The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 188: Yvon Chouinard on Belonging to Nature

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: Botching people’s names; blacksmithing; fishing with a single fly forever; 18 strands of white stallion tail; Steve being good at libraries; feeling the current with your testicles; taking kids fishing on the Crow reservation; riding out an avalanche and burying a dead friend; being an asshole when you start out and an asshole when you get back; Yvon in jail; Jani on karma; "Fuck Mars"; 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 Onyx. Okay, Mr. Chouinard, on the drive over, I was asking you about how I've heard your name pronounced so many ways over the years, and you laid it out for me how it would have been pronounced where you grew up. Want me to say it? Yeah, hell yeah. This is an audio project. Okay. My name is Yvon Chouinard.

Because I hear, even just for normal, regular American pronunciation, you hear Yvon, Yvon. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, there's a root in Yosemite called Cunard Cunard

Cunard that sounds like a place down in Mississippi or Louisiana and that's you yeah that's me so Yvonne

not Yvonne Yvonne Yvonne Yvonne yeah Yvonne Yvonne I don't know. Whatever you want. I feel like you get to call. You get to make the call. It'd be in your name and everything.

Well, if I was in Canada, it'd be Yvonne, but try Yvonne. Yeah. And your mom, you have the same, were you saying that your mother has the same name? Well, hers is Y-V-O-N-N-E, which is Yvonne. Mm-hmm. And I'm Yvonne. It's like a slightly more masculine version, right? Yeah. And you grew up, you grew up in a French speaking household, right?

Oh yeah, I was in Lisbon, Maine and all French Canadians and everybody in that town spoke French. Is that still the case today? No, I don't think so. No, with television, everybody's speaking the same language now. So, yeah, I mean, I went to grammar school there, and it was all French-speaking. When you say you went to grammar school, what do you mean? Like elementary school?

Yeah, elementary school. Yeah. And, you know, it was run by nuns and stuff. Really? And I was there till seven. And then we sold everything that we had and immigrated to California. And so there was five of us in a car, everything we owned, and drove across the country.

It was kind of like a Grapes of Wrath thing. And then we settled in the Burbank. Washtubs hanging off the side of the truck. Well, you know, I mean, my mother had put up canned vegetables and stuff to eat. Yeah. Because we couldn't eat in restaurants and stuff. Because of money?

Yeah, we didn't have any money and stuff. And I remember, I mean, my first lesson about philanthropy, I remember we were going by the Navajo or Hopi reservation on Route 66. This is on your Western emigration. Yeah. Yeah. This is 1946 or something. And World War II ripping away, just done, you know.

Yeah, just done. And maybe it was 45. So anyway, yeah, there was some Hopi or Navajo woman in her Hogan on the side of the road. And my mother felt so sorry for her. She got out and gave her her canned corn that she had put up. Oh, is that right? Yeah. From back in Maine?

Yeah, back in Maine. Yeah, so, I mean, at seven years old, that kind of stuck to me. Yeah. And you had quite a few, you had older siblings, right? Yeah. They were all much, much older than me. My youngest sister was eight years older than me. And my, another sister was like 10 years older than I had a brother that was like 12 years older.

Yeah. And you're 80 now? I'm 80. And your siblings are gone? Yeah, everybody's gone. Yeah. I'd read somewhere that when you were a kid in Maine, maybe because the French-Canadian, well, I'll let you tell me why,

but when you were a kid in Maine, you had an aspiration to be a fur trapper. Was that because like the Courier Dubois, like the French-Canadian fur history? Yeah, well, it's in my DNA. I mean, you know, French-Canadian. And even in California, I read all these books about fur trappers and stuff, and I wanted to be a fur trapper.

And I started out practicing on gophers. Yeah. I got to be pretty good on gophers. You know, there's a lot to it. You don't just stick a trap in a hole and expect to catch a gopher. You got to be wily, you know? Yeah. Have you ever heard with gophers um i remember i don't know

if this is true or not but one of my mentors when i was a kid kind of like a hunting and fishing mentor is this guy eugene groeters and he insisted that all you needed to do to get rid of gophers was take what's that gum it's like Wrigley's? Damn it, man. Big League Chew? No, no, no. Not Big League Chew, but remember when you were a kid, there was like two kinds of stick gum?

Like the long, there was the big red, and then there was like, oh, Juicy Fruit. Juicy Fruit. Remember that? Yeah. What if they still make that?

Anyway. They do. He was insistent that you just stick a juicy a stick of juicy fruit down in there and that gopher be dead oh i don't know i don't know about that they couldn't resist juicy fruit and to come but somehow gum them all up and then they'd be gone well the the ultimate atomic bomb for gophers you take your acetylene torch and fill the hole up with acetylene gas and then torch it. That's next level. That's next level.

So if you want to do that, like you never made it, you never became a fur trapper, but what was the first line of, what was the first kind of line of work you wound up into? Because someone was telling me, one of the guys you work with was telling me that uh when you need to introduce yourself to people i hope this is true then when you introduce yourself people who don't know who you are you'll often uh say that you're a blacksmith well yeah yeah i mean i started that's my craft is blacksmithing and And, you know, I was drafted in the Army in 1962, and I put down my occupation as blacksmith, so they sent me to Nike Guided Missile School. Can you imagine?

What am I supposed to do, hand forge a missile or something? You were drafted? Yeah. I something you got you were drafted i don't know if you're drafted yeah i was drafted in 62. i tried everything to get out of there yeah i tried everything like with the intention that you'd go to vietnam or that was part of it no there was no vietnam there was no korea well how the hell did he get drafted they had a draft Everybody had to go in the military. Between Korea and Vietnam? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, because the Vietnam draft didn't kick into way later, like 65 or 66 or something. That's right. Yeah. So you're drafted and you're not, I had no idea. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I had just started my business making climbing gear and blacksmithing, and I felt pretty resentful about being drafted for two years. So I tried everything to get out of the draft, and I heard that Japanese during World War II got out of their draft by drinking soy sauce, a whole bunch of soy sauce.

Why? Which elevates your blood pressure like crazy. And so the day I was supposed to report to the draft board, I drank a whole bunch of soy sauce. And I had such a buzz on it. Because you didn't have the way that politicians now get out of it. No, no. When you hear about how they got out of it, they usually have the force of their father.

Oh, yeah. You just had to buy soy sauce. You had to buy soy sauce. But they put me on a train to Fort Ord, and I got so sick on the train, I just puked it all up. I couldn't stand another bottle of soy sauce. And they sent you off to South Korea? Yeah, they sent me to Korea for a year. And that was, yeah, and my job in Korea was,

I caused so much trouble. You know, I wouldn't salute officers and I wouldn't wear a hat. And finally, my company commander said, hey, we have an inspection Saturday morning, just get lost. And so I started climbing in Korea. At that time, you couldn't wear civilian clothes. You had to wear military clothes all the time. But I ran across some Korean climbers and they kept some civilian clothes for me and I'd, and we'd go off climbing. And, and I made a whole bunch of first ascents in Korea. In fact, I'm, I guess I'm famous in Korea.

For first ascents? Yeah. Because climbing there hadn't taken off yet? Well, yeah, it had, but all the climbs had been done by the Japanese during the occupation. And the Koreans were happy just to repeat climbs. Like we did one climb, and I said, hey, how many times have you done this climb? He said, oh, about 75 times. 75 times?

Why don't you do new routes well why because it's just perfectly fine climb yeah so you know i kind of introduced him to doing new things and so we did some pretty serious climbs and and uh yeah you know what a question you'd be able to you're uniquely suited to answer for me being that you grew up in maine and you're a blacksmith as i was in new brunswick one time oh yeah and a guy was telling me that larch which maybe they call tamarack out there burns so hot that you can use it for forage work in the absence of coal really i've never heard that you never heard that i've told a lot of people that they're like i don't know about that but he said like you burn you can warp the door on your stove really you don't know

about this no oh so uh talk to me about how you got into making the climbing equipment and how that fell under, like how that was a blacksmithing thing. Well, I mean. Because that's just not made out of like forged iron anymore, right? No, they don't use pitons and stuff anymore. Yeah. But in those days, well, I learned to climb through falconry to get hawks, iris and stuff like that.

And. You got to back up on that one. Yeah. Falconry. Falconry, yeah. Well, that was my first, when I was 12 to 16 or so, I got into a falconry club and. In California. In California. In California, yes.

In fact, we started a club called Southern California Falconers Association. And I was a secretary at 12 years old. And, yeah, so we used to climb the hawk sires and stuff like that. We learned to rappel. And slowly I learned to climb. To get the chicks out. Yeah. What kind of birds were you after?

Well, I was, I wasn't interested in falcons. I was interested in short wing hawks, like goshawks and Cooper's hawks and stuff. Yeah. And, you know, I had. And you guys used them to hunt for what? Well, the goshawk, I'd hunt on rabbits and coots. Yeah.

We had some flooded alfalfa fields there in San Fernando Valley, and the coots had a hard time taking off in those fields, and so I'd get coots, eat them. They were actually pretty good. Yeah, they get a bad rap. No, they do. It's like a crow and a duck had sex. Yeah.

Yeah. That's right. So, yeah, from bad rap. No, they do. It's like a crow and a duck had sex. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So, yeah, from falconry I got into climbing. And I got into some climbers from the Sierra Club in L.A. and started climbing that place called Takis Rock out of L.A. and then slowly into Yosemite. And at that time all the gear was made in Europe and it was, the Europeans had an attitude towards climbing where you conquer the mountains,

you know, and you make them safer for the next group. So they would make these soft steel pitons and leave them in place for the next party to make it easier and we didn't believe in that we were brought up with john muir and you know emerson and thoreau and kind of the the uh and so you know we found make the throw connection it seems like throw he would have had a hard time climbing a ladder, it seems. Probably.

But he had a good philosophy. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, we didn't want to leave any trace behind. And so we made, there was an old blacksmith who's a climber in Yosemite, and he made pitons out of Model A Ford axles, which is a kind of a chromium vanadium or something steel. Hold on, out of a Ford axle? Yeah, Model A Ford axle, which is really good steel instead of iron. And Yosemite has a lot of incipient cracks. They're not clean cracks. And so if you try to pound in an iron piton, it just bends over. And so he made them out of steel.

And so when I started, these things weren't available at all. He just made them for himself. And so I got myself a forge and an anvil, a book on blacksmithing, and went down to the junkyard and I got a piece of harvester blade, which happened to be chrome molybdenum steel. Made my first pitons. And they worked great. I could pound them into incipient cracks and I could take them out or the soft steel ones you couldn't take out. Because it conformed to the shape? That conformed to the shape and you try to take them out and then the head would break off. Gotcha. Can you just quickly explain a piton just so

everybody that's listening understands? Yeah, it's just a metal spike you pound into the rocks and then you clip into it for protection. So it's got a loop on the end. Yeah, and you put a clip of carabiner into it. And so I made a better piton. And so I made them for myself. And we were on the cutting edge of big wall climbing in Yosemite in those days. And in fact, the cutting edge of rock climbing worldwide, really.

And so we need, the climbs we were doing, you had to have these things. And so I made some for myself and friends, and then pretty soon friends of friends. And then I'm making two an hour, and I'm selling them for $3 apiece. Yeah. What year was this? 1957. Huh. And that was Chouenard equipment right yeah yeah so yeah that's how

i became a blacksmith and that's how i i got into business did chenard did chenard equipment like gradually is it true that it became black diamond? Yeah, eventually I sold it to the employees who renamed it Black Diamond. And that was in the 80s, late 80s. Yeah, and at that time you were back. I already had Patagonia. You already had Patagonia. And I couldn't run two companies. And also I saw climbing going in a direction i didn't like what was the

direction well sport climbing um when you didn't like sport climbing i didn't like sport climbing i didn't like i guess i don't really understand what that means well sport climbing is indoor climbing it's it's uh it's climbing where there's no risk involved. You put in bolts every 15 feet and clip into them. And it defaces the rock. And everybody's using chalk. I've never used chalk in my life to keep your hands dry. And when you use chalk, it leaves a mark. And so when you go do a climb that someone has used chalk,

you know exactly where to put your hands and feet. So it answers all the questions. And I don't like anybody telling me what to do, and I don't like to tell anybody else what to do. And it just pisses me off to have somebody say put your hand right here and the disappointment was enough that you didn't want to be in the business anymore yeah yeah but i could see that that that's not a sustainable philosophy because i'm sure that people wear your clothes to do shit you wouldn't want them to do

so you could be like well i don't like where jackets have gone anymore because evil people wear jackets when it's cold yeah well i gotta just disregard that that's what i'm saying that'd push you out of a lot push you out of a lot of businesses yeah no that's okay it's just uh I didn't want to – I thought it was just time to get out of the game. Yeah. I mean, you can imagine with any sport, you know, there's a deterioration. I mean, it's just a matter of time now before you're going to have glass fibers going down your fishing line so that you can sit there on your boat and watch your TV screen and watch the fish take your bait. Yeah.

I'm not interested in that. Yeah. Your fishing methods, I don't want to use the word regressed, but you try to constantly simplify. I understand you try to constantly simplify your fishing. Yeah. I mean, I taught a class i just came back from teaching a class with the crow indian kids but uh three years ago i taught a class and on uh bighorn river and i cut a branch off a willow i put a horsehair line on the end

and i mean the only synthetic thing was the leader. And I put a soft hackle fly on, walked out. Was that horsehair line braided? Yeah. Not braided. It was twisted. It's 18 strands of white stallion tail. Because you use white stallion because it's transparent.

Yeah. And you got to use a male. You got to use stallion because mares piss on their tail and it weakens the fibers. Is that right? The piss corrodes the fiber? Yeah. So you start out with 18 strands and you taper it down to three strands. And so I put a fly on, I walked out and I said, hey, kids, you don't have to pay $600 a day like all these dudes going down with a guide.

You can do this. And I walked out, caught a fish. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean. Did you make that leader or the line? No, I didn't. It was given to me by this old Italian guy who taught me this tenkara fishing. He lives in a valley where they've been doing it since the 16th century.

Isn't tenkara fishing basically that you're just fishing a fly on a cane pole? Yeah, no real. And it's just a- Where do you store the line? Because on a cane pole, the rod's reel. And it's just. Where do you store the line? Because on a cane pole, the rod's so damn long that your line just goes down to the butt. Like if you've got a 10-foot cane pole, you've got a 10-foot line. No, I have a 20-foot line.

Yeah, but where does all that line live if it's not on a reel? It's just, I put two paper clips on the handle. And wrap it? And wrap it around, yeah. And then you just offload line as you need it? Yeah, it's a really simple method of fishing. But what I spent a whole year fishing was basically one fly.

And most of it was with this method of no reel. And what I discovered is that with a fly, what's the most important? Is it the color? Is it the size? Is it the action? Is it the style of the fly? You know, what's the most important? And I came to the conclusion that the most important thing is the action of the fly. I mean, trout are predators. And if you take a toy mouse and draw it across the room in front of a cat, right?

Yeah. And you slowly, and the cat goes into his prance, he's watching it, watching it, watching it, and you stop it and give it a twitch, that's when he pounces, right? Yeah. I mean, just like grizz that's when he pounces, right? Yeah. I mean, just like grizzlies love it when you run, right? So trout, the same thing.

You want to get that instant reaction from them, a non-thinking reaction. And so the most vulnerable part of an insect's life is when they're emerging, when they're going up to the surface. You say the most vulnerable part yeah that they're vulnerable to trout because they're trying to bust out of their carapace and and you know fly away and sometimes they get trapped and they get one leg trapped in a you know and uh and that's what you're imitating with these simple flies. And these tenkara rods are really sensitive. Like in the old days, like in the 15th century or so,

they would make a pole out of a certain wood, and then they'd use a different kind of wood for the last foot and a half so that they could do that twist, that they could give action to the fly, make the fly alive, like a cat is, you know, jumping around on the surface and stuff. Yeah. And modern fly rods, you can't do that. They're so stiff, they're meant to cast 100 feet because it's, you know, fly fishing is

such a macho thing that everybody wants to cast 100 feet, whereas the trout, they're right in front of you. Under your boots. Yeah. And so I find that I catch way more fish with that style of fishing than I do with a regular rod. How do you reconcile? I want to return to fishing with the crow kids but how do you reconcile um a loathing for technology with being a company that people would say is a technical apparel company right like you guys popularize you popularize capeline

you popularized um synth like a lot of like fleece and synthetics yeah but then i feel like why are you not in a position where you're proselytizing uh the attributes of buckskin and beaver wool felt do you know what i mean like yeah i don't i don't want to say this because i'm not i don't mean this as a i don't mean this as a um i'm full of hypocrisies i'm packed full of hypocrisy well so am i so i'm not pointing this out as a oh you're i'm not pointing it out like to illustrate some way in which you've got something wrong because I struggle with all my hypocrisies all the time. But I'm just curious, you know, how you do view it. Because your company is, if people gave a list of words and people could pick words that they would draw a line between Patagonia and words. If you put innovative on the list, people would be highly likely to connect Patagonia to innovation.

They would connect it to advancement. They would connect it to technical, right? They wouldn't connect it to anachronistic. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, I've got chemists from MIT working for me. And, you know, we made a commitment by 2025 to use no fossil fuels, which means our polyester— Even recycled? No, yeah, we'll use recycled stuff.

Yeah, I would imagine. Either recycled stuff or we're working on making nylons and polyesters out of plants. So kind of reverse engineering. I mean, it's highly, highly technical. In my own personal life, I lead a really simple life. Yeah, you told me you don't like a phone. You don't have a phone. No, I don't.

No, I don't. I mean, I got this thing against electronics. And if somebody's working on a computer or whatever or trying to show a – I mean, I walk in the room and the computer crashes. I got this thing. My old man was a tradesman. He could build a whole house himself. And he used to play tricks on me.

Like he'd be working on a car and say, hey, come on over here. I'd come over and he'd grab my hand and grab a spark plug and just, you know, shit myself. Or I'd stick a screwdriver in a light socket and grab my hand. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, no, I got this aversion against electricity. No, really. And I just, I have nothing to do with it. Zero. And so, you know, it's kept my life real simple, but it's also, it's getting hard. It's getting hard to travel if you don't have a cell phone. You know, they'll cancel a flight. Well, how do you know they cancel a flight, you know?

Right. Yeah, one of the first benefits I realized when cell phones came out was it wasn't so hard to find your friends and you're out drinking because you just had to pick a bar and everyone just had to stick to it no matter what was going on yeah Rose you couldn't find them when it also became you can go to another bar and it didn't destroy the whole night that was like Ozzie the first minute I'm like you know these people might be on to something when I got my first cell phone.

Well, in Iceland, you can get an app where you're hitting up on a girl in a bar and they'll tell you whether she's a cousin or not. I recently had a guy write in. We have people write in with a lot of questions and I don't even see a fraction of them, but one guy wrote in and he said that if you could wave a magic wand, which I like any question that begins that way, he said if you could wave a magic wand and make cell phones, not only make cell phones go away, but make it that they had never existed, would you do it? Yeah, I would.

Well, yeah, that part, that you made it that they never never existed would you do it yeah i would and well yeah that that part that you made it they never even existed i would do it the having them just go away now yeah i know would be tough because then i'd be like well it's hard to you know find your friends you become a martyr yeah but had they never existed because i was i liked i just i feel like I did better in life when things were different, you know. When you had to go down and use the card catalog at the library, I used to be a really good researcher because I was better at libraries than people. What's a library? It's a place. You go down there to use the computer when you're out of town.

You know, I got another question for you. Then we're going to get into the crow, what you do there. Before we get too far, because I have a little follow-up question. Oh, go ahead. I want to know what that single fly was that you used. Oh, yeah, that's good. Oh, yeah, it's a pheasant tail and partridge soft hackle. And it's one of the oldest flies ever.

I mean, it's— Is that the fly you can tie entirely with a pheasant's tail? Almost, except for the hackle, which is a partridge. Oh, I got you. Yeah, and it's very simple. It imitates every mayfly. It imitates every caddisfly. And I've used it for bonefish.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. It's the best bonefish fly I've ever used. What size for a bone fish oh about a eight or ten it depends you know and i i weighed them a little bit but you know with bone fish uh what's what's happening bone fish you know they they learn from from mistakes as opposed to humans. And now they've been hit up so much that any flash that they see, they freak out.

And so you're throwing out a crazy Charlie or whatever, and it's got all this flash and a silver hook and everything, and you give it a strip and the bonefish just blow up and out of there. It's a flash. And so I tie these, it's a brown fly, and I tie it on a brown hook. And I use longer hackles, and so the hackles

kinda go in and out like a jellyfish. Sure, yeah, yeah. And so it's really attractive. in and out like a jellyfish or something. Sure, yeah, yeah. And so it's really attractive. They'll come from 20 feet away to hit that fly. And so I spent a whole year with that fly in different sizes, and I caught Atlantic salmon, I caught steelhead, I caught bonefish, I caught California perch.

I mean, I caught all kinds of stuff with that fly. And at the end of the year, I had caught as many fish as I ever catch. Oh, is that really? Yeah. You didn't suffer on the fishing? And I learned deep knowledge about that fly. Okay. I mean, it's kind of like, by deep knowledge, I mean, you know these navigators that can sail across,

these Polynesian navigators, they sail across the Pacific with no compass of sextant or electronics, nothing. They've got to get a deep knowledge about what is going on. And if you ask them, well, how do you know that's going on? How do you know to turn here? They can't explain it to you. It's down deep and and I I learned some things about using the action of the fly that I can't even describe to you sometimes it's just an innate feeling

when you hear about the Polynesian navigators and the things they know deep down the thing I always wonder about is what the attrition was like. Oh, that's interesting. It had to have been overwhelming, man. You know what? Like the people that were, you know, they're finding, you know, when they were colonizing like the Hawaiian Islands and other places where you're colonizing places that are a thousand miles away how many how many young like how many

young groups took off and not never nothing well it'd be fascinating to know man but things the ways like the using birds and then like also I think like cloud formations to identify, you know, that you look at clouds and tell that they had broken up in a certain way or formed in a certain way, passing over land. Yeah. But man, the people that must have been lost at sea. Well, you know, the ultimate is when it's cloudy, it's clouded over, they can't see the sky there's nothing going on they can't there's no winds and they lower themselves off to side and try to feel the current with their testicles is that right yeah i'd be at a loss mine are dead i guess technically mine are too, man. And Yanni too, right, Yanni?

Yes. You know, talk about fishing with the crow a little bit. That's like a, it's an educational thing you do, right? Yeah. Do you do that as you or is it as your company or are you and your company the same thing? No, no. I just do it personally. And I've been teaching this simple method of fishing to women and children. I won't teach guys because the guys just, especially if they already know how to fish, they're hopeless.

They won't listen at all. There's two kinds of guys. You tell them, okay, cast 45 degrees downstream, swing it, give it a little twitches, and if you don't get anything, take two steps down. There's the guys that will stay in one place all day and expect, you know, a different result sometime. And then the other ones that take 10 steps. They will not take two steps. And children take two steps. Women take two steps. Yeah, but steps women take two steps yeah but you

don't like being told what to do man god I know I know but I I love teaching kids and then I can see that man I have taught me but kids it's frustrating though cuz they snag you and snag everything and lose all the stuff not if you keep it simple not if you get rid of that reel and uh you know i mean this yeah and they have a 20 foot line and a simple fly and and as long as they get the line in the water and the line straightens out and they give it a little twitch they catch a fish why the crow oh it's just because I have a friend there who works with the Crow Nation there. And it's a really, it's a tribe that has a lot of problems. And the kids, I mean, the kids that we had on this last group, last couple days, hadn't left the house.

We asked them, when was the last time you went outside? They just looked blank at us and said, I don't know. They just, they live on, you know, this, you know, one of the best rivers in America. They have all this wild land. They just sit there and watch television and play the Game Boys. And they're all from broken families. I mean, the kids that you're instructing. Yeah.

I mean, there's some really, really really sad stories really sad stories is that like uh the disassociation with wildlife and dissociation with nature that you see there oh it's it's far more than your average white man in in new york city oh yeah i I mean, yeah. Do you feel that when you take people fishing, do you feel like when you go there and take kids fishing on the Crow Reservation, do you feel like it winds up being an isolated thing in their life? Or do you feel that you, have you had it where people were kind of like turn something on and you feel that they might go on to?

I've heard from their parents, the ones that had parents or their grandmother or whatever, whoever was raising them, that it did have a big effect on them. Is that right? Yeah. Not that they become fishermen per se because, you know, they're not fishermen. They're buffalo hunters. You know, they never fished. They probably don't even like to eat fish but you know I like let me give you example I had a eight-year-old boy this is three years ago everybody caught fish and for no reason whatsoever he did not catch a

fish he was just having a bad day you know i have bad days like that where you just can't catch a fish and so i took him under my wing and we walked over to another spot and bam he catches a 15-inch rainbow beautiful rain on a tenkara i mean and um i said what do you want to do with this oh i'm gonna kill it and eat it. Great. You know, they don't play with their fish like we do. Yeah. They want to eat it. And then he catches a 16-inch brown, and we kill that.

And then he catches this 17-inch rainbow. I mean, it's a huge rainbow. So now he's on fire. Yeah. And he said, I don't want to kill this one. I said, well, how many is in your family? He said, five. And you don't want to kill it? No, I want to release it. I said, well, by God, you're not only a great fisherman, you're a great conservationist. So we put his fish on a branch, you know, Tom Sawyer style and walk back to the car and cars

and everybody was waiting there at the end of the day. He shows up with the biggest fish of all and he had a grin from ear to ear. Yeah. I mean, it's transformed, transformed his life maybe. I don't know.

Yeah. Did you teach your own kids to fish? Yeah. Do they like to fish? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And my son hunts and my daughter doesn't hunt but my

son hunts and he does it you know he's he was a boar hunter for a while shooting boars with the arrows bow and arrow and then it got too easy so then he went to a spear then that guy what he does he drives him into the ocean, into the surf, and then goes after him. So the spear got too easy. So then he went in just with a knife. And he couldn't find his hunting knife one day, and he got a kitchen knife. Oh, shit. Doesn't have a hilt on it, you know?

Yeah. And he went in to get this borer. Got his hand pretty good. Yeah. He cut his tendons on his two small fingers. Yeah. That was a big one. His back, honey, was a bow.

So you lived between Wyoming and California? Yeah. I lived, yeah, I spent half the year in Wyoming, half the year in California. Do you view those states as being, you know, I view them as being almost polar extremes? Oh, absolutely. I mean, Wyoming is the most regressive redneck state in the country. I love that state. Don't even bother voting there unless you, because there's nobody to vote for.

You know, the conservative Republicans are going to win every time. Yeah, but, you know, I liked, I thought Governor Meade, he did some good stuff, man. I like that guy. No, he's a climate denier. No, he is. Total climate denier. He believes he is. Total climate denier.

He believes, you know, the future of Wyoming is coal and he's you know, he's lost in the last century. I mean, you know, Wyoming But you enjoy being there. Yeah, but the thing that pisses me off about Wyoming and Utah

is that there's no stream access laws. Yeah. The homeowner owns to the middle of the river, and it forces you to float the rivers. You can't even put an anchor down. Yeah, I agree with you about this part of the Wyoming criticism. That's horrible. And, you know, there's no catch and release in Wyoming. It's a catch and kill state.

It's a... What do you mean by that? You mean that there's no, you mean like where it's, you mean there's no areas where it's illegal to retain a fish? No. Like no designated catch and release water. The stream access thing is a problem. Oh, that's, it's the worst thing there is i mean the the idea that you know the landowner owns all this rain that comes down off the

out of the sky and i mean it's horrible and nobody protests especially the fishing guides have got a good deal going because. Yeah, because they got a drift boat. I'll spend the whole summer. I will not fish out of a drift boat. And so I walk everywhere. And I won't see another guy walking. They're all paying $600 a day to float down and stare at a bobber with a nymph on the end.

I mean, it's a total deterioration of the art of fly fishing. It's awful. Why don't you just bop north a little bit and set up shop in Montana where we have fantastic stream access laws? That's where I spend most of my time, yeah. I do. That's why he's on this road trip now. Dude, people burn the state down if you took away stream access laws here, man. People are used to it.

Well, people try. People try to. These landowners, you know, it's just the American thing where you homestead a little piece of land and you put a fence around it, not to keep anything in, but to keep everything out. Keep everything out, yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, compare that with Sweden where, you know, first of all, Sweden is no road within 800 meters of the coastline. So you don't have a thing like going on in Malibu where you can't even see the ocean because of all the houses. And then you're allowed to go on any private property to pick berries or to hunt or whatever as long as you're respectful.

And nobody objects to that. You know, Scotland, they have almost – it's almost the opposite of what we have. Because in Scotland, they have right to roam. You can go anywhere you want. Which there's, you know, something pretty nice about that. Yeah. From the perspective of someone who doesn't own property. But what they really, what they did to make it not a utopia is that the landowner owns the wildlife.

So they're basically cockeyed from what we are, you know, completely sideways from how we approach it. Yeah. 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.

Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24k

topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell

phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I always knew about your company. And I became interested in you a little bit long, long time ago where I was in Patagonia, the region. I can't remember who he was, but I was with some dude and he was from down there and had worked for your company at some point in time. And he was telling me that you like to hunt and had grown up doing some hunting. And I remember thinking like, that can't be true. I don't know why I thought that, but it just surprised me. He's like, no, man.

He was insistent um and then i a couple years ago you came and you went to the backcountry hunters and anglers rendezvous and uh they have an event i told a story at this about getting charged by a bear and you got up and told some stories and uh and i realized that you know when someone you can tell when someone's talking about wildlife and talking about hunting and talking about fishing there's a way that you can tell that it's very real for them and that it's you're not just drawing from isolated things that happen, but from a life of immersion. I don't know how you just tell. I can just tell.

Most people can tell. And in there, you told an interesting story. I would like if you re-shared it, where you're talking about something that happened with your daughter. Oh, yeah. And a road killed deer. It's not even a hunting story. It's just a kid's story. It's not even a hunting story. It's just a kid's story. It's like a child raising story or whatever.

Well, I raised my kids to, you know, respect life. And like in the 69 oil spill in California, there was all these birds on the beach covering oil and they were, you know, they were going to die. And people are going around poking them with sticks and stuff. And I had me and my kids would go out and pull their heads off, you know, take them out of their misery. But it was a foregone conclusion they were dead. Oh, yeah. There's nothing you could do for them.

And then, you know, like one of the biggest lessons I taught my kids, one day my wife comes home and said, somebody just hit a sage grouse on the road. And, man, I packed my kids in the car and off we went and got that sage grouse, brought it back. I showed them how to clean it and we cooked it and ate it. And then I showed them how to tie a fly with the feathers. And then we went out and caught some fish with the feathers. And so they know not to waste anything and also to eat while game.

And so my daughter, when she was a teenager, her brother and another girl were going to a party, and they were dressed in the nines and their party clothes and stuff. And they hit a deer, and the thing was still alive. And so the first lesson is, you know, put it out of its misery. So they're trying to break his neck with their party clothes on. So, so. Using the bird strategy.

Yeah. And so the thing finally dies. And so the next lesson is you don't waste the meat. So they're trying to stuff it in their car. And in California, it's illegal to pick up roadkill. You know, it's not now? In Montana. And in California, it's illegal to pick up roadkill. You know what's not now?

In Montana, yeah. No, I think California just- California? I think- Is it? Am I right, Yanni? I don't know. Check me.

They are or did, they're fixing to or did legalize roadkill in California. Or they're loosening restrictions. Oregon also and Montana recently. Oh, yeah. Dude, we grew up eating roadkill deer. It was like there's like a little system. You just call and they give you the permit. Yeah.

So anyway, they're trying to stuff it in their car. Here comes the highway patrolman. And he says, what are you guys doing? And he said, well, this poor deer is suffering and he's still alive. We're trying to take it down to the – Patagonia has a wildlife – we bring in injured raptors and stuff. On your campus? Yeah. And so the guy says, no, it's illegal.

You have to leave it here. And so, yeah, so, I mean, that's another lesson I tell them, you know, lie through your teeth. But we also have this Raptor Center, and we have a legal license to get roadkill so when the highway patrol runs across the roadkill they they call us and we go and pick it up and and then um so that's what happened and then in the end i end up with the back straps anyway you know what's interesting i just found out the other day is I got a friend, Mitch Petrie, and we were texting the other day. That's when you send a message on your phone. And he was out fishing. He lives in Minnesota. and he was out fishing for bluegills for a rafter rehabilitation center

where apparently they got some very finicky ospreys and bald eagles. Well, they got to feed them fish. Yeah, and you got to go out and get them. He's like, they're particular. Well, bluegills are delicious. Yeah, he'll bring them. Yeah, he goes out and gets them. They like those fresh bluegills.

Go ahead, Yanni. Yeah, he'll bring them. Yeah, he goes out and gets them. They like those fresh bluegills. Do you... Oh, go ahead, Yanni. If passed, SB 395 would go into effect in 2021. Dude, we got to get hardcore behind that, man. The last time we got... No, we've gotten into two... We've gotten into two initiatives when they were trying to ban...

They were trying to ban trapping on public land in montana that was a that was a bummer and we need to get real vocal about legalizing roadkill in california i feel like we need to burn some political estimated 20 000 deer hit on california roadways annually a lot of meat yeah of course you know% of the people that kill one have no idea what to do with it. No. Yeah, but mostly the people that eat roadkill aren't the people that hit it. They're the people that come in behind them. We already told the story, but Yanni just ate a roadkill moose that someone else hit.

What the hell kind of person hits a moose and doesn't want it? Craig Matthews and I stopped for every roadkill bird for the feathers. For fly tying? We were with Dan O'Brien, you know, the buffalo rancher. Yep. And he called us ghouls. Hey, when you moved out to California when you were a young kid, you became a diver. Is this true? Yeah, I was a spear fisherman, a free diver.

And in those days, we made all our own stuff. You know, made a waist belt out of ammunition belt from the Army store. I'd melt down my own lead batteries and put weights in there then i make a little quick release thing out of a door hinge i mean to get your belt off in a hurry yeah and we made everything and there was no wet suits or dry suits there wasn't anything. Is that right? At that time? No. And so I'd go to the army store and I bought a flight suit. And these flight suits are wool complete, you know, suit. And it has wires in it,

because you know, they plug it in, but that's okay. So I would wear wool to dive. And we had fins and we had masks, but we had to make our own spear guns and stuff. And in those days, the limit on lobsters, I think, was 10 lobsters and five abalone. And I was diving around Malibu and every time we'd get our limit. Were you doing it just for personal use or commercially? Oh, okay.

Personal use. And I got a 14-pound lobster one time. I believe it. Big one. Yeah. That's a big... No, that's huge. I mean, it took all my strength

to hang on to it. I mean, these things are strong. Because I got in a wrestling match with one one time out in the channel islands i don't know how big it was but i was astounded by how big it was yeah i mean it was like intimidating like you'd feel the power of it when you yeah grabbed like you feel like it's pull when it was trying to work its tail you know i don't think it was 14 pounds but it was interesting um do you still do that now no i'm too old for it i mean i you know i i've had some i had a friend who had a shallow water blackout i had to pull his head out of the water and and then i lost a friend um

who got tangled he was a novice diver and he got tangled up in the kelp, and he drowned. So, you know, I know my limits and what I can do, what I can't do. And I got a kind of irregular heartbeat thing, which worries me some. So, no, I stopped. But I used to hold my breath for almost three minutes. Oh, that's good. And I practiced in high school in math class. Nothing else to do.

No. No, that's for sure. I didn't let school get in the way of my education, that's for sure. Yeah, that's Mark Twain, right? Yeah. That's Mark Twain, right? When you, I read, did you ever read, you know the writer Nick Palmgarten? Yeah. Yeah, he profiled you.

Yeah. And I never understood what he meant. He was talking about how you, I can't really tell, but he was describing you as an isolationist. Isolationist. He used that. I couldn't really tell. Is this political isolation? I don't know.

About trade deals and stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Explain that to me. Well, I'm not for this globalism business. No. And I think we're going to have to hunker down and work locally. This whole thing of globalizing the world. You know, I went to New Zealand 49 years ago.

I was doing some mountain guiding there. And I just went last year again. And you know what? They've totally lost their culture. Whatever culture they had, which is an English kind of English culture and stuff, now it's Subways everywhere, McDonald's, grocery stores have all the same brands. Except for their accent and their honesty and stuff. They're more likely to wear Romeo boots than Americans.

Yeah. When I flew there, that's a long-ass plane ride to get off and feel like you drove down the road. I know. Yeah. When I go that far, I want to get out and someone's got feathers in their hair, man. Yeah, except for the occasional Maori that has a tattoo on their face. Yeah. Yeah.

But it was really a disappointment to see. I've traveled all over the world, and cultures are being lost everywhere. So that's the part when you say isolationism, you don't mean an america first agenda but you mean a way that you don't want the world to shrink so much yeah it's it's uh you know nature loves diversity and humans love control and centralization. We try to, everything tries to pull to the center, which is wrong. Nature is always out trying to make new species. It's flinging things all over the place.

And it's dynamic, and we're trying to pull it all together. And it's absolutely wrong. And it's, you know, I told Nick that I thought it was the end of the American empire. But how is that linked? Well, I think the country can't be governed. Oh, I see. It can't be governed. And the best we can achieve now is compromise, which compromise never solves a problem. You know, it leaves both sides feeling cheated, and it doesn't solve the problem.

It cuts the baby in half. And that's – I mean, we have a constitution that's completely obsolete where you have two senators from Rhode Island have the same power as the two senators from California, which is the sixth largest economy in the world now. California should be its own country, as far as I'm concerned. And I would vote for it. But Nick Palmgarten says you also cry at fourth of july parades yeah i do i don't cry at funerals i've had enough near-death experiences that it seems like natural

and i don't cry at funerals but i cry at fourth of july parades do you cry at fourth july parades because you have no stirrings of stirrings of patriotism or because you feel like something in america has been lost? No, I see those little girls out there twirling their batons and shit, and I cry. I mean, I just read this book by Wade Davis about the early attempts at Mount Everest in the 20s. I mean, brilliant book. And it talks about, it introduces each character in the book as to what they did in World War I. And that war was so hideous.

I'm thinking, if I was in that war, I'd run away. Yeah. I mean, lining these people up, wave after wave after wave, and you can't break ranks. You can't. You've got to be on a straight line, and off you go. And you get mowed down by these German machine guns. You've got officers who believe in cavalry and swords going against machine guns, and one wave gets totally mowed down, and then here he sent another wave and another

wave i'd be out of there so fast i mean that's an age thing i was having i had this conversation yesterday i was with my friend mark and he was he came to my bachelor party, which is up at, we have a little shack in Alaska and a neighbor up there wanted me to, he had a tree that the, was getting undercut by the tide. And he was afraid I was going to crush his stuff when the treatment, this big spruce went. So he had me climb up and knock the top out of it. You couldn't tip it.

You had to knock the top, but take it down in chunks. And I used to do that professionally. Oh, yeah? A bit. A topper. In grad school. Oh, not for the timber industry.

Residential. Yeah. And I got away from it and became a writer and climbed back up in that tree. And the minute I got up there, I knew I didn't belong anymore in the tree.

It was terrified. When I used to like it. I used to like when you knocked the top out of that tree and that thing started bucking back and forth. I loved it. I was aware that you could die or whatever, or you can make mistakes and they had real consequences. I didn't care. It was just very enjoyable. But then I went up in that tree and knocked that top out. And when I got my feet on the ground, my friend Mark was talking about it.

He's like, I remember when you got down from that tree, you said like, I will never go up and do that ever again. Because whatever it was I liked about it, I don't. And that got us talking about with soldiers. And we were talking about the D-Day invasions. But I was like, besides just physical fitness, the reason you send 18 to 19-year-olds up that beach is because they'll go. Dudes like me would be like, oh, man, I don't know. That's right. Let's head back.

Yeah, you'd figure a better way. Yeah, but those kids are strong strong and they'll do it. Yeah, it's all that testosterone. And just like, I think it's beyond that. It's just, I mean, besides whatever, like sacrifice issues God and country, it's just like a kind of a little bit of an inability to run all the scenarios out to their conclusion. And I think about that because I know you used to like to climb. You have many friends that died on mountains, right?

Yeah. Did that start to affect you? Well, at the time, no, not really. How do you view it, you know? Well, the last, I mean, where I really, I was in an avalanche in Tibet in my later years of expedition climbing. And I was with my friend rick ridgeway and some friends and so we rode out this avalanche and um one of the guys was killed explain what that means to ride out an avalanche i don't really know what that means well you just get caught in an avalanche

and get carried down oh rode it out like not yeah any particular strategy, just being pushed by it. Yeah, about 1,000 feet. And one of the guys was killed, broke his neck, and the other guy had a broken back, Ridgeway, had some injuries. I had a concussion. And at that time, you know, I had kids and stuff, and that basically did me in. That ruined it for you. Yeah.

Did you have to retrieve your friend's body? No, we buried him right there. I mean, climbers are not the kind of people that would call in helicopters and pay for a first-class ticket to take the body back to, you know. We just built a cairn and put them in. I mean, that's— That's where he is today. Yeah.

Yeah, so— What year was that? I don't know. I can't remember. But you had children. Yeah, I had kids. So, yeah, that got me thinking twice about it. But as far as friends being killed before, it didn't slow me down at all.

You know, I mean, climbing is, you can't take danger away from climbing. Otherwise, it's not climbing. It's a, you know, they're going to have climbing in the Olympics. It's going to be a no-risk thing. You take the risk away from climbing, it's not climbing. It belongs in the sport pages, whereas climbing doesn't belong in the sport pages. It's just a different thing. No, I understand that.

Loses its soul, doesn't it? Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah. And you do it to prove yourself. You do it to better yourself. You know, I've been known to say, you know, those—this is going to be on my gravestone, that these guys going up to Everest, you know, paying, you know, $85,000 for a guide to be guided up Everest. And they have a Sherpa in front of them with a three-foot rope pulling and one behind pushing and carrying the oxygen.

And then they get in this conga line of 250 people. The conga line. Yeah. And I say, look, you know, the purpose of climbing like Everest or something is to affect some sort of personal and physical gain. But when you compromise the process away so badly that, you know, you're an asshole when you start out, you're an asshole when you get back, that's going to be on my grace.

But when you grow to love something, we had a guy on one time, he dedicated his life to wildlife and hunting and writing about hunting. And he talked about the pain of seeing people, as he put it, pissing in the cathedral. Meaning like you grow to like this, there's something you grow to like so much and it and it and it works and when you see versions of it that you don't like you could feel like the whole thing got destroyed or you or you struggle to create a new vocabulary you know like like i don't understand why in my person like this is my person world with with sport climbing and climbing would be like canned hunts okay i just would like to me it resembles uh agriculture it resembles like the it resembles a form of livestock husbandry

and it pains me not so much that it goes on okay it doesn't pay me that it goes on so much unless there's issues with disease and other things that can happen but it pains me that it's discussed as hunting and not livestock husbandry because i feel like it taints the thing i like it doesn't make me not like it It doesn't make me not like it. It doesn't make me not like what I like. Right. It doesn't make me be like, I'm going to quit a version of it that means a great deal to me because there's, there are versions of it that are an abomination. Do you follow what I'm saying? So, so to lose, like if there's something that you, if you love something a certain way fly fishing surfing

climbing if you love it in a way and it makes sense to you um when you see versions of it that don't reflect your particular understanding why does it make it why does that taint it in your head do you know i mean like because it's still like you still have what means something to you well it'd be like if you know it'd be like if i said i love my wife okay and i really and i like the and i respect the institution of marriage you've been married to the same person your whole damn life so if i hear that most marriages end in divorce i'm not like well screw. I'm going to go run around on my wife. Well, you know, every sport, every institution, I think, deteriorates.

You know, when basketball players are all seven and a half feet tall, raise the basket. Yeah. You know, yeah. My, my, but when my high school teacher, I remember like,

uh, he would have been a college basketball player and he says he can't watch a game when someone dunks. He has to turn it off. And he says he doesn't watch games for very long. No, you have to purify the sport or whatever. It has to be, you know, I mean, in Jackson Hole, we've got this so-called elk refuge.

No, no, the feeding grounds? Yeah, it's a feeding ground, and it's a stockyard. And the last manager of that thing said, shut it down because we're going to have wasting disease. And, you know, the animals are so close together, it's no different than a stockyard. They're going to be passing diseases among each other. Well, it's happening. We've got wasting disease in deer now. Yeah, one came up in Grand Teton, right?

Yeah. A mule deer with CWD? More than one. And then you have, you know, the hunters, they have some buffalo hunts in that refuge. And, you know, they drive around until they see a buffalo, and the buffalo is just standing there. So it's the kind of hunting that gives hunting a bad name.

I think on that, you actually go with a ranger, warden, to do the animal selection. But I don't know if they view it as hunting. I think it's just like a cull. Yeah, but they think it's hunting. Yeah, they use the language of it around there. McGuane was telling me about this guy he knows. He actually wrote a book, this guy. And he used to be an elk hunter, and he got too easy for him, so he decided to hunt elk with a spear.

Which is illegal in a lot of states. Well, that's what he does. And, you know, you read about the Indians, the Ono Indians, who used to live in San Francisco Bay. And they had a paradise. I mean, they had all the oysters they could possibly eat. I mean, the bay was just full of oysters. They had every waterfowl, and they had deer everywhere. And the way they hunted, they just put a deer cape on themselves and put musk all over them.

And they'd walk up to a deer and poke it, so it'd turn, and then shoot them with a short bow. I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, well. And that's the way, in every sport, it should be going in a simple direction rather than more and more complex. Have you done much? Did you ever hunt big game much? I've shot deer, yeah. Yeah.

And I don't anymore because I've got friends like Craig Matthews. I've got two freezers jam-packed with—I don't eat, you know, store-bought beef and stuff. You like to eat wild game? I eat all game, but I—like, I've done a lot of pheasant hunting, but I find pheasant really boring. It's just a carrier for some strong sauces. So I'm not too interested in shooting another pheasant. Because I hunt because I like to eat the product. And plus I'm, you know, I eat all the stuff that my hunting friends don't eat,

like the liver and the tongue, all that stuff. That's the part I really love more than anything else. When I saw you speak at the BHA deal, if I remember right, you were talking about a good way to learn how to wing shoot is to get a red rider. Because you can see the bb yeah that lefty craig taught me that and that you learn how you learn about lead and stuff because when you're looking down the when you're looking down the barrel over the top of the barrel you wind up catching the glint of that yeah you can see the bb and you learn what those things do

when they come out of a when they come out of a barrel yeah Yeah, I did that a few years ago, because I was never taught wing shooting. I just learned on my own. And so Lefty told me about that. He used to be an Annie Oakley for Remington Arms. Did he really? Yeah. The flycaster? Yeah.

So he'd go to these circuses and stuff, and they would throw aspirin in the air. Yeah. And he would shoot an aspirin with a.22. And then, you know, he's a real showman, so he'd take a washer, and he'd throw a washer in the air, and it'd shoot through the hole in the washer. And, you know, of course people would say, wait a minute, how do we know you shot through the hole? I've seen how they'd patch it with masking tape.

No, he'd put a one cent stamp when they had one cent stamps, put a one cent stamp in there, throw it in the air, shoot right through the hole. I said, Jesus, Lefty, how'd you ever do that? He said, oh, it's easy. He says, you want to be a good shot, get yourself a Red Ryder BB gun and get to where the light is just right and take the sights off and have somebody throw up some beer cans. And you'll see that you're shooting behind the can every time. And you can't aim. You know, it's got to be instinctive.

So I did. I used to have a Red Ryder, but I went out to Stone Drugs in Jackson, Wyoming, and I bought another Red Ryder, and I had my wife shoot us throwing up beer cans. And pretty soon I was getting two out of three beer cans. And that was it. I'm going to go home this afternoon and throw some LaCroix cans around. Oh, yeah. Mike, he'll sit there for a long, you know, he'll sit there an hour at a time lobbing BBs into cans, you know.

And, you know, he sees that arc and learns how to aim high. I remember doing that a lot. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated.

Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free Free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet.

Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. You got locked up in Arizona one time? Thrown in jail for 18 days? Oh, yeah. Just for wandering around wandering about aimlessly with no apparent means of support that was a crime in those days but how did the whole how did the whole exchange start oh like how was it obvious that you were wandering around with no apparent means of support well that's kind of what they get rambo for in rambo one right he's just walking down the road they bring him to jail just for wandering around.

Look where that got him. Well, I was hitchhiking back from the East Coast, and it was a long story, but this friend of mine and I got on a freight train, and it was in the winter. It was November, and it was freezing cold. And all the boxcars were locked, but we got on a gondola with cars. They were transporting Jeeps, Jeep wagons. So we found one wagon that wasn't locked. So we crawled into this thing, and we ended up in Winslow, Arizona,

with a railroad bull with a flashlight in our eyes. And he yanked us off, and I said, how did you ever find us? He said, it's easy. I just look for foggy windows. So we go in front of the judge. And, you know, it was a hanging judge thing. He said, well, you know, you're being charged with wandering about aimlessly with no apparent means of support. And I said, how do you plead?

He said, well, wait a minute. If I plead innocent, what's going to happen? Well, we're going to lock you up, and you're going to have to get an attorney, and you're going to be here for a while until we have a trial. What if we plead guilty? Well, we're going to check you out with the FBI,

and if you're clean, I don't know, maybe a day or two, we'll let you go. Okay, guilty. Well, we're going to check you out with the FBI and if you're clean, you know, I don't know, maybe a day or two and we'll let you go. Okay, guilty. Okay, 18 days. 18 days. Oh, shit. I couldn't believe it. But, you know, the thought of ever calling our parents or anything like that never entered our minds. I mean, it was a different era then, you know. How old were you? Young? Teens? I was about 18.

No, I was close to 20. Yeah, and then we got thrown in another jail. We got thrown in Grants in New Mexico for hitchhiking. And it's a long story, but we finally got home, and my friend was drafted. Got home to a draft notice, and then a few weeks later, I got drafted too. It's kind of a when you spend so much time messing around but then simultaneously like build this big ass super valuable company um do you feel life's about work or do you feel that life's about work or do you feel that life's about play? I, you know, when I was a little kid, I could play baseball, you know, as well as any kid.

But when it came time to a game with people watching, I couldn't do anything. I'd clutch up. And I learned early on that you invent your own games. And you can always be a winner. Like my kid went to a – my son went to a school near Jackson, a little one-room schoolhouse. And two days a week they'd bring in an ex-Marine PE instructor. And his idea was, okay, kids, line up on this line.

Let's see who can run the fastest. Let's see who can jump the furthest. And my kid, you know, he's like me. He'd just go into Mahatma Gandhi. I mean, what that does, it's the American way. It produces one winner and a bunch of losers. And so, like, you know, when... So that led me to a life of nature.

And I was always... I was living in Burbank. I was going down to the LA River, gigging frogs and catching crawdads, and I was probably doing that in high school prom. You know, I didn't have any girlfriends. And so that led me to a whole life, I've given talks at commencement, things at universities and stuff where I get a, I got a whole bunch of honorary degrees and stuff. So I tell kids, look, life is a lot easier if you break the rules than if you try to conform to them. It's a lot more fun and it's a lot easier. And that's the way I've always run my company.

So I've never wanted to be a businessman, and so I decided to do it on my own terms in a way that I didn't have to go to work every day. I didn't have to act like one of these business people that, you know, these greaseball businessmen that I did not respect. And so it led to a method of doing business that is different than anybody else. And I'm, you know, you might- Are you surprised that it worked?

It works unbelievably well. And- Did that surprise you? I mean, did you have a feeling like, no shit? it works unbelievably well. And, um, did that surprise you? I mean, did you have a feeling like, no shit, it worked. Yeah. Yeah.

That's it. That's exactly. And over and over again, I see that reinforced every time, you know, like for instance, a couple of years ago, um, one of my employees, you know, I got like, now I got like 3,000 employees.

One of them just said, hey, on Black Friday, let's give all our revenue away. I said, okay, why not? Revenue. Yeah, the whole sales. Everything we. Not like earnings. Not Revenue. Yeah, the whole sales. Everything we. Not like earnings. Not the profits. Yeah. The whole revenue.

So I said, okay, let's do it. And the year before we'd done like $2.5 million on Black Friday. So we did it. And we advertised it on social media a few days before. And then the word got out. And by 3 in the afternoon afternoon somebody called me and said hey we're up to six million. I said really? And then by six we're up to ten million. I said whoa, holy shit. I didn't expect that but I don't care, you know? But what happened is that 60% of our sales were to people

who never bought from us before. And in business, you can't believe how difficult it is to get a new customer. You know, you can spend $5 million for a 20-second ad on the Super Bowl, and you will not get the publicity that we got from this or the new customers. It was unbelievable. And then we thought our sales was going to go way down after Black Friday. Because everybody already bought their shit. Yeah. It just kept climbing and climbing and climbing. It's been climbing ever since.

So, you know, I believe in karma. I really do believe in it. You're speaking to Yanni now, man. Yanni, Yanni, Yanni. I'm right there with you. He's a karma man. Back to Nick Palmgarten. He's a good writer. Yeah. i read a lot of his pieces he writes stuff yeah he writes about a lot of stuff man but like great pieces about skiing and things yeah

he said um he said that you come across he's talking about not about business, he's talking about, not about business, but he's talking about just your lifelong quest to keep wild places wild, right? Save wild places. He said that you seem, quote, deeply disheartened, perhaps even defeated. Did he hit it right? Or do you think he missed the mark there? Well, I think I've done climbs on every continent, including Antarctica. I've been all over the world. I've been to Africa a bunch of times.

I see nothing but deterioration everywhere in the world. Everywhere. I see nothing but deterioration everywhere in the world, everywhere. I don't see where anything is getting better than what it used to be. And that's where I feel defeated, I think. And, yeah. Do you think it's a non-stoppable slide now? Nature is going to take care of it. In the long, long game? No, probably sooner than we think.

I mean, I think these new diseases and stuff that are coming up, I mean, we're a petri dish, and we've exceeded our nutrients, and we're on our way out as a species, I think. You know, if you think that, okay, we're a special species that, you know, God made us in his own image and we're better than anything in nature and all of that stuff. Fine and good. But I don't believe that. I think that we're just a species. And that every species goes in and out of evolution and extinction. And I think we're on our way out. I mean, imagine if we had a serious situation in the States right now. The way people are having to live in Syria,

these bombed out towns, how many of us would survive that? How many of us could drink water out of this, you know, sewer practically? No, we'd all be dead. We're devolving as a species pretty quickly. And, you know, I'm very pessimistic about that, but it doesn't bother me because I have this attitude that we're just here for a short time, shorter than we'd that, you know, it's not so bad out there. I actually went, yeah, you read about these near-death,

where people actually die and then they come back and then they resent coming back. Yeah. Because it was so peaceful and nice over there. So I just accepted that. I think that there's a little bit of a risk with fatalism because it becomes infectious for other people, younger people. I made the mistake of telling my kids that that the earth's

having like a midlife crisis because in four billion years the Sun will burn out and some people say the earth's been solidified for four billion years so I'm like oh we're halfway done and months go by and my kid says when the sun burns out and everyone's dead, who can drive us to the cemetery? Oh, he's been talking to the Zen master. Well, I realize that there's viewpoints. There are viewpoints and perspectives that are often just best kept within. Yeah, I saw a bumper sticker that said, dude, when the rapture happens, can I have your car?

No, I agree. They're too young to understand. But, you know, you get these Greta Thunbergs, you know, from Sweden, who gets up 14 years old in front of parliament in London and just reads them the Riot Act. And she's not sitting around being depressed. She's kicking ass. Yeah.

And that's what we got to do. I mean, you know, there's no difference between somebody that says, oh, it's all over, don't bother, and somebody that says, oh, everything's going to be great, don't bother doing anything. Either way, nothing gets done. So, I mean, we have the biggest crisis humankind has ever had with this global climate change. It's too overwhelming to grapple with.

Most people don't know what to do well because you look and you're like it's too overwhelming to grapple with because you're like okay no matter what like whatever we do there's still china there's still india yeah but so it's like what do you know you know i learned you know, mountain climbing is conquerors of the useless. Why climb it? There's nothing up there. I mean, and it's the same thing. You want to be fighting for the sake of fighting.

We're not going to win, but you got to fight. And so I'm a happy person knowing that I'm doing everything I possibly can. I mean, I just changed, this last year, I changed the mission statement of our company to where it simply says we're in business to save our home planet. And so we had to sit down and say, okay, as a business, or as one employee out of 3000, what does that mean to me that the company I work for has made this commitment,

so how does that affect my job? And so every one of us has to say the same thing. If you really believe that global warming is happening, you have to ask yourself, what can I do? What should I be doing? Because it's World War III. It's like, you know, the Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor. You got to mobilize the whole country, the whole world in doing this.

But yet people are just going around, well, you know, I'm just one person. I don't know what to do. So as a company, we sat down and said, okay, here's what it means. The best thing we can do, because we use a lot of natural resources, is work on changing agriculture, going back to a regenerative organic style of agriculture. So we're working on developing a new certification that goes beyond organic

to where it captures, agriculture captures carbon. And then, you know, the other thing we can do is save, work on saving wild lands that capture a lot of carbon, especially like swamps and like I'm working on a 750,000 acre park at the tip of South America. That's all peat bogs and stuff like that. It captures more carbon than anywhere. And then the other thing is to get rid of this evil government. This next election, we are going to be up front and center in fighting those assholes.

And it's, you know, all those climate deniers in the government, they know what's happening. But they're evil in that they're choosing not to do anything about it for the sake of profit and staying in power. That's evil. When you're doing something you know is wrong, that's evil. And so we're going to be, as a company, with this new mission statement, that's what we're going to be doing.

And, you know, we've already started. Like, we've been growing cotton organically for years in all our clothing. We only use organically grown cotton. Well, that doesn't do the world any good. All it does is use up space that should be grown for food and stuff. And every time they plow in between, it releases all the carbon that we've captured. So now we started a program in India where we're growing it regeneratively and organically, started with 150 farmers, small farmers, and we talked them into growing cotton without tilling

and using cover crops and compost. And they're using chickpeas and turmeric, and plus we give them an extra 10 for their cotton so is that right yeah so they're making more money than they've ever made and it's they're small they're like an acre an acre and a half and um it's just really successful they get rid of the bugs with lights at night and they go around squashing them, I guess. I don't know. You can do it on a small scale, which is cool because it employs people. One of the problems with the world is we need to employ people.

Well, what are they going to be doing? They all can't be working on computers all day long. So many people want to be small farmers, and yet they have to compete with this agribusiness. So next year, we've got 650 farmers growing our cotton regeneratively. And we're going to be making products out of that. So that's my answer to global warming. That's not a defeated man. The solution to depression is action.

It's really simple. Yeah. As long as you're active, you know, then you don't get depressed. What do you got, Yannianni got any follow-uppers i'm with you i feel like uh when you say i like that new mission statement when you say the home planet i feel like really that segues right into saving because it's not really the planet like steve said i think in the long run the planet will sort of shake and shrug its shoulders, and it won't think twice about who's been here and what. But if we want a place to live as a species for a long time to come,

we should be thinking about how to secure that. Yeah. Well, that's why we added our home planet. Yeah. We didn't just say the planet. Right. Our home planet. We didn't just say the planet. Our home planet. I guess my point

is that a lot of people don't connect the two. I feel like I've been saying that for a long time because everybody's always talking about saving the planet. That doesn't mean anything to anybody. When you say home planet and you connect the two, you have to have a place to live.

It hits a little harder. Well, I can tell you we're not going to be colonizing Mars. In fact, we're wasting so much money in trying to go to Mars that we should be using to do some good here. You know, I want to start doing some T-shirts making fun of this. In fact, my daughter, who's got a right sense of humor just like i do says hey let's do a t-shirt that says fuck mars that's it i love it what do you um and i'm not like like you know i understand i understand the impulse to explore other planets and i think that it's

the same impulse that quickly after the african diaspora that quickly pushed our species to all six continents right just like curiosity so it moves and the fact that it's moved into the celestial space doesn't surprise me and it's hard for me to condemn but i love it when you do press people on um so like you suppress people on what do we really get out of planetary you know exploration space exploration they'd always be like, ah, you know, the Teflon on your egg pan. And I was like, man,

I feel like we put all that money into eggs. We'd have a hell of a lot better pan. Yeah. Well, there's some, there's some derivative, there's derivative outcomes. Anything else,

Giannis? I'm asking you, man, you know, you got every right, but I just know that you like, I don't know if you have any if you had any uh karma observations or anything oh no i don't he likes to keep quiet about that you know who doesn't believe in karma who's that do you read cormac mccarthy yeah you're

a cormac mccarthy-esque person he's. Dude, there's no karma in those books, man. Evil pays off. Evil pays off. Oh, he's a depressing guy. Oh, man. Yeah, I'd be real curious. If I could have a conversation with one person on this planet, it would be Cormac McCarthy. Yeah, he's kind of a hermit.

Yeah. Yeah, I don kind of a hermit. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if he, yeah, I doubt it. No, I doubt it. No. All right, well, do you got any, was there anything you were dying to talk about that I didn't ask you about? I don't want to, I don't want to like, I don't want to drag it out and wear you out. To get back to meat eating.

Okay, go on. You know, I got part of a company called patagonia provisions yep and and i own 49 of a bison ranch over in south dakota along with dan o'brien yep he wrote buffalo for the broken heart that's right yeah and uh so um or no what the hell is that book called yeah that's one book yeah okay he's he's written several books but um that's the most famous one and so he does it all naturally um we just leave him alone and um harvest him in the field shoot him with a copper bullet right in the brain and they drop and a copper bullet right in the brain,

and they drop, and the other ones just continue grazing, and then we butcher them right there in a tractor trailer. And so it's a really natural process. And those buffalo have a choice of eating 300 different grasses and forbs and wildflowers and things like that. So they're getting a really varied diet. So we wanted to test them as to the nutrient content of that meat compared to somebody who takes their bison and takes them to the stockyard in Colorado and feeds them on GMO corn and soybeans. I don't think you can do that, can you? What? Test it? No, you can't. I think that, isn't there a thing where you can't, it's not grain finished?

Yeah, no, that's what a lot of ranchers do. They grain finish them? Yeah. Oh, I thought there, okay, go on. I thought there was some, I thought that the Growers Association had certain things where when you see meat labeled, when you see like bison

sold, it carried with it certain parameters. No. Oh. No, you can feed them anything you want. And so, we, I'm really interested in micronutrients in your gut biome and all that stuff. So we did a test and ours is, well, the ones that are finished on grain have 12% fat, of

which most of it is omega-6 fat, which is the bad fat. You know, if you take a Petri dish and you put cancer cells in there, you put omega-6 fat, it grows the cancer cells like crazy. And so it's 12% fat and omega-6 fat. Ours is 3% fat, mostly omega-3 fat. Omega-3 will shrink the tumors. And plus the potassium and calcium and the 45 minerals that they've identified that are essential for your health are all in our buffalo and they're not in. You are what you eat. You know? And when you're eating a grass-fed beef, you're getting way more nutrients

than if you're eating a grain-fed beef. And like, you know, I have a woman who works for me who used to work for Sunset Magazine. I know that magazine. Yeah, they used to. That magazine's still around. Yeah, it's still around. And they used to have chickens Sunset Magazine. I know that magazine. Yeah, they used to. That magazine's still around. Yeah, it's still around. And they used to have chickens that are feral.

And they had, you know, bright orange yolks and real firm whites. And they decided, this was years ago, they decided to test the nutrients compared to organic eggs. Nine times more vitamin D. I mean, it's just a whole. Yeah, organic doesn't have that. I mean, you can find anything organic. It doesn't mean shit.

No, it doesn't mean anything. In fact, yeah. Rattlesnake venom's organic. Yeah, I mean, chickens are omnivores. Chickens are dinosaurs, little dinosaurs. If they were bigger, they would eat you if you stumbled and fell. Yanni's a chicken man. He knows this whole world.

So they need to eat those stink bugs and worms and stuff like that. So if they do that, the nutrients of those eggs is off the chart because when you're feeding just grain, whether it's organic or not, they're not getting the proper diet. And so we've been working with a guy at UCLA who wrote a book called The Mind-Gut Connection. And our gut biome is so depleted compared to hunters and gatherers that it's only about 30% of what it should be. You know, hunter-gatherers, I've heard, there's one tribe in Africa that's still hunter-gatherers.

They have between 80 and 100,000 different things to eat. And they eat like this, you know, just picking this and that. And when you sit down with a steak, a baked potato, and a salad, this guy says you're starving yourself. You know, if you eat a spinach as opposed to kale, you're getting different nutrients.

And it all comes from, spinach as opposed to kale, you're getting different nutrients. And it all comes from starting to realize, like look at grapes, okay? Wine grapes. Okay, go ahead. In Central Valley in California, you grow Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, and you get $800 a ton, and it makes, you know, plonk wine. 200 miles further north, you get up to $30,000 a ton. Same grape.

So what's the difference? It's all about the longer growing season. The longer a grape matures, the better wine it makes. A quick maturity in a hot climate makes shit wine. All these polyphenols that make taste are missing. And I know of a guy who's bought a farm in Italy, and it had 800-year-old olive trees in there. And so he tested the olive oil from those trees,

and it's so full of polyphenols, and that's what's really good for your gut. That's what's so good about the Mediterranean diet is all these polyphenols and olive oil. It's off the chart compared to the younger. And that's because the longer the roots, the more nutrients you get. Yeah. And, you know, modern wheat has roots like eight inches deep.

And we've been working with a wheat called Kernza. That's a perennial wheat. The roots go down 15 feet. And we tested the nutrients in that off the chart compared to normal wheat. The thing I struggle with this, and you're speaking to me, because I eat a highly varied diet, and we actually have a gut biologist, or there's a doctor that specializes in stuff, and she wants some shit samples off me and Yanni,

because we eat so many weird things and eat so much wild game, and I'm looking forward to getting that back. But then the thing I think about is now knowing now that i know so many families where they're real wealthy and they're food obsessed and everything they eat is so carefully selected and their children aren't allowed to eat this and that processed and they can't have sugar and shit and they never had a pop and all they eat is kale all day i don't see them spinning off these amazing physical specimens but then you have people who are coming out of like you have people who are coming out at inner city broken homes who wind up becoming uh professional athletes who are the most physically capable,

powerful individuals you've ever seen. Or that you go to people like the Incan Empire where they ate potatoes and the accomplishments there and impoverished people. Plains Indian tribes ate three things. And when you talk, when you read about the U S cavalry discussing the way that like at the

battle, the little bighorn, the way that those people moved through their ranks, like a wolf through sheep. Like I feel it and I hear it and I'm like, and I, and I think about it, but then I just never see when you look at the population in general, I never see where you have really wealthy

people who have the luxury of food choice that they're like so much tougher and shit. Like, in fact, I often kind of see that they seem weak. Their kids are riddled with allergies. You know what I mean? So, like, I want to believe it, but when I look, I don't see it. It's puzzling to me. I'd love to say, like, fuck yeah,

but it's hard for me to grasp. You know, the U.S. military is really worried right now because they can't get anybody to sign up for the military who can pass a physical. That's not because of how deep the roots on wheat are. That's because of what they're doing physically.

Well, it's the number one cause. They're rejecting 70-something percent of people who want to be in the military. This isn't a draft where you get every loser around. Because of physical fitness. Well, number one is allergies. Number one causes allergies because these kids have never played in the dirt. Yeah.

And they're allergic to all kinds of food allergies. You can't have that in the military. Number two causes diabetes, which is, you know. Food-based. Food-based. Well, you have two large. Number three is obesity. It's all based on food.

And, you know, they're gonna spend $250 million in the next couple years trying to get people to join the military. But, it's, I talked to this professor at UCLA, this Emory Meyer, Emron Meyer, and I said, well, what can you do about building up your gut biome?

Because all these immune diseases that we're getting from Parkinson's to ALS and everything, it's all in your gut. And he said, well, forget about probiot forget about probiotics so the best thing you can do is have it as varied diet as you possibly can be a grazer yeah and you know that's what I do when I walk by a wild rosebush I always Papa you know went in because I eat dandelions. I eat, you know, whatever. And I try to do that as much as I can. And he said, that's the best thing to do.

And then you eat meat, but a small amount. And he says, well, you know, I don't know what else to say. But he did say 10 years from now we'll be looking back and say, I can't believe we used to prescribe antibiotics. Man, I don't know. I've been pretty sick and laying in a hospital. You're going to be making a fortune out of your shit pills. Yeah, maybe I don't want to give them away i i i i don't mean to yeah i don't mean to trivialize what you're saying but it's just

like i i try so hard to make it make sense but then i imagine like if you went to you know like if you went and got the kids out of the the swankiest, most philosophy-riddled private school in L.A. and then went and got a bunch of hog farmer's kids out in Nebraska, those hog farmer's kids had kicked the shit out of those kids. Oh, absolutely. So it's like it always is puzzling to me, man. But I think what Yvonne's saying is that those hog farmer kids might be getting more of what he's saying is good than those other kids.

They're eating a hell of a lot more dirt. Yeah, for sure. They're getting more nutrients. And they're getting the exercise. Stanford University did a study in 2013. They studied organic vegetables and non-organic vegetables. They just went to a supermarket and got organic carrots and non-organic carrots. They found no difference in nutrients.

That's the thing that people don't understand. I think that there's a big misnomer around what the hell organic means. That's right. You could have a hydroponics establishment and give a carrot only what it needs to become something that resembles the shape of a carrot and be organic. That's right. Hydroponics now can be organic. And all you're doing in between crops is you're adding liquid fertilizer and just a few soil amendments. You're not replacing all those

micronutrients that we're only discovering how important they are. And whereas regenerative organic uses cover crops and compost. So in between crops, you're replacing that. And so if you go to a supermarket and you taste a carrot that's organic and one that's not organic and they taste the same, they have the same nutrients. If one tastes better than the other, the one that tastes better has way more nutrients. A wild strawberry that's a quarter inch across- We were eating some yesterday. Has more nutrients than this gigantic, hydroponically or organically grown strawberry. There's a direct correlation between taste and total nutrients.

Yeah, man, when you grow your own carrots at home and eat them, it's not even the same thing, man. Exactly. Remember we were talking about when you're doing a can hunt, they should come up with a different word for it? There should be a different word for when you grow a carrot. Oh, you can say that for tomatoes. You can say that for cucumbers, strawberries.

I mean, the strawberries that we get in our garden. Yeah. Wow. I mean, they just blow your mouth off, you know? And then you go to the store and they're hard and flavorless. You want me to tell you what's wrong in the world? I'll tell you one anecdote what's wrong in the world. Please.

When I was living in Seattle, I identified this little slope in my yard and put in strawberry. You should back up and say that you just transformed what was there when you got there. Because that's a part of it, right? But your house was set up for fancy urban landscaping. Yeah. And it was like, we had the kind of place where you get a lot, and they build the house. They overbuilt the lot so bad.

The house took up so much of the lot that the house would have been in violation of having too many non-permeable surfaces. So they had to put in a permeable driveway in order to have it not exceed non-permeable surface status because it's a hell of a lot of rain i don't know if you heard yeah comes down in seattle now and then um anyhow i put in i start putting in strawberries and whatever it is i don't know man, man, about why. I mean, this thing was like, you couldn't keep up with the strawberries in here. Best strawberries you ever ate. Tons of them, couldn't keep up with them.

And they were just like, I was like, man, these things are going to wind up cracking the foundation on this house, how these strawberries went. And we sold that house. We lived there not too long. Sold it. And my neighbor was like, man man those new people took out the strawberries i'm like i just can't picture you know i mean god bless them uh don't know the first thing about

them sure they're great people probably broken down inside the road they probably you know jump out and help you but um yeah it's hard to imagine, like, a view that, like, oh, here's a thing you can eat, and it's just growing here. I wish it wasn't there. I wish there wasn't something there that made, like, a great thing to eat. Not only that, but I like these things more than likely, because who doesn't like a strawberry? But I would rather just go down to Whole foods and buy the tasteless yeah the world would be better if those berries were not growing

there but yeah we used to have a weeping willow man um we had a weeping willow on our yard on our beach when i grew up grew up as a kid and muskrats had den under it because they had root structure and bull heads would like back into the muskrat dens and lay eggs and everything in the world and i remember the old man getting sick of raking the leaves and got rid of that weeping willow and there's not on my lake where i grew up which was ringed by weeping willow. And there's not, on my lake where I grew up, which was ringed by weeping willows, there's one. There's one weeping willow that I know about, and it sits in front of a kid when I was growing up who was named Justin Russell, and his phone number was 6695. That's the weeping willows left there.

All right, man. Thank you very much for coming on. I've been wanting to have you on for a long, long time. Well, anytime. I'm just down the road. You've got better fishing here. We can walk around on our streams. Better access than Wyoming. We can walk our streams.

My kids can probably walk one right now. Okay, thank you again. Appreciate it. again appreciate it you you you you you you you you

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

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.