The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 298: Cooking Captain Cook

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Hampton Sides, Ryan Callaghan, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.Topics discussed: Where Captain Cook died in Hawaii; blaming everyone and taking statues down in the future; the beauty of youth deer season; bullpen vs. arm bar; hermaphroditic parrot fish making our beaches by pooping out sand; Pablo Escobar's invasive hippos; when a gray wolf takes a 1,000 mile walk from Oregon to Southern California; the greatest American survival story of all time that no one knows about; cannibalism, scurvy, and mutiny; all of Hamptons books and The Exotic; the Battle of Chosin Reservoir; Hampton choosing book subjects based on places to which he wants to travel; Kit Carson's war on the land; spreading syphilis; Mai, the cause celeb and bringer of BBQ to England; how the British really know how to name ships; 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.

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. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by First Light, creating proven, versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear for every hunt.

First Light. Go farther, stay longer. That's the island greeting that we're bringing to you. Make sure to cut out Cal singing. Joined today by very famous author, Hampton Sides. Listen, Hampton, I don't want to reduce your...

I mean, you've written a lot of books man but i want to say this blood and thunder is a hell of a damn book agreed god it's a good book well thank you i just reread i reread the whole i was going to like refresh i was looking through like what i had downloaded on my phone from way ago i was like oh and then i was like man i want to get i want to see we get that guy on the podcast and then i was like yeah i reread from start to finish it is such a good book but i mean you know you probably hate talking about it because you wrote along you've written so much stuff since then uh no authors never get tired of talking about their

books uh you know it's like a little kid one my kids. I love talking about my kids. And especially that one because it's really about my chosen home. I chose to live in the West. I chose to live and New Mexico and the Southwest got to be what it is and what an education it was for me, you know, just to learn all this stuff and to follow. tissue to get you through all of this history of of how the american west and a single generation became uh became part of the united states um all the good the bad the ugly all of it yeah dude was like kit carson was like forrest gump man he was there for everything it seems like it's just amazing uh yeah we're gonna get into that we're going to get into that. We're going to get into Bunt, your kind of whole body work, what you're doing now, which I got to tell you a story. Please do. Well, you've taken an interest in Captain Cook. Yes. Cal and I, Cal, how many times did we go past where we were trolling for Wahoo in Hawaii?

I mean, we must have drove past where he supposedly died 10 times. Oh, at least, yes. On the big island. Yeah. We spear fished out in front of there. I got to kayak out there one time. Oh, you did? Yeah.

They're like, right around that corner, supposedly Captain Cook died. And that brought us into speculating. You know one of those situations where no one really knows what they're talking about? We were all talking about what exactly his situation was. Right. As if, you know, time long, long ago when the internet didn't exist, we were having one of those conversations.

And then later we all, I think, I assume, I know I did, we all went to bed and typed into Google, Captain Cook. Yeah. Damn, man. That guy. A lot of people think maybe it's Captain Hook, the pirate, or maybe Captain Kirk from Star Trek. Sure. It gets mixed up with a lot of other captains. And some people think he was fictionalized. There's always Captain Crunch.

No, that guy. But he was real. He's the guy that cuts the inside of your mouth up every time you eat his cereal. A little sword cuts in the inside of your mouth. Especially with the Crunch Berries. Do you remember Crunch Berries? Yeah, I do for sure. Carcinogenic cereal for kids. I do think that Cook is one of those legendary mythic guys that a lot of people confuse with caricatures of him.

Like where's the real – you have to dig through all the layers to get down to the actual guy who is actually more interesting than all those caricatures. Yeah. But also very controversial, especially now. I mean, you know, a lot of these guys are, you know, the statues are coming down and they're being yanked from the history books. And, you know, because they're part of an era of colonialism that is under, you know, under attack right now. Understandably so from folks like from Hawaii. Native Hawaiians really hate Cook. Sure, man. He's sort of the beginning of the end of that era. Even though he was primarily just an explorer,

he was not an occupier. He didn't lead an army. He was genuinely a great navigator and explorer, but he was the beginning. He was the beginning of modernity coming to their shores and changing everything. Yeah. And he kind of paid the price for it in his own day. Well, that's what a large part of the book is going to be about is, is, is all the events that lead up to that, you know, he's murdered and, uh, he, you know, a lot of people say he deserved it karmically or something like that. How many encounters with how many Polynesian people did he have before finally, you know, violence escalated. There was a lot of miscues, missignals, and, you know, a hatchet ended up between his shoulder blades.

Yeah. A hatchet that he had given them. Oh. So note to self, don't give people a hatchet that if had given them uh so note to self don't give people a hatchet uh that if you don't know them really well um because it might why he might it might get returned to you it might get returned in a way you don't like okay we're gonna get into uh get into all that stuff and then other books as well um including uh arctic exploration some other things we got to cover off on a couple things oh you, you know what I was just saying? You know what I'm talking about, like taking statues down?

Listen, man, I'm telling you what. I had like a prophecy the other day. If any of us gets a statue erected about them, okay, in 100 years, they will rip that son of a bitch down. It'll be like they were flying in airplanes. They were burning fossil fuels they knew what they were doing and people would be like but everybody was burning fossil fuels back then and they'd be like they all knew and they will tear your statue down and throw in the ocean you know everything you've done that you think is great and everything you've done that

you think is good and worthwhile, no one will care about. They'll, they'll reduce you to that one singular fact that you contributed. To the destruction of the planet. Yeah. And I don't care how nice you were, what kind of dad you were, the way in which you knew that it was wrong, but that's what

you'll become. That supersedes everything else. That's what you'll become and they will tear it down. And people will be like, maybe we should put it in a museum. Think of what your statue in an ocean can contribute though. Like that's some habitat right there.

Yeah, that's good. You should have a statue with a lot of fish-sized holes in it. Yeah, exactly. Throw it off into there. Maybe put a bunch of coral polyps on there. Yeah, dude, my statue's already doomed. Real quick.

Oh, Brody, we've got to talk about youth deer opener. Montana has, like every state does now. I think it's the greatest thing in the world. Our state has a youth deer season. Yeah, special opener before the real opener. If I didn't have kids, I would be against youth deer season oh i thought you were gonna say you'd go find a kid to go hunt with no i would have been like like yeah like you know most people on earth like when i was in uh eighth or ninth grade i had al de young civics class and al de

young taught civics through the lens of him he role played we didn't know he was role playing but now looking back he was clearly joking but he he taught civics as he would go like, I am concerned only with what affects Al DeYoung. And he would teach civics through the lens of an extremely selfish person. He would be like, I hope that you people in this room never register to vote because why would I dilute my vote? Yeah. So if you're not a parent, you'd be like, to hell with that youth season. Yeah you see yeah so i would have if i didn't have kids i would be like anti-youth season i bet cal's anti-youth season are you cal oh all the shit i pay for your kids like the taxes and gallatin valley my god i mean did they just suck up by going to that free school every person

in this valley should stop me and say hey hey, thank you so much for not breeding, but paying for my offspring. Yeah. So there you go. Sentiments like that. Yep. But my God, do I like youth deer season. Oh, it's fun, man.

So what happened with youth deer season, it's this beautiful little system where normally kids go take hunter safety when they're 12. Like when I was a kid, you could start bow hunting at 12. You couldn't rifle hunt until you were 14. You could take hunter safety at 12. What this does is there's a system by which if you're like, how do they describe it? You gotta be like within arm's reach of them. Yeah. I there there's wording in there. You can't just wander off. No, you're, you're their mentor. Yeah. tree yeah you're their mentor um they can get a regular deer license they have to be with their mentor it can be a parent but a parent can also

appoint a mentor who has to be 21 i'm not sure if it's 18 or 21 21 licensed legal standing all that yep and then the kid can hunt and it's a two day, it's two day season. Yeah. Without taking, also in Montana. They can do it for two years without taking a hunter safety. And that's not just kids.

That's anyone, right? Yep. Yeah. I'm staring at my hunters, my Montana hunter's ed certification right now. Uh, October 4, 1994 is when, uh, I went, went through the program

here in the state. Really? I did 86. Uh, and Brody's boy got his first deer. Yep. Brody said he almost

teared up. How do you know when you're almost tearing up? I felt it coming. I felt it coming. Did you choke it back? I choked it back.

Really? You didn't want it to come? Yep. It was emotional though, man. It was emotional though, man. It was, you know, because we put our time in on that. It's a short season, but we did a day of scouting, day of hunting, day of hunting and killed one. You know, midday, second day when we thought it was all over.

And my boy spotted the deer when I thought it was all over. Buck gave us a slip and then we slipped in on him. So it was fun. And what was the scene? You were driving down the road road talking on your phone and your kids oh yeah all about that no man we were hiking around some public land that's only accessible by you know hiking or boat or however you want to get in there but you can't drive in there um yeah it was it was a great no we had a little camp set up yeah i had my daughter who's not old enough she was there that was great man she's a hiker yeah she's a hiking

machine yeah yeah is she into the hiking part of the uh adventure that's what she likes most but not real what was her connection to the hunting part she She kind of, um, she very much likes to go, likes to hike around, but isn't that concerned with what we're doing. Uh, whereas your boy is like, he's only there. He's there for the shooting. Single-minded.

Yeah. He's there for the shooting. He's there to be successful. He's there for the success. Like he's there. He's enduring everything that leads up to the successful part. If he didn't enjoy it as much as he did, I'd just call him a trigger man. He's a trigger man.

He's like there to be successful. He wants that. He's happy to skip ahead to that moment. My daughter, on the other hand, is there for the experience to the point where we could be out halibut fishing um and be really like fighting a halibut getting the harpoon ready you know and i'll look and she's looking off the other direction and isn't totally aware that we're in the middle of catching one you know and my boy like give me the rod give me the rod just like they're way different. Yeah, she loves it though. Hiking machine.

She picked up a bunch of antlers. Yeah, she had seven sheds she found. Hiking fool, man. She loves it. That's awesome. She loves it. Big old blisters on the back of her feet from wearing her brother's boots. Were they all interested in cutting it open? Loves that.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's actually, you know, after my boy shot it, his buck, he said to me, I feel happy and sad at the same time. I don't know what to do. But then once, like, that stuff all kinds of goes away. He's very involved. Yeah. But once the butchering starts, he's like. It's dead.

He's like, okay, now I. It's meat. Yeah. My daughter likes to do the, likes to cut the stomach open. Mm-hmm. But I tell her, you know, that's interesting on fish, but on deer, it's like, it's just grass. Yeah, but maybe she wants to look around. No, no.

Yeah. Knock yourself out, but I'm like, you're not going to find like a duck in there or something. Right. It's just like, well, she, yeah, you know, she likes to cutting up. She likes all that. Oh, she's great, man. And she's excited to turn, but she's got another two years because she can't do it until she's 10.

Listen, with her hiking and endurance, she could turn into just a stone cold killer because that's the hard part. That's the hard part. Oh, this is interesting. You know, like here's a P like I hesitate to even do P to news because PETA makes news

their formula, like people for ethical treatment of animals, like their formula is to do something that the coverage will wind up being like, what will they do next? It's like a, it's like a PR formula. Yep. You do something so kind being like, what will they do next? It's like a PR formula. Yep. You do something so kind of like, what? Huh? That it gets media attention. And then here we are.

Talking about it. You feel like you're contributing. We're getting baited in by their like, what? Come again? So the new thing is that. But it's a special occasion though. Because we're in the middle of the world series yeah yeah and we have a good friend who's in mlb not in the you know much to his chagrin not in

the participating the world series right now but so peter's new thing they're like hey why everybody's thinking about the world series here's something to try on they believe that the word there's time to retire the word bullpen. Because it makes you think of a bull all penned up. I thought of the fact, if I was in charge of PETA, and someone's like, hey man, what should be our gripe with baseball? I would probably be like, well, the gloves are made of leather. The balls made of leather. Everybody the gloves are made of leather the balls made of leather everybody's shoes are made of leather let's go after the leather those guys probably consume a lot of protein but no they're like i got it man we're gonna hit them where it counts

in use of the term bullpen uh pete alonzo matt's first baseman and uh two times he's the only guy uh he's been on the show he's been the of the term bullpen. Pete Alonzo. Matt's first baseman and two times, he's the only guy, he's been on the show, he's been the only guy to hit, to win the old

home run derby twice. Pete says he likes to call it the bullpen. Well, first let me tell you what Pete says about it. See, it's confusing

because we got Pete and PETA. So you got to announce it. I was going to say this would have been a good Halloween costume idea. PETA Alonzo. See, it's confusing because we got Pete and PETA. So you gotta enunciate. I was gonna say, this would have been a good Halloween costume idea. PETA Lonzo. We got... Oh, wow, Phil. Oh, you don't even... This guy, listen.

This guy is very good at sub-sentence shit. Dumb wordplay is another way to put it. Yeah, dumb wordplay is another way to put it. Like a baseball player wearing like Birkenstocks you got like a hemp like purse

or something PETA Lonzo you got a baseball bat dude Phil is so good at shit like that PETA says that

words matter and baseball bullpens devalue oh they're kind of playing they're playing to the strength

of the ball players to begin again quote words matter and baseball bullpens devalue talented players and mock the misery of sensitive animals. PETA encourages Major League Baseball coaches,

announcers, players, and fans to change up their language and embrace the term arm barn instead. That's upsetting. Which seems like a bunch of severed arms in a barn. It's just a disturbing image. Here's what Pete Alonzo says. He says they should keep calling it the bullpen.

How I see it is when a new guy comes in, he's fresh meat anyways. He's there to smash that pitcher's earned run average, and that's how he views he's fresh meat anyways. He's there to smash that pitcher's earned run average and that's how he views him as fresh meat. So he likes calling it the bullpen. Moving on. That's a Cal term. Moving on. Oh, Corinne, tell us about

all your wild food adventures when you went to Aruba. Oh, yeah. Did you guys sing that song a lot? Aruba. No. Oh, Jamaica. No, we didn't. But take it away, Steve.

No, no, no. That's about all I know. Yeah, I went to Aruba for vacation, but then kind of did it a little bit the meat eater way. Went fishing. And there are quite a number of things that I learned about. On one of the days that I went fishing, caught a couple of different species, but one was a pretty small parrotfish. And when it came, when we reeled it in, the guide said that it was a protected species. And so we returned it and an opportunistic seagull. God, those.

He was on it. God, they were just that poor little fish just could not get down fast enough. Did you get the feeling that the seagull was like on your situation? He's like, these people will produce food if I stay, if I fly around here. Like there were times where there were no birds around the boat and then all of a sudden there'd kind of be like a flock hanging out and we tried to put the fish, return it to a spot. We tried to do it surreptitiously. Yeah, exactly. We tried to do it surreptitiously, but this one was just, just went in there and grabbed it.

But, you know, we, we, we hope to get it back into the water safely. But anyway, so. You killed a lot of fish. We, we killed a couple. We killed a couple of fish. But I was looking at its, its mouth and it is like a little, it's like, it's like someone who just had their braces taken off, and it's got like really straight, a really straight top and bottom row of these just, yeah, they're not like little sharp teeth. It's just kind of like a curved tooth, like a retainer. That's a good way of putting it.

And it hurts when they bite you. Thankfully, I did not experience that. Um, but I would imagine because they use that little beak type mouth teeth situation to, they eat algae and they eat algae off rocks and coral. Uh, and then they, they, they poop out sand. Yeah. If you watch them when you're underwater spearfishing, you'll just see it coming off them.

So they, they make our beaches. Yeah. So I found that fascinating. When Kimmy Werner, we were spearfishing for parrotfish. Kimmy Werner, one of her strategies is when she dives down, she takes a rock and scrapes the rock on the coral to mimic the sound of feeding parrotfish. So she goes down and she's like, and does it that, like the rhythm they use when they're doing that to try to like replicate the sound of a feeding one. Oh, that's like fish calling. Yeah, to put them at ease.

How clever. Yeah. That's really smart. Or she'll take two rocks and put them in her hands and to put them at ease. How clever. Yeah. That's really smart. Or she'll take two rocks and put them in her hands and just rub them together like that. Did you eat them

when you got, Oh yeah, they're very popular. Are they good? They're like a high grade fish in Hawaii. Oh nice. And often they're protected

and people say they're protected because they make sand, but they're protected because they're like, There are other reasons. They're a favorite of the scuba diving world yes they're like big bright beautiful at times pretty easy to kill and so it's one of those ones that in

some areas it's just even like in places where it's like in mexico you can but it was explained to me in a lot of areas it's like yeah you can but we kind of don't okay yeah because they're so popular with divers. Okay. Yeah. These big blue crazy ass fish, you know? Yeah. And people like, you can shoot them, they're good to eat, but we generally don't because they're, they hold a lot of value as a fish to behold.

Yeah. You know? And they do have like that sexual transition too, right? So they're all female. Oh, really? And they're herm're all female. Oh, really? And then switch over to male. And there's a worry of like the harvest, how the harvest is going to impact that dynamic.

Oh, that's interesting. For breeding. Is that a, does that happen? Which is another argument, like in these places where, where it is a really good food fish. I mean, we ate several. Yeah.

They were really good. Um, and, uh, and, and then you, you have a lot of interest, right? Land of many uses type of situation where you got divers and fishermen and, and people that just want to eat, so. And then the, their, when they, their hermaphrodites, when they turn their, their

coloration, I can't remember what way it goes. Can you explain it? I think the blues are the males. they, they're hermaphrodites and when they turn their, their coloration. I can't remember what way it goes. Kimmy explained it. I think the blues are the males. Is, does that happen at a certain stage? Cause the one I caught was pretty small. I think the big dogs are when they turn to a female or is it the other way around? We're going to have to look at that.

Cal's going to look it up on the internet. Yeah, I did get a really good opportunity to, we were talking dinosaurs with my buddy's kid the other day. And he was explaining to me how the females, T-Rexes, are always smaller than the male T-Rexes. And I said, you know, that's called sexual dimorphism.

And he was like, anyway, T-Rex. Oh, man, do we got to, you should bring that kid down. We got a guy coming up that that kid would be extremely interested in. Oh, yes. I don't want to say who. Bring that kid down. Let him sit in the lazy boy back there. I'll let his dad know.

How old is he? He is like probably in between your two oldest boys. Hmm. Yeah, he takes it crazy, boy. While he's looking that up, Corinne, talk about the little gonads you were eating. Oh, yeah. So the other thing I did was I, the first day of snorkeling, I spotted a number of sea urchin around. So then I wanted to make sure that I was allowed to attempt to harvest one or two.

Found out that it was not an issue. And I harvested one white sea urchin and one black sea urchin. I was told that the white ones you could pick up without being stung, but I was kind of just very nervous about, I was out there by myself, so I didn't want to misstep. So I was like, I used my scuba fin and I used like a mesh bag to try to figure out how to get it without really touching it. So that was successful for these two critters. And I was very excited to try to replicate like a great restaurant experience with these like plump, you know, pieces of uni. Unfortunately, that was not what happened. Uni is gonad.

So the roe. Hold on a minute now. It's a gonad? It is a gonad, so the row. Hold on a minute now. It's a gonad? It is a gonad. Well, a gonad's not a row. Like a gonad, how's that not a testicle? You know about this, Hampton? You ever write a book about this?

I do not. This is esoteric stuff. We're getting pretty deep. So, okay. This is from Science Daily. The general gland of a sea urchin, the so-called gonad, is found inside the urchin. The organ stores nutrients and contains milt and roe during the spawning season. Oh, okay.

And you can eat both males and females. And I didn't know what season we were in for spawning and females. And I, you know, I didn't know what season we were in for spawning and not. And I know that there are a couple of, after reading, I found out there are a couple of factors that would influence how plump the row would be. So my little urchins had just kind of a tiny bit of slime in there, not particularly orange, not particularly plump. Was it tasty? Not really. I kind of, you know, there's a lot of gooey guts stuff inside the urchin. You kind of wash that out.

And the gonads are kind of right at the back of the inside of the shell. And you can kind of scrape those out with your fingers. It's pretty easy to do that. And I just had like a little yellow film. Not particularly good. So I was disappointed, but the, the experience was, was fun anyway. And just kind of cutting them open and seeing their parts and. Yeah. And yeah. So.

You can try again next time you're in the right area at the right time. Yeah, absolutely. Oh yeah. Up at our, up at my fish shack, there's commercial guys come through in the winter. Oh really? And they're even up there? Oh, yeah. No, they do.

Yeah. They come through every winter for the cucumbers and the urchins. Okay. The urchin row. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, I would try again any day. I love finding things like that. How's it coming, Cal? Should we just move on or are you going to report? Oh, I'm going to report. So yeah, blues are male, according. There's all sorts of parrotfish, as you know. Yeah.

But the ones that we were hunting specifically, Hawaii considers them, the blues male. Huh. kind of tend to a harem of females. And when the big blue male is shot, as per our discussion, the alpha female then transitions to a male. Wow. That is wild. It's, I think she's just addressing a need. Huh.

Cow, man. Yeah. Wow. That's so interesting, you know. When I was diving down in California, uh, we talked a lot about sheephead down there and, uh, that is a species that's like highly targeted for like the, the restaurant aquarium side of things.

Yeah. Um, and the argument down there is because they, they, um, reproduce in the same way a male tends a, an area, develops a harem of females or congregates a harem of females. And then, uh, when the male is, is caught or killed or removed from the scenario, a female then transitions to male. Well, um, that population, they've seen it reduce in average size. Like the average size of the take is getting smaller and smaller and smaller because the, um, the population is, is forcing smaller fish to turn male.

I'm with you. And I think that's a big part of the argument here. Because I know on the big island of Hawaii, you can take male parrotfish. But on Maui, you are not allowed any male parrotfish take. Oh. Can't kill the blue ones. Because they don't want you prematurely triggering

younger ones into their sexual transition. Yeah. I think would be the biological argument. That's good stuff. Speaking of sheep's head fish, I just looked up a picture of that. That is gnarly. There's a gajillion sheep head.

Yeah. Different versions. Yeah. Good teeth on those. Oh, yeah. The one I pulled up has like. Human teeth. It's teeth look human. And, yeah. The one I pulled up has, like, its teeth look human, and then it's just, like, got these rows of flat, like,

cud-chewing, molar-looking things. Wow. Cal, hit us with this deal. You're checked out on this Pablo Escobar deal? Yeah, yeah. This recent development is new, but I feel very comfortable with the folks at the table. We can cover it just fine.

So, drug kingpin Pablo Escobar got into hippos and released hippos. Those hippos make a, in Narcos. Oh, they make an appearance? The hippos have like a, what do you call it? Like a cameo. Nice. Yeah. His hippos are in Narcos, yeah. They're big, big stars.

Um, so there was a point in the world, uh, a point in time rather where, where people had the idea of transporting wildlife all over the place. Um, it, you know, you can probably get more eccentric than a big drug kingpin, but they do what they want. And, and this guy, Pablo, uh, got some hippos in as probably like an oddity. And then there was, there's all these stories about like also for defense, you know, nobody can come in through his hippo defense, whatever.

So, um, from an ecological standpoint, we know that they are, they consume a niche where they're, um, they're deforesters. They really, they're, they're a huge animal and they reconstruct waterways and. Yeah, the world, I was surprised to see it's the world's largest invasive species, which makes sense to me.

What, like a couple thousand pounds? Oh yeah. Over 2000 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, and they're, they're very dangerous. They're very territorial, all the things. Um, interesting side note, this, this was

actually proposed in the state of Louisiana to bring hippos in as a possible commercial enterprise. For meat production. For meat production. You can fast forward to see how well Louisiana did with Nutria. I'm glad, we're probably glad they started small. Like, if this works. Then we go to hippos. Uh, so the interesting thing is, uh, somebody

here in the U S decided to get ahead of the hippo curve and have, has somehow won some court case to bestow upon hippos, um, some, some human rights. And this has absolutely nothing to do with the very catchy headline of uh cocaine hippos as they're often called um but it is interesting to say like here is this species that if something were to happen with one in the U.S., it would be protected under an extra level of protection. Somewhat human, you could say.

Hmm. But it's not doing anything to protect the hippos in Colombia because it's an American. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's just like borrowing the headline but you can see this is like uh an animal rights type of win right and um depending on on if you want to take sides i hate saying that we have to take sides but it's like is this a win for animals or is it i'm leaning

more towards the barn arm thing with this one. No, man. See, Holman, this dude, real quick, this dude is, they're talking about culling the hippos. In Columbia. In Columbia. Yes. So some dude inspired by that threat tried to make a, is trying to make a thing in the U.S., but a legal analyst is saying that you can do all you want in the US. It has no enforcement. Correct.

It's just doing it for fun. Yes. It's like crusading against the bullpen. It's like you're just throwing stuff out there. Let's say we have a situation where all of a sudden somebody managed to get a bunch of Louisiana hippos started way off and some

parish. And then all of a sudden. Now you have the legal precedent. You have this legal thing hanging out there is like, you know, kids and their P rogues get sucked under by territorial hippos. Right. And it's like, well, those hippos have rights.

Well, now's the time to get a hippo thing going down there. If you worry about their long-term deal. Brody, real quick, dig into this kind of crazy journey by this gray wolf, and then we're going to get into our esteemed author here. Sure. I feel like these wolf take a long walk stories are getting a little passe, but this one- Dude, listen, man. No, they're not.

Well, I mean. I like any story about any animal that goes a long ways for mysterious reasons. This one's interesting because of where it ended up. A gray wolf named OR93 from Oregon took a 1000 mile southward journey from Northern Oregon to Southern California.

A thousand miles. Mm-hmm. Crossed. It never gets old to me. Crossed two major highways, 99 and the five. Southern most sighting of the species in the Golden State in nearly a century. And as is typical, it's a two year old male that broke off of its Wolf River pack and decided to go for a long walk.

Covering 16 miles a day. Yep. Before his collar failed. Yeah. You know what biologists call when they got something with a collar? They call it keeping it on air. They're like, we kept that thing on air for five years or whatever. I like that.

Traveled through 16 counties. Yep. There's a great quote in the end where he, now they're wondering if the wolf is in Ventura County, right? Yep. Yep. There's a great quote in the end where he, uh, now they're wondering if the wolf is in Ventura County, right? Yep. Yep. Near Santa Barbara.

There's a quote. Where's that? Oh, there's a quote from a guy who says, um, it's very rural. It's not like he's at the beach with a whole bunch of people or anything like that.

Stealing potato chips from someone's like towel off the beach. That's from, uh, California Department of Fish and Game. That was his quote. It's not like he's at the beach with a whole bunch of people or anything like that. But when I read this one, you know how there's a certain segment of people who are both anti-wolf and anti-left wing city people. They're like, well, we should turn those wolves loose in Boulder, Colorado.

Oh yeah. This one's just, you know. There, you got your dream now. Yeah. Wait, there's a wolf in Santa Barbara. Yeah. Like, oh, we might be there now. I was speaking with a family that runs a mixed

like goat sheep operation to knock down, you know, like nasty, they do like thinning operations around California primarily to get rid of fuel buildup, fire fuel buildup and some noxious weed control and stuff. But so they run a ton of, ton of boar goats and a, and a ton of, um, a type of hair sheep that I can't remember what it is, but, um, we were talking about, um, predators and the way the state of California, uh, runs their, their predator stuff.

And, and according to, uh, these folks at Star Creek Land Stewards, they do participate on like a wolf board in the state of California to talk about like how we are going to manage wolves. So California is like being progressive in the fact that they are going to have wolves in their near future. Well, they have an established pack there already. Yeah, it was Shasta. Yeah. What did they do with this wolf? Did they bring it back to work? No, I think he's good to go wherever he wants

as long as he doesn't get in trouble killing a cow or something, I would assume. Yeah. And this guy, he made a bunch of headlines last year, but then went off radar, right? Yeah, they lost the signal and he just turned up um he's probably a dead end i mean unless he he either comes back he could but he's probably a dead end because he's got to run into a female right that's the weird thing about when when you

when you see these large predators that take off you know it's so often like juvenile males yeah yeah and so i see what they're going for. He's like, you know, he's going to find like the Shangri-La, but you wind up going is you're like a, you're like a, um, genetic dead end. Yeah. Because you're just not going to turn up. What he's doing makes sense. He's just not going to find what he's looking for. Right.

The Shangri-La in this situation would be, uh, unattended females. Yeah. Ladies and no competition. But Cal, going back to what you were saying, like I don't ever see California getting to the point where Montana, Wyoming, Idaho is with wolves. Like no matter how many they have. No, they'll never cut a wolf season in California. Holy shit, man.

People would have a heart attack. Oh, yeah, man. Can you imagine? But, you know, California does a lot of culling of predators. Because they don't... Big private landowners. Because they don't have enough bear hunters or lion hunters to get it done. Yeah, they like to let the government do it and not paying sportsmen.

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 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 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. Hampton, remind everybody what your books are. I got them right here if you can't remember. Well, I can remember them. Although I wish, you know, they take me a long time to do.

They take me like five years to actually get them done. So they're not as many as I would like. Yeah, but they all count. So Go Soldiers, which is about the Bataan Death March in World War II and the Philippines and the prison of war camps there and a rescue that took place late in the war to rescue the last survivors of the death march. That was my first book, my first history and moved on from there to Blood and Thunder which you mentioned – we mentioned earlier which is about the opening of the American West in the 1840s, 50s, and 60s, and sort of follows loosely the life of Kit Carson, this controversial frontiersman who did a little bit of everything and was kind of like, as you say, kind of a Forrest Gump of the American West, pinged and ponged off of every historical event and was everywhere. Yeah, he'd be like, mountain man, check.

Cattle man, check. Sheep man, check. Rancher, general, scout, courier. Indian agent. Check. And, of course, in his last kind of act of his career, he did the roundup of the, uh, of the Navajo people, the, the Dine. And, uh, that's what he's known for now. Um, not all those other things that he did,

but, uh, after that, I wrote a book called, um, uh, Hellhound on his trail, which is about the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, which is where I grew up, born and raised in Memphis, a psychological profile of, of him and how the FBI finally caught him, um, after one of the largest manhunts in American history. Where was he from? He's from Southern Illinois. He was kind of a redneck, uh, came from, came from just terrible, terrible poverty. Um, lots of, I mean, I don't know how much time we have to go into him, but he, he was a piece of work, a real piece of work. And the book follows him in the months just prior to the assassination.

He begins to kind of stalk King and he moves to Atlanta and he is trying to find his moment where he can – he buys a rifle. He buys scope, buys the ammunition, buys binoculars, and literally stalks them, hunts them. So after that book, that's when I moved to this Arctic story. It's called In the Kingdom of Ice. And it's about the first American, the first official American attempt on the North Pole. It's a story that almost no one's heard of. The USS Jeanette, which happened in 1879, 1880, 1881. They went up through the Bering Strait of Alaska and they got stuck in the ice.

It drifted in the ice for two years until the ship was crushed by the ice pack. And these men, 33 men and 40 dogs and three small boats out on the ice pack, a thousand miles from the nearest landmass, which is the central coast of Siberia. And it's really a story about how they made it home. Some made it home. Some didn't. But it's- I'm only halfway through the book, Hampton. So you're really-

Okay, I won't tell you. You're really killing me. No spoiler alert. Except that, you know, I think you can tell that it's not going to go well for everyone, including the dogs. Cal's like, hold on, wait a minute. Yeah, the dogs? Throwing it away. I'm sorry. PETA probably won't, you know, doesn't, hold on, wait a minute. Yeah. The dogs? I'm sorry.

PETA, PETA probably won't, you know, doesn't like my book. Well, they won't have a problem with the book. They'll have a problem with those people. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. That, uh, that, that's one of the, what I'm appreciating the most is just how I haven't heard any, any of this. Like,

and, um, how, how much of a story it was in its day. Yeah. To not be known. To not have, not even anything. That's why I wrote it. That's why I wrote it.

I was like, why haven't I heard of this? Why haven't we all heard of this? This is the American Shackleton story. You know, it's like greatest, one of the greatest survival stories of all time, I truly believe. And yet I had never heard of it until I, you know, just kind of found out about it by chance. And it was in its day the story that everybody knew these guys. Everybody followed their fate and wanted to know what was going to happen to them. And, you know, it was like we had sent men to the moon or the dark side of the moon, really, because they were gone for three years and no news from these guys.

God, man. So it's a classic survival story. A little bit of scurvy, you know, a little bit of cannibalism. Okay, no, there's not actually cannibalism. But it seems like these Arctic stories always have that kind of ethos. So there's cannibalism, scurvy. Oh, mutiny.

That's the other one. Oh, yeah. Good times. But also football. Like, it's a very regimented, okay? Oh, like they just keep them all active. Yeah. The captain's got a very regimented, uh, daily routine and, and the, the, um, executive officer.

And it involves, you know, like mentally and physically keeping people engaged. Cause it's, it's like us in this room are in a space, not all that much bigger than this room for two years. Yeah, Cal's dog is laying here and we'd probably wind up eating it. Yeah. I mean, how much of the year is darkness? About half of it. And there's this one guy who is, his name is Collins and he is a wordplay guy, kind of like you. Oh, a little thrill to fill there.

He's a punster and he does limericks and he's this jolly guy that – we all know people like that and they're wonderful to be with for about an hour. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Well sorry that checks out but phil hasn't gone into limericks yet yeah okay if he were to go into limericks he might be looking for a job yeah noted so one hour would be enough for most of these guys but they were with this dude for two years and they all wanted to wring his neck i mean they wanted to kill him. They really did. So, yeah. So, yeah, a lot of the book is a study of how people survive close proximity and claustrophobia and darkness for half the year and Arctic conditions. And one of the things they do is, apart from playing football out on the ice, is they do a lot of hunting.

And they hunt polar bear and walrus and seal. And they get to be pretty good at it. And that's one of the reasons they don't get scurvy, as they're constantly eating fresh food and greens that they find around the edges of the Arctic. So it's a cooking and hunting book in a lot of ways. It kind of fits in with what you guys talk about. And they finally get to open water after 1,000 miles on the ice. And they put in their boats and they start sailing for Siberia. And they encounter a gale the next day, a very bad storm.

And the three boats are scattered from each other. And the story becomes, you know, really just follows these three boats as they make their way towards a river delta, the Lena Delta, which is one of the hugest deltas on earth. And it's a labyrinth of thousands of islands and, you know, switchbacks and cul-de-sacs. And it's, it's, it's where the story, the rest of the story takes place. I won't tell you anything more. It's like a psychological false summit story where you're like, as soon as I get on top,

you're like, oh, it's keep, keeps going. Yeah. Yeah. The misery just keeps, it's like misery porn. You know, it just keeps going. Hey, you know, when you were mentioning there's certain, uh, I don't want to call them tropes, but certain things that Arctic

exploration stories involve, like you're always like looking ahead to the cannibalism part, the mutiny part. There's also the encounters with Eskimo or Inuit hunters who, and you wind up with this like really stark juxtaposition because here's these people who are thriving. They're like raising children and they show up and it's often that they don't want to get too close.

It's kind of like, what are these people doing here? And you see like these two just like vastly different ways that people sort of comprehend the Arctic landscape and can live on the Arctic landscape. You know, it's like the thing that's killing all you people. Meanwhile, there are individuals who are raising children here. By choice. It's just. Yeah. And it's like, and you kind of go like, because it brings up these, all these things you're talking about, like resilience and ingenuity, but like that juxtaposition, like they're

raising families here. Yeah. And you're all dying. Yeah. In this story, they end up in a place in Siberia that I went to. And the Yakut people are still thriving, still living there. And they play a big role in rescuing these guys and sharing what they have. They're great hunters and, and they live off the land and they understand the nuances of ice and when to fish and when to hunt and when to retreat,

uh, to the South. And, you know, uh, it's a fascinating part of the story actually, is the, is the people who actually live in this place that, that seems to be killing, uh, these, uh, these white dudes, mostly white dudes. But there are two Alaskan Inuit hunters who are part of this expedition from the beginning. And they play a big role. They're great hunters and they keep this thing going. They keep these men alive. Their knowledge of how to hunt this kind of landscape, this sort of permafrost, um,

landscape. And, um, you know, they're hunting reindeer mainly, but also polar bear and walrus. And I was thinking the, the mental side of things, right? It's like they, I think they brought on a hundred dogs at the very beginning. No, not that many, about 50, Sorry, 50. About half that much. But the dogs are important. And don't worry. They don't – they aren't eaten until maybe the very, very, very, very bitter end. Because they're working. They're part of the team. They are part of the team and they're beloved. And there's one favorite dog named Snoozer. Things do not go well for Snoozer in the end, I'm afraid.

But we won't – let's not go there. It's too sad. But if you're on that boat too, it's like these, these two, um, Alaskans are, um, there to take care of the dogs too. And man, if you're not a dog person, you have 50 of them that you're living with. They're peeing and pooping on stuff. Uh, walk everybody through your latest on desperate ground. On desperate ground is um a battle story it's a story of the most um the most epic battle of the korean war and it's called

it's the battle of chosin reservoir um you know i i've i've always kind of been curious about the korean war because you know it's kind of an also ran in our history. Like we don't talk about it that much in school. It's not studied as much. Some people don't even think it was a real war because it's been called a UN police action or it's been called, you know, perhaps a civil war that the world kind of glommed on to. But they killed far, far more Americans than the global war on terror has. Absolutely. And more people per year than the Vietnam War.

I didn't know it was a more efficient killer. Yeah. And it was kind of a world war. It was like a world war crammed down into this one peninsula. The Chinese, the Russians, and the North Koreans versus the UN, led by, of course, the United States. But it's also why I kind of wanted to do this because it's sort of my parents' war, my parents' generation war. My stepfather fought there. My father-in-law had Korean War orders and made it as far as Japan. So, you know, I just kind of want to understand what they, this was their conflict. And I was was saying goodbye to some of my, that generation,

a lot of, I lost my stepfather and lost my father-in-law a couple of years ago. So that was kind of my personal motivation, just want to understand what was this thing. And I think the Korean War is a very tough narrative to get your arms around. So I decided to reduce it down to something more understandable, which is one battle, you know, that has a clear beginning, middle end. And the Battle of Chosen Reservoir is that battle. It's, you know, it's kind of like a classic, it's like something out of Thucydides or, you know, Herodotus or something. It's like this, you know, this army marches up into this wilderness on the shores of a frozen lake where they are completely surrounded by 10 to 1 by this force that had

secretly entered the war. I'm talking about the Chinese Red Army. And this is the first Marine division of the United States is, you know, seemingly going to be wiped out. And it's really how they fought their way out of this trap and how they fought their way back to the sea. You could say it's a retreat. It's a story about a retreat. But the Marines, of course, do not allow you to use the word retreat. And there's a lot of euphemisms for retreat. Retrograde maneuver is one I like. Oh, that's good.

Another one is advance to the rear. But this is one ofal, you know, I mean, there's a series of blunders that led to this, mainly by blunders committed by a guy named General Douglas MacArthur. Oh, I've heard of that guy. You've heard of him. And, you know, the Marines just can't stand MacArthur. They just, to this day, just hate him with such a passion. But so the first half of the book looks at all those

blunders and kind of how it all happened that they were trapped and how they didn't know, how could they not know that the 300,000 Chinese had crossed the border from North Korea? I mean, from Manchuria. And how they got kind of put in this position. And then the rest is, is of the book is about how they, how they fought their way out. Uh, how do you, of all the bazillions of ideas that flow through your head, how do you, um,

narrow down? I mean, is it, is it like eventually it's like a throwing a dart at a wall and be like, I'll pick that thing. Or does it become clear to you what you need to do when you're, when you're doing book projects? You're like,

I'm going to spend five years on. When you said the five years, that's what I'm become clear to you what you need to do when you're when you're doing book projects you're like i'm gonna spend five years on when you said the five years that's what i'm like are you procrastinating for four being like what is the thing well some people have said that i pick my books uh based on interesting travel that would be required uh that's what i was gonna ask you about travel because i was wondering how much, if it's always places you want to go or if you're ever like, Oh, that sucks. I got to go there now. That's not completely, um, untrue. You know, I do, I do love to travel and I do want to pick stories that require interesting far flung travel. Um, so that's true um but it's also uh you know it's it's a whole combination of things i think i always say that it's like there's two sets of criteria or two ledgers that i use like one is one is the kind of rational ledger you know it's like is this a good story? Check. Is there enough material? Check. Has it been written about not, you know, too much or not enough? Check. And, you know, you check all the obvious boxes for what stand up when you think about this story? Does it grab you? Is it exciting?

Is it that kind of tingling in your gut feeling that I can live with this thing for five years and it'll sustain me? And you got to have both of those. You got to have the rational side and the irrational side. And I guess timing also has something to do with it. I mean, this Korean War book, I thought about doing 20 years ago or 15 years ago and kind of filed it away. How did it first, like, how did the, how do you pronounce the reservoir? Chosin? Chosin Reservoir. Chosin. Okay. I didn't realize that.

Yeah. How do you remember, how did the Chosin Reservoir or take Kit Carson or the Jeanette, like, do you remember the first time it entered your head? Yeah. Well, because I'd never heard of it before. Uh, and I was signing books, my first book, Ghost Soldiers, uh, which is about some really tough dudes, the, the, the veterans of the Baton Death March. You don't, you can't imagine people tougher than Baton death march guys. But as I'm signing this book, this gentleman comes up, uh, who was a Korean war vet. And he says like, yeah, he's baton guys are a bunch of wussies. You know, you should do a book on the, on the reservoir. And I'm like, what, what's the

reservoir? I tell me more. And he's like, well, you know, here's my card. And he put his card down and it said the chosen few. It's the name of their organization. They call themselves the chosen few. And I noticed- Phil would like that little play on words. Yeah. And Phil would like that.

And I noticed that he was missing his fingertips. Oh. And it turned out that he had lost his fingertips in the battle. To cold. I forgot to mention that this battle was fought in 35 below zero weather. And that it was the third combatant, really. You know, it was the Chinese, the Americans, and old man Winter. It was fought in late November, early December of 1950.

And it made an impression on me. I was like, yeah, tell me more. And I took his card and I filed it away and began to read about it. But I think it took me about 15 years before I started really deciding this is the time to write that book. But in the meantime, you're probably just reading books and, you know, let me ask this question another way. At this moment, sitting here right now, how many contenders are floating around in your head? I don't know. I got a list for maybe 10 or 20 book ideas that I might be thinking.

And you're not going to get to them all. Oh, I'm not going to get to them all. Like it's a race against the clock at a point, right? It's a race against the clock. It's also a race against, I mean, I don't know about the future of publishing. I don't know if people are going to be reading 20 years from now, at least not in the way that we think of, of ink and glue and paper and uh you know the old-fashioned books that you know i love to just read a good book and and uh you know now it's it's a different kind of

reading public yeah but but the but the you see i'm getting back i gotta ask you this and i gotta go back to another question but the economics if people are reading on their phone, like that doesn't affect your economics, right? I mean, too terribly. No, it's not, it's not too terribly,

but do you mean, do they want to sit down and live with, uh, live with 500 pages? Yeah, that's part of it. I mean, I have kids as do you and my kids,

you know, attention span sometimes is lacking. You know, they, they like things quick. They like movies quicker. They like, they like, you know, just, just, you know, they want action, you know. And some of these books take a long time to set up.

And, you know, I mean, they're long books. And, you know, I don't know generational. The generational reading habits is one factor in all this. Most of the people who read my books are a little bit older. Is that right? You know, they're like people in their 60s like, you know, start to really like history. I think it seems like that seems to be the turning point. Um, because you have to keep that in mind when you're writing. I kind of do. You have to be like, remember you're writing for, yeah. My wife was

never worried when I went on book tour, you know, she's like, cause most, a lot of my readers are like, you can hear them coming before you see them. And, uh, you know, that depends generation. Um, but, uh, look, I love my readers, whatever age they are. Um, and, um, I do, I do have younger readers too, but, uh, I just do worry that I guess this is just getting off on a tangent, but you know, what is happening in publishing and how, as we're moving into the digital, the digital age, um, I also, you know, audio books are, are going, going gangbusters and, uh, it's, it's an itch. I, I read one of my books, um, for an audio book. I don't know. Did you read your, uh, like American Buffalo? Did you read? After 10 years I did. Yeah. Well, it was one of the hardest things

I've ever done. Sitting in a studio. I thought this producer said, it's going to be really hard because, you know, your mouth and your throat and your tongue. And, you know,

it's like sitting in a studio for eight, nine, 10 hours a day reading. He said, it's going to be like digging a six foot hole in the ground with your mouth. And that's the way it felt. That's the way it felt. But, um, also I wanted to edit, I wanted to change the book. Um, I mean, I kept saying who wrote this crap. I, I, you know, I wanted to edit my own stuff for, for, for, uh, to, to be read aloud. Uh, and they said,

you contractually, you cannot change a word of your own book. So you just have to read exactly what this clown wrote. But it was interesting. That's great. So audio books are going great, though. I mean, they're selling, and they're a bigger and bigger portion of the overall sales.

Yeah, we just did a thing that went direct to audio and won't have a print life no that's viable it's like yeah but it's not and it's different it's different than the book no no because it's it's um it's a it's a collection of a bunch of people telling stories about close calls but there's sort of like a there's a narrator component to it that comes in but yeah it was like i mean you would experience it very much like a book, but it just was built. You know, you're talking about that you wrote it. If you knew you were going to read it, you might have did some things differently just to have it work that way.

This is kind of like this project, which is called Close Calls, is just leaning into and adapting the project to be suitable to audio rather than having to be let's take a thing that was like built for print and make it audio right like just make it for audio like make it perfect for that format right um and yeah and i think that that a little that a little bit ties into what you're saying about just trying to understand the future um and you know but you've probably learned to live with all that kind of fear because you were a magazine writer. And then you had to be, like, nervous about how can I continue to pay the bills as a magazine writer? Yeah. Which is daunting.

You've got to evolve. And, you know, we're living through, I think, one of the most consequential periods of change and transition in terms of information. And, you know, it's like the Gutenberg Bible or whatever, you know, these moments in history that are so important to publishing or to how information is spread around the world. Well, we're living through one of those moments now, and that's, you know, the digital age and everything that has come with it, with the internet. So writers are having to evolve with it, trying to figure out how to make a living doing this and how to make their impact, you know,

and you know, it's interesting. It's an interesting time. I think we have to look at it that way. It's interesting. Yeah. Otherwise it's just kind of scary because the writers who aren't involving are suffering now.

I think there's either, there's two paths you can take. You can take the path of resentment and fear, or you can take the path of, there's a set of things that I want to talk about, and I'll continue to talk about those things. I don't give a shit what happens. It's like you have to take your choice.

Yeah, and you'll find your audience. It's binary almost. Yeah. You know when you were mentioning, you had an interesting term for the cold during the battle of the Chosin. Chosin. What? I always thought like Chosin.

Well, it's Chosin is how they say it, but it's a complicated thing. I'm just going to go with Chosin. That's a Japanese word, even though it's said in Korea. But go ahead. You had an interesting term you used, which would be a third combatant for the cold. And there's a thing like, I felt really stupid not even knowing that this happened, but to refer back to blood and thunder. I didn't know that during the Mexican-ican american war i didn't realize that we actually invaded that the u.s army invaded mexico and made it all into mexico city but remember you're

talking about like part of the strategy when someone invades mexico is you just wait until yellow fever hits them or malaria i can't remember. And like, let disease take its toll, then we'll respond. Yeah, that happened. There was this huge amphibious invasion of Veracruz, Mexico, and then they marched

all the way to Mexico City and held Mexico City for over a year. Occupied it. It's kind of amazing. I don't think we teach that very much. Dude, I was, yeah, I remember being like, how do I not know that we actually did that?

Yeah, yeah. We invaded their borders, you know, before they, and, you know, there's so much news now about, of course, crossing the borders. And, you know, it's like, it's a murky, messy history for sure. Yeah. But Carson, Kit Carson in Blood and Thunder is so mixed up in it all because he's married to a Mexican woman, a New Mexican woman from Taos, New Mexico. And he sort of sees all sides of it.

And that's why he's such an interesting cat is that, you know, he's conflicted. He's. Yeah, his first wife was a Arapaho. Was it she Arapaho? Yes. That's right. They had a child. They had two children, actually.

She died. He like brought his child to be raised elsewhere. Yeah, like the, you think of these people like this like American figure, but most of the people around him in his life wouldn't have self-identified as Americans. I mean, that idea hadn't even really taken shape where he was. Including him. I mean, he was a runaway. He tried to get away from America. He ran away on the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri and kind of never looked back. He fell in love with the West. And as you mentioned, his first wife was Arapaho and he lived with her tribe and spoke her language. And

we always talked about it as being his favorite, the favorite part of his life was those years living with Arapaho and being a mountain man. But, you know, eventually he, after she died, he married a young woman from Taos and then he started a different life. He converted to Catholicism and he spoke Spanish in the house and raised their kids speaking Spanish. And, you know, he lived that life. He is like, you know, I just say Forrest Gump, but, you know, he just keeps. He has a cat with nine lives.

He just organically morphs into the next guy and then the next guy and the next guy. And by following his the trajectory of his life, you can begin to really understand all the different forces that shaped the American West. And that's that's really why i wrote it there are two things in there that that that really strike me in a way of just like understanding american history is i talked about the the idea of like being american being kind of a flimsy notion for a lot of the um a lot of people who are in the southwest like it wasn't like clearly defined right it was kind of like you know there's this government that's far away in mexico and they exert some level of influence on this portion and then also there's this governor there's this government in washington and they're exerting some level of influence but it all seems very abstract to try to understand like you know who to be with

but you can talk about when like the u.. Army had people who had recently emigrated to America from Europe. And they're in the U.s army waging war in mexico and they feel conflicted between being a u.s citizen but fighting against catholics that's right and they leave the u.s army because they feel like they have more of a sort of religious obligation to Roman Catholics. And then they leave to fight against the U.S. Army, and then the U.S. Army catches some of them and hangs 50 of them at once. They didn't tell you about that in history. There's a painting of it in the book of that day when they

hung those 50 people it's like man just like a just just i don't know a sort of ruthlessness that existed then yeah yeah it was a different obviously a very different time and and i think the notion of what is an american was evolving then, you know, very much. All of a sudden, there was this western third of the continent that was kind of up for grabs. And, you know, I kind of describe it as one of the largest land grabs in history. You know, like all of that terrain, about the size of continental Europe, was taken in one generation, really in a four-year period in the 1840s. You just – we'll take that. We want it all.

Yeah, people in the time that were involved in it even acknowledging that they were in a moral – they're a little bit in shaky ground. And there was all these books that came out that were kind of the proto-Westerns, early Westerns that were called Blood and Thunders. That's where the title of my book comes from. Blood and Thunders were these pulp Westerns. And they always had some kind of hero who often was Kit Carson. Now we're getting into the fictional Kit Carson. They said he was a six foot eight and Aryan and blue eyed and he got all the ladies and won the day. And, you know, that wasn't what Kit Carson was really like at all. He was like five foot four, five foot five, awkward. I read that he had a feminine voice.

I don't know about that, but he had a little twinkle in his eye. He was mischievous, but he was just not, you know, he spoke seven Indian languages. He was a lifelong devoted friend to many Indian tribes. Don't get me wrong. He had an amazing life, but he wasn't this pulp hero that seemingly people back east, writers back east needed to celebrate. You know, he was this kind of ornery guy who was extremely loyal. I mean, it'd be great if you could have interviewed him on your show here because, I mean, he was the ultimate meat eater, you know, like he, he knew how to, he, he knew how to hunt and he knew how

to fish and he knew, he knew how to butcher an animal and set up a camp and strike a camp. And he knew when to fight and when to bluff. And, you know, he just had all this sort of panoply of skills, um, that, uh, you know, got him through a whole life, uh, living out here. And, uh, uh, but he, but he wasn't that, that, that sort of, um, Cape Crusader mythic hero that was the, was the protagonist of these blood and thunder books back East. Did a lot of running away for, for that to be true. Right. Right. Yeah.

Right. You know, when, when to fight and when not to fight. Yeah. He did, I mean, and that was one of his great skills was, you know, sensing the situation. There was one particular battle in the panhandle of Texas at a place called Adobe Walls where he was completely surrounded by Comanches and he and a small army and mostly an army of other Native American tribes, actually. But he realized— Yeah, he fought with the Utes a lot.

He fought with the Utes a lot. Like he'd bring up—they'd travel with him. They did, and they were his scouts. But he, in that particular situation, just figured out a way to extricate himself from it because— Advance to the rear. It was another retreat story. I guess I'm kind of attracted to them, but, uh, he lived to fight another day. He figured out that, uh, you know, this could have been Custer, Custer times 10, you know?

Uh, but he, he was smart enough and, uh, cool under pressure enough to, enough to to remove himself from that particular situation are you familiar with uh that there's the first battle of adobe walls and the second battle yeah there are two yeah uh-huh he he was involved in the first one yeah did you did you visit that site yeah yeah yeah i haven't been there yeah yeah the second one was a much minor deal was buffalo hunters like hide hunters versus hide hunters versus I think, I believe the Comanche and Kiowa again. Yeah, I think so. In that same setup.

How, how do you approach, um, coming to a conclusion? Um, in your job, you got to suss through all these sources, many of which are not around today, certainly when you're talking about Kate Carson. Um, but you can very well come to a conclusion that can be refuted even the next year, right?

Like we always talk about advances in technology and new findings and going back and looking at that thing in the drawer with the new technology that we have to have today. It happens, go through tons of stories like that all the time. But you kind of brought it up in your, um, when you're talking about James Earl Ray, right?

Like you decided that, that he did it, right? Because there's a whole bunch of other folks out there that think that. Big conspiracy. Big conspiracy and a bunch of other things. So, uh, I guess I'm kind of interested in, in, um in if you have a uh, come across people who are supportive or not supportive, if you, uh, if you're working on the next story, because you, they don't like the conclusion that you came to. Well, absolutely. I mean, you know, you're making a million little judgment calls all the time. Uh, when you write a piece of narrative history,

you know, you are, you, you have to, unfortunately, and you make mistakes sometimes. And I think, you know, it's certainly, it's an art, very muddy, messy art, not a science. And you have to be open-minded like that maybe you were wrong. And, you know, maybe you have to revisit a subject sometime down the line and say, I got that wrong. But in the end, you just got to be as fair and as meticulous and try as hard as you can to put yourself in those times and not judge them by today's standards of politics or sensibilities that we have today. And read as many things as you can read and try to understand the times and give as much context as possible. James Earl Ray, interestingly, I did not reckon with the ferocity of the conspiracy people. When I wrote that book,

it's a small but very vocal group of people who live their life around conspiracies. Conspiracies or that conspiracy? Well, that one is often tied to JFK and RFK, at least, at least those three. Um, but you know, like I knew they were out there and I knew they wouldn't like my book because I happened to have decided independently that Ray pulled the trigger. But, you know, wow, they are, they hate me. They hate my book. I am the enemy.

You know, they actually have said things like Hampton Sides is obviously a name that was invented by the CIA. And, you know, he's obviously – And your previous works were all part of the same scheme. Right. Like what they'll do is they'll establish him as a prominent author. Right, right. And later – I was groomed from an early age. same scheme. Right. What they'll do is they'll establish him as a prominent author. Right, right. And then later. I was groomed from an early age.

Only later will he then. I was groomed from an early age to write this book. Or it's just a made-up name. I'm not even – it's not even really me. It was written by some committee or something. Oh, I mean, I'm always approached by these people who at my talks about that book that usually these are – they almost always have toupees or really bad dandruff or just something about them is off. And you can tell, oh, here he comes. He's coming at me now with –

You're not even done talking. You know the guy that's going to be the guy that yeah and so you know it's like they didn't it's not about whether they like my book or the way i wrote it or or or where the uh you know did i use nice metaphors or something it's that they hate my guts because i came to a conclusion they don't agree with and so conspiracy people are and actually went to one of their i went kind of undercover one time and went to one of their gatherings. During your research process. Yeah. I just kind of want to understand who these folks are and everything is conspiracy.

Everything is connected. the world order, you know, whatever, the black helicopters, you know, and 9-11 didn't really happen the way we thought it did because, you know, Bush ordered it all and, you know, he knew about it from the start. And, you know, it's like, whoa, you just take some deep dives into this alternative history. It's really, it's fascinating. And I think ultimately kind of pathetic, but these, these people live and breathe it. It's part of their, it's a big part of their identity. You know, earlier I said there was two,

this is my last question about Kit Carson, but earlier I said, there was two things that really stood out to me in there. One of them being, I brought up the one about the sort of developing sense of like Americanness, you know, like people understanding what that meant. And that it wasn't as sort of, it wasn't like as clean as we now imagine it, like how you identify your national identity in those areas. But the second thing was, is, um, how, uh, overt you mentioned earlier that he was, he wasn't responsible for, um,

bringing the Navajo into reservation confinement. And that had been a vexing problem for hundreds of years, like the war with new Mexicans in the Navajo. And then they finally put the task, they got serious about it and put the task to Kit Carson. Can you talk a little bit about just like that, the way he engaged and I think you used the term like total warfare, scorched earth policy. Can you real quick walk through like what exactly that guy did to accomplish that task?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So like for hundreds of years, there had been this kind of low-grade war between the New Mexicans and the Diné, the Navajo, where they were stealing each other's women and children and cattle and sheep. And it was just horrible. It was a horrible existence on both sides. Yeah.

They drove like a slave trade. A slave trade. Between the two of them. And you couldn't leave your house along the Rio Grande without fear of being kidnapped and vice versa. These Diné would be doing their thing

in places like Canyon de Chelly and suddenly a slave raid would come from, you know, a Spanish slave raid would come and take women and children. And it was a horrible existence for everyone, I think. And so when the Americans showed up during the Mexican war and took over, they looked at this problem and began to figure out, you know, how do we solve it? How do we stop this back and forth stealing of each other's people and cattle? And, you know, they zeroed in on the Diné because they were very successful raiders. They were a thriving, huge culture to the west of the Rio Grande.

They were expert raiders. And they decided this is the first group we're really going to have to go after. Of course, the Comanches were also raiders and so were the Apache. And so there was this general, General Henry Carlton, James Henry Carlton, who decided once and for all that we're going to really go after the Navajo. roaming around and teaching them to be Christian farmers living in like apartment buildings and dense areas and make them more like us basically. And he decided, this guy, General Carlton, that Kit Carson had to lead the fight because it was going to be the culminating act of his career. And Carson very much did not want to do this at first.

He rejected overtures. He actually resigned from the army at one point. But in the end, he was convinced to do it and how he did it, it was like a couple of years before Sherman's famous scorched earth campaign against the south. Carson led a scorched earth campaign against the Navajo that was every bit as brutal. The way he did it, he realized he couldn't fight the Navajo because they didn't fight in that – any kind of traditional way with lines of – with – you know, basically they scattered. You know, and the Navajo country is so conducive to scattering. You know, there's just endless canyons and caves and – and so Carson was frustrated.

He couldn't fight them. So he decided to fight their land. He killed every horse and every cow and every sheep and he burned every cornfield and every peach tree. And it was a war on the land. Yeah, I remember you talking about like chopping down thousands of orchard trees. Yeah, that's a famous part of the campaign into Canyon de Chelly. He also like had his men guard the water sources and the salt sources. And, you know, it was just the systematic thing. And so you have this guy who very, very much didn't want to do this. He was very reluctant, but somehow once he began,

he turned out to be really good at this kind of warfare. Um, and it, and it kind of went against so many of his instincts and yet he led this campaign. He understood the landscape like no one did though, you know? And it worked. I mean, worked. I mean, within a year, it took about a year. They began to starve and they began to surrender in ones and twos and then dozens and then scores, then hundreds and hundreds and thousands. This was one of the largest tribes in North America. And he brought them to their knees. Yeah, in the end, it was like, they came to him. And they came to him.

Yeah. It'd be like, if you took a town, like if you imagine today you took a town and you came in and said like, okay, you destroy the highway coming into the town on either end, blow up all the gas stations, burn all the grocery stores. Right. Then you sit back and be like, give it a minute

boys. They'll be out. And eventually the, you know, it's just like. And then they were marched on this kind of thing that's often compared to the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee. But they were marched to this place on the Pecos and they tried to make it work. But it was so alien. It was such an alien environment to the Navajo, you know, just in terms of geography. But also in terms of, you know, it's like there was just nothing recognizable out there. It was like Mesquite and, you know, just this kind of semi-arid desert without all of those amazing rock formations that the Dene, you know, we think of the Dene country and we think of Shiprock and Monument Valley and all these amazing places.

This was just this flat, boring swatch of land on the Pecos. And it turned out there wasn't enough firewood to keep them warm. There wasn't enough clean water for them to drink. And they didn't want to be congested in a tight little area. And they just – it was like they suffered, the tribe suffered a psychological breakdown. You know, it was like they wouldn't plant, they gave up, they were morose and diseases took over. And a third of the Navajo died in a few short years. And Carson understood this wasn't working. General Carlton refused to admit that. And finally, it took General Sherman. After the Civil War, General Sherman came all the way to the Pecos and saw what was going on and realized that this huge experiment had failed and he eventually sent them back to Navajo country. And this is one of the very few

examples where people were, you know, a tribe was removed from its homeland, but then returned to their homeland. Somewhat bittersweet, somewhat happy ending for the Navajo after all this tragedy that they were actually allowed to go home. 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 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 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 on x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all when you're uh looking at your book subjects and thinking about what you're gonna do uh

you were talking about things having things that you need to like check you know sort of the i don't know i can't remember what term you use but there's sort of the yeah i mean you know it's got to have good characters just have good plot good structure you know all the things that a good story needs to have. Is death, like death's a big part of misery and death. Are you aware of that component or is that just sort of like that just happens? Yeah, well. I mean, do you go like it has to have – it has to be about life and death? I suppose.

I mean, I don't think that I'm gratuitously depressed highs and lows and a good narrative needs to have high stakes and it needs to, you know, you need to care about their, the character's fate, uh, whether they're going to live or die, whether they're going to survive. Uh, and, um, uh, yeah, I, I think a good narrative history has to have that component your fellow Santa Fean Cormac McCarthy talks about you know

I'm paraphrasing but something to the effect of if it's not about death it's not important it's about how people face death and how they get through an ordeal and how they, you know, all the combination of traits that they summon to survive an extreme situation. I guess that's a theme that runs through almost all my books. For some reason, it just is a theme I keep returning to. And the truth is, you know, like a story in which everybody's happy and everything goes well and there is no adversity and no one dies is rarely a good story. I'm sorry.

Sometimes perhaps it is. Yeah, what's the number one bestseller? Everybody had everything they needed and lived happily ever after. And we started at a spot where they were still happy. Right. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of stories that don't involve a lot of death. I guess like a political writer is writing about, right, I don't know, if you're reporting

on a campaign. Yeah, they just stop before they get there. We know this will eventually have this implication. Yeah, like eventually these people will all be dead, you know. Tell us about, tell us about how you got on to um how you got on to captain cook like what like how did that wind up grabbing you well um i uh i've been thinking about him for a long time because of that uh in the kingdom of ice story which is you know set in, sat in Alaska and, and, and Siberia. And the only other person really tried to do what the Jeanette did was Captain Cook.

Um, Captain Cook charted the entire coast of Alaska and on his third voyage. And, you know, he's mostly associated with the South seas, but Captain Cook was all over Alaska. Yeah. Like,

and they like, well, we had our little thing where we kept going past where he died fishing Wahoo. In over Alaska. Yeah. Like, and they like, well, we had our little thing where we kept going past where he died fishing Wahoo. In a way. Yeah. So then I got to reading that night, we'd get done fishing. I'd go read about Captain Cook a little bit.

But, um, almost seems like almost like casually moving between, like he'd go to Alaska, then wind up out in the South Pacific and then back to Alaska. Right. Yep. Which interestingly enough is what a ton of people in Alaska and Hawaii do. I know. Every year. There is such a strong connection between those two places.

That's true. It's crazy. Yeah, it's funny. My brother lives in Alaska and he's like, you know how it was, like, because we grew up in Michigan. He goes, you know how it is with Michigan people in Florida? He goes, in Alaska, that's Hawaii. Yeah.

Well, you know, somewhat facetiously, my wife said that, you know, it was like, you do all these books. Like, you did this book that's set in Siberia, and you did a book set in this kind of remote part of the Philippines. And, you know, why don't you pick a book that involves travel to places I would like to go to? Yeah. And we go together. Some tropical fruit and stuff. She was kind of kidding, but she was not really kidding. And I said, well, I've kind of fished out the old notes from previous book ideas.

And I said, well, how about Captain Cook? She's like, well, where does that involve going to? And I said, well, Tahiti, French Polynesia, Donga, New Zealand, Alaska, lots of other places. She's like, OK, bingo. That's it. That's the one. But I started looking at Kit Carson and I realized – I mean Captain Cook's story. Captain Cook is a very controversial cat just like Kit Carson in terms of we were talking earlier of statues coming down and people reassessing his legacy or something like that. And to me, that made him more interesting.

Like whenever a historical subject has a pulse and has a controversy surrounding it, all the much better. So you're like you're aware of whatever. If you humanize him, you're aware that you will be criticized. Yeah. But that's what also will bring people to the book, I think. Give it a pulse. Does that like – does it change the lens you're looking at? Like, are you looking at him, you know, through a lens you would have looked at him 20 years

ago? Or are you like, ah, I'd be thinking about what he did right here a different way? Yeah. I don't think a historian can help, you know, that filter, you know, you have to be aware of your time and i'm sure that like for example blood and thunder if i were writing blood and thunder today i would write it differently i can't help it times i've evolved but i don't think well listen i think you allowed a lot of people in that book you allowed a lot of people their humanity and you mostly when in that

book when you condemn someone for being inept it's mostly that they were regarded as inept by their peers in their own time you're not you don't like i'm sure you do like you can't not look at it from now but um the people that were assholes did things that were often recognized as asshole ish and incompetent yeah by their own people yeah like you really do it like in that project did a very good job of helping people understand what was happening at a time well I think like I don't know how and I would guess that if you take on a cook, you're going to be like, okay, listen, at the time, this is shit that was going on. Right, right.

You know, and let's just talk about what happened at the time and what people felt at the time, and then you can now go and interpret that. But, like, at the moment, this is what the world looked like. Right. And the other problem with Captain Cook is his story – he had three voyages. Each one was every bit as big as the other one. They're just all very consequential and sprawling. And I realized I couldn't do like a big biography of Captain Cook. That's not what I wanted to do.

I had decided, and my wife actually was the one who said, you got to pick one voyage. And I decided I'm going to focus on the third voyage because, for a lot of different reasons, but it has this amazing murder story in the middle of it. Yeah. I can see why you'd go with that one. I don't know why. And not only that, but it also happens, you know, it's the most American, and I'm an American writer, this is the most American of the three voyages because it happens in July, it starts in July of 1776.

Hmm. It happens- I didn't realize that. During the American Revolution, he discovers or rediscovers Hawaii. I didn't realize that. who captains the vessel's home. So it's an American story in a lot of ways. And so that's one part of it. The other part of it is there's something wrong with Captain Cook on the third voyage. All his scholars and all the kind of cook nerds out there are trying to figure out what's wrong with him. Psychologically.

Psychologically. He's cruel. He's using the lash. He's being very cruel to his own people. He's cruel to the indigenous people he encounters in ways that were not true. How long had he been at it by this point? And how old was he? The three voyages were, you know, he'd been doing it for about 12 years, doing this kind of voyaging.

But he'd been in the Navy for a long time. He was late 40s when the expedition started. He was tired. He speculated that he had some kind of weird parasite from eating some bizarre food. You know what I was going to say, Matt? He had cat scratch fever probably. What kind of food do you guys talk about?

Yeah, toxoplasmosis. We've been exploring lately all these, there's latent toxoplasma we've been uh we've been exploring lately um all these there's latent toxoplasmosis it's like a parasite doesn't sound good well just all these links between irrational um reckless behavior and people who have suffered like increased entrepreneurship increased auto accidents with people who suffer from toxoplasmosis. So the minute you said that he was behaving erratically, that's where my mind went. Well, and an interesting – one of his attributes, everyone talks about it, is that he would eat anything. And he would – whatever culture he was encountering, he would break bread with them and eat whatever they're eating.

And a lot of his officers would go, God, I'm not eating that thing, whatever it is. The kind of food you guys eat routinely. He had an iron stomach and he would eat anything. But apparently something got him. Whatever it was, I guess we'll never know. Like it was pronounced enough that people wonder if he didn't. It's beyond a bad mood. Right.

No. His officers wrote about it. All the serious cook scholars from the 1800s on wrote about it. Something was wrong on the third voyage. And the old standby of syphilis isn't cutting it. Probably not because – I mean I'm still open-minded to this, but I think everyone says that he never got it on with any of the Native women. Wasn't a fornicator. I mean, believe me, all his men were.

And that's another issue that was going on. They were spreading syphilis all over the South Seas. And it was sad. It was pitiful what was happening. But Cook was married and apparently was loyal to his wife and didn't partake. I'm still looking for evidence to the contrary, but apparently – I suppose he could have had syphilis prior a very weird disease and manifests itself in a lot of different ways. But no, syphilis usually is not one of the ones that is listed as one of the culprits here. But anyway, something's going on with Cook. So that makes an answer, kind of creates a little bit of a mystery to the story as he moves through his voyage. And by the time he gets to Hawaii, he's not his usual prudent

self who knows how to negotiate. And he pisses off a lot of people on the big island. And ultimately, it leads to this kind of passion play on the shores of the big island where, you know, that's been dissected by a lot of different people, including the Hawaiians. And this is the other part. Lay out a rough sketch of what happened that day. I want to know because I looked at the spot. Yeah. Well, so the Hawaiians, I have to go back a little bit because so he had been on the big island for a number of weeks and had been treated like a king, had been treated almost like a deity. In fact, that's a whole nother issue is that perhaps the Hawaiians thought he was this god named Lano.

Can you speak about that for a second? Is that connected to the way he approached the island and then sailed around the island a couple times? Yeah. It sort of fulfilled a prophecy in some weird way. Yes, exactly. He sailed in a clockwise fashion around the big island, and there was this tradition in Hawaiian culture that lano would come during this particular season that happened to be right when Cook arrived. They either treated him, thought he was Lano or they thought he was a manifestation of Lano. This is endlessly debated. But nonetheless, he came ashore and was treated truly like a god. I mean, they rolled out the red carpet and his men were treated so well for about a

month. And there was this huge celebration going on. Trevor Burrus Then he was there. Peter Robinson And he was there. But then when he, it came time to leave and to go back to Alaska to pursue this. The reason that he was going to Alaska was to find a passage to the Atlantic Ocean, like a Northwest passage. Obviously it doesn't exist or didn't exist. But so he's going back to Alaska and about two days after leaving Hawaii, he encounters a storm and one of his masts snaps and he has to turn around and go back to Hawaii to find some wood, uh, to, you know, replace his mast.

Also, he, I didn't know he went back on such a flimsy, not a flimsy premise, but it was like a freak. Yeah. And this time they were like, well, what are you doing here, Lano? But you're not Lano. Real quick though. Uh, is it plausible that he would have never gone back to Hawaii? Yes, very plausible.

Like his future plans, like he may have never – if that thing hadn't snapped, he might not have been there ever. Very plausible. Yeah. And the plan was to go back to Alaska and try to find the Northwest Passage and then go home after that to England. But when he comes back, everything's different. They're like, you can't be a god. You know, god's ships, masts don't break. What are you doing here? Maybe you're just, you know, here to steal our stuff. You want our water and our wood and our women and our food, our hogs. And it was pronounced. It was like a totally different environment.

And, uh, within a couple of days, um, some Hawaiians stole, uh, one of his smaller boats, a cutter. Uh,

and those, these cutters were very important part of their expedition. And so he was, he was angry and he came ashore, cooked it to try to find the boat. And in the course of things, he kidnapped. Like he physically goes on the beach. He physically did it. Yes. Just going crazy. You know, you'd think he would have gotten

one of his officers or, you know, one of the Marines or something to go do this. He personally did it. And he kidnapped this chief, the chief of the big island, pretty much the highest ranking, uh, figure. He kidnapped him and tried to force him on back on to the ship. The idea was that they would, they would hold him, uh, until they got their boat back, you know, he's going to take them and, you know, as hostage. Uh, well, some of the warriors saw what was going on. They didn't like what was going on and they started to resist and wouldn't let their chief come aboard the ship. And things escalated and, you know, there's certainly language differences and cultural differences and miscues and misunderstandings. And Cook fired a shot in the air. And then he fired a shot at a native and killed a native, uh, Hawaiian. And then, uh, very soon thereafter, a hatchet ends up between his shoulder blades and he drowns in about a foot of water at, uh, on, at the bay there, Keleikukia Bay, where you were fishing apparently.

Um, and, uh, you know, there's a monument there still. It was actually declared a little brief area of that around where the killing happened is still technically British soil. What? It's kind of a weird thing. I don't fully understand how that's possible. But it's, you know, a lot of people go there. It's a monument to what happened, but also, you know, the British presence. You know, it used to be a Britishish possession the sandwich islands it was called um and so it's kind of uh you know i've been reading history stuff for a long time i never i didn't know that the sandwich islands were hawaii

and i only yeah i remember like putting it together like oh shit that's what that is well cook named him that because um the great uh the the great great advocate for all of his explorations was the first lord of the admiralty, Lord Sandwich. And Lord Sandwich was the inventor of the sandwich. The Earl of Sandwich, right? He was real busy all the time and he didn't have time to eat. So he just took two pieces of bread and put a piece of beef between them and stuck it in his mouth and became known as the sandwich. I'm not kidding. But anyway, that's the book I'm writing now.

And it's about two thirds, almost three quarters done. Probably come out late next year. Tell me about the character. Look, explain what's going on with your story you have about the guy, Mai. Okay. Is that part of, that's not part of the book, right? It is part of the book right it is part of the book okay this is kind of like an early uh excerpt from the book uh but also turned into its own thing it's it's a kind of a story that i've carved out of the book um and uh it's just recently been published

by scribd originals which is a new new thing it's kind of an interesting long-form digital deal that I've just discovered. I love doing this piece for them. So the piece is called The Exotic, and it's about this young man named Mai who came to England as part of Cook's second voyage and was the first Polynesian ever to arrive on English shores. Cook took him.

Yes. He was a Tahitian man, a young man who became this cause celeb in England. He just took that country by storm. They loved him. And it's really about his two years in England and how this noble savage, as they called him, kind of won over the nation and the leading thinkers and writers and politicians. He met the king of England and he was vaccinated. This new thing called a vaccination for smallpox. Oh, vaccinations are new?

Yeah. This was at least the procedure for smallpox was. And it was still a little risky. It was still a little experimental. But unfortunately, what would happen is the English would bring up to that point, it had been Native Americans and Eskimos into it. They're bringing them to London. They want to show them off, parade them around, impress upon them how powerful England was. But they were also genuinely curious about these people and how they would do and how they

would fare in a big city. But almost invariably, they would die. Smallpox. It was almost always smallpox. Well, when my got there, the King of England, King George III said, we got to get this guy vaccinated. And they did. And it was successful. And because of that, he lived for this two years. He was healthy. The ladies kind of fell in love with him. He ended up being this – he became a gentleman, an English gentleman. He hunted. He learned to play chess and backgammon and went to all the balls and dances and salons.

But people – it was kind of a mixture of like they were genuinely fascinated by him, but they also were studying him. Is he really the noble savage? He became a traveling chef too, right? He also turned out, this guy, Mai, brought barbecue to England. Because at one point, at one of the estates where he had been hunting, one of the lords said, well, we hear that you cook in this special way down in Polynesia. Perhaps you could cook these fowl that they had just shot in the Polynesian way. And he said, well, I would love to. And he turned out to be a great cook.

You dig a hole in the ground and you cook it in the Polynesian way. It took many hours, slow and low, lots of smoke. And they just loved it. They loved it so much that everywhere he went, they asked him to cook for them. He became this kind of celebrity chef. But was he in some way treated as an equal or was it always sort of understood

that he was like not quite European? Yeah, a mixture. I mean, I think a lot of his uh mates on the ship that he had sailed with uh almost viewed him as an equal because he he acquitted himself very well and on on the ship he was a great fisherman he was he was a great uh just someone who understood the ocean they you know polynesians are just excellent navigators. And, you know, I think he was treated quite equally,

surprisingly so on the ship. But by the time he got to England, I think there was this mixture of like, yeah, you're fascinating. You're interesting. You're a Prince of some sort, but you're still,

you're still a person of color. You know, you can't, you can't divorce yourself from the racial views of that time. There was a patronizing quality to the way they treated him. There's no way to avoid saying that. But overall, I think they did about as – they a kind of a colonial competitive layer to this, which is that the English really wanted to take over Tahiti. And they wanted to make sure the French didn't and the Spanish didn't.

So they wanted to treat this guy like an envoy and make him happy with England so that they would return him. And that's the second part of the story is he goes back to Tahiti on Captain Cook's third voyage. And he has returned to Tahiti with this experience that he's had, this excellent adventure that he's been on. And he's returned with all these possessions that are so alien to the Tahitians. He's got horses. He's got goats. He's got sheep. He's got a suit of armor. He's got all these guns and muskets, and he's got gunpowder and knives and swords and all this metal. I mean, they had never seen metal before the Europeans had arrived. And it sets in motion this, you know, all these jealousies and, you know, people are trying to figure out who is this guy? My, he's not actually from a chiefly class. He's actually from a kind of a landless.

He's a nobody basically, but he suddenly is a nobody. But now he thinks he's big shit. He thinks he's big stuff and he's got all this, all these belongings, more than any chief. It just drives people crazy. And it's, it's really about how he returns. And, and I forgot to mention the whole reason he got on board Cook's second voyage to go to England. Really the only reason. It's because he wanted guns.

He wanted to go to war against the people of Bora Bora, which was – this is a long, old, festering kind of Hatfield and McCoy situation back home that he wanted to – he wanted guns so that he could a battle against them with these new things called guns and wins the battle. So very interesting arc to his story. And I decided to kind of carve it out of the bigger book and turn it into a, you know, it's like, it's like a novella length story. But it'll go back into the big book.

It'll go back into the big book with some differences and changing it up a little bit. But, yep. So with your work, do you always, are all your stories optioned out for films? Let's see. Well, yeah, all of them have been. Very few of them have gotten made. Ghost Soldiers was turned into a movie called The Great Raid that was made by a really

nice man named Harvey Weinstein. He bought my first book. Wonderful guy. Oh yeah. Is that right? My wife used to work for him. Oh my gosh. Nice guy.

She's got great Harvey stories. I bet she does. She's got some doozies. Oh, wow. Well, anyway, it was made into a movie by Miramax, and it wasn't great. Didn't do particularly well commercially. Were you happy with it? I was happy with the historical accuracy of it, but it just didn't work.

You know, there were some casting problems. I think maybe they got the wrong director or something about it wasn't quite right. It had James Franco, and it had actually an excellent cast. But somehow in the end, it just didn't work. Did you get a weigh in on the historical accuracy of the actual film? Yes. Yes. I mean, they actually wanted me to like it.

They wanted me to vet it. And they actually flew me to the set, which unfortunately wasn't filmed in the Philippines, which is where it needed to be. It was filmed in Australia. So I went to Australia and I went to the set and they happened to be fighting that night. It was night filming and there was explosions and grenades and flares and all this stuff going on. And all of a sudden this kangaroo terrified pops across the camera, uh, in front of the camera. And the director has to say,

you know, cut, you know, cause there weren't any kangaroos in the Philippines. Um, but, uh, but you know,

it was, it was, you know, I, like I say, I was happy with the historical accuracy in the end. They listened to me and they tried. And it was a decent movie.

I call it the perfectly good raid, not the great raid. You know, I went to – in the Philippines, I went to – where's the – there's a Bataan Memorial. I can't remember where I went, but I went in the Philippines too. Oh, you did? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a huge event still memorialized. It would have been cool to film it there, man.

Yeah. It would have been amazing. And that was one of the weaknesses, I think, of the film is that you can just somehow tell it's not the Philippines. Yeah. You know? Other stuff has been optioned. The most interesting thing is Blood and Thunder. I mean, there's just something about that book that people have just constantly – it's like when one group tries to make it and fails, then another group comes on board.

And I think it's too big and sprawling and ultimately controversial a story for people to figure out how to crack it. It's like how you really can't do – no one one's really done Lewis and Clark Expedition, right? You're right. You can't. It's just, I think it's, I guarantee right now someone's working on that son of a bitch. Yeah. Always. And it won't work out.

Undaunted Courage has probably been optioned 20 times, you know. Yeah, I could see like how you'd have to, yeah, you'd have to find, for Kit Kars, you had to find some like micro type event, you know? Yeah, I think you have to, or make it sprawl into a series, which is the group that's doing it, trying to do it now is the same people who did Game of Thrones. You can imagine that. Just take out the dragons and, you know, turn it into, it's like this story of all these kingdoms all fighting over the same, you know, trying to, you know, survive this, you know. It's a very similar story, actually.

The group that's trying to do it now is interesting. But at first, the first person who optioned it was Spielberg, tried to make it into a movie. It didn't work for him. Then it was Robert Redford. And then it was Ridley Scott. Jeez, man. Some big players.

Pretty cool. Every time I get very excited. And then, of course, it just somehow didn't work in the end. So we'll see what this new group is able to do. It'll be interesting to see. You know, the first meeting i had with anyone around like television and film and stuff uh the first serious meeting i had was around like having a project of mine option i always remember uh the woman's name was gloria we're sitting in a room like this a bunch

of people and she said first off i just want to say that um nothing ever gets done. It's impossible. With that, let's get started. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't figure out why when the Oscars happen, you know, and somebody wins and there's just all this exaggerated excitement, like, oh, gosh, you know, it's so exciting. And they're just freaking out on stage. I always thought it was because they were just incredibly self-obsessed, narcissistic people, which they are. But the reason they're that way is because it was truly a miracle that the thing got made and that it was good and that it actually won an award.

I mean, it's like there's so many reasons why films fail, especially films about, you know, complicated historical subjects. I think I've mentioned this quote in the past, but who's the, you know, John LaCouré, is that how he says the intrigue, like espionage writer? He described having his books turned into movies. He described it as watching an oxen turned into a bullion cube. That's great. Well, they always say that, and I think it was Hemingway who said it, that you're supposed to, the writer of the book is supposed to drive to the California-Nevada border in the middle of the night. And the Hollywood guys show up on the California side.

And you go into your trunk and you hurl your manuscript over the border. And then they go to their trunk and they hurl the money at you, and then the two cars just turn around and drive away, and they never meet. It never happened. That's probably the smartest way to do it because it would be a lot less heartache and a lot less frustration. Yeah. Well, maybe you'll be a big Captain Cook blockbuster.

Hey, real quick, when this does happen, who should play Captain Cook? Just give us an idea. Ooh, who should play Captain Cook? Is it feeling like Nick Cage-y to you? Who's Captain Cook, man? How old was he when you died? He was 49 or 50. I guess I should know that off the top of my head, but I haven't gotten to that part yet.

Who should play Captain Cook, man? That's a very good question. Jeff Bridges is too old. He was a very tall and very severe looking guy with an intense gaze, a very large nose. Rick Moranis is out. Rick Moranis is not going to do it. That's a very good question. I haven't thought of that, but, uh, and in fact, that's another one that has not been

done. You'd think there'd be a lot of cook movies out there. There really aren't. Hasn't been done, right? Hasn't been done. I don't know. I think it's maybe way back in the old black and white movie days, but yeah. So when can people, when can people see your new book come out?

The one on cook yeah you haven't even finished it yet but i mean it'll be a while right it'll be late at the at the very earliest it'll be the end of next year around christmas time and uh the tentative title is the resolution which was the name of his ship the resolution um man the the British knew how to name ships. Yeah. The Endeavor, Discovery, and this one, The Resolution, which has got so many layers of meaning, including the resolution of his story, his life story. Oh, that's a good point, man. I'm going to read that son of a bitch when that comes out, man. Oh, good. Well, maybe you'll invite me back on here and we'll talk about it.

I feel like those people that when the new Harry Potter book was coming out, they'd line up at the bookstore. I'm going to be out waiting to get that book. Oh, good. Because I need to find out. Did they add them or did they not add them? Well, we will. I mean, because I am from Memphis and we consider ourselves the barbecue capital of the world, we probably will have some barbecue recipes in the back of the book. You're going to spend some time on that.

You know, like dry rub of European, you know, or, you know, different recipes. It's, you know, the Hawaiians insist that he was not actually eaten, but he was in fact, he in fact was dismembered and cooked, baked, and when his remains were presented to the English, who were still waiting in that bay, waiting for something, they brought him a thigh bone and part of his hand and some of his scalp and his hat. Is that right? So naturally, the British thought, well, they must've eaten him. Uh. And they just said, you guys don't have to worry about that parasite anymore.

Anyway. You remember, uh, Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea? Yes. So the story of the tragedy of the whale ship Essex in the book, um, you know, they get to eat each other. And there's a part of the book later where, I don't know if it's like apocryphal story or not, but there's a part of the Whaleship Essex in the book, they get to eat each other. There's a part of the book later where,

I don't know if it's like a pockerful story or not, but there's a part of the book later where someone meets a survivor of the Whaleship Essex and he says, hey, did you know Bill Johnson? Supposedly the guy says, no, I had him. Oh my. Well.

Well, thanks for coming on, man. I'm looking forward to your, see, I got to go, I got to read your whole damn canon, man. Your whole damn library. Well, please do. And keep talking about it on your show. Well, it's like, it's, yeah. It's just such well-researched, un-bullshitty history that has the weird parts, man, that you didn't know. You got a good ear for the weird. Do you know what I mean?

And you wedge it in where it doesn't just feel like you're being... You wedge it in where it doesn't smell like someone just trying to wedge weird stuff in. Like it still, you find a way to like make it fit, you know, but you got to ear for the strange. Well, thank you. I'll take that as a compliment. It is a compliment. It's the highest compliment. Maybe it's just that I'm a little strange.

And I do think that it's true that, you know, history is so much more interesting than we were taught in school. You know, like there are these undercurrents and these bizarre facts and little trick doors and interconnections that we somehow missed in history class. Yeah, because history class, you couldn't spend an entire semester on a class. Yeah, because history class, you couldn't spend an entire semester on a day. Yeah, yeah. You know, you just have to gloss over and it takes on this way that just feels not personal. All right.

True, so true. Well, good luck finishing your book. Thank you, thank you. I got to probably, I should be working on it right now. I'm a little behind. COVID has kind of slowed me down a little bit. I don't mean that I had COVID. I just mean I couldn't do a lot of the research.

Have you got a lot of your travel done now? A lot of it. I still got a lot more to go, though. And, you know, I may not get to some of the places, which kind of just drives me nuts. But, yeah, you just can't go to all the places where Cook went, even on just this one voyage. Did you go hang out in Cook Inlet in Alaska? I've been there before, but I need to go back. I need to go back.

And you've got a connection to Alaska, don't you? My brother's been there decades now. And you have some sort of shack up there, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we have a place up there. Yeah. He lives on Cook In cook inlet meaning lives on anchorage but our fish shacks far south of there okay yeah well thanks again would love to have

you back on but yeah man i highly just really highly recommend um the like your books and the kind of the kind of history you do which is just so illuminating man this helps you really understand why you know why america or you know why things look the way they look and why we remember things the way we remember them and what sacrifices were made by people. Well, thank you, man. It's been a pleasure. I appreciate it. 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 on x if you visit on x maps.com slash meet