The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 216: Roasting Coffee In The CIA

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Evan Hafer, Phil Taylor, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: ice fishing is not a crime; exactly how big is a big blood transfusion?; let’s sort out addiction issues later; ass goblins; Bergmann's rule and Allen's rule; negligent discharges; pissing out your car door and into your ice hole; Black Rifle Coffee Company; growing up outdoors; why it’s called MeatEater; having more degrees than intelligence; back-slapping, pleated-Dockers-wearing, back-nine D-bags; acclimating to the stress of a war zone; repatriating to the mountains; on liking Folgers and wanting your coffee to look like tea; being ass backwards on caffeine levels; why Jani's a decaf man and how Steve saved his life; need-to-know basis in a time of not normal; flattening the curve with the family; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Alright, everyone. Take two on not making the show the way we're supposed to make it. We're all sitting there all tight, smelling each other across the

podcast studio table. We're remote again. So quarantine episode part two. But I do got a piece of good news. I just got an email about this this morning that I don't know if you know, but

the Trump administration has done a number of things around access enhancement. And that could mean a thousand things, right uh access is real popular all people that hunt and fish and recreate are like the idea of access or voice the idea that they like access and access can mean different stuff right um so i've heard people take the access argument being like access enhancement and use that as a way to say

we should carve up our wilderness areas with roads in order to give us more access in our trucks so you can take it different ways but this is a good access where they got a plan they're just rolling out a new plan here which would uh it's a proposal which would expand hunting and fishing opportunities across more than 2.3 million acres at 97 national wildlife refuges so there's there's always been a lot of refuges where you can hunt and fish or hunt and or fish and they're trying to roll that out and also rolling out pushing to roll out hunting and fishing opportunities on some fish hatchery lands so it's just like taking existing lands and getting it so you can use it for you know pursuing your activities in places where maybe

you can't but it doesn't really make sense why you're not allowed to. What they look at is they look at distinct new hunting and fishing opportunities. The way they define this is it be a species at a field station in a state. So, for instance, if you opened up, you had a refuge and a refuge had a bunch of largemouth bass on it, and you opened up the refuge in Delaware for largemouth bass, you're creating a distinct new hunting and fishing opportunity, meaning at a specific refuge, you're allowed to catch a specific fish in a specific state. They're projecting that this proposed rule would create 900 distinct new hunting and fishing opportunities wow uh on top of last year they you know we had access expansion of 1.4 million acres now i'll be the last guy to say that that everything that's um you know every administration's got its things it does right and its things it doesn't do right.

But in terms of access enhancement in making areas that you previously weren't able to hunt and fish open for hunting and fishing, these guys are doing a pretty good job there. We got a guy. I just got a bumper sticker. A guy sent me that says ice ice fishing is not a crime, and it's meant to look like the... Yeah, do you remember the skateboarding is not a crime?

Buddy, my mom's Buick Skylark of era, probably like 88, had one of those stickers on it. Yeah, this guy, he's connected somehow to Harvard University university and he invited us on our live tour our dates keep getting postponed because of covet 19 uh he had he already had a ticket to go to our show and uh our our show in the boston area and he was inviting us that we could come tour harvard but he was pointing out that

he had to make ice fishing is not a crime bumper stickers because ice fishing is so unfamiliar to the people in his area that when people see someone out on the ice, they, their first impulse is to call the police, which I haven't dug into it much, but I thought it was funny. I almost put it on the podcast studio window, but we're not there. So I'm never going to be able to do that. I don't know what the hell to do with the thing now. Follow-up on another question. Oh, go ahead, Yanni. I was going to say mine's on my freezer.

That's where my sticker collection lives these days. On your home freezer? Yeah, maybe that's what I'll do because no one's going to take your damn freezer from you this hasn't gone that far yet another quick follow-up on a past conversation we were talking about yanni who are we talking about a dude told a story about his dad's blood transfusion and uh i was i was incredulous about how could you give someone 14 units of blood when the human body, like your body only holds 8 to 12, quote, units of blood. So how do you give someone 14 units of blood? It's like they'd overflow and it'd all run out their ears.

Yeah, which is, are you talking, because a couple of people wrote in to clarify that. Yeah, yeah. Are you talking because a couple of people wrote in to clarify that? Yeah. Yeah. So what was the – there was a good analogy that someone used. Well, a surgeon wrote in. He's done a lot of trauma surgery. And he was saying it's real common to use that much blood. And they use what's called a massive transfusion protocol.

And he said they keep bringing in little red Coleman Lunchable-type coolers containing a combination of packed red blood cells, fresh frozen plasma, and platelets. There's six units in a cooler. And you just keep pumping those things in until the bleeding stops. And he says his personal high he had a patient the guy actually lived he ran uh he'd been shot in the gut with a 45 and the surgeon ran 72 units of blood through that dude whoa he had injuries to his aorta his inferior vena cava which i don't know what that is his left renal artery which i don't know what that is plus some other stuff the whole time

they're trying to fix them um like when you take your uh you'd have to like take a valve off or whatever on blood vessels. And yeah, dude bled so much that they gave him what is it again? Your body holds 8 to 12 and they ran 72 units of blood through the dude after getting shot by a.45. A doctor named Sam

out of Amarillo, Texas. This other guy wrote it on the blood thing. He had this to say. He talks about how he's a real good blood donor. And he's got a kid uh who has down syndrome and they had uh some other complicating health problems and the kid had to have an open heart surgery the he's got good insurance we said the itemized bill for the surgery came out to two hundred thousand dollars and he went through the itemized list and they had a single unit of blood ready for him in a cooler, a little lunch cooler, igloo lunch cooler that the kid never even needed

because the surgery went well, apparently. But on the itemized list, that unit of blood that you donate when you need it back, it comes at a price tag of $827. I was just wondering how much one of those was. Yeah. A couple more good things. We were complaining. I think Cal was complaining about this.

With all these questions going on right now, like what's an essential service and not an essential service? And we were talking about how could it be that you could close like a fishing access site down, but a liquor store could remain open? Like who determines what's serious or what's essential and how can booze be essential? And a social worker wrote in and he says he works in addiction services. He says when people detox, it can be real ugly. And detoxing often requires a hospital bed. With anticipations of hospital beds being in short supply,

we don't want folks detoxing right now. Right now we're focusing on harm reduction. Basically, trying to help people stay safe while drinking. They'll sort out the addiction issues down the road. He also pointed out a revenue issue and trying to minimize the economic chaos. A lot of restaurants, alcohol pays the bills, or I'm sorry, you know, beer pays the bills, liquors allows stay open or whatever that mantra is in the restaurant business, meaning restaurants without alcohol sales business gets very difficult.

And in trying to minimize the chaos here, it can be helpful to allow res, uh, restaurants to do, to go booze and things in order to help them stay solvent. Right. And keep food flowing, um, in a, in a time of like very stressed situations. Yeah. We heard about that too.

Right. Cause I think Cal had included that in his, his statement there that one of the states had thrown that in and he didn't understand why, but obviously that's why. Yeah, and this dude was writing in about that. The ongoing debate, I'll interrupt these updates here to tell what we have on the beautiful and lovely Evan Hafer, right? Is that how you say it?

Hafer. Hafer. Hafer. It's close enough. From Black Rifle Coffee Company. We met. I was emceeing. Turns out I don't feel like, and my wife pointed this out to me,

that I'm not a, she feels that I'm not going to make it into the MC Hall of Fame. Everyone has their talents, she pointed out, but she doesn't know that I'm a gifted emcee. I'm like a functional emcee. Like I get it done, but I get it done without a lot of fanfare. Anyways, I was emceeing at the National Wild Turkey Convention or the National Wild Turkey Annual Big Blowout Convention in Nashville, and I met evan hayford

there and then we became kind of like email friends recently yeah yeah that was uh that was a great that was the first time i've been out there so that was a it was a great event it was huge i didn't realize it was that big no it's huge hey uh did you take in any of my emceeing or you just backstage and doing stuff the whole time? No, I was down in the crowd. I was taking in the emcee. I thought you – Did you think to yourself, man, this young man really has emceeing dialed?

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking the entire time. I didn't think about much else. I was just, this is impressive. Steve, what did your wife say your weak points were, your MC weak points? That I didn't do a lot of the really sort of corny drumming up, you know, like drumming up enthusiasms. It was more, I did more of it.

It felt more transactional. That was her takeaway. Evan, now that we've brought you into the conversation here, we're doing our rundowns. Yeah. We have an ongoing debate, and you probably have some feedback on this because you spent time in the Special Forces

and we'll talk about that. But we have an ongoing debate about whether or not a real man or a real woman can wear flip-flops like because my buddy ronnie bame feels that you're not ready to defend your family in flip-flops and feels it like he's like when i have flip-flops on, I ask myself, well, what if there's a volcano? Right. What will that mean for my feet? What will that mean for my family? And so we have a lot of people write in.

We had a guy one time, his wife got assaulted by a rat, and he was able to kill the rat with a flip-flop. Right. But because he could get it off quick. Yeah. This guy just got caught up in the earthquake there. He's in Boise, got caught up in the earthquake. He was running around his house in his flip-flops, and he got to worrying about the structural integrity of his house

and went to book outside, and on his way outside, tripped in his flip-flops and then made it outside. And here he is, the world's falling apart. He thinks his house is going to fall down. You know, the Yellowstone volcano might erupt and he's outside in his flip-flops now and it made him think that this is not an appropriate footwear for american living i should put it to you yeah i would i would tend to agree with that. I know a couple guys out there that they always point out that the Afghans have been fighting wars and in flip flops for since the 80s. So when they talk about combat footwear, they think about the Afghans fighting, you know, the Soviets. And, you know, you've got all these other factions in Central Asia that have been fighting wars for decades and flip-flops. So they're always like, it's combat footwear. It's kind of a joke, actually.

It's kind of a joke. It's interesting that you brought that up because it is a debate even internally. Whereas if I wear a flip-flop, I'm typically, I know that it's because I'm in a boat or I'm in the water and it's recreation time. I don't typically wear them as casual footwear, but my partner, Matt, he wears them every day. I've actually barely seen him wear shoes. So it's an internal debate over here too. Do you guys have a company policy? No flip-flops? No, we have a company policy, which is carry your firearm most of the time, but that's typically the only company policy we really adhere to. And if you want to do it in flip-flops, that's your business. Yeah, you do it, you know,

and I think most guys are more concerned with, you know, how fast can they react. And so they try to become as proficient as they can in their footwear. That's kind of their mentality. So they wear them all the time, just to, just to, just to stay well, to stay trained, to stay trained, to stay trained. Yeah. To stay trained, stay in the, stay in the mindset, stay in the mindset. Uh, another thing, uh, we had, we recently had the Turkey Doctor on, um, that's a great show. What was the name of that episode? Do you guys remember? we recently had The Turkey Doctor on. That's a great show.

What was the name of that episode? Do you guys remember? Gobble Your Ass Off? Was that it? Yeah, sounds right. Yeah. Go back and listen to that one. After that, Jared Oakley, he's kind of a friend of the show.

His brother, he's a conservationist, works with mule deer. His brother works with Mexican gray wolves. Anyways, he wrote in. He was talking about hunting in the Black Hills of Wyoming. He found what looked like a bear shit, like a large boar, not B-O-A-R,

not like a large boar male. I mean large boar, like large caliber. B-O-R-E. Yeah, large caliber bear shit. And he got to inspecting it as one does and saw that it had a white coating on it that white frosty coating

that you see on bird shit which I always think resembles the white mold that you get on good Italian salami but he says it's the biggest bird shit he'd ever seen he got to talk later to an expert on turkeys i don't know if you guys ever heard of john hutto i think i don't know how he pronounces his name

hutto i think he's that guy that lived with turkeys he raised up turkeys and learned how to communicate with them and he talks about that he believes there are it really changed his viewpoint on hunting a fair bit i think right now he's living with some mule deer but he lived with turkeys for a long time and learned he he feels that he's identified 27 vocalizations that turkeys make or something uh he's got a lot of interesting stories about turkeys but learn to communicate with them and uh you kind of got to watch his own story of it hUTTO interestingly he's married to the singer Rita Coolidge but he was Jared Oakley was asking about these giant turkeys which he called ass goblins and it says that when a hen

sitting on her nest it seems that they don't want to defecate I should ask the turkey doctor about this but they don't want to defecate. I should ask the turkey doctor about this, but they don't want to defecate near their nest because it increases the odor, right? And it could be attractive. It could attract predators. So they build up these giant deuces and then wander off and drop these giant deuces, which are the size of bear scats.

What do you think of that, Giannis? It might be Joe Hutto. That's what I said, right? Oh, I thought you were saying John. My bad. Oh, yeah, I could have said that. Jared Oakleaf was the guy, our friend that wrote in. Yeah, Joe Hutto.

I'm sorry. Sounds very possible. Sounds like what I would do if I was sitting on a nest hiding, not wanting to go off just to drop a deuce, stay low key, hold it for a few days. Yeah. We talked about this before, but another word for that would be to take a growler.

You know, another quick note before we get started here. Oh, two things. And one of these is going to be great for Evan. The first one, I don't know if this is up Evan's alley or not, but we talk a lot about Bergman's rule or Bergman's principle. Phil the engineer, do you know what Bergman's principle is? I don't know. So when you're working on the shows,

you're not actually listening to anything anybody's saying. I think that Bergman's maybe hasn't been mentioned since phil started dude it's the main thing i do not i do not recall ever hearing about it okay so maybe you're right or maybe yanni maybe yanni's right for anyone who's ever wondered why is it that white-tailed deer in Florida are real dinky, and white-tailed deer in, say, Alberta have big, huge bodies. Why is that? Well, Bergman's rule is this thing, or Bergman's principle is this thing that mammals, when you look at a mammal's range, okay, and you imagine its range from north to south,

when you look at an animal's range, you will find that within its range, it will tend to have a bigger body the more north you go. So within its range, smaller specimens live in the south, larger specimens live in the north. We're talking about body size here. It's believed, like a way to explain this, is that it has to do with heat retention and heat dissipation. Let's say this, a 200-pound person has less surface area. A 200-pound human has less surface area than a 150 pound human meaning the the measurement of your body

that's exposed to the air relative to the mass of the body is less so those bodies are better able to retain body heat when in the south where it's hotter, smaller bodies tend to have greater surface area. So they have greater ability to shed, greater ability to shed body heat. And someone pointed out, as much as I like talking about Bergman's rule, he pointed out there's also Allen's rule. And Allen's rule is interesting.

I had never heard of it. It's the animals have longer extremities and hot climates you take the antelope jackrabbit and think about that and what's interesting there is it points out that uh i think it's true that the mule deer defies bergman's rule that the mule deer there's a lot of confusion where you have some larger specimens of mule deer in more southerly latitudes. And so it's an exception to Bergman's rule. But I think when you look at their ears, I think that they adhere to Allen's rule in terms of length of ear and how much you're putting out for heat dissipation last one this is one where evan can feel helpful we had a debate uh we've been having a debate it goes on uh where we're talking about

accidental discharges and evan if i'm not not mistaken, in the military, they trained you up. I know in the Marines, they pound it into your head. Oh, yeah. There's no such thing as an accidental discharge. No, it's negligent discharge. Okay, a guy decided to challenge that. And he's from the Air Force.

Well, of course. Okay, well, hear him out. Hear him out. Okay. They're on a firing line. Okay. They were getting ready to deploy, and they were going through some tactical exercises.

They were firing M16s, and they had fired dozens of rounds in the last few minutes. Barrels are hot. Yep. They finish another round of shooting, but still have loaded rifles. The range instructor tells everyone to point the rifles down to the ground

and downrange, but one guy didn't get the downrange part and only got the down to the ground part. All of a sudden, blouch! Gunshot goes off. Right. He looks over, and a guy just falls down in a way that he thinks the guy just somehow

killed himself or killed someone killed their neighbor right but it turns out he'd only shot himself in the foot and then and then instantly passed out is why he looked like he was why he went down so hard right everybody laid their weapons on the ground to give first aid. And his rifle, which was now a few feet away on the gravel and pointed downrange, went off again on its own. And pointed out that it turns out the weapon had cooked off a round. The barrel got so hot, it ignited the round without trigger pull right they found the cartridges they did not have dents in the primer but there was a bulge where it had been pressed against the bolt right the pressure of the round going off on its own had pushed the brass into the hole on the bolt where the firing pin lives so So actually like an inverted dimple.

So he says, basically put that in your pipe and smoke it when it comes down to negligent discharge. But he points this out, just reminds you, watch where your muzzles are pointed at all times. Yeah, kind of. There's something called a negligent discharge. And obviously, when you don't point your weapon at anything, you don't seek to destroy it. That's one of the rules of handling a firearm.

So you never point it at anywhere but a safe direction. So he was false in that because he's pointing it at his foot. Two, I've heated a lot of barrels in my day. I've sent hundreds of thousands of rounds downrange. And that doesn't happen very often. However, it is something that as the training NCO, the guy that the non-commissioned officer that's in charge of your block of training, they have to be conscious of how many rounds are being put through the barrels and what timeframe. So I would say the negligent discharge wasn't actually owned by the shooter. It was owned. And the responsibility of that was on the guy that was in charge of the range.

That's where I would say that was a negligent discharge. But the ownership is passed on to the person that's in charge and allowing the weapons to get too hot because that shouldn't have happened. Yeah. I feel like I editorialized a little bit now that I'm looking at his email more carefully. I should point out, in this gentleman's defense, he did not say, put that in your pipe and smoke it. In fact, he just kind of says, watch where your gun's pointing. Right. Well, put that round in your foot.

I don't know if that works, but it's probably not. Maybe in that circumstance, you could see it. He also said the Air Force ended up pulling lots of ammo out of operation due to the incident. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. So, I mean, all the ammo, all the barrels and things like that. Now, all these things can, inspections can fail so depending on how the equipment was the the the prior maintenance of the equipment the inspections of the equipment you know where were the rounds coming from were they you know depending there's a lot of variables there but ultimately don't point your weapon anything you don't seek to destroy and don't heat up your rifles to the point they're going to cook off rounds it's it's pretty i i've literally put on hundreds of courses with thousands of guys at this point and i've not

cooked off a round on a range with a rifle but evan you're familiar with this thing called cooking off around oh yeah yeah yeah yeah we're when your barrels are too hot, what'll happen is a lot of these in depending, right? We're cause if you're using suppressors or not using suppressors, your barrels will get really hot and they'll start to smoke. So it's not the smoke from the discharge of the round. It's actually, it's cooking the, uh, the, the surface of the barrel. At that point, you, you run a lot of different risks, right? You run a lot of different risks on the, the, the barrel itself, your firearms, your hands are going to be, they're going to be hot as hell. You're going to have to use a glove

to hold onto your rifle, depending on what you're, you know, what you're shooting. Your hand guards are in place on an M16, M4, depending on the variable they're using. They're in place to protect your hand from the heat of the barrel. But at that point, your barrel is so hot. That's an interesting point, yeah. Your barrel is so hot that your hand will not be able to maintain, even through a glove.

If you get a barrel that hot to cook rounds, you're going to feel the heat coming off that barrel through the hand guards and through your glove. Somebody should have stopped that training iteration well before that happened. But, you know, it's easy for me to armchair quarterback it from my, you know, comfortable office here in San Antonio. No, I like it, man.

That's good insight. When my dad would reminisce, he had a certain stories from World War II that he liked to tell and tell again. And when people, on the subject of urine, human urine, he would often reminisce about how much he disliked the smell or how much he associated the smell of piss with pissing on overheated barrels. Oh yeah. In the military and the distinct odor that made. And that, um, it's kind of turned them off to piss smell, hot piss smell.

I, I, I know that smell, not from pissing on firearms, from pissing on my, uh, muffler, you know, pulling, pulling over and trying to find the wheel well.

Like just burying yourself in because you got a long road trip and you can't find a place to pull off and get a cover. So I just go in on that rear wheel well of the truck. I've lately adopted the really old manny thing you do where you open your door and just kind of wedge in there. Yeah. Kind of wedge. So you're standing. Yeah. You look like – you're trying to look like a person who – I don't know what the hell you look like you're doing.

Like you're contemplating whether to get in or out of your truck. Yeah. And you take a piss there yeah i was doing that the other day and kind of got almost got busted by someone i was at a river access and almost got busted by someone who came in around and caught me through my own passenger window but i i pinched her off and didn't have an issue. That brought up a thing a guy recently wrote in where he was saying a hot tip for ice fishing. He says, if your hole is freezing up

and you think peeing on it will thaw it out, don't do it. You just wind up with a frozen hole covered in frozen piss. Evan, now, when someone's like, hey, man, what the hell's Black Rifle Coffee Company? Yeah. Like, why that? What do you tell them?

Why not? Sir Edmund Hillary, I think he said, they asked him, why'd you climb Everest? Because it was there. You know, I don't know. I always say the Genesis story is not very long and it's really not that complex because I'm not that smart of a guy, but I was teaching firearms and roasting coffee, uh, my previous profession. So I was teaching,

um, close quarters combat and advanced pistol marksmanship to a bunch of former special operations guys. And I would have this one pound, it's called a fluid bed roaster, which is really just hot air. It's an elaborate popcorn popper essentially. And I was roasting coffee and teaching firearms at the time. But roasting it for personal use? Yeah. And for the courses that I was teaching. So guys would come through, I would get 24 to 12 guys every few weeks and I would roast coffee for

the courses. Just as a nice gesture. Yeah. That's all it was for. I had a couple of buddies that I would ship it out to, but most of the time it was just because I was interested in roasting coffee. It was my hobby for a long time. I loved it. And I had my service rifle literally on the, on the tailgate of the G ride, the government vehicle. And I had a one pound fluid bed coffee roaster on the other side. I looked at those two things, put the two words together, black rifle, because that's essentially, it was just this dirty black rifle from being used on the range and coffee, merged those two things. And there's Black Rifle Coffee Company. That was it. It managed to create a, I guess, an image in a lot of people's minds. So if you're anti-black rifles, that obviously would kind of incite some feeling of negativity. I wasn't really thinking of that

at the time though. I was just looking at my service rifle. I was very naive even to the Pro 2A community and some of those other things i was super naive i was just looking at my service rifle and looking at my coffee roaster going yeah yeah those two things look together you know i've told this story a bunch of times but and when we were naming when we were like starting a show making a show um I was reading a lot of books to my new kid, a very young kid. He liked dinosaur books, and you'd always get to the T-Rex. Right. And it'd be like, this ferocious meat eater, right?

Or you'd get to like a grizzly bear part of a book or whatever, and it'd be like, this meat eater is the king of the mountain right and i was like i kind of like that word i just like that word i hadn't thought of the full implication and then later it became like um later it's often understood by people that you're sort of making a dietary suggestion right or that you're like the meat eater when it was just meant to be like this sort of like, it was meant to be this kind of like classification of animals. Yeah. You know, I wasn't blind to the way it would work, but it wasn't like a really well thought

thing. It was just, it seemed like a cool word. It is a cool word. It is. It rolls off the tongue. They're balanced. It's a cool word. It's a cool logo. But it's the same thing. People go, I didn't hire a marketing company.

I didn't really have any ideas to even how to market a product, to be honest with you. Did you have a lot of people tell you as you're starting your business, did you a lot of people tell you that um you better change the name every day oh yeah we hear even today even today yeah we hear it we hear it every day yeah it ours isn't ours isn't is pugnacious as yours at all but we still hear um you know we have a book coming out uh wilderness skills and survival book and we just heard from someone affiliated with, you know, that our name in there could be divisive, you know. I hear it all the time. It's just, you know, people, they'll DM me or something.

Or you know where I hear it a lot is from people that don't know me and they're, we're introduced in public places somewhere. And you'll be sitting there with a group of people and you'll have somebody typically from the corporate world that has, you know, way more degrees than they have intelligence. And they'll say something like, well, how are you going to capture the entire market with a company name like Black Rifle? And instantly I just kind of want to say, you know, I don't care. And typically that's what I say. Like, I don't care.

I'm not that concerned. Well, how can you not be concerned? That's typically their reaction too. It's like, I'm just not that concerned, man. I was roasting coffee in my garage. Like this is bigger than I thought it was going to be when I was doing it. This is way bigger than it is now. I'm more concerned with, you know, other things than capturing the entire coffee market and, you know, working with a bunch of back slapping, pleated, docker wearing, you know, back nine D d-bags like that's not it's not my thing it's not my thing i need to get a t-shirt that says that on it 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.

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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 handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. You grew up in Idaho, right? Yeah, yeah, I grew up in some place I'm sure you're familiar with, Lewiston, Idaho. Oh, yeah, well.

Yeah, yeah. Did you grow up hunting and fishing? I did, yeah. Yeah, my dad actually, well, every, both sides of my family, mom's side, my dad's side, I grew up in a smaller logging town when you go up to Clearwater on Highway 12, as you're probably familiar with, up and over the Lolo Pass. There's a really small, small town, a logging town up there called Weeipe, Idaho, where my family's from. Yeah. Weeipe, Idaho, where my family's from. Yeah.

Weeipe Prairie, actually. And then we moved to Lewiston later in life. And I spent more time fishing early on than I did hunting. I would go out hunting with my grandpa, my dad, both. But I was way more interested in fishing from an an early age i was a i was a nerd you know like i was when i say you know nerd i was the guy building a fly rod when i was 12 when all my other friends were you know wanting to do skateboarding and you know i was like i'm super interested in doing this trying to build this fly rod. I'm sure that you guys are very similar to that.

You spent a lot of time on the river. I did. Every, I've spent, I would say the majority, I'm, I'm at home and I feel the most comfortable outside of my home home as is in the river. You know, I feel like you said this to me, your mom or your dad was Jewish, right? Or you, my dad. Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's Jewish ancestry. How did he wind up? Uh, what was the line? How'd he wind up in the logging community there? It's a family tradition. I think my great-grandfather was actually a sheep herder.

Oh, is that right? Really? Yeah, they were sheep herders. And then my grandfather was logging only because that's where they landed. So my grandfather, my dad's dad, we disconnected from our entire family tree at that point. He moved out West and we didn't really know anyone past my grandfather. So he had moved out to Idaho when he was like 12 or 13, taking like a train from Colorado or New Mexico. And just strike it, like strike it out on his own. Yeah. Yeah, they had something like 80 kids or something at the point,

and he struck out and he landed in a small logging town, which was Wee Eye Borfino, that whole area in northern Idaho. And so we didn't really – we weren't practicing or anything like that. It was something that I found later in life where, you know, through 23andMe and a bunch of putting the pieces all together because my dad used to say, oh, we're this, we're German. And then it was, oh, we're, he'd have some other names for it. But it was pretty easy for me to piece it all together

because I went to Jerusalem later in life. And I knew by that time, even before 23andMe came out, 23andMe just confirmed the genetics test, basically. Yeah, gotcha. How did you get in your head growing up the way you grew up where you grew up? Did you guys have – how did you get in your head you wanted to go to Green Beret school? I mean, were you a military family? No.

You know, it's super easy. As guys that were outdoor – you guys are outdoorsmen. I spent every waking moment. I went to the university of Idaho, which is in Moscow every weekend, every morning. And then if, you know, depending on what, you know, steelhead run was in, it was how active I was going to participate in classes basically. Uh, and I spent the majority of, of my high school and college days in the outdoors. Uh, I was kind of introduced to Green Berets through a friend and I loved being in the outdoors. That's, that's, I love being in the mountains. I love being in the outdoors.

And I thought, well, I also want to jump out of planes. That's, that's pretty interesting. You know, the Green Berets mission is by, with, and through. So they're working with host national forces to do essentially covert action, which is direct action. That's, to me, that was really adventurous. It was super cool. It was something that I could spend all my time like in jungles and mountains, you know, wearing a rucksack and living out of it. And, and, and then also, you know, jumping out of planes and potentially going to war. That sounded, nobody really had to convince me too hard. You know, that was a, it was a pretty easy connect for me as far as being able to look at my life in Idaho and say, how do I spend my adulthood outside and doing these high adventure things?

And then two, I wanted to learn, and I was kind of in love with this image of, you know, to be a Green Beret, they're called snake eaters and, you know, they'll eat things and make a billy goat puke and all this stuff. And I was like, man, I want to be the ultimate survivalist. I'm going to, I'm going to be able to just like go out with nothing but a loincloth after I'm done with this and like a knife and just survive off the land, which is total horseshit. But, um, that's kind of at 18 years old, that's kind of what I wanted to do. And it wasn't a hard sell. It was easy.

As soon as I was done with college, I was off and wanted to do that. Were your parents pissed or supportive? They didn't really know. They didn't really know what it was. My mom was, I don't even know if my mom today even really knows what a green beret does or is she just knows like my son was in the military you know he worked for the cia for a while i think she might have even thought that the cia was the

culinary institute of america for a while well you like you like to roast coffee you know yeah my dad was like once he found out that that's what i wanted to do i think he probably pulled me off this side and was it was like well don't get your hopes up you know like get get ready to be disappointed or something like that you know because you wouldn't be able to make it through the courses yeah i don't think my dad ever looked at me as like a really hard kid at, you know, 18 years old. So I think he was more looking at it like, dude, don't, don't really get your hopes up too high. Did you struggle through the elimination course? No. I, you know, I'd spent most of my time backpacking and, and just kind of suffering. I, I, I loved to kind of do these endurance events before endurance events were cool. I liked the aspect of suffering. I

wanted to kind of go through this hero's journey for a lack of a better term. Um, I was in love with that process and there was never a time I've heard that people always say, well, there's always a time when you would have thought about quitting or something like that. Like I never thought about quitting. I was concerned about my body quitting on me, you know, like, Oh, can I walk another step? You know, is it, am I going to collapse from heat exhaustion or, you know, sleep deprivation?

I was concerned about that. So it was a very conscious thought as to where does my body end its physical performance, right? And I never found that. I don't know. It's very difficult to find that, I would imagine. I haven't found it yet. A friend of ours who was in the Navy pointed out that in the SEAL elimination, or what do you guys call it? Not elimination course, but the tryout, whatever. He was saying that the strategy there is to use cold water

and PT. What do they use on you guys uh well they have cold water pt to break you down you know or to find your limit right so but with you it's not cold water i'm guessing no a lot of it is built on you have to be alone in the woods under a rucksack for a long period of time so it's's a map, it's a compass, it's 60 plus pounds of weight in a rifle and you're walking from point to point to point. That's part of it.

And a lot of people are really uncomfortable being in the woods at night. A lot of people, psychologically, it's a really easy thing to start chopping away the fat. And then two, as you guys know, navigating with a map and compass is a difficult thing. To be good at it and to hit your points on time. And as you're running through the mountains with a map in one hand, you're dead reckoning portions of it. You're trying to hit your times. And if you don't hit your times, you're going to be eliminated. So

that's part of it. The other aspects of it are how do you work as a team? So they do what navigation, team events, and then you get into the course. The course, so you lose, we'll say, 70 plus percent on the first 20-some days. Then if you get accepted into the course, you lose another 70 plus percent. It takes you two years. It took me two years, a year and we'll call it nine, 10 months just to get a Green Beret. So it takes a long time and it's different. So when you look at other special operations units

and what they're selecting for, each one is selecting for a very specific mission set, the type of person for that mission set. They have very similar, they actually, the Special Operations Command and the Joint Special Operations Command, they have similar sleep deprivation selection criteria. So they can only keep you up, I think, don't hold me to this, but it's about three and a half days. You can stay, at some point in the course, whether you're a Green Beret or Navy SEAL

or a Force Recon Marine or whatever it might be, they're going to keep you up for about three and a half days before they put you down for about 10 minutes of sleep, give or take, because they'll cause permanent brain damage if you go past something like four days or something like that. I was talking to a special operations psychologist

about this several years ago. And he's like, everybody has the same sleep deprivation standard. Like everybody has to do the sleep issue. And sleep is, it is the single worst thing for, I think, to go without. It hurts your body. It just hurts your body to go through intense physical activity with no food and no sleep. Psychologically, that is so difficult to work through problems and be you pile in all the other things with that. It doesn't surprise me that most of the people that try these courses, they just don't make it because it's devastating. Even to this day, I can do without sleep, but I don't like it.

I do not like it. It's not something that I prefer whatsoever. Um, and I've done it, I think my, the majority of my adult life, but you know, you take yourself three days and then put yourself down for a 10 minute nap and then do another day, 24 hour cycle, and then put yourself down for another 10 minute nap and then do it again. You're a wreck. You feel like you've been hit by a, by a freight train. Real quick. What, how much do you like to sleep now? Now that that's all behind you? Yeah. I wish I could like that. I, that is like one of the things that I've, I really try, I have to be really disciplined with my sleep, my sleep routine. Because I was pre-built in this era of

guys that used to refer to sleep as a crutch. It was repeated and beat into your head over and over and over and over again. You're going to sleep when you're dead. Sleep is a crutch. Sleep, sleep, sleep is not, it's not an option. I've had two plus decades of that. It's only been in the last, I'll call it two and a half years of my life where I have had to be extremely disciplined about getting seven hours of sleep. And now I have to force myself to sleep more because I know the long-term health benefits and then the negative attributes of not getting it. I don't want to have dementia when I'm 60. I don't want Alzheimer's.

Your recovery cycles are faster. There is such a big difference between five and a half hours in me and seven and a half hours of sleep. It's miles of difference between performance. Especially when I've got all the responsibilities of the company and a few other things I notice, I notice those two hours way more than I ever have. And more importantly, now I've got to think about it, concentrate and work on getting more. Yeah. That's a, well, I've been sleeping my ass off now because this, you know, all this quarantine stuff going on.

I was telling my wife the other day, I feel like I'm getting soft, man. We've been sleeping at least eight hours every night, which is like I need to end it just because I don't want to have that become such an important thing for me. Just what Evan said. You're going to do the opposite now. Yeah. Well, hey, what year was all this going on that you were like, like, were you, give me the timeline relative to the 9-11 attacks. I had graduated the Q course in the summer of 2000. Oh, okay. So you were like, you were ready to roll.

Yeah. Right after September 11th, a few days, not a few days, a few months, I went to the Philippines on our first rotation, which was a war on terror rotation. And then from the Philippines, I went to Kuwait in preparation for Operation Iraqi Freedom. And I did the invasion of Iraqi Freedom, which was March of 2003. So I was graduating and then going straight into the mix. Did you spend a lot of time in Afghanistan as well? Only about two and a half years total, I would imagine, give or take. The majority of my time, because I was with Special Forces in the invasion of Iraq. And then I went to work 2005, late 2005 for the CIA.

Then I spent the next nine years there. So I was deployed the majority of my, from 2002 to 2014, the majority of those years, I was deployed either to Iraq or Afghanistan for, give or take, 250 plus days a year. Is the work you were doing with the, this kind of, I'm anticipating this is a dumb question, but maybe I'll be surprised it's not a dumb question. Is the work you were doing with the CIA like fundamentally different than the work you're doing with the military?

Was it just like a whole other skill set or was it sort of a continuation of what skills you had acquired and were putting to use? Combination as a Green Beret, you kind of learn a lot about the art of combat and then you start to put it into practice in real combat. And then you start to develop and curate other skills that are in the combat environment. So not every one of your skills in combat is direct fighting, right? So it's not just taking tasks to the enemy. It's surveillance, counter surveillance, it's asset management, so it's information collection. But you have to be proficient in operating in a combat zone because it's a unique environment.

It's a lot like hunting. If you go out and hunt for the first time, and I mean, you guys think back to think about yourselves if you've never hunted or you've hunted with a person that's never hunted before. Their gear is all messed up. They walk too loud. They don't understand wind. It's a totally different experience. Combat is so much, and living in a combat zone is so much like that. You have to learn the environment,

and you have to kind of learn how to even survive in that environment. And then you can apply the skills of just survival to being able to thrive in that environment and then excel towards mission accomplishment or mission success. So it's a different set, but it requires the previous skills, if that makes sense. Yeah. I imagine that you end up with an inordinate amount of time feeling at risk. When you imagine that, all those years spent in war zones, is the amount of time that you felt like that heightened sense of being at risk. Is that when you think about it now, is it, was it minutes? Was it hours? Was it years?

It's interesting because your body gets acclimated to it. Um, and it's, if you guys, you guys have run like big rivers, I would imagine, or done really sketchy stuff. Well, a bit. Yeah. I've done, yeah. I mean, not like you, but yeah, I've done stuff where we were very aware of the, very aware of risk. So, but as you start to run and you get more proficient, your tolerance starts to go up because you're more proficient, you're more confident. And then you start going through stuff where you're like, ah, it's no big deal. Or you're doing a, you know, a climb or you're, you're roping off on something. You just kind of get a greater amount of tolerance towards risk.

Your body starts to acclimate against it. And then you're only really heightened when you're being shot at. But even then, it's not like the first time you were shot at, if that makes sense. I got you. So you just get used. Your body starts to acclimate and adapt. So I've got, I got the best sleep of my life when I was down range.

I would, you would live in these shipping containers. I'd crank the AC unit and block off all the light and I could sleep for eight, 10 hours. I can't do that today. Um, but it, it definitely is one of those things where the first couple of years, Baghdad, Iraq, and Ramadi, those places in 2005, 2006, it was so active all the time. There were car bombs and IEDs going off every day, and not just a little, just a few. These were really the most dangerous places in the world, and they were targeting Americans every day with complex attacks and IEDs. So you got used to being out in the city and in fighting. I remember very distinctly sitting multiple times going, Oh,

that's not my gunfight over there. So I can just kind of watch it. Or that's not my ambush. I'm not in that ambush. So, which it's such a weird mentality. When you think about it, I'd be on the road and it's not my ambush.

All right. I'm going to be back here drinking coffee until this ambush comes to me, mentality when you think about it i'd be on the road and it's not my ambush all right i'm gonna be back here drinking coffee until this ambush comes to me i guess and you know those cities at those time frames uh there i don't know of any other more dangerous uh kind of work you could do in the more complex environment uh bagdad, 05, 06, and Mosul, where I was there in 08, 09, by far, they were what I call the most spicy. They were the spicy cities of that country. And you're just living in it. You just kind of learn to adapt to your environment. You just live in it. If you think about it, it'll just eat you alive and you won't you won't actually be able to to conduct your profession at what point um maybe it was all the time

did you start thinking like man when i'm done doing this shit i'm gonna blank like i'm just gonna hunt and fish that's it yeah yeah i'm gonna start making roasted coffee like like how do you um how did you become aware of the sort of afterlife you know i i didn't i didn't plan for past 30 which is always kind of a a morbid thing for people to hear but i didn't plan past 30 so past 30 I kind of had to develop a new plan. Oh, so if I'm going to be around for a while, I'm gonna have to try to figure my shit out as an adult. And then I started having those thoughts. It wasn't until I met my wife where I decided that, and it was much later in life, I was like 36, 37.

I wanted to have kids and I wanted to have a family. Did you always know you were going to have kids? No. After 30, I didn't plan for anything. I thought that I truly didn't think that I was going to leave Iraq or Afghanistan. You mean you didn't think you're going to leave alive or you just thought that the war would go on forever? No, I didn't. I didn't, I didn't think I was going to leave alive.

I didn't make plans for, for, for post military post CIA. And if I did, my thoughts were in, what was I going to do as a special operations guy or a CIA guy at 40 or 50. It wasn't until probably 36, 37. And honestly, I was on the middle fork of the salmon. I'd just come back from Afghanistan. And the middle fork of the salmon is in the Frank Church Wilderness area,

as I'm sure you're familiar with, cause it's just West of you guys and Bozeman. And I'd rode down the river with my buddy and I'd done two trips back to back. So I'd spent about 14 days in the river. And I realized I was like, I've got to get out of the life that I'm in. I've got to repatriate myself into the mountains. I had had such a long road in deserts and in places where people wanted to kill me.

It was really hard for me to even unplug and enjoy the wilderness. And that was strange to me. It felt really, really foreign. And I didn't want to live with that anymore. I really didn't. When you're dead and you're calloused and you can't enjoy snow-tipped ridgeline or a simple track somewhere,

and you can't take enjoyment in, in those things. It took me about 14 days to kind of strip away that and realize I got, I gotta do something a little bit different with my life and get back to the things that I really, really loved. And it wasn't even two years past that point. It probably wasn't even 18 months. I started chopping everything away, and the agency, thank God, told me that they didn't want me to work for them either, and I didn't want to work for them.

And it was perfect, which is a polite way of me saying that I got fired. But everybody gets fired from there, so I don't feel too bad about it. It's normal to get fired. Yeah. No, I, you know, I mean, when I say it's normal, man, they have a, you know, it's, it's an interesting place to work, but it's, it's, it's very political. I'm not a political animal. Like I can't survive in political environments. It's not, it's not something that can do. I'm not a career animal. I can't survive in political environments. It's not something that I can do. I'm not a careerist. And I knew that, you know, I knew that. And so did the people working around me. I'm curious when you say a political environment, what do you mean by that? Do you mean like politics, like how we understand politics to be or do you mean like political like

in terms of people plotting and yeah scheming i don't know it's not even that you've got two and i think this is true with the corporate environment just in general you've got people that are and you guys understand this too you got've got the mission-first people that are all about accomplishing the goals of the company, for the company, with team effort and unity. You have people that are serving the country that are the most patriotic and driven people in America, and they need all the love and support and appreciation we can put onto them. Then you have the me first people. And these are people where maybe they were picked on as a kid or whatever, and they think that working for an acronym will make them a better person. So because I work at the CIA and I get this next promotion, that will define me as a human being.

And so everything is about me and making sure that they're the ones that eat first. They're the ones that are promoted and are receiving the accolades. And you have the silent majority that are mission first. Unfortunately, the missions and the me's come in conflict a lot. Yeah, I got you. They come into conflict a lot. And there's just a lot of, and that's just, I think, true in general with government bureaucracies at times. When you have people that are more concerned with their career than they are with the the the mission and the men and it's unfortunate but

it's it's true but that's not the majority it's definitely not the majority 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, a high in 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 three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

Onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Earlier we talked about getting interested in coffee, and you kind of just mentioned you like to roast coffee. Yeah. But in more detail, how did this whole thing happen i mean there's a lot of people that like to roast there's a lot of people like to roast coffee yeah uh i'm not one of them but i understand there to be a lot of them and they don't all have

right a big coffee company now which is weird because it's a whole other thing my buddy and i were joking around he was he's up here at the ranch with me. He was like, man, you're kind of seen as like the man now. And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? He's like, you're kind of a bigger company. I'm like, I don't feel like it. I still feel like the same guy that was roasting coffee in my garage.

But to go back, I started getting really into coffee because I loved coffee. Um, and I, I started roasting it because I couldn't get fresh roasted coffee down range. I could get this like old stale, nasty coffee. I could get that shipped out, but I was like, you know what, I'll just buy a little roaster. It'll be a really cool hobby. You know, a lot of guys are, you know, they do random stuff where, you know, they're like fletching arrows or whatever they do, right? Like coffee roasting was somewhat like that for me.

I would come home. I would experiment with a bunch of different roasts. I was learning about the profiles and it allowed me to kind of completely disconnect from the profession I was into and just kind of dive into something that was a little bit more of a curated, I guess, interest that I could drink. And a lot of this was just being able to take coffees that I truly loved and take them with me.

So I would have these epic cups of coffee that I would roast and spend a lot of time with. And I would take them out and, you know, be fly fishing in Northern Idaho or Montana or somewhere. And I would be using my jet boiler, my MSR, whatever it was. I'd make these incredible cups of coffee. And then I would take that same roast profile and I would take it with me to Iraq, the shittiest place on earth, right?

Yeah. And I would go, I would get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and it would remind me of, you know, the North Fork of the Clearwater or Kelly Creek or, you know, it would remind me of these beautiful rivers that are amazing and that experience that i had on on on the riverbank but i could get that in the mornings

in iraq and honestly it would it would allow me a little bit of psychological comfort and a connection to home and those specific places that kind of just allowed me to continue to operate. And then I just got more and more interested in it. You know, when you're hanging out with all these, you know, you're hanging out with all these war fighters, you know, and like super tough people. And you talked about learning how to suffer. Was there like a joke? How I'm sorry said i i like coffee a lot too yeah but was there the joke that's kind of this like fussy sort of a feat like were people kind of like what what yeah all the time man there's a big difference between fletching arrows and roasting coffee

yeah yeah all the time all the time so that it didn't go un time. So it didn't go unnoticed. No, it didn't go unnoticed. It was a joke. It was like, Hafer has got this weird thing with coffee. But the thing is, is people could come over to where, you know, my little hooch was and they knew, you know, one of my other buddies who's a great guy, he's a former SEAL, V. Diamond. He and I were coffee, hardcore coffee heads, and we would make these little coffee areas in each one of our bases. Well, everybody likes good coffee. I don't know of anybody, unless they don't drink it, right? Everybody loves good coffee. Nah, I know a couple people that don't.

Yeah, in Utah, there's a few people that don't either, too. No, I mean, I don't mean that they don't like coffee, but for instance, my mother's husband just doesn't. He drinks a lot of coffee, but he just insists on it being very. He likes Folgers, and he likes it to look like tea. That's like the old school. The guys from the old old school my grandpa would take these two you know those green stanley thermoses that and they just roll roll around the bottom of

the truck the the f-150 and the mountains and just they're just beat they got dents all over them almost all the green is rubbed off they're almost like a shiny steel wool or or stainless steel my grandpa would make the same crap you could look through the bottom of the top of the glass and see you know 12 inches below you could see the bottom of the cup right it's just it was horrible it is horrible so but that's that's the old school i know if i go anywhere anywhere, I've, I've, I've trained my dad to drink better coffee now, but if I go anywhere with my uncles, man, I can't, I can't even entertain the idea of opening up that Stanley and pouring a cup of coffee. It's just horrible. It's nasty. I wonder where that originated, right? Cause you still see it in like ranching communities.

Like if you just stop in at some random ranch house and they invite you in, like that's probably the cup of coffee you're going to get, right? Oh, yeah. Is it a depression era thing where we can't use too much of this because we need it to last longer? I would imagine. Yeah, I would imagine. The hardest guy I've ever met in my life was never a Green Beret or a Navy SEAL. He was a guy, Rusty, Rusty Bentz. He's a guy from Lewiston, Idaho. The guy would only drink coffee as far as I know. I don't know if he ever even had a, he's had a glass of water.

He could run full sprint up the, and you guys know these guys. He could run full sprint up a ridgeline in white's boots after a cat with a, with his dogs. up a ridgeline in white's boots after a cat with a with his dogs and i would be you know i'm running like 50 miles you know 50 milers i'm like a hardcore green beret and he'd be putting me in the in the ground in the mountains on coffee he's just running on coffee this is like the hardest guy on the planet he's 70 years old he could probably still hunt me into the ground you know what i mean like these guys think the old school mountain mountain guys that we've all you know come into contact with like there's there's the hardest some of the hardest people on the planet and i don't know if they just survive on weak coffee which is that's how they hydrate but i don't know i've thought about it a lot though, because those people are, there's a lot of hard people out there and they're not seals.

Hit me with the basic chronology of how you went from hobby coffee roaster to, like what was the first time you sold some, right? Like what was your first transaction? Oh, that was 2014. I teamed up with my buddy, Matt. He was making these stupid videos on the internet. We still do. I mean, that's what we kind of do. And he was working at the CIA. I was working at the CIA.

And we were introduced to one another. And we both have this similar sense of humor, which is kind of messed up. And he, um, he's like, yeah, I've got this t-shirt company called article 15 clothing, which that's a reference to getting in trouble in the military. And, uh, you know, maybe we should roast coffee. And I was, I was like, yeah, let's roast some coffee for you. So I started roasting their coffee first. And so I roasted like 500 pounds of coffee for them. Then I said, you know what? I think I'm going to do this online.

And I was really interested in figuring out. I didn't know how to build a website. Didn't know how to do product photography. But I knew that I wanted to have a business that allowed me to explore coffee. That's really what I wanted. And so I built all of that stuff because I was fascinated with it. I took my product photos, built a website,

started tinkering around with how to market and put out even really bad videos videos and um and then i started selling coffee uh really my first transaction was january 2015 that's my first official black rifle coffee transaction and man it's blown up since then yeah we have 228 employees that's incredible man it's insane like it's insane like i'm you know i to come back from war have all your fingers and toes you know i'm a really lucky guy like i i mean i'm a very very fortunate and lucky guy for a laundry list of reasons what's your guys what's your guys policy on i know you have shit loads of vets that work for you but what you, but is there a formal policy or do you just try to lean that direction as much as you can lean that direction? Explain that all. As we've grown the company, I've had to pull in civilian help because they just know more about a lot of different things, especially when it comes to finance and operational efficiencies.

So when we say it's our official, if everybody's created equal in a resume, we try to put veterans in the shoot against non-veterans in a more proficient way. So we understand how to read their resumes. We understand their work experience. And we might take on people that don't necessarily have the definitive qualifications for a role, but I might want to see them there in 180 or 270 days. So we'll take on people that we just want to grow into those positions. So I'm trying to be more patient in the way that we hire. And then I want civilians to kind of adapt more to a military culture versus the reverse is true with most veterans, which is they sit at like, you know, 5%, give or take in some companies, which is high for a lot of companies, but they have to adapt to civilian. When I say their, their lingo, we use a lot of

acronyms out here. I do mission planning here for the company and that's my corporate planning. So everybody has to adapt to the way that we do company planning, the way the military did it. We run military structured meetings and briefings, which is kind of crazy for a lot of civilians because they're like, what in the hell are you guys doing?

Like, we don't understand. I'm like, yeah. What do you think it feels like to be a new guy going into the corporate world, stepping into GE for the first time, and you've been, you know, running missions in Ramadi. You're trying to learn as fast as you can because you don't understand what they're talking about. What is a SWOT analysis?

What are you talking about? What's a cost per, you know, acquisition? I don't know. Right. So once you dial in your lingo and your recruitment piece, uh, it becomes pretty easy that that's, that's the way that we attract people and the people that we, we hire and put into positions. You know, you just made an interesting point man um i was looking at some resumes recently and and two of them three counting coast guard three of them had military experience and it's funny you just mentioned that because i didn't even realize i wasn't able to do it all it registered when there's the explanation right okay what they did for these years all it registered in my head was military right i had no way to look at it it'd

be like oh yeah i could picture that skill set right it was like but but now what i realized about myself is i didn't even give it the time to go find out, meaning any other job, any sort of job in the professional sector or whatever, private sector, I would have literally been like, oh, yeah, I could picture what that entails. Right. I see that he or she must be proficient at X, Y, and Z to have done that. But with the military stuff, I'm like, oh, military. Cool. Yeah. I don't know.

It's the same thing. It used to be I was looking for a chief financial officer a couple years ago, and my partner had to explain to me even what a CFO did. So he's just like, hey, man. And I've got a great partner. I've got a couple great partners, but they've had to really unpack and organize information for me.

And it's been extremely helpful because I can read a military resume. 90% of the time, I can tell you plus or minus 10% efficiency what that job really was, right? There's the definition to what it is. And then what does it mean when you're actually executing on it? Whereas if you're a couple of years ago, if you were to ask me to build a finance or an operations department, I would have been like, all right, man, I'm going to grab some

people and hopefully they can help me figure it out. And that's kind of where my head's been the last few years. Like I said, I've been pretty lucky growing the company to not have too many, you know, massive head injuries when it's been hiring people. But still not without its mistakes, that's for sure. Yanni's got a question for you. It popped up on my screen here. Please. Me and Yanni communicate through little messages. I didn't even see him type. Are you just thinking? Evan's on that same doc.

Yanni developed the ability just to think into his computer. Just to think it? Yeah. He's working on that software. Go ahead, Yanni. I was going to ask, just in your testing of making coffee and trying to get the right brews and whatnot, and just being a coffee connoisseur, like, have you ever gotten to

the point, because you're drinking your regular old caffeinated coffee, have you ever had too much and had a real issue from drinking too much coffee? Yeah, about once a week, give or take. Plus, yeah, I, when you're really cupping a lot of coffee, so I'll go to country of origin. So I'll go to like Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Columbia, wherever. And, um, if you're cupping a lot of coffees, I've made those mistakes really early, which is you're trying the coffee and you take a little spoon and you're dipping it in, you're, you're, you're aspirating it across your tongue to try to pick up all the different,

the different aspects of the coffee. Well, early on, you're supposed to spit that out as you're doing it, because if, if you're going to be doing it all day, man, that's just too much coffee. And these are typically lighter roasted coff man, that's just too much coffee. And these are typically lighter roasted coffees, which have more caffeine in them. Well, lighter roasted has more caffeine. Yeah. So a lighter roasted coffee has more caffeine than a darker roasted coffee. Oh, dude, I've always make my call on how much caffeine I want by I had to ask backward.

Yeah, it's super easy to think about because the the bean itself as you're applying heat to it it's turning into carbon right so you're just taking away its its integrity and you're putting it into charcoal essentially because if you over roast it you're you're you're you're you're you're pulling the the beans going endothermic so it's pulling in all this heat and it goes exothermic. So it's pushing it all out. And then eventually it starts to decompose from the heat, right? So the darker roasted coffee is less intact of the coffee bean itself.

And it starts to take away a percentage of its caffeine as it gets darker roasted. So yeah, if you want caffeine. I bet Phil knew this. Yeah, that's one thing I did. That's one of the stupid things Phil would know. That's like Phil knows stuff like that? Phil will surprise you, man. He knows a lot of stuff.

Not Schlitterbahn's principle or whatever the thing is we were talking about earlier. Bergman's principle and Allen's rule? Phil, he's good go on so and what was uh what was your question i forget he's just wondering how often you drink too much coffee so early on when i was cupping this stuff i would just drink it because i'm you know i'm an idiot when it comes to something it's kind of like the you know sleep is a crotch and some of these other things. I'm like, I'm just going to drink this stuff. And your heart, I I've, I've had a few points where I think my heart is, might come

beating out of my chest. And then what happens is you get too much and it makes you sleepy. So you hit a wall. Oh, yeah, man. I know that wall well. You know the wall. But you come back off the other side. What happens is you come back off the other side of the wall, for me at least, is you can't really drive through it. But you'll go sleepy. And then you'll make – sometimes I'll take like a five-

or ten-minute nap. And then I'll come back out of it and I'm just as wired for just as long. So caffeine obviously takes you a long time to metabolize it. I think it's up to eight hours, depending on how much. So if you're drinking it all day, what I like to think is I can just acclimate myself to just crazy amounts of caffeine and eventually I just power through it. You know, Yanni, I don't know if you know this about old Yanni, but he can't drink regular coffee anymore because it's his ticker. Really? No, he's decaf only. Are you decaf only? Yeah, it triggers a severe ventricular tachycardia. Really? Yeah. How long has that been going on? I his life three years three years you saved his life yeah i had to save his life one time how did you do that i had to drive him to the doctor

really yeah he's having heart trouble wow let's say so you owe is it he owes his life to me wow steve steve might be exaggerating the situation a little bit. Who else is going to drive you down there? Yeah, drove him all the way down there. Middle of the damn night. What's your take on what's going on right now, man? Psychologically, you know? I imagine you had to learn how to deal with a lot of stress. Um, do you, is business stress and family stress

its own brand of stress or is just, do you view stress as it's just stress? No, it's his own. It's a, it's its own stress there are different brands yeah it's heavier so depending on the type of stress it carries more weight for me so light stress for instance would be uh like a violent engagement which sounds crazy you know be like oh violent because it's it's you're in and you're out right you? You're done. The psychological weight of what's happening right now because the cross-pollination of anxiety between all of these different aspects of your life, between the company, between your family, between you,

like this is a big, heavy circumstance that I think we're all living in. It weighs, one, it's heavier, two, it weighs more heavily on my psyche, which means I have to spend more time compartmentalizing different aspects. And then essentially what I do is I try to compartmentalize and then tick off priorities against how I can solve to decrease the load of stress, if that makes any form of sense. No, it does. No, I got you, but walk through it a step or two. Okay. So from my perspective, you have concentric rings of responsibility that you have to ultimately take care of in order to be more effective as you move out. So myself, I have my internal stress, which is compounded by the family and then the business. So what I have to do is I have to say, okay, what are all the things that I can do individually

to make sure that I'm taken care of as far as, you know, did I get enough sleep? Am I eating correctly? Am I taking care of all the things that I need so I can be psychologically comfortable solving the more complex problems? Then, okay, what does my family need? My family needs stability. They need a plan. So that becomes finance. It becomes food. It becomes a laundry list of

different items. They need leadership. When I say that, I've got to be plugged in in a positive influence to the family. So I can't wait. I can't let any of these things affect me to the point where I'm not the cornerstone of responsibility for my family. And the way that I can do that is by plugging in and being positive every day, like, you know, propagating love and understanding that my kids and my wife need me to be the guy that's the catalyst to nothing but good, right? I can't bring any of this negative shit into the house. That's my responsibility. And then what I have to do is I have to balance that weight again and say, not only can I not bring any negative things in the house, I have to be the positive injection

of influence across my entire family. So I'm way more engaged with my kids than I have been when I say I'm always engaged with my kids, but my kids get like a thousand percent dad right now, which is I got little ham radios for my kids and I'm, you know, doing radio checks and we're doing like fishing and we're more active in the garden and I'm getting up in the morning and I'm like super charging them like tickles and stories, the things that mean a lot to them that sometimes, sometimes you don't get to them on your regular work cycle. I'm making sure to hit all those boxes now because they need me to be that guy that makes sure that they're not effective negatively in any way as far as their psychology. They're three and six.

They can't feel the weight of this fucking thing. It's interesting you bring that up because earlier I was taking some jokes at my own expense about sleeping right now um and how much i've been sleeping but to give a little more uh depth into that it was there was also a little bit of a conscious decision there where i do better um i do better as a dad when i don't drink at all um and i don't i never drank to the point where like you like you get drunk around your kids, never. But it would be the hangovers, right? And hangovers, really the first thing that takes a hit is my patience when I'm hungover. And then lack of sleep takes a hit at my patience and focus. And so in talking about how I've been sleeping a lot, it was kind of conscientious to sleep a lot through this because it's a lot of stress.

And I just thought I'd do better with my family if I was well rested, which has kind of been being true. But we had also have been spending a lot of time talking about this will be a – our kids are at a very young, impressionable age, and this will be a thing that, this will be a thing they talk about for forever. Yeah. Just because of where they're at in their age. Well, that's interesting. I was just thinking that my kids, by the time they're 18, it'll just be like a little blip in their early childhood.

How old are your kids? Six and eight. Okay. I think that the year that they got pulled out of school and were homeschooled, and it was introduced, this idea that you have to introduce to them that there's, without trying to use these words,

that it's dangerous to go into other people's houses right now, to not go super close to your friends, to if you go to the river launch to put in a boat that you don't go over and talk to the dude fishing. Right. I feel like this is going to stick. I feel like it'll stick. We've really tried to, me and my wife as a couple

a little bit, have tried to talk about how much we early on a few weeks ago hit on that we're going to try to switch to, I think I talked about this last week, we're going to try to switch to more of a need-to-know basis with our kids and um give them the information they need day in day out but not uh not spend a whole lot of time

talking about different projections from different models and what this might mean and you know just try to keep it normal but there's a lot of not normal yeah there's a lot of not normal. Yeah. There's a lot of not normal. And I, at least for us, you know, we've just decided we don't talk about it. So we don't talk about it around the kids. We don't talk three and six is, I think it's a little bit too young and they can already sense that things are wonky. And you know, when, when, when we look at it as a, when my wife and I talk about it, it's at night. So we talk about it at night before we go to bed and some of the things and how it affects our life. But, you know, as kind of going back to where, what I was

thinking about earlier was I have to go self for the most part first and then family, make sure my family's taken care of and I can start taking care of the company more effectively. Once those boxes are full for me, and I'm very kind of a linear thinker in that regard, if I've got everything kind of checked across the board and I'm psychologically comfortable being a leader and a positive influence, then I can move to the next one. Then I go to my company, and then I go from company to the community. So I have to fill up every one of those and make sure that they're directly proportionate and are representing energy. And not only do I think, that's what I put out to my company too, is you have to take care of yourself, your family, the company and then the community. The community is is the last one in the line, but it's not it's not unimportant to us.

And we do have to directly consider how we can help others. And I don't want to get on a soapbox, right? But it's, you know, if we have psychological stability, leadership and the things that we're plugged in and we've taken care of, then we need to be out in the community from my company's perspective, trying to inject more positivity and do good for the people that are in need.

So my wife and I were literally just talking about this last week. We're like, we got to get down and donate blood. We've got to do some of these things that we know are really important that also impact the community outside of what we're doing just for the company. Yeah. Yanni and I have for a couple of years now, not because of any particular love for the company at all, but we've plugged up Starbucks Via as being a great alternative to Noe's Cafe or Folgers Crystals. Yeah. And we feel that Starbucks like fundamentally changed the landscape for backpack backpackers and backpack hunters um i'm switching though dude but walk me through your

hunting your your walk me through your product line man well you know it's funny i actually did not bring this because we're going to be on the podcast but i'm that's what i'm drinking right now is black rifle coffee's black powder um dude that's a good name we i spent a couple years on this i you and i were talking about the other day where i didn't have a really a good instant option and it really annoyed me because i was taking competitors instant options with me and oh that's got that's got to burn right dude it's horrible i was i was doing i was doing the lightweight uh fly fishing trip in in west yellowstone and i was carrying a competitor's coffee with me because i was more concerned with shaving the grams than I was with, with making my own coffee. And so I spent a couple of years really trying to work on my instant. Um, and I, I would

say it is the best instant out there, obviously I'm biased. Uh, but I, it took me a long time. I had to go, there's only a few different companies that do what's called micro grinding. So they actually grind real coffee into the instant coffee. It's a combination of freeze drying in micro grinds that are ultimately put together to make the best instant coffee. Other instant coffee is a lot. They can be just kind of a, an amalgamation of different chemicals that make a taste profile similar to coffee.

Yeah. So, um, we really, when I say we, we spent a lot of time on this product. The other product that I came out with for backpacking hunting specifically was, uh, tea bags. So the standard old looking tea bag, but we filled them with coffee and we've got a different filtration paper system so you can dip it and create a dark cup of coffee or a light cup of coffee depending on where you want to land that and then of course I've got

pour over devices and all these other things I'm the guy that develops all those products for the most part when I say any product that you see from Black Rifle Coffee, there's two names on the lower right-hand corner. And there's either my name, which is about 80% of the products, and then there's Matt Best's name, and he's contributing a good portion of what we do in the product line as well. So I do all the coffees, though. So I do all the coffees, 100% of any coffee.

I profile it. I cup it. I not only do that, but I cup it against the specs every year. So I cup every one of our profiles against my original specs in my original notes that i developed some of these profiles in 2008 so i cup it against my original notes from 2008 to make sure you didn't get like mission creep or exactly yeah yeah and if there is then it's intentional i've changed it intentionally and then uh you guys got a good decaf for all Giannis here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We do. I do. It's a decaf.

And we do it in a couple different options, but it's a Swiss water Colombian decaf. A lot of people, because of our marketing, they think we're just good marketers. I'm like, man, I have a roaster in Nashville that I built last year. I have a roaster in Nashville that I built last year. I have a roaster in Salt Lake City. We go direct to source. I've got direct farm relationships with the majority of my coffees.

I have what's called Q graders, which are roaster masters. There we go, roast masters. Q graders in the company, myself. So we really take pride in those two things, like roasting coffee and creating great marketing. And then I think everything else kind of takes care of itself at the end of the day. Is there a decaf in the instant too?

No, but there will be in September, depending. Depending. As we look at manufacturing dates continuing to be pushed back, you know, based on shutdowns across the United States. I'm hoping that it's going to be in September, like last elk season, I did a, it was a Costa Rican black honey and I called it flying elk for elk season. And this year I'm doing a flying elk 2.0 during elk season. So every year I kind of curate different coffees for different seasons as well. So they're, they're different.

And I took one to moose camp this year, which was pretty, is an amazing cup of coffee, They're different. I took one to moose camp this year, which was pretty – it was an amazing cup of coffee, but it's so funny because you're out in like an old trapper cabin with a bunch of salty guides, and you're like hand-grinding coffee and bringing it up to temperature. You're like, what are you doing, man? Just make some coffee. Come on.

Well, man, it's terrible that we're not. Normally, we'd be sitting there hanging out, but we'll have to put that on hold. We could have a cup of coffee. We'd be having a cup of coffee together. I know. I love making it, so I'd be in there in the studio, hand-grinding this stuff.

I could smell it. You probably weigh it per cup, don't you. Oh, I can smell it. You probably weigh it per cup, don't you, Evan? I do, yeah. I weigh it every day, every cup. It doesn't matter what it is. So it's all proper water-to-coffee ratios based on gram weight and also temperature of water. All right.

I just lost half your audience. You did. I'm just being mindful. No, no, I don't mean that. I just mean, I'm just disappointed because I'd like to,

well, I want to hang out. I want to hang out sometime and do something fun. I'm just feeling like psychologically. We called our last episode. I miss my friends. It was just, I didn't realize that it would be so hard for me, but it'd be cool. Yeah, I'd like to meet you sometime and hang out.

I appreciate you coming on the show. I would love to. Two more seconds of my rambling, but I'm a huge fan of the show, guys. I love what you guys do over there. I watched Das das boat i think i was telling you the on via text i was like that's the best show my daughters watch it uh so either way like i i mean i'd love to hang out with you guys i i it's a huge honor to be here because you're you're you're creating some of the best content on the internet. And I don't say that to hardly anybody ever.

Thank you. But yeah, man, enjoy your time. So you're holed up in Texas. I'm holed up for at least the next six weeks. We're going to just flat the curve with the family. And I'm here in San Antonio. I'm going to be hunting with my daughters, pretty much. I'm hunting and fishing every day with the daughters

and making sure the company stays on the tracks. Good. Have a good turkey hunt tonight. I'll try. I can't wait to get back up there, you guys. I'll definitely try to hit you up so I can come in because I'd love to see you guys in person. Yeah, we'd like to have you.

Our opening day of turkey season is getting ramrodded by a snowstorm, but we'll see how that goes. Oh, seriously? It's bad. It's been beautiful, man, but Saturday just goes to hell. We'll climb out. We have a long season. We'll be good.

Good. All right, thank you very much for coming on. As soon as all this bullshit ends, we're going to reschedule you and get you up. Man, I can't wait. I would love to. Thank you. Evan Hay for everyone. Black Rifle Coffee Company.

Oh, should we find out where we can get some Black Rifle, Steve, if we wanted to try some out? Yeah, give me a pitch or tell people how to find you. Yeah, go to BlackRifleCoffee.com. Join the club. There's no better way to experience Black Rifle Coffee go to blackreiflecoffee.com. Join the club. There's no better way to experience Black Rifle Coffee than joining the Black Rifle Coffee subscription. There it is.

Well done. There it is. Okay. Thank you very much, man. Thanks, guys. See you. Bye. 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.

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