 80 pounder or an 85 pounder that's plenty big right which is plenty big and it's not necessarily big breeding female and so you're not really going to hurt the species. It's like the guys who keep the 400-pounders, absolutely. And the weird thing about fish breeding behavior is that it's exponential.

So a buddy of mine, a guy named R.J. Waldron, he landed a 53-pound striper in the delta. Actually, it was his fishing buddy. And they tried and tried and tried and tried to revive it, but it died, which sucked. And then, but it was that thing there would be like the supermom for thousands and thousands and thousands of stripers. Whereas an 18-inch striper that was a female would not be, it's not linear. It's not like they get a little bit more. They get exponentially more, you know, they have exponentially more breeding power as they get bigger and bigger and bigger.

So it's generally not a good idea to eat your seed corn, even if they're fish. Wow. I had a friend of mine who caught an enormous halibut on a boat. It was one of those charter boats, fishing boats. Like Hummer? When they were pulling it up, they cut the line on him, and he was so pissed off. They were trying to tell him, like, look, you can't keep this one.

It was huge. He was like, I go, how big? And he's like, more than 300 pounds. I don't even know how big it was. It was so big. Took forever to bring in, but once we got it to the surface they wanted to cut the line They let it go yeah, and he was so pissed off. He's the right thing to do biologically makes sense It totally makes sense and there's such a cool-looking animal to like what a strange

The size of that fucker yeah, that one's too big 255 pounds they fucked up. They shouldn't kill that one right I wouldn't know I mean, it's it's legal. It's not illegal, they fucked up. They shouldn't have killed that one, right? I wouldn't have. I mean, it's legal. It's not illegal. Right. But you're not supposed to do it. Because the stocks are okay, but they're not doing super great. Because the chances are the next drop down, you're going to catch a 75 pounder anyway. Right.

Really? Jesus. You see the ones on the right? Uh-huh. That's what you should be keeping. The 287, I'd let that go. Because think about it. How much halibut are you going to eat, really?

Right. I mean, yeah, I know. Most guys are going to go up to Alaska once a year. But still, those other ones are in the 70s. There's easily three or four of those in the 70-pound range. 287-pound fish is a big big ass fucking fish, man. And the flake, the flake on those big halibut is so big that it gets so coarse that they're not, they're okay. I mean, they taste fine, but they're harder to cook. When my oldest daughter was, I guess she was like 12, somewhere around then, 12 or 13.

She's real sensitive. She's a very sweet person and she wanted to be a vegetarian and uh you know and she was a vegetarian for a while then she started eating meat again but she always loves animals and i said well listen let's go fishing and this is before i ever hunted i'm like let's go fishing we'll catch a fish and we'll cook it and it's a kind of a cool experience because you get to experience catching something cooking it so we went on this boat five minutes into the trip we catch a fucking marlin all right where are you fishing hawaii oh we're in hawaii and five minutes in we we it's not a big marlin it's about a 70 pound marlin um it takes a while to get it on board we get it on board and then the

guys who run the boat beat this thing to death in front of her with a club, because that's what you do. You get a marlin on board, you beat it to death. Why? That's the only way to stop it from flopping around and going all over the place. Why were they keeping a marlin? They kill it and eat it. Oh. They eat them.

Okay. Yeah, they smoke them, apparently. Okay. But that was another thing. I thought marlins aren't good. I'm glad you just said that, because the most recent trip that I had, I was in Hawaii just a month ago. That's the only state I've never been to. Oh, my God.

You've got to go. That's a magic place. That's a real – I think Hawaii has an energy that when you get off the plane, you go, oh, we're here. Like it's got a feel to it because you're on a fucking volcano. You're on a volcano in the middle of the ocean. I mean that's really what it is. It's a volcano in the middle of the ocean i mean that's really what it is volcano popped out i mean you could you could we took a helicopter where you fly over the volcano as it

leaks into the ocean we see the steam coming up as the lava's flowing it's amazing um anyway they pull i mean she's such a sweet kid she's so sensitive and friendly and nice and they beat this fucking marlin to death in front of her and then they're covering it with bags of ice and they're all psyched and it's making all these weird noises and then like she just starts to calm down and get over it and then 20 minutes later it starts flopping again it's not totally dead oh god i've never been able to take her fishing since she's 20 now she She's like, fuck you. Fuck you, Dad. What did you do?

And I'm like, honey, this is where we get fish. This is where fish come from. It was the size of a dog. It was like a dog-sized thing. It wasn't like we brought in a 12-inch trout. It was a giant-ass living creature that these guys beat to death. I mean, it's a small boat. They beat it to death five feet from her.

So five feet away, they're beating this thing with a club. Wow. That's kind of traumatic. It was very dramatic. It was a lot of that. It was a lot of that. So that was the end of that. We've talked about taking her hunting, but I think still that fucking one marlin messes with her.

But they were telling me that you had to smoke it. But on the last trip that I was on, which was about a month ago, these guys were telling me that, no, no, no, you can cut it and eat it like swordfish. Yeah. You cut it and grill it. There's no reason why you couldn't. Have you ever had it, though? I've never actually eaten it. So why were you saying why would you keep

marlin? Because almost nobody does. Like if you go to Costa Rica or Baja or the Caribbean, they're caught catch and release only. Now do they do that to ensure the population? I think they do. I mean because I've heard that the Hawaiians eat them but I've never eaten it.

But yeah, I mean almost all marlin fishing is catch and release. Hmm. That's interesting. Yeah. That's the big trophy fish, right? That's the one that they want to have on the wall. Yeah.

That was the only time I ever caught one. Yeah. And we caught it maybe 10 minutes into fishing. Now, swordfish get that big. Yeah. But that one's coming over the rail. Yeah. That's a delicious fish, right?

Now, you think that tastes significantly different than a marlin? I bet they're pretty similar. I'd like to know. Well, I just wanted to ask you about gar because I've always wanted to go gar fishing because I've seen them. And when you see those images that we just looked at, like, God damn it, I want to see that thing in real life. I would wish that you had tried it. I've tried a lot of things. Yeah. How have you not tried it. I've tried a lot of things. Paddlefish, bowfin. Paddlefish is an interesting one, right? That's a Sacramento fish too, isn't it? No, that's a Missouri

River thing. They're cousins of the sturgeon. Okay, and that's one that doesn't really have they don't have any bones, right? Neither do sturgeon. Oh, really? So sturgeon is a lot like a shark in that sense. But sharks have bones only around the jaw. Right. Neither do sturgeon. Oh, really? Oh, so sturgeon is a lot like a shark in that sense. Yeah. But sharks have bones only around the jaw. Right. Now, there's also some weird thing with

the paddlefish where you pull that spinal cord out of them, right? What a weird looking fucking thing that is. They're pretty tasty though. That's what I hear. And if you've ever had lumpfish caviar, that's what that is. No, never. What is a lumpfish caviar? It's just caviar out of a paddlefish. I don't know why they call it paddlefish, but they should just call it paddlefish caviar, which I think they are now. Something about the restrictions on commercial paddlefishing because of the concern. I don't think there is any. No? I think it's all recreational now. And in some states, wow. Look at that fucker. That looks like a fake animal. That doesn't even look real. Football fish. But I think that concern was about the

caviar, right? Right. So there was, again, there was an illegal trade in petal fish caviar. So there's some states where you can keep your fish, but fish and game keeps the caviar. Really? How bizarre. I don't think that's cool. I think it should be illegal to sell, but like in Missouri. Why would Fish and Game keep the caviar? What are they going to do? I think it's going to go to waste.

I think they sell it. Oh, that's even weirder. Yeah. That's really weird. Well, I would- I mean, probably, I would hope. Missourians will tell us. But I would hope that the proceeds from selling the caviar by Fish and Game would go back to like habitat restoration or something.

I would hope so, too. But I would hope so that you could pay like an additional tag and get to keep the caviar. Say if you caught a female and you pay an extra $30 or something like that and you keep the caviar. Yeah, I know you can in some states, like Montana for sure. You can in Montana? They have paddlefish in Montana? Yeah, they're all in giant rivers. Like, you know, name a big giant river

in the middle of the country and they live there. That looks like another one that just made it through evolution. Yeah. How long has that fucker been around? A hundred million years. Ugh. Easy. There's a show on TV, I forget the name of it,

but it's this guy who cooks weird stuff on the Sportsman's Channel. Oh, that's Scott Lasath's Dead Meat. Yes, Dead Meat. Scott lives like 10 miles from my house. That's why I was going to bring him up, because he's a Sacramento guy. And he cooked paddlefish. Yep. He pulled the spinal cord out of them.

He's on an interesting show. He cooks everything. He has one of the best self-deprecating sense of humor ever. Yeah. Ever. Yeah. It's hilarious. I mean, the dude's on the road like 300 days a year.

Really? Yeah. He does a lot of stuff for a group called Hunt Fish Feed. So it gets hunters together to donate tons and tons of game meat for homeless shelters. And they do a big cookout thing so that everybody gets a meal. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, it's cool stuff. Yeah, but he's found a lot of fish and a lot of game that people thought was inedible.

It actually turns out to be quite delicious. I'll tell you one that he didn't. What? Python. Oh, really? Not good? He said it was like mainlining mercury. Whoa.

He said it was the worst thing he's ever put in his mouth. Wow. Yeah. Python. Python and the Everglades. Huh. Did he try to do anything with it? Marinate it or anything?

I think he tried it every which way but Sunday and he was just like, no way. Just none of it? No, dude. Now, how do you know when you're eating something like that whether or not it's actually edible? Well, I think you can do some, like all birds are edible, for example. All birds? Yeah. Some say it's disgusting and fishy, some, like all birds are edible, for example. All birds. Yeah.

Some say it's disgusting and fishy, but, and most mammals are edible. But like, you know, the livers on polar bears have so much vitamin A, they'll kill you if you eat them. Really? Yeah. So don't eat polar bear liver. Dude, I was about to. Pro tip. Another pro tip?

Two and a show, folks. What a show. I know. It's like so random. A polar bear is an odd one, right? That's a strange animal in that it's just 100, it's a bear, but it's 100% carnivorous. There's not a vegetable to be seen up there, and it's adapted. I've seen them eat seaweeds on TV.

Really? Yeah. I think it's because they're freaking out because they have no sea ice anymore and so they're just doing whatever they can do to survive yeah that's creepy there's a really fucking scary video of this uh polar bear there's a seal on an ice shelf and the polar bear slips up behind the seal and the seal doesn't know and the seal's like, oh, Jesus. And then just tries to get away. And he's got that really sad look on his face. I've seen that video.

It's just like, oh, you lose, seal. And he gets into the water and then the polar bear is in the water right behind him seconds later. And then the polar bear comes out with it and it's in his jaws. That's a goddamn ruthless animal. Poppy's got to eat.

Well, there's no other way. You know, there's no, way. And it's enormous. So there it is. Look at it. He just slowly creeps up. I mean, literally like a shark. Look how slow he's just moving around. And that's sea lion.

Is that a sea lion? Yeah. No, it's a regular seal. So apparently they differentiate seals. So that one's the good tasting one. And then I think if this is the one that gets eaten, one's the good tasting one. And then I think if this is the one that gets eaten,

it's the good tasting one. And then there's another one that is really nasty with sharp teeth. So the polar bears are like, eh, I'm going to leave that one alone. Like a leopard seal?

Is that what you mean? It's not that bad, but it's some seal that lives up in the Arctic that's kind of badass. Leopard seals are amazing. Oh, yeah. That's a crazy animal.

I remember that Marching of the Penguins movie. I didn't. Oh, yeah. That's a crazy animal. I remember that Marching of the Penguins movie. I didn't even know that a leopard seal was a real thing. He's like, well, we're just chilling. Look at him.

He's like, yeah. Fuck. And he's just right in the water after him. Sorry, dude. You ain't gonna make it. I like the silence.

It's kind of epic there's a stand up comedian Kevin Fitzgerald he's also a veterinarian and I worked with him once in Denver and he told me that polar bears are one of the few animals that when they come out of the womb

they're like the little alien from the movie Alien that bursts out of the chest like they're looking to bite you and he's like they are predatory from the moment they come out of the vagina he said they just look at you different they look at to bite you. And he's like, they are predatory from the moment they come out of the vagina. Yeah, he said they just look at you different. They look at you like you're meat.

Well, that's interesting. So another friend of mine, a woman named Rebecca, who's really good with animals, she's worked with all kinds of animals, but she mostly focuses on raptors now. But she worked with cats back in the day. And she said that mountain lions are big kitty cats. They're giant house cats. So if you can understand a house cat, you can understand a mountain lion. Leopards and jaguars, very different.

It's exactly what you were saying. They are looking at you for you to make a mistake. And it's just a very different vibe from those cats than from a mountain lion. I remember that. Yeah, it was interesting because it's, you know, back to our talk about jaguars coming back into the United States. Well, any animal that's forced to kill things with its face in order to stay alive, sketchy thing to have in your neighborhood in San Francisco. They're just so big. They need so much food, too. I mean, you think about how big a polar bear is,

how much actual meat that thing must need to consume in order to keep that mass. A lot. I mean, there's a place called Oli's Big Game Lodge in Paxton, Nebraska. And it's one of these places, it's the middle of western Nebraska, it's kind of in nowhere.

But it's where you get off the highway if you've got to go eat. And you walk in there, and you're like, holy shit, there's this giant 12-foot-tall polar bear stuffed, like, right at the door when you open up the door. And it just gives you an instantaneous notion of how small you are compared to a polar bear. They're the biggest, right?

Yeah. They're bigger than Kodiak bears? Yep. Wow. Yeah, that's a weird biggest, right? Yeah. They're bigger than Kodiak bears? Yep. Wow. Yeah, that's a weird thing, right? An animal that lives where there's no vegetation and all the life comes from the sea, and it's bigger than all of them. See, you know, blubber must be good. Well, isn't also that principle that the larger mammals...

Bergman's rule. Yeah, the further north they go, the larger their body has to be in order to maintain heat. Yep, it's called Bergman's Rule, the Scandinavians. Yeah. That's another animal, bears are, that Steve Rinella likes to call charismatic megafauna. Yeah, that's an old biological term for when, back in the 70s, when, you know, save the whales and everything. And everybody who was studying keystone species like krill or, you know, things that aren't very charismatic were like, who is studying keystone species like krill or things that aren't very charismatic,

we're like, man, everybody wants to say the charismatic megafauna. What really is the key to everything is this indiscriminate krill or this little teeny forage fish or whatever, whatever. Or like ants we were talking about. They say if all the ants died, there would be no life on this planet

inside of 100 years. Wow. It would be dead. Even fire ants? I think it might be inside of 100 years. Wow. It would be dead. Even fire ants? I think it might be less than 100 years. Find out what would happen if all the ants died. I think it's actually less than 100 years. Even fire ants?

I hate fire ants. They're not nice. They definitely mean it. I first discovered fire ants. I knew they existed all the time, but I'd never actually encountered them until I was in Texas, in Austin, digging wild onions. And these ants crawl over my hand like, oh, look, there's ants. I used to live in Florida.

Florida, they were all over the place. What the hell? And my friend Jesse's like, what are ants? People have died for sure. There was some little old lady who I remember the story. She tripped and fell like right onto a, and they just consumed her with bites. Wow. Yeah, and just fucked her up.

They just thought she was a threat, and time to take you out. God, what's going to be on that poor lady's tombstone? I don't know. I don't know. You're aware of bullet ants, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting one. Didn't Steve encounter bullet ants?

Yeah, in Bolivia. It's the same place where he ate a monkey. Yeah, no thanks, dude. You wouldn't eat a monkey? No. That's where you cross the line? But if someone cooked it in front of you and it smelled good and it was in the bowl and you were with these people and they were all eating it, you wouldn't take a bite? I don't know.

I'd have to judge that when I got there. I think you would. I would probably try and get out of that situation before it ever happened. I would worry about primate to primate diseases. situation before it ever happened. I would worry about primate to primate diseases. Like I know they're cooking it really well, but I know that prions, like the prions that cause mad cow disease that come from brain matter. Well, you know, with chronic wasting. Yeah. Is that from prions as well? Same thing? Yeah. And chronic wasting disease for folks who don't know what we're talking about is a disease that affects deer and it's really common in the Midwest.

And they think that it may have originated, at least this is the rumor, from these weird commercial deer farms where they grow all these deer and they all live together. Because apparently one of the things that happens is if deer eat out of the same spot, like that's where it develops. Like if there's like a feed tray and they're all eating out of the feature, that's unnatural for the wild. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's, you know, it's one of those things that are difficult to, I mean, I get

asked about it all the time. I'm like, well, what do I do with, you know, if I want to make chops or if I want to make stock out of the bones of the deer I shot, what do I do with CWD? And it's, I've done an exhaustive look at all the science that's out there, and it's never jumped the species barrier. To humans. To humans. It's primarily going to be located in spinal tissue.

So you're going, you know, pelvis to skull. And that's about what we know. So if it was me and there was testing available for my deer, I would absolutely do it. And if you're in the clear, you're in the clear. And if not, it was too hard, I would probably keep the limb bones, but not anything off the spinal column because I've just, you know. And you would keep the limb bones for marrow? Yeah, either marrow or making stocks and broths. And then, you know, cooking shanks on the bone.

Right. And when you do shanks, you braise them and slow cook them. And that's a neglected part of a lot of undulates, right? I think it's probably the single easiest way of, you know, to use the stupid catchphrase, opening your game. Because grinding shank meat sucks because there's so much connective tissue, and they're easy to saw off with a sawzall or a hacksaw. They usually will fit in your pot, and they're amazing braids like that. And even if that's all you do different, besides your butcher will like you

because all he's got to do is just saw them off and put them in a butcher paper and bring them back to you. Now you started your hunting and cooking career off. You started as a chef, and then you wanted to get closer and maybe understand what you were cooking better. Is that a good way to describe it? Is that accurate? Sort of.

I mean, I started hunting in Minnesota, and my best friend was the outdoor writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. And we had been fishing at the time, and then hunting season came around, and he invited me out. Well, let me preface this, but he'd been sort of plying me with mallards and with rabbits and with some venison prior to me ever going out. So the stuff that he had killed, he wanted you to try. And you were already a chef by then? Well, at that point, I was a newspaper reporter. So I started as a restaurant cook, you know, line cook and a low-level sous chef. Then I went into newspapers, and I was still as a newspaper

reporter at that point. And I got into it because I wanted to eat these things. I loved cooking the mallards. I love cooking pheasants. I love cooking, you know, venison. And you can't buy it, I love cooking pheasants. I love cooking, you know, venison and you can't buy it. So got to learn to get it. And the other thing that was really, you know, life changing about it was, so I'm a pretty good fisherman. And when I'm in a place for a while, you learn tides, you learn weather patterns, you learn all of the little intricacies of what it takes to actually get on fish. So most anglers are just hooks and lines. The real fisherman knows where to put the boat to find the fish, knows how fast to troll, knows what angle to the waves you want to be, and all these little detailed things. And I knew that. My friend Chris knew this by looking at the land. Like he could just take at a glance, he could look at a field like, nope, no pheasants are going to be in that.

And I didn't, how do you know? And he just knew because he'd done this a zillion times. And his ability to read land like I could read water, I wanted that ability. And that every bit as much as the eating part of it was what brought me into it. Now, when you say that you really enjoyed cooking them and you really enjoyed eating them, is it because the flavors are different? They're more complex. They're more like, you know, one of the main criticisms that people have said to me when I talk about wild game, like, oh, I tried venison and like it's gamey. I'm like, God damn, somebody ruined you because it's just it's not like they did something wrong with it.

That's I mean, there's two things to gamey. So one, I think we both agree that what we would call gamey is somebody screwed up. Right. we would call gamey is somebody screwed up. Right. So poor, almost 75% of all good venison care happens before the meat ever gets the kitchen. So that can give you what we would call gamey. But I mean, I've had people eat backstrap that it was perfectly prepared, perfectly cared for. And they say, well, it's kind of gamey. What they're talking about is that it doesn't taste like corn Mmm every meat animal including to some extent salmon that we will get in a supermarket is corn fed

They corn feed salmon. Yeah, it's in the pellets that they feed him. It's part of the pellets Christ Yeah, and this goddamn corn industry that has its tentacles deep into America, right? And you you know, this corn tastes like it has a very particular flavor profile. And so with that flavor profile is broken by, you know, deer that ate something else, people are like, ah, it's different. Well, yeah, it tastes like something. It tastes like something that actually lived a life. Tell me that about mule deer, that they don't like mule deer because mule deer tastes like the sage that it eats and that they like whitetails because they eat corn. I'm like, Jesus Christ, man. Like, I've had mule deer because mule deer tastes like the sage that it eats and that they like white tails because they eat corn i'm like jesus christ man like i've had mule deer they taste

great you're out of your mind it's uh you know then people will say elk is so much better than deer i'm like okay i get it i like i mean elk there's some minor differences and subtle differences and if you put one next to each other yeah there, there's a little bit of a difference. But it's not that dramatic. Like, I'm a duck hunter. The difference between a spoony and a pintail is profound. What's a spoony and what's a pintail? So a spoony is a northern shoveler, and it's one of the least desired ducks that we have. Northern shoveler. Yeah.

And is it a diver duck? Is that what it is? It's kind of a hybrid. It's technically a puddle duck, but it dives more so than the other puddle ducks. If you don't mind, explain to people what the difference is. Oh, okay. So every duck that you've seen in a park with his butt up in the air, that's a dabbler or a puddle duck. So a diver duck is a duck that dives very deep.

And the deepest of all are a third kind of duck called a sea duck, which, as you might guess, lives in deep, deep, deep, deep water. So divers would be like bluebills, canvasbacks, redheads, buffleheads, golden eye. And then puddle ducks would be obviously the mallard, which everybody knows. Mallards, pintails, spoonies, widgeon, teal. And so in general, puddle ducks taste better than diver ducks because of what they eat. And so in general, puddle ducks taste better than diver ducks because of what they eat. And so, but ducks are all omnivores, much like pigs and bears. So you have a spoonie, which loves to eat shrimpy things and algae, meh, versus a pintail, which loves seeds.

It loves seeds of all kinds. And that's a more tasty bird? Any bird that eats seeds as a matter of habit, human beings are going to like to eat it more. It creates a set of flavors that we're more familiar with. The exceptions to that are kind of fascinating. If you talk to Newfoundlanders or Icelanders or Inuit,

people who are grown up eating seabirds, they love that fishy, low-tidy flavor thing that's going on. Yeah, I see you're getting the hairy eyebrow. I want to try, even though I know I'll hate it, I want to try that fermented shark that they love in Iceland. No, you don't. Have you had it?

Tell me what it's like. Fishy natto. What's natto? It's fermented stinky soybeans. Oh, I've heard of that stuff too. It's disgusting, supposedly. It's stinky, blue cheesy, fishy, ammoniated. It attacks your mouth.

Ammoniated? Yeah, heavily ammoniated. Now, the Iceland people, are they drunk when they're eating this? I think it just was, there was nothing. It's like a polar bear. There's nothing else. So they developed a taste for it? Well, apparently you can't eat that shark fresh. What?

Yeah. Oh, wow. I think it's another vitamin A or something like that. There's some reason you can't eat that. It's a Greenland shark. And you can't eat a Greenland shark fresh. So it was the only way to eat it was to ferment it. How bizarre. Yeah. And so they became the first guy to figure that one. Yeah. Right. Let's eat the rotten one. How to prepare it. You have to figure out how to ferment

that thing because I have never seen or heard. I've seen videos of people trying it. I've never heard anybody's tried it that enjoyed it. Anybody who lives in Iceland, though, will tell you. Like, it's a delicacy. We like it. I'm like, I don't understand. I wonder what our delicacy is. What is the thing that we, either in California or in the United States, really, really like that everybody else in the world is like, holy crap, how can you eat that? That's a good question. I don't think we have anything like that.

Our food is so bland. Like, an American food is like you think of a cheeseburger and fries or steak and mashed potatoes. You don't think of anything that has like incredibly potent flavors to it. Yeah, I mean, I can think of some regionalities like Scrapple. Right. But that's not, you call Scrapple regional American, but not dominant American food. What's Scrapple again? It's basically lips and assholes ground up really small

and mixed with either cornmeal or sometimes oatmeal. Yeah, but that still won't be potent. It's baked in... Is it? Yeah. Liver mush is even more potent. Liver much? Liver mush. Mush, really?

It's basically that, but it's made with liver. And they're both breakfast meats. And, you know, I've had good scrapple. I've not had liver mush that I really, really enjoyed. It's kind of a, you see a lot in South Central Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee, that area. Well, whoa, that's, wow. See, that's scrapple. Yeah. So it's like you cut it like a loaf, like a meatloaf. Yep. And then you fry it. Oh, wow. So you- It's not horrible. Do you boil it? How do you get it like a loaf, like a meatloaf. Yep, and then you fry it. Oh, wow.

So you form it. It's not horrible. Do you boil it? How do you get it to that state? Oh, it's all liquid. Oh, Jesus, look at this. Yeah. I don't look good.

It's all liquid. It's basically like scrapple is the scraps from slaughtering a pig. So is it almost like a gelatin thing, like a head cheese type of a scenario? It is, but I would say head cheese is probably a more wholesome product. Oh, Jesus Christ. Well, head cheese is very strange. I didn't know what head cheese was until probably like five years ago. And I remember watching a video of someone making head cheese. I like head cheese. I've never had it. It's, okay, so here's the thing. All it is is, well, there's a German way that is really dig on the gelatin.

And I'm not super heavy on the gelatin. And that gelatin comes from the collagen that breaks down in the tissues? So take a pig's head. Okay. And typically you will either have the ears thrown in there or you'll have an extra foot thrown in there for some more collagen. You boil it slowly with a lot of spices and herbs until it practically falls apart. Then you fish everything out. And then the iron rule of head cheese making is if it looks like meat, keep it fairly big.

If you have no idea what it is, chop it very small. And then you pack it into a loaf pan or a sausage casing, and then you boil down the cooking liquid by half. And then that really concentrates the gelatin. And then you pour that hot broth over the mixture that you've packed into the the loaf pan or the or the sausage casing or whatever and then you put it in the refrigerator and it sets and you eat it cold so the best head cheese as um is where the gelatin is set just enough where it kind of melts when it hits the heat of your mouth. And so it's not sort of, you know, knocks gelatin. And it's actually very, very good.

And it needs pickles and or mustard. Pickles and or. Yeah. There's head cheese. See, it looks good. That looks better than Scrapple. Oh, yeah. It's much better than Scrapple.

But it's a weird distinction. I mean, I guess it's because it's not dicks and assholes. Right. More uteruses, please. I mean, I've always been fascinated by chartreutery. Just the idea that people figured out a long time ago how to dry things and

preserve things. That's it? Head cheese right there? That's how I make it. That's colpata testa. That's an Italian style. Okay. And then you slice it very thin? See that arc thing in the bottom left-hand corner? Mm-hmm. That's a little beady slice of pig ear. Oh, wow. Really?

Mm-hmm. And that's edible? You can chew that down? Yeah. Well, it's been boiled for hours and hours. It just becomes super tender? Yeah. Because I think of them as things I feed my dogs.

I buy those at the pet store. If they're not boiled, yeah. Yeah. Pigs are a weird one, man. That's such a weird thing because you find out how smart they are and commercial pig farming

becomes very disturbing when you find out how... That's another reason why I got into hunting is to... I have not bought meat or fish for the house since 2004.

That's awesome. With maybe a handful of exceptions. I bought a chicken a couple of times. But part of that is I would prefer to opt out of that system

because you're exactly right. Yeah. I just did a podcast really recently with my friend Ari, Ari Shafir, who's a standup comedian. It is his podcast. It's called The Skeptic Tank. And we went into that because he's never hunted and he asked me about it. And that is what I gave him. It's pretty much my reason for doing it in the first place. I felt like I didn't want to be a part of that system anymore. And I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a vegetarian. I felt like I didn't want to be a part of that system anymore, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a vegetarian. I was like, it's going to be one of these things,

either a vegetarian or a hunter, so let me try this hunting thing. And then I got into it, but it's the connection with the food, it becomes a completely different experience. And it's so hard to explain that without sounding pretentious or without just repeating myself over and over again, which I've done many, many, many, many times on this podcast. But when you, if I'll, I'll pull like an elk backstrap out of the freezer tonight and I'll thaw it out and I'll, you know, marinate that, put some kosher salt on it, some pepper and

grill it. And it's a wonderful experience. Like while I'm cooking this thing, I'm all excited. I remember the hunt. Yep. I remember, this thing, I'm all excited. I remember the hunt. Yep. I remember, you know, seeing the elk, the whole thing. I mean, it's just, it's a totally, and when you're eating it, it's just rich with vitamins and flavor and it's alive. I mean, it's just, it's definitely not alive.

But I mean, it has this taste to it that's just so different than anything you're going to buy in a store. Well, for me as a cook, uh, having entered this whole game as a, as a cook or, you know, this pursuit of hunting, um, it really challenges me to make great food out of every bit because, you know, you broke it, you bought it. And tacos de lengua made from elk tongue. Phenomenal. Um, head cheese made from a doe's head, uh, braised shanks. Head cheese made from a doe's head. Braised shanks. Hell, I even made venison tripe. One of the most delicious meals that I ever cooked with Wild Game was on our first hunt.

Rinella cooked a deer head in the ground. Oh, yeah. Like the Big Sky. Like he read about it in that book, Big Sky, the Guthrie book. And he decided that he wanted to try it that way. So this is like the first time he ever tried it. And we buried this thing. We put hot coals, wrapped it up in cloth and wet cloth, put it underground, poured hot coals all over it and buried it. I do not remember, but it was amazing. Whatever he did, he did it right. Maybe he didn't salt it. I don't remember. I love how Steve will like always take the hard way out. Oh, he did it right. Maybe he did insult it. I don't remember. I love how Steve will always take the hard way out.

Oh, he's the hardest motherfucker on the earth. Every time I hunt with him, I feel like a pussy. He's just always wanting to do everything hard. If he doesn't get miserable. I watched a show once where he saw this giant bull elk on the first day of his hunt within the first couple hours, and he didn't shoot it because he didn't want to be done hunting. That's why you go fishing afterwards. You're you're out of your fucking elk's dead time to go fishing he explained it to me afterwards it made more sense and it was because he had just

come from kentucky where he had did another show and he had shot an elk in kentucky like literally the week before so he felt bad about shooting one right away i'm like it's not like you're gonna let it go to waste and he's like well we have to make a show and I can't just shoot it on the first day shoot it on the first day and then pretend you're looking for an elk for three fucking days afterwards Jesus Christ, you know about editing

he's so his ethics are so strong and his inability to be disingenuous is so powerful that he won't do that. Well, the hunt I did with him, it's like, I'm older than he is. I'm like, I'd like to climb to the top of this mountain, look for things, and then sit here until I find something, and then walk to that thing and shoot it.

He's like, let's climb all over these mountains. Like, woo! And I'm like, ah, dude, I'm just going to sit here. Like, this is where we saw deer. I'm going to go. No, as it turned out, he was right. Oh, he's always right. He knows what he's doing.

I went on a mule deer hunt with him recently, and, you know, I was like, let's go after them now. He's like, no, no, no. Just sit and wait. You don't want to blow them out. I'm like, you sure? Just go. Let's go.

He's like, you can go if you want. I'm like, okay. I go down the hill. They're gone. If I could take off. He's like, we'll go after them tomorrow. I'm like, I don't know, tomorrow? But it's like one of those things where your friend could read the land.

You have to listen. When you have someone that has this deep experience in something that's very odd information, like where the quail will be. How do you know? Dude, I've been doing this. I have that with ducks. I can do that with ducks and geese. Is that your favorite bird?

Well, I don't know if it's my favorite bird to cook. Maybe grouse. Grouse. Maybe grouse. Never had it. What's it like? Imagine it's what a chicken dreams about being when it grows up and goes wild. It's a wild chicken.

Just a little tiny wild chicken. They're not that tiny. No? What's a fat grouse? I shot a big blue grouse in Utah that plucked, gutted, and dressed just, it looked just like a chicken you buy in the store. It was two pounds. Oh, that's pretty heavy. That's about as big as they get. That's a...

About like that. That's a pretty big animal. Mm-hmm. No kidding. And sage grouse are even bigger. Really? Mm-hmm. What's like the biggest world record grouse, like a five pound grouse? It'd be a capercaillie in Sweden. They're, I think they're like 15 pounds or so. Oh, it's a fucking turkey. Pretty much, but they don't have turkeys

there. So, wow. So, I mean, I guess the biggest gallinaceous bird would be the turkey. I was interested in what the difference between wild turkey and regular turkey is. It's surprisingly not as big as you might think. Yeah. The breast was almost identical. Except it's very narrow. Yeah. But the wings, or rather the drumsticks, did have a different flavor to them.

Yeah. It was more distinct. And they work for a living. Yes. They're out there hustling. Yeah. Which is the same you could say about pigs. Like the darkness of the meat of wild pig

is so preferable to domestic pigs. I love shooting wild hogs. Well, you have to, first of all. That's one of those things. That's one of the animals that really, when you talk to people that are anti-hunting and they just want to let nature run its course. Like there's some animals where you literally can't do that.

Like pigs are one of them, especially invasive pigs. I had no, so I've hunted pigs in California for years and years and years. So, and I've heard all these stories about Texas. And a few years ago, I finally went down to Southeast Texas to do, I do hunting and cooking schools. And so the guy I was working with is in Bay City. And so we're down there and uh he's like okay first thing you have to understand is that these are a problem like what are you talking about so we went out and there are these herds of pigs and like 90 pigs in

a shot they'll walk into a field and do a hundred thousand dollars of damage in one night and it's it's astonishing this is all year round. And I had no idea. Because if you've hunted pigs in California, it's a hunt. If you go to Texas, it's like, how many can you kill? And you still won't make a dent on the population. There's a story that I've told before, but I'll tell it again just for the sake of this conversation. There's a new highway that they opened before, but I'll tell it again just for the sake of this conversation. There's a new highway they opened up in Texas. And the first night they opened up the road, 40 car accidents with pigs. Wow.

Just overrun. They were just overrun with pigs. Wow. Yeah, car accidents and wild game and population control is one of the most surprising statistics when you give them to tell people 2 million car accidents with deer every year, or 1.5 million at least, in the United States with deer. And they go, what? Like, people who don't know go, what? No, you have 1.5 million car accidents with deer a year just in the United States.

Yeah. And they're delicious. Yeah. Years ago, I did. I was working at the pie press pioneer press in saint paul and i did a data analysis one of the first ones that was ever done on deer vehicle collisions and apparently if you're in anoka county north of the twin cities on november 8th at dusk watch your ass that's the one day that was like so you're like there's this

huge cluster right there well then, then November hits the rut. Yeah, November's the rut. That's when they just get completely bonkers. They go running into traffic. Well, you've been to a singles bar at closing time. Yes. Well, I've also been to Iowa in the rut. I was just there a few weeks ago.

You got an Iowa tag? Yes. Wow. I got a governor's tag from my buddy of mine who owns some property out there and knows people. You're lucky. Yes, very lucky. Yeah, you can get one there. It takes a couple years.

You know, you put in points. You can get one every five years. But Iowa's amazing. Like, the whitetail population is so strong. And one of the reasons is they don't have a rifle season. Right, it's shotgun only. Shotgun and archery. So you've got to work for it.

Because if you're going to shoot someone with a shotgun, you've got to be pretty fucking close. I'd rather use a bow. Even with a Sabot rifle barrel slug, you're still talking 100 yards. Is that the most you could shoot one at? I've heard guys shoot farther, but week in and week out, 100 yards with those rifled Sabot slugs. And I would imagine there's a giant drop to how far it falls in 100 yards. Yeah, you've got to be aware of it. It's like shooting at the top of the back at 100 yards.

Whereas, you know, I shoot at 270 and I lose like two inches at 300. And I've heard that with some places, some states, they allow you to use shotguns, but you can't use a scope. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, you can't use a scope on the shotgun. You have to use the old timey. Iron sights. Yeah.

Or you could probably use a peep sight. Do you have a favorite game that you enjoy cooking? Is there anything that you like, this is my favorite game to cook in a variety of different ways, or do you just like all of them? Well, I think if you're talking about a variety of different ways, ducks and venison. But if you're talking about a favorite thing to cook in general, go back to grouse. Grouse or not, it's versatile, but I love the flavor of grouse. But it's a whole bird that you're cooking.

And is it because of its wild diet? It just has a more complex flavor to it? Very much so. There's nothing that tastes like a grouse. It's sort of like a chicken, but you'll know you're eating a grouse. Now, well, I didn't know this either until fairly recently, that as you were explaining before, that there's different kinds of ducks. And the ducks that eat seeds are preferable. But diver ducks, you can eat.

Oh, yeah. All the time. Do you enjoy them? Oh, yeah. But they have like a fishy taste to it because they eat primarily seafood. So this is a great example of diet. So brant, which is like a sea goose, there's East Coast brant and West Coast brant. And the season just ended yesterday, I think, on brant.

And so on the West Coast, they are the best eating waterfowl there is, period, bar none, because they eat eelgrass. And they have a very very clean almost saline flavor it's very it's not fishy it's not pondy it's just it's it's a they're fantastic birds you shoot it brant and the east coast and they eat sea lettuce a seed a seaweed revolting like barely edible really like barely you just gotta chew through it yeah but you know so canvas backs or they're a diver red, they're a diver. Redheads, they're a diver. For the most part, I'll always pluck them because they have a different diet.

But on the other hand, golden eyes, buffleheads, most bluebills but not all, ringnecks, a lot of those birds, you know, they still taste good, but I'll tend to skin them. It is really fascinating to me that the taste of when you eat an animal depends so much on what the animal's diet is, and then it makes me think about my own diet and what is going on with the cells of my own body. And you think about people that are on poor diets that have terrible food that they consume and they choose to drink soda all the time, and their tissue itself is affected so drastically. Oh, long pig. This one's sweet. Oh, long pig. That's what cannibals called human.

I don't know what that accent was, but I don't like it. Have you ever had blueberry bear? I've had manzanita bear. What's that? So manzanita is just a different berry that bears love to eat in Northern California. Oh, okay. And was it similar, like the blueberry bear concept? is just a different berry that bears love to eat in Northern California. Oh, okay. And was it similar, like the blueberry bear concept?

Well, it didn't turn anything blue, but it was amazing. I mean, it was super sweet, super fatty, just very mild. Yeah, that's what I hear, that blueberry bear is like the ultimate game. Like then you get a bear in the fall that's been eating blueberries and like Rinella did a whole episode about it on his show where he cut one open and it had purple fat. Isn't that crazy? Amazing. There's actually a better one and it lives right near you.

So Legend has it. So I believe the state record black bear in California is a 700 pounder from the San Gabriel Mountains in Ventura. Or it's from Ventura County. From Ventura? Yes. 700 pounds?

That's not far. So apparently these bears live in the mountains and they come down to the avocado groves and gorge themselves on avocados. And it's one of my bucket list goals is to get what they call a guacamole bear. A guacamole bear is supposed to be really good? I can only imagine how delicious an avocado-eating bear would taste. I wonder if it would affect it that much because avocados are a fairly mild fruit. It is a fruit, right?

Wouldn't you consider it an avocado fruit? But the fat quality would be amazing. Yeah, well, it's very rich in fat, right? I eat a lot of avocados. I wonder if I would, hmm. of avocados I wonder if I would hmm see the thing about the blueberry bear though is that it's got that engaging sort of sweetness to it that I think would be really interesting I don't think you'd get that from the avocado now now you do have an urge to eat Mexican food I think hmm is that what is this the other Rinella one yeah he's just showing how when he cuts into it this this fat

has this insane sort of bluish hint to it. Huh. Yeah, he's sick. You see how that... Is this when he gives himself trichinosis? No. Okay. That was later.

Poor Steve. Yeah. Well, it's just... He's just crazy. He's too crazy. He's had everything, this fucking guy. He's had trichinosis. He's had...

Lyme disease. He's got Chargian loose. Yeah. Oh, he got Giardia? He got Giardia, yeah. If you... The other cool thing is that if you were to get one of these guacamole bears, you can freeze it and be free of trichinopsis.

Because south of about Oregon, draw a line all the way across the country, the bears there, if they have it, will tend to have a variety called Trichonella spiralis, which you can kill by freezing. Interesting. But north of there, from the northern tier of this country and all of Canada and Alaska, it's called Trichonella nativa. And that one is resistant to freezing. So it stays alive even if you have it in the freezer for months. Right. That's sick.

What a creepy animal. I know. Well, I mean, it's from up there, so it must be frost resistant. I was surprised how good bear taste. I was too. Yeah, that's one of those ones where you go, I don't know if I want to eat this. This is just a teddy bear. Same here.

This is Yogi. This is all the anthropomorphizations of all the- Charismatic megafauna. That's the weird- I've never had people more mad at me for anything I've ever shot than bear. Like, they don't—people don't seem to be that mad about a deer. Some people are, but most people understand it. Like, you ate that. You're going to eat it.

That's the way you shot it. We are who we are because we hunt deer. Yeah. You know, anthropologically speaking. I mean, there's all kinds of evidence to show that the reason why we can run—we were the only primate with an arch. Mm-hmm. The only reason that we can run, we were the only primate with an arch. The only reason that we can actually throw properly. The reason why that we can communicate so complicated in so many complicated ways. There's all kinds of reasons of, you know, the structure of our shoulders,

the structure of our hips that are a great amount of the way we're built and the way we think and the way we act has to do with us teaming up to hunt large deer like things really where'd you get this all over the um the anthropological literature i mean i could cite you a bunch of books but um but there's i mean obviously it's debatable but the consensus is that there's an enormous amount of uh of development that stemmed out of pursuit hunting and ganging up on things like mammoths and rhinos and basically large herbivores. And that's why we're hardwired to hunt deer. Well, one of the things that I said that I was describing to my friend Ari about it is there's this strange familiarity and almost like this deep reward system that gets plugged

into that you weren't even aware that you had when the deer's down. And when you're quartering it and cutting it up, it's like, oh, I kind of know how to do this. Or at least I don't know how to do this, but this seems normal to me. It seems familiar. I mean, we've been, this is the other thing about some of the research I've been doing lately is that everybody hunts deer or something like a deer. So all over the world. So my banker, a guy named Omar, I was doing some banking stuff and I was talking about this book I just wrote. stuff and I was talking about the, this, this book I just wrote. And he said, Oh yeah, you know, I really miss hunting gazelles in the Eastern deserts of Lebanon. Right. I said the same reaction. You know, I have a friend from the Yucatan who hunts deer in the Yucatan. And,

you know, I have a, uh, another friend from Hokkaido and the Northern Island in Japan who, who hunts the same sick of black tail in Alaska now that he used to hunt in Hokkaido as a kid. And, you know, South Africans and New Zealanders, I mean, even if you can, you know, if you're smart and thinking out there, you're going to say, well, what about Australia? And Australia, I mean, I don't know if you've ever eaten kangaroo, but kangaroo looks exactly like venison. It pretty much tastes like venison.

Yeah, it's a crazy deer, right? It kind of is. It's a strange sort of a weird hopping deer with a tail ish yeah yeah ish yeah so i mean there's so the the human connection with hunting and eating something like a deer is very very is worldwide and and very very deep now this new book that you have here i've been reading it i was reading it today actually buck buck moose it's a lot of like really interesting information about animals and about how to prepare them. One of the things that I thought was really funny is the whole point about testosterone.

Yes. Testosterone stinks. And the animals that everybody wants, like the big bucks with the big racks, they're going to be smelly animals. They're going to be tougher. If you get them before the rut, which is not easy, but if you get them before the rut, they're perfectly fine. But that's the rub is that that's when they're easiest to get when they're all horny and confused. Yep. But you've got some great fucking recipes and ideas in here, man.

How long did it take you to put this together? Over, I've started, I don't know, maybe some of it 10 years, but, but actually sitting there writing it two years. Um, you know, because I, all the recipes I had to test and I had to send the recipes out to, um, you know, lots of readers because one of the things that's important for me is that my recipes are as watertight as possible. So I send them out to civilians. I don't let other chefs test my recipes because I, first of all, they're not going to follow the recipe. Second of all, I want- Really? They wouldn't? They would have their own bullshit? Oh yeah. I mean, because they can't help themselves.

Wow. No kidding. It just is. I'm at peace with it. But what I want is for somebody who reads what I write to be able to make what I made. So anybody who's ever sent a text message knows that if you ever send a text message, what you write is not necessarily what the person hears in their head. Right. So that can't, that can't go if I'm writing a recipe, because especially, because think about it, right? If I'm going to tell you to do X, Y, or Z with a, with a tenderloin, there's only one, you only get one shot at it. There's only one set of tenderloins on any animal.

And if I'm going to tell you to do something with it that's beyond whatever it is that you normally do, it better damn work. Because you can't just go to the store and get another tenderloin. Like you can get another chicken. You can't get another tenderloin. You mean a tenderloin from a moose or from a deer.

Right. And so everything has to be airtight and tested. Will any of these recipes work with domestic animals? Sure. Like if somebody's really curious about it? Sure. How would you know how to substitute? I would say bison or grass-fed beef will get you pretty close in flavor.

And lamb or goat will get you pretty close in size. Lamb doesn't taste like medicine, but in terms of size, like a shank recipe, for example, or a shoulder recipe or a neck recipe, lamb would be a perfect substitute. But if you want to get close to what a good deer or an elk tastes like, grass-fed beef or bison. And when people do buy commercially available venison and elk, doesn't it all come from other countries? Does it come from New Zealand, most of it at least? Most of whatever it is that you will see called venison will be red stag from New Zealand. But there are elk farms in the United States that I've seen elk commercially for sale.

Really? Commercial elk grown in the United States. That seems wrong. You might say that, but I couldn't possibly comment. Doesn't it seem a little... But that's one of the weird things about wild game is that you can't sell it. Right. And that's one of the really appealing things about... Because they belong to all of us. Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's also the market hunting is what wiped them out at the turn of the century. Even as late as the 1950s, it was a news item for somebody to get an eight point. Wow. I know guys who- An eight point buck, what he's talking about, the antlers, because they were almost wiped out. Yeah. I mean, it was a news event, even in the 60s in some places. So it's like, these are the good old days of deer hunting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, when I was in Iowa, we saw a lot of, we didn't see any big deer that got close, but we saw like, wow, this is crazy. They're here.

The biggest whitetail I ever saw was this giant in western Kansas when I was quail hunting. Kansas is supposed to be Mecca, right? It's a Mecca. I mean, Kansas, Iowa, you know? Yeah. Iowa and Kansas for big, giant whitetails. Yeah, I know people that move there. My friend John Dudley moved there just because of the deer hunting.

He's an archer. He's a little obsessive. He's a little crazy. He's a little crazy. Do you have a favorite mammal that you like to cook? You know, okay, but the first thing that popped in my head was javelina. Javelina? Javelina.

And I think it's because I'm a fan of the underdog. Oh. So I shot a fan of the underdog. Oh. So I shot a couple of skunk pigs. So Javelina- They call them skunk pigs. Yeah, they do. Yeah. It's not really a pig, right?

Well, it is, but it isn't. It's a peccary. And it's native to the United States where pigs are not. And they look like pigs. They act like pigs. They are related to pigs in the family tree, but they're not that close. And there is no reason why people should hate javelina so like if you go to arizona or new mexico everybody loves javelina like yes to eat yes to eat really and you go only to south texas there you go creepy fucker um if you go to south texas they're like ah they're disgusting

or they're rats or whatever and and so i was in South Texas, and I said to the landowner I was with, like, let me shoot a couple of javelinas. He's like, all right. And I cleaned them because I was wondering about this mysterious scent gland that you're not supposed to break up, which is on the smaller back. It's kind of like a javelina tramp stamp. And so if you skin the animal like you would skin a pig, you never see it. It's in the skin. So if you come underneath the skin,, you never see it. It's in the skin. So if you come underneath the skin, you'll never nick it. You'll have no problem.

Oh. And it's just like a little teeny pig, and they taste fantastic. Really? There is no off taste to them at all. Describe it. Is it pig-like pig? More like pork, like domestic pork than wild boar is. Really?

Yeah, because they're almost, I don't know if they're obligate vegetarians, but they're primarily vegetarians. I know. My friend Doug Stanhope told me that one killed his neighbor's dog. They fucking, they surrounded the dog and mauled it. Well, that's because, have you ever seen javelina teeth? Yeah, they got big ass crazy teeth. They're spikes. Yeah.

They're actually like spikes where wild boars have like arcs, like cutters. Yeah, well, they hunted this thing. They killed it on purpose. Look at that fucking creepy bastard. Jesus Christ. Roar. Ferocious looking, weird hobbit animal. Hobbit pig.

Yeah, it doesn't look like a real animal, right? It looks like something from a movie, like Lord of the Rings movie. But, you know, that said, I love cooking them because they're fun and I like pork. And you prepare it the same way you would cook like a pork loin? I tend to go a lot of Mexican, Central American recipes because that's where they live. And, you know, desert Southwest kind of stuff. But, you know, don't get me wrong. I love antelope.

Probably pronghorn antelope wouldn't be my second favorite. I've heard it's delicious. See, you'll hear it's delicious and you'll hear it's disgusting. And here's why. Because pronghorns are, they're super nervous animals. They're like high-strung deer, basically, even though they're not deer. Pseudocapra, something or other. That's their genus.

They're their own thing. Weird side note. They're so fast because they evolved to run away from the cheetah. This will blow your mind. So the cheetah in Africa was actually a cheetah in the American Great Plains before the Ice Age. It migrated back over the land bridge and got itself into Asia and Africa. So the cheetah that exists now is our cheetah, except our cheetah died out in the ice age, and the pronghorn antelope did not.

So the antelope is essentially waiting for the cheetah. Nothing can catch it. Yeah, they're so fast. Nothing can catch it. People call them speed goats. Speed goats. Yeah. And so they're super nervous, and they die really easy.

Usually it's like, ow, I'm dead, and they fall over. And so what you do is you go up, and you take your little shot. Yay, you killed little nil. And then got him right there, throw the wobbly bits in a bag and throw it in a cooler, and then get him out of the skin as fast as possible. If you do those two things, it's some of the best venison you'll ever eat. Why do you have to get it out of the skin as fast as possible? Because they burn hot.

Their body temperature is hotter than a deer's, and their hide holds heat better than a deer. So those two things, plus the fact that they're super nervous like this, they can go off in a hurry. So what you see a lot of guys do is like, let's say, you know, you and me and Steve, we're hunting antelope. And, you know, I shot mine first thing in the morning and you shot yours to me in an hour or two later. But Steve can't buy a shot, which is probably not how it would work, but for the sake of the story. So let's say Steve finally gets one at like three o'clock in the afternoon. Yay. Then we would start gutting him.

You see that happen a lot. And our antelope will be ruined. His will be fine. Oh, I see. So you just got to jump on it right away and get it to a cooler as quickly as possible. Because you often hunt antelope in warm weather, too. Very hot, right? Like New Mexico in the summer.

Late August, September. So it's like many things. We were talking about gaminess. It's just a preparation and an understanding of what you are required to do in order to make sure that this meat is edible. Exactly. And tastes good. There's a bunch of animals that people, you got to get out of here soon. Soon.

We'll wrap this up. We can wrap this up. Yeah. Um, there, there's a bunch of animals that, uh, I think, uh, have no equivalent in, um, domestic food, right? Like, what would you say if you've wanted, if you were trying to Coke someone into, uh, trying wild game or being interested in wild game, what do you think would be one that you would start them off with? Something that's familiar.

So duck, venison backstrap, anything with wild boar because it's basically boar. If you had to pick a recipe out of this backstrap. Oh, out of this one? I would do just a simple seared backstrap with like a Cumberland sauce or steak Diane. Steak Diane? Steak Diane. So steak Diane is, it's a 150 year old recipe that's a classic for a reason. It's, it's back, it's Diane is for Diana, the goddess of the hunt. So originally in France, it was a, it was a venison recipe and it became a beef recipe later. And it is a recipe with cognac or brandy, a little bit of mustard, a little bit of cream,

the drippings from the pan sauce. Look at that. Yep. Good Lord, that looks good. And that's actually my recipe. Is it? Yeah. I did that on Simply Recipes. Oh, nice. And so it's a million years old, and it is amazing. I don't think I've ever encountered anybody who has made my recipe for it who didn't like it. God damn it, I want to cook that tonight. It's easy, too. That's the other thing. It feels sort of chef-y and date night-y, but it's the 30-minute meal. Wow, that's awesome.

Well, listen, man, your book's awesome. I've enjoyed a lot of your videos. I've enjoyed you on television before. It's a pleasure to have you on and get to talk food and the origins and everything with you. And I heard— I like our nonlinear conversations. It was great. It was fun.

It's all mine go that way. I urge people to go out. If you're a hunter or if you're just a fan of delicious food, go out and check this out. Buck Buck Moose by Hank Shaw. And you have other books available, right? What are the other books? My last one is Duck Duck Goose, which as you might guess is about waterfowl.

You silly goose. And then my first one is called Hunt Gather Cook. Okay. And you are Hunt Gather Cook on Twitter and the same on Instagram. Yep. And do you have a Facebook as well? I do. And it's Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Okay. Thank you, brother. This was really fun. I really appreciate you coming Instagram. Yep. And do you have a Facebook as well? I do. And it's Hunter Angler Gardner Cook.

Okay. Thank you, brother. This was really fun. I really appreciate you coming on. Absolutely. Thanks, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow with James Headfield from Metallica. Ah!