The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 002

Episode Date: February 6, 2015

Ketchum, Idaho. After a day of flyfishing for cutthroat trout, Steven Rinella talks with Kenton Carruth and Ryan Callaghan from First Lite, along with Janis Putelis and Helen Cho from the MeatEater crew. Subjects discussed include: killer instincts; the suicide of Ernest Hemingway; catch-and-release vs. catch-and-eat; acquiring a strong sense of grrrrr; fish physiology; Danny Rinella's adipose nipple; an exotic Japanese way of dispatching fish; the conundrum of wanting to fish for threatened or endangered species; the mountain man Jim Bridger; and whether or not flyfishermen are total pansies. Related links/notes: Smell Us Now, Lady! Books: The Old Man and The Sea + Hemingway's Guns First Lite MeatEater television show on Sportsman Channel Instantly Download MeatEater TV Episodes- Listen to the episode for the coupon code. Western Hunter Magazine Ike Jime technique First Lite Fusion Camo Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Guests: Kenton Carruth twitter.com/firstlitewool firstlite.com Ryan Callaghan twitter.com/olCal406 firstlite.com Janis Putelis twitter.com/LatvianHuntr Helen Cho twitter.com/HelenCho Originally Recorded August 2014 ++++++++++++++ If you’re enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review on iTunes. The MeatEater Podcast is available on: -iTunes -Stitcher -YouTube -Soundcloud Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meat. All right, everybody, this is the Meat Eater Podcast. We're coming at you. I want to say we're coming at you live from Ketchum, but we're not. It's not live.

We're coming at you dead from Ketchum, Idaho. And before I get into the main thing, Ketchum, Idaho, the way I always knew Ketchum, Idaho, and this is my first time I've ever been in Ketchum, Idaho. I'm here for a backcountry hunters and anglers get together. And I always knew it was being like where Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway, the writer who wrote perhaps the greatest fishing story of all time, The Old Man and the Sea. You guys read that? Yes, sir.

He shot himself to death here. And right here in town, his grave's here in town. And I always knew that. It was funny, this book just came out called Hemingway's Guns. And it was always rumored that Hemingway shot himself with a boss shotgun that he bought at Abercrombie & Fitch, which is totally funny because now Abercrombie & Fitch sells shirts that say Abercrombie and Fitch which is totally funny because now Abercrombie and Fitch sells shirts to say Abercrombie and Fitch on them but used to be able to buy guns there so he supposedly shot himself with the shotgun and it turned out these

guys did this book recently called Hemingway's Guns they did a bunch of research they realized he shot himself with a 12 gauge shotgun that was a WC Scott and son after he kills himself apparently like someone his family brings his shotgun down to a welder here in town to have it destroyed the guy smashes the stock up cuts it in little pieces and goes it buries in the field one of these writers goes to find this well whoever this welder is his kid still runs a welding shop as of a couple years ago. The kid pulls out a matchbox, showing him some parts they kept off this shotgun.

The guy looks at it. He says, that's not a boss shotgun. That's a Scott and Son shotgun. And he apparently, this shotgun, he hunted ducks in Italy, shot shooting competitions in Cuba, went to a safari in East Africa off the shotgun, favorite shotgun. Kind of a weird deal.

Right here in Ketchum. And Ryan Callahan, who's sitting right here, told me that whenever he runs out of alcohol and he doesn't have any money, he just goes and takes the offerings that are left at Hemingway's tomb. It's right across the street. When I asked him about this,

he said, I can walk over and get some alcohol for you right now. I think that's Hemingway's gravesite. And site and yesterday sure enough we're standing there in town here we're standing there and he told me it's like oh yeah people are always going to his grave we're standing there and two dudes come up and they're like excuse me sir would you know where the cemetery is i'm like let me guess you know and sure enough i'm sure they're heading over to papa's uh papa's tomb well yeah i mean what are your thoughts on that? Is it bad to steal it? Is it bad to steal it?

No, because when they put... Someone told me... Like, normally you put plastic flowers at a grave. Someone told me that they just periodically come and take them all and throw them in the garbage. Yeah. It's only okay if you're buying alcohol or guns. Yeah.

I think so. Not plastic flowers. Now, something formal. The Meteor Podcast brought to you by First Light, based right here in Ketchum, Idaho. It's an original hunting clothing brand. They make high-performance hunting apparel. I wear it all the time. These guys pioneered merino wool hunting clothing.

They're the first ones to take that fabric and technology and bring it into hunting clothing they make everything to get you covered for hunting from your merino base layers out to waterproof breathable technical layers like i said the good thing and you're going to find this out in a minute because two of these guys are right here the guys are first like actually hunting fish real hard all year round and they test their stuff endlessly and it shows and the weird thing is if you ever want to call them and ask them a question, an actual dude will answer the phone, like a real live person will answer the phone

and answer your questions. Or you can make it even more simple. Go to FirstLight.com, check out their stuff. Fantastic materials. And the Meteor podcast is brought to you

by the Meteor TV show hosted by me, Steve Rinella. I've got one of our producers sitting right here next to me, Giannis Longtong-Poutelis. We'll get to him in a minute. We air new episodes on Sportsman Channel, which if you don't have it on your TV set,

you really ought to get it. It's actual, real reality TV, which is like the reality kind, the kind that they don't normally make. And the network, Sportsman Channel, is great because they trust us to make the show we want to make and they give their talent i don't know if it's okay to say talent when you're referring to yourself they give your talent the freedom to do real things in a real way without having to dope

it up into something that's embarrassing to watch that's a note i made to myself but it's totally true if you don't get sportsman channel and you ought to you can still find all the meat eater you can stand at meat eater.vhx.tv you can stream it you can download it you can use the code meat eater podcast one word meat eater podcast and get five bucks off on any volume so we package these episodes what five per yeah they vary but four or five four or five episodes per package so that gives you like two and a half hours of viewing pleasure um we got a ton of them on how many like how many packages do we have now six i think i want you to know that for hunting and fishing podcast this one's really integrated because the

person you're hearing talking right now is not only a woman she's korean right korean american korean american helen cho the most integrated um broadcast you're ever gonna hear about hunting um what else what else do i want to cover yeah sportsman channel first light meteor podcast or i'm sorry meteor.X.TV. Hit Meteor Podcast for your discount. What we're going to be talking about, and like I said, I have two, Ken Kruth and Ryan Callahan from First Light are here. Giannis Boutelis from the Meteor team is here. Helen Cho is here. And Helen, tell what you just did for the first time today.

I went fly fishing for the first time. Helen Cho went fly fishing. And so it's like today we watched an otherwise honest person get corrupted because helen show was up until today like a meat slayer yeah pretty much helen fished in order like helen went out to fish she used to go out to fish in order to kill fish and eat them with a spinning rod. You like to surf? More conventional, yeah. You like to surf fish?

You like to fish? You fish the- Party boats? She likes to party. She likes to party on boats. She likes to fish on party boats. She used to go out and was a fish killer. And today she was corrupted right here in Ketchum and went on an outing that was meant to be,

to catch fish, to poke holes in fish's faces for fun, and then let them go. So Helen became a fly fishing catch and release angler today. I don't know if you become one if you go once. Well, you dabbled in it. It was, yeah, the introduction, the beginning of the end. She was lured to the dark side of catch and release angling today right here in Ketchum. I was with her. I caught a fish and let him go.

I caught him on accident, but I caught him and let him go. And that's one thing I want to talk about today. It's the thing that's perplexed me my whole life. And I've said on both sides of the fence is, and I've packed this room with fly fishermen, is what, like, I want to talk about why do some, like, what is it with fly fishing? Because we all know that fly fishing is, like i want to talk about why do so like what is it with fly fishing because we all know the fly fishing is you know technically right catch me if i'm wrong the real only difference like to define fly fishing would be the fly the lure is delivered by the weight of the line right yep and on spin fishing the the the lure is delivered by its own weight when you cast.

Yeah. But there's massive amounts of cultural BS. There's like massive amounts of like cultural and ethical stuff has been laid over. What's the difference between spin fishing and fly fishing? Yes, and that's something we covered today. I look at fly fishing as a means to catch fish. This is Ryan Callahan talking. That's it.

Right? fishing as a means to catch fish this is ryan callahan talking that's it right and there is just like you said there are massive amounts of opinion and chunks of like nostalgia heaped upon how you fly fish but for me it is a means to catch fish. Was the first fish you ever caught on a fly rod? No. No, not at all. What was the first fish you caught? I would think it's a rainbow. Because you grew up in Montana. Yeah.

You caught them on what, a worm? Man, you know, we used to, my mom used to have us round up grasshoppers out of the garden. We'd take a bobber, a hook, and float it down a prior creek on the Crow Indian Reservation outside of Billings. Yep. And catch a lot of fish. That's prior creek, like the prior mountains. It has some wild horses in it, right? Yep, exactly. Yep.

And you guys catch them. Would you thump them in the head or would you? We would keep quite a few fish, yep. Yeah. Yep. So, Ryan, I'm going to get real technical about fly fishing. catch would you thump them in the head or would you we would keep quite a few fish yeah yeah yeah so right i'm gonna get real technical about fly fishing remember ryan was sharing with me today we're talking about all the do's and don'ts of fly fish and all the ethics of fly fishing he was saying that around here guys are guys like we'll fish a dry fly they will not want to strip a

woolly bugger which is apparently not how one fly fishes. But they will run a nymph rig, which is basically bobber fishing with a fly rod. I call a fly, what do you call it, a strike indicator? It's a bobber. I call it bobbers all the time. It's a bobber. It pisses fly fishermen off. You say, what are you guys, bobber fishing? Well, no, it's a strike indicator.

I'm like, yeah, that's what it is with my four-year-old. My four-year-old uses it to indicate when he has a strike. Yes. But we'll say it's a bobber. The funniest thing about that, too, is that they had all these different kinds of bobbers. Right now, you're hearing Kenton. Is that they had all these different kinds of bobbers for years, right? They had these fuzzy things, this and that.

And now, guys just have thrown the towel in. They use bobbers. For real? Like a spring-loaded bobber? Well, it's a little bit lighter, so it casts a little bit. Are you referring to a thingamabobber? Because it's thingamabobber. When it comes to fly fishing, yes.

Will you use one? No, I didn't use one, but I will use one. Heck, I like to catch fish, man. I use indicators all the time. Tell these guys what you just got back from doing today. Steelhead fishing. I was up on the Klamath, and it was exceptionally good. Explain the whole thing.

You had a seven-year dry spell or something like that? Oh, I mean, I have been. We kind of go regardless. It's a family reunion kind of deal deal so the fishing is a secondary program so we just kind of show up and if the fish are in the fish are in traditionally the fish are not in this year because the time of year or just because like the rivers have because those rivers have been so degraded and the steelhead runs are not what they used to be and all that all of the above but you know with steelhead fishing it's one of those things where you're

either you know and you quickly find this out is that you arrive, and everybody there is packing up and saying, you should have been here last week. It's just the classic example. But this time I was there last week, and this was traditional. You were there this week. I was there this week. It was the week.

And it was off the charts. It was as good a fishing as even the old timers there, fishing there there for 40 years said it was the best fishing they'd had in 40 years. Now, I want to explain something real quick. So a steelhead, like there's a term anadromous, right? So anadromous means that a fish lives in the ocean or in the case of the Great Lakes, lives in a lake and runs up the river to spawn and then the opposite of anadromous cataginous where a fish like an american eels cataginous lives in the river and goes out to the ocean to spawn but steelhead a river run or like sea run rainbows it's a rainbow trout that you know he's hatched he's born goes through his larval stage or whatever

his his youth in the river, goes back out of the ocean, turns into a big fatty, comes back out the river, guy like Kenton goes down there and catches one and it's not too big. And sometimes it's hard to tell if he caught a rainbow or a steelhead. Certainly. On the younger fish, you know, a young steelhead will be, you know, two pounds and 18 inches, which, you know, for a rainbow, that's a great fish. It's a giant fish, yeah.

And steelhead, you know, they can get up to be huge. I mean, you know, it's not uncommon for a guy to catch a 10-pound fish. What was the biggest one you guys got? I caught a nine-pound, probably eight-and-a-half, nine-pounder on a dry fly, which was kind of cool. And there's no doubt that that fish had been out in the ocean for a couple years at that point. I mean, he's just a

full-on balls out steelhead full-on and we were only 15 miles off the coast was he clipped was he a hatchery fish no wild wild born fish wild and in fact all the fish i caught pretty much were wild you probably can't even thump those fish right you can't keep them so that's legally enforced catch and release. Exactly. And then if you have, and so one guy on the trip caught one with a clipped adipose fin and we smoked it and ate it and it was fantastic. Oh, did you really? Yeah. So it's got a clipped fin. If it's a hatchery fish, you can keep it. Correct. And then you guys stumped it. Yep. Brought it in and it was probably a seven or eight pound fish, filleted it, and then smoked it all day the next day in the smoker.

You know what adipose fin means? It just means extra fin. It's like a little fin on their back. It's not clear what function it serves. Probably serves some function. They used to cut everybody's tonsils out because they didn't think tonsils served any function. So adipose means extra. My brother Danny has an adipose nipple.

He's got a third nipple on his chest. He calls it his adipose nipple all men's nipples are out of post why no but it's extra out of post it's like it's like the extra yes you know so oddly enough he didn't show that so he's got an adipose nipple. An adipose fin, like when you take a fish, if you want to know that he's a hatchery fish, they just snip that little fin off. It's kind of like it sits between the dorsal fin and the caudal fin, which is the tail. There's like this little thing on there, and it's, I don't know. It's kind of floppy.

Yeah, I don't know. It might be some kind of vestigial thing. Like it used to do something that it doesn't do now. so if you want to mark a hatchery fish you just snip that thing so what kenton here is saying is that a wild fish it was like hatched and reared in the wild is hands off and you know the other way around if you could have killed one of those fish you probably wouldn't have killed it though i. I would have kept one or two. Really? I already had the smoker.

I mean, I was going to fire it up. I might as well fill the little—it was kind of a small smoker. The goal was to fill the smoker up. If you're going to run it, you might as well fill it up. I already had the smoker. One thing I kind of like—today, we fished this morning when Helen got corrupted. We were fishing for cutthroats. I have kind of honestly quit killing cutthroats I have kind of honestly

quit killing cutthroats yeah I understand that in rivers like like wild cuts because cutthroats as a species there's certain species in in this country that are just sort of you know they have highs and lows but the just the general atmosphere they're generally going downhill you know i mean mule deer it's like you know like like people are predicting in some ways you can predict the end of mule deer like they're sensitive and sure you'd be like oh yeah the golf course there's always mule deer on the golf course but in general like mule deer are things don't look great for mule deer right now number of things like drought habitat loss or you know a lot of issues we could correct if we felt like it.

If we had the energy and the money and we didn't care so much about being inconvenienced, we could fix the situation. Cutthroats are another thing that just like generally seem to be going down. You can talk about putting cuts, some strains of cuts on the endangered species list. So I like to go out and get them. And this is kind of like hits the conundrum of what I'm talking about when I want to talk about this on a podcast. I like to go out and get them. I don't want to kill them because I'm like, yeah, I just feel the pain of the cutthroat. So when I hold a cutthroat, I feel the pain of the species. And I know that the individual, the essence of the species isn't wrapped up in that little individual fish in my hand,

but he sort of stands for something that's in decline. i see him and i want to let him go but what is it that made me want to poke a hole in his face and reel him in you know because the the dirty secret about catching release stuff is there's some mortality yes there absolutely is they don't like it depends on water temp it can be high as 15%. What have you ever heard? Yeah, about there, 15 to 20. Yeah, tell me the story you're telling me the other day as a guide, how many fish you guys land in a day. Well, there came a point well into my guiding career when I would start to.

Tell where you were guiding. This is a weird deal. The guy that's talking right now, the guy that's talking right now the guy that's talking right now Giannis Pitellas works on Meat Eater and the show knew my are you still sick

of hearing this story Giannis knew my Giannis knew my wife in high school okay so

my wife when we met my wife's like the only person I ever knew who liked to hunt like you guys do is this guy Giannis Pitellas who's just in one ear and out the only person i ever knew to like to hunt like you guys do is this guy yannis putellis is just in one ear and out the other like i never paid any attention what she's talking about just like you know no i'm joking but she's always talking

it's the one day i'm looking at this magazine western hunter magazine which is my favorite hunting magazines and i'm looking at western hunter and here's a picture of kind of like that iconic image of a dude with a pair of binoculars up in the mountains and it says like yannis putellis glasses the colorado high country and i right away call my wife at work i'm like who's that dude you're talking about yannis something or another that likes to hunt she's like yannis putellis i'm like i'm looking at that dude he's in the magazine right here in my lap so we connect through i think through my wife's facebook and it turns out that yannis is living up yannis's wife is a botanist, and they were spending some time

up in Fairbanks. And so we were going up to do a doll sheep hunt for the show, and we hired Giannis to carry a backpack. Everybody fell in love with him. And at the time, you were guiding. Easy thing to do. At the time, Giannis was like, guiding elk in Colorado, guiding elk in Arizona, doing some coosier stuff down in Mexico.

He started working with us, and eventually we wooed him away from all that. But he was a trout guide for a long time, and he's now going to relate an observation he had about how catch-release fly fishermen can't quite have as bright of a halo hanging over their head as they might like. Spin it, Giannis. Yes, because I felt like with with seasoned good anglers that were competent and knew what they were doing um when the timing was right when the fishing was hot you know mostly it

was for us the month of july this is central colorado the eagle river the colorado river the roaring fork um down outside of aspen we could catch 40 to 60 fish, sometimes per angler, in an eight-hour float. When the fishing's hot, your fish is hitting the dry every couple minutes. So you can rack up the numbers. I never did it, but we definitely had guides that would run the clicker. Really? They were proud of their numbers, so they would sit there and click fish.

Like a golf clicker? Or does orvis make a click just i don't know but when you get into those kind of numbers and then you start talking about 10 mortality rate you know that's a lot of fish that die every day you know it's more than some dude down there with some snell hooks and a box of crawlers well as long as he is abiding by the rules in most places it's two trout a day you know so if he catches his two and leaves they only killed two and he probably he probably didn't poke too many others you know um where we would poke 50 and you know for losing you know five to ten of those fish it's a lot of dead fish and, whenever he goes by that dude on the bank, like some dude at the bank, four or five kids up and down the bank in diapers, and he's out there drowning in crawlers.

They're like, look at that guy. I did a walking back with a stringer. That guy. One of those chain stringers with the clicker, the wire clasps on it. I helped the Division of Wildlife do a dead fish count once on the eagle and we floated down we didn't really float we like kind of crept skidded down the eagle river super low water just going over rocks the whole way warm water temperatures i think we picked up 24 dead fish you can just see them on the bottom of the river you know white bellies up red spots on their

lip when you look at them just count them no we were taking them you know um i want to say it's 17 out of those fish you could see the handprint on them from where they were probably held up for a picture and um you know like you were telling jimmy today wet your hands before you touch the trout and so many people don't know how to probably handle a fish and so then then that mortality rate goes even higher yeah we're talking about my little boy i wanted him to let a go and so i was telling you know get your hands wet before you slip it on your belly i know like i i'll tell you that i remember the exact instant instance i ever in my life is it instance or instant i think i feel like i always screw that up i think i know the exact instance in my life when I heard the term catch release fishing.

Like my old man, I'm not even going to get into why this was okay. But in my old man's eyes, like bass season began on whatever day, okay, in Michigan. Let's say it was June 1. So we all thought it began at midnight. Rather than looking at it, it began on June 1. we talked about like beginning like the 31st at midnight and he thought well as long as it's starting up at midnight which was technically the next day we were allowed to fish that day because we couldn't be up at midnight we had to go to bed so we were allowed to fish and keep bass but we wouldn't we couldn't cut them until the next day when it was well into

season so we had a live well i grew up on a lake we had a dock and we had a live well that my dad made out of you know those you know you're at a grocery store and they have those bread racks like the big rolling racks the plastic perforated shells they have all the loaves of bread on them yeah he just took a bunch of those and zip tied them together and into a live well and put styrofoam around it and we could fish bass all day and put bass into the live well and then season would start so the next day we'd get our fish out of live well and flam i'm not telling you to do this and i was trying to get and i was so i was so little that i was still getting my parents are still giving me baths. I remember that because I caught a big, huge bath two docks down on Gary's dock

and hauled that thing home and was trying to get it into the live well and dropped it. And I was devastated. And I was so young that my parents would give me baths. So remember that night, I was getting a bath. My mom was giving me a bath. And I was still so distraught about the bass I lost that my old man came in and told me some people fish just to let them go as a way to try to make me feel better.

And I later got into it. I got into like and steelhead and like, I don't mean this is going to bring down the steelhead you like to catch, Kenton, because in the Great Lakes we have steelhead. Like the Great Lakes are like an aquarium where you turn. All the fish that were in there are kind of like either not there or they're hurting. But then we have great, it's a great fishery of imported fish. So we have great, we have almost all the Pacific salmon. They try to get Atlantic's going.

We have pinks, coho, chinook. we got lake run browns okay there's tons of fish steelhead and we used to count them and like for us i remember the best year i ever had my third year of college i think i landed 44 steelhead and i probably thumped two of them i thought one of them when i was dating this girl from sarajevo because i wanted to cook one for her and i thumped another one at some other time, and we mostly just caught them just to count them. And you were badass if you could catch a hundred steelhead and let them go.

And I would get where I looked down on the dudes doing it. And then, I'm going to quit talking mostly after this, but I just want to put it to you. So we got so into fly fishing for steelhead, and then the steelhead wasn't always good, so then we got way interested in going to Mexico and fish for bonefish. So then my brother and I went down to Mexico to catch and release bonefish for a month. And we would fish bonefish all day and let them go.

And then in the evening, we'd catch other fish to eat. And I would, in my day, look more forward to going and trying to catch little snappers and grunts and stuff out of the channels in order to eat because we just had a bag of rice a bag of dried rice a bag of dried beans water and we ate fish or we ate conch so here we are like oh no we're not going to kill the bone fish because some reason i can't explain but we'll kill all these other fish we don't even know what the hell they are they're just fish like no idea what this is like oh it looks like a edible fish we eat them and i eventually just get dizzy from all the like like the what you know the why why is this better than yes and then i know somebody why is this worth saving i know some of the guys that fish catch release and they're like i'm not gonna kill these trout i don't want to damage the fishery you know damn well when they get done they go to

some restaurant order fish I don't know where it came from it's like what about that fishery yeah what's that fishery doing we talked about this on the hunting side of things all the time you know it's like I was hiking with the friend of mine's niece taking her mushroom hunting this spring came across an elk calf. And you ate it? And we ate it. I bonked it. I landed it fairly. No, and she said, well, where's the mom? I said, well, she's probably up in this meadow feeding.

We were kind of on the fringe of this big meadow. And she said, well, should we stay here and help the calf? And I'm like, well, if a bear comes by came by it honestly and she's like well we should save it from the bear it's like well what makes the bear less valuable than that health calf you know it's like and why is that up to us to decide that yeah exactly so uh the whole steelhead steelhead fly fishing is a great topic because that's like to our very first conversation that we made where it's like this is how you fly fish but you look across the river at the guy with the you know single pin rod and he's running 300 yards of mono down the river on a slip bobber

and he's crushing fish you're like i bet i can make this fly rod do that yeah and catch more fish and you know a lot of times i call it like playing with house money right like i'll go out and i will nymph and we'll run the bead right and that's very controversial in fly fishing we've talked about that when we were up in b, honest. You mean like a beadhead nymph? No, you run a bead. Meant to look like an egg. Yeah. That's controversial?

Yeah. It's not honest? It looks like an egg. It's not pure. It doesn't have an egg, or it doesn't have a hook on it. Nobody tied it. It's artificial. You take a toothpick, you jam it, so it sits above your hook.

So it's basically like running a flasher. I don't really know about this. Now I remember you guys talking about this when we were hunting in bc yeah it's no different than what the guys back in michigan do with running like a sack of eggs with like a hook a couple inches below it like a stinger hook yeah same thing so you're saying that it's controversial in in i don't want to say elite, in like, what's the best term for like, like the pure, like, okay, from a purest fly fishing perspective. I don't know. It's controversial to run a bead.

A traditionalist. A traditionalist. Yeah. A traditionalist won't run a bead. I mean, a true, so a lot of these true traditionalists don't, won't even, they're just all about dry fly. Like even, even if you, even nymphing is. They don't want to catch a fish on a wet fly.

Yeah, it's just kind of, it's, it's, you know, look down upon. But you can swing a wet fly. One of the best arguments I ever heard, and it's one of the oldest arguments out there, was the late, great Lee Wolfe, who. Yeah, famous fishing writer. Exactly. And, well, and he tied up the uh the royal wolf which is still a fish catching machine but it doesn't it doesn't replicate anything

no it's just an attractor so it's a map spinner yes no i know okay let me finish my story his deal was why he wasn't into fishing because i think during his fishing career fly fishermen started to basically fish below the surface. And you started using sink and tip lines and adding weight and whatnot. Do you know when this was? I'd have to guess it'd be 50s, 60s. Unsubstantiated. Moving on. Rejected.

He felt like by doing that, you weren't given like the fish um just a day off a time to of reprieve like he felt like you should be catching them on the surface when they want to eat on the surface when they're not it's like you give them a break exactly hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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That's interesting. Here's the thing, though. I'm going to try to make a parallel. I'm going to warn you right now, it's not going to work. People will say, I like to hunt wild pigs. I'm guilty of this. If hunt wild, and I like to hunt wild pigs, okay?

So I'm guilty of this because I hate, if I could wave a magic wand and make wild pigs be gone, I kind of, I'd be very tempted to wave the magic wand because of the damage that wild pigs do. I mean, they hurt ground nesting birds. They cause a lot of, you know, economic trouble for people, a lot of ecological trouble. So if I could, if someone, if God came down from the skies and says like here's a stick if you wave this stick i will eliminate the wild pig from north america i would carry that stick around seriously consider waving it as a guy who likes to hunt wild pigs but people are like oh i we need to hunt wild pigs because they're overpopulated okay so if that's the case why aren't they happy when they can't find a wild pig but

they get bummed they're like it was a terrible day we couldn't find a pig but shouldn't you be glad because isn't the goal that there aren't or not any around so when i'm out wild pig hunting i'm always like hoping to run into a bunch but it's supposed to be like well i kind of should be hoping to not to right because i want to not be here so if a guy really wants to have something be super difficult so you you're going to use something that you know doesn't work well. You're only going to use dry flies. But then you're happy when it works well. So you're happy if you get a 40 fish day. So what is it? Is it then not challenging and then doesn't it cease to be what you wanted it to be, which is a challenging form

of fishing? It just worked really great. You caught 40 fish. You out fished the dude throwing map spinners. You out fished the dude throwing map spinners you out fished the dude throwing worms so now you should throw it away and start fishing worms because your dry fly works better than that you want it to be challenging answer that well no i don't know if there's a question there but you know it's only 10 of the time that you get that day you fish all year for a couple days like that. It's like the gimme. You know, the gimme hunting. When you're like, oh, walked 10 feet from the trailer head and there he was. You're not going to not shoot.

You don't go. You got to shoot. That was too easy. I didn't like that. You go, I just spent 12 years, you know, swinging a fly waiting for this day. Just spent 12 years hiking up those mountains and i'm definitely going to take this gimme yeah and look i lived on a great dry fly fishing creek gore creek in veal colorado for a year and in our backyard gore creek gore creek never heard of that one um exactly

where is it and how great it's pretty darn good gold medal named after lord gore who just went through those mountains and oh he raped and pillaged he hired jim bridger as a guy exactly jim bridger got so sick of that guy shooting everything jim bridger quit him yeah he killed grizzlies in places there aren't grizzlies within 500 miles there no he killed a grizzly out by glenn dive montana yeah the the you the you indians tried running out of that country this dude had blood on his hands hands. He killed like – he's like – he had a little tally. He talked about a golf clicker. He's like, 2,000 bison, 1,200 antelope.

Yeah, Bridger got sick of them. Anyways, Gore Crick. Gore Crick. Your buddy, Gore. Yeah, so – I prefer that over Al Gore. I'm glad it wasn't named after him. It's like an incandescent light bulb burning next to it.

When we first got there and we noticed we had a great fishing hole, right? And every day we'd just be in there pounding them. They'd be in there rising and we'd be in there just getting after it as much as we could. And eventually it was like, you know what? Let's just sit here and have a beer and watch these fish eat. It's just as enjoyable. We don't need to catch these fish

again. It's still your same cutthroat buddy sitting in the same hole. And so you don't always have to have those 40 fish days. Even though the opportunity is there, you can catch a couple, maybe a dozen, and then just sit on the bank and enjoy yourself. Let's talk to Kent. He just had a 40

fish day. How many steelheads did you catch? A lot. A hundred? Yeah, probably. How many do you think are dead right now? Did you fight them to absolute exhaustion and then take thousands of pictures of him jimmy houston a man flop him up no i'm pretty gentle how many days he's trying to stun him he's trying to stun him until they hold over the picture with a nine weight too so i could definitely get pretty aggressive once they got close like it wasn't like you know some guys will go steelhead fishing with a five weight you

know and then that's when you really – Because that fish is dog-tired by the time you get them. Dog-tired because your fish with a 5-weight would say 5X or 4X. You have no way – even when it gets close, the thing can keep running on you. I was on a 9-weight with 2X. So even a bigger fish, if it got to the shallow water, I'd kind of Jimmy Houston it close, get it loose, and get it out. But I have no idea.

The whole time we were there, we saw one fish floating downriver upside down. It was still breathing. We turned it over. It had the adipose cone. We grabbed it, and that was one of the ones that we smoked. How many did you catch altogether? As a team, out of the four of us, we probably caught, I don't know, 100, 200 fish maybe.

And how many days was that? Five. Five days of fishing. Five days of fishing. Probably more than that. Some guys fish more than others. That's awesome. You kind of got the white whale too.

You got the- Hey, hold on a minute. Hey, Dan, I just called my brother. Who's a fish. He works with fish. Well, who cares? Can you tell me right now? We're recording something right now, so you're not live, but you're close to it.

Why do fish die if you overplay a fish? Just real quick. Is it like something to do with lactic acid buildup? Yeah, I'm guessing it's lactic acid buildup and probably oxygen debt in the muscles.

Have you ever heard any ideas about what percentage of steelhead die after people catch them and let them go? No, but there are studies on it. And it varies by water temperature and fish size and bait versus fly and a number of other. So if I'm sitting with a guy who just caught a 100 steelhead What do you think How many do you think he just killed Off the top of my head Yeah

I'd say Maybe a third Whoa blood on your hands Alright I'm going to let you go I'll talk to you later Listen I want to check it out This dude's a fish biologist He's an ichthyologist

He does like ichthyologist so he does like ichthyology but he does uh aquatic invertebrates at a for a university he's full-on phd great school of minds kind of guy right so you're saying he knows what he's talking about he knows a lot about fish but he likes to catch steelhead and let him go mm-hmm who knows should have kept more. Who knows what a man will do with a green hippo. Should have just kept them all now. Ken's like selling smoked steelhead on a bag of his truck next to a taco stand.

I got plenty. I got a bigger smoker. I could have gotten that one fired up. Now, hold on a minute, Helen. Let me, okay. Ask someone who's like, how many years have you been fishing? Maybe like seven, eight, seven, eight. What did you, like, so what was your feeling?

Let's say you had caught some fish today and let them go. Would you have felt bummed? Yeah, let's say you caught a whole bunch and let them go. Would you have felt bummed or would you have felt like, no, this was just its own experience. It really had nothing to do with, it had nothing to do with catching fish to eat. It was just its own thing. We were enjoying a certain place, doing a certain thing

that people have been doing for a long time. I'm putting words in your mouth, but like, what was your, like, how did you look at it? I don't know. I think if I had hooked it, if I had gotten it and it died, I would have probably felt a little bad.

Really? Yeah. I mean, just for my entertainment that I'm going to go and fish. I don't know. But if I had released it, I think I wouldn't feel it. I feel like it's a separate experience. Fly fishing is so far and different

than fishing for meat to me. Why is that? I don't know. When I go fishing in New York, it's like I'm on a mission. I want to go out. I want to have a good time. But ultimately, I want to come home to fill my freezer. Yeah, I went fishing with Helen and her boyfriend one time.

And they come out there with, one, condiments for eating raw fish. And they come out there with a wire that when they kill a fish, they cut the fish's tail off and run the wire through the fish's spine which does the fish what if you've ever been to a slaughterhouse and watch them slaughter cattle they hit the cattle the captive bolt gun then they cut its throat and then they electrocute it to relax its flesh and when you run that wire through that fish's spine he relaxes in a way that all the rocks in the world banged against his head are not going to do what and you spike his it is unbelievable yeah wow it's a japanese process called ekg may

i gotta remember it's like running a clothes hanger through a fish's backbone inserting his tail and that fish just melts he's like i give up that is amazing you can really taste the difference though i'm telling you when i used to i used to trap snapping turtles that is amazing yeah i used to trap snap turtles and sell them and you'd cut the head off the turn not your snapping turtles this what was no what i'm gonna tell you no i'm bringing this full circle i'm bringing this back around to joe because hurry up because this is no i want to get back to i know i'm detracted but anyways this is gonna enhance what helen's going to talk more about is you chop a turtle's head off you'd grab i'd grab with the channel

lock plier his head pull the head out cut off of the axe hang him up by the tail and you'd have to wait six seven hours sometime before you could clean that turtle because he was clenched up and clawing right i was down in guyana hunting with amer amer indians so it's like you know here we'll say like native american or indian south america's amer Indians were hunting with amer Indians they caught a big river turtle first thing they did was run they just whittled a big long stick ran it through that thing's backbone and that thing was ready to eat and the meat was super tender it wasn't flexed and they cooked that turtle right in his own shell and they did the same thing and i just kind of like i was like wow that's crazy but then the next time i saw that happen was when you guys were doing that to porgies poor pork

they put him in like an ice like a saltwater ice bath but they do i mean after you after you destroy their spinal column and spike their brain what. What's that mean? Spike their head. Like you take like a gaff and, you know, basically spike it in its head. Which one first? It stuns it. Then you wire it? Yeah, yeah. What's the discipline called? EKGMA.

And how many steps? IKJME. Processes? J-I-M-E. I think it's like a three-step process. John would be better. You head first, then tail, then wire? I think you spike the head first, and then you cut towards the tail,

but not the end. It's like you have a little meat left, and you kind of just fold it over, and then you stick like a shark wire or something. That fish is cached out after you do that. You basically run all the way to its head. I will catch a Chinook at some point on my fly rod. after you do that. You basically run all the way to its head. I will catch a Chinook at some point on my fly rod. Yes, I will do this.

Then you put it in an ice bath. I'm going to find some things to practice on. They did a chef blind test, blind taste test for this. Is that right? We went out once and we had zip ties. It was like a science experiment. This one was just like the Montauk way where they just you know take a like a bat and just like hit it in its head

and throw it on ice so we did that way then we did it you know ekg may way then we did it like you know all these different ways and then we actually it wasn't even the same day it was like 24 hours or 48 hours afterwards and then the chefs you know we put on different plates and and they actually picked the ekg may one which was incredible yeah that day we did that was funny it's like a lot of times you'll see a bunch of sports you know on a guide boat and you'll see where they're playing the fish and you hear them all going oh no you go with like the people like oh you go ahead and take them no no if you want you go ahead take them you're like dude I guarantee you

that in one year all that fish is gonna be freezer burned and getting thrown in the garbage yeah but we ate half our fish before we left we were mild man that was fun that was a fun day ek gmail ek gmail yeah there's a youtube video of a guy in like japan doing it but not your boyfriend he there's a video somewhere yeah yeah but he wrote about it, right? Yeah, he wrote a piece about it for the food magazine, Lucky Peach. Yeah. And it has broken down. It's definitely more than three steps.

He's a good cook. New York City fish murderer. Cool. Yeah, I mean, who'd have thought Helen's the one with the most fish blood on her hands? Yeah. And spinal fluid. You got spinal fluid on your hands, man. hands well what's the deal with like with fly fishing it seems like everyone's all about numbers instead of like because when we when we fish in long island it's like oh i got this like doormat

you know double digit fluke you know like the size and versus like i mean like obviously you can alter regulation so you can alter regulations, so you can only keep a number of things. I'm not like, I caught 50 porgies today. Our buddies, it's like one good fish. Like, you'll go on like the Missouri or, you know, the Yellowstone or something that has the potential to be like there's a big fish in there. People catch them all the time. It hasn't been me you know and a lot of days like you're like okay i'm gonna throw

like a big streamer or do something that i've told myself is the way to catch a big fish and it's a one fish day or a zero fish day you know yeah yeah you know and one of my i once wrote something about how i was like imagining the world like if we could go back to the beginning of human existence and have all the same conditions and let everything run forward again just to see what would happen right i think a lot of the things that happened would happen all over again okay i think that we would probably a lot of people would develop sort of monogamous relationships okay like there's all these things of human behavior that i feel like if you just backed it up and let it go again the same thing would happen

we would hunt we would fish right we'd probably form government language would have happened again i think there's a couple things wearing your pants down around blow your ass would not happen again and i don't think catch release fly fishing would happen again i think it must have been a total fluke because i feel that like when people and i do it too so i'll talk about me too i think it's it's like you're it's like some wiring got crossed in your head where you feel that as a human and i'm saying this about myself as a human like i'm supposed to be out extracting okay i'm supposed to be out hunting and fishing because for however long you want to define human history you want to

go back 75 000 years 50, 50,000 years. There's always, you know, everybody basically says some last 100,000 years, whatever. Anatomically modern humans. We've been doing these things, hunting and fishing. And I think people are kind of like, but I'm a little civilized. Like I'm not cool with the death,

but I have to do the act. Like I have to do it. You're doing it for pleasure at that point. Yeah, but I just don't see where it came from. It's like golf with fish. Where did cave art come from, right? Like, part of it was I want to express myself. The other part of it is it's pretty brutal out there.

I'm probably going to waste some time in here. Make some paintings. Yeah. It's a form of entertainment right it somehow could be superfluous to survival and you couldn't tell me that these guys were like okay i know i can catch a bunch of these things i'm gonna kill all of them even though i know i can't eat them right yeah i I mean those people at the time be like boy there's a lot of you know this fish in this area this you know rabbit population's really good here I'm going

to take a couple and come back later right so in a fishing scenario they're catching fish in this spot be like boy it's fun catching fish I know i can catch them right i'm not gonna answer your own question i think that human beings are just hardwired to do exactly that like you know they're like getting it on that's like hardwired in and so fishing but i mean love making correct yeah making i don't know because a lot of people say like let's get it out let's go fishing but it's the same it's the same kind of deal. It's just hardwired in. This is fun.

Why it's fun, I have no idea. It's just fun. It's just fun. A friend of mine is an evolutionary biologist. And we were talking about the evolutionary benefit of sex being enjoyable is that people will continue to procreate outside of intent. You know? My wife's pregnant right now with a kid we weren't exactly planning on.

You're preaching to the choir. So she was saying, like, I wonder, and she doesn't understand. We took her out spearfishing in the Bahamas. We went spearfishing. And after, she's like, why, I wonder, and she doesn't hunt. We took her out spearfishing. In the Bahamas, we went spearfishing. And after, she's like, why is that fun? You know? She's like, I wonder if it's not fun because it was, like, advantageous for it to seem fun to us.

That it would mean, like, even beyond desperation, that we'd be out there hammering it. Like, out there fishing, out there hunting. Like, if you draw some kind of pleasure from it, it's not an onerous task, but you'd have it be that, yeah, I'm just out there. And even though I'm not absolutely out of food, I'm out there doing it anyway because it's just my, it's what I enjoy doing.

Like there's possibly, there is some huge adaptive advantage to us thinking it's fun to catch fish. It is huge because for instance, if you didn't enjoy it that much, you wouldn't do it that much. And when it got truly difficult, you might not be that good at it. Whereas the guys that really enjoyed it, almost to the point of overdoing it, when things got really difficult,

they were the only guys that were actually catching fish and the only guys that were eating catching fish and the only guys that you know were eating enough to go procreate dude if you wrote that you would get it published in like science or nature i'm sure i like it that's like the best thing i've ever heard in my entire life that's evolution i almost want to end this right now i'm sure it's on a post no i actually want to back it up i want to back it up and end it earlier and then steal that idea. So, Helen, cut all that out. I'm going to do it. Okay, we'll be right back. And I'm going to say what Kenton just said.

You know, but that's how it works, right? No, you're right. When push comes to shove, if the guy is totally obsessed, he's going to be just a little better. So, let's say what if he's obsessed and just like just completely horrible at fishing i already know that guy there's no way i'm gonna say his name but i fish with him i fish with him the most like the most obsessed fisherman i know is the worst fisherman i know it's like a curse all we can hope is that he makes god-awful love to the woman who doesn't

like fishing but if she did would be extraordinary at it and then you create this dude is the worst angler and i feel a lot of times when people are bad hunting and fishing i feel that what they lack is killer instinct like they what my brother would say they like grr the girl it's like they lack girl they don't have like what it takes like you're like I'm gonna kill that thing you're not gonna kill it like today when I'm fishing I'm not like if I see a fish come up to grab my comes up to pop a dry fly I don't in the moment when it's happening in the moment when my mind's registering his presence i'm lifting the rod i'm not thinking oh you sweet fish i love you right i'm more inclined to say oh you son of you know i mean it's like i have an antagonist even though i love the

essence of the thing in that moment i feel this is going to come off weird i feel a very distinct sport like a hatred for that fish if he doesn't grab my fly right yes if i hook him then i like him again correct if he comes off i don't like him but if you go to set the hook and they're and your line goes in a pile expletives follow and they normally directed at that fish yeah i hate the fish it's like i'm like i hope something bad happens to you and you die you just project it and someone and someone does what's that word again to your spine i'm just gonna do like ekg like like e like echo kilo helen to her credit did not mutter i think any expletives on the river today. Did you love them?

No, I was very upset with myself. We were watching the little trout eat bugs next to her fly, and I was the one sitting there being like, you think we're written to hurt? But now that being said, so you take an example of somebody that doesn't have the gir, but I think that the gir in general can possibly be learned when it comes to hunting. Like an acquired gir.

Perhaps. When you first go out with a— Can you bottle it? I don't know. When you first go out hunting with a bow, though, and you get your first couple close counters with a big bull, it's kind of— don't know you're kind of sometimes like am i is this guy i it's can i shoot you know what i mean and then after a while

you get rattled i think and it makes you freaks you out but then after a while you know you i wouldn't say you hopefully you never get comfortable that situation it's always exciting but it goes from kind of like wow this is great to like how am i going to get an arrow in that animal yeah you know that's the thing i've said a lot about uh particularly bowhunt but when you pull back on an animal you have to know that that thing's gonna die because if you're like i hope i hope i hope this doesn't happen you know what i mean yeah it will happen but the guy who could be like i will now kill you yeah well more like is more that's more of a successful attitude than sort of being like let's see what happens yeah

agreed agreed and that's probably why you know and you know there's probably some synergy here between uh rifle versus arch bow and and uh spinning or bait fishing verse that's what I thought why does that mean you know I don't know no no I mean I've never I've personally never gone hunting but I imagine fly fishing is like bow hunting you know versus like bait fishing or jigging or something. Oh, my God. It's like, I wish I would have ended the podcast. Here's the similarity. Here's the similarity. And that with archery, you have got to practice a lot.

You got to practice, you know, and the practice becomes enjoyable. Like, you know, leading up to the season, you practice every day for a few months at least. And it becomes part of your daily ritual. You enjoy the shooting of the bow right whereas fly fishing i think a lot of times even if it fly fishing is not that great you kind of enjoy the actual act of casting whereas i'm not sure if it's the same with you know chucking bait no and i'll tell you what we just got back from our place in alaska

bouncing a pound of lead and 250 feet of water for halibut right and you don't enjoy that right it's not like oh i love lifting this pound of lead up and bouncing on the bottom but i'll tell you what you do like how that thing goes yes now he's on there and he's smoking line out and you have no idea he's 200 pounds or that sounds awesome dude i'm telling you but yeah there's no finesse there's no art you know and to a large extent i think that fly fishing you know you got to practice without even fishing generally speaking for at least you know a week or two i want to interject to say though that rihanna's had my my four-year-old was fishing with us this morning my four-year-old what i mean he hooked the fish on like the first time he ever laid his hand on a fly rod. Yeah. A four-year-old. It took him a long time

to catch fish on his Zabco spinning reel. Even though he smokes. You know, that's actually something I wanted to bring up because my little boy, all my little boy knows about,

like at home when we eat, we just eat game, you know, wild fish, wild game at home. So he's always, every night when we eat, we're talking about where this where this came from you know daddy killed this thing and here's what happened he's always talking about the moose that ran daddy over which ryan callan knows knows

that moose well we're all still eating on that i know so he always knows these stories he always knows these stories and he's never heard anyone because he's young enough where I know what his influences are. He's not off with kids that I don't know and I know who he hangs out with. I take him fishing, and we're at my mom's lake I grew up on, and we're on my mom's pontoon boat, and he catches five bluegills. I mean, he's making his own casts, reeling them in, like legit catches five bluegills i mean he's like making his own casts reel him in like legit catches five bluegills we go home and i scale the fish and when i'm playing blue i just cut their head off first just easier you know i get a cleaner filet so i come in by their uh not packs yeah pectoral fins

no no no the what's the fin up by the right below the gill plate i don't know i can't remember yeah that's pectoral is it so anyway they cut in there cut the head off and then i flame so as i i go in and cut the heads off and i got the heads in one pile the bodies in another pile and he's up on a chair next to me helping and he was like legitimately honestly upset and it came from an organic place because this isn't something that's something like no i know that no one has said to him it's bad to kill fish all he's ever heard is it's good to kill fish that's what we eat he was upset and you could tell that he thought he didn't he didn't articulate this way but he looked at those fish he told me i

don't like that you put their heads like that and their bodies like that. He didn't say it, but it was disrespectful. And he said, and he said this exactly, he expressed regret that we killed those fish and we should have put them back in the lake. Where'd that come from? It came from somewhere, and I'm telling you what. He's not saying something that someone else. Well, it could have come from Finding came from somewhere and i'm telling you what it's like it's not he's not saying something that someone else well it could have come from finding nemo or something he's never seen that movie he didn't kill nemo just then no it wasn't that man i'll tell you my

experience i'm sensitive to that because what you know i always call killer whales killer whales you're supposed to call now like a lot of like softies call them orcas but orcas just some like it's like a greek word that means whale they used to call them whale killers because now you can't call them killer whales if you feel like it gives a bad reputation. I always call them killer whales. One day my kid comes back, he's like, you know, you got it all wrong. I was down at the Seattle Aquarium. It's an orca.

So now he always calls them orcas. So he cited to me where he heard contrary information. No one, I'm telling you, no one has told that kid. Not to kill bluegills. Well, nobody told this kid that you can't call a killer whale a killer whale. You know that? He's an orca. Are you hurting the whale's feelings?

What do you mean? Give him a bad reputation? Apparently, I don't know. I have no idea what they're after. I think they're like badasses, right? Yeah, an orca just means whale. It's the stupidest thing in the world. But some of my dearest friends are like, oh, it's an orca.

One day I was with these guys, speaking of all this. Am I getting way too far afield? Can I tell a tell a quick story okay i was working on a book about buffalo and everyone knows buffalo is a bison so the american bison the american buffalo it's not actually a buffalo blah blah people been calling buffalo a hell of a lot longer they've been calling them bison i've never said to someone in my life buffalo and had them be confused about what i was talking about okay on this continent. Anyways, I was with these guys when I was working on my book. I spent some time with these guys' Buffalo Field Campaign.

So they're pretty radical environmentalists who have a certain vision for American buffalo or American bison, and their group's called the Buffalo Field Campaign. So their group uses a name that's not the scientific proper name for the species, which is bison and their group's called the Buffalo field campaign so their group uses a name that's not the scientific proper name for the species which is bison I'm standing with this guy outside of Yellowstone Park in Gardner Montana and I see an antelope okay I go hey check out those antelope over there it's actually pronghorn he says to me I'm like dude you you work for a group that calls something the wrong name oh it drove me nuts man i can tell that bothered me more than it bothers you guys so is it so yeah do you say antelope or pronghorn

just like everything under this prairie goat speed goat speed goat prairie goat yeah pronghorn antelope i combine them now i found i found myself doing like the weirdest thing i should have been like it's antelope capra americana. Prongalope. That would be good. I always say prong or antelope. I'm like, why? But I just say that now. Let's put prongalope. There's nothing confusing with that. Ant to prong.

All right. What were we talking about before I got off on that? Jimmy. Oh, that he had a natural? And I got to say, my experience with folks from Michigan who fish, this kid has gone way off the reservation. Because all the Michiganders I know, they fill the freezer. That's the program.

Well, he told me now. I gave him a, not a stern talking to. Is it a Michigander? But he told me this morning, he goes, I get it now. He's like, I get it now. I don't know what that means, but he's like, now it's okay. But when he let that cut go today, he said, I'm quoting him. He said, there you go.

Back in the wild. Okay. I got to visit something. So you guys eat bass out there. Large mouth. I eat them as a political statement. What does it taste like? I tried cooking bass one time in a bind and let me tell you, it didn't go that great.

My fishing mentor who grew up about six houses down from me, was a man named John Gary. He fished so much and caught so many fish that he sold like a black market fish sales. He's dead now. Right before he died, I was over at his house, and he offered to sell me. He's like, I'll make a deal. I'll sell you my house. Everything in it down to my shoes. Lakefront property. He said, I'll sell you my house everything in it down to my shoes lakefront property say i'll save this house for 75 000 you give me the money now the only deal

is i live here till i die and when i die you have everything down to my shoes why why do you want to keep your shoes after he died he's saying what no he's saying that i would be buying everything he's ever owned on the agreement that he could get the money now and continue to live in his house till he died and i didn't take him up on that deal i should have ran down to a bank anyways he ate a lot of bass and largemouth bass and he soaked him in milk and grilled him whoa whoa skin on took large mouths soaked him in milk grilled him skin down scaled up no oh no because what he would do then he'd put the fish on the grill skin down scales on he'd cook it till it was till it got you know they get loose

from their skin he then take the fish and flip it back over onto its skin so it didn't get stuck to the grill finish it like that and he would eat them all the time like that what it tastes like muddy fish yeah what is the milk thing because it helps the money this i'm telling you it does man i'll pepsi challenge it any day of the week i sell catfish and milk better than like salt water i don't know i can't answer that question it's an interesting thing that you brought up because a lot of the people that live by the ocean um and fish in the rivers they don't even keep any fish unless they catch them in the within like don't even keep any fish unless they catch them in the within like five miles because ocean fish are 10 times better that's what they say they

say i don't even like it there's no it's like that's not even debatable they taste it they're like they catch big 40 pound salmon going back it's like i don't even and if it's like more than two miles or whatever that you know off the way out of the ocean, forget it. Well, with salmon, it makes sense because when a salmon goes to enter, he's in the best shape he's ever going to be in for his entire life when he leaves the ocean. When he's at the mouth, if he's still actively feeding near river mouth, he's never going to be in better shape. He's got a higher fat content than he's ever going to have the rest of his life.

The minute he enters that river, he's degraded. He's going downhill. He tastes like mud. They just get worse and worse. The person, they got fungus and lesions all over them. Now I eat largemouth just as a political statement. Every time I kill largemouth and flat, I like to put it on social media. You know, because I know I'm not damaging a fishery when I thump a largemouth.

It's not. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. How often do you guys eat, like, trout? I mean, because people are eating.

I just ate a trout. I ate a trout the day after. I ate a rainbow the day after me and Giannis here contracted trichinosis. You guys both got trichinosis from bear. 98% of the cases of trichinosis come from bears. So, anyways, we ate some trout and grayling. One of them was caught on a fly pole. A fly rod.

I call it a fly pole. As a political statement. As a political statement, I call it a fly pole. See, I think the ideal thing would be to like, I mean, just because of my water access, to learn how to fly fish but salt water so then you can target like blue fish and striped bass and stuff on the fly because to me it's like a progression like as a fisher you know fisherman or whatever it's like okay you can bait fish you can jig you can do but it's like what's the next step you know like the next

challenge like fly fishing is to me me, like, much more challenging. You know, obviously, because I'm a beginner. That's ridiculous, man. You don't think so? You cannot make a statement like that. You don't think so? No. Okay.

Go up and show me how easy it is to go mooch like a big 30, 40-pound king. I guess that's true. I guess it's because I've never done it. Well, it's so simple. You just, well, I don't even know what you do. It's like, it's not. It depends on the situation. It depends on the species, too.

Steve, you just put your bait over the side. Okay, go to my mom's. Go stay at my mom's dock. Go stay at my mom's dock with a beadhead pheasant tail when the bluegills are on the beds and tell me how tough it is to hook them on a fly rod. You can't keep them off. That's true.

I guess it depends on the situation. It just depends on the situation. Yeah, that's true. But on those situations where you cannot keep them off i change things up because i'm like okay i know i can catch them this way really yeah i do all the time and when we fish steelhead yeah you know i'm like okay i know for a fact today i can catch a fish this way yeah but if they're that hungry to eat everything i throw in this way i bet i can tie this on and catch a deep you know catch a few fish so when you're when you're like

hammering ducks on a great day i like to hunt ducks do you ever start shooting left-handed no no i do not do you ever start like pouring out half the shot out of your shot shell and putting it back together shooting that no i do not okay just curious but the thing i'm eating those too you know typically i really don't eat steel you would if you were hammering and switch to a 12 gauge instead of a 20 i mean a 20 instead of a 12 you would yeah i don't know anybody's ever done that in the history of my life that's common out here perhaps you should get out with a 12 and a 20 and be like if i start really knocking them down i'm gonna switch to my 20 you're like the hunting's been good it was good last night i'm shooting with a 12 and a 20. If I start really knocking them dead, I'm going to switch to my 20.

You're like, the hunting's been good. It was good last night. I'm shooting with the 20 tonight. There are some other reasons. The 20 is significantly quieter. It's probably because your head hurts from shooting your 12 all day. Maybe. It hurts so good.

We watched a movie last night with a guy shooting ducks. Black powder. Now, that is respect. I respect that. Right, but why is he doing that? For the challenge. No, he said it's fun. I respect that. It's fun.

Yeah, well, it's just like fun's a synonym for challenge. Wait, a black powder with- This dude hunts ducks with- So this is like- Last night, we're at the hunting film tour sponsored by First Light, sponsored by- As a fundraiser for Bad Country Hunters and Ang i spoke there briefly a couple minutes i had five minutes to explain to people why public land is important why backcountry is important which is typically like five minute

subject yeah yeah i tried to cover this quickly it's probably six minutes to explain a little bit about why we need more of it around or not more there's no way to get more you don't get more of it why we need to hang on to what we have um and there's a film there about a dude who made a little wetland and was shooting exposed hammer black powder at ducks and he's saying if i could go out like a limit seven if i can get two with this it's better to me than getting seven with something else yeah i just thought he don't like duck meat that much could be be the case. Now, I'll tell you the fly fisherman I'm going to respect. And again, I keep – because there's two things. There's a guy out – there's like a bunch of guys out there right now super annoyed

because they're probably the meat slayers, people on the planet who like fish fly rods, right? They probably fish stripers on a fly rod, thump every fish they get, eat them all day long. They don't think that there's this dichotomy where it's like, oh, you fish with spin reel, so you must be a meat guy, and you fish with a fly rod, so you must not, because there's a hell of a lot of guys that fish largemouth bass with spin and tackle and never kill a fish ever, right? So it's not a dichotomy, but I'm talking about general trends, particularly in the western U.S. Anyway, so there's that I should clear up. I want to meet the guy, and Giannis alluded to this today. I want to meet the guy who not just cuts the barb off his hook, but cuts the whole hook off before the bend. Because he's so pure of heart, so pure of mind,

that he just wants to see that fish come up and lip the thing. We can make a phone call where we would not um get a hold of ted himself but i can get a hold of probably the guide who guides ted i'm guessing you don't mean ted nugent no way cooler than ted nugent but um this dude's he could darn be close to 90 years old and he's fly fished the Eagle River for 30 years and floats all the time. Yeah, on those good days when they're just like I was saying, every couple minutes you're getting a hit on the dry, he catches a couple, kind of gets the tug out of the way,

and then just starts clipping the hook off. Is that right? Yeah. Because he just loves the – He feels like it's getting in his way to fight, net, release, and all that. Out of the fun he's getting out of casting and watching those fish eat that dry. Helen, how long have we been

going for? An hour and eight minutes. What since I got you First Light boys sitting right here, what's cool on the horizon? Are you going to make a coat that lures in bull out? We work on scents all day in the office.

It is. You come in there and it just assaults. It's called the cow in estrus coat. Yeah, it's odorific in that office. No, what's going on? I do really appreciate you mentioning that we do try to keep a live person in the office when's this gonna go on when's this gonna be on the radio i don't know whenever i feel like it like how long a week i don't know why does that matter just tell us what's happening

oh because you got oh because you're worried okay yeah you're safe i mean what you tell me at what point yeah you can tell me at what point two Yeah, you can tell. Tell me at what point. Two weeks. Okay, you're fine. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you know, if it's something that you don't want us to release, you know, you won't do it. Yeah, that's fine. We're just talking about the new camo pattern. You guys coming out with a line of swimwear?

We're coming out with our new camouflage pattern. Really? Yep. Yep. It was designed by a guy, an ex-army guy, who was just super, super into camo. And we started development maybe, I don't know, well over a year ago. And we're coming out with a new camo pattern just for First Light. I'm excited to see it.

Yeah. That's a good idea, though. Yeah, it is. We've really liked a lot of the existing camo patterns. And they certainly work great for certain environments, but we kind of wanted to take some of the technology of a few different patterns and kind of blend them into one and kind of make a camo pattern that worked well

in a bunch of different environments. Does it have a name? Fusion. Really? Yeah, First Light Fusion. And you're going to make all your stuff from that? Yep, and it'll all be available here uh by the end of the year most of the base layers and stuff should be available in the next week or so but

no one's seen it i haven't seen it nope no one's seen it no one's seen it we didn't have the shot show it was it's just so difficult to get we have so many different fabrics now we had no idea if we could even pull it off this year so basically we just went forward with the program and said, if we can do it in time for hunting season, fine. If not, whatever. But there's just all these different – all the fabrics have to match. You might buy one synthetic top from one end of the country and another merino piece from another end of the country.

You want to wear them together. So you've got to – Own it to look different. Yeah. So you've really got to struggle to get all those colors to match and everything. So it takes a long time. So once we got all our factories all in line, we told them, you know, let's go. When we were building it.

So we're going to have stuff ready shortly. Now, correct me if I'm wrong. You're the- Was you the first person to ever put camouflage on merino wool? Yes. Basically. Which is not an easy thing to do. It was a total pain.

It's Kenton. Yeah, it was me. We started wearing- You got a box of Crayola crayons? Yeah, exactly. Melted them, put them in the oven, bam. No, we started, we were all totally into hunting, and then we started wearing, you know, we live in a ski town so then kind of in the early 2000s you know merino stuff kind of came into the ski and snowboarding

and snowmobiling seemed pretty heavy you know and we started switching over to that like people started wearing it just because they realized it didn't reek like it wasn't exactly they started uncomfortable they started yeah it didn't smell and it's it's just way more comfortable even when you do sweat. And then we were all super into archery hunting and hunting in general, and it didn't take long to figure out that this would be way better than the existing products for hunting. But at the time, nobody printed on Merino. People would like T-shirt style, maybe like a finished T-shirt,

and they'd print something something cutesy on it, but not like large rolls, just rolls. So it took us about 18 months to find a factory that could actually do it. We tried a couple different things, and it didn't feel good or whatever. Then we found a guy that could do it and do it well. And that was the beginning of the company. The first year I showed up at the SHOT Show with literally like a duffel bag and I had five pieces, you know, and that was it. And just kind of hung them up and

you know. Some weird dude? That was weird. It was Kim was wearing white with your like skater Levi's. Like white boots? That was my hunting boots you know

I wore whites up until like eight years ago they were just the most comfortable shoes I'd used you mean white logger boots or the pants

yeah logging that's what I used for logging and that's what we used for you know walking around it wasn't until

probably eight or seven or eight years ago that we kind of got into the more you know technical stuff but that's what we'd work in all day

so we figured out it's great for hunting but the fact is it's kind of a different deal you know and stuff but that's what we'd work in all day so we figured out it's great for hunting but the fact is it's kind of a different deal you know and once we switched over to you know now i use handbags but you know solomons or whatever just having something lighter that the thing with whites is that if you have to wear them every single day you'd wear out a pair of solomons in six months when you see a guy on a trade show yeah they're not they're not they're not intending that you're actually just gonna wear them around on hard surfaces all the time yeah or even you know in the woods you destroy them or a pair of

whites you wear for whatever you know two years you send them out to get them resold and they're good to go i keep a pair of schnees i keep a pair of schnees for hunting yeah and i keep a pair of schnees for not hunting i don't want my hunting boots to get screwed up walking on sidewalks and stuff like that right yeah it makes sense it dulls the edges down too bad and you can't cut in on hills you know big yeah and going down hills they still aren't as good as whites but the fact is is that you know our hunting season out here it's only whatever 10 weeks so you'd rather have a pair of shoes that they don't have to last that long you just have to work really well and be really light and make it so you can carry a you know 80 100 pound pack down a hill and all of a

sudden once you realize that it's it's nice you know i think for the listener we should explain what whites are because i don't know what yeah i just barely know they're out of spokane yeah they're out of spokane america they're just like they're you know what you see all the forest service guys wearing the logging guys it looks like To the untrained eye, it looked like a lady boot. Yeah, the heels are literally two inches. Pretty low pro. Yeah, they're two inches, and then they've got just regular Vibram soles, but they can rebuild them for you.

I used to have some White's Pack boots, which were just real heavy. I used to use them climbing trees in the wintertime because I used to do arborist work. We get these winter contracts doing Boulevard Maples. I remember one year we did 300 and some Boulevard Maples. And some days it's 10 degrees below zero because this is cutting trees in Montana. And I would put tree spikes on over them because they were so rigid. But I always thought they were kind of too rigid for hunting. You know, they were.

But they break in. But that's before. We'd spend all day in the woods. We had a logging business, firewood and whatever. That was just what you wore. And then after a while, though, you realize, wow, there's some way better options there. Yeah. Especially because they don't have to last, like I said,

maybe a season or two seasons max, and you're ready to buy a new pair. You know, I want to talk a minute about you know just talking about wool because you guys do such a nice job with the merino wool stuff wolves had a weird history because my old man like my old man started hunting after world war ii so he started hunting he got back from world war ii in 1945 um got into hunting he said at the time like there wasn't that you didn't have like sporting goods like you have now you know he said they used to they just hunted their clothes they hunted their military surplus stuff he said for 10 years it's still the best stuff you could have and he just spent two and a half years

crawling around essentially camping out you know from all through italy up into europe in wool clothes and living in a foxhole camp so he said they just hunted that stuff and he told he tells a funny story where he used to just hunt with other vets, you know, and they were out one time in a field hunting. Everybody had their Army surplus stuff on. I guess it wasn't surplus back then. Their Army stuff back on. And someone took a shot.

He said a couple of those guys out in the field all hit the deck. Like it was like still like in their head, you know what I mean? But he always hunted in wool. I mean, all the time I was growing up my old man wore you know those like green wool yeah like they're not surplus but i don't remember who makes them but it's like a field pant yep and you die hiking into your tree stand you'd be like so sweaty you know right we used to like hike in and put your pants on when you got there because they're so warm this thick green wool my mom would buy bulk wool fabric

in so close for me my brothers out of wool that we would hunt in i wish i had saved them we all had pants and a jacket my mom made out of wool we sit up there hotter than hell and i remember like when i was a little kid they came out with that king of the mountain wool clothes yeah and getting that catalog and um just dreaming over that trapper pullover it was like a 400 washable wool jacket seems like it was like unfathomably you'd like have that kind of money to buy some sort of garment and then cabela's came out with a washable wool it was supposed to be like a knockoff a king of the mountain and they were half as much i bought a pair of those pants and washed them and they were like spandex my buddies be like they're like dude what are those i'm like listen man you're looking at a lot of money right now

i don't care what these things look like i'm wearing them and then now with like your guy's stuff like you honestly can put it in it's like you wash in the washing machine yeah it's unbelievable it is but it's like still the best fabric, and it grows on the back of sheep. It's a good line for a bachelor. I didn't even know that. I wasn't even aware of wool. I've been wearing poly pro since I was 10 years old. Dude, when I started hunting the mountains, we looked like dudes out of the REI catalog.

Yeah. We wore mountain clothes. Yeah. We didn't have anything actually meant for 101 because it was all too big right if you're like a skinny guy who runs around the mountains a lot it's too big for you right then and so we just wore like mountaineering clothes we hunted a mountaineering same exact thing we'd have like blue and red you know i mean it's like hard we'd like i'd like get rit die and try to like die stuff so it was a little duller yeah some patagonia stuff some a lot of

sims fleeces totally man totally and i would get it at i would go to goodwills i didn't have a lot of money i was in school i'd go to goodwills in rich towns like if you could hit a goodwill in jackson hole wyoming you know or hit a goodwill here catch my idaho you would go there and walk out like tricked out and amazing mountain apparel, ski apparel and stuff. And we'd hunt it because it was like so great. Now people make stuff for like skinny dudes that like to run around the mountains. Flip side is senior citizen centers. Don't overlook those because you get –

They flag them. You get old guy dress sweaters that are 100% lamb's wool. Oh. And you can haggle those ladies down at the counter. No, my brother, he still does hunt old man sweaters that are 100% lamb's wool. You can haggle those ladies down at the counter. He still does hunt old man sweaters. He's like, what are you talking about? It works.

That was it. Once everything switched over from synthetics to wool, so did we. You mean everything meaning the smart people i just you know like people who don't like smelly clothes yeah the people spend a lot of time outside you know like we're fortunate to live in a place where everybody spends a lot of time outside you know so

this is a fit town man yeah a lot of telling you what last night people some fit mugs so that's like a fit crowd you know yeah they would come out for something like that i was kind of blown away man yeah i mean this place is unique too and that i mean it's it's it's as steep as it gets like most places in the mountains you know you could still kind of enjoy yourself walking up and down stuff out here everything's like 30 degrees minimum wouldn't you say i mean it's just so steep that if you're not pretty fit it's really it just wouldn't be fun you'd just be like this sucks yeah ryan was showing his place he likes to hunt you said this is one place i can just tell people where i hunt because they're not

gonna walk up that hill it's the dream they're right now yeah you might be walking along you might be walking along and kick something and realize that it's hemingway's cut up shotgun right oh he brought a full circle he brought the podcast full circle i'll bet you that right there there's the welder right there right right he's down in the pool yeah he is he sold those pieces one piece off every now and then on helen show me a note just tell me what it is helm no we're going to post the the notes on TheMediator.com. We'll post links to the Ikejime videos and all of the stuff. Oh, I understand what that means.

Show notes? Yeah. We just did a show. Helen's been taking notes. You're going to post a show note? Yeah, like links to videos and stuff that people might want to check out. The Ikejime video and relevant stuff about our podcast. So Helen says, we'll post podcast show notes,

links, et cetera. Okay. Correct me if I'm wrong. We should talk about not forgetting things in the woods too. Okay, correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, Helen used to be the most... Here we go. I used to admire Helen's work ethic.

And I'm old enough to have sired helen that is not true at 12 i could have sired you at 12 years yeah actually i couldn't so um uh helen lost her phone today when she went to pee in the woods it's so different for girls have to pee in the woods it's so different for girls to have to go in the woods I don't lose anything when I pee in the woods

because I stay upright my pockets stay oriented upright good for you but girls got to invert essentially invert and spill their pockets out

did you find it no it's an hour away she's got to go back and get the thing why do you need to call it she's sitting here right now how

is she going to walk back over watch some dude piss in the middle yeah I'm sorry you're pissing can get the name why you you need to call it she's sitting here right now how is she yeah that one guy that was there so what was i about oh show no should you be listening to this podcast and you're like man i wish i knew what they were talking about you go to the media.com and you will find show notes. You'll find links to stuff

that we're talking about. Is that what you mean? Yes. Why don't you just say that? Helen missed her flight yesterday. I hate you so much. Missed her flight. Lost her phone.

Didn't catch a squat. It's been a rough week. Alright. Giannis, can you tell us anything you want to close on? He's shaking his head no if you can't. If you can't hear the shake. I was deep in thought there, but no.

Brian, Callahan, closing thoughts. After I brought it full circle with that Hemingway deal, what are you going to do? but no. Ryan Callahan, closing thoughts. After I brought it full circle with that Hemingway deal, I mean, what are you going to do? There's nothing. You wrapped it up tight, tight. We got some cooking to do tonight. I'm starting to think about that.

Oh, you know what? Yeah, I want to talk about that real quick. Real fast. Amazing menu. So, Backcountry Hunting Angler fundraiser tonight. I'm doing beaver cornit which is where si senor yeah i i feel like i had some guy be like oh no she don't know what's been done i just

have a feeling that i'm the first guy on the face of the first guy to ever have made beaver confit he's like you don't know everything's been done i'm like no i don't know that's why i said i think i'm the first guy to ever make beaver confit. Every tall peak around here has got a Coors yellow belly sitting on top of it. You're never the first guy to make it up there. No. You know what? We were hunting in BC.

Remember, we were up on that crazy ridge, and the wind was just howling. He looked down. Sure enough, 32 caliber. 32 caliber Dominion casing. Did you look that cartridge up? Yes, Canadian maker. Wow. I took a little bit of white out i have a after on your per your suggestion i made a medicine i didn't do a medicine bag i did a medicine box cool which is like a centralized location to put all your

weird stuff so i took that cool finds i took that 32 dominion casing and took white out and made just i did like artifacts in the museum i did white out and then i wrote the date location i found it and then i took my wife's uh nail what do you call it lack nail lacquer nail not polished it wasn't colored darned if i know you don't tell them all clear nail polish yeah yeah and i went over. So I did white out. Then I wrote the date and location. Then I went over that with clear nail polish, let it dry, and threw it in my medicine box. Sweet. That's cool that you started. Did you start one?

I've had one for a while. Dude, I've got boars, toffs, Indian arrowheads. Well, I have your slug. My tooth fell out of my head. From that black bear. Do you? Sitting on my desk at home. I got pecker bones in there.

Yeah. A.K.A. Swizzle sticks. Swizzle sticks. A.K.A. Baculum. Baculum. Baculum.

My raccoon baculum off a 20-pound raccoon is as big as a black bear baculum off a 200-pound black bear. Badger, buddy. You start skinning out a badger and you're like. You just can't get through it because of all the bac i had to give up all right joe you already closed your thoughts you lost your phone and joe likes her phone kenton no nothing to close with all right thanks for listening tune in for more take care have a good day