The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 175: If Cabbages Had Legs I’d Hunt Them Too

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Doug Duren, Randall Williams, Matt Rinella, and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: Nip ripping stories; the essays of historian Elliott West; a dead man’s brother packs him in brandy; shooting out the windows; Steve’s interview with R. Kelly; Matt’s three favorite foods; Randall's missing pituitary gland; the hunting sadness; 1SHOTJJ; Doug’s morel village; monster trucking chicken wings as a matrimonial bonding experience; hunters according to Looney Tunes and the anti-hunting bias in children's books; Stars In The Sky; and more. 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.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Doug, you'll be able to relate to this story. A guy wrote in and he got his nipple pierced. I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to relate to this story.

That's just a joke I stole from Brian Callen. Where if you're telling someone a story that has... You're telling someone a story that has really nothing. In a crowd, right? You'll tell some perverse story, and you'll say, oh, you know, Billy, this will... You'll appreciate this, Bill.

And then you tell some story, and people are like, later, they're like, why would... So that's why I wanted to correct it right away. So a guy gets his nipple pierced and he writes in about it. He's out shooting his bow. You can imagine where this is going, right? Oh, God. Oh, yeah.

Very painful. I'm not sure that's something I'd be writing in about. No. Well, we've been talking about stuff. People getting, it started off with hunting scars. And gal wrote in to say she had jumped a barbed wire fence once and ripped her nipple. Horribly. And then the ripple nipping, nipple ripping stories have come in, have rolled in.

Yeah. She was jumping a fence to go dove hunting. And yeah, we told a little story. Anyways, and then she had made a joke about how her husband had later, she said, my husband called that one Scarface. And then other people wrote in just nipple-ripping stories. For you people that are slower to take, he gets his nipple pierced. That's one...

That's one I just... God bless, right? But I just don't... Not on my list. I would go there before I went tongue piercing. Oh yeah, for sure. But if you wrote down all the things you could get pierced in a list

and I had to start from the top and I didn't know when it would end, that one would be real low. Real low on my list. But he catches it on his bowstring. Right? I would, if that happened to me, I would say that it happened. You'd keep it secret? No, I would say it

publicly yeah like i don't know how to say this but in the last few years i uh i've increased i've never been i've never i've never been like reluctant to publicize when i do something stupid but it's gotten to the point where i really want it out there it's like a kind of a form of massacism yeah well no it's you dumb motherfucker you people are gonna know about this too you know yeah maybe it's like some kind of form of like self-betterment like well i think it's i think it's helpful too because the worst thing you can be is a blowhard yeah so yeah if you are a generally competent person and you it's like under promising over delivering and if you're very vocal about what you've screwed up,

but you are generally competent, it's only going to do good for you. And I have found that when I have like contractor, a contractor over, I said, there's a plumbing problem that's beyond me to figure out. If I have a contractor over and I say, you know, I'm such a dumbass when it comes to this right it just makes the whole thing go better than if you're in there acting like you've all but got it solved right right do you know what I mean right you're also putting yourself in a position to learn a little bit more probably too speak of things then it's good stories you could tell to the world and kind of get it, you know, clear the air. You got a T-mat up on a... I saw a picture, but I didn't really get the story. Yeah.

No, that's kind of where I was going with this. Oh, shooting your bow out of your own window? Yeah. Yeah. So this is, yeah, this is me putting on sackcloth and ashes right here. Is that a biblical reference? Mm-hmm. What part of the Bible?

I don't know. Isn't it appearing multiple? Sackcloth? Sackcloth. Sack. And ashes. And then also, I think it's in several places in the Old Testament. And I think that when one is wearing sackcloth and ashes, it was a stupid way.

It wasn't the right usage because it's usually you're repenting for something. You're not repenting for doing something stupid. Is it wearing a hair shirt in the Bible? I don't know. Usually when somebody's wearing sackcloth and putting ashes on their face, they're also gnashing their teeth.

That seems to be... My boy does that, my four-year-old i have a llama that does it i think that nipple piercing just got replaced by uh sackcloth and ashes you know where this is going is you're gonna tell the yeah but first i gotta ask you have a llama shirt on right now somebody gave me this it's a little tight on me. So it says Wikipedia fact number 58,801. Llamas like to wrestle. Yeah. Yeah.

You like that shirt? I don't know. Okay, go on. So what happened? They do like to wrestle, though. Oh, they do? Oh, my God. Oh, I thought I was just being stupid and cutesy.

No. Oh. They like to wrestle. Yeah, sometimes I go out in my pasture and break it up because I'm afraid one of them is going to get hurt. Really? What is a llama? You ever hear, Doug, what was your thing about farm wrestling? Well.

Doug threatened. You were going to farm wrestle you? Duck was threatened to farm wrestle someone. It was a typo. It was. No, no, it was him. He was interested. I was like, I don't know what that is, but I don't want it to happen.

He wanted something from me. I said, well, I'll arm wrestle you for it but i think i spoke into my phone and it said farm wrestling farm wrestle anyway so there you are playing with your bow and arrow. Yeah. So I, um, I, uh, was shooting out of my house this winter cause it was bitter cold, you know, and I, but I wanted to kind of keep up on the shooting a little bit. So I was opening up the window and shooting out the window and, uh, I went out to fetch my arrows and I had an idea why I was out there it's like man I cannot see my pins very good inside the house so I went out into the

garage and got a got my headlamp and was zip tying it to my sight pin and then i got back in it was you know things a little bright you know so i was you know i was like there was a lot going on and i i freaking forgot that i had closed the window did you hit the target i never found that arrow it took me a few seconds to even realize what happened. I was like, what the hell? You thought someone had the string just break? You're like, someone just shot me through my window. Another quick thing. I'm reading a book. Oh, you know, Randall, you'll appreciate this.

Watch out. You'll appreciate it for real. Remember I was recently asking you about the historian elliot west and i was because i'm enjoying his book so much his collection of his essays yep one of which is an essay that really counters the idea that lewis and clark had discovered you know from a european perspective had discovered the like the great plains right and he goes on to explain at the time of lewis and clark's um journey there were indians on the great plains who had been to europe met the king of france and returned home yeah at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

So. You forwarded me that story a long time ago. I know. Well, I went and got the book that that piece, it was a podcast listener that sent that essay in. Uh-huh. And I went and got the whole book and then I was trying to,

and I wanted to get the dope on Elliot West. So I asked Randall what Elliot West's reputation was and he told me about Elliot West's reputation. Then I get the book and I'm reading, and there's a piece about the difficult job of a historian to uncover the unheard voices in history. Meaning that we follow like, oh,is and clark right and we know all these monumentous things but like the details of people's lives and people that weren't spoken for right people whose recollections aren't like he talks about the paucity of of accounts from chinese immigrants who worked in the mines right they were just they didn't leave a written history. So now you're trying to like

find these forgotten voices. And in there, he's talking about this guy and his brother that are going out to the California gold rush and they're leaving the East Coast, going to the California gold rush

by boat. So presumably going all the way around Patagonia at the time, right? There's no Panama Canal. Correct. Yeah. His brother dies on the way. So there's two. Correct. Yeah. His brother dies on the way. So there's two brothers, they leave, and his brother

dies on the way, and he gets a barrel of brandy and packs his brother into a barrel of brandy. The dead body. Packs into a barrel of brandy, gets to California, and

to bury his brother at home, promptly sets out on an overland journey with the brother packed in a barrel of brandy to bring him back home again. He's so intent on bringing his brother home. Why was it easier to do that? And then if he opted to do the ocean one, do you have a bunch of stuff with him or something? He doesn't explain that, and I haven't dug into the footnotes

to find where he pulled that story from, but I don't understand why. I was like, let's go one way. Maybe they were moving a bunch of, maybe they were moving stuff, and he left the stuff, and it was quicker to pack them in brandy. He just wanted to change the scenery. Yep.

A couple other things I wanted to touch on real quick. A guy wrote in, he's fishing, and his brother hooks into a, they're fishing on the East Coast. Where were they fishing? They're fishing off Maine. And his brother hooks into a big fish. Oh, I'll appreciate this. Yeah.

Hooks it into a 14-foot blue shark, and they're just fighting it for the fun of it. And it's a strenuous fish fight. They let the shark go. A couple days later, he develops this horrible pain in his chest.

Can't figure out what it is. He thinks he pulled his chest. Can't figure out what it is. Thinks he pulled a muscle. Can't figure out what it is. It gets worse and worse. Pain goes to a doctor, and he's got this tumor that he didn't know about and would have killed him. And somehow fighting that fish. Aggravated it.

Tweaked something, and that tumor pressed up against the nerve and alerted him to the presence of that tumor. And they removed the tumor. Now he's fine. Moral of the story, go fishing. You gotta fish more. With your brother. Finally, here's one last one before we start,

before we get some more stuff. Guy takes his dad turkey hunting. His dad's sentimental type. Takes his dad turkey hunting His dad's sentimental type Takes his dad turkey hunting His dad gets a turkey And he gives the kid The fan Because he wants the fan mounted

The guy's dog Destroys it I think it was his dog Destroys it Wife's dog Oh you saw this story? Wife's dog destroys it. I think it was his dog. Destroys it. Wife's dog. Oh, you saw this story? Mm-hmm.

Wife's dog destroyed. Like, what's the difference between your dog and your wife's dog? Oh, I think it's just, I think it's the same as if... Nothing until you get divorced. It's the same. I think it's the same thing

as if you tie the tuna to your girlfriend's car. No, my girlfriend's dog dog no one says my wife i guess they do you know i'm saying like at a point we have two dogs my dog is the good one my wife's dog's a bad one really yeah and it's like the wife's dog my wife yeah she decided to get it when we started dating and and you don't you've never acted like it was your our dogs no i mean it's it's our dog but it's her dog yeah she said she's we're in we're living together and she said um i i want you to know i put a deposit on a chocolate lab puppy

so if we're going to keep going with this thing we need to move into a pet friendly apartment and you you know do you want to go looking for apartments with me or not? And so she made that decision on her own, and he's the bad dog. Meaning she was going to move whether you did or not? Yeah. She was like, you want to keep this thing rolling for another year's lease? We need to go find a pet-friendly apartment. But she put a deposit on a puppy and did that all on her own. And it's her dog.

He's seven years old, and he's terrible. And then what does he do he's just he's like a does he shit on hold it no he's no hold go on yeah. There's a big difference between your dog and your ma's dog. Go on, Randall. No, he's just too much. He's just hyper. Yeah, he's a 100-pound lab, and lab people are overwhelmed by him. We actually had someone come over for dinner, and they hadn't seen him in about a year,

and they said, oh, know, you guys are great. Most people I know wouldn't have kept that dog. No joke. And I mean, we looked at each other like, I don't really know very many people that would get rid of a dog, you know, just send him on his way. But yeah, we got that from someone else.

You kept that thing around, didn't you? So, but then right before we got married, we got a second dog else. You kept that thing around, didn't you? But then right before we got married, we got a second dog, and I got to pick that one, and she's perfect. She's an angel. That's your dog? Rosie, yeah. That's my daughter's name. Kind of.

That's a good name. You know, the only thing I have to compare that to is when I was younger, that when we would get one of my siblings or I would get in trouble, it seemed like the parent who was pointing that out to the other parent, they would say, your son did this. Yeah. Well, that's because they're seeing that behavior, I would guess, being married and having kids, they're seeing that that behavior is a result of your influences. They're saying because of you, what they're saying is because of you, your son. The parts of our child that owe to you are responsible are responsible for x yeah can i get it back to this thing his ma's dog eats it he then his mom and dad must be divorced huh so his ma dog eats his ma's dog eats the you follow me yeah there's a There's a kid. Mom and... Yeah. Okay. This is still...

A kid is dead. Doug's probably lost. I was just thinking about my childhood. I'll make a flow diagram for you. A guy, there's a guy, we'll call him the kid, he takes his old man

turkey hunting. His old man shoots turkey. The kid then takes the old man's turkey fan. His job is to mount the turkey fan as a gift to the old man. He then takes it to his mom's house to store it. The mom's dog, if they are divorced, it's because the mom's dog is still

out for vengeance. Eats the turkey fan. He then goes and gets a different turkey's fan, mounts that, gives it to the old man, and never tells the old man the truth. So the old man, when people come over his house, he's

stuck in the awkward position of pointing it on the wall and being like, see that? And then telling all about what happened, when in fact, it's a lie. But the old man's not stuck in that position because he doesn't know. He doesn't know.

The guy is like, is that immoral? What do you guys think? I just think it's keeping the peace. I think it's immoral. I think it's keeping the peace. How's it keeping the peace? Between the parents, the divorced parents. I'm reading that into it.

I don't know. Oh. I'm just guessing. If that's the case, though, I agree with you. If there really is a keeping the peace function to that. If that was a part of it, I feel like he would have said that it was a part of, like, that his folks were divorced. Yeah. And now the ma, and who knows, maybe she was running around.

But I read the email. I just think he felt bad. Yeah, it's not like he's trying to preserve some little semblance of family dignity that's left after this tumultuous divorce. He's not laying out that level of trouble. It all comes down to whether he can live with his little white lie or not. I think that it's immoral and i would tell the old man really you might not remember this pretty innocuous do you remember why well let me tell you a lie let me tell you something that happened to me

and you'll know all the players probably has something to do with something no so when we were little real little you know how daddies take us like you could go fishing on your birthday yeah it was my you skipped i just lied i don't remember that oh like you would often get the you would get to play hooky if you wanted an ice fish on your birthday oh because i had a february birthday yeah or whatever different different activities. He took me out, and a guy caught a big northern. Not our party. It was me and dad, and I think Alcoholic was with us. And a guy, do people know who that is?

No. Okay. You've introduced him before, but you can. It's a great name. Well, his name is Alcohol, but he was a heavy drinker. He would develop such a thirst. He would develop such a thirst during his outings that he often couldn't wait to get home. Another guy catches a pike, and he doesn't want it, and Dad wants it.

So Dad takes it, and it freezes up like how they do. And my dad says to me, hey, and throws it to me. And I catch it. And he says, you just caught a pike. And I later told Ron Spring, who was a commercial

bait fisherman. Ron Spring made a living catching wigglers and digging worms and catching minnows. I told Ron Spring I caught a 27 inch pike i don't i don't know if i if it's a good use of our time to do a post-mortem on those two lies but that one seems that one seems far worse oh no it's just i'm putting myself yeah that's real bad but i'm putting myself in the role, not of the dad, I'm putting myself in the role of the son where he's living with a lie. But there's the whole bit that

the dad actually did get a turkey and it's just... Yeah. You didn't get shit. But I'm not putting myself in the role of the dad, I'm putting myself in the role of the son. I doubt it would cost him anything to come clean and be like, look, here's the deal.

This is what I did. This is what happened. Let's go get another turkey next spring. What I would do is just record this and send it to him. And let him put it together. Or tell him after he gets another turkey. Because maybe he won't. Yeah, be like, you know, Pops, you'll appreciate this.

Okay, let's get down to what we're fixing to talk about. Oh, no, one last thing. Randall Williams is here. Yes. Minus his pituitary gland. Yes. How's it feel? Are you as smart as you used to be?

No, I'm not. Really? Yeah. Categorically not? No. Really? Yeah. Tell me more.

A lot of issues with memory and short-term and long-term memory. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know. I was joking when I said that. Oh. We can cut this out. No. So you've been feeling?

You've been, since you're a surgeon? Oh, yeah. No, it's been a pretty rough road, just ups and downs. But yeah, I mean, I had a lot of symptoms that were pretty similar to like a traumatic brain injury. Really? Yeah. I wasn't aware of that.

No. Is it bad that I asked you? No. I'm pretty upfront about it all. Are you on any hormone replacement yeah i'm on um i'm on a couple different hormone replacements like testosterone and thyroid hormone and i take uh hydrocortisone which replaces cortisol um and then i've got stimulants i've got antidepressants i've got sleeping pills i've got the whole mix are you serious oh yeah and you got a big bear this spring and and

and growth hormone so every morning i'm like barry bonds wow really yeah yeah it's the real deal oh i mean i knew that this was a big deal but I didn't know that you were really, I didn't know there was that much to it. Yeah. No, it's been a pretty serious, it's been a pretty serious struggle, but. Better than the alternative. I'm all good, yeah. You're on the right side of the grave. He did get a big bear at this point.

I did, yeah. I got a big bear. Still hunting, still carrying on. Well, you're tagged out this point. I did, yeah. I got a big bear. Still hunting, still carrying on. Well, you're tagged out now. That's true, yeah. I just meant in the general sense. Oh, okay. I have tags for this fall.

I was like, now you are going to get in trouble. Now you are going to get in trouble. No, yeah, it's been pretty crazy. I started a new job around that time, and I had to postpone the start of that job for about a month while I went to California and got surgery. And yeah, so it's been a learned a lot about the human body and a lot about myself. And yeah, I didn't mean to make this so serious. No, you didn't. But I guess what's happened is you being so casual about it was like effective.

Yeah. At least in the way you were putting it forward to your friends, you seemed casual about it. So I thought it was more casual than it is. No, I mean, I haven't held any secrets, but I haven't really broadcast a whole lot of this stuff i don't put any of that on social media or anything like that but it's kind of hard to this is a little bit worse than this yeah um well yeah no i mean it's some of the symptoms like i i can't hide you know

like sometimes for a while there i was like crying all the time and just have very little control over my emotions and all that stuff so do you enjoy movies more now you know I've always been a crier at the cinema so uh that that hasn't changed much but yeah um and it's pretty crazy all these uh chemicals and Chemicals and processes in your body and kind of take for granted that it all works. Yeah. But we're figuring it out. And luckily, I've had a lot of help with that. So, yeah. Anything else?

No. I'm typing something. Hold on. I feel like I'm at the doctor's office describing my symptoms and you're taking notes um if you were at the doctor's office another dude would come in here a minute and ask you the same set of questions oh sure yeah and then i i didn't have a copay when i like i was saying like i was saying to the other person that was just in here a minute ago. Yeah.

No, I mean, it's, yeah. I mean, just to sum up, it's been tough, but it's all good. We're figuring it out. Damn. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. Later, I'll ask you if there's anything else we can do to help.

I don't think so. Well, back when you had your pituitary gland, you, the people here, so the reason, one of the commonalities, here's what I'm trying to say, one of the commonalities that binds our friend Randall Williams and Doug Dern and my brother Matt Ronell

is that they were all participants for good and bad, in the documentary film that we recently released called Stars in the Sky. And we're going to talk about this a little bit and kind of talk about the making of and aftermath of and the themes that we explore in the movie. The movie, if you want to go

watch this that's what this is really about i learned there's a writer ian frazier and he always says that he's written a lot of books and he says he likes to very cleanly um in the beginning of his books tell people what a book was about so he begins a book with the line, this is a book about Indians. He wants people to know what they're getting into. The goal of this here is that you will go watch this movie. Tell them where to watch the movie, Anas. You have to go to, do you know? Vimeo.

Yeah. You have to go to Vimeo. It's called Stars in the Sky, a hunting story. But what's the website? Stars in the Sky, a hunting story. But what's the website? Stars in the Sky Film. And it brings you to Vimeo, and you've got to pay some money. But it's really helpful to us if you do. You've got to pay some money, and you can stream it and download it.

Super helpful if you do. We started the film. It's such a weird story how it went, because we started the film. Do you even remember? That was how I met Brodydy who now works with us when we film the first bit of the film was several summers ago shifty's in the film and she's five well how's that help well it was no more than five years ago oh i see but but that was not even when we started making it oh started making it several summers ago you didn't film me first no the first thing like you were after me you filmed me in 15 or 16 was it really that long ago my god it was right after we did the first podcast which was

like june of 2015 yeah and we had already of 2015. We had already filmed parts of it then. Cause the first, like going into it, we knew we were going to do, we kind of knew we were going to do two things going into it. It was going to be this exploration of, um, sort of the,

the, the mindset and conflicts and contradictions and loves and hates and worries and joys of contemporary american hunters uh and i felt that you know when we started working on it we felt that to do this you needed to kind of show like what a hunting trip looked like to demonstrate to people what it could be and how it could feel and smell and look and so the first thing we did in the movie was we just went and recorded we went and filmed a hunt and we filmed the hunt in alaska for a sitka black tail deer and it was meant to in some ways if people watch meat eater meat eater the tv show you kind of get you you can

almost kind of imagine what this hunt might be though it's it's structured very differently but just like this kind of like through line it starts with someone leaving uh leaving a building and striking off into the woods and it ends with someone coming back to a building um and what i i thought when i mapped out in the movie like the things i wanted to talk about the thing the themes i wanted to explore and ask various hunters from around the country their impressions of and uh i realized that all these topics were things that could pretty easily spring off of conversations that one might have or thoughts that one might have or spring off actions and things that could happen on a hunt so this through line of this hunt winds up being winds up presenting these conversation starters and later over the one of being over the years as we were able to do it we interviewed a great many people from all around the country and asked

them uh their particular thoughts and this is kind of where some of the contradictions came into place their particular thoughts about these themes and issues that come up, and then assemble this thing like a documentary film. And an added voice I wanted to bring in, I actually want to get him on. An added voice that I brought in is a philosopher and an animal rights ethicist named Robert Jones. And he's a steady line as being someone who's not connected to hunting and is actually adversarial to hunting, like opposes hunting outright. And he also speaks about these different themes. What we did is we wound up interviewing 20...

Can I add that he's definitely a star of the doc. I think that... Oh, he's very credible. He really adds a lot. You know, it was a very smart move, I think, on your part on directing that. But, I mean, just to have both viewpoints, you know. Everybody that I talked to is like, I mean, good thing you had him in there. One thing you always get from people is you always get people,

we encounter this a lot when you're dealing with ideas. People get angry when you give someone a voice. They think that giving someone a voice in media, that giving someone a voice is tacit approval of what that person has to say or that you by giving someone a voice you endorse what they have to say and i hear about it a little bit for his inclusion in the movie like why would you give voice to him and then when we had rob bishop on the podcast and like like we have a pretty consistent uh pro public lands like like you know as a company whatever we have a pretty consistent pro public lands philosophy and rob bishop is um i don't want to call him anti-public lands at all but he he opposes a lot of the things I believe in around public lands management.

And people are like, I can't believe you'd give Rob Bishop a voice. I'm like, Rob Bishop is the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. I don't know that he's lacking a voice. It wasn't like I went and found someone who had no way to, I mean, the guy could talk to anyone he wants, anytime he wants. And this animal rights guy is a professor at a school in California. Doesn't lack a voice. But that was probably one of my favorite interviews that we did for that

because it was so, it was really challenging. It was challenging to, like like if we were sparring um it was challenging he brought up some really challenging ideas so if uh like richard spencer or kelly hunted would you have them on um would you have them on um it's a good it's a really good question like knowing what we now know about r kelly if we were doing a film you know why i probably I probably wouldn't because what he's most known for, which is sex abuse of minors, in the case of R. Kelly, what he's most known for isn't what I would be asking about. It was so peripheral to the conversation

that that aspect of their personality or that aspect of their biography would be this this like really weighty thing in the room yeah we just sat down and did an interview with we did an interview with bo jackson about his relationship with hunting um and as part of that you can imagine that we talked a lot about his career as an athlete because it would sort of be this this like weird thing to have not come up the elephant in the room yeah and so in that case i see like that's good devil's advocating but in that way yeah yeah i was trying to put you in a spot i was just i was legitimately i was legitimately curious oh yeah but but no this dude was fascinating um hit like his main thing is that that the main point he tries to get across you have to watch

because i could like i kind of cherry rather than like picking moments where he didn't do great i picked i felt like i that should say i that we working on it kind of picked his best points you know and and he counter it like he has really good counters for things where hunters love to hunters love to talk about it's natural right oh man's always hunted we didn't hunt we wouldn't be here today it's natural and he brings up there are a lot of things that are natural fratricide matricide rape that have always occurred does that it's yeah i i does that mean that it's good? Does that in and of itself an endorsement of the activity? Right.

It's not a vindication of hunting that's always been done. I mean, we've always, like from a historical perspective, we've always not driven cars. Yeah. historical perspective we've always not driven cars you know yeah so uh let me finish my i want to finish my little preamble here then we'll get into a couple other things because yanni has yanni has some uh he's thought about how to how to discuss this and he's got a good idea for it but the preamble being that i had this idea that it felt very cohesive um and then we talked to so many people and then you run into this problem where how long is something?

So then you, in the end you have 90 minutes or so, a hundred minutes. And you go through the very, very painful process of narrowing this down to where you have a hundred plus hours of interviews with people that you need to fit into 100 minutes. And then you wind up with something where someone would watch it and not this isn't saying something's good or bad it's just a fact of life someone would watch

it and never have and never have any idea what it was how you framed it in your head because it only makes sense right the framing of it only makes sense to someone who felt that they were seeing a process that they were trying to put in place. And when it's all done, you can't expect that people would watch. You go like, oh, I see what you're doing. Because so much falls away. When we started this show that you're listening to right now, I had like a precise idea of what I was trying to do. No one has ever written and said, you know what? I see what you did there.

It's just, it lives in your head only, you know. But the guiding through line is just these themes. And we're going to ask you guys a little bit about your feelings about these themes and thoughts that you might have had. And you could speak to kind of like what you meant and what was represented in the movie or if things that you wish you said and hadn't said. And one of the things I want to start with, with Matt, and this was like in there almost up to the end. I don't think it's in there.

It's not in there. It was the ending for a long time, for a long time, the ending of the movie, almost the ending of the movie was you saying, if you woke me up a hundred years from now, is that how many years he had said? I can't remember.

I think so. If you woke me up 100 years from now and told me there was no hunting, I wouldn't be surprised and I wouldn't care. I don't remember saying that, but yeah, I guess I still, that still rings true for me. You were saying, I don't believe in hunting for hunting's sake. I'm just stuck being this. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't think that hunting makes someone a better person. If you want somebody to be a better person there's better other more constructive uses of their time it's like if i was going to advocate for something after that that's going to carry on after i'm gone it wouldn't be hunting i mean reading books maybe or volunteering you know being a good civil servant is far more important to me than the future of hunting once i'm gone if i if i care about hunting at all after i'm gone it's because you know i i uh it's i guess it'd be i'd have to be convinced and i partially am that it's it's good for wildlife conservation i guess there's part of me that wants to look down from the heavens

and see wild animals running around still. But, yeah, I don't see hunting as making people better. 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. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

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movie we took all of the people that we interviewed and asked them about their hopes and fears for the future everyone was really when talking about like a future, everyone, except for two individuals, my two brothers, were the only people out of everyone we talked to who didn't in some way worry about what would be lost.

And these are two of the people that I know that like it the most yeah uh i uh i i just watched dr maria for the first time a couple nights ago and i do remember like i'm proud of the way i described it that i'm i'm stuck being a hunter i would i mean would just, I'd have an identity crisis that 48 years of age would be just kind of jarring if all of a sudden I stopped hunting. You know, I don't know what I would do or how I'd relate to what might, what would preoccupy my thoughts, you know? So, um, that's why i guess i hunt my kids recently i brought this up a couple times i think but my kids were recently asking about like why we had to go um i think it was ice fishing on a cold day and like why do we have to go ice fishing it's so cold and i tell him well you know i can

think of a bunch of reasons but one would be you'll get to hang out with way cooler people if you learn how to do this and so when i think when i think about like if someone says oh it's gonna be in 50 years it'll be gone i wouldn't i wouldn't be able to have a huh it would like really make me sad but a lot of it would be nostalgia nostalgia for like a vert like the version of it that i experienced and imagine that other people would experience yeah yeah there's i, so many of my positive memories about hunting are about the people I hunt with. I mean, that is, it's doing these adventurous things with people I care about. I don't like it as a means for meeting new people very much i just have this small group of people that i hunt with if i'm going to make friends with

somebody i don't want it to be like through hunting probably that's it's not a vehicle for forming friendships for me really although like a lot of a lot of my closest friends i've met through hunting but i don't want to i don't use it in that way you know like if you're at a wedding reception and someone looks across the room and says oh you know that guy likes to hunt a lot you don't feel like a gravitational pull yeah i want to talk to him about it and then yeah i want to talk to him but but if he's if he's i mean there's just so many guys they're gonna get the phone out and show me all the big shit they got and then i'm gonna be jealous and then i'm gonna wish that you would go they'd go away you know you can always tell no you know it's like i met

doug i i and janice through hunting and i consider very good friends of mine so i i don't know i should really think this out better before well you know what you can always tell when a conversation is going to go wrong. When you're at a wedding reception and you go and talk to the guy that someone says likes to hunt, you'd be like, oh, yeah, what have you been hunting? You're like, oh, yeah, we've been getting a lot of turkeys. Use a 12-gauge. You always know. You always know.

That should be the 20th thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I had a guy. If it's not like, oh, yeah, where do you guys go? I had a guy on the ranch where my wife co-owns and works, the dude ranch, another co-owner. He likes to talk.

Careful now. He likes to talk hunting once in a while. Careful. Okay. You should have set it up different. Yeah. you thank you man i would not i wasn't even thinking about that i guess i've grown comfortable with this podcasting thing i just think is it too late conversation yeah yo no you're right you're absolutely right it would it could be devastating i don't know we'll cut it out i don't know if she listens to this or not oh we'll cut it out um no no no no you don't need to cut it out i i can keep

this part in yeah really yeah i'm willing i mean we didn't i didn't even say where i was really going with it yeah there's another thing you say in the movie and you do say this in the movie and i i love the line what i just i was now i want to know oh you can ask him later yeah well there was a another there was another person okay different in a different locale and they they said they said to me exactly you say, when the firearm or the weapon is the first thing that comes up, it's just a bad sign of how the conversation is going to go. And because I just think of weapons as something that you use to slow down animals so that you can cook and eat them. I don't give a fuck about that shit.

You know, halftime, I can't even remember what caliber my goddamn rifle so he says so what are you used to kill them and he wanted me to go over 855 your shit's a shotgun with uh bullets in it um there's a thing you say in the movie and i and i love it and people it's like the one line that people bring up that people like the most in the movie and i don't even know what you really mean by i mean i know what you mean by it but you're saying uh you said saying if cabbages had legs, I'd hunt them too. Yeah. I think that. So is it that you like to hunt things that have legs?

Well, I like to hunt things that are motile. I mean, I also. What does that word mean? That they move. Yeah. Not mobile. Well, yeah, I think it's just another way of saying the same thing. I'm checking.

There's also, well, you know what an animal that doesn't move is, or an organism that doesn't move is? Cecil. It's a Cecil organism. No, yeah, you're right. Capable of motion. Yeah. And I like to gather Cecil organisms.

I just gathered some horse mushrooms the other day. How you been doing on wild asparagus? Kicking ass. It's been really, really good. My pee's been stinking every day. That's good. Can you tell people a hot tip on finding wild asparagus? You taught me.

Oh. You can spot it driving down the river in your boat at full tilt you gotta look for last year's stems right do you have it in wisconsin yeah we have ditch asparagus we have that too but uh no yeah ditch is a pretty pretty abundant there um if you know where to go yeah yeah your riverboat isn't fast but you've i've seen you spot it at full tilt oh yeah and and you know i i can also spot green new stems at full tilt really yeah you just kind of get a search image in your brain tell them about tell them about last year's growth because this is a hot tip yeah so you look for last year's stalks as you know and it puts off a branch

at a perfect yeah a perfect 90 perfect perpendicular yeah to where the branch with the stem creates two perfect 45 degree angles and that's key because there's a lot of other plants that superficially look like the dead stems look superficially like But the way that branch comes off that stem like you could square a house with that sum of bitch. Man, I've been finding some like, I don't know why but it seems like at the tail end of the season

they get fatter. I've been finding some freakingicking quarter pounders lately. Figure around is a silver dollar. It's like a steak knife. Yeah. It's just as good. Right. And that's interesting.

And I realized that because I got some that was grown in a garden from Doug's wife. That's the easiest way to find it is to actually propagate it. And when she first busts out. Because there's no way it's over in that part of my garden. Oh, yeah. Just look out over there. I'll let you finish, right? Yeah.

When she first busted them out, I'm kind of like, oh, those big old things? Because I never buy asparagus that looks like that in the store because it's gross. Oh, but out of the ground, man. You can eat it like a carrot stick. Yeah. I mean, just unbelievable, the difference. Like you said, just as tender and as tasty as the little guys. It's all non-native, right?

Yeah. It's all like feral house cats, but feral asparagus. So if cabbages had legs, I'd hunt them too. Well, I think that Dan Doty was there that day and he asked me, what is it about meat? And that's what

precipitated that. So I guess I don't want to just seem to be like it's all about meat. It's like I love to eat all kinds of food. I love vegetables. I love just be like it's all about me it's like i love to eat all kinds of food i love i see what you're saying vegetables i love um it's just to procure me you gotta hunt it so yeah that's that the product of hunting the food product of hunting just so happens to be meat but if if cabbages ran around in the woods i would freaking love to go hunt me a cabbage

you don't like not that you won't do it like you'll eat in restaurants like the rest of us you don't relish buying meat well with one exception my it just so happens that my three favorite foods are um conventionally raised meat products. Tell me more. Hot dogs? Bologna? No. Chicken wings with ranch, chicken wings with blue cheese,

and chicken wings are my three favorite foods. Well, that changed because your old favorite food was pizza and your second no your favorite food was hot wings your second favorite food was pizza and then one day this is a big deal this is a big moment

I like this story one day you go into a restaurant and they had hot wing pizza which was not good and you ordered it and were surprised that it wasn't good. And it really like shook you up. No, you're right. Too much of a good thing. I remember how delighted you were.

It was like the first hunt we might've done. I think Juanita was there and we were in Ennis maybe. And we went to some random, you know, restaurant. That was the first year it was open. Probably the last year it was open. And you looked at the menu and you were like, this is my kind of place. And all it was was pizza, hot dogs, wings.

And you ordered one of everything and ate one of everything and just happy as can be. I do like the bar food. Oh, another thing I really like, and I just got to say this, and then I'll stop talking so much, but I really like. Well, I'm asking you questions right now. Okay. I really like, and I just got to say this and I'll stop talking so much, but I really like. Well, I'm asking you questions right now. Okay. I really like. I'm working around the way you don't deal poker. So I'm going to.

Okay. Yeah. I like some thin sliced turkey on Wonder Bread with a bunch of mayo and cranberry sauce. Like Thanksgiving leftovers. That's a favorite food? Fuck. So, you've expressed, like you don't relish buying meat. I don't buy meat.

Because there's a fruit galley. The chicken wing thing is like, it's a major treat. And my wife, my wife weighs probably 100 and what do you think? 15, 30 pounds? Yeah, she's 130. Very similar to my wife. She eats as much food or more food than I do, and I'm not exaggerating. And that woman can freaking monster truck some chicken wings, man.

It's kind of like something we do together. What I'm getting at here, let me tell you where I'm going with this. You don't relish buying meat. No. I don't buy meat except when i go to a restaurant yeah and a lot of that like it comes from a couple places i think and you've expressed this and i'm sure you're like i'm sure your feelings about it evolved and changed over the years because all of our feelings evolve and change over the years but i think that you are a naturally

very frugal person um and you would never be like, well, why would I buy something when I have an approximation of it in my freezer? And you're not anybody – sure, it's more convenient that it's all ready to roll and thawed out, but you'll go home and thaw elk meat out in your microwave and eat it because you're frugal. But there's also a little bit of ethics mixed in there. There's some ethics and there's also another dimension that I tried to explain. Um, when I was interviewed for the documentary, it didn't make the cut and I can see why, cause I wasn't very clear and I probably won't be now either, but there's this childlike it's from childhood. This is where this feeling emerged was in childhood for me this giddy sense of getting something from free to eat from nature and that is an abiding component of what drives me to hunt and gather is in fish is that what that

giddy feeling of like you doing it yourself and getting your food from nature for free like that it's like it's like a thing that I've been thinking box we've been eating a lot of morels from Doug's farm that he picked. Morels are good. They're good. Yeah. But they're not that good. They're not that good.

I mean, they're great, but people's enthusiasm for them. Listen, listen. They ain't chicken wings. No. I know who's not getting any more Morels. Hear me out. No, hear me out. Hear me out.

Hear me out. I like Morels. Okay. I like morels love morels but people's and people who look for and find morels have an enthusiasm that exceeds the flavor of the morel yeah yeah it's it it's like it's not like they're like dude come may i'm eating a shitload of morels whether i gotta buy them or not that's not true people that hunt morels if all of a sudden there was a drought and no morels came up it's not like they're going to be driving around calling to stores to find morels because they have to have morels they morels are great because you find the sun's

bitches growing out of the dirt yeah yeah and they're great and they're great and they're great i remember it's like you can't untang you can't untang like you can't disconnect the two yeah i remember when i did i did a deep dive on mushrooms for a number of years three four years meanwhile you were like really infatuated learning a lot of different species three, four years. You mean when you were really infatuated by mushrooms? Learning a lot of different species. Yeah, you got to where you knew more about mushrooms than anyone I knew. And I remember learning that they have no calories, and that was very disappointing to me

because I'm like, yeah, dang it, really? So this isn't like getting a food item anymore. Although morels we read have protein in them. Oh. Do they really have minerals. Morels, we read, have protein in them. Oh, do they really? Mm-hmm. That's interesting. They sure taste like they would.

They taste like freaking meat, man, when you put a little of the good, yeah. Flour on them and brown them in a bunch of butter. Oh, my God. Do you guys see what I'm saying? Doug, I'm not dissing

your Morels, man. Okay, well, let me ask you this, Doug. When was the last time you bought a Morel? I have never bought a Morel, and I've never sold a Morel either. I've given a lot of them away. And I agree completely with what you're saying about the fascination with going out there.

And, I mean, I was so frustrated this spring because I'm looking and I'm looking. You know, I'm going out almost daily because the conditions are right and I've got great spots and my wife and I were out looking for them and and uh we we came around and we had taken a pretty good hike and and ironically found this big batch that that you saw and then you got some of right behind the barn I mean you know 150 yards from the house. And I had left that tree alone, but we came around there, and it's just this fascinating sort of magical thing to come there and see this little village of these little village. The roly-poly houses.

You know, little fairies and and you you see them and then you look away for a second and you look back and okay i know there was one there where did it go and we we spent trish and i spent an hour and a half there picking morels and just keep looking and you know and and trish said we picked 125 or 175 morels there, and she said thank you for every one that she got. Oh, she thanked the earth. Well, I mean, it's the magic of it. It is magical. Yeah, you can take somebody that's never seen a morel, never eaten a morel, out morel hunting, and they'll get that.

Yeah. Like that about it. And with those things, too, like that, that makes them extra special is that you can't farm them, right? Right. There's something wild about it. And with those things too, like that, that makes them extra special is that you can't farm them. Right? Right. There's something wild about them. Yeah, they're wild.

It's like people get excited about the asparagus, but you can go to the store and buy them. But it's still a thousand times cooler to find it. Or you can grow them. They completely defy cultivation.

I think that when you see morel, it's wild grown i don't think you can i don't think yeah i don't think you can cost effectively yeah but i think i i know that you can buy these little pots where you water them and if you do that's my understanding is no one's figured out a way to like make money cultivating morels talking about you just your relationship which is like the meat right and you talk about like hunting isn't like the meat because i'd hunt cabbages right um but then you you have some pasture land at your house and you guys raise up you and your buddies raise up some lambs we did for a while yeah and then you know you'd go

out and have to dispatch, say, the lamb, and you didn't like that, hated it. No, I did not relish that. There was like, I was doing with the butler. Let me lay one more part on, then you can talk about the whole experience. Because you don't like that. No.

You kind of dread it. And then, but then you really enjoy the lamb meat. Mm-hmm. So is that connected to hunting or is that as different from hunting is picking asparagus? You know what I mean? Like, like what is that?

Cause in the movie we see your place and you're kind of a little livestock area there. Yeah. Um, so the, the raising the sheep, I was doing that with some friends that they hunt a little bit but not a lot and they got young families and they were using the meat and i would take a little bit of it but it was more to encourage them to spend time at my house and just like something

to do with my community of people you know my friends um i think that when i kill an animal hunting it's like it's it's usually after a tremendous amount of work so the feeling of accomplishment kind of kind of offsets the sadness a little bit you know kind of overrides it a little bit because there's so much work involved in finally getting something but when you kill domestic animal it's just the sadness without that other component to it does that make any sense yeah i'd puzzle over with the because people like oh you just like to kill but then when you go out to like and maybe some people don't but anyone that i have that works in livestock that I know,

they might really love to hunt, but I never meet anyone who's real excited to go out and shoot the pig. Right. Right. Yeah. I like hunting right up to the point where I pull the trigger and then I stop liking it until the point where the animal is starting to become meat.

Oh, really? Yeah. Huh. If you're tracking something or have to finish something off, that is too nerve-wracking and sad. You're watching the life go out of something. I know the sadness is real because I've seen so many people cry, but then be really glad that they did it.

I know people talk about it, and I feel like I've even paid some lip service to it, but when I really think about it and I'm really honest about it, the sadness is only when it goes bad. When you make a mistake, then it's awful. But no, to see something go BAM down on the ground, never sadness. Never.

It's only when it's ugly. Doug, one of the themes... Matt was themeless. Matt's conversation was themeless. Meaning, I asked you about all the themes but your perspectives are just interesting perspectives. But Doug is like part like Doug's role in the film

as part of a theme. Okay. Did you feel manipulated by the movie? Not at all. You didn't feel manipulated? No I felt like. I hope you weren't because i was i was kind of hoping that that's who you were i mean you look well no let me tell you the way in which let me tell you the way in which doug seemed like doug to me no it's doug it's doug it's doug absolutely but if you were manipulated the manipulation occurred with what's said

before your segment what's said before your profile piece and oh about trophy hunting and the first sentence that comes out of your mouth in the movie right which was not the first sentence that came out of your mouth when we sat down to interview you so there was a manipulation of what you said and there was a manipulation of when you said it the amount of emphasis you might put on it and then to have it be the first thing out of your mouth really sets that tees up a point and it starts out with the animal ethicist doug segment is kicked off by the animal ethicist and animal rights activist who says the most egregious form of hunting is trophy hunting. And then the next sentence you hear is Doug saying, yeah, I think you say, yeah, I guess I'm a trophy hunter, or yeah, I do some trophy hunting. It was interesting.

Which, oh. No, go ahead. I'm going to let you go. I just want to set the scene a little bit. Yeah. And then the movie tells the story of a particular deer. Right. And the way I feel that it might have been taken by you

to be slightly manipulative is it takes your life story and family story and the death of your brother to sort of serve this thing of to sort of make this point that when you go into a person's house and you see a dead deer hanging on their wall without asking them you will never know. You might have assumptions about what that thing represents and assumptions about what it stands for and what it's supposed to mean and what it's supposed to make you as the looker feel, but you will never really know when you look at something dead,

hanging on someone's wall is kind of what like your story is so beautiful as a freestanding thing but it's kind of like it's taken to service that point like hey let's yeah let's talk about a dead deer on a wall i know just the fucking deer that dog's house yeah um no i i didn't feel uh manipulated but by it at all. And in fact, I think before we even started to roll camera, you said that you had been speaking with this fellow, Robert Jones, is that his name?

And who I was my favorite, he was my favorite person in the film. I mean, other than everybody in this room. That was a good save, Doug. But I mean, because I like the way he asked the questions or made the points, and I couldn't disagree with his ideas. It was more the exploring of them that I was more interested in. And in the case of that deer, before the cameras rolled, you said, so we were just talking to this animal ethicist. Oh, I told you this? Yeah.

Okay. And you said, so he said the most egregious thing is trophy hunting. And you said, well, what do you mean? I told you that? Yeah, before the cameras rolled. Sitting in that bar. Sitting in the bar, yeah. And you remember the deer hanging on the wall full of deer and uh i said well there's a bunch of trophies right there like you know what's the um and we didn't talk about those deer at all we talked about a particular deer in the story behind it and uh my it's interesting because one of the things my wife said about the movie

is that you were a younger man when this was made because of the time it passed. And not only was I a younger man, my thinking – She was saying you were a younger man. Your wife said you were a younger man. Yeah, yeah. She noticed that I wasn't as great. Was she feeling frisky after watching it? Anyway, I don't remember exactly.

I watched it the second time. She's like, I don't remember you looking like that. I watched it the second time the other night with my daughter in Chicago. And that was a real interesting thing too. So how things have evolved for me since, um, as we tell them, as, as, as you tell in the, in the movie, um, my brother, my younger, my late brother, Matthew, um, and I had talked about deer management and, um, it was conservation based deer management, but really a part of it was, you know, we were sort of, oh, we've been killing with these little forkies, you know,

the thing that we get a basket full of. And we had started talking about deer management, things that we could do better and, you know, habitat work and all that sort of thing. And then he died tragically. And I kept that idea alive. And, uh, we, I think we did a good job of, of, of conservation, you know, deer management. And, uh, it sort of culminated in the fact that I, I got to kill that deer. And, uh, it was, uh, you know, as I said in the movie,

it was sort of a remembrance of that, of that whole process. It wasn't like, oh yeah, we manipulated our landscape and we let all these bucks go and then all these things happen. And it wasn't that, it was much more, I mean, the first thing I thought about when I killed that deer was him and what we had done and how close it was to where that had all happened. And so it was really the remembrance of a whole group of things that happened in over a period of time. And then it wasn't that important. I mean, the deer is real important symbolically, but what I've learned since is that, or acted on since, is that the conservation was way more important.

Any of those restrictions or attitudes that we had about not, you know, shooting younger deer, that's all gone now. Yeah. restrictions or attitudes that we had about not you know shooting younger deer that's all gone now yeah because the thing that's more important now is conserving to me conserving the resource and doing the right thing for the species and um far down that road we want to go but because of where our farm is located that's you know it's a part of it and so to me it was just sort of tell me what you're talking about because they're gonna be confused if not oh yeah i'm sorry but it brings up it brings up an interesting point where you and i find this all the time like you know you're always leaving these these sort of time stamps by things you say but then earlier i mentioned to matt how people evolve over time and and your understanding of yourself and understanding of things around you change and you try to um you know i have these certain like things i feel

consistently throughout life and i explain them in a way and then i start to realize that that i know that the thing is there like let's say there's some like undeniable there's some undeniable truth okay that can't be debated that it's there like there's an objective reality that's there and and i feel that that objective reality stays constant through life and i'll look at that objective reality and i'll say to people um you know why that's that way right it's that way because and i'll explain why it's that way and then 10 years ago by the objective reality is still there and i'll say you know why i think it's that way and it'll be different and some people will be like what you used to think

and i'm just like yeah and i came up with a ago. I'm like, I used to shit my diapers. I used to shit my diaper. You usually say it like this. I used to shit my diapers, but things change. It became uncomfortable. No, no, that's not it. That's not it. The devil's in the details with this. It's, yeah, I used to shit my diapers too, but things change.

That's how you say and you may well still again the sad reality so point being well there's a saying uh what's that saying it's uh once a man twice a boy yeah that's good yeah or what walks on um four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening. That's what you had to say. That's what, was it Oedipus? I think you're right. When he, like, Oedipus, his deal was, we talked about Oedipus before, didn't we?

Oedipus' deal deal was he was raised not by his actual parents but he didn't know that they weren't his parents and he goes to a soothsayer the soothsayer says to Oedipus oh you know what's gonna happen to you you'll kill your dad and marry your ma but he doesn't know that he thinks he lives with his parents uh-huh right right he splits to to to get away from his thing and then winds up in some crazy town. And to get into the town, you got to answer a riddle. And he answers that riddle. And the guy that gave him the riddle dies or he kills him.

And he goes into town, gets in a fight with a guy, kills him, marries the gal. It's dad and ma. That's where the riddle came from. Well, but what I was trying to get at was this. That was the riddle that he had to. Well, but what I was trying to get at was this. That was the riddle that he had to solve. No, what I'm trying to get at is this. What your kids asked me last night.

When I caught you, your time stamp. Yes. In this movie. In the digital age, they'll live forever in some form or another. Your time stamp is a guy that's interested in growing big, huge, giant bucks. Because in your mind, big, huge, giant bucks are emblematic of a healthy deer population. And then chronic wasting, and then the movie ends,

and you get really concerned about chronic wasting disease, and it emerges that a leading theory on the spread of chronic wasting disease is the deer most likely to go all over the damn place. And that's young bucks and then you start uh you kind of have an attitude of trying to lower deer numbers in your area because that's the game agency objective too is just the drive deer numbers down down down to slow the spread of chronic wasting disease so had we made a movie about you uh five years two years after we did right it'd be a completely different story except the thing that so there you are saying stuff that you don't even believe anymore not true he'd believe those things if the circumstances were still the same. Yeah. That's a good point. But the, what was the?

Oedipus? No. Sleep with your mom? You'll appreciate this. No, the thing that's consistent throughout it, and you and I have had this conversation before, and we've talked about it on the show before and we've talked about it on the show and we talked on podcasts we've had you know is that it's a part it's a the conservation of of the area and a part of what we were doing in uh growing you know bigger and older bucks is we were knocking the population down go ahead and call them big huge giant bucks that box dog i really don't like that expression um but um so you know more mature whatever we

it was a part of oh we've got a population problem and that was expressing itself in our in our woods um and and you know we were there was over browse and we were trying to regenerate oaks. And so, and we're killing a bunch of deer, but we happen to be targeting does more. And then I'm learning, well, you can't really stockpile bucks. It's not like you can just turn the whole farm into a whole bunch of bucks. Because, you know. This used to be all does, now it's all big bucks. And then it's, you know, and then the other thing that's interesting about

big giant bucks is once there starts to be a lot of them around, it's not that unusual. It's not that special anymore. Deer are special to me. And the fascination of seeing them in the woods. But anyway, so it was conservation-based. And that has been the overriding theme through my lifetime. That's what I meant by the objective reality. That's the phrase that I was looking for that I i couldn't remember um the objective reality is fixed the fixed thing the fixed thing

is conservation and so i i don't think that uh i've been accused um you know well i guess in some ways negatively about yeah well you used to be the guy who's all about right i didn't think you killed you know i thought you were a big buck hunter. I've been accused of that in bars and things like that. My response is, well, no, it's just always been the same idea is that we're

trying to do what's best and one of the byproducts of that was bigger bucks and older bucks. And so that was one of the things that happened of it. And I felt like not only was the standard, as we came to – we never named – you know how whitetail guys name deer when they see them on the camera and stuff? You don't name them until they're dead. We don't.

I like that a lot better. Well, and a friend of ours had said when he saw it, he goes, well, that is the standard by which all deer in the future will be judged. Right. And so, you know, that was how that happened. And so that's the part that made sense to me. And now that the resource, because of chronic wasting disease has been uh is threatened i mean we have high prevalence in our area um i can't i i have trouble with with the visualization now of seeing 100 deer in a field and and uh you know realizing that up to 35 to 40 of that 100 deer are carrying a fatal disease that they're also spreading around. Not in our area yet, but south of us.

So I'm trying to do what I can for it. So the conservation ethic of it is that overriding theme or that continuum of it. And the fascination of deer in the woods and the time in the woods is also the part of it that's been real consistent for me. But Jones brought up a lot of the questions that, and I never was offended by anything that the guy said. And I thought he was a fascinating guy because he talked about moral responsibility. And I feel that responsibility. And I think that all the folks that I like to hang out with anyway and hunt with and stuff, that they feel that responsibility for it too. Just like I feel a responsibility, you know, you're talking about the livestock that you raise and, you know, as you know, I raise cattle and there's, I have a, I have mixed

feelings about that, but at the end of the day, there's a, I feel a responsibility. I would never grow cattle in a way that, you know, that they are done on a large scale. It's just not something that I would do, and I'm in a position where I don't have to. Because you dislike large scale because it's large scale? You dislike what you assume comes with large scale or what you know to come with large scale? What I know to come with? If you have an experience, if you create an experience, I don't know if that's the right word, you create a reality or an experience for your cows,

what's the difference if you're doing it for that experience for 20 or that experience for 1,000? It's how they're raised. One of the things that you brought up was the desire of people now to know that their meat is humanely raised that their animals are like you see what i'm saying right it's not that it's large it's not that the fact that it's large scale it's like what efficiencies come with large scale that you don't like or or there's a i'm i don't want to put words in your mouth but there's probably an environmental

component exactly that's exactly right like if you right. Like if you're doing a thousand, then you've got a lot of manure you're dealing with. For a finite space. For a limited space. Confined feeding operations are environmentally problematic, to say the least. And when I was a kid, when you'd drive around our area, and you guys had been there, farm here, farm there their farm there and and sort of everything that was happening looks like a milk jug man yeah green hills red barn silos yep black and white cows and uh you know the the manure that was being uh produced on that farm where those cattle was pretty much going back in the field and there were times that you you know you kind of wish you had more because it was you know it

was it was it was a it wasn't a byproduct or a waste product that you're getting rid of. Yeah. So there's that. There's the living on concrete, a cow, a steer, whatever, living its life out in an environment like that. For me, I'm not going to judge other people that are doing it, but for me, I don't think that's morally responsible. I raise grass fed beef. I'm able to do it in a way that I think about all the time. Like, am I doing this right? Am I treating them well? Is this environmentally sensitive?

And then Robert Jones would say, you know, that's all great. But in the end, you kill it. Yeah, he'd say, well, let's take it one step further and not do it at all. Let's finish it up. Well. But you're sort of saying, like, no, you're sort of saying, I have to do it. This is the best I can do. He would challenge the idea that you have to do it, this is the best I can do, he would challenge the idea that you have to do it.

Yes. Yes, he sure would. But I think that that idea, when he talked about instinct, for instance, well, you know, we don't act on all of our instincts, but we can act on our instincts in a morally responsible way. There's an interesting point he said, when I smell bacon, I think, man, that bacon smells good. It was really interesting to hear him say that. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I don't take any of it lightly. You know, you were asking me about this last night or the day before or something, and it gets harder for me. You know, I loaded up a bunch of six-month-old calves, six-month-old steers and heifers last year and sent them down the road and listened to their mother's beller. And, you know, I mean, it was a decision that I had to make because of the cattle and all of that. And it was – I'm literally changing how I'm raising cattle because I don't want to do that again. I mean, I'm just going to raise them differently and not have big groups of cattle like that. I'm going to take them through their life so that when they do go to slaughter,

and I really want to move towards being able to have a USD-inspected mobile butcher come back into the barn, walk them on there, and they do all the work right there because the inspection is important to me because I sell the beef. But rather than even putting them on that truck to go to the locker where they then settle down, spend the night, and the next morning they die. That's how we do it now. Um, but I can tell you this, they have a great life up to that point, just like the deer on our farm do. Um, and I, and I, and I try to balance that with, you know, with that, that's that responsibility that I feel. And I think that, um, that, as you said said I think that's the best I can do a quick story for you a little digression I was at my friend Ana's house one time her dad was a vet but also a rancher and she had a bunch of friends over including some vegetarians are over and they get there and they got this little they got this little corral right off their house, and it's all the lambs are in the corral.

I said, what's going on with the lambs? She makes a throat-cutting gesture to me, like this is a sensitive subject, considering the people she has over. While we're there hanging out in her living room a truck backs in and the guy's custom plate is one shot jj she looks out the window she's like uh-oh and jj got out his 22 and set to work really wow what did they think of that no one really liked it but they he's set to work right then and there well i mean no one went out to view but it was just like you know yeah i was like a guy uh one shot jj's here yeah i wonder what he's for and he had the whole

he had his truck but then he also had his whole mobile anyhow yeah i've been real matter of fact about it in the past because i grew up with it you know with the the slaughtering of animals and and hunting and all of that i think that's key and i think that that that's like what makes you realize that it's just you know it's kind of like there's a lot of things a lot of sense a lot of a lot of tough issues that if you were raised in a range of environments you'd come out thinking the same thing like we'd all agree that no matter what kind of household we were raised in that violent crime is bad that you know beating somebody up is bad there are people who question that well yeah but i mean depending on how they're raised often or their level of sociopath

sociopathy right but go on 99 sure but people would agree that perpetrating violence against somebody's wrong but with hunting um or killing animals whether you were great raised in like a vegetarian household or a hunting house farming household has a huge bearing yeah what you end up thinking as an adult yeah i know that because i've had i i continue to have so much exposure to people who had such a very different upbringing and the things that i think of as just very matter of fact are sometimes shocking to people. Yeah. Look at even people that have been exposed a lot to

hunting and fishing. My wife, she's been exposed to hunting and fishing, I don't know, for her whole life. And ranching. And ranching. She doesn't hunt and fish, but she's been exposed to it. She thinks it's deplorable that we don't know for her whole life and ranching and ranching she doesn't hunt and fish but she's been exposed to it she thinks it's deplorable that we don't kill panfish i've talked about this on this here program a lot yeah and uh to me that is just i was told when i was a little kid that they don't feel stuff hold on expand on that because it's not just that we

don't kill pan okay so we catch the fish and we don't dispatch them. If you catch a catfish and throw it in the bottom of the boat, she acts like you're driving around with a deer flopping around in the back of your truck. Yeah. Or you'd have a rabbit in your game pouch kicking around back there. That's exactly how she views it. And when I try to counter her, my arguments are extremely thin. Like, I don't know what that thing is feeling.

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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 On x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all that narrative which i love it's like this sort of thing, and Pat Durkin's explored that narrative of your family farm and this NBNY that we get into in the movie, Nice Buck Next Year, this sort of ethos or this conservation ethic that perhaps is elastic in some way uh that it's like a really um

it's this really like compelling beautiful and very tidy story it's like this nice tidy package when you want to pluck it out and so and to have it be in a movie that you like pluck this little package out and bookend it with other people's sentiments it has it winds up feeling like conclusive you know but then it ends and shit goes on yeah well and right the story continues just like the story has continued to that farm for 115 years and one of the interesting things to me is how in the arc of my lifetime, we went from few deer to more deer to now to too many deer and disease. And at the same time, that's, if you're just isolating the deer, and at the same time, we have these other conservation issues on our, on our property and in our in the whole driftless area that are all sort

of intertwined together and so i see them as as a group of of issues that are intertwined together as opposed to you know people who are most interested in or in some cases solely interested in deer and deer only. And I don't, I don't know exactly how to wrap that all up real tidy, but I think that with the kinds of themes that we're talking about, the, the, the bigger ball of all of these things together is, is, you know, where I, where I rest my case in all of this, that I'm not just caring for one thing or trying to do one thing. I'm trying to do, and a lot of folks that I know doing that, and really the people that I personally respect the most

are trying to do something that's much more a wider conservation-based idea. Yeah. That's Leopold, the whole community. Yeah, yeah. something that's much more a wider conservation-based idea. Yeah. That's Leopold, the whole community. Yeah, yeah. From the soil all the way up to the sky. What was his – he didn't coin biome. What did he coin?

Randall? He would have known before. Yeah. In the old days, Randall would have known before yeah but the old days randall would have known but the land ethic and that that i mean and leopold is my he's my hero um in ways that i don't understand take out his recurve and take 70 yard shots at deer just see if you could hit him yeah Yeah, there's a book. There's a later book of his where he's... He used to. Just see if you could hit him. Yeah, there's a later book of his where he's hunting in New Mexico with some friend of his and there's a lot of

questionable shots. If you just saw him hunting now, you'd think he was a slob. This is the perfect segue if we wanted't want to jump into the ethics thing oh i thought we were talking about ethics oh well we talked about this idea of one of the things we talk about one of the themes rattle off a handful of themes and

i'll touch on this quick but i want to get i want to get to randall too um the patrilineal passage of hunting so we had yeah Yanni had this idea and we just you know conversations like movies going their own direction um Yanni said they're bringing up a bunch of the themes that we explore in the movie and we're just Yanni's gonna throw them out and I'm gonna give a handful of snapshots and then we're going to move into talking to Randall. But yeah, so we explore like patrilineal descent being, that's how like just, I'm not talking about the way things should be. I'm just talking about the way they are. 90% of the people that buy a hunting license in this country are men.

And most of those pick it up from their dad we talk about that and then we talk about cases that aren't that and and and it's sort of this chorus of characters talking about what it like what it was that pushed them in this direction and i oftentimes find the ones that are most interesting are the ones that aren't just the same old same old which is like you hung your dad on it you hung because your dad hunted yeah you hung because your dad hunted you hung because your dad hunted randall no my dad didn't hunt there you go see we're um we're statistically skewed right now there should be nine of us there should be and one of you uh no no that's not true that's not no that's not that i'm mixing that up with

the i'm mixing that up with the with the with the gender thing rattle off another one real quick uh hunter's pr problem yeah the way in the movie we get into try to explore this idea of the way a hunter experiences their actions and activities and the way those actions and activities look to people who are not that they are seeing there's a there's a really good book have you guys let him read milan kundera kundera's book the unbearable lightness of being it's a good book there's a guy and his girlfriend in this novel and and she was from the soviet bloc and he's not and they talk about when they see a parade when they watch a parade what she thinks when she sees a parade and what he thinks when he

sees a parade same thing but they it conjures very different emotions in them. So we get into that a little bit. The question, like, why have ethics become so intertwined with today's hunting? If you go back to the first people, the first Siberians that came into the New World, the Western Hemisphere, what's now the U.S., did they feel, was there an ethical conundrum? Was the sadness there? Or other animals that are alive now on our planet. Yeah. Is there sadness when the wolf, when that are alive now on our planet. Yeah.

Is there sadness when the wolf, when that elk finally bleeds out and dies? Is the wolf like, dude, I'm always kind of bummed. I imagine the fact that ancient man didn't have a choice is a major mitigating factor and if you look at you know we don't explore this fully at all but if you look at there was also like kind of a hallmark of indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures and this is something robert jones brings up and he winds up contradicting himself it's not in the movie but some dad liked to release the whole interview he winds up contradicting himself because he's okay with indigenous hunting yet his point is that animal doesn't care about your things that he kept telling me like you you talk about ethics but animals don't care about your ethics they're getting killed they feel pain and they die they don't care what kind of trip you're on yet he

expresses to me being okay with indigenous hunters because it has religious connotations for them i'm like the animal doesn't know it has religious connotations you're contradicting what you just told me and maybe i feel something something that borders on the religious. But it's a thing where people that are anti-hunters oftentimes have to find these ways to make other things that they feel should be okay, okay. And the thing that's hard for them to explain is it's hard for them to be like, well, why can indigenous people hunt? Because they don't want to say they can't because it's like colonialism. But you wonder why then, like, it brings it all the way back around to what we were just talking

about with Leopold and, like, Pope and Young, right? There's plenty of stories of those boys going out on hunting trips with hundreds of arrows because they were known to fling at distances now that even the best archers think are long and far with today's equipment, right? And so, even in that short period of time,

what is that? When did Pope and Young come around? Like, I think the 40s? No, no of time, what is that? When did Pope and Young come around? I think the 40s. No, no, no. Was it that? It could have been like weirdly early too, but I want to. Either way, within the last hundred years, right? So look where the hunting ethics has come in that short period of time. Yeah, or just some of the classic gun writers that are lobbing bullets out there

right taking shots with a yeah that's why we call yanni yanni o'connor yanni o'connor not because i lobbed shots actually lobbed shots we call him yanni van's wall too but um what yeah yanni o'connor jack o'connor he they'd like roll up on a group of bighorns and just everyone would start shooting. And they'd go, oh my gosh, we've all done it before. Well, there's also, I mean, this is going back a little further. 1961, Pope and Young. Was it that late? No.

No, really? Yeah. But that's when it became an official club. Pope and Young themselves, I think, were doing things prior to that, but the Pope and Young Club came around. Saxton and Art, right? I think so. Yeah, because Boone and Crockett Club was early, 1880s.

All right, Randall. Yes. So am I doing any justice, Yanni, on the themes? You get the point. I want to move on to Randall, though, since we got him here. Yeah, those boys were hunting together together just to wrap it all up, 19, 11, 12, in those years. I hope they like each other. They liked each other because they're like nuts on a dog now.

Yeah. Like, they're just together, you know. Randall, if you had, like, a 1 to 10, if you had a sliding scale of 1 to 10, and you had to rate our job of capturing what you had to say on a 1 to 10, where are we? 4, 5, where are we? When you watched it, what was your level of disappointment? Oh, I was thrilled. level of disappointment? Oh,

I was thrilled. You were thrilled? Yeah. You weren't disappointed? No. I mean, we had, we talked to you a lot.

Yeah. We did one interview. It was probably like three and a half hours and one that was probably two something. And, uh, so now when you release all these, that's just a giant transcription.

Oh God. I'll clean them up. You know, like I, I, I walked away from each one of those interviews feeling kind of punch drunk. Like, did I really say that that way? Or did I get it backwards? Or did I flip that? Did I actually get across what I was trying to say?

And when I pressed play on the documentary for the first time, my hope was that I would just make sense and that I wouldn't say something that was categorically false or outrageous. I thought I came out pretty good. Can you tell people what it is you did that first put you on our radar? Yeah, so I did a PhD in history at the University of Montana, and my dissertation was a study of hunting in American politics and culture in basically the second half of the 20th century.

Called? Green Voters, Gun Voters. Hunting in American politics and culture in the 20th century, I think. Can people find it anywhere? Do we know that that was the title? Yeah. Back in the day?

You knew that? I knew that. Yeah, it's not published. He was ahead of his time. It's not published. I started working as an editor after that. And at the end of the day i just wanted to put away the computer and not look at another word document so i never kind of picked it back up

um did you uh did they did you get your little piece of paper that says phd i did i did and i i just realized the other day i have no idea where that is no one's asking i was looking at my wife's degree on the wall and i was like man i don't i don't really idea where that is. No one's asked you to see it? I was looking at my wife's degree on the wall, and I was like, man, I don't really know where that went. No one said to you, prove it, and you've had to go get it? No. If I didn't have a PhD, how would I have this?

I have two PhDs, and I only know where one is. Ah, this is a good joke. Don't tell this joke. I only have one. One of them's my pretty huge... Don't tell this joke. I only have one. One of them is my pretty huge. Don't tell this joke. Go on, Randall. Is that going to get cut?

No, because you didn't tell the joke. I was actually going to alert Randall to check in with you about your joke later. You used that line on me in the first podcast i think that's i i learned that from a girl i was dating and she learned it on the tv show friends is that right wow yeah i didn't know that that friends was like on yeah um yeah so basically i um as part of my research i just looked at hunting and fishing magazines over the course of like 60 some odd years and looked at other public representations of hunting and hunting where it popped up in the news or in other, you know, forms of popular culture, like when Sesame Street in the 70s or 80s does something on hunting, what does that look like?

Or how are hunters represented in Looney Tunes, things like that. So just basically tried to digest this huge volume of material and think about how hunters have represented themselves over time and what others have thought of hunters and the dialectic between those two things and how that's evolved in this period in which hunting's place in popular culture has really changed a lot. Have you ever seen that cartoon where it's like, it's not of looney tunes or anything but used to be on like saturday morning

once in a while where it's like deer hunting and it's just like people shooting each other and stuff it was all like from the 50s from the 50s and like one of there's in the embedded in is like an ad for the mother-in-law deer hunting suit and it's like she puts it on it's a deer suit so she gets it's so she gets shot yeah and then a guy in that same cartoon a guy shoots a buck and then says to his buddy i got one that's got antlers like this and he gets shot his hands up to show the antlers, and then his friend shoots him. Yeah, and there's one, I don't remember the lead up, but it ends up with the deers driving the car,

and he's strapped to the bumper. You haven't seen this? I haven't seen that, no. And I said before, Sesame Street, what I'm thinking of, I think, is the Muppets. And there's a scene in the muppets um that i came across where that buffalo springfield song like stop what's that sound you know that's one of my vivid memories of the animals are walking through the forest and there are hunters there and whenever it's stopped they

start shooting oh i don't remember that yeah and they're they're like these these hunters are creeping through the woods looking for the animals and yeah and it's like a protest anthem so it has by a band that's named after a rifle yeah yeah i talked about that in my buffalo book buffalo springfield huh and what that name what that name is all about um i teach my kids to recognize anti-hunting bias in the things that they look at and they're good oh my gosh my boy is my boy is good at picking it up and we talk about in children's literature it is almost i don't want to say daily but weekly i bet you i got i have to just like stop and be like okay girls let's just think about what this book just said and like really go through

it and and dissect it because no wild animals don't need our help. And you don't have to put food on the windowsill so that the birds will continue to live. Like, what in the world? That's why you got to read your kids Light in the Forest, Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, Possum. There's plenty of books out there, man. The worst anti-hunting show is, one. The worst anti-hunting show is, one of the worst anti-hunting shows is Wild Kratts. I haven't seen it.

That show. All right, we got to keep moving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's this, on a sliding scale, all of your complex ideas, we kind of mostly just had you be like a little bit of a demographics guy and a little bit of a Roosevelt guy. Yeah.

I was fine with that. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I felt there's so many people. It's funny because there's so many people that I feel like getting into. I didn't know what I was getting into. I didn't know how hard it was going to.

I just knew I wanted to capture like we're gonna go capture tons of stuff yeah and then i knew that you know i've watched hundreds and hundreds of movies i know how long they are um and i didn't put those two things together like i didn't i didn't think about i wasn't thinking about um i was thinking about it i wasn't thinking I was gonna be like like Ken Burns the Civil War or something yeah but I wasn't think I knew what was gonna wind up being it's gonna be like a like a 90-minute whatever right and I wasn't picturing that's why I want to do another one someday I wasn't imagining what would happen to all of these ideas yeah not only that like

that you you need to like simplify things and pare it down for a couple reasons so that the viewer could understand and you also have this sense of allegiance to the subject. And you're like, I can't have the subject say 10 things incompletely. Yeah. I'm going to have to find, they're just going to have to say two things in a way that makes sense. Yeah, no. Rather than letting them, right, giving them sound bites about tons of stuff. It's like, there's this guy be like, if you're going to boil it down, what are some things? And then the problem was like with friends, and there's so many friends of mine in it yeah

you know rogan's in it robert abernathy's in it i don't want to point like i don't want to pose these problems they're problems only in my head because they're not problems for someone that watches the film and i really want people to go watch the film because i do i like i like i want people to see and experience it so there's the thing we keep talking about these things there's the thing as a freestanding entity is something I want people to see but I can't watch it

without all of the noise in my head part of the noise in my head is I had these friends who have really interesting experiences like Matt who's sitting here has this very refreshing, like everything out of Matt's mouth is delights me. Yeah.

Like everything he says delights me. Likewise. So, um, Doug, you know, like Doug's like this generous, beautiful person with kind of this,

like a way to express the, explain his life in the way that's very moving and instructive right and you have this like really cohesive view of something that's really complicated and like a real knack for sort of explaining this activity that is so influenced by history and influenced by demographics and sort of like making it seem like a picture you know like like presenting it and and i'm friends with you guys and so then to put you there i'm also like well i want them to look like what i see when i see them it's just it's just complicated man oh yeah i'm like kind of haunted by the i'm haunted by the process well i think that's i think that's why i'm good i'm so I'm glad to be sitting here talking

because I want to make sure we're cool. Yeah, no, we're all good. This also goes out as an apology to all those other people that we interviewed that didn't make the cut. Well, I... No, I mean, a lot of what you're saying resonates with me because when I worked on my dissertation,

you're telling a story and you're trying to explain something through the storytelling process and you have to choose a beginning and an end and an arc to it. And you can't compress everything in there. And so that's like, when I go back and look at my dissertation, I remember all the things that started to become threads that I wanted to weave into this. And I had to, I had to cut them. Um, and I have, you know, boxes and boxes of photocopies and notes and things like that, that have been traveling around with me for a couple of years. And, um, and they're all little things that I wanted to cram into that. Um,

because when I read what I wrote, I think like, man, it's more complex than that. There are several other layers that I need to weave into this thing. And so, yeah, I mean, I think, especially with, you know, I'm lucky because I didn't have a page limit. But when you're making a documentary film, obviously there's that window of time that you have to fit it into.

It doesn't matter how good the stuff you get is. You have to make those really, really tough choices. You know what a criticism we got early on about the movie, which I would have thought would have been a compliment, but it was always issued as a criticism, is it doesn't come down hard enough on anything it feels too open-ended and i always want to be like good that's great yeah no i mean i uh people want it to be like a like a like a michael moore kind of thing i try not to surround myself with people who come down hard on stuff like there's

what's the point you know and to the point earlier about having this animal ethicist as a leading figure in the documentary like having an open exchange of ideas and questioning your own ideas and reflecting on what you really think or what you really believe or what values you have. If you just are in an echo chamber and you're talking about the people on the outside or you're talking about how great the people in this room are, what are you really doing?

Yeah. It's not a real serious intellectual exercise and so i yeah you could have made a movie of people saying dude if we don't kill all the deer we'll get overrun yeah yeah and i think like you know one other thing too is like uh it's really easy to like write a book review or a movie review and and slam it like and this is something that at least in graduate school you could recognize people who are starting to write book reviews they just trash everything or it's the greatest thing they've ever read but it takes you know it takes it takes a lot more effort to to you know pick something apart and ask questions of it and go

back and revisit it and chew on it. And that ultimately generates more questions. Yeah. When you hear a film reviewed on NPR, you're like, I can't tell if that dude really liked it. Yeah. He might not want to bore his

listeners with whether he liked it or not. Yeah. But I always want to bore his listeners with whether he liked it or not. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But I always want to know, cause I'm like, well,

I mean, this is his job. If he liked it, I'll probably, I might be more inclined to see it. Yeah. Yeah. If your goal was to be thought provoking,

I think he succeeded there. I think everybody can't agree on that. Right. Well, that's for sure. Yeah. It's, I don't know. It's,

it's nice to see something that like hunting as you're saying is often portrayed as this cartoonish activity and you're either the hero or you're the villain and that's not the reality of it and so to see this like nuanced exploration of what we're all doing and why we do it and why we think we do it why we may actually do it um i don't know i i found that refreshing it'd be interesting to like hear what i don't 10 people from various uh walks of life that don't haunt what did what did anything change in their perception of haunting as if you could consequence? If you could take people who were ambivalent or hostile to hunting and somehow force them to watch it and then do a post-interview,

I could set that up. I just haven't done it yet, but it would be interesting to do it. We should definitely do it. For sure. And, you know, I don't know if I need to hear it now. Maybe when the making of it I would have been interested to hear, but now it's like the ship sailed. I don't think that would be the reason that I would do it.

Remember how I began? You want to see some full circle, right? You want to see what like – As long as you're going to allow me to do a concluding question, then yes. You can do a concluding question. You want to see me bring something full circle? Yep. Remember how earlier I mentioned Ian Frazier?

What did I say about Ian Frazier earlier? He starts his books with... Oh, he likes to tell people right away in his books what they're about because he thinks people start reading the book, they don't want to wait to find out what it's about. He also told me this. When he's writing, he's a nonfiction writer. And when he's writing and he's profiling people, he'll get this feeling that they're not going to like what he's right he's a non-fiction writer and when he's writing these profiling people

he'll get this feeling that they're not gonna like what he's writing and he always um mitigates that by giving a very flattering physical description of them which he says usually can undoes any harm they're like you know i really like that you know i really liked what you had to say about our conversation Which he says usually undoes any harm. They're like, you know, I really like that. I really liked what you had to say about our conversation. I didn't need to do that with you guys because it's a movie. And so people can see just how wonderful you all are by going to Vimeo and watching Stars in the Sky. Holy cow, did he just turn it around? Did you see how good? Did you see how that was?

That is, that's from years of... That's why you do what you do. That's from years of show business. Just picture him with a little more grain. Yep, and Doug, just imagine, you see Doug now, just imagine him when he looked younger. It'd be even better

if you just went to starsintheskyfilm.com and bought it there, watched it there. That was a little more blunt, Yanni. Yeah, but that's good. Then we could track your watching better, and we could report numbers to people that give a shit, and it would help us out. It helps us out a lot.

What's the question? Starsintheskyfilm.com. You told me when you first started doing this that really the end goal was to do it well enough so that you would be allowed to make another one well that's the woody allen maximum yes but all of his movies were good enough that they let him make another one right but you thought that would be like a a measure of success yeah so do we know that now? Or if not, how long will it be until we know? I'll make another movie. I'll make another movie.

But just my circumstances are such that it doesn't matter. I'll just find a way. I would like to make another movie. And yeah. All right. I'll write more books and I'm going to make another movie. I don't know if it's going to be because someone let me or if it's just gonna wind up being just because you're gonna do it someone let me or if it's gonna wind up being just because i went and did it but yeah i love it

that's my favorite um if i if i had to to be honest with you if i had to pick a medium a medium if god came down and put a gun to my head and made me pick one medium, one thing that I could take in for the rest of my life, it would be films. And if he really subdivided it out, I would say documentaries. Because even if I went blind, I could still listen to them. And if I went deaf, I could watch them. Good point. Tell them that website again, Yanni.

Starsintheskyfilm.com. All right, everyone.. StarsInTheSkyFilm.com. All right, everyone. Thank you so much, guys, for coming down. I really do love you guys. And you people listening. I was talking about these guys, but you guys too. I don't know them. Oh, you'd love them if you got to know them. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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