The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 045: Interior Alaska. Steven Rinella talks with Janis Putelis and his father, Janis putelis, along with Rick Smith, Korey Kaczmarek, and Brody Henderson from the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: September 29, 2016

Subjects discussed: Janis's dad's moose hunt; positive visualizations; Latvian power rings; Steve's wife; cooking up moose nose; skepticism; the sculptor Michael Heizer; wolverines and other animals on Rick's list of special animals; a hypothetical game called "a whale, a monkey, and a wolverine"; cow calling; Janis's caribou hunt; fad diets; getting hit by fashion; and shooting the first animal you see.  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. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Many people know Giannis as the Latvian hunter.

Others know him as the Latvian eagle, the Latvian lover. What people don't know is that Giannis wears a special Latvian power ring. It's a somewhat ladylike braided silver ring. And it's called a namis, the ring. Giannis is paying absolutely no attention to what we're talking about right now. Just doing my job here. Wears a special Latvian decorative power ring on his right hand. Now, his father is here, and I would like his father, also named Giannis, all Latvians are named Giannis.

I would like his father to explain to us all, once and for all, why you fellas wear Latvian power rings. Okay. Well, first, I'm not sure where the power thing came from. I call it that. Okay. Well, because one day I was making a joke. You know that genre of jokes that go like, you're ma?

Yeah. Okay. I got into those for a while. And I like to do it to Yanni because he's the only guy I knew that cared. Got it. So if you did a, you're maanni because he's the only guy I knew that cared. Got it. So if you did a Yerma, if he's like, hey, Yerma,

he would actually act like you were talking about his mom. Yes. And he said, the next time you do that, you're going to see a blinding flash of silver as my name makes contact with your face. Yeah.

So then we started calling it, or I did maybe, the Latvian power ring. So we'll just call it a Namaste. But I feel like if you said to a Joe Blow American that you had a Namaste on, what the hell are you talking about? But if you said to them, you're wearing a Latvian power ring, I think that they'd start to get the picture. Could be. Depends on where they're from.

I don't have the answer to that. So it's not a Latvian power ring. It's just a ring. Anomais. Anomais. And it has a definite braiding to it. There's actually more than one type. So you can get variations on them.

It's a, I think, a beautiful ring. And it's something that Latvian men wear with a lot of pride. But you pointed out to me this week that while hunting moose that you own four but stopped wearing anamis i think i have three still and they're broken because i got my finger caught in the wrong place and gotcha they're better you know some are being better than others so uh yeah they break somewhat easily so tell us tell us all the story.

I want to warn you, this has absolutely nothing to do with the normal things we talk about on this program. Which story? The one where I got my finger caught? No, no, no, no. Why Latvians wear name rings? How that tradition came to be? I have no idea. Well, I know.

Oh, you do? I'm leading you into telling me something I already know. Oh. Yanni, you tell them. Maybe Yanni knows more than I do about it. I told you the other day. I told you the story to check it with you. I don't recall. I can tell it as I know it.

Yeah, you should. Okay. You know as well as anybody. Okay. Now, Latvia as well as anybody. Okay. Now, Latvia is a small country in Europe. Once upon a time, they had a king named Names. Oh, now I remember the story. Okay.

But go ahead. You're doing good. A bad guy, an enemy of the Latvian folk, says, I'm going to come kill that king, Names. I'm going to kill him. And someone must have said to him, well, how are you going to know it's him? How are you going to know

to kill the right Lavian? Right. Kind of like the Custer story. Names says, or the enemy of Names says, well, he wears this special braided ring. So,

I'm going to find him and kill him. Now, the Latvians get wind of this and they concoct a scheme by which all Latvian men will go out and get themselves a ring just like King Names. Then, the bad guy's

going to show up and he's going to have to either kill every single Latvian male or he'll be, you know, you, right. There's a story like this in the Bible, you know, it has to do with painting stuff on doors. Yeah. But, uh, so now in case they're still out there looking for him, it's, it's, you know,

it's become tradition now to wear the ring to sort of as an act of solidarity to protect the king. Though I'm guessing Lat of solidarity to protect the king. Though I'm guessing Latvia no longer has a king. That is true. Latvia never had a king as a democratic country. Okay. But it was a bunch of tribes. So there were, at some point, there were kings hundreds of years ago.

So how much of that story jives with the truth? Well, I mean, I think it's a good story. I don't mean the truth like that it literally happened. But I mean, is that like why the ring? With the legend, yes. It would follow the legend. So do you know the legend? So why did I ask you to tell me the legend

but you told me that you didn't know? Well, because I recall this story. I don't particularly know. I mean, I'm sure there may be other legends that deal with this particular ring. Like Latvians have a bride's ring, too, that has seven bells from it. Oh, really?

Does your wife wear one of those? And you can get variations on what every one of the bells means or how it's to be worn and how it's to be given. So they spin their own yarn. Sort of. Similar thing.

I used to, for a long time, I had a Jewish girlfriend and we would go to this place. It was fun to go to this place called the Chabad House. We're like super hard-hitting, ultra-Orthodox. And their mission is to take, their mission, I don't know if they'd state it quite this way, but their mission would be that you'd take moderate Jews or secular Jews and bring them into the traditional old way,

to bring them into the hard line. But we would go down there because we like talking to these guys and getting the inside scoop on deep Judaism. And we were talking about these guys and getting the inside scoop on deep judaism and uh we were talking about the various prohibitions so i was asking the this rabbi i was like is it ever possible would every possible have kosher wild game like could you have kosher wild game he said the only way you could have kosher wild game because we just we always ate wild game so we realize we can't be kosher right right so Right. So he said, well, here's what you'd have to do.

You'd have to catch it in the net and not harm it, not injure it at all, capture it in the net, and then bring it in for kosher slaughter. Right. And that's the only way to do it. Anyways, what I'm getting at is a similar thing where you would say to this guy, you know how people say there's this prohibition, there's this Old Testament. The Jewish Bible is the,

the Torah is the Old Testament. So there's a story in the Old Testament where you have all the dietary prohibitions. And that originates because they didn't want people to eat bad food, right? No, no, no, no. That's my assumption. But I'm saying when I put that to that guy, I said to this Chabad house guy, I was like,

yeah, but don't you think that they didn't want you to eat pork because you could catch parasites from undercooked pork. And so it's sort of like a prohibition that kind of saves you from yourself. He said, you don't know why God said don't eat pork. God didn't say don't eat pork because I'm concerned about trichinosis. It's not your business to even understand why God said don't eat pork. God said don't eat pork.

Don't eat pork. Don't rationalize this and guess my motives. My motives are unknown to you. Correct. But that's a little different than the ring. No, but it just reminds me of that. Oh, okay. Sure.

No, that's acceptable. I mean, the ring is basically to protect one person's life. Yeah. To make it so that he's unidentified. But that king is now dead. Oh, for many centuries. So many people still wear the ring, though. Yeah. Brody, rip a cow

call. Ladies and gentlemen, oh, oh, ladies and gentlemen, this is Brody Henderson. You know, you don't think I can't figure out, we have so many fly fishing guides on this damn show. I don't understand why they, you guys just trickle your way in. It's a natural progression

from fishing to hunting, right? Bro is a big swinging dick fly fishing guy. Yeah, yeah. Rip a cow call, bro. I'll give it my best. Ah. Oh, God. Rick?

You don't want me to do it. No, we'll do Rick last. Corey, this will be the second ever cow call Corey's ever ripped. Yes, here we go. Yanni, rip one. That's pretty good. I like Yanni's, but the end of Yanni's

gets weirdly human. That's also good. That was good. Rick? Oh, man. Mine's too high. I know it. Yanna Senior?

Do you want me to? I'm going to try. Okay. I'll point out that this man called in a bull. This man called in a bull on the second day. I really do think it was. Now, that right there is the sound. That right there is the sound of a winning cow call.

Proven. Field tested. On a big bull. Thank you. Yes. Rick. Oh, man. All right, I'll do it.

That's good. Nice, nice. I'm going to rip one out of my special horn. Uh-oh. Where is my special horn? Here's a factory-produced rip. Oh, bro, do you have my phone over there? Wait, it's plugged in.

Oh, we're going to do the little test. Why don't we show Buck Bolden's master? Show Buck Bolden's master call. First I'm going to do Buck Bowden ripping one. Let me know if you guys can hear this good. This guy's a guide hitting Alaska Outfitters. This guy's called in a bajillion moves, including a

78-inch bull one time that he called in twice. First time he didn't want to shoot, then he shot the second time. Here's Buck Bowden cranking a cow call. You'll hear me say something. You guys getting that over your headset? Here's a factory produced cow call. So now... I think it's the end that does it, that separates it.

What do you mean? Separates the men from the boys? Yeah. The think it's the end that does it, that separates it. What do you mean? Separates the men from the boys? Yeah. The bulls from the. No, there's something about the guttural quality of that fall off that's either real or us blowing out our noses. And mine is real bad, and I can hear it be real bad, but I think the difference is in that last little section. Everybody can kind of make that tone,

but it's that exhale of whatever their exertion. Yeah. But the problem with it is this. Raise your hand. There's six mugs sitting here. For radio. Raise your hand. Yeah, raise your hand for radio. If you have heard a cow moose call in the wild i've heard him be pestered i've

heard bulls grunt in the wild yeah on at least two occasions that i'm thinking of right now i've never heard a cow but boden when i told him rip me a cow call he ripped a cow call i started talking about this and that place i've learned. He says, well, that's just what I've heard cows do. And he's not a, he's not a bragging fella. So yeah,

I don't think it's a very complex sound. I think it's probably a sound that just really like, you know, it's a sound meant to carry. And my guess is that a bull isn, you know, it's a sound meant to carry. And my guess is that a bull isn't sitting there hearing it and being like, yeah, don't buy it. Like an educated elk would or an educated turkey who's seen it only because I think that, especially in the area we just came out of,

I don't think they hear a lot of calls. So we just came out of an area. We were 75 miles 75 miles from a highway. Roughly. Central Alaska in the Alaska range. 75 miles from a highway.

Just flew out this morning. We've been out there moose hunting. Giannis, explain your big bull and what happened and all that. Particularly the part about how you conjured it.

Oh, well, I've been visualizing this for a year, though. It doesn't happen overnight. Oh. Conjuring, that is. You started conjuring it a year ago. Well, you can call it what you like. You used a word. Manifesting.

Manifesting. Manifesting. Visualizing that I was going to be, when I knew that I was going on this trip to hunt with my son and to hunt with you, I just created this scenario where there would be this nice big bull to come in, and it did. But it's more than that, because you told me where it would come and how big it would be this nice big bull to come in, and it did. But it's more than that, because you told me where it would come and how big it would be. Well, Giannis had— And then that wound up being true. Giannis said that the area where we are,

that somebody had killed a bull before, and it had literally come up the drainage. And when I got there and saw the area and I thought well this is just like what you know I'd been conjuring or thinking about as you visualize that story that you heard about the area you created a mental picture and so worked with those raw ingredients mental picture the only difference was that I was above the bull and in the picture I had seen this bull coming in on flat land, but the bull was actually coming out of the drainage,

and he literally, I was not expecting this bull. So we were walking down, and to the second, we were on the higher bench. We had walked down to that first bench where you could see a little bit more of the base of the valley, but not entirely. And when we kept moving around, and I can talk about cameramen, right? Yeah, hell yeah. Right. So Garrett's behind me, and we stop at one point and start talking about the area and how nice it looks, and wouldn't it be nice? And then literally, as we step down to the lowest bench,

the third bench, we're there and Garrett is behind me. So I've been calling every 10 minutes. Yeah, I've been calling about every 10 minutes, just what you heard. And Garrett all of a sudden gives me one of these taps on the shoulder and I go, shit, man, there's a effing bull coming, right? I mean, he was probably, well, he was closer when I first saw him

because then he moved away on the drainage. So he was probably 75 when I first saw him and moved out to about 90 when I shot him. But why were you surprised to see him? Because I would feel that you would be like, well, here he is. Yes, ideally. Because it's like I made him. Why were you surprised to see him? Because I would feel that you would be like, well, here he is. Yes. No, ideally. Because it's like I made him.

Correct. But. Like when my child was born, right? That's right. I wasn't like, whoa, you know? I mean, I was, but I knew that it was coming. Right. Well, but it's just like when you have a good experience and you go like, yeah, but I didn't think it was going to be that good.

I'm with you. So, yes, when I saw, and I'm only seeing the top of him, barely seeing the hump and the antlers. And when I dropped down, I mean, he was doing the old move, side to side, swaying. And, I mean, he was hot. He was looking for that cow that had made that sound. Hit the sound again?

No, no, no. Your cow call. The real one. The one you use in the field. Now again? Yeah. I may not be able to do it again. Rough approximation.

The actual cow call you rip in the field. Oh. See, you like that. No, no, try for real. Try like you did in the field. You're messing with me because I know your call from the field and I don't know why you won't treat the listener. I can't do it. You only do it when you gotta be on the mountain.

You gotta be on the mountain. My nose is sore, my lips are part. I've been do it when you got to be in the mountain. You got to be on the mountain. My nose is sore. My lips are part. I've been doing it for a long time. Wind chap. Yeah. Now, set the picture, too, because a moose is at his shoulder. He's as tall as a person.

Yes. Weighs like, even if you're a substantial-sized dude, if you're a 200-pound dude, he still weighs like six of you laying there. Yes. That's what I'm saying. So the surprise to see this animal, and literally off to my right below us, and then he disappeared because there's some brush, some of those little dwarf birch or willows that he's going through. Kind of picked the spot where I knew he was coming through,

dropped down to my knee, you know, flipped up the scope covers, dropped one in the chamber, made sure that... Defender scope covers. Yes, I... Did Yanni trick you out with some defenders? Yeah, yeah, right. Flipped them up. Shooting that nice Savage.

That's right. Shooting some really great Federal 180s Bear Claws. Yeah. The little special tips on them. And you blouched him. Or you blouched. Yeah. First shot, I mean, I made sure that Garrett was, you know, like, are you on this? He acknowledged that Garrett was, you know, like, are you on this? He acknowledged that he was.

And the first shot, it just, you know, was short of 90 yards, right in the honeypot. And, you know, the bull kind of stopped, and they don't do the Statue of Liberty like elk do, or sometimes their white tails, you know, where they kind of stand up on their hind legs. But you could tell this bull was hit. And chambered another one and thought, hey, he's still moving a little forward.

We don't want to chase this bull. We want to make sure he goes down exactly where he is. So we put another one, and he was actually dropping down a little bit, so that bullet came in. I'm sorry, it was going up more, so it came in a little bit lower than what I anticipated. But both were killing shots. And we found the one bullet.

So it was a perfect, I believe that was the first bullet. And then he ran behind some spruce, got woozy, and tipped right over. He didn't run. He didn't go five yards. From the second shot. Yeah, from the second shot. Yeah. And, I mean, it was just textbook hunting, kill, everything.

Yeah. The only thing missing was Steven Rinella coaching me at that point. I wouldn't have had nothing to say. I would have just messed it up. Well. What I thought have had nothing to say. I would have just messed it up. Well. What I thought was missing was the suffering. Because we had nine hunt days, ten hunt days. Mm-hmm.

And the whole point of the whole trip. Was to make me suffer? No, it was to get Giannis' dad a bull moose. Oh, okay. So we did that successfully. Then we had eight days left. I just felt like it should have been like getting dark

on the last day and you're like crying who's crying you're crying cause like it didn't work out and Austin is out of the fog

man yeah well blouch blouch yeah I don't know about the crying part that's probably you're never gonna to see that.

What did you think about all that, Giannis? Tearing up my eye. Your dad got a bull so easily. And what were you doing at the time while he was getting his bull? Making coffee. Were you really? At the top of the hill. At the glass and all.

Yeah, because we were in a cold, windy spot. Not like our spot. A couple hours. I'm sure not like the infamous wind tunnel that you guys were sitting in. Our calling station was called the wind tunnel. We didn't have a tunnel. We were just like in a chamber. Wind chamber.

A wind. So you're up there making some coffee. How did you feel when the old man starts blouching down there? Well, yeah, that's what I was going to say. Like my only I don't want to call it a regret, but like what could have made it better for me would have been if I would have been able to see it have made it better for me That was the whole point of the trip If I would have been able to see it Yeah

Earlier I summed up the whole point of the trip I missed a part The whole point of the trip Was that Your father Was going to get a bull moose With you Yeah

Which we still kind of did Yeah You were up making coffee You was up making coffee But he was close I mean he was What 100 yards No 150 yards

up the hill yeah so when you heard boach boach what'd you think the bull down did you really you didn't think

he was getting mauled by a grizz no I'll tell you something interesting so we butchered the bull which is no small task

perfect weather for bull butchering but um we butchered the bull was it no small task perfect weather for bull butchering but um we butchered the bull was it the next day i think when the wolverine showed up the next day or two days later maybe next day yeah so we go up to yeah there's a glass and tit where you can look down on where the no two days because we went caribou hunting the next day. Yeah, you called up them. Then the next day, I decided I want to go hunt

with you a little bit. Before I get to the Wolverine, I want to talk about how you double manifested. Yeah. Yannis, this is where, see, I'm a very skeptical person.

There's a famous quote that I often tell Yannis. Skepticism is the chastity of the mind. No, the chastity of the intellect. Skepticism is the chastity of the mind. No, the chastity of the intellect. Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

So, a fellow tells me he's going to conjure up or he's going to manifest a bull. But my knee-jerk reaction is skepticism. That's interesting, but nevertheless nevertheless you're sitting on a chair that somebody conjured.

Yeah, then had to make it. So what's the difference? No, that's a good point. What's the difference? I could tell you it would take me a while to think of it and I don't want the listeners to get bored while I try to articulate while I try to conjure

and then articulate why that's different. I can tell you the differences. You don't believe that you can do it and you haven't worked on that skill set. But you know what your skill sets are, you know, conventional college education, a lot of hunting education, right? And you have a great deal of woodsmanship and knowledge.

Nobody, I mean, you created all that, right? How did all that start? Where did that come from? You can call it conjuring. You can call it whatever you want. Manifesting. Manifesting. It's the same thing.

It's just that people don't realize, and we do this every day. And what happens is we get stuck in our environments of maybe perhaps you have a parent that says, well, you can't do this. Or, hey, if you don't become a says, well, you can't do this. Or, hey, if you don't become a doctor, you're no good, right? So you decide to be a woodsman and a writer. Well, you're no good, Steve, right? And that we are kind of kept in line in that way.

I think that if you understand that anybody has that capacity as a human being and it's nothing special. I do see what you're saying. I'm coming around the way you're thinking. And I don't want you to think I'm trivializing this shit, because I'm not. It doesn't matter to me, because I've lived my life this way.

It matters to you some amount, or you wouldn't have just said, you wouldn't have taken the energy to tell me that. You can't take the energy to tell me it and then say it doesn't matter. Well, of course it matters, because that's the way I live my life. Yes. And I'm starting to see a point in what you're saying because you said that you had an image

how this would work. You got there. You had this thing. And what do you need to do to make it work? Exactly. It wasn't going to work if you sat in your tent. That is correct. That is correct.

But you said, in order to make this work, I'm going to call. Right. I'm going to go look there. I'm going to go look there. I'm going to call. I'm I'm going to go look there. I'm going to go look there. I'm going to call. I'm going to look there and look there. I'm going to call. I'm going to look there and look there.

And they had you needed to do it for 10 days or two days or one day. You were going to. That's right. Yeah. I understand. And I'm pointing out, because it's a little bit funny and also kind of interesting, that at the moment. Ironic. You didn't know.'s correct i didn't know that your bull was in route but you had a bull in route that's right and i was in the drainage

i was 0.6 miles away i checked my jeep right uh because i took a waypoint i found a bull i have been calling at a call station the wind tunnel and i go over there there's a bull. I had been calling at a call station, the wind tunnel. And I go over there, and there's a bull thrashing, brushing 100 yards from where we were calling. And took a gander at him, kicked it around, bull bed down, couldn't find it. Brody found it. Came and told me he found it. We went over and had a look at it.

And I said, well, let's go grab Giannis' dad and see if he wants to put the moves on this bull. No sooner did we just, like, I'm packing my bag. Two seconds. And we're even kicking around, like, should we leave our shit or grab our shit? Oh, let's take a waypoint and bring our shit with us. Bouch, bouch.

Right. So you had, and it's not like we had a ton of encounters. We saw some bulls, but these are close encounters. And you had manifested bulls up two parallel draws. Or? I'll take credit for the one, but.

It was mysterious. Right. Do you remember the way you met your spouse, by the way? Yeah, I? yeah I tell you everything about it I'm sure there was a bit of manifesting in that too no no I didn't know I never manifested that I would like have a different

girlfriend and then go to a business meeting in New York and meet a gal who grew up like an hour and 45 minutes from where I grew up in it was this wasn't in my mind but you know what I did say this I had already known her but after me and my girlfriend my last girlfriend broke up I said at the end of that relationship I said from now, I am only dating Michigan girls. Ever. Smart man. And then wound up having a wonderful wife. So you set the stage for it.

And I'm sure if you looked at it more in detail, you would find more than just perchance. Corey, what do you think about all this? I love this stuff. It's right up my alley. You know, visualization and something occurs that becomes a truth. Well, weren't we talking just on the last shoot about, like, the difference between imagination and a great idea? No. I think Corey and I were.

You weren't on the last shoot. I'm sorry. Two shoots ago in Nevada. Maybe it was Joe and I were talking about this. We were talking about how the fact is that the same thing happens in your brain. Sometimes it works out immediately or something resolves, and people go, damn, that was a great idea. If there is no resolve, people could just say,

oh, they're just kind of imagining things. That's his imagination. You can kind of write it off in that way. Does that make sense? No. It doesn't? What are you missing?

I feel like it's, the failure is on my part. I just don't understand. Like, it's one of the same thing. It's just how it's perceived. Like your brain doing the same thing. So if you see, yeah. You're having like an idea or something that just happens in your brain so okay you're sitting

there and you have an idea yeah or i imagine something like man whatever you want to call it beer that has like vanilla accents for instance yes okay. And I go and make it. Okay. Okay. And it just happens that beard and the whole accents is a good thing. It doesn't sound good to me, but I come back and you're like, damn, man, great idea. Okay. Or you can be like, man, that guy's just imagining things.

When people say it that way, just say you're imagining things. It kind of puts it in this negative sort of connotation where it's just like this wild kind of like goofy thing that really didn't make much of anything where when they say, man, great idea. Also, and it's like put up on this pedestal,

the same thing happened in your brain. Huge difference. I hear you saying, but there's a difference because you wouldn't what you're saying, but there's a difference because you wouldn't say like, let's say I'm like, oh, world peace, right? Now people say, imagine world peace. You can't say, I got an idea, world peace.

Okay? Because it exists at an imaginary level because it's almost like a hypothetical notion that's kind of impossible. No one would say imagine. You could say like, imagine beer with vanilla accents. You could just be like,

I'm going to make beer with vanilla accents, but you can't go and make world peace. You have to imagine world peace. Not world peas, but world peace. Or living. World peas you can make. So there is a big difference between an idea of something and imagining something. Right?

Well, this is the funny thing. People that... Introduce yourself, Rick. I'm Rick Smith. Rick Dangerous. Oh. Slick Rick. Rick got a bad ass.

Ranger Rick. Ranger Rick. You got a Ranger Rick, Slick Rick, or Rick Danger. One of the camera guys. Depending on whatever happened last. But people with wildly unorthodox views are often kind of put in the crackpot arena. Yes.

Until they actually do something that makes them visionaries. So most visionaries, once they have had their idea and implemented it, in retrospect, it's like, oh, that guy was just like this budding genius. But at the time when he was an actual budding genius, everybody thought that guy is a weirdo thinking about some idea that nobody has thought about. Yeah, imagining things. Imagining things.

But some of them were crackpots. Like Hitler was a crackpot. Well, I mean, crackpot, if you put your idea into practice, might have some great effects, whether they be negative or positive. If he had won, there'd be a segment of the population that would talk about him being like true believers and say that he was a visionary. Right.

And when Steve Jobs was cruising around at Reed College attending classes for free, people were like, that guy is a weirdo. He's not paying for class. He's just sitting in on, what is he doing with his life? But once he was running a billion-dollar empire, it's like, oh, Steve Jobs, the messiah of freaking technology. I just read a piece about the sculptor Michael Heiser, and he's one of the earth movers.

You know, the guys do large formation sculptures out on the earth and also welding steel and making giant things you can't put into a museum now and this piece is talking about like his father was a archaeologist and he'd come from a ranch family and and it was talking about his father uh He was like a straight F student and a terrible fuck up. And his father later came to him and said, I'm sorry. We just all thought you were a loser. But he made it. Right.

He became the visionary. Yeah. I don't think there's any, I don't know. The idea that you can do well in school and that is predictive of your future success is... There's a correlation. Hardly. Bullshit.

You're saying there's hardly a correlation between doing... I said that wrong. We're just so badly... So we've cut this moose up. Now... Yeah, let's get back to the. So we've cut this moose up. Now, we cut this moose up. And the bat came on a moose. Explain the weight, Yanni, because it's a little bit complicated. Yeah.

Well, I think our pilot today, who's handled many, many moose, and we were asking him about why they have to be deboned. And he said he doesn't really care about the bones themselves. It's the fact that you get a rear ham that weighs somewhere between 125 and 150 pounds. And you have to wield it in one big chunk. That's why you have to debone it and then split it into two. They like 50-pound chunks. So every ham is 125 to 150 pounds.

And that was long. Yeah, this is cut off at the ball, skinned, cut off at the ball joint, and cut off at what we consider the knee, 125 pounds. And by the way, I want to point out what a badass you are Steve because you that is right walked one of those suckers all the way back up to camp

damn straight in a backpack did you say badass or dumbass I said bad bad the dumbass word should go to Corey and I

for doing it without a backpack we tag teamed one of those just cause yeah they put it over their shoulder like they're carrying

a piece of log and too hot they were kind of doing like a Chinese dragon thing you know We tag-teamed one of those just because. Yeah, they put it over their shoulder like they're carrying a piece of log. They're kind of doing like a Chinese dragon thing, you know, with like little legs sticking out of the bottom and holding up the moose on their shoulders. Yeah, you're just not, like, the size of these things is hard to get across. So if you took the front shoulder, like a moose is highest, the highest spot on a moose is the, you know, the shoulders. It's not actually the shoulders, but it's backbone has that thing there. When you cut the front leg off

and then cut it off at the knee, that son of a bitch comes up to your clavicles when you set it on the ground. It's like five feet, yeah. Huge. Big piece of meat. Anyway, Yonka, continue the story. Wait.

No, I was just thinking, because we weighed one one time at our scale at max our 110-pound scale. Yeah, we had a 110-pound scale at max. So cut this moose all up, and you can't, yeah, in this place we're flying, you're flying it on something called a Super Cub,

and a Super Cub has the capacity to carry... 400, just under 400 pounds. 350 is what they want on there. 350 pounds max. Yeah, but they'll carry 400. So the way some air carriers will do it is they'll just take your body weight. So they'll say that you can put a grown person in there. It has to do with weight distribution.

You put a grown person in there and his clothes and whatever he's got on him. And then 50 additional pounds. So if you're going on a sheep hunt in a Super Cub to hunt doll sheep and land in the mountains, you might have it dictated to you by your bush pilot, your transporter, that you can only have 50 pounds of, you can only have a 50-pound backpack because that's what you're going to want to put into a Super Cub. Now when you're flying, so when you're flying a moose quarter, so the moose quarter weighs 130 pounds, obviously the plane has the capacity to do it, but you got to

get it in a little tight spot. So they don't like to fly out bone meat. They stipulate that you, sorry, they don't like to fly out bone in meat. And this air carrier that we were flying with makes you bone out your moose meat and have bags that weigh no more than 50 pounds per bag. And we had probably about 13, I think, wasn't it? No, I think you counted up 16 or 17. Okay. Yeah, because we had to separate it more. Okay.

The pilot said 500 pounds is what they're flying out for a moose. So 500 pounds of boneless meat. Yeah. We wound up taking some of the marrow bones out on a later flight. Now, the pilot, one of the pilots is telling me a couple of interesting things. His wife cooks. When he killed the moose, he knew his wife. His wife was brought up in native Alaskan culture.

And she uses all the marrow. When he kills moose, he has to bring all the marrow bones home because she wants the marrow. He brings the nose home, and they take the whole nose of the moose, burn the hair off with a blowtorch, boil it until it gets soft, cut it in slices, and just put salt on it and eat it. And he knew that she liked the stomach. But they do cut the cartilage out of the nose.

Is that what he's saying? Yeah. He knew that she likes the stomach. So he went and took the stomach and washed it all out in the creek and brought the stomach home, and she was pissed because you don't want to wash it too well because you wash away all the stomach acids and things, and those stomach acids are what lends it the right texture and taste.

Interesting. Yeah. I learned that this morning. 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. You're 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 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. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So, let's cut this moose up.

And lo and behold, two days go by, and we go over there, and shitloads of ravens hanging around. And we look, and there's a wolverine scavenging the carcass. The wolverine has a hoof, a hoof from the knee down, which is a substantial chunk of thing. And he's dragging it, and he's getting dive bombed by ravens and then uh would stop what he was doing now and then to kind of like hiss at and kind of challenge the ravens

and then drug his hoof over the hill we started making plans to uh get the wolverine and put a tag on him and the wol Wolverine never turned up again. But we had hiked this meat up, bone-in meat up to the airstrip and boned it there. And over the course of the night, the moose dragged off two whole back boned-out legs. No, you mean the Wolverine.

What did I say? Moose. No, he didn't do it. He was dead. The Wolverine then dragged all that stuff off, going to cash it somewhere. When we were fixing to kill the Wolverine, Rick got sensitive. Very.

We realized that Rick has a do not, he has a special animal list in his mind. Can you speak to this? Yeah, I mean... Giant anteaters are on the list. They're on there. Especially if they're carrying a baby on their back. Okay. I mean...

Why is the wolverine... I understand. I just want you to tell me why. I mean, for me, the idea of eating wolverine, while possible, does not seem practical. It's like a lot of death for a little meat.

Yeah, a lot of death for a little meat. It's a symbol of wildness in a way that very few critters are. Their ranges are pretty large. But I understand why you would want to kill a wolverine. They have the coolest friggin' fur. But his range isn't as big as a caribou. That's true. Okay.

So why is a caribou not in your kill list? Well, yeah, I mean. It's not range. Don't tell me it's range because it's not range. Yeah, but he's the only one in his range. There might be a couple, but... How rare are they? In terms of density and abundance,

where they are on the trophic scale, there's this friggin' glacial weasel. I mean, they evolved to deal with super cool... And just like the caribou. I like the caribou, too. But I think I would like eating the caribou better than the wolverou. I like the caribou too, but I think I would like eating the caribou better than the wolverine. You do.

So in a way it has to do with, and I know because I have things that I don't like to, things that I've eaten that I wouldn't want to go get myself. But when you look at a wolverine, is it fair to say that you value him more alive than dead? at a Wolverine. Yeah. It's that, is it fair to say that you value him more alive than dead? Yeah. I mean, I see him kind of like us.

Like he's cruising around looking for his meal in a way that we are. And I put him on our level in a way that I don't put the caribou or the moose. Does that make sense? Okay. Would you put a pine martin? I like pine martins too. As much as a wolverine. They're pretty badass, yeah.

Okay, a monkey. Yep, monkey. More or less. If we had a monkey and a wolverine standing there, and I said, Rick, I'm going to shoot one of them. What kind of monkey? Rang-a- no a tailed monkey not a great ape like a capuchin white white face capuchin i've seen those yeah they're they're relatively abundant red howler mean little fuckers capuchins we take out the capuchin a A Wolverine and a Red Howler.

That's the kind I ate. The Howler? Yeah. How was it? I said it a thousand times, but it tastes like if you took a steel cable and put liquid smoke on it. Oh, yeah. Not that bad.

It's just like a dry... I mean, they smoked the bejeebs out of this thing. What do you think it tastes like? I don't know. I've eaten beluga. Smoked turkey. Smoked turkey drumstick. Smoked turkey drumstick.

I mean, I've eaten beluga, which I think is worse than eating a wolverine in some ways. So if I had a red howler monkey, a beluga whale, and a wolverine, and I said, Rick, I'm killing one of them, and you're eating it. Oh, man. You would tell me to shoot the... I think the one I like the least is the howler. Okay.

So if you had a whale, a wolverine, and a monkey, you would say shoot the monkey. That's a great game. I feel like the listeners need to chime in and send in their answer. I would shoot the Wolverine. Yeah. A whale, a monkey, and a Wolverine. I know. And that's probably a good answer.

I think that's a good answer. I mean, the coolest thing about a Wolverine is, I mean, they're frigging. You weren't totally anti-shooting the Wolverine. No, I wasn't. No, he warmed up to the idea. I'll point out, we never shot the Wolverine. No, we definitely did not. And I understand this as a

human. When the new iPhone comes out, I want one. That's how I feel about an old re-night. I just kind of want it. You want the claws. You want to take possession of it. I want to take possession of it. And I think that desire is problematic a little bit.

Yeah. It's part of consuming culture kind of thing. I want to have it. I want to put it on my jacket because they're cool. It's cool. Yeah. You know. But even if you lived, like if you were the last person alive on Earth, if you were the last person alive on Earth,

so you're the last person alive on the planet. And when I put this out, I'm just saying there is no more checking things against your peers. There's no more any sort of judgment. Like, judgment is gone. There is no judgment left on the planet. So your own judgment of yourself. Right.

I feel that in that situation, you would kill the Wolverine right off the bat. Because I want it. Yeah. Because you didn't want to kill the Wolverine, I think, because it had something to do with your perceived, the perceived judgment. There is, yeah.

I think that's probably... Because the last man on earth would want that thing he'd be like she looks warm yeah there's something desirable about it for sure but i don't need it i got uh some oil-based material that does pretty good and and those poor geese provide amazing insulation yeah i'm not trying to i'm not trying to put holes in your thing because here's my feeling about it i don't want to kill the wolverine because I have said for many years that there's one animal like outside of a polar bear

there's one sort of animal in the large North American critters land critters that I hadn't laid eyes on and it was him. And there I was and there he was and I got to see him and i said to yas i don't want to shoot the first wolverine i ever saw i didn't want to shoot the first lynx i ever saw

yeah i think that's a good because it's like i'm like how about if another one popped over the hill just like i would feel different about the second one because i felt like i didn't have a personal the personal level of context with the thing where I didn't have that predatory feel. I was like, wow. And I know that the best material for trimming out a parka is Wolverine. Damn straight. Frost free. It doesn't frost up.

It doesn't frost up. So if you saw that Wolverine the next day, you wouldn't have went after it? Oh, because it still would have been the same one? Yeah. I would have rather someone else went after it. Yeah. And I'll point out to listeners, if you're a non-resident hunting in Alaska, it depends on what unit you're in.

The unit we were in, you're allowed one Wolverine per season. So we're not going out on a limb here. You're allowed 10. In this unit we're in, you're allowed 10 wolves. 10 wolves, right. One Wolverine. Right. One Wolverine per season.

Yeah. So we're not talking about something. No, yeah, this was like by the books sort of thing. September 1 to March 31st. If you did want to kill that Wolverine, I would have been like, sweet. Yeah, give me part of thing. September 1 to March 31st. If you did want to kill that wolverine, I would have been like, give me part of it. Yeah, you did want the claws.

But yeah, most folks without a little bit of education would probably think that the wolverines, well, I guess they are in a kind of similar situation as the grizzly bear. Like in the lower 48, there's not a lot of them. Yeah, like 40 or something like Yeah. They're also like, you often hear the term symbol of or icon of,

and the wolverine is one of those iconic wilderness northern animals. Yes. University of Michigan. Some people say a wolverine may have never stepped foot in Michigan. Did you know that? They just spotted one a year or two ago, I think.

They did? Yeah. That's the thing about the lower 48 versus Alaska, right? Lower 48, we have all these preserving wilderness in Alaska. It just is. Wilderness. It just is wilderness. You don't have to even think about it.

Grizzly bears occupy like 90% of their range. Wolves occupy 90-some percent of their range. Exactly. People have a much different view of grizzlies in the lower 48 than they do up here. Very different. You can kill a bunch of wolverines. You can kill wolves. You can kill grizzly bears in Alaska.

There's not any global effect to their populations. They view the wolf as a nuisance that's what well yeah in some areas to some degree in the area we were hunting in um they get after wolves pretty hard because they're trying to they're trying to assist a beleaguered herd of caribou right in the area so they tend to get after wolves pretty hard in that area. Right. Any other thoughts on this wolverine thing?

That's cool to see. Yeah, I liked it. I mean, it's pretty rare to be able to see a wolverine in person. Extremely rare. One of our pilots today, 44 years in Alaska, I'm guessing, probably 20 or more of them flying. Never seen one. That dude's 44?

Young guy? No. Oh, one of the older guys? Yeah. Yeah, we all expected grizzlies to show up in camp. There was grizzly shit everywhere. And then, boom, a wolverine shows up right next to camp. So that was pretty cool.

Yeah, it was interesting. You know, one thing I want to make a little remark about, which some hunters, I've done a lot of hunting out west, or significantly more than most Midwest hunters. And on occasion out west, you know, you'll be walking a big field or a meadow and you'll come upon grizzly bear, well, not grizzly bear, but just black bear shit.

Here, when you're walking these meadows every third step there's a bear turd and some of them like brody that one big pile big boy i mean this this is no kidding i've got a normal size fist fist. This ejection that came out of the bear was bigger than my fist. Like a bigger gauge. Bigger gauge than my fist. Our good friend, bear biologist Carl Malcolm, said that there is a correlation, and they use it in research, there's a correlation between the gauge on a bear's shit and the size of the bear.

Man, I would believe it. But you're seeing a lot of, you have to understand, you're seeing a ton of bear shit where you are because the bear i man i would believe it i mean and but you're seeing a lot of you have to understand like you're seeing a ton of bear shit where you are because you're in the spot you're in the berry zone right and you get above the alder and dwarf birch enter the alpine but there's still a lot of good ground cover before you get into the bear rock and there's like a there's a band of blueberries exceptional berry growth cranberry you happen to be also you know you took it when you're hunting you spend a lot of time berry growth. Cranberry. You happen to be also, you know, when you're hunting, you spend a lot of time in that band because it's got good visibility, easy traveling. So you're in there where the bears are.

And there's just a lot of bear shit there. So it's like that little boy digging for that pony on that pile of manure. Did I tell you about that boy? I don't know, but it's an old story. It's like, you know. My dad always told that story. Yeah, well. No. I haven't know, but it's an old story. It's like, you know. My dad always told that story. Yeah, well. No, I haven't heard this.

So my dad said, he said, there's two kinds of people. Two, yeah. Okay. Now, well, no, my dad put it like this. He put it as a, he put a socioeconomic spin on it. He said, you take a rich kid and put him in a room full of horse shit, and he's just going to cry. You take a poor kid and put him in a room full of horse shit,

and you open up and he's going to be digging. Because you'd be like, with all this horse shit, there's got to be a pony in here somewhere. Right. Yeah, so that's the same theory that I'm applying to the bear shit. He's there somewhere. Yeah, there's got to be a bear somewhere. You guys have never heard that?

No. I was quite happy to see four bears two miles away. That was fun watching them. That grizzly mama with the three cubs. Yeah, we saw a sow with two and a sow with three. Right. And the blonde, that was awesome. She was almost white. right, Yanni?

Mm-hmm. Just beautiful. Without looking like a polar bear. Tell us your whole caribou story. I mean, right down to the... Brass tacks. Everything. Yep.

How we got there, they were all over the place, dicking around. There I was. We were looking for the monster across the way. Rick, what's so important on your phone there? Oh, nothing. Girl. I figured he was just researching the numbe string.

I'm single these days. Is there anything we can do to help you out there? You got a number out there? Here you go, Rick. He asked for it. Do you want me to put in a plug for you? On this podcast? Do you have a little website or anything?

Definitely not. Can people visit you on Instagram? I'll just say this. The right type of girls listening. Difficult guy to find because of his last name. Yeah. Do you have an Instagram account that we can join? Rick Smith Media.

Yeah, so go dig up, try to find Rick Smith on Facebook. What is it? How many? Rick Smith. Millions. Bozeman. Rick Smith Bozeman. Fellow named Rick Smith Bozeman. Now let me just put it out there. How old are you? 36. 36. Gainfully employed. Freelance

lifestyle. Works on interesting projects. Rick recently as discussed on a previous podcast, Rick will sometimes go into a, he'll get a shot list and go out and just observe wild animals and film behaviors. That's interesting dinner conversation, right? That's not lacking. Very bright guy, well-educated.

Do you own a house, Rick? I don't. Doesn't own a house, but he might someday. He's looking. He's looking. You were on Bear Grylls Survivor Show. I was a reality TV participant. Reality TV participant.

And he made it. I survived. Survived and is not married. No. No major commitments. No. So there you have it, ladies. Rick Smith, Bowles, Montana.

I'll let you know on the next podcast what comes to fruition out of this. You got a lot of female listeners of this podcast? No. But what I picture is there's some dude listening with his wife, and she's like overhearing. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. Oh, no, not his wife.

His sister. No, listen. That ain't going to happen. But his sister is overhearing.'t gonna happen but his sister is overhearing yeah or like his cousin oh no

that could work though cause his wife could be like oh we should set him up with my friend so and so

we should call Deb and tell her to call this guy oh boy so can a gal go like move in with you or do you want a gal

who's already in that town with her own place? My current place would be a little tight. So what radius are you looking at here? I don't know. Is she selling four corners? Is that too far? I don't have a lot of restrictions. Any lifestyle choices?

Livingston? I mean, yeah. I think with the right gal, Rick would import her from Palm Beach, New York. But let's say, if you're from Butte... What are you looking for, Rick? Oh, wow. No, I don't put a lot of stock in... Rick's not a judger. He told me that.

I'm not a judger. He has no opinion about promiscuity. He told me. That was an example of a psych profile question that I had to take for a reality show. Rick was giving me a lesson. And I said neutral. Yeah.

Rick was giving me a lesson about how to pass psychological profile tests. No, that's you claim neutrality on things. I claim neutrality on that one. Yeah. So good guy. I just want to help you out there. That's good.

You got some followers out there and podcasts. But they're all men. Yeah, they're dudes. They're all men. But they have cousins. Sisters.

So, Yanni, tell your character story. Why did we start talking about Rick's love life? I don't know. Because I mentioned the fact that he was on a reality show. No.

You actually wanted to be promoted. We were about to get the play-by-play of this friggin' I don't know. Because I mentioned the fact that he was on a reality show. No. You actually wanted to be promoted. We were about to get the play-by-play of this frigging... Yeah, then somehow I got concerned about your love life. Oh, I was on my phone. Oh, you were messing around. I thought you were on one of those dating websites. Nope. Nope, just texting.

Okay. Stop doing that. Stop doing that because... Trying to make the most of my time here in Alaska. I know, but it makes me really uncomfortable, man. It makes me feel like you're not engaged. That's a good point. Yeah.

No, it's true. It's really hurting my feelings. All right. Yanni, tell the Caribbean story. Rick's dying to hear it. Rick's attentive. Look at him over here now. I just want to hear...

I want to hear... Undivided. I want to hear about the cameraman's role in this hunt, too. We got to start from the beginning. Yeah. We land. Day one. You see three caribou.

First thing I see, I step off the plane, throw up my knockers, and I see three grizzlies and three caribou. I'm sorry. Explain that. Throw your what up? My knockers. Binocular. Okay. I always call them binoculars. I call them knockers. Bino. Binocular. Okay.

I always call them binos. I call them knockers. Well, when I grew up, knockers were something else. They still are. Okay. But I keep my knockers right there

at that part of my body. And when I see a fella and I like his knockers, I'll be like, nice knockers, bro. Okay. And I just call them my knockers.

You've never said that. So that was day one. I didn't see those three I think the next day I glassed up six bulls But we were moose hunting And we were like Thinking there's gonna be more caribou And they're moving

We later heard we're moving northward Yeah The way what these bulls did that day And they're moving. We later heard we're moving northward. Yeah. The way what these bulls did that day is we spotted them fairly early and actually ended up bedding in this big valley for quite a while and then feeding, and they never left sight before dark. So they actually could have been bulls we could have caught up to. That day, I think I saw one bull that was tricked out. He was already getting his winter pellage.

Big white mane, big white feet, clean antlered, big son of a bitch, and he had five or six cows with him. Yeah, out of the six I saw, half looked like that. Were tricked out. Yeah. out of the six I saw, half looked like that. We were tricked out. Like all Fabio'd out. So we were pretty confident that we were going to see more caribou. We'd been told we were probably hunting

stragglers, but at that point we'd been seeing caribou every day. So my dad kills a bull moose. The next day we go caribou hunting. Did we go up there two days? Two. Two days we go up on there.

Sit all day. Do not see a single caribou. Any direction. I didn't see any. Then I said, I'm going to go bull moose hunting with Steve. Just because we wanted to hunt together. Dad was

getting a little talky. They were missing days. Didn't more days go on? Yeah, they were. Because I spotted another day up there. I spotted two the one night. We were in the weed tunnel while they were. We crossed the valley there.

You spent a whole other day up there, and then it got rained out. Yeah. Well, we might have done three up there. One partial, two. Anyhow, a commanding Anyhow, commanding view. A commanding view. And see nothing.

Not hiding. I mean nothing. Void of game. And so we go moose hunting. We're calling, calling, chatting it up. And, uh, we actually get to talking about, uh,

writing workshops, writing workshops. You're, it's true. You're dissuading me of, uh, spending my money on a writing workshop. I just happened to look over my shoulder and there,

as someone had manifested a single bull caribou on the horizon, playing his day. He's like on a beer commercial. Yeah. Like a bull skyline on top of a high mountain. It would be a shot that photographers get a little chubby for. How many chubbies? We have a little list going. We got a little chubby for it. How many chubbies? We have a little list going.

We got a list. The shots that outdoor photographers get a chubby about. Yeah. But it was a distant shot. He was not close. No, he was probably a mile long. He was a speck. Maybe a mile.

Long lens. But still, it's like this beautiful mountain scene and a silhouetted caribou. I mean, from the hooves all the way up. Like he went up there and said, see those fellas down here? I'm going to stand here and watch the look on their face when they see my ass.

That's right. That's what he was positioned like. Yeah. Yeah. So we make a quick plan and pack up our backpacks and we who? Oh, we had a whole pile. We had six of us there. Cameras bouncing every which way.

Yeah. We just, we took the lead. I didn't get to see, I guess, any of the action. Everybody was talking about how funny it looked, I guess, in the back. You were saying how funny Rick looked. Corey was saying. We were running with 45-pound packs for one mile. We're trying to send a bunch of ladies his way.

Are you talking about how he looks funny running? With a 45 pound pack one mile up the tundra that's a foot deep. I thought he looked sexy. He stayed with the honest man. You were right on him. I thought he looked unbelievably sexy running. I didn't want to run faster than you. I just made him feel bad.

At one point Steve commented on how we were kind of out of order for a good production. We might not be getting the right camera angles, and Rick should be closer to me. And Rick was like, hey, bud, I got no problem. If I need to be on his heels, I'll be there. And I trust Rick that he could do that because of this. He's so sexy. Yes.

But then you and Steve kind of split off at one point. We did? Yeah. I mean, you were. No, this is not normal TV production. No. We did? Yeah. No, this is not normal TV production. No, we had to catch them. Caribou is one of the few things you can run after. At high elevation.

Let's back up a bit. Just general caribou hunting. When I spent a little bit of time caribou hunting, we would go and get on a big high knob or a big high tit and just wait. Because they're always moving. You seldom watch. They don't just like rarely does a carrier just stay someplace

to stay there all day long. They just start drifting. And we would sit out there, and you'd have to catch them where you're always like calculating like if we start a hauling ass now we'd be able to intercept him somewhere if you caught one going away from you can't catch him you know he's like a mile out you're not going to overtake a grazing caribou they're just like moving um we used to see the most of them when if we were hunting in august early september and if there was a wind it feels breezy you would not see caribou you wouldn't see many caribou

then the wind would die and the minute the wind died the hordes of mosquitoes and white socks and black flies would rise up out of the tundra and start mauling you and you'd put your mesh gloves on and you'd put your bug net on your head and then you'd start seeing shit loads of caribou because the bugs would bother the caribou so bad it would make the caribou get up and start moving and they would settle into these little draws and stuff to feed and then when it got buggy they just start hauling ass because they wanted to get away from the bugs and you're always like trying to gauge where you could catch them we started off after yanni's caribou kind of not really we thought we were being that we were gonna go and wayhead him off and then actually go toward him.

Yeah. But by the time we got there, we way missed the mark. Way missed him. And we were saved by the gregarious nature of caribou. Yeah, he was on his own going to just feed, walk,

do the caribou thing across the bottom of a valley and up the other side and disappear over the ridge and as he's cresting the ridge and he's on the horizon again gone gone gone alive i mean 10 more 10 more 10 more steps and yeah he would not be in our bellies at this point he happens to look over his shoulder and see six mugs and cameras and dudes throwing their packs down and getting ready to shoot. And he's like, oh, what's that?

My friends. Yeah, he's like, hey, there's some other caribou. And he was a young bull, so he's probably that much more curious. I've seen them all. It's just a thing they do, man. It's like when you see them, the best thing you do is just get down. Let them see it and get down, they just they just don't want to rule out they don't want to like they have a herd mentality yeah and i don't know why i even thought

about it because i don't think i've ever heard about it is it like a thing that dudes do caribou hunting with the white flag i know it from antelope my right yeah antelope hunting it can work i've seen it work well yeah so we tried that with a game bag. It may have worked. Brody picked up a drop antler, which are littering the ground around there. He picked up a drop antler and waved it. That way he didn't want to leave. Then he caught our wind, and then that changed his mind about it in a hurry.

I like the fact that he was all alone. He was missing out on the whole. Days behind everybody else. Oh, yeah. He was missing out on the whole. Days behind everybody else. Oh, yeah. He was looking for his friends. You know what the pilot told me? I told the pilot. He said it's a little bit unusual.

You know, he lived his whole life here flying here. He says it's a little bit unusual that you would see a bull traveling with no known other caribou in the area. But he said that in his experience, it's coming from his set of experiences, it's frustrating for him to watch nature documentaries where they are saying like,

oh, the caribou are migrating to X place. This time of year, they go this direction. And they all go there, and they all know to go there. He said that that herd has many places they wind up. Some years, they're up in the White Mountain Range, north of Fairbanks, the same herd hundreds of miles away. Some years, they go in an entirely different direction. Some years for days they're going north.

You're like, oh, they're going north. And then all of a sudden for days they're going back south. Or one side of the river there's a bunch of caribou going east. That's sort of new. The other side of the river there's a bunch of caribou going west. And he says he has seen many times where a band of caribou will hole up on one of those mountains where we were get on the windblown side and spend the whole damn year there really so he was saying yeah it's unusual that you saw one run around by yourself until you

consider that there's no like absolute there's sort of like these general things but within that he said there's so much willy-nilly behavior and things sort of bucking the trend. He said it's a little bit like when he said when people speak in absolutes about caribou movements, it's a little frustrating. But they do migrate. Yeah. But he was saying that like, to be like, oh, they all went north.

He said it's just, it's never. No, it's like narrative simplicity, right? You like, you have a documentary that needs to be like be like okay we're talking about caribou migration we can't talk about all these places they're going we don't have time we gotta they're going one place yeah so he was saying it could be that i'll fly somewhere and every day all winter i see there's one bull that for whatever reason decided to make his stand yana shot the anomaly bull yeah but he was heading out. He was heading somewhere. He was heading north.

He was going the same direction as everybody else we had seen. I was hunting one time on the north slope of the Brooks Range, right ahead of the rut. And I remember it was we were out there the first week in October. I killed one on October 9. And at that time of year, it's like the rut's

coming on, and everybody says, those caribou there, all, not all, there I go, those caribou that are on the north slope of the Brooks Range tend to winter on the south slope of the Brooks Range, where they go down into the taiga forest and winter down there, and they calve out on the coastal plain because there's more wind and you can get away from the bugs and there's good food. Now, we were waiting

and we're convinced that all the caribou had left the coastal plain and gone over the range because we weren't seeing shit. And then one day, here comes from miles off, I can't remember what it was,

nine or 10 bulls, just like a laser headed toward the coastal plain so gone in the wrong direction the quote wrong direction but they move so much that they could correct

and be you know the next day turn around and recover all the ground but it is I mean you do get in your head when you want to see these certain things also something we discussed they they said that uh those moose do winter there he said they particularly like those draws those willow choked draws that lead down to the main drainage he said they'll move once the snow starts piling up they'll move up into those kind of like right below where we got it out yanni's caribou butchered down his caribou that head high willow he says they like that stuff a lot for wintertime

it's great walking through i know it's fun to walk through you know running through i just want to go back to one thing about these camera guys well how can you any fix i i i got i got such an epic interruption going on right now we got to get back to Yanni's finish your story he's at like probably 500 as he's about to go over the horizon right I think that's what you were yelling numbers

but he sees us he comes back towards us and gets I think all the way maybe even under 300 right 290 I I heard. Something like that. But he's facing us the whole time. The wind's kind of blowing. I'm just not a huge frontal guy shot, especially when I'm thinking meat.

Yeah, Yanni was practicing excellent restraint because he was going to let the carry boot get away rather than hit it in the front. Yeah. And I will not lie, this makes me kind of like the trophy hunter or whatever. Had it been just like the gargantuan monster bull with just points coming off every direction, I would have taken that shot. Really?

Yeah. So were you not shooting, like on the shot placement argument, were you not shooting the frontal facing you because you're worried about meat wastage or because you worry about having a greatly diminished kill zone and getting a clean kill both in such whipping and it was it was brisk wind yeah both which one was more i don't know i mean it's one and the same, really. Wasting meat and crippling a critter is not the same thing. Well, I mean, it's still like a huge negative, both of them.

So you're practicing incredible restraint. Bad ethics. He was practicing good ethics. Right, no, but bad ethics. Bad ethics to take weird shots. Big antlers would have caused me to maybe take a little bit more questionable shot, possibly lose some meat, possibly not have quite as, you know, the high percentage for a quality kill.

Do I feel like I could have made that shot? Sure. But on that bull, I was, like, very able to just be calm and be like, I'm going to get the right shot. Wait for it. You knew it was going to happen. You happen you were just gonna let him walk well it was very i'll continue my story he got down like 295 or whatever and he's like coming he's coming he's coming and i thought he's almost i was like man he's just gonna walk into our laps and it'll be a real gimme and then all of a sudden

his nose picked up and he got our wind and he was again heading out. It looked like he got hit by a car when that wind hit him. Yeah. So you're in the bottom of the valley? Yeah. Bottom of the drainage. And instead of heading right back

towards the horizon, he kind of just heads back and like a side, he's traversing the side of the hill instead of going, you know, just back right up towards the horizon where he could have quickly, you know, had he gone the same distance towards the horizon, he would have disappeared. But he went across the hillside, and you gave him a couple of hoots and hollers.

He didn't stop. I feel like I – That trick didn't – he didn't care about that trick. Yeah. I gave him my – You tried to bugle at him? Yeah, I bugled at him. I whistled bugle.

He's like, hey, my distant cousin, the elk. He stopped and he turned broadside and you said, I don't know what you said, 4-0. I remember hearing 4-0 and I was like, okay, I got this. I knew that my second hash down was roughly 400 yards. So I held right on and shot broke clean. Bouch! Yeah.

That was it. Went through both lungs. And he ran down into a little fold in the land and disappeared. I thought you missed because I saw what I thought I saw was a poof of powdered rock. Right.

But now I don't know if I might have just seen some hair come up. Because I heard the thump. Like when you get a good hit on an animal, it sounds like hitting a pumpkin. Like hitting a watermelon. It's unmistakable. Yeah, I've heard it described as like a baseball bat to a wet towel that's hanging. That's good. That's good.

Punching a pumpkin, hitting a wet towel that's hanging. That's good. That's good. Punching a pumpkin, hitting a wet towel with a baseball bat. Just like a... No, not like that. Like a... Is that good? It's like a whap. Sort of a whap.

Deeper. Yeah. There you go. No, it's like... I heard that. And then we went over there and you double lunged him. That's the heart. We got to keep the heart.

Very windy and cold. And we dug it, drug it down a hill. And then proceeded to butcher it up. And his liver, we're having a conversation about liver. I had just had some very good deer liver hunting down in Southeast and was kind of excited to replicate that meal with this liver, and the liver's full of spots. Now, in kosher slaughter,

which is called um, okay, if you're an observant Jew, you eat kosher food. Non-kosher food, I think, is a glad?

Anyway, one of the things you do during the kosher slaughter process is you inspect the animal's organs because God said in the Old Testament, God says, don't eat carrion. Okay. I mean, don't eat animals you find laying around dead. Now, you don't know why I said that. It's not for you to say like, oh, I'm not going to do it because I don't want to get sick. You don't know why I said that. Good idea. It's not for you to say like, oh, I'm not going to do it because I don't want to get sick. You don't know why I said it.

But don't eat dead animals you see laying around. So to be extra careful, because a lot of that, like the interpretation, a lot of the rules is to be like, if he says something, like God said, don't shave the corners of your face in the Old Testament. Now, ultra observant Jews will grow out the sideburns because they're like, well, I don't know where the corner of your face ends and your hair begins. So to play it ultra-safe

and to be extra careful to be observant of the law, I'll grow out this long thing. So God says, don't eat carrion. They would say, well, then you better not eat a wounded animal. Don't eat an animal that's damaged to be extra careful. So when you do kosher slaughter, you inspect the organs to look and make sure there's no evidence of illness in that animal because you're being extra careful to follow God's word. Now that's not why I was inspecting his liver.

But I happened to be inspecting his liver. Pre-FDA. And it had large white spots on it. Yeah, this way predates the FDA. Or USDA. But that's actually USDA. Yeah, it does. So I happened to be inspecting his liver.

Noticed some large white spots on it. Yanni tries to tell me it's from laying in the creek. Well, it was just funny that we hadn't noticed it when we, or I hadn't noticed it when I cut it out and then went and put it in the creek. And we talked about leaving it in the creek to wash it off a little bit. Because my mom, when I was a kid, I had iron-poor blood, and I used to eat a lot of liver. And my mom would take deer liver and cut the deer liver up

and soak it in lemon water to draw the blood out. People soak it in milk or water, various things to draw the blood out. When you throw a liver in a creek, I mean, it changes color quickly. So Yanni threw it in this cold-ass creek and then we pulled it out and it had these things in it.

Who did a biopsy on that liver? We cut it open. Yeah, the senior knew about it, though. I thought it was some fatty deposits. You've seen it before, though. Yeah, I'd seen it before in Michigan. They were about the size of a pea. It is a big-ass parasite in there, man.

I don't recall what it was, but that's what I recall. The DNR Michigan biologist told me it was some kind of a parasite. He said, don't eat it. It's real waxy. Yeah. What are you doing on your phone, Rick? I'm looking up fatty liver, which that's what I think it is. I don't think it's a parasite.

Rick feels as though, and we did a biopsy on it. You pull out a thing the size of a pea with an encase. It's got a case. And you pull it out, and it is just like a waxy fat inside there, whether it's a parasite or not. So we discarded the liver. Would animals get – I mean, humans do because they eat the wrong diet. Would that animal get that?

It wouldn't occur in that way. It occurs just like he'd have a lot of abdominal. He'd have a lot of fat in his abdominal cavity, like kidney fat. He's not going to wind up with balls of fat, Rick. Yeah, maybe. That's what I'm looking at. But it didn't look like a larva either. It might have been an egg or something. Whatever the hell it was. It was good to eat.

Not the liver. We ditched the liver. And then this morning... Who wants to explain this morning's meal he already got to explain a bunch of stuff well I watched you master chef and hunter

prepare a extraordinary meal the primary entree was bone marrow. We took and cut, sawed up the moose's front. Yeah, shins, and cooked those on a pan. I went and collected some berries. What kind?

You picked three kinds? Blueberries, huckleberries, and cranberries, right? No. What was the third one? You picked blueberries, crowberries. Oh, crowberries. And cranberries. Yeah.

All right. And then you reduced those down, added, I'm sorry, you took a little bit of the fat out of the bone marrow, heated that, reduced it down, added it to the blueberries to make a blueberry reduction, like a sauce. Fat reduction, like a sauce. And then we also took a mushroom that you had. Rough-stemmed bleat. Rough-stemmed bleat. Rough-stemmed bleat.

Thank you. Which I at first didn't think had any taste to it. But by the third one, not. Because the flavor just kind of comes through. It grows on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had that sauteed in a pan and then we also had uh the uh tenderloin which was grilled on an open flame fire and you sort of made like a little i'm sure there's a

french word for it hors d'oeuvre stacked up with the tenderloin on the bottom. The caribou. I'm sorry, caribou, yeah. The tenderloin and then the bone marrow and then the mushroom on the side with a little sauce covering it all. And you served it on a moose dropping, not dropping. No, shoulder blade. Shoulder blade. A moose. Yeah.

Shoulder blade. No, I thought we put it on the. Scapula. Oh, we did put it on the scapula. Oh, we didn't use the shed antler. We didn't use the shed antler. I don't want to shit it all up with blueberry sauce. I want to keep it, yeah.

Yeah, so we put it on the bone of the scapula of the moose. And that was very impressive for in field. And it all tasted excellent. So for those of you who have never had any bone marrow, you got to do it. No, but you had eaten bone marrow. Oh, yeah. I've done it with venison, thanks to you and Hank Shaw. So it's not a Latin.

It's not a Latin. And I'm sure I could find a Latin recipe for it because I would think most European countries do that. I got turned down to bone marrow in a French restaurant in San Francisco. And I ordered that bone marrow. I remember sitting there and saw it. I was like, how can I eat this? This is many, many years ago. I think this is, you know, I'll tell you what year it was.

It was 2003 or 2004. And sitting there and it was 2003. And I see bone marrow. I'm like, I just didn't understand what they meant. And I order it and it's discs of femur cut. And each one has a sprig of thyme and a sprig of rosemary stuck in it with sea salt on top. And I spread some of that on some toast.

And the first thing, the first and only thing I thought was, do you know how many pounds of that shit I have left laying in the woods? Yeah. And most hunters, they don't know about it. Just. Yeah. But it does take some work.

But on a whitetail, there's not a lot there. I usually say to people, I usually say like, a white, bigger than a whitetail is worth your while. I think on tongue and i think on marrow bones you know you get into an elk like that's a marrow bone right a mule deer white tail it's just not a lot of you think about game processors in the west how many pounds of

that stuff i don't think that shit can't be that good for you i think it's real good why not good for you i don't know if you're trying to like watch i don't care i don't think that shit can't be that good for you. I think it's real good. Why not? Is it good for you? I don't know. If you're trying to watch, I don't care. I don't pay attention to it. But if you're in a situation physically where you're trying to watch cholesterol and all that. Better than a Coca-Cola, I'm pretty sure. And cholesterol is actually good for you.

Just an overabundance of cholesterol. It just depends on what diet is in fat. And these days, high fat is in. Yeah, but here's the thing. Real fat. I didn't change what I eat. I eat what I'm going to eat. I know what I feel good eating. Now, people who are like, oh, I used to not eat this, and now I eat that.

When you're involved in a fad diet, no one knows they're doing a fad diet while they're doing it. They only know it's a fad diet later. So now you've got the whole damn world. It's like skinny jeans. Yeah. It's like, oh, this is what jeans look like. No, it's a fad diet later. So now you got the whole damn world. It's like skinny jeans. Who just like re, yeah. It's like, oh, this is what jeans look like. No, it's not what jeans look like.

So it's like, it's like now everybody's like, oh yeah, fat, fat, fat. Oh, of course, it's healthy. But it's like a while ago, no one was doing it. They're doing it now. All the people that change what they eat all the time, according to what they're hearing on whatever kind of media they take in, those people will, in some amount of time,

move away from fat. I will still be consuming the same food I always eat because I don't shift my food around based on what dudes tell me. But for... But most people, not most, many, many people do, and then now they'll be like,

oh, what you're supposed to do, and then they'll be on to some other shit, and'll be like you should really be eating a ton of bread and refined sugar that's actually where the science is and then and that's what i eat now do you eat that no i'm just saying no one engaged in a fad diet knows they're in a fad diet right now there's a fad diet yeah that that happened be like, Yanni and I were talking about this with shoes. When I used to work for Ronnie Bain, Twin Lake Installations, we wore red wing boots that had a white flat sole on them. Because we did most of our work on bare concrete floors. I, the other day, found a pair of these boots and purchased them.

Because I'd always liked that style of boot. And Yanni was saying, those boots are the shit right now, real in fashion. And we were talking about when fashion comes and collides, like fashion comes and collides with you. Like you're on a path, and all of a sudden you get hit by fashion. Yeah, that fashion was just where somebody went home and saw a pair of grandpa's old boots and said,

man, those mothers would look good. Why don't I make some money and we'll just popularize that and make that the new thing. So fashion collided with you. And that's easy because stupid follows that all the time. Yeah. I mean, look at America. I mean, just, oh, yeah, let's create this.

And it's another stupid thing we can spend money on. You know? Exactly. But for the bone marrow, I feel like my diet has been, I feel like the diet I eat has,

has fashion came and collided into my diet. Now, they'll all go off and do other shit, but I'll be eating what I like to eat. Yeah.

But for the bone marrow, there's like, if you eat a, like back in, you know, before. People. Agriculture and civilization.

Not quite before people, but before we could go buy food in the grocery store, there's a legitimate reason to eat bone marrow because lean meat doesn't have what bone marrow has in it. Yeah, it's a factory diet. You want to hear an interesting theory that I read one time? I don't know if this theory is fashionable anymore.

Rick, you might be able to speak to it. You're schooled up on this kind of stuff. When you look at the African diaspora by which hominids left Africa, of course, Neanderthals left Africa 600,000 years ago and had quite a long tenure in Europe before we showed up,

before Homo sapiens showed up. But there's a theory out there that hominids didn't leave Africa. Tell me if you've ever heard this. I read this. And I'm not weighing in on this. I'm just telling you about a thing I read.

I find that oftentimes people have a very hard time. Like you'll go and tell someone about something you read, and you're just saying like, I read this thing. I'm telling you what I read. And they'll get mad at you. So you're like, they're like mad at you. I'm like, I can't tell. Are you mad at me that I read it?

Or are you mad at me that I'm telling you about it? Because I'm not claiming that it's mine. I'm just telling you that I read this thing. There's also not a one-to-one, right? In the reading and the interpretation of the thing you read. Well, let me give you a for instance. I mean, you might, you have a pretty good memory though. Let me give you a for instance about what I'm talking about.

Here's a prime example of what I'm talking about. I once read an article. I think I just told you guys about this. I read an article where it was saying, were we to build an impenetrable wall between the U.S. and Mexico? I've heard that. No. Here we go. I'm not doing any.

Here's the problem. I'm not doing value judgment right now. But there's no way for people to listen to me without realizing I'm not doing value judgment because people have so much shit in their head that they need to assign value even when someone's not making value judgment. But there was a biologist who said, were we to build this impenetrable wall between the US and Mexico border, it would have, it may have the following implications for migratory patterns and movements of jaguars, mountain lions, and black bears. So he's just saying, as we consider this idea, if you're interested in large carnivores and large omnivores when making the decision about the rights and wrongs of this a set of factors to consider would be the movements of large rare animals the wild kingdom okay he's just throwing it out there right now i put this article up on social media i put it up on facebook and get bombarded with people saying well if you lost your job to a you know mexican but it's like but like no no i wasn't saying that

at all i know i didn't write the article i'm sharing with you a collection of thoughts about a thing that's in the national debate and people were attacking me for having drawn attention to a piece of field work done by someone. Because they couldn't keep their values out of it, or their worldview out of it. But here's what I fail to see. Why could you not support the wall and do it, be like, yes, all factors included, all factors considered, including the implications for jaguars mountain lions and black bears i still support the wall and i've taken time to consider that because my people don't work that way yeah they're like i don't want to hear about that shit because i support the wall who cares about those bears they don't even like the

bears they're not even there they're like they're, you can't say, you can't look at things. Can't even bring up the topic. People have this thing where they don't want to look at things well. So I'm prefacing my story because I'm not making a comment about humans and how our species came. I'm not talking about any of that. I read a that. Right. I read a story.

Yeah. Where someone was positing, someone was making a hypothesis that the human diaspora from Africa had some link in time with the proliferation of saber-toothed cats now here's why this is important to this theory saber-toothed cats can't crack open bones could not just teeth their tooth structure we were talking about how wolverine will get into a femur yep he'll whittle his way in there like a dog you. A dog will slowly destroy a bone. A wolverine was going to get in there eventually. He's going to get that marrow out. Sabertooth cats

can make a kill. They eat soft tissue. They couldn't get into the bone. Once you had, this guy was positing, can't remember if it was a man or a woman, saying that once we see this great proliferation of sabertooth cats on the landscape, we start seeing more movements out of humans.

He was suggesting that there was an abundance of bone marrow on the landscape because these are people who didn't have a very sophisticated tool set, were just starting to mess around with stone tools and figuring out how all that shit worked we're in knew about adzes and hammers and anvils and things but weren't very effective at going out and killing large dangerous animals with projectile points yet and they were making a lot they were making the life pre pre-human human right making a lifestyle out of uh out of scavenging carcasses and cracking them open and getting and getting marrow you know just throwing it out there that's something i read i think that's well there's they they talk about this idea that early humans were scavengers all

these like sort of bipedal semi-bipedal creatures cruising around, and then they could carry away meat. They could run up to a carcass, grab some shit, and hustle off. Before the big guy showed up. Before, yeah. Like our Wolverine friend. Dragging off part by part. Right. No, you can't fight.

I mean, you just aren't equipped to fight with other predators, but you can run and grab stuff. And bone marrow is transportable. It comes in its own package. It's sealed. It's hermetically sealed. Yeah. How long can that last?

You know what? I'm going to start. I should start messing around with going and cracking open a bone down there and seeing what it looks like. I have found old bones before and cracked them open and had it been kind of dried out and whatnot, but it would be really interesting to take a shin bone and throw it out of the yard.

I have to think it would last a long time, man. I mean, a hell of a lot longer than the boneless meat. Like a week in 70-degree weather or longer. Not even. I can't say. I can tell you I wouldn't be surprised. No, but I think if it's reasonably cold out, like 40 degrees or colder.

It's solid at room. It's colder. It's solid at room. It's a fat that's solid at room temperature. We ate more than a week later. Yeah, true. Nine days later. Yeah, it was laying on an airstrip. It was laying on an airstrip for nine days. You know, the best thing

is the scapula had bits of meat just kind of on it. But the like... It was cured. Oh, gosh. Yeah, it was cured, but the color, the white bone, red meat, blueberry, bone marrow. We had to scavenge from the scavenger. We had to take what the wolverine left us.

We went up to get the femurs, and the wolverine would haul off our femurs. We had to sell it for shin bones, and now that's my favorite marrow bone. I don't know why in the world I had never cut into a shin bone. Yeah, I'd watch those camp robbers climbing all over those things when they were up there on the so you know they were doing their thing on those bones too

on those scapulas. That's a bright bird man. Yeah. Like the camp robbers after we, so we killed a moose and the camp robbers were there so we killed a moose and the camp robbers were there within a couple hours not even probably an hour and we were throwing bits of fat to them and then we realized they weren't eating we were being followed yeah rest of the week we were being followed by camp robbers all the time they're like see those dudes yeah i would follow those guys man because there's gonna be something something. It's a food source.

Because they've got to get there before the ratings get there. Gray Jays? Yeah, they're called Whiskey Jack, Gray Jay, Camp Robber. Yeah, Corvids. Old Trappers didn't like them because they were. Canadian Jay, too, right? Is that another word for them? I think so.

Might be. I know that when you read old Trapper accounts, they really didn't like them because they would tune into your trap line. And in all your Martin sets, they'd harass your bait. So people were always pissed at them. When they killed the mad trapper from Rat River, he had a couple of frozen whiskey jacks in his backpack. He was feeding off them.

Wolverines, too. Feeding off the gray jays. Trappers hate wolverines, too. They do the same thing. Follow the trap line, right? And then they would just eat the stuff that got stuck in the trap. Kill your catch. Yep.

Giannis Sr., you got any concluding thoughts? Oh, yeah, quite a few. It's been an extraordinary week. Well, two weeks, basically. Well, a couple things. Let me start out. First of all, having just watched the show, having been involved with my son, just seeing what he goes through.

What does that mean? Well, I'm sorry. Let me backtrack. Having talked to my son and hearing what he does to do the show and having met you in the field before doing a show, but now being in a show puts a whole entirely different perspective on it. It's an incredible amount of work that you guys, and I'm talking about everybody, but it's not just you,

it's not him, it's the camera crew, the field, you know, production assistants, everybody works their asses off. Yeah, they work hard. To make this show go. And I mean, it, to me, you know, everybody has kind of like their time and place. They're all like a well-oiled wheel in the bigger set of wheels. It all moves together. You never hear anybody bitching, at least hardly at all. Did you hear some bitching? Dude, I started feeling bad. Like I felt bad for Corey.

Well. Because I like reminded myself that Corey's here working, and it's like we're just sitting in one place for several days. And I start to feel self-conscious. No, I just go in my own little world. Some people

pray for the job that you just described. Sitting in one place for several days. Not in the wind tunnel. Not in the wind tunnel. The people, when they watch a show, I mean, like, you know, some of these silly reality shows are on TV. I don't think that those camera people

have to move around as much as what I saw you guys doing this week. I mean, when they say 40 pounds of gear, they're not kidding. And it's probably more than that. And then you got headsets on. And this stuff that we're walking over is, I mean, it's either rock shale sliding, or it's moss that sinks in. And then you got these tussocks of grasses, right? Very uneven.

And you're watching somebody on a lens and you're moving across this while they're moving. That's a tough job. Tough job. And then putting that entire picture together, it's an incredible amount of work. That's the first thing I want to say. So my hat's off to you guys. And then my hat's off to you, Steve, because you add an incredible amount of authenticity to that show. Because you won't take anything but top tier, man. It was like there's no fraud to this show.

It's like the real deal. And it was tough enough just walking, you know, around, hanging around you. But just to keep up with you, it's tough. And knowing that you want that better quality show. So when I asked you, why are you making, why do you do Meat Eater? Your answer was excellent. It was for those guys who hate TV who want to see the real deal. And I may be paraphrasing it.

No, that's who I'm always. You know, you get like in your mind, you're sort of picturing who you want. Yeah. Yeah, I like the guy who hates TV. Yeah, and that's what this show is about and of course you know i'm coming in kind of from the outside you know considering myself a experienced hunter man well not really not when you put yourself into alaska because that's an entirely different environment so that that you know i mean there's a lot of environmental conditions that I had to get used to.

Like constantly having your hands cold. I mean, you do warm up, but you're constantly cold. It's just one of those things. I thought you were kicking ass, though. Well, I thought I did okay for a guy that's, you know, my age and physical condition, all things considered. Yeah, I thought I did all right. Crew acknowledged that. Talk a little bit about, can you hear me? Yeah, yeah.

I don't know why you're wearing it like that. Why do you have the head part across your forehead? Because I've got a pointy head. And when we get into this time period of the podcast and it's sitting right on top, it really starts to jerk me. Can you keep asking about them coldies? Yeah. But no, about how you really haven't

camped in 40 plus years and all of a sudden you went on a nine day camping trip. You haven't camped in 40 years? No. Were we camping all those... 40 years ago? That was with my dad in a tent.

No, this isn't car camping. How many ever 40 years ago? Well, it was with my dad, you know, in a tent. And then I think we... No, this isn't car camping. This is like... Oh, no. This is... This is the real deal. This is the real deal. Yeah.

I mean, you're out there in the effing wilderness. And yeah, it's cold. You were asleep in about 20 seconds every night. Oh, yeah. Right. You know what? Hey, this is no kidding. I would lay down.

I could get like a third away through my meditation. The only thing I remember is my son waking me up, quit snoring, Dad. That was only one night. What's your meditation? That's for me. It's private. Well. Okay, don't tell me yours, but what do you mean by that?

I meditate. What does that mean? Basically, I just release everything. I just let it all out. Do you have a checklist in your head? Well, I go through a little checklist, and then at the end of that checklist, I basically just zone out. I just go to that other place. Nothing there. Does your checklist consist of specific things that you need to think through,

or is it that you're emptying of everything that comes up? Yeah, I'm not going to share that with you. You're going to have to develop that on your own. Why can't you share it with me? Because it's a personal thing. It's what I do. In other words, it's the way I've developed my intuition, my practice. Can you share with me what?

Corey will tell you. I think it's a very personalized thing. But what is the goal, let me ask? The goal is nothingness, to be totally nothing, to be totally withdrawn from everything that is around you, so from emotion, from all want, to be just i don't know that's like the ultimate spirit 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 it 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, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. 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. 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 3 months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet OnXMaps.com slash meet

welcome to the OnX club y'all that point are you able to meditate while hunting or do you meditate you got to be in the dark in your sleep no you can you can meditate any place point time it's just various levels of meditation that you can achieve yeah i don't do anything like that but i remember i read something not long ago where someone was a practitioner of meditation. Someone said to him, you know, I don't have time to meditate 20 minutes a day. He said, if you don't have time to meditate 20 minutes a day,

you ought to be meditating two hours a day. I totally agree. Basically, in two minutes, you can do anything that you need to do. At last. Yeah. There's a lot of good stuff online. People want to check it out.

Yeah. I got no experience with it. I don't even really understand what it is. Well, but you're going there. I mean, you're on your own path, you know. And eventually things will come to you that will say, hey, you know what? I got to check this out.

What I do do, I stumbled into a Eastern practice, if you will. I don't know if it is or not. When I can't sleep, I focus very heavily on inhaling and exhaling. Your breath. I just think about, okay, air coming in, coming in, coming in, air going out, going out, going out. And it makes me fall asleep so goddamn fast. I don't do yoga like my son does,

but I think that's the one common thing with meditation. That's the simplest of all meditations is basically concentrating on your breath. Yeah. Real simple. So the last thing I want to say about- This is your last concluding thought. You're going all you want. The last item would be that

having grown up in the Midwest, hunted in the Midwest, and then in the West for big game, elk, antelope, and mule deer, hunting out there is still, you kind of get the feeling that you're hunting in a box. How so? Kind of like a cornflakes box, but I'm saying Midwest was definitely the cornflakes box, and then you go out West and it's a little bit bigger. When you get-

Oh, like you're in a contained area. That's right. When you get to Alaska, it's like somebody took the top and just ripped it right off of that cornflakes box, and there's just no limit. I mean, there is is you look around you and you go like holy smokes man no matter what direction i look in it's this is it yeah and that

took some getting used to a thing that first struck me when i started hanging around in alaska and it was after i just started hanging around in alaska Alaska until one of my older brothers finished his schooling and went up there as a biologist. The first thing that struck me, and it still strikes me now, is to see the size of rivers that don't have roads on them. Because you think about, like, even in the West, there's a certain size of river. There's a threshold, right? Where you get like a size of river that invariably has a road on it. Right, right, right. And the fact that you can have, well, the Yukon, for instance. Thousands of miles.

Which is a, you know, drains a significant portion of the continent. It is by all definitions a mighty river. Right. There's no paralleling road. No, yeah. drains a significant portion of the continent. It is by all definitions a mighty river. There's no paralleling road. No. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. If you imagine, like I used to think, like if I was king of the world, where my call just made,

I would take a lot of river courses in the American West, and I would make them not road it. If I was just able to act with impunity, you know what I mean? I would say, you know what, we're going to take this river and just not be able to road on it. We're going to tear the road up. But in Alaska, you have giant, mighty rivers. True.

That you can't, there's no road to go on them. Right. I said to the pilot today flying out, I said, do you think right now still today that there are populations of game animals moose and whatnot that are living and dying unhunted simply because you cannot get to them he said oh yeah absolutely sure because like you got a moose you kill moose you. You are bound by law to move 500 pounds of flesh. Got to get it out of there.

So you either are going to have to get a wheeled vehicle, or you're going to have to get a boat, or you're going to have to get fixed-wing aircraft. Because you can't use a helicopter for any aspect of hunting. You can't transport hunters. You can't transport hunting equipment. You can't transport hunters. You can't transport hunting equipment. You can't transport meat. It has to be fixed-wing aircraft.

Right, or a horse. Did you mention a horse? Didn't, but yeah, horse. So you need to get some form of conveyance there, or you're limited by what you can do on your own self. Well, Yanni was just saying that tonight, that this hunt that I experienced today probably would not have been possible except for a very few people, what, 25, 20 years ago?

I was relaying to him how Buck had said that now we can do these hunts in a week because it's so easy to get in, get out. Yeah. Where even just 20, 30 years ago when you wanted to come up and do this kind of hunt it was going to take a month yeah you know the old old guys would say that alaska was ruined by the bush plane um buck boden who we were talking about being a moose expert moose caller buck boden one day was saying to me just a couple, in fact, I was at his place in the southern Alaska range, and he was saying, you know, the really true hunting, the true hunting ended 30, 40 years ago.

And I said, well, what was the true hunting? He goes, it was before we had satellite phones and stuff. He goes, because back then, that was like the exploration. You could still ride a horse and go in and fly in and ride a horse in and hunt stuff no one had hunted in modern times.

And he said the sat phone ruined it because as a guide, we used to wave goodbye to that plane and it was going to be 10 days, 20 days, and there was no change in anything. When that plane took off, it was gone. And you had a rendezvous to meet that plane at a specified point in 10 or 20 days. And then you just hunted.

He said, now a lot of clients get their thing, and they can't get out of there quick enough. Yeah. And they're on the sat phone like the guy he'll even say let's go get a caribou let's go look for a bear and they're like let's get the hell out of here i got what i'm after right then he said it really started to sour things for him that long ago so it's always like you know well from our perspective like i consider that we're like i'll always be that I experienced the good old days. Right. And there'll be some as yet undeveloped technology.

And then in 10 years or 20 years, I'll be sitting around saying that I had it during the good days and now it's all messed up because of unknown. At least we didn't have cell phones out there. I mean, I could imagine one day where some sort of satellite, whatever. Every cell phone. Can't get an email, can't send a text, can't make a phone call. So, yeah, you can make a phone call on a satellite phone. But, yeah, so someday we'll be like, man, it used to be. Well, I couldn't send a text message or whatever.

You're making up for it tonight, though. That's right. Don't feel bad, Rick. I can't tonight either. All right. That's good. Yeah, I'm balancing it out, though. that's right don't feel bad Rick I can't tonight either so alright that's good I'm making yeah

I'm balancing out though yeah any concluding thought he's got his headset back on right was it did the Wolverine think about

taking the two femurs my closing thought is a question oh I have a theory about this did he taking the two femurs? My closing thought is a question. Oh, I have a theory about this. Did he take the two femurs

or was it just coincidence or randomness? I think he couldn't move those front legs. Because of the shoulder blades? He's just too damn big with that scapula

and everything. That's my theory. He's got four legs. I should call my brother who does a lot of statistics for work. What are the chances if you have four objects? Rick will figure this out.

What are the chances that he grabbed the two back legs? What are the odds? You have four objects. What are the odds that two of them, two specified ones, get picked? I don't know. What are your combinations? You grab one front, one them, two specified ones get picked. I don't know what your combinations want. You grab one front,

one back, two fronts, or two backs. Yes, there's only three. You have two A's and two B's. And someone has two picks, and they happen to grab two B's. What are the odds that they're going to grab two B's? One out of three.

Those aren't bad odds. But you're not talking about a human being. You're talking about an animal. You know what used to trip me out about statistics? No, but it's still the same probability, right? I mean, if it was random. I'm saying I don't think. In my mind, I haven't thought, oh, it was randomness.

But here's another thing my brother talks about oftentimes because he's very involved in probabilities, that we find patterns. He thinks fly fishermen are more guilty of this than most. We see patterns where no pattern exists. Oh, they were coming on chartreuse. And then all of a sudden, they were coming on olive. Humans were good at it.

He's like, I think that it has a lot to do with coincidence and what was going on. And maybe one of you, you were running three different things. And some guy cast a chartreuse and someone caught one on. And then everybody put a chartreuse on and later appeared as though a chartreuse. But, you know. It's the classic correlation causation issue. It's rampant.

But with the Wolverine, I feel that this might drive him nuts. Were he here right now? I feel as though there's something about that it was easy to drag those back legs off and the scapulas were hard to manage. I don't know. Maybe they taste better. Yeah, maybe they taste better. That's what Yanni was driving at, weren't you?

Oh, yeah. He's thinking there's more bone marrow. He's handled enough carcasses to know what's got the goods. Were they the two closest bones to us? What was interesting about it, because Brody and I went and looked for him one last time last night right at dusk, and I had pulled that hide over that carcass. That hide was still pulled over the rib cage.

I noticed that. So he hadn't gone through the pain to go do that, to dig inside there, for whatever reason, he's like, no, I'm taking these four lower legs and I'm going to go stash them. I think, and this again, this is me, I'm not anthropomorphizing, but I think that when a critter like that shows up, I think that he, through experience, knows that a bigger, badder something is going to show up.

Same way like a gray jay, they're the first to the carcass. They get displaced, no doubt, by the ravens. Yeah. The ravens are going to get displaced. The ravens we saw get displaced by the wolverine. The wolverine has to know from experience that when you find something, a very good approach is to get that shit out of there before the grizzly shows up. Yeah.

Although they're known to every now and then. Yeah. But I'm sure, like, the fact that he was dragging it way across the hillside, down into wherever he was dragging it, he was getting it away from something. Sure. Do we know that, that he was dragging it? No, I don't. I know that he was dragging it. He was getting it away from something. Sure. Do we know that, that he was dragging it? No, I don't. I know that he was dragging it, but I don't know. We saw him dragging.

No, we saw him dragging parts off. So I don't know. I'm just like, I'm trying. As I try to make sense out of things I observe in a somewhat unscientific fashion, informed maybe by some amount of science, I feel like there's something like that going on. It just happens that when I saw the other Wolverine that I saw.

Oh, yeah. Oh, you saw another one? He saw Wolverine. Four years ago. Tell that. And he was doing the same thing. He was caching parts. Off caribou kills.

Yeah. Was there any rhyme or reason why he was hauling away? No. The first thing I saw him hauling away, which is like before I could get my spotting scope on him, I could not for the life of me figure out what animal I was looking at because he was hauling away a whole half a neck and a whole head of a cow caribou that still had her antlers on her head.

You see that dragon on the ground? No. I mean, this dude was like just moving. And I'm looking at it and I just could not like, cause you're seeing white, you're seeing antler and just like, you're just like running through the species in your head. You're in the snow. Yeah. And you know, black animal in the snow and it wasn't. Yeah, exactly.

Pretty much like this weird jackalope thing. But yeah, finally I got a spot in scope one. I'm like, oh, Wolverine carrying a cow caribou head. Sure. Why didn't I think of that? And we watched him for, you know, we probably watched him make four or five trips. He would go into like this kind of a draw that later we skied by it.

And you could see he kind of had like a crevasse almost, you know, kind of he had like a little stat, like just a dark hole that he was going down into. And we watched him make four or five trips. Putting caribou parts in there. Yeah. This was up around the Arctic Circle? Yeah, north of the Arctic Circle.

North side of the Brooks Range. South or north? North. Huh. Is that your concluding thought? Yeah. That was a good addition to the story. Corey?

Since we, I think, just figured, sorry, it's late, but we just finished up a father-son meat eater. It's just a good reminder, I think, to not take for granted your loved ones or your family members and set aside some time in your busy schedules maybe to go do an adventure with them or, you know, just get out there and enjoy each other's company while you can. Good point. No, that's true shit. I thought about that a lot.

I think about my father a lot all the time. I thought about, like, how much he would have enjoyed a trip like that. Yeah. No, I heard it once in a hunting camp. We're actually in Mexico, guiding coos deer, and there's a father-son combo there. And they said one of the biggest reasons they like to go hunting together was for the windshield time.

Because when they're on the hunt, they're like pretty hard. They're hardcore hunters, and they're hunting. But they're like, yeah, we always drive everywhere. So there's like this time period that they don't have in their lives anymore without kids and wives and life and work and stuff going on so they get to get in the truck together and drive six or twelve or two days time and have windshield time and just get to talk yeah yeah hunting i mean for me and my father it's it created this situation last 10-15 years where we spent time together where that we wouldn't have otherwise you know best hunt i was ever on was when he shot that gigantic gigantic big buck and i i

nothing i've ever shot like no hunt i've ever been on is compared to that, you know. Well, it's true because I, now, kind of every year we try to get up to Wisconsin and have a turkey hunt. I do with both my sons. Yeah. And other people, but primarily with them. And it's, yeah, it's an enjoyable time. Yep. And they're, you know, it's not like they're little kids anymore.

I'm learning. Well, it's not like they're little kids anymore I'm learning well it's valuable especially when you're older it's different when you're when you're both adults you know

it's not like dad taking the 12 year old right no it's right exactly yeah that's the problem

is I never got with my own with my own dad I never got beyond that point like I got to be the age you know and then we moved like we just moved away so I never got, with my own dad, I never got beyond that point. Like, I got to be the age, you know, and then we moved, like, we just moved away. So I never had, like, I never took the time really, except for, like, hunting rabbits in a small game for five, six hours.

Never took the time to go out, like, as adults. Then he died. We'll just hang out with Yanni Sr. We'll give you some more of this. Good. Rick? I mean, there's two things. One, I mean, as a non-hunter,

I've really enjoyed getting to hang out with the, like, I don't know, hunting cultured humans, like progressive hunters that are getting after it. And I feel like doing it in a way that's, uh, I don't know. I can see myself pursuing hunting in a way that I haven't before. And one just mostly wolves and Wolverines. Totally. All of them. Yeah. And omnivores. Yeah. It's not leaving out the omnivores um no but i just i look forward to that point where i'm gonna i don't know kill kill something and eat it and cook it up and it just is such a cool process um to be a part of so that's that's on the one hand and then

is your dad still alive yep you still talk to him yeah yeah he would he would have not wanted to hike around he would he would? Yeah. Yeah. He would, he would have not wanted to hike around. He would have, he would have been camp cook. Is that right? Yeah, he would have been

happy to cook up some good stuff, put some butter on some bone marrow. He would have loved that, but he would have, he would have not really wanted to

hike around. Yeah, I mean, he would have done it, maybe, but, uh, that being said,

the other thing was, uh, the Latvian part of this episode. I mean, we sort of joke about it when you guys are... I mean, I'm listening to your audio all the time. Them arguing in Latvian? No, well, when they're on camera, the Januses, when they're on camera, would speak English. But as soon as they walked off almost always

just buzzed right into Latvian and to listen to that it's just like I don't know there's something fulfilling about about a culture that has kind of maintained its language and I mean Giannis Jr., Janka, I mean, he was born in the States.

His dad was born in the States. Right. But still speaks Latvian. And I think that seems rare that that would happen, right? A lot of second-generation immigrants sort of have a really tough relationship with their first language, I think, just because of trying to assimilate.

So to see Janka kind of embrace speaking Latvian, I feel like I'm jealous in some ways. It's such a cool thing to be able to have your guys own, I don't know, little inn. Secret language. Secret frigging coded ancient unrelated language. It's weird to listen to because they'll be doing their thing and then an English word will pop up in the middle of a sentence, and it just sounds wrong.

Copy and then Latin. Or Latvian copy. Yeah. Bull. Yeah, so I just enjoyed it. I enjoyed the whole deal. It was good. What was the charm you were given, Steve?

Oh, yeah. Can you tell that secret charm? Well, it's not a secret charm. It's just... A well-known charm? It's actually a... Or whatever it is. I didn't tell you the full story.

I thought I didn't want to spoil it for you. No, just don't tell me the story. Just bless this here beer bottle. Or not bless, but whatever it is. I can't do that with a beer bottle. It's the mystique. Can you tell people? Would you mind telling listeners what it was, the incantation, whatever it is,

the words you uttered when setting things in motion for my rifle? But I have to do the whole thing. I have to tell you what it is. You haven't told me that yet. I will. I will now. So this incantation is nothing more than a little ditty that you use with small children that when you're deciding which one is it.

So it goes like, Oh, it's an E-D-E-E. Anko, danko, drilly-doo. That's what you're doing in my life. Amo, dramo, ritter, shamo, u-te, bricks. So now, if you're... Why would you do that to my gun? Because I made a believer out of you. Oh, that's why you said you're setting things in motion.

For that moment, I changed your acceptance of that, and you believed it. You were right there, man, because you had me do it twice. He washed it up with water. I said, no, you were doing eeny, meeny, miny, moe. That's what it was. Remember when he said, did you cross water?

You're like, yeah. And he's like, oh God, you crossed water. That's right. Washed it away. Yeah. So I don't care. You want to put that, I mean, there's a lot of,

in that context, you get it? So if I make a book and say, this is the book of Giannis, man, this is the way you got to do it. And if you're a believer, you're going to do it that way. I'm with you. I'm tracking. Brody, concluding thoughts? Yeah.

Obviously, this whole thing's about Alaska. And when people talk about Alaska, they talk about it as this all-encompassing, umbrella kind of word. And my experience with Alaska up until this point was at your cabin in Southeast Alaska, which couldn't be more different from where we were in the Alaska range. And it's almost a disservice to say I went to Alaska

because people just get whatever they're going to get in their head. Some nature documentary about Denali or whatever. And Alaska has like, I don't know how many, like Southeast Alaska, Interior Alaska, Arctic Alaska. And it's just big. Yeah. And it's just big. Yeah. And it was super cool. It's so different than the Southeast.

Yeah. And it was amazing to see that difference, experience it. Makes you want to see more different places in Alaska. So you had a good time? Hell yeah. Yeah. It was impressive. Even though,

you know, he passed up on old three-time. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not stuck. My concluding thought,

it kind of has to do with fathers and sons. We just talked about the CRDA and I can't get it out of my head. It's not something that I came up with

but Mo, who we worked with quite a bit over the years, was talking about having kids. And he was saying that how when you have kids, and he has young kids that are my kids' ages, he's like, when you have kids, all you wish upon them is that they'd be happy, you know? And you don't, like he said, he was talking about how you don't spell it out.

You don't spell out like, oh, I want you to, you know, you're just like, no, it's just that. Like, that's all I want is one that'll be happy, whatever that means for them, you know? And then later in life, you know, later in life, when you're looking at your own life, you get into all these specifics. Like you want this truck, I want this house. All these specific things you want.

And you lose sight of that original idea that you would have upon your own shoulders. Be like, oh, I just want something to be happy. You don't use that term anymore. You're talking about things that will, right? Right. But he's saying that now that he knows that's just a side note to what he's the point he's making with me that's really stuck with me he's saying that now that he has kids and he knows how badly he wants his kids to just be happy he's like oh now I understand how my parents must have felt. Right.

They must have just looked at me, and all they ever wanted was for me to be happy. And he was saying, and now I'm at a point in life where I am. He's like, and I'm going to make a point to go and say, you know what? I'm happy. Because now that I'm a parent, I realize how much that probably means to you. Yeah. You know? Got it.

It's an interesting observation. Right. He's like, that's the least I could do for my parents. It's to let them know that the thing they obsessed over all through bringing me up has come true. It's like they did it, you know? So you bring up an interesting question, and that question is very obvious to me. Did your father ever know about your finding your happiness?

Mm-mm. Right. And that's probably your biggest regret, is that- Yeah, I have a million regrets, man. Millions of- No, it's probably not a million, but I got a shitload of regrets. No, because I wasn't.

I was in a- I got a shitload of regrets. No, because I wasn't. I was in a – I took – at that period, I had in my head something I wanted to do, and it was – it seemed like a moonshot. It seemed impossible. So I think he saw me – he definitely saw me struggling toward something that was that I thought was impossible and he was very encouraging

that I go and do it never put any pressure he was all my parents listen that's good my mom my mom and my dad

never laid any bullshit on any of us about you need to do this and you need to do that and that's you're just dreaming and that's not how the real nothing like that.

That's interesting. Ever. In my family. Ever, ever. They're like, you got to find something you love to do and go do it. My mom was always the encourager, and the dad said, no, you need to go. You need to be a doctor. My mom and dad never laid any of that bullshit on us, ever.

My dad's thing, always said this, is that you're going to spend a third of your life working. He was actually off because I feel like I spend a lot more than that. But he said, you're going to spend a third of your life working, you better do something you like.

Correct. That was the only career advice he ever gave, but he gave it adamantly. And the same thing, like, you know, we never heard from our folks, you know?

Yeah. My mom, thankfully, I can still talk to my mom and she's, you know, never, never. thankfully I can still talk to my mom and she's you know never never just like do stuff you like

find a way to take what you like and make it pay the advice I give out now when I give out if I ever have a chance to give advice out to people which comes up now and then

I'm always like man you gotta figure out what plan A is and forget about plan B cause plan B is gonna be cheaper and easier. And keep you from planning. You're going to go, you'll wind up.

It has a tremendous gravitational pull, plan B does. Don't you think that, like you guys were saying, tell your parents that you are happy? Yeah, wouldn't it be nice? Yeah, but I'm saying. And you've got young kids. But wouldn't it, I think it would be... Yeah, wouldn't it be nice? Yeah, but I'm saying... And you got young kids. But wouldn't it... I think it's just as important

to tell your kids, I'm happy. Yeah, that's a good point. You know, when you're not screaming at them. Listen! Ketchup, ketchup, ketchup! I'm happy!

Listen! No more ketchup. Forget you ever heard that word. And I'm happy. happy okay to wrap up will you say we just went moose hunting and now we're back

and thanks for listening to the meat eater podcast in Latvian sure uh we just we just we just

we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just

we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just

we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just

we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just

we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just

we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just we just We were in the big Alaskan territory. And now we have finished our Meat Eater, which is a radio program. And we are done. Well put.

Thank you Giannis Senior You're welcome Who's actually Giannis Junior It is Giannis Junior How the hell that makes Giannis Hey man The hospital Giannis the third

The hospital screwed it up Alright thanks for tuning in you 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 meet.