The Joe Rogan Experience - #951 - Dan Doty

Episode Date: April 26, 2017

Dan Doty is a writer, director, producer, educator, and founder of Evryman.co and the Everyman Podcast available on Spotify. https://www.evryman.co/

Changed my life. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Yes, Dan Doty, yes! We're live. What's up, brother? How are you, man? Good to see you. Good to see you too, man.

So, for people who don't know, I met Dan way back in 2012. That seems like a long time ago now, doesn't it? It seems like at least half of my life, which is not even close to true. Why is that true? I mean, why is it like I mean why is it like five years it was five years ago yeah four and a half years ago well that was back when it was October of 2012 I thought there was only two months left in the world because I thought the Mayan calendar was correct and it was oh my god December 21st 2012 was going to end the world okay

and so yeah so you fucked off and went to Montana to Go on a boat ride with us. Yeah, we took we took a canoe down the Missouri River. That was fucking awesome It was not wild. It's one of my favorite trips ever. It's cold really cold like not fun cold It was yeah, it sucked. But once you got moving it was fine. Yeah, you know and I learned about merino wool That was the important that was an important lesson like the first light merino wool like that people don't know if you're ever in a Cold area it's so important that you have a base layer of merino wool cuz that shit gets wet and you stay warm Even if you sweat in it you stay warm and it doesn't stick half as much as the synthetic version Yeah at all. It's really some people really like synthetics in some weird way. Have you used them or did you get them?

You have. I have. I smell terrible. See, I actually don't care. I like them both, but I just, you know, working with those guys for so long and First Light, I got used to it. I like it.

But I used synthetics for 10 years before that. I mean, I didn't smell good, but I didn't really care. A lot of mountaineering people like some synthetics because they dry quicker yeah but I feel like the one of the best benefits of the wool is that when it is wet it still retains your warmth and I don't mind being a little moist well the synthetics will keep you warm too when they're wet just it's slightly different value like cotton will not right cotton will not but a synthetic like a capellini that patagonia uses

or other things they also will they won't they won't kill you um but yeah uh the the merino has some other better qualities yeah it's just well the stink thing's huge because i fucking smell terrible that was a fun trip man that was actually the first episode of that show that i um that i fully kind of shot and directed myself. So that was kind of a big stage for me. It was fun. I just basically hung out with Callan for a week. When you have Callan, when Callan has like a captive audience, he's the funniest man alive. I will never forget a few scenes. I won't share them, but a few scenes from that campfire. Do you remember the ravine comer?

Oh, yeah, of course I do. I remember him taking a shit literally 10 feet from our campfire, his ass sticking out. And we put a flag in it. I took pictures of it. I have that shit. We put an aluminum flag on it and stuck it in there. I've never touched another man's shit other than his. I tried to set up a hunt for myself last year in the breaks, and it just ended up didn't happening but uh it's one of my favorite places oh it's so lonely out there but so amazing that area is so it's such a perfect place to introduce cal and i to the the

world of hunting yeah because it's so wild well it's multifaceted too you have a lot of history there you have the uh you know it's it's one of those Well, it's multifaceted too. You have a lot of history there. You have the, you know, it's, it's one of those areas where it's a complete wilderness experience because you're on the water, right? We're not crossing roads. Like we got dropped off at the end of a road and floated to basically the next road down the river, which is a big deal. We floated 40 miles down over the course of, what was it? Six days. Is one of these bucks? Yeah one right there that's the buck right there hey buddy hey fella that's a different time that was in wisconsin that was when we're wisconsin that video that you just put up but um when we did do that man it was uh that was where

lewis and clark had made some stops on the expedition yeah and that's where that was one of the coolest things about doing it with ranella because he knows so much about the history of the united states and the the settling of the united states and also the nez perce indian stories that he would tell us oh yeah holy shit years yeah and that's when i heard the story about the what the real story the original story about the leonardo dicaprio movie the revenant like what really happened before they turned it into a movie. Okay. Yeah. He told me that story, the actual story about the guy that got left behind and crawled back

many, many miles. What's the guy's name? Do you remember? I don't remember the actual guy's name, but there's so much they made up in the movie. It's just kind of brutal. Yeah. It was a freaky movie. It was a freaky movie.

Especially the grizzly bear attack was a real freaky thing. The real grizzly bear attacks though, man, I bet the real grizzly just kind of swatted that dude once, and then just he fell down and then it left him alone. Why do you think that? Because that thing would have torn him to pieces. Yeah. It was a giant bear, too. I just, fuck bears, man.

They scare the shit out of me. I wonder what the average length of time of a bear attack Like how long does it last two seconds 30 seconds? Well the that movie grizzly man apparently the audio of him getting killed by the bear is like seven minutes long I listen to that was terrible. No, it's not real the one you listen to online is not real. Oh, no shit. It's fake Yeah, yeah, the actual audio was never released my life is a lie yeah somebody sent it to me too but then i looked into it and um warner herzog and the woman who owns the actual audio they got rid of it they destroyed it they never listened to it and warner herzog

actually told her to destroy it in the documentary so the one when you hear it online it's just fake and then once you know it's fake and you listen to it, you go, oh, this shit's fake. You can hear it. All right. You want to hear it? I'm not going to listen to it again. I mean, sure, yeah. You can listen to it.

I don't really want to. See if you can find it. Grizzly Man Audio. You hear it and you go, oh, yeah, this isn't real. That's one of my top five movies of all time, though. It's a great movie. It's an incredible movie. It's one of the funniest movies ever as far as unintentional comedy oh my god it's funny

when the was it the sheriff the sheriff goes well i thought he was retarded here so here you hear like screams and here all the fox audio bear attack Here All the flocks Audio bear attack Why is it echoing? Hear the echo? Yeah That was done in a room

All these voices It's supposed to be It's supposed to be in the woods Yeah That audio is unquestionably done in a room somewhere. See how it's resonating? Yeah, totally, of course. See, now you know.

Those motherfuckers, they got us. Do you think they benefited from creating that? Probably, yeah. Like some money? Yeah, somebody probably put up some YouTube ads and made some cash. It's entirely possible. Or they just did it for fun. It sounded like people were having a good time. As the guy's

yelling, it sounds like you can almost kind of hear in his yells like, holy shit, someone's going to believe this. This is so ridiculous. But it supposedly lasted seven minutes. Because the bear just started eating him. Wait, so what's that?

Where's that stat? That's not from the actual audio. Because the bear's not trying to kill him. It's just eating them. Wait, so what's that? Where's that stat? That's not from the real audio? The actual audio. Because the bear's not trying to kill them. It's just eating them. Because bears apparently, well I've seen bears kill moose in videos and they just start eating them. They don't kill them first.

I know wolves do too. They just eat right away. They start right at the back end. Just start eating you. They don't bother. They don't have the decency. At least a mountain lion kills you. Cats kill you. Bears and wolves, they just eat you.

I guess they just don't need to. They don't need to incapacitate you. Why? Well, I think it's also a thing with omnivores. Omnivores, I think, don't have that instinct to instantly kill that's interesting yeah but that doesn't make sense though my theory sucks because of wolves because wolves yeah right break that yeah so maybe it's uh interesting yeah i don't know i mean they they

do that because they have to right like that's how they they take they take down a running animal it's all wolf kills they snap at the legs right yeah and then they just it's the easiest softest part of the animal you just start eating on the back end i was listening to a podcast today about wolves in idaho where they were talking about how when you go deep into the back country where people can't get to or where it's very difficult really rocky terrain the wolves are just running rampant out there they just have so many wolves there. Ever seen one in the wild? No.

You should put that on your list. I actually did see one in Alberta, I think, but it was at twilight and it was dog sized and it ran across the road and it was a little too big to be a coyote. Sure. In my mind. But I thought I saw a wolf for like two seconds and it was a squirrel. So take that with a grain of thought. Sure. In my mind. But I thought I saw a wolf for like two seconds and it was a squirrel. So take that with a grain of thought.

I've seen a couple. The most memorable, we were in a valley in Alaska. And it was dusk and, you know, just two massive mountain ranges on each side. And I don't know, it might have been Giannis. Somebody yelled and somebody spotted one across the river. And we went and looked at it. And it was, man, my, my memories fell. It was either pure white.

I think it was pure white. And it just, I swear to God, it shone. I did just like emanated light and it was the most like regal, beautiful, just like perfect, perfect. And it just sort of trotted along the river and disappeared back in the woods. And they're amazing. I was thinking about this morning on a hike here. I was looking for mountain lion tracks, but the sign at the trailhead says, gives you warning about mountain lions.

They're out here for sure. I never really, I don't know. The only thing that ever gives me pause in the woods is a grizzly because Steve and I, we got charged that once, and ever since that happened, my bear radar is more intense. It's just such a freaky animal. When you see what a grizzly really is, it's essentially a 1,000-pound giant wild dog. Have you seen those in the wild yourself yet? Grizzly? No, never seen a grizzly. Not in the wild.

I've seen them live in a sanctuary, and I've seen a lot ofly? Yeah. No, never seen a grizzly. Not in the wild. I've seen them, you know, live in a sanctuary and I've seen a lot of, oh no, I did see a grizzly. I saw a small grizzly in Alberta last year. Yeah. But it wasn't that big. It was like maybe six and a half, seven feet. From a stand? Were you pretty close?

Yeah, it was very close. It was like 30 or 40 yards from us. Yeah. Yeah. But it took off pretty quick. But it wasn't a grizzly. Like they had some trail cam photos of like fucking tankers. They were goddamn VW buses.

This was like a juvenile. So it was probably, like I said, probably like six and a half feet or something like that. So where I live in Bozeman, so it's literally a line right where we are. So south of us is the Gallatin Range and the Madisonison range just full full of grizzlies yeah but just north of town there's the bridger range and a couple other ranges too and for whatever reason that is an impasse to the population of bears why is more or less do they have any idea i mean it might be um just physicality it might actually you know steve renell would be the one that I've heard him talk about this. He would know exactly, but it's either a physical impasse or it's, it's the human, uh, the proximity to humans of the, of the town and all this.

But the way that it relates is that, you know, if I'm going to go hiking with my little baby boy, I choose to go North just, just because, you know, I don't think I would have always thought that way. And I carry bear spray. Usually I don't carry a pistol. I don't think I would have always thought that way. And I carry bear spray usually. Do you carry a pistol? I don't. I probably will in the future just because. That guy, he was from Bozeman that got attacked last year. He got tore up.

That was horrific. Oh, yeah. His scalp is hanging off his head while he's making the video. It was a gnarly video. And he wasn't hunting. He was just hiking. He was scouting. And he used bear spray and it didn't work. It was a sownarly video. And he wasn't hunting. He was just hiking. He was scouting. And he used bear spray

and it didn't work. It was a sow with her cubs. Yeah. So that's about, I don't know, 50 miles from where I live is where he got hit. 60 miles, something like that. That's so close. Jesus. Yeah, nothing to mess around with, man. I think it's awesome that they exist.

I think it's so cool that they exist. I don't want them to not exist. But at the same time, I don't want to be near them. Yeah. You know, I don't want to encounter them. So it's, it's so, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm more sensitive to him now. I really have a deep, deep love for them. Sharks on the other hand, we could just kill them. Yeah. I just don't care, man. What's weird, people are getting like really touchy-feely about sharks because they hear all about these sharks getting slaughtered for shark fin soup oh like yeah the governor i think of new york caught a shark um fishing totally legal and not

an endangered fish at all and he got so much hate because people who it's like we were talking before about science that so many people want to argue things online but they don't want to actually like look into like what are the studies that have been done how much do people actually know what is the no people want to have an opinion they have this like narrow window of information and then I'm just gonna run with my opinion say fuck you for killing that shark oh yeah you know people I don't think people have time necessary to go investigate everything they have an

opinion about. No. Which is an issue. No, but they do have time to tweet about it. Get mad at the governor. Was it the governor or was it the mayor of New York that got in trouble for the shark? Well, he didn't get in trouble because what he did was totally legal and they cooked it. And Mako shark is delicious.

It tastes like swordfish. It's one of the best I've ever had. Yeah. In Puerto Rico, they serve shark everywhere. Like you go to a food stand, they fry shark, put it on a stick. It's delicious. It's a fish. I mean, it's an ocean.

It's an ocean. There it is. New York governor sparks anger after killing threatened shark. But it's not threatened. That's not true. Why does it say threatened shark? That's not a threatened animal. Thresher shark?

Yeah, I don't think that's. But it said threatened, right? It said thresher. Did it say in the headline? Oh, threatened. Oh, yeah It said threatened. I don't think that's true I do not think that's a threatened animal I'd have to look it up. All three species of

Thresher shark is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature because of their declining populations. Fishing for them is regulated in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but it is not illegal. Okay, despite its legality UN patrons of the ocean Louis Said the killing and subsequent photos were abhorrent. Oh, it might be a twat and Worked against those trying to conserve dwindling shark numbers

Okay Yeah, all right. Well, maybe he's right. I against those trying to conserve dwindling shark numbers. Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, maybe he's right. I know that some of them are not. I don't know, man. I mean, you can't really control what kind of fish you catch when you go fishing. And if you catch a fish that's legal, I don't know what you'd do.

The problem with catch and release, this is a dirty secret, ladies and gentlemen, because people do go catch and release fishing, and I've released fish before a lot of them die it's it's kind of weird like oh yeah is that a secret still you think i mean that's for some folks okay yeah yeah not for you sure oh absolutely i mean think about it i mean it'd be like taking you and i and dunking us underwater for five minutes and putting us back or even worse shoving a fucking barb through your face yeah and then drowning us yeah because that's what we're doing to them we're literally yeah drowning them literally yeah yeah well i mean some people use barbless hooks which are better and the inside of a mouth of a fish is very different than our mouth so like i mean there's right there's best practices to harm the fish as little as possible, and I think that has something.

Sure. Yeah, fly fishing with barbless hooks, most likely most of them are going to be fine. Yeah. But a lot of them are not. It's a weird practice. I just don't. To putting them back? Yeah.

Yeah, well, I'm not a catch and release fisherman. I'm not even a huge fisherman. I love to eat it. I love to go to Alaska, catch a buttload of fish, come home and eat it for the rest of the year. I need to go halibut fishing. Yes, you do. You haven't done that yet? No, no. I love halibut. I've gone fluke fishing. I've caught flounder before,

which are little baby halibuts, but they're delicious. But halibut is supposed to be like one of the most delicious fish to catch and then cook like right away. Oh, it's amazing. It's one of those real fleshy white fish kind of like grouper you know grouper um and uh yeah like chunks of halibut deep fried like like well coated and deep fried the thing about halibut if you overcook it though

it's like chewing on a sock it just gets tough real fast and maybe that's true of other white flesh fish like that too but no it's. It's not the most exciting to catch. Well, they're giant doors. Yeah, exactly. It's like you caught a door. Yeah. You're just like hauling up this heavy ass. They're so alien looking too.

Two eyes on one side of their head and they flatten out at the bottom of the ocean. You know that their eye migrates, right? Really? They start swimming up and down, eyes on each side. And then part of their maturation process is they flip over. As they're getting older? Yeah, as they're getting older. And their eye literally slides onto the other side.

Oh, but it stays there once it's on the other side? Yeah, it's not like it can't go back and forth. Yeah, it stays there on that side. Whoa, how fucking weird. They're so weird looking. It looks wrong. Yeah. You see two eyes on one side of their head, their bodies flattened out.

But it's full of so much good meat. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. It's like as heavy. My aunt and uncle live on Kodiak Island. We've been going up there since I was a kid. I mean, that's as much meat as a deer, right? Yeah.

You catch a 200-pound halibut, which isn't the most common. They can be way bigger than that, too. You're supposed to release the really big ones, though, right? Don't they say that? I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, I'm not sure. A friend of mine caught one, and it was apparently enormous, and he was furious because the guide,

they went fishing with the guide, the guide cut the line because it was so big. Do you think he just couldn't get it in the boat? No, no, no. He said, look, we've got to let this go because it's a big breeder. Oh. And these big ones are responsible for keeping the populations healthy and because this guy made a living off of fishing He's like it's our responsibility to cut this loose and the guy was like what are you talking about? He's like this is like he didn't know that that was gonna be an option

Yeah, and so he's pulling up this thing where you know he described it as like the side of a wall Oh, yeah, the wall of a room. It's like it's fucking fucking huge i don't know if it's true with hal but but i know other fish you know sometimes the big ones don't eat that well like that's not true right so it might not have been it's not like he's gonna get that mounted i doubt right like a 400 pound they say that's true with deer too like i've never eaten a really old deer but they say old deer just do not taste that good it can be it be. I know they can be worse for sure. Didn't you shoot an old doe? That was Mo. That was Mo, that's right. Yeah. And he said it was rough. I've never had an issue. He had to chew through it over a winter.

My little brother shot me a deer and gave it to me for Christmas. And it was the first slightly off tasting animal that I've tasted in, seven years you know and i've been eating a lot of animals you know over my course of time um you know we're talking about meat eater which i worked on for a long time i don't anymore but uh i had a lot of animals and they all tasted exceptionally good and my brother shot this one and um i don't know what it was it was cold he he killed it um and it got dark and he had to track it in early the next morning and it um did he god shot it no no he hit it well it it it died fairly close um but yeah no it was it was pretty gnarly and i even made i made sausage out of it and tried to eat that and that

was hard to get down really we have a couple we have a couple pounds of it left still. It just wasn't good. Hmm. That's weird. Well, maybe it was a tarsal glands or something. Like, was it in the rut? No, it was muzzleloader season in, in December in Minnesota. And, uh, I don't know what it was. I don't know what it was. I really don't. Yeah. Well, you hear stories, you know, I'll tell you what, man, that was one of the things that really got me into hunting, not just how cool that trip was and how amazing it was and how bizarre it is to be out there in total silence, no cell phone signal, you don't hear, what did we see, like maybe three people the whole week we were out there? Yeah, two boats, maybe. I don't even remember seeing them.

I remember we saw a dude's tent, and he had like a little wood stove. And I was like, Steve, we got a stove. What the fuck is this? This guy's got a stove inside of his tent. Because he used to stay warm in his tent. We were freezing our dicks off. And then we saw another guy who had a deer in his boat. He had shot up.

Oh, yeah. Remember that guy? Yeah. That was a memorable meal, man. Yeah, that was what I was going to say. The food was so good. Once we did shoot that deer and we ate it that night, man. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. The food was so good. Once we did shoot that deer and we ate it that night, I was like, good Lord. It's the best meat ever.

And there's so much connected to it. It's not just that you went to a restaurant, you had a delicious meal. It's like, no, you busted your ass for five days humping over mountains, finally put a stalk on a deer, shot the deer, killed it, dragged it back to camp, cut it up, butchered it, and then we ate it. And then when Steve took that doe head and buried it underground, because what is that Guthrie book? Big Sky.

Yeah. Right? It was in the book. Big Sky? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the name of it. I think that's the name of the book.

Okay. Right? Sky? Yeah. I think that's the name of it. I think that's the name of the book. Okay. That sounds right. And in that book, he talks about cooking a deer head under the ground. So Steve wanted to try it. Yeah. We soaked a burlap sack in the river. It was incredible. No, it was really good.

It was incredible. It was like some sort of exotic smoked pork or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. We ate everything, man. We ate the liver liver we ate the heart we we ate it all it was amazing do you still have a freezer full of meat right now are you shot an elk nice in october so yeah and i had shot a deer in november but i ate that deer pretty

quick yeah i had a dud of the season last year and so this year for the first time a long time i've been eating more local pork and beef, and I'm just so sick of it, man. I can't wait. I can't wait until this fall again. When are you going back home? Back home from here? Yeah.

I'm going home a week from, two weeks from yesterday. I have two commercial freezers in the back. I could hook you up. Yeah? Yeah. I won't turn it down. I don't know how you get it back to you. How could you get it back?

Let me think about it. I could go buy a cooler or something. Go buy a small Yet turn it down. I don't know how you get it back to you. How could you get it back? Let me think about it. I could go buy a cooler or something. Go buy a small Yeti or something. Figure something out. Get you something. I have one of those Yeti hoppers at home. I could give you that. That makes me really proud that, like, you know, I was there the first time you hunted,

and now you're going to hook me up with meat? Hell yeah, man. That's awesome. That's good stuff. I live off it now. I don't buy meat anymore unless I go to a restaurant. It's very rare that I go to a store, like a butcher shop, and buy meat unless there's something I'm preparing. It's just not as good.

It's just actually not as good. Beef or—I find that it's— It's different. It tastes like a soft, lazy animal. It's weird. Like, when you eat a steak, like, from a butcher shop, I mean, they taste good. They still taste good, but it tastes like, like this soft, almost sick thing.

Like there's a difference between grass fed beef. And that's one of the things that I noticed like way back in the day when I first started learning about grass fed beef, I'm like, well, what is the difference? And people explain to you, Oh,

there's a difference in the fatty acids. And what's, what's healthier about it is these animals are not supposed to be eating grain. And when they eat grain, it's bad for their body. And that's why they're so fat. And the marbling is actually them being incredibly unhealthy.

I'm like, huh, okay. So I'm going to try some grass-fed meat. And it was so expensive. And then it was like they're smaller. Like the steaks are small. And it's a darker meat. I'm like, hmm. And then I remember eating it thinking, wow, this tastes really different.

It does. Like a grass-fed steak tastes different than a grain-fed steak They look different when you lay them out side by side Oh, yeah, but then you take those and then you put an elk steak next to it, and you go okay That's the real meat man. That's what you're supposed to be eating You're supposed to be in that deep dark red meat that you you eat it You just want to run through a fucking wall It's like it's got energy in it like it feet it makes your body feel different when you eat it

So what is it? What do you think that is? What is that is that a psychological thing? Do you think that it's actually? Biological in the meat it is better. There's something in there more for you How do you how do you make sense of that for yourself? I have a terrible unscientific theory My unscientific theory is things that run fast are better for you. That's why fish is really good for you because it's hard to catch and they swim fast. Deer are great. They run fast. Rabbits are great. They run fast. Cows just sort of wander around. Yeah. You know, they're just meandering and slow. I like your theory, but it makes sense that we have more cows because it's just all right there. Corral those bitches.

Well, you know, my buddy Adam lives in Australia, Adam Greentree. And in Australia, they have wild cows where cows at one time were domestic, but they broke loose. And they've been for many, many, many generations living wild. And they're extremely dangerous. Yeah. Especially the bulls like when you watch cowboys Riding bulls and you're like wow this is crazy Yeah, that's a fucking again. Yeah big scary animal

But again a domestic animal that is not fighting off predators. It's not I mean, it's just it doesn't want you to fuck with it it's got these giant watermelon testicles, and they're just full of piss and vinegar. And we don't eat those. For people who don't know, when you buy meat from a cow, you're buying meat from a steer. And what a steer is, is a bull. They cut his balls off when he's young, so his testosterone stops. So his body's mushy and soft.

But these bulls that Adam sees out in the the bush in Australia are Super aggressive and very dangerous and one of his friends was torn apart by one gourd like really badly No, he lived but they had a med vacuum to safety it tore his guts open and you know He was I don't even think he was hunting it I think like he was just in the wrong place the wrong time. They see you, and they just fucking charge. It's the reason why they have those goddamn giant horns. Yeah, what's the saying? You cut a male animal's balls off, and they stop thinking about ass and start thinking about grass.

Right. So, I mean, it's literal. They stop trying to get laid, and they just eat. They just keep eating. Yeah, and the lack of testosterone makes them soft and mushy. Whereas, um, Cam Haynes shot a water buffalo in Australia.

And he said that he had one piece of meat in his mouth for half an hour trying to chew it down while he was practicing archery. He goes, I'm not exaggerating. Chewed one piece of meat for a whole half hour. What's it say about us though though, as humans, though? I mean, you could easily make an analogy there between cows and a wild animal and us. I mean, nobody's more domesticated than us.

No one. Like, these things we domesticate, I think we are, you know, we're the domesticator somehow, but I think we're even more domesticators. Right. Like if you could eat one of the Duck Dynasty guys, like, oh, man, they would cook up good. They'd be so soft and mushy. You know, there would be so much flavoring and marbling. Plus, they probably eat a lot of sugar,

so there's probably a lot of sweetness to the meat. Yeah. I'm not advocating this sweetness to the meat. Yeah. I'm not advocating this, by the way. Well, it depends what your tooth is, though. If you're used to eating wild animals and you ate one of the Duck Dynasty guys, it would taste like shit. That's true. Right. That's true.

But if you eat McDonald's. And Ringdings. What's a Ringding? Like one of those little hostess things. Those little chocolate-covered, cream-filled jammies. I might have to get one of those. I haven't had one of those. They're disgusting.

They look great. You're like, oh, I'm going to enjoy this. And then as soon as you eat it, you're like, what the fuck is wrong with me, man? I love just, I had some tacos. I got to town last night and had to go to the first taqueria I saw. It was the best. We have legit Mexican food in L.A. Montana does not have Mexican food.

Not really, right? Not such good Mexican food. But Colorado has some really good Mexican food. It does. It does, yeah. The line of that, I think, stops at Colorado. Maybe Wyoming, I don't think, has it. But north into Montana, you're in dead zone.

Well, where you are is amazing, though. It's worth it. You could take a trip for Mexican food. Where you are is amazing, though. It's worth it. You could take a trip for Mexican food. Because where you are is like, I feel like, I mean, I almost feel like I shouldn't say this on the podcast because I don't want anybody moving to Bozeman. It's already on all of the list.

It's everybody. I mean, it's the cat's out of the bag. It's not, you're not spilling the beans here. I know. But, I mean, it really is a special place. It's the people are so nice. Yeah. They're not dumb either. It's the people are so nice. Yeah. They're not dumb either. It's not like uneducated.

No, no, no. It's actually that county has the highest percentage of PhDs in America. What? Bozeman. Really? Yeah, look it up. Fact. Wow.

Yeah. It's a highly educated population. But it's also not like Boulder where they're like, oh my God, save the butterfly. You know, they're more rational about their approach to nature. It's balanced. Yeah. You can find some, you know, you can find good yoga. You can find your woo-woo stuff.

But there's also a rancher right next to you. It's really interestingly like neutral. Yeah. It is. Yeah. It's diverse some ways. Not with mostly white. Yeah.

No. It's not different that way. Moving there from New York, and that is my least favorite thing about Montana. Yeah, it's not a whole lot of flavor. No, no, no. But there's so many good things about it. And the landscape, like what you get to see when you're there, it's just stunning. And the access to the land is a huge thing, too. I mean, I'm in Bozeman for my house in, I don't know how many, in four different directions, three different directions, you can be at a trail in 15 minutes.

And it's just endless. You know, you can get on a trail right outside, man, I can't talk, right outside of Bozeman and you can go, if you wanted to, for days through the Yellowstone ecosystem south and just keep going and keep going and keep going. I mean, it, it connects you to, I mean, real big wilderness, the kind, the kind that you can, I mean, in Alaska you find it even bigger, but I think in the lower 48, yeah, it's unparalleled. Yeah. In the lower 48 is about, it's about as wild as it gets. And that leads me to what I want to bring up to you today because I saw this today where Trump is challenging some of the protection of certain national monuments and some public lands today.

It was something that came out. Like, I told you, fuckers. I knew this was coming. There were so many people that were telling me that Trump is going to protect our public lands because his son is a hunter. And, like, listen, man, that guy worships money. There's money to be made in delisting these public. Look at this. Trump order could roll back public land protections from three presidents.

He's going to have a shitstorm on his hands, though, man. Play this so we can hear exactly what he says. Of America's natural resources. And I can tell you the group that's in here right now, they're really doing the job. Right, Lisa? They're doing a good job? We're going to take care of Alaska, too. Don't worry about it.

And they protect the ability of the people to access and utilize the land which truly belongs to them and belongs to all of us. Secretary Ryan Zinke is doing an incredible job, and he never overlooks the details. He's a detailed person. Soon after he was confirmed, we had a snowstorm big one and he was out there on the steps of the lincoln memorial shoveling the snow all by himself and he's a strong guy he did a good job

what the fuck am i listening to very very good job he's so proud of him the first 100 days we've taken historic action to eliminate wasteful regulations. They're being eliminated like nobody's ever seen before. There's never been anything like it. Sometimes I look at some of the things I'm signing. I say, maybe people won't like it, but I'm doing the right thing. What the hell? This is so weird that that's a president, like the way he communicates.

Did you see when he just pinned a Purple Heart? Jesus. He just pinned a Purple Heart on a returned vet. A guy lost his leg. It just happened the last couple of days. It's the most awkward and the weirdest. It is the weirdest single thing I've ever watched on a screen. His body language and what he does, it's bizarre.

He's an odd guy. It's really bizarre. What does it say there in terms of what the actual rollbacks mean and what the issue is? Here, let's go larger. An order which Trump signed the Interior Department could lead to the reshaping of 24 national monuments, An order which Trump signed in the Interior Department could lead to the reshaping of 24 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon, Parachant National Monument, Grand Staircase, Escalante National Monument, and the Basin Range National Monument, as well as a host of Pacific Ocean local voices in the decision to designate monuments, the review of the Antiquities Act, which was first signed by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, stands in stark relief to years of bipartisan work at conserving lands. Wow. The move comes after Western Republican lawmakers, including Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, complained that Obama overused the law to overprotect land.

How the fuck do you overprotect land? You kind of protect it, but don't overprotect it, bro. I don't know, man. It's just weird. I think the worry is going to be that this would be the beginning of a larger pattern. Yeah, it's a slippery slope. Well, what I wanted to, I mean, what you know about and what I think most people don't when you talk about this, the vast majority of the people in this country

live in these communities and cities and towns and, you know, even small towns. They don't understand how much of this land that we live in is just this incredible bizarre experiment in like the people having the actual American people owning this incredible swath of public land. Yeah. I mean, it's wild. Like what you're talking about, like you can walk for days and days into that stuff.

Yeah. I think they don't know that it exists necessarily. And I think even to me, more importantly, they don't understand the impact that that actually has on people and what it actually means to be able to be part of something like that. It's a really deep, important thing. And I think that people just, you know, you get your postcard tourists and you say, oh, I love the National Forest. I love the national parks. And let's drive around and take pictures. And that's great. That's fine. There's a big industry there. It's very helpful to the economy. But there's something way deeper too that brings a lot of people. And I would even say culturally something really deep there that we shouldn't be fucking with. We just shouldn't be messing with it. Well, it's been there for a hundred years,

110 years. It's, you for a hundred years 110 years it's you know the conservation part of it yeah absolutely but the land itself has been there way longer and that's you know sort of like the deep time part of that is what really interests me is because you know you step out into that in the right context and you're all of a sudden you know you're uh you're playing with something way bigger and more powerful and more impactful by just being part of a landscape. Yeah. You know, but you're right. Yeah, the conservation thing is present and real.

And I grew up in Minnesota, North Dakota, and my first wilderness trip was in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. It's this million-acre wilderness of lakes that are interconnected by trails. million acre, million acre wilderness of lakes that are interconnected by trails. And you can go out for weeks at a time and canoe across a lake and then carry your boat to the next lake. And there's campsites and it's just, it's paradise. It's where I fell in love with the idea of wilderness. It's actually where I fell in love with my first, the first lady that I fell in love with at the same time. I was on a church trip. Oh no. Yeah. And, uh, but you know, so what I, you know, what I'm saying as far as it's shaping people and its importance, I mean, that's first trip into the wilderness changed my life.

Like, and that's a, that's a pretty mild way of saying it. It, it, it shaped who I am all the way. Well, that gets us to what you're doing now, because you, you stopped working for 0.0. And we talked about on the last podcast that you had done a lot of these wilderness therapy trips. Yeah. Where you take troubled kids that have lost their way, and their parents don't know what the fuck to do, and you would take them out into the woods and live with these kids for months. Yeah, for a long time. Yeah. Which is crazy to think about, but makes sense.

Think about, like, but makes sense. Like, just the five days that I was out there, six days or whatever, when I first went to Montana with you guys, changed the way I thought about wilderness. Because I really had never been. I mean, I'd kind of been to, like, wooded areas. Right. You know what I'm saying? But, I mean, I went to Yellowstone when I was a kid, but I didn't really remember it. It's a different thing, man. Totally. And then we went to Alaska, right? And that was, but I didn't really remember it. It's a different thing, man. Totally.

And then we went to Alaska, right? And that was, to me, that's another level of wilderness. I should have listened to you on that trip. You were like, fuck that place. We shouldn't go to that place. Sure. It was uncomfortable, but. I'm glad we went, though, now.

Yeah, in retrospect, right? And I'm glad you went just because of the level of how deep out we are. I mean, the Missouri breaks in Montana. you went just because of the level of uh how deep out we are yeah i mean you know the missouri breaks montana you're out there but in in this spot and on in southeast alaska we were really out there you can feel in the air but i thought about two months when i fell yeah i fell off of this like six foot drop i slipped and just and luckily i just landed good but i was like man you could fuck yourself up up here. Yeah.

And not be able to get out of here. Like, especially if you do a solo trip. Oh, yeah, man. No bueno. No, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I'm addicted to that, that feeling.

Yeah. That sort of immense, kind of, it takes you over. You are so tiny. You are not, you know, you're not in charge anymore. It doesn't care about you. No. That's the thing. Like the thing about like Prince of Wales is this solitude, this sadness that's beautiful. It's really weird. It's a weird feeling that you get where you just like it. There's no denying your lack of significance in this particular environment. It doesn't give a

fuck about your credit cards. It doesn't care about your cell phone. It doesn't care who you know or where you live or what kind of car you drive. It doesn't give a fuck. It's just tooth and fang and claw and rain and constant rain and beauty. Just unbelievable beauty. That place is a

roller coaster. Oh yeah. I mean you're just in hell and all of a sudden you're on the top of a ridge and the sun peaks, and a rainbow pops up. And the technicolor, hyper-vivid, just crazy green. Yeah. You know what's a—sorry about that. I have a cold. That place has a personality, right?

But being in wilderness—I've been in wilderness spots all over the globe. What's so fascinating to me is how they all have a different vibe. They all have a different like life. And it is it's it's like I mean, sure, it looks different. But there's a like a felt sense or a feeling you get from place like the Brooks Range in Alaska is the northernmost range of mountains. And it runs east and west. And then above it is arctic um the arctic plain and then arctic ocean there is something about being up there and especially i think in the summer when the sun doesn't really go down it is it is it feels like being on a different planet but oh man i don't know if i have the words to describe it but yeah man i mean and that's what i said i'm addicted to

i'm i am and i you know i moved to montana for professional reasons but then also because it's where i wanted to live and so i get out hiking all the time you know i train i hike with that's kind of how i stay fit um but i come i need to figure this out because i come home from that feeling like I just got started. I've missed the deep immersion of the woods. Like when you were working for Meat Eater and you're constantly on those trips. Yeah, or any time that I spent over. I think there's something that happens after, depending on how long.

The longest I've stayed out of time is 40-some days. But there's something that happens, I don't know, a day, two days, three days, five days in where you really just kind of let go of the regular, you know, I don't know. I think it's actually physiological, some of it, but whatever. It could be just psychological too. But something shifts, you know, when you do a real expedition, when you do a real thing where you're not not your brain's not half stuck back in all the other stuff and so yeah i go hiking and i love it you know all the time and we get out in the woods but it just doesn't really do it for me i feel kind of unfulfilled that's interesting so you

you just got so addicted to being out there completely disconnected that you when you go on the hike you know you could always just make it back to town a couple hours Oh, yeah, it's just like a little I'm trying to think of like an analogy, but it would be like Little taste. Yeah, it would be like maybe Like a five-minute porn session versus a week-long like lovemaking session that of your dreams, right? Just like a little Yeah, a little teaser just not as fun. Do. Do you plan on staying there? I think so, yeah. I mean, we think about, we definitely won't move back east. We would either move somewhere out here or stay there.

It gets cold as fuck in the winter, though, right? It does. Yeah, not that cold, actually. No? Like, not compared to where I grew up. In Minnesota, it gets really cold for a long time. Yeah. And Montana, where we're at, used to do that.

Global warming. Something. Yeah. Something. It's different. This year was pretty mild. The year before was really, really mild. You know, like 35 average temperature.

Really? That's it? Yeah. It's not that bad. Oh, I thought it was like 35 below. No. You go northern Montana, up in the highline area it'll start to you know more of a deep freeze a lot more wind bozeman's kind of a nice little protected we should stop talking about

bozeman so people you're telling you we're gonna get people into it it's um well just another fact on that it is the i think the third fastest growing county in the in the states right now wow so it makes sense when i was there we went there we took the family there last summer i was like this place is magic so pretty i got a couple other spots though that i'm saving oh yeah don't tell anybody no i'm not gonna um when you were in the brooks range did you put uh like uh masks on to go to sleep those you know sleeping masks they say that's the move a t-shirt yeah i just use a t-shirt just cover your eyes yeah yeah they say you have to because if you just try to like sleep you'll wake up a couple hours later and be all

bewildered oh yeah no it's weird it's weird it's cool it's a very it's a perception changing thing to go up there and watch the sun literally just kind of like you know kiss the horizon and then just keep going yeah i went to anchorage a couple of years ago in the summer we were there in july me and my friend a Ari went fishing up there. We did some shows up there. And it was weird. It was like 2 o'clock in the morning. It was light out.

We were like, what in the fuck is this like? And the people are cool as shit. That's another place. There's something about those people. Alaska, even more extreme. There's something about those people that they deal with nature in a way that everybody else just doesn't oh yeah well they have

yeah all the time yeah weather's gnarly I mean you can't walk out your house for more than 10 miles before you have a you know giant massive in front of you yeah peak the oceans right there yeah yeah yeah I mean Anchorage is a it's a weird place too I love it. Yeah.

It's really interesting too, because you think of it as like a bunch of like lumberjacks and fishermen and weirdos and like people trying to run from the law or something like that. And you get there and there's like hunk free quality. There was a bunch of people with gay rights signs and people beeping their horns as they drove by. I'm like, Oh, this is not what you think it is. Craft breweries and really good restaurants. I'm like, oh, okay. This is not like Hicks. I feel like it has a little bit of flavor of the Pacific Northwest, of Seattle and Portland,

but then a big dose of weird, too. Yeah, a lot of weird. A lot of weird. A lot of extreme. Yeah. I mean, these are people that are, this is where they're going to live and die. Yeah. And, you know, there's grizzly bears everywhere a lot of minnesotans and folks from where i grew up there's there's a big connection a lot of people move up to have moved up to alaska so i like i said i grew up going up there fairly regularly in the summer

who did you say lives that you know that lives on kodiak island my dad's sister family that's a scary place. Those bears are fucking giant. Yeah, they are. Aren't they the biggest brown bears in the world? They might be. I think I've heard that the Kamchatka brown bears in Siberia, in Russia, across, I don't know if that is Siberia, but across the water there, they might be bigger.

I could be totally wrong about that. the water there, they might be bigger. I could be totally wrong about that. I saw this video of this guy. Do you remember that show that was on? It was called The Hunt. It was a show that, it was interesting because James Hatfield of Metallica was the narrator of it. Right. And people were so angry at him for narrating this thing that they were talking about about boycotting metallica when they played some music festival i never watched i remember you

talking about it and then yeah i know what you're talking about and it was about uh bear hunting yeah yeah it was about brown bear hunting which is a really controversial form of hunting because you don't really eat those things i mean you kind of can yeah but they taste like shit well the coastal ones. Yeah. Especially. They're just eating rotten fish all the time. Yeah. Like animals taste like what they eat, which is really, I mean, it makes sense, but it seems pretty counterintuitive. I dare Trump to try to take away some of those Alaskan wilderness areas, man. I mean. The real worry is that he's going to let people drill in him and they're going to

destroy something. Yeah. And that's the real worry. The real worry is the reason why he's releasing or relaxing some of these regulations is that he wants to

let industry get in there. Mm-hmm. And as soon as they start fracking and polluting wells and rivers and it's just... It's fucking dangerous, man.

It's just not... It's something that if they do fuck it up, it could be fucked up for a hundred generations. Yeah. Do you ever live in New York City? Not in the city. I used to live in New Rochelle,

which is right outside the Bronx. I lived there for seven years or so. And if there wasn't the existence of Central Park and I lived in Brooklyn, so Prospect Park, if those two green places didn't exist while I lived there, I would have probably lost my mind or just moved. Right. I feel like these big areas of wilderness we have, you know, as we, we will not be okay as, as humans. I mean, like individually, sure. Is it going to, here's my worry. My worry is that, you know, the general American public or the general public doesn't have enough connection or a lot of different angles you can take on that.

There's so much, but there's just something that I wouldn't, I mean, if it really gets intense, I'm going to have to basically drop what I'm doing and do everything I can to stop them from harming these places. I don't know what could be done. My real concern is not just this, what's going on now, but the future. And then also, when you really consider it, overpopulation. I mean, there's 7.5 billion people on the planet now in the most recent census. Yeah. That's a half a billion increase over the last, I don't know how many years, but it hasn't been that many.

It was 6 billion just a few years ago. I remember that was a number that they bandied about like a decade or two ago. Yeah. Now it's seven and a half. Like what happens when it gets to be 30? Like where are we going to put these motherfuckers? What is the carrying capacity of the planet? There must be a number, yeah.

It's weird. We're like rats on a sinking ship. Yeah. We're just scrambling everywhere. We're everywhere. Something's going to happen. There's not another animal like us. We're on every fucking patch of land you can find.

It's weird. But we're awesome. Except these wilderness spots, right? Look at this. This is the current world population. Is that real? How do they know that? Births today. It's based off averages. Look at the births today. You can watch the numbers just roll in.

Oh my God. The difference between the births today and the deaths today that's incredible that's why it's moving so fast people are dying slow as fuck population growth today so the the average 139 000 people today wow 44 million this year oh my god my God. It's weird. But that's scary. And what's the U.S.? 400 million? I think we're 300 plus Mexicans. 326, it says. See, but that's, they're not counting.

They're not counting all the people that snuck in. I just don't think they know. Like, when they say Los Angeles, when they say Los Angeles, 20 million, I'm like, okay, and? What about the Mexicans? Like, because there's a lot of fuck, and I'm not anti-Mexican in any way, shape, or form, ladies and gentlemen. Don't. I'm just looking

at this pragmatically. There's a fucking shitload of illegal aliens here, which I support. Also, how many people are here at any given time that don't live here, but are here on vacation or working here for like a week? That's a good question. Or just added people for at any given time?

Hundreds of thousands, I would imagine. Yeah, probably. Yeah. When you get on the 405 and you head to San Diego and it takes you six hours and you go, what is this? Like, what have we done this mass of humans yeah there's so many of us but when you get here and you realize oh you guys don't have any weather that's what it is yeah but you could also you know go 30 miles outside the city and have that

same weather couldn't you yeah pretty much not the people yeah but you know you don't get the same taco stands right Right. Yeah. I get it. I love cities, man. I miss it. I miss living in New York City. I really do. Do you?

I wouldn't trade it at this point. You know, I was younger and single in New York. Had a fun time and moved to Montana. Have a family now. It's kind of perfect for where I'm at in my life. So I don't really need anything else. Yeah. That's the balance, right?

It's like, there is no really perfect place. It's like, there's places that are perfect for certain things. Like if you're a comedian, Los Angeles is the best place. It's either Los Angeles or New York. I prefer Los Angeles.

There's a lot of clubs. There's a lot of comedians. Like most of the best comedians in the world live here. It's a great place for us to network and we work together and stuff like that. And if you want to be in that business, this is probably the best place in the world to do it. So that's one of the reasons it keeps me around here. Plus the podcast and all that jazz. But for peace of mind, it's not the best place.

No. Does that actually fuck with you? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The numbers of humans is just, it's untenable. You're close to North Korea. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. But if you know what, man, if they nuke California, where are you going to go? You know what I mean? The whole thing's going to be a mess. Yeah. You might be better off if it lands on your head. That's what I always say about asteroids. that's what i always say about asteroids like you don't want to be that guy in the movie that like is like storing food in his basement and staying up all night to shoot vandals and because people

are trying to steal your canned goods that doesn't sound fun not like a healthy life no you don't want to live like that and then what happens you die of old age die of old age protecting your canned goods yeah in fight or flight your entire life. Fuck that. Freaked out. Fuck that. Just let that rock land right on your fucking head. Boom.

I used to stress out a lot about what the perfect place to live was. I just gave that up. Doesn't exist. Doesn't exist. There's places you don't want to be caught dead. Like? Florida. I like Florida.

How dare you? I like it. What part? Sarasota no my wife was uh raised on captiva island which is on the southwest coast okay like key west is pretty dope yeah down there it's pretty cool yeah that's it's a good place you just want to drink and take naps or fish yeah yeah yeah there's some cool stuff down there but it's just florida's just so fucked up it's they've they've done such damage to Florida with their OxyContin regulations. You know, at one time, there were more OxyContin prescriptions in Florida than there were the entire country combined.

Seriously? Yes. I didn't know that. It was insane. Is this recent as like recent in these late opioid struggles? Yeah. There was a documentary that they did on it called the Oxycontin Express that was on Vanguard. Wow.

And these people that went down there, they went undercover and saw how easy it is to buy opiates down there. They have these one-stop shops. They have these pain management centers where you'd go in. You'd say, hey, doc, my back is killing me. Doc said, you need some pills.

Go right next door. So he'd write your prescription. You go right next door. You get the pills. And then, boom, you're off to the races. Wow. And they didn't have a database, which meant that you could go to Dr. Jamie and you say, Dr. Jamie, my back's killing me.

Dr. Jamie gives you a prescription. You buy some opium pills or whatever the fuck they are. And then you come to me and you go, Dr. Joe, my back is killing me. I'm like, oh, you need a prescription. So were they just being sourced there and then sold elsewhere? Or were they consumed there? They purposely made their regulations lax there so they could make more money. So people were buying

them and then bringing them and selling them in Kentucky and up to Ohio. And that's why they call it the Oxycontin Express. The highway that led from Florida to the rest of the country. That sounds evil. Yeah, it was sick. A lot of people lost their lives,

and a lot of people lost who they were because of the addiction. Wow. Yeah, the numbers were insane. Google the numbers. What were the numbers of OxyContin or Oxycodone? I still don't know what the difference is. Have you seen the reports lately showing that the uh the life expectancy or the early death rate of middle-aged white men specifically lately has dropped for the first time in i don't know dozens or because pain pills yeah

well part of it they're calling them deaths of despair. How they're being written about is literally deaths of despair. It's, yeah. Jesus. No, it's heavy. It's real heavy. That's a heavy description. There's been a spate of articles over the last three or four months just that's really diving into it. And it's guys.

It's men. Here it is. Doctors in Florida prescribe 10 times more oxycodone pills than every other state in the country combined. Wow. And this is now, right? What is this article from? This was actually from 2011 on NPR, probably when it came out. Ah, there we go.

I can get the updated one. Nah, doesn't matter. It's just, it's a crazy place. Let's just put it that way. Despair is one of the scariest words. Right? Despair. Yeah.

When you hear about someone like despair and lonely, those are two like really. So that's the other word that they're using is loneliness has been, they're now measuring it and loneliness is as or worse of a health issue in our country than smoking, heavily smoking. There's all this, there's this new. Loneliness is? Loneliness is. Overpopulation coincided with loneliness the same time. Think about that.

We're thrust further and further closer together. We don't know each other. And we're more and more disconnected and lonely. And it's literally, so there's a whole new, I don't know how new, but it's called interpersonal neurobiology, which is the science of our brain wiring and physiological wiring on how we're, yeah, this is one of the articles. Loneliness might be a bigger health risk than smoking or obesity.

Whoa, that's dark, dude. It's dark, but, you know, with the, in my life, the experience I've had in my life, when I read that, I'm like, of course, duh, duh. It makes sense. Yeah. We are a disconnected people. We are electronically, digitally connected in a crazy way, but in a human way. And it literally is harming us and people are dying. And it's crazy. It's crazy stuff.

It's so fascinating that feelings have an effect on your health. The feeling of loneliness, the feeling of despair. It's not like you could eat your vegetables, you can get your exercise in, and if you feel despair and you feel loneliness, your body is actually being harmed by that. But there's a real like practical reason for that. And that's because we are, when we come out as babies, we are the most dependent individuals. So like our, you know what I mean? Like on your parents, on your mother, we are completely socially dependent when we're born completely. And so, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs,

you ever heard of that? So it's like, you know, to be okay, you have to take care of breathing and water and your basic functions. But there's, there's been, um, studies recently by these neurobiologists that are showing that these social needs are just as, or even like come before some of these physical needs. There's, it's, it's crazy, man. And there's literally, um, there's a book called Social by a guy named Matthew Lieberman. You got to check it out. And so what they are finding is that there's like two parts of our operating brain. And this is going to be me paring it down. But one is the analytical thinking, deciding thing.

And the other is this social awareness brain which is always like always checking in on how am i in relation to others and it's also the part of the brain that actually we can you know like the metacognitive part and the part that i can they call it mind reading but really it's just it's just by us sitting here i can kind of get a sense of how you feel and what you're thinking right just by the the connection that we have and just it's part of who we are. So when our analytical brain is offline, this other one, the social one pops on immediately. So what they're theorizing is that that is like the fundamental need for humans in safety and survival is how are we relating to each other as a group? But it makes sense if you look, I mean, to me, it makes sense in, you know, we are social animals. We forget that, I think, but you look at other species

of monkeys or wolves or whatever. I mean, you know, there might be a period of time where, say, a wolf will get kicked out of a pack for a while and he'll go do his thing, but eventually come back to a pack. It's not safe for us as humans and animals, social animals like these, to be isolated. It's not. And so there's all these parts of us that just, if we're not connected to other people in a very direct and true way, there's these sort of deep down emotional and physiological fears that come up, right? And they're real. And that's what the neurobiology is showing, which is really interesting. I mean, we can just think about that, but they're actually showing it now that if we're not really connected to each other, we're going to be freaked out.

We're not going to be okay. And, you know, I really believe that this really drives a lot of the internal struggle we have. And we're really, and this is part of, you know, getting into it. That's part of my, what I'm trying to bring into the world and my platform now is just to, you know, stand up and say, hey, we need each other and we can do it. It's not, and for guys specifically, right? It's such a social stigma of ours to not be real or open or connected or vulnerable with guys. And it's cool to see the science coming out because I have all this anecdotal evidence of being out in the woods with kids or being in a men's group with guys or running a retreat or whatever this is of how powerful it is to, like,

set down all of our differences and just be there with them. But now the science is really lighting it up. And yeah, man, loneliness. I mean, we can all think about it. Loneliness isn't fun. It's not, it doesn't feel good, but the other, this is crazy too that they're showing that emotional pain lights up the same centers of our brain as physical pain. And that one study showed that, um, an insult to someone had much more painful and long-term effects than slamming somebody with a hammer, hitting their hand with a hammer. So like our emotional pain

literally actually exists in the body. Like it is actual pain. And the reason that it's so uncomfortable to feel our emotions, which it is, you know, I mean, I'll just say it is, is that it actually hurts. Like actually hurts. I mean, and there's like people say things like you broke my heart or I'm dying of heartache or whatever, but the science is catching up and showing us that this pain is actual. It's real. And we're not addressing it. showing us that this pain is actual. It's real.

And we're not addressing it. We're not even aware of it. It's really interesting. Whoa, that's deep. You know, it's interesting too, because what you're saying about us being disconnected and how unhealthy it is and how unhealthy loneliness is, it sort of confirms these ideas that I've always had that the human race itself is not like a group of individuals, but a super organism, much like the human body is like the human body requires all the bacteria in

your gut, all the skin flora, all the different things that compose the actual physical structure of the human body. Whereas we think of it, I think there's some nutty number of how much bacteria, how many bacteria cells are in your body versus how many human cells. Right. Isn't that crazy? Far out numbers, the human cells. Yeah. And it's just that we think of ourselves as I'm Mike and I put my shoes on and I go to work because I am Mike.

But Mike, you're a system. You're a system of individual organisms that are collectively keeping this whole thing alive and when the imbalance is off like when someone takes an antibiotic and it fucks up their gut flora like literally you've like nuked a part of your civilization right and you know to try to save something like if you had some sort of a surgery and you're worried about an infection which is kind of like an invading army coming in and taking over part of your leg that you haven't operated on. Yeah.

Or it'd be like slashing the tires of all of our transport system in the country. Like that's our gut. That's like what delivers things in and out. Right. Yeah. And even has an impact on your, your health mentally in terms of like how you feel and your, you know, depression. A lot of that is connected, legitimately connected to your diet

and how that affects your gut flora. And it affects the way your body produces serotonin and dopamine. And it's bananas, man. Oh, yeah. No, I get it. It is. Scientists bust the myth that our bodies have more bacteria than human cells. Decades-old assumption about microbiota revisited.

Okay, what's the new it's the new data one to one instead of oh so it's you are as much okay so they used to say it was 10 to 1 but now it's 1 to 1 okay wow that's still crazy man it's still like you're half bacteria yeah i like that analogy though of the body is like a civilization or whatever. I mean, think about if you're one of your, I don't know, one important neuron, one cell, neural cell or something, decided just to go rogue and not be in connection with the rest of you, right? I mean, I don't, that wouldn't work so well, right? I don't know. I don't know what would happen. Your body would probably get rid of it and get it out of there.

Or, I don't know, maybe, so I'm just really reaching here, but it's some sort of rogue cell at that point, right? Like a cancerous cell or something. It would probably be attacked. So yeah, if you, I think that if you take that analogy, you know, our civilization here is we're hurting, really hurting because we're really not, you know, we are working together obviously in practical ways, a lot of times, you know, work and commerce and, you know, the world is functioning, but I think on a, like a health and fulfillment level, we're, we're missing something pretty deeply. Yeah. Well also like, let's talk about people that are disconnected from actual humans, but connected to them in a cyber way. Yeah. Like how many people are like really lonely in terms of like physical touch and communication

with friends and, but they sit in front of their computer all day and they interact with people online. What shows you like some of the most unhealthy communities you'll ever encounter are like online message boards and forums where people are just anonymous and interacting with people without what we're talking about earlier. Like one of the reasons why I like to do podcasts with a person in the room, I've only done one podcast ever through Skype. Um, and that was with John Anthony West because he was living in New York and he's this really important Egyptologist. And I really wanted to talk to him. It was the only way I could get him to do it was do it through Skype. So I did one.

I prefer to sit there with people because I want to look at them. I want to feel their energy. I want to, I feel like you and I do in this conversation, you get to understand each other. Totally. No, I get it. And I, and I think I can hear it in your podcast too. And I think that, you know, and again, I'm not going to keep hitting the biology part, but there's to me, I think that there, it means I can sense that there's a, something else in me is getting, is triggered, right? If we were just talking on the phone, there is something, and it's might be this other part of your brain, but it's lit up right now, right? Because I can, I can spatially, you know, see and feel where you are. We can, we can, you know, have eye contact

and all of that. Yeah. And it's that sense of connection. It's that real, I think, and I think that is, you know, really apparent in your podcast is that you, yeah, you sit here and you really connect to somebody and just run with it. And I think that's, it's a big, it's a big thing, man. I mean, I mean, I think of like, um, so part of what I do is I help, um, proliferate this idea of men's groups across the country where guys get together for exactly what we're talking about. It's just like, you know, the, the intent of them is to, um, get together to challenge and support each other's growth or personal growth, you know, and it's just a simple sort of protocol and a simple sort of, um, uh, design or, or sort of it's, there's a structure to it, but the whole point is, is remedial in a sense. It's that, you know, our culture in general, but guys, especially in

our culture don't have, um, this, this unfettered place to really show up and actually connect with each other. And it's a scary thing. I mean, it's until now and still now, but hopefully not too long. I really think that stigma of not being connected is a big deal. And I think that back to the cyber thing

that you're saying, we can get that hit of serotonin by getting a like on Facebook or Instagram or whatever. We can get that, but that pale, I mean, I don't even want to make a comparison toward actually sitting, sitting down with somebody and actually feeling and,

and experiencing them. Yeah. It's, you can't make a comparison. No, it's not okay to me. It's not, I don't, yeah. It's just so different.

I'm in a tricky position because I rely on social media to let people know that I have a podcast coming out. You know, like right before the podcast, I was like, what's your Twitter? So I could tweet it. Yeah. And then I also like to promote comedy dates and to let people know about cool shit that I find. But the, the interaction is so it's so weird like especially there's like a bunch of different kinds of interaction like instagram is one of the weird ones because the cuntiest people all have blocked pages oh yeah

it's like they're blocking don't look at me and they just say nasty shit to people but they have these blocked pages it's like but i think that that, it's so funny how that seems to be like, it's so common, but it makes sense. It's like they're blocked off and they're attacking people and saying shitty things to people. And I'm not even talking about to me. I'm talking about like when I go to someone else's page and I read cunty things, I always go to that. I go, let's see if that guy's blocked. Yup, he's blocked. How funny. Like always go to that. I go, let's see if that guy's blocked. Yep, he's blocked. How funny.

Like, it's super common. It's like this weird thing that people are doing with each other where it's not real interaction. And I feel like the people that are perpetrating it are extremely unhealthy, which is why they're saying such nasty, vicious shit in the first place. It's really, really odd. They're lonely. Yeah.

Or in some way or disconnected or disenfranchised or they feel inferior yeah and so they lash out they want other people to feel the way they feel and so one what i feel when you say that like one thing that's missing there is empathy yeah in that in that interact whatever that interaction is yeah it's this removed story that you're making up some, some like whatever you want the world, you know, you're projecting your shit out into the world. You're not actually slowing down enough to, you know, you can sit here and give opinions or whatever all day long, but you, you know, the, no, but to what you said though, it is a weird position, but I think the

way that things are going, so we, we are using these tools, the social media, to connect us and to get messages out. But, you know, the way that the, like, the millennial generation is going is that what they value and what they want to spend their money on is meaningful experiences, which means, you know, generally speaking, a live in-person event. And there is a wave of things going back to this. So, you know, as a tool, we need that. I mean, this is amazing. You know, this, this platform, this podcast, you have that touching so many people or just Twitter, whatever it is, but then it can be, you know, used for incredible good to bring people together, I think. And then, and then, so what's missing in that, in that social media interaction, um, I don't know, maybe it balances out. Maybe it doesn't. I don't really

know. It's a message in a bottle. You just got to make sure it's a good I don't know, maybe it balances out. Maybe it doesn't. I don't really know. It's a message in a bottle. You just got to make sure it's a good message. You know, you're not going to, you're not, you have to like be cognizantly aware, I think, of how other people are going to receive it without actually getting that reception back from them. You know, and that's where it gets real weird. And you have to like, I i think apply the same principles that you

would in communicating with other people like without actually communicating with without seeing them without getting the social cues without looking them in the eye and we're we're a weird thing man so this might not make sense but i'm going to bring it back to connect to the wilderness stuff what we're talking about in this sense of this sort of isolation and loneliness that we have. And for me in my life, where I learned to connect with others, where I really learned to sort of give it up, let go, be present with people was in the wilderness. It was, it was doing that job out in the desert with kids out there for eight to 20 days at a time with these kids where that was my job. It was my job to simply be with them and in a way, uh, to be with them in a way that was, um, you know, obviously we had a lot of boundaries and everything, but to be

really real, just to be totally real and honest and straightforward, call bullshit. When we saw bullshit, be empathetic. And it was just like this crazy crash course in human connection. And it happened to be out in the wilderness. But so what I think, I don't know, this is, this is, it'll tie together. But for me, I started to feel way, way, way more human being out there in the wilderness. Like just being out there where it was quiet, being out there where like, you know, if I sat on a rock, I was sitting on a rock and the sun was on me and all of my senses were engaged, you know, very aware of my body.

We were in these groups where we're being, practicing being very aware of what we felt and being able to feel and express that. And it just felt like, you know, since then, for me it all comes back to being out in the wilderness, but since then all the other things I've engaged in, meditation, the men's group stuff, all the other personal, even psychedelics, things like that, all the things that I've experienced, all for me tie back to that thing.

And it comes down to what I feel is like being totally as much as you can truly present yeah like just just here right and you can write a twitter message from that place of being present right that's fine i mean there's there's nothing necessarily wrong or bad about that but um but don't check the responses every three minutes for the next six hours. Like a fucking maniac. Yeah. Yeah. It's a matter of, I guess, rationing some of that social media stuff or rationing some of that online interaction with other people. I've gotten much more of my online interaction in like an educational form in terms of like interesting articles, science things, things that don't involve like social interaction or opinion as much as they involve really fascinating facts.

Like something that I found today, they think that North America might have been settled by humans as much as 100,000 years earlier than they thought i saw that you see that yeah i did yeah it's insane like that kind of shit freaks me out i love that kind of stuff because that that kind of stuff is just pure curiosity and pure wonder and and the imagination goes wild thinking about what it must have been like to be one of these early humans surviving or trying to survive. And if they didn't, we wouldn't be here. And these these Macedon fossils, they found them. The bones were shattered and there's rocks nearby that do not seem like they were brought anywhere. So it was 1992.

They were doing highway construction near San Diego, and they found these odd-looking bones, and then they started doing these studies on them, and then they found their mastodon bones, and they didn't have the ability to do carbon testing and get a real accurate assessment back then, but now they do. And so now when they're checking these bones

and the way these bones had been shattered, they're pretty sure that they had been shattered purposely to get to the marrow. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, that's a great example of a positive benefit. I sat up afterwards and I clicked on my phone and opened Facebook. And the first thing I clicked on was a video of a woman in slow motion who stuck her ass out the window of a bus and just shat the stream of shit. And I just laughed. I had to laugh to myself, man. I was just like in this zone.

I was in this beautiful place. And then open and watch. I was like, oh, my God. It reminded me of Callan's one joke, the shitting out of the car at 80 miles an hour yeah youtube video i think yeah i've definitely seen too many of those videos i've seen too many videos of people getting beat up too too many videos of street fights too many videos of people like skateboard accidents where they fucking flip and fall on their head it's hard to not watch that though, right? Very hard. Very hard. It's very hard.

I mean, I feel like there's something to be learned in those videos. Like I almost want to show my kids, hey, don't try to do flips. If you don't know what you're doing, you're landing your fucking head. But, you know, I mean, understanding the consequences and having someone else do it so you can learn from them. They've already done it. So here, learn. This is why you don't fuck with a tiger.

See? Look, the guy got killed by the tiger. Now you know. This is why you don't do this. This is why you don't do that. There's got to be some educational value in those. Yeah, I'm sure. That seems like a reach a little bit.

It's a little bit of a reach. I mean, we have some pretty strong instincts in us that say don't fuck with a tiger. I know, but dumb kids, man. It's almost like dumb kids are there as educational tools for the survivors. It's like you're supposed to see that one kid poke the tiger and get mauled. And you're like, shit, I can't believe he actually broke into the zoo. Now Bobby's gone. and you're like, shit, I can't believe he actually broke into the zoo.

Now Bobby's gone. Yeah. You know, like Bobby, like, I mean, that's the Joseph Campbell story of the hero, that it goes all the way back to the one person who sacrificed their life and got killed by the predator in front of the tribe so that the tribe could survive and that they worship that person for doing that. Yeah, yeah, the hero goes off, learns a lesson, brings it back to the community, and everybody's better for it. Yeah, or you watch the hero get mauled when he's a martyr, and then you escape while the hyenas are eating him. One of the things we taught or we worked with kids out in the woods was we called it natural consequences, right?

Which just means that when you do something, something else happens. There is a natural reaction and it was used a lot of times um in uh opposition or instead of of like a penalty system right so if you do something bad we could we could lay this punishment on top of you like what kind of stuff i mean oh well so for example if um if somebody was going to harm themselves or somebody else you got tarped you basically yeah you got you put out a tarp and uh your shoes and everything would be taken away from you and you couldn't leave the tarp like that that was where you had to stay because you couldn't hurt yourself you couldn't hurt anybody else wow um so that was you know and some what'd you do with their shoes?

Ate them? No. Where'd you put them? In your tent or under your tarp. And so they had to stay like under a tarp? Is that the idea or? Uh, if it was raining, yeah, but no, I mean, otherwise it's just, it was just basically a timeout, you know, you gotta stay here. You can't interact with the group. You're by yourself, whatever. Uh, that's actually not the best example, but I'll just use it. So if you swore you could, some programs would maybe have a point system. You get penalized. For curse words? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that wasn't. That seems a little silly. Yeah. It wasn't really upheld. I'm reaching for a good example here. What I'm trying to say is that if you do something shitty, generally you hurt others around you and things happen. And so what we tried to show is that if kids would do something shitty to pay attention and that they would see the harm they're creating themselves by harming other people. in society, just locking a kid up for, you know, breaking the law. Um, it would be, you know,

maybe if you break a window, you in, in this other way, you would go and, um, actually see and experience the, the, the shit that other people had to do to fix the window and, and, you know, more of a reparative type of justice system rather than like a penalty punitive punitive. Yeah. Right. So when you did take these kids, like what was like the most extreme example of someone who's like really disturbed? Cause I would imagine there would be like a big sort of, uh, like there was a lot of variables. Like some people would be kind of fucked up and some people would be really fucked up. It's probably a spectrum, right? Oh, absolutely. Generally speaking, very few were, I would say, actually fucked up. Very, very, very oh absolutely generally speaking very few were i would say actually fucked up very very very very very few what was the case with most of them

um they were kids in families and like communities that didn't know how to make space for them and deal with them they didn't have mentors they didn't have uh people to they didn't have parents that that gave them the right direction. I don't know. You know, like being a kid is, you're supposed to test boundaries, right? It's like that's the part of your development in your ontogeny that it's like you are defining your personality. You're defining who you are and you need to test the boundaries. And, you know, some of the kids made only two, I probably worked with at least a thousand, maybe more kids altogether. Maybe that's a stretch.

A lot, right? A lot for a long time. And only one I went to bed at night worried I might get my head kicked in. Really? Just one. One kid. And maybe one or two other kids that I walked away actually not enjoying being around them. Almost every other single one.

It was just like, I walked away. What did you do about the one that you worried about getting your head kicked in? You know, just kind of sat with it. There's really nothing you can do. Was it just like initially or through the entire experience? That was through the whole thing. Oh, Jesus. That was through the whole thing. It was Jesus. That was through the whole thing.

It was uncomfortable. Fuck that. What happened to him? Oh, he's dead now. No, I have no idea. You know, I mean, there's laws and there's things you don't generally get to stay in touch. Oh, right, right, right. This was actually at a state program.

So this was in lieu of a jail sentence that came out. Oh, wow. So this kid was locked up. Wow. What did he do? I don't remember. I don't know. Probably stole a car or beat somebody up or I don't know.

He was just super aggressive? He wasn't. No. But he had that, he had the, I had the feeling that he had no empathy for others' pain. Right? He couldn't feel that. That's the,

that's the only time I'd ever got any interaction with any of those kids ever got, you know, that, that sent chills through me, you know, that was like, and maybe, maybe I didn't feel in any practical sense that he was going to hurt me, but I had the sense that if he did, he wouldn't care. Right. Oh wow. Because there wasn't that connection. The same thing we're talking about in a sense like that's the thing get dropped in a group of eight boys or young men and um it was so funny like you could you know we worked with therapists with therapists come and all this stuff but all like the fundamental thing i took away from that experience was that

in order for these for these guys to grow up and sort of move on and get going in their lives, you know what they needed was just somebody like me to just show up. Like it's really not complicated, right? Yeah. And so just let them air things out and talk about better ways to do things and sort of get some perspective. Now, you know, we maybe talked about this last time, but then they'd go home and not necessarily have that support anymore and be back in their old, uh, arena where, where,

um, you know, their old friends and their old family dynamic and all that. And it, and it, you know, it's hard. It's a, it's a hard way. And so I left that whole experience just feeling very strongly that a, we can as a community and society do just way better with some simple, simple changes. We can do better at raising our boys. We just can't because done it. When you have someone that has no empathy though, what can be done to instill empathy in someone who lacks it, if anything? So I don't know, you know, if you go on that far end of the spectrum where there's nothing i don't know and i don't know if that's possible but i do know that it's a muscle we can practice empathy is something that right that we can get better at and that we can pay more

attention to that's for sure fucked up young kid without empathy like how what what sort of motivation do they have to gain empathy if they feel like no one has shown it towards them or I don't know what. So that's it, right? So the motivation that I believe you could show is for them to, if they could let you caring about them really in. If they could really feel cared about. they could really feel cared about. And what's incredibly sad, but real is that I think some people, you know, grow up in a, in a, their brains develop, they develop as humans where they don't have that. And so the actual wiring, the actual state to, to, to receive that isn't there. I think that that is possible to gain. And you know, there's been, what is that? A child called it, you know, have you heard of that book?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's possible in the much, in the less extreme cases. I mean, in a sense that that's kind of a lot of what I do is help guys become more empathetic and the, not just for the benefit of others right for the benefit of themselves the reason why i brought this up there's a podcast um on radio lab about bernie madoff okay and um where this guy contacted bernie madoff he sent him letters and then finally bernie madoff called him and they did this interview together where the way it works in prison, I guess, at least the prison where Bernie Madoff is, you get 15 minutes to talk on the phone, and then you have to wait 15 minutes before you can talk again, and then 15 minutes again. This is how they did the interview, like 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off.

And after a while, he sort of gained his trust. And he went deep into how this whole deception started and how Bernie Madoff, if you don't know the whole story, Bernie Madoff is the guy who had this gigantic Ponzi scheme and stole billions of dollars from people. And it's called Ponzi Supernova is the Radiolab episode. Wow. And one of the things that was the most chilling was how little empathy he had towards the people that he ripped off. Right. Whose lives had been destroyed.

His son committed suicide. People literally went from having all this money to being so broke they were like dumpster diving. And he didn't care. He didn't give a fuck. Yeah. I mean, he had no empathy and he's a monster i mean it's it's really it's really interesting to see like this guy's reaction

to bernie madoff's lack of empathy and realizing somewhere along the line like oh this guy does not care that was one of the things that the investigators had said about him that it didn't seem to bother him at all that he had done this to these people. What bothered him was that he had gotten caught. But it didn't bother him that these people had been devastated. What bothered him was that people had made money and weren't giving that money back. He had called one guy and told him the guy had made like $9 billion. He was worth $9 billion rather.

It's 7 billion of it had come from Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. And he told me how to give that $7 billion back. The guy had a heart attack, drowned in his pool, which is kind of hilarious because you can't live with 2 billion. I guess, well, maybe it's not liquid. Maybe he couldn't give back the 7 billion. Maybe it was impossible. It was tied up in real estate and holdings

and this and that and the other thing. Isn't it amazing that one person's reality could... I would love to step into his head for a second. Bernie made up just to see what it felt like. I think that'd be very helpful to be able to step into that because... Just to see. I can't picture it.

I just can't picture it. Well, I also couldn't picture not being able to live with $2 billion either. Like, what is it? It's that weirdness of the game, right? It's like you score 100 points, you want to score 1,000 points. You score 1,000, you want to score a million. You score a million, you want to score a billion. It's like you never stop.

And people never, they never achieve peace. Like, that's what I always used to say about Bill Gates. Like, why the fuck is Bill Gates still working yeah you hear about him being them richest and now he's not I mean he really did sort of find some sort of a balance and now almost all of his work is done towards humanitarian efforts he's you know he donates a lot of money a lot of charities I mean a lot of really good work like post his Microsoft career Which is like really kind of unique that a guy sort of found his way found his back kept a shitload of money

Yeah, don't get me wrong. Yeah, you know apparently he's got some Stupid fucking house with a submarine and in the Pacific Northwest where like if someone tries to break into his house You can fucking escape in a submarine. I Kayaked by his house once actually. Did you? Yeah. Did they let you? Did Secret Service fucking swarm you

and ask you where you're going? Yeah, nobody. I couldn't see anybody. They're probably all in the trees. Are you allowed to just walk by his house? How's that work? Well, it was a private island, at least the place that I was at.

I was just told by the guy I was with. We were actually throwing crab pots out of a kayak. I was just told it was his like house I don't know if his main house might have been one of his houses But we were you know I don't know 50 yards off the shore and there's a private island a private island That's when you're yeah ballin. Yeah, you got your own island You know as an island Tyler Perry the guy that makes those shitty movies and TV shows those awful shows Tyler Perry.

Yeah. He has a private island. He has a private island. Where? I don't know. You can't know. If you know, I actually feel,

uh, some sadness for Bernie Madoff. Really? Oh yeah, man. I mean, that's, I don't know.

He's as tortured as, you know, I think it's harder to feel empathy for him, but he's as tortured of a human as, I don't know, pick anybody. Maybe. Right? Yeah. Maybe, maybe not.

I don't know that's a fact, but I don't know. If you're hurting that many people, are you kidding me? Like, you aren't feeling all right. Yeah. You know? It's a weird line. Like, when do you feel bad for someone? Do you feel bad for Jeffrey Dahmer? Like how did he become that cannibal murderer guy? How did that happen?

You know like what what causes someone to go from like you have a boy What causes someone to go from your cute little baby boy to being some monster? Yeah, like how does that what is it about people? Yeah, that makes it Like, how does that, what is it about people that makes it possible for someone to go, even not to a monster, but how about that young boy that you were working with that had no empathy, that you worried about sleeping near? Like, what happens? Like, the developmental process of a human being is way more fascinating to me as an adult with children than it was when I was a young man. When I was a young man and I was single and I didn't have any kids, I just thought people were fucked up and some people weren't.

The people that are fucked up, fuck them and death penalty and kick their ass. See, I've been obsessed with this all my life. Really? Absolutely. What is this process of growing? Have you ever heard of the novel Siddhartha? No. By Hermann Hesse. I'm not sure how to say that, but it's a classic novel, an author from Germany.

And it chronicles the life of a young guy named Siddhartha. But the whole book, what it is, is it goes through his entire life from when he was born until he dies. And in it are these like very specific stages of life. So he's, you know, he's like young, wandering years. And then he needs to work. So he goes to you know, he's like young wandering years and then, um, he needs to work. So he goes to a city and he learns from a, from a trader and then he needs to learn about love. So he, so he gets with a prostitute, but, but all in these big stages. And that book did something to me at an early age. I just got obsessed with this process of maturing. And there's a, there's

a term for it called ontogeny, which is the, the process of an organism's growth over their lifespan. It's just this natural sort of like a tree, an ontogeny of a tree is it is a, you know, a seed that drops and then it sprouts and then it roots and then it grows and then it dies. And, and it is, yeah, it's been an obsession of mine and, you know, getting thrown into that work of working with kids and yeah, it's, it is, yeah, it's been an obsession of mine. And, you know, getting thrown into that work of working with kids. And, yeah, it's, I'm so fascinated by it. And I don't have, obviously, any, you know, solid here's how it goes. But I've been looking into it for, you know, a long time. And I just, I think that, oh, anyway, back to the book.

I used to read that book out loud to these groups of kids. I was working, we'd sit around the fire at night and I'd read a novel. You know, you'd be out there for days, so you'd have time to read a novel out loud. And, you know, it's just something poetic, not about just the words, but about watching the life, someone's life unfold as a whole story and watching them, you know, I don't know, grow up. Yeah. It's just, it's this weird fascination I have. And specifically because, and it all comes, I keep saying it comes back to that time in the woods, but I only worked with males, with boys and it wasn't, I didn't choose to do that.

I felt like. Do a lot of girls do the same sort of therapy? Yeah. Yeah. I think. But they must go with women too. It's probably a problem with men going out there with girls. They'll do mixed leadership groups, like a male and a female for both boys and girls. But yeah, there's always a girl with the girls. But yeah, man, I just got obsessed with this. What, what, how do we grow up? What does it look like? Was it feel like? What does it feel like? How come it's not happening? Because that's a big part of what I felt as I looked around is that I think that a lot of adult, physically adult men walk around with parts of themselves that are still 13, 6, 2, 18. Right. You know, like there's this human maturation process, this human journey that we all have available to us that I, you know, I think we're too busy a lot of times to let it actually flow and happen.

Well, I think that's true. But I also think that there's a maturation process that comes from overcoming obstacles that a lot of people just don't encounter. They don't encounter difficulty, so they don't learn about themselves. That's part of it. But I think that a lot of times, even if they do encounter difficulty, they don't let themselves actually feel. They don't let themselves experience it. Right? Like, everybody has shitty things happen to them, but you can keep that shitty thing at a distance from you.

You can like kind of address it. You can sort of, I don't know, act out against it. But unless you actually feel it, I mean, think about and this this gets into things like trauma and resilience and how people are able to move on from hardship. are able to move on from hardship. Right. And, and a lot of the research, um, there's a psychiatrist called Bessel van der Kolk. Never heard of him. No. Fascinating dude. He's, uh, he started working with the VA in Boston and, uh, worked with return vets from, um, from, uh, Vietnam and then did this whole, uh, lifetime of study about trauma and how it comes into humans and how you can move through it and how you can heal it and all this stuff. And, um, it, it just, it basically comes down to, uh, being able, like to be more resilient, to be able to get over things. So say death in the family or an attack or an assault or whatever, whatever that trauma could be, that if you don't allow the body and your system to actually go through, feel, and process what's going on, you lock it up.

You lock it up. You, like, it doesn't, I mean, it's almost like it gets implanted in you somewhere. And then it just like this. Festers. Festers. And the cool thing is that the science now is showing the very specifics of this. It's not just, I mean, it's still theory, right? But it's, so I feel like I got off what we were talking about there.

I feel like I got off what we were talking about there. But yeah, I feel like, like you said, being able to overcome things, of course, absolutely. And part of that is just, to me, again, speaking more from a male perspective here, but part of that, and I think a lot of what our culture says is okay, is let's horse our way through this, right? Let's force it. Let's push harder. Let's horse our way through this right let's force a let's push harder let's let's conquer our fears and our feelings let's let's not address it let's just push right run through the wall right sickly or take

antidepressants well right so that's that's the thing then there's this other whole way to get through hardship which is by actually surrendering to it and letting your, this like brilliant system that we have as humans to process it and get through it. Right. And that's, that's a way to wholeness and health in some ways. I think they're both important. I mean, like, yeah, you need to be able to, uh, you know, ignore the pain and power your

way up that mountain or, or save somebody that's getting hurt or whatever. And then there's this other part, I think that needs to be in balance, which is accepting what's happening and getting through. Just a way to accept what's happening and let your body do what it needs to do. Well, I also think there's an extreme lack of discipline that a lot of people have. And that discipline, a lot of it comes from overcoming difficult obstacles and understanding the work that's required to get things done. Making these little leaps and bounds, making these improvements in your life, getting better at things. I think those things are really critical to the human mind.

Yeah. I think the mind has desires. And one of the big desires is it has a desire for improvement and his desire to achieve goals And there's a lot of people that these goals are laid out by other people these goals are like Graduating from third grade graduating from fourth grade a lot of shit that you don't want to do so these goals are meaningless to you So you never feel like you've accomplished anything that you actually want to do and next thing you know You're a 35 year old man working for an insurance company You don't want to be there

Yeah And you don't have any real part of you that you've nurtured you just sort of plugged you into these other weird Shapes and conform to them and then you just want to go fucking crazy and probably bitched about it all the way along probably Yeah, you probably complained and you're annoying and you're a whiny little twat and you're out there just clogging up the freeway, beeping at people and giving them the finger. I mean, that's a lot of humans that you run into. That's a lot of it's a lot of this life. So, yeah. And that points directly to what, you know, I do and what I'm building is that.

So you take eight of those guys and you set up a room and you say, all right, in this space right here, fuck all that. We're going to be actually honest and say what we're feeling, but maybe can't even really access. So like all that frustration, all that shit or whatever, it could be anything. That's so hard for people to do, right? Like what, what kind of techniques do you employ to get someone like, say, if you got some guy who's closed off and has been bullshitting his way through life. And then all of a sudden here he is, this 35 year old guy, that's really troubled, that's in a room with you. How do you get that guy to open up? Safety.

Safety. And leading by example. And being vulnerable by example. And when somebody, it's part of this connection, like sitting down with somebody. That if you, after one of these last retreats, one of the guys came up to me and said, safety is the new ayahuasca. Which is maybe a strange thing to say, but he said he'd been all over the world doing drugs, trying to find growth, trying to find himself. And we went to this retreat and all we did was sit down and say,

okay, our intention, all we're doing, what we actually are doing here is just making this, you're not going to be, you're going to be supported. You're not going to be laughed at. Like, like it's a safe space to do it. And then you just, uh, you dive in and lead by example. And that example like plugs others right into it. Like it's this amazing, like symbiotic thing that happens. So, and, and people just sometimes break open, sometimes crack slowly open but you know all of a sudden so maybe after 35 years of only being other people's program you get in touch with what you actually feel what you actually want and who you actually are it's just like this

fucking it's like holy shit i think for a lot people, it's really difficult to try to do what you actually want to because you've spent so much time rewarding yourself with material items for these little accomplishments that you've become in debt. And you really can't escape the system. I mean, that's a real problem with people. They have a car that they're leasing. They have a house that they're renting or even worse, that they bought and then they they're stuck and then they don't know what the fuck to do. They have to keep this insurance company job and it's just rotting them out from the inside. Totally. Yeah. I mean, there's like a whole society built on, on, uh, trying to keep you not who you are in a sense, I think, you know, but so what we're finding, which is really amazing, is that if you stay on that surface level, if you stay on that sort of I don't know, like so.

So trying to improve yourself goes so far, but it's kind of like an iceberg thing. Right. make more money, right? And here's your goal. And you're going toward it and you, I don't know, listen to podcasts or you do all this stuff and you try to figure out how to do it. How do I do it? How do I? And you keep hitting the wall. You keep getting sort of thrown down and you don't really understand that underneath, meanwhile, is this massive sort of like pent up shit. And if you address that massive pent upup shit then all of a sudden getting to that goal is a whole different story it's a whole different story it's uh it's it's like always trimming the like if you need to get rid of a tree in your yard but all you do is every day you chop the leaves off the

leaves off but if you address that the, the roots, the deeper stuff and, um, you know, and again, there's a stigma against that, especially for dudes, right? So there's this,

like guys don't want to go to therapy. Guys don't want to get into woo woo, hippie, spiritual shit. Or they do. And they're annoying. Sure. Right.

They don't. Yeah, exactly. They do want to get into it. Right. Exactly. And I mean, I don't know.

I don't know if I pull this off or not, but I feel fluent in, like, you know, bro culture and fluent in, you know, like, I've gone down that spiritual route, too. Well, you recognize when the spiritual route is legitimate and when the spiritual route is, like, a ruse as well. Oh, yeah. Like, sometimes even the spiritual route is just something that someone has plugged themselves into To try to find some meaning exactly well. It's not authentic exactly So how are you doing this if you don't mind me interrupting like what you when you so you're you're planning on taking guys like Say say if I'm that 35 year old guy that works an insurance company for example, and I'm just fucked up I just I'm going crazy man. I need to do something. Hey, this seems interesting to me. Wilderness therapy. What does it mean, Dan Doty?

What does that mean? How do I get involved in this? And how do you, how do you get me out of this rut I'm in? Yeah. So three, three things we're offering right now. And, um, the first is a, is the wilderness route, which is a, like a six day expedition. And you can sign up, pay some money and go out in the woods and change your life like pretty we'll climb mountains we'll go fishing we'll um and all along i'll set up this sense of safety in this community and this sense of uh brotherhood and how many guys do you go with you know 10 or 12 for that just you and these 10 people a couple other leaders in my couple leaders all right because you have to deal with interpersonal disputes and all the nonsense you're going to have to most likely encounter, right?

And so I'm working with some guides to just take care of the logistical stuff so that I can manage the group stuff more. That's one offering. That's kind of our capstone offering. We're doing weekend retreats, and we've been doing these for the last six months, and they've been just catching on fire. About 30 guys at a time in a lodge. Been doing them in the Berkshires, so out in the woods. A couple hours from New York City.

30 guys there, and just set up sort of an intense weekend experience of practicing the stuff, and we'll hike and do trail work and all that stuff. But more importantly, do the self self you know diving into yourself within the presence of other guys which is um just you know i've done therapy i've been in therapy i'm not a therapist but um when it's been very helpful like i for if you work with a good therapist that really is really good i couldn't recommend it more. But there's something about these men's retreats, which I totally understand sound unattractive to a lot of guys. Sounds like a lot of butt fucking.

Yeah, of course. Of course. That is the big first sort of response, right? Oh, the woods, huh? Yeah. Tell me more. Oh, I can be open in the woods? Yeah. We made one of our advertising videos for it and it just starts out that a guy stands up and says,

yeah, I heard about a men's retreat and I thought, the first thing I thought was, this is going to be fucking awful. And so I get it. But I think we're getting further enough along where um the guys that are going through this are literally coming back with the most positive feedback that i could i couldn't write the shit like like changing their lives and just like literally um because it's you know back to that thing we're offering a place for them to uh accept a part of themselves that's been offline for a long time it's a big fucking deal it's a really big deal it's probably also a big fucking deal to just separate from the hive for a little bit and just be outside of cell phone range and be in the woods and just take a big deep breath of fresh air and look around at the wilderness and just realize that this is reality as well.

And you've been plugged into this civilization reality, this city, this urban environment, which is entirely unnatural and has only been a real thing for the past couple hundred years. It literally didn't exist for the gigantic swath of humanity that existed that existed before that. Yeah. I think that swath, is that the right word there? Not really. I think it does a couple deep things. It lights up this, this, um, this neurobiology that, that of us as social animals, I think it, it goes back to, um, more of a tribal sense of living too. It's like all of a sudden you went from being isolated and lonely to having 30 dudes who would honestly fucking do anything for you in that moment.

And I got a buddy, a good buddy, is a returned special forces operator. He sits in my men's group in Bozeman with me and really struggled with coming home. And then found our group, and within a month, his life was back on track. Like just killing it, man. Just like kicking ass. And, you know, I mean, there is a connection between, I wouldn't say the general military, but the special forces. You know, you read books and hear about the aspect of brotherhood and how they're there for each other.

You know, this is definitely a very different venue, but I think the bond and connection that is created out of it is, and this is, you know, from his mouth too, is he went, you know, I don't know how many years, several years in the Special Forces, living with in close connection to guys, got thrown home, was all of a sudden isolated, and then came into our group and just had this, this, uh, closeness again. And it just, bam, just like back to,

back to killing it. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, I'm very aware. I mean, it's, I've been scared to start speaking about this for years, man. I mean, it's very, uh, to me, even I look at advertising for similar men's programs and things like that. It just so turned off. I'm like, right. It just seems weird. It does seem weird. I think people need resets. You need some sort of reset. And we've talked about this before about we've both experienced those resets through psychedelics or, or through these hunting trips, you know, and these wilderness trips. But I think people get caught up in the momentum of their daily existence and all the requirements of that daily existence. And they become overwhelming. You know, like we were talking about, like, your lease that you have on your car or your mortgage that you have in your house and the credit card bills that keep coming in.

Your student loans you need to eventually get to and blah. It's a fucking overwhelming grind yeah and sometimes people need something that removes them entirely from it for a certain amount of time that allows you just the fresh air yeah the not not just literal flesh air but the metaphorical fresh air of allowing you to just separate from the all these weird influences and all this weird energy and momentum, the momentum of the life that you've created or that's been created for you that you're sort of trapped in. Yeah. Yeah, man. So that reset thing, I mean, I think a warning is that if you start getting a reset, I mean, from my own experience, I need it pretty regularly.

So actually the biggest goal of Everyman, the organization I founded, is to – our goal to immediately get into a weekly group to basically continually and regularly experience the same thing. It's like a hit. Well, there's a thing, too, about men in this culture where there's not a lot of sympathy towards men that are struggling. It seems like there's this thought that men are the patriarchy and we're dominating the world and we're almost like subhuman. We're responsible for all these issues. So men with issues like, oh, cry me a fucking river. What about women with issues? What about trans people with issues?

What about gay people with issues? What about black? Oh, Jesus Christ. Like a regular white guy with issues like your issues are bullshit. But it doesn't matter. You are who you are. You can't change the fact that you're a white guy with issues like your issues are bullshit. Okay, but it doesn't matter you are you are you can't change the fact You're a white guy. So if you're a white guy with problems, nobody gives a fuck can't they see that it all connects though No, they see that white guy makes everybody else unhappy to what the fuck man

They don't because it's not convenient for their narrative the narratives that you're responsible for all the problems in the world Even though you're just Dan Doty from Bozeman, Montana. No, I get it, but it's, it's so, I mean, that's one of the most powerful. So the podcast that I'm launching is a self improvement podcast for guys, but instead of going to experts and saying, Hey, you know, what's the best morning routine that you can do designing a routine or whatever i'm talking to regular guys and and asking them to share you know more vulnerably than they normally would because that's what happens in these scenarios is that we learn from each other just as simple human fucking beings we're just like you know like one guy might share that he's having trouble

with his son for example or with his kid he doesn't know how to do it and you know like no matter i don't care like a bunch of other guys will say like holy shit i thought i was the only one feeling right you know and it's just all of a sudden you and it's back to this isolation thing you think that you're we all think we're fucking special right we all think that we're so unique and the actual if we actually took the time to connect with one another we'd be like oh wow we have a lot like and just that just that is enough to uh drastically change somebody's day what's motivating you to venture off because you were working for 0.0's big production company they make make Meat Eater and Anthony Bourdain's show

and all these different shows. What's motivating you to step away from that and start doing this? This is what I've always wanted to do. And this is what I've been passionate about. What compels you? I want to help guys. Yeah, I just, and I know that I can.

Even if it's just one guy, whatever it is. But working out there with these kids and seeing all of this, it just left me with the deepest, deepest... Satisfaction? Fulfillment, satisfaction, but also a sense of purpose. And then I tell you what, man, I had a boy, I had a son last year. I tell you what, man, I had a, I had a boy, I had a son last year and when he came out and there was something inside me that said, if you don't do, if you don't act on what you know, you can bring it. Fuck you. Fuck it. Like, this is your kid. Like, like there is, um, I don't know. I'm, I'm also, you know, I was born a, a fairly sensitive, I could feel I was born a sensitive

kid, right. I could feel other people's pain. And when I'm, you know, working with these kids and now these men, I mean, I don't know. I want, I want good for people, right? I want good for you. I want good for my family and I want good for, I don't know. I feel connected and I want to do what I can. It's a noble purpose. I was just curious about, like, what, I mean, you have a very promising career and a lucrative career with 0.0, so for you to leave that, it has to be, like, a really compelling sort of a pull. Yeah, I mean, that job and that career was an amazing wild ride

and in some ways felt like a, you know, a temporary sidebar from what I'm really meant to do. You know, I've been, I've been writing for a long time and, um, yeah, I think that, uh, whatever this thing is that I'm doing, it, it chose me somehow, or, or I don't know, maybe that's, I don't know if that's true or not, but I don't, how long can you ignore the thing inside you that screams at you that says you have to do this, you have to do this, or you want to do this? Yeah, well, you shouldn't.

Yeah. You definitely shouldn't. Yeah. I mean, it's obviously beneficial and it's obviously something you're compelled to do and it's obviously something that you feel like is very fulfilling. So why ignore it? So when do you start this podcast? It's out.

It's out. It's out. What's it called? It's called the Everyman Podcast. The Everyman Podcast. Yeah. E-V-R- the everyman podcast yeah evryman what about chicks no fuck off fuck off chicks you got your own you got oprah okay i know i mean that's a good question i don't think it's uh why uh why'd you spell it that way because shit out of people well because the full one was like a lot of money or wasn't available. The website.

It was just a practicality thing. Okay. Yeah. E-V-E-R-Y-M-A-N was not available. E-V-R-Y. So E-V-R-Y, folks. E-V-R-Y Man Podcast. How many episodes do you have out? Two now.

And then. Yeah. Two right now. Are you doing them every week? Like how are you doing it? I'm going to try. I'll probably be every two weeks to start. And then I'm just got to get in the swing.

You're on iTunes, the whole deal? Yeah, on iTunes. All that jazz? Yeah. Beautiful, man. Yeah. All right. Let's wrap it up.

So that's awesome. It's awesome that it's out there. It's awesome that people can get a hold of it. I always love talking to you, brother. So let's do this again. Yeah, brother. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Dan Doty, ladies and gentlemen. Everyman Podcast. We'll be back tomorrow with Dadius Russell. See ya.