The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 317: Super Slammin' with Tom Miranda

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Tom Miranda, Spencer Neuharth, Katie Hill, Hayden Sammak, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.Topics discussed: 20/15 vision; Tom Miranda, the rare book collector; the archery Super Slam; Cutting the Distance with Jason Phelps and Friends; go get our limited edition Line One Pot Call; Chester's big sturgeon; a half million cysts per pound; "One State Might Expand Bobcat Hunting and Trapping Seasons"; science news click bait; when your ex tattles on you for poaching wild game and selling it as beef jerky; read Katie Hill's investigation, "Major Online Retailers Acted as Black Market for Endangered Animal Parts," on MeatEater's website; skinning for a furbearer as a hard way to make money; the job description of a government trapper; the power of VHS; when you're on PETA's Top Ten list; buying your first car, home, and plane with trapping money; bow hunting as making the hunt as hard as it can be; all of Tom's books, including "Master Trappers"; and more.Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light, go farther, stay longer. Oh, you know how I bought these glasses? Like, five for ten dollars? I just went to the eye doctor. Not the kind I needed. I need a.75 magnification, not a two. That's why it's like really... He's getting me all hooked up, man. A.75 magnification, not a 2. That's why it's like really.

He's getting me all hooked up, man. Oh, good. Oh, my vision, my normal vision, long range, 2020 still. Older than I am. And if I put these special glasses he's getting me, I'll have 2015. Huh. That's what I have. Do you know what that means yeah you know i never knew what that meant it means your one eye is better vision than 2020 it's 15 you got the machine on right now machine's on let me tell you what it means i didn't know

what it meant either until here's what 2020 was i had no idea wasn't i right no it's like i i didn't know what the numbers meant all the numbers mean is at 20 feet okay you can see just as good as average people can see at 20 feet gotcha that's all that means i'm like well how big is the average like how big is the pool he said it's like virtually infinite now yeah thousands and thousands of thousands of people have taken this vision test so 2020 just means you're joe blow how can they never test you above like to see if you're above the average well if i put on they do here's the thing i have a slight stigmatism in my left eye or something like that. And if I put these super glasses on, he's going to get me. Meaning glasses.

They're big goggles. I'm 20, 20 now. I will be able to see. The bottom line. Yeah. It's the bottom line on the test. That's not what it means. I will then have. I will then means. I will then have 2015, meaning what Joe Blow can see at 15 feet,

I can see at 20. It has nothing to do with the line on the bottom. Is there like an accredited test to see how far you can actually go with that? I don't know. It's like the Rorschach test, but it's not. I feel like every time I've ever been to an eye doctor, they just do the standard one. They're like, okay, you can see good. Oh, like you never got to max her out.

Yeah, exactly. Remember? My guy would do it. He's nice. Tell him to push it out. Yeah. Remember when they redid the food pyramid a few years ago because we were thinking maybe we shouldn't just be eating nothing but bread?

Let's rethink this. I think we should rethink these eye tests and what 2020 means. The food pyramid was written by the dairy industry, though. You know that whole conspiracy theory? That the dairy people are like, listen, I got an idea for a food pyramid. Put our stuff on there up top. You know? Well, top, top.

Or at the thick part. Oh, yeah. I think dairy's near the bottom. So, yeah, that's the thick part. It was their idea. It was the dairy industry's idea. That's a conspiracy theory. I don't like to traffic in those too much.

Joined today by Tom Miranda. That works. Bow hunter extraordinaire. Well, Tom Miranda, too, he became famous for two things. Like, first, he became famous as a trapper, and then became famous as a bowhunter. There's a little bit of crossover in there. There's a lot of crossover. It's not like you were like a famous librarian and then became a famous bowhunter.

I was an infamous librarian, actually. Oh, yeah. You know what? Tom and I had drinks last night. Not really. Not really. Like, we had beers um even though we were both thirsty for a drink um you have he's like a rare book collector absolutely

yeah and told me his story i almost want later i almost want you to tell the story about the captain cookbooks oh yeah i'll do it are you are you able to do Absolutely. Because what if the guy hears and realizes what a mistake he made? I think he's dead as a hammer at this point. Yeah, he's got a rare book collection. And he has narrowed in on rare books about piracy. Sounds interesting. See, I thought that titillated the hell out of Spencer. No, I'm in.

I want to skip everything on Spencer. Let's just talk about that. Also, we everything also we're gonna get it we got to cover a few things there and get back into it um tell me about your archery super slam holder that's North America North American 29 correct so North America has 29 big game species that's basically tracked by the Pope and Young Club. And how do they break them out? How many mule deer slash black tail are on the list? Well, there's five deer. There's the white tail, the desert cows, white tail.

You're a cows man, not a coos man. You can be coos if you want. Okay. Cows is correct. You also have... Sorry about that. So, okay, I interrupted Okay. I interrupted you. I shouldn't have done that.

That's okay. Back up on deer. There's five deer. There's five deer. There's the, there's the white tail, the desert white tail. There's the mule deer. There's the Sitka black tail and the Columbia black tail. There's five deer.

I thought they like really, Hayden and I were just talking about this. I thought they really got into those, all those kind of like goofy distinctions where they're like, you know, like dividing up the country's white tails and stuff like that. So it's pretty clean. Well, there's a white tail slam where you can get, you know, biologists say there's 32 plus different subspecies of white tails when you start talking about it all. But, you know, with all the different programs over all the years of seeding deer here, seeding deer there, there's really not.

Oh, they let them all bleed together. It's about eight, pretty much. Yeah. Only the desert cow's white tail is the purest deer of all of them. It's maintained. Because it's an isolated population. Yeah, it's maintained. It's an isolation.

Correct. Hit me with a couple, like, hit me with some other ones I wouldn't be thinking of that are in the 29. How many cats are in there? Well, just cougar. That's it? Yeah. So they don't put a bobcat in there or something like that?

No, bobcats not included. They don't consider that big game. How many bears are in it? There's four. Polar bear, grizzly bear, Alaskan brown bear, and black bear. Okay. Mm-hmm. Huh.

I'm still trying to add it up in my head. You know what would be a great trivia question for you, Spencer? What's that? Something like based off that. Might have something like that coming up. Is that right? Maybe. Is it rigged in Tom's favor?

Not rigged. Did you know you're doing trivia with us today? I'll try. I'm game for anything. Listen, just that little prelude conversation we're having right now, I feel like you might be in a unique position to win. Yeah, rare book collector that's a super slam holder. And he's kind of checked out on taxonomy

checked out on genetics a little bit uh okay we're gonna come back to all that bear with us here absolutely feel free to chime in if anything happens you need to know about you got me seat belt and roped into this chair so i don't think i'm going anywhere uh okay we got a double new launch we gotta talk about so jason phelps taking over at the Cutting the Distance podcast. So Jason Phelps and friends going there. If you already subscribe, what's the word for it? If you already, yeah, is it subscribe? If you already smash that subscribe button, I think is how people say it.

That's right. If you've already smashed that subscribe button for Cutting the Distance, it'll just serve right up to you. If you haven't subscribed to Cutting the Distance, go do it now. You're listening to a podcast right now, so go into that platform there and subscribe to Cutting the Distance. The first Cutting the Distance with Jason Phelps and friends, I'm on it, talking all about turkey hunting.

Also, right now, speaking of Phelps, we have a hot new limited edition thing out. It's our Line 1 pot call, our Line 1 turkey call. They're available. So you can hit pause. You got to make up your mind. You can either hit pause and go do this or keep listening and go do this. Depends how good you are at doing something while listening to something else. So pause or not, but go to the MeatEater online store.

So go to themeateater.com and follow all the prompts. Get one of our sweet limited edition turkey calls. Out of the black walnut and the Osage orange trees that Phelps and I felled, we wound up with about 1,400 calls. They're numbered sequentially, right? If you've been listening to the show at all, you know the whole backstory here. Years ago, me and my old man, my old man built a pole barn across the road from, on this little parcel he owned across the road from our house.

So me and him and my brothers built a pole barn there. We had to cut down a couple of trees to make room for the pole barn. And we cut down some oaks and had them milled. And then my old man stacked them up in the garage on little stickers. What do you call that in the lumber business when you're drying them out? We always call them stickers. Yeah, I think they call them stickers. Not perlant, no.

No, I think they always call them stickers. Stickers. Okay. Yeah. Stacked all of our planks up. They were just rough planks. Stacked them all in the front of the garage. And then later my dad died and they were still sitting there.

And I eventually took them all and cut them into like strips and made a big workbench top and made my desktop out of them. So I kind of liked that whole, you know, it was an interesting process to see. So I was telling Phelps, you ought to go cut down a tree and see how many turkey calls are hiding in there because these oak trees had a workbench hiding in them. They had a office desk hiding in them and probably could have made three more deaths out of it. So we were talking about how many are in a tree, how many pot calls were in a tree. And we found, uh,

we went to Kansas, we filmed this whole thing and we're making a video all about it. We went to Kansas and picked out a walnut, a big black walnut tree. And we picked out an Osage orange or a Bodark. And we got out of this walnut tree and we kind of fetishize the walnut with drone.

You'll really get to meet the tree. 1400. Well, that's how many it was 1400 i was wondering did you guys kill dry that it killed yeah we cut it down in kansas seth was there he's eyewitness took it over to walnut kansas and milled it sent that to phelps's place out in Washington where they kiln dried it, and it wound up being out of that tree. I took enough for a knife handle, enough for a couple knife handles. 1,400 pot calls were in that tree. That's pretty cool. And that's like select grading.

So we're selling 1,400. I took 1,004. They're numbered And what's funny is we were trying to save number one This is like an incentive to purchasers We were trying to save number one for the guy that owned the walnut tree He wanted number one but it got packaged Phelps is like dude we got a problem

He's like I already got to Open up 300 of these packages To find number one Or we do something special for the guy who gave us the walnut so we gotta figure out his his call is gone so someone's gonna make their order and get 001 i took one golden ticket somehow phelps i was like send me one phelps sent me 1004 that's my special edition i got 1002 thousand and two. Oh, you did? You got a better one than me. Better one than you.

Yeah, they're available. The Line One Pot Call. Have you messed with it? Yeah. Dude, it sounds... I was messing with it last night. It's beautiful. I like it. That Osage Orange peg. I like to point out the Phelps ruined one Osage Orange. Remember that?

Yep. What do you call that? High-chaired it? Barber-chaired. Barber-chaired one? Yeah. Like you'd notched it wrong and cut it and split that thing 10 feet into the air. Yeah.

Then you had to go find another one. My felting was perfect. Of course. The black walnut. Yeah, it was good. Yeah. A black walnut expert guided me through it you'll see that in the video yeah so those are out get them now like i said it's like 1400 so

i think they're gonna vanish in a real hurry um but man they're gorgeous they come in a sweet box it's it's very it's like a it's like a collector's item um moving down oh uh chester can you fill us in first can you start out by what's going on with your shirt This is a Schmitty's Ore House Which is a local watering hole Back on Lake Winnebago That's where I grew up in Wisconsin

And it's It's a sturgeon spear and sweatshirt No it sounds Wisconsin Schmitty's Schmitty's Anyway No, it sounds Wisconsin. Schmitty's. Schmitty's. Anyway, this place is right on the shores of Lake Winnebago, which every year in February, thousands and thousands and thousands of people gather.

And they do this thing called sturgeon spearing. I'd like to challenge you on that. so there's already multiple thousands so and thousands so there's more multiple thousands and thousands well that's just so that's a minimum of six thousand individuals well yeah we say things like that in wisconsin so take it with a grain of salt but anyways there's 12 roughly and i don't know the numbers so but i think roughly 12 000 tags sold this year oh okay so he could have added a couple more he could have been he could have said three more times but obviously all 12 000 people are not out there spearing but how long is the season it's a quota season so it just depends it could be closed already which it's not it's still open right now you're like this is this is

up-to-date information as of this recording up today tuesday day four it says on the winnebago system total sturgeon speared is 590 what's the quota? Three. Yeah. They went, no. I don't know. It just, it depends because there's like certain number of juvenile females, adult females, and males. And they'll shut the season down when they hit that quota.

Oh, if they hit, and it has certain, it's like that, there's like a Fisher unit where it's a five fisher quota but it's a one female it all ends with one female yeah yeah because you can't really tell when they're down there um what they are but but they give out so 1200 individuals or 1200 sheds shannies 12 000 tags 12 000 tags i was like man okay i see so 12 000 people get a crack at filling a quota that's sub 1000 fish probably correct and so you basically i mean if you were to show up on lake winnebago there'd be road systems everywhere there would be ice shanties as far as the eye can see and you're trying to spear one of those fish which is like the odds are like you know it's like a very small percentage of the people that spear those fish yeah but you run with an elite group of hard players because according

to the pictures you just sent me you guys are tearing in a new one out there. I run with my cousin, and he is a scouting fool. He drives out weeks prior to the season, and there's certain things he's looking for, like feed, like food. Oh, this is the guy that does the worm surveys. Worm stuff, looking for shad, gizzard shad, which it's a terrible year on the winnebago system for gizzard shad um it's a poor year for from what i've heard for the red worms which is a lake fly larva as well um but these sturgeon are bottom feeders so they're just in the muck they have these long mouths that will stick in the muck and they'll mill through there and eat stuff that has fallen in the mud, basically. So what you do is night before the season, we call it cutting in.

So we take a chainsaw and we cut a hole that's about probably four feet by six feet into the ice. And then you take these. It's too big to lift it out. So you got to push feet into the ice and then you take these it's too big to lift it out so you got to push it under the ice and we call it sink in the cake so you take that slab of ice that you cut around and you push it down and you sink it and you push it away from your hole and then you back up your ice shack, which is, ours is like a nice metal ice shack with heat and propane. You guys ever worry that a fish is going to bang his head on that cake he sunk down there? If he's cruising along real fast, not paying attention? This is crazy that you say that, Steve. So, no, you would never think that right but anyways i'm gonna back up

just a little bit before i get there so what you do is you cut that hole you back up your shack on it and the the actual frame that is of that trailer is on a hinge so you can lower it down to the ice yep the ice shack you can lower it right down to the ice. You shovel snow around it. It's really dark in there. And then you shut the doors and you look down the hole and see what your clarity is. We could not see bottom very well. So we lowered some white siding down and it's an X on a string down to the bottom of the lake. And that gives you, you can barely

make it out, but at least you can see bottom a little bit and get a reference of where you might want to throw if a fish comes through. We spear off cameras. So we lower like a Markham camera down or Aqua view camera down. So you can see around you um it would be very difficult to spear one if we didn't have that you'd have to move shallower in that depth of water yeah but that's where the sturgeon were it's a very controversial thing whether you're spearing with cameras or not there's some traditional traditionalists that aren't happy about that. So when you say spear of the camera, you mean only off the camera? Yes. Like, I don't even understand that.

So this is what I'm getting at by the sturgeon potentially bumping his head on the cake that you sunk that's sitting up on top. So we are only expecting to most likely spear that sturgeon on the bottom when we're using cameras. You can look down the hole and you might be able to make out a sturgeon if it swims right over your X and all you would see is a little black mark. But typically we're on camera and that camera is facing your X and we have a TV up there so we can watch the screen and you'll see a fish swim through and you you kind of are almost it's an educated guess on where you're throwing because you're looking at that camera and you're like i think he's on the edge of that x i'm kind of opposed

to this and sure i i mean i could see this is like that guy in texas that would allow you to log in and shoot deer they but they made it you can't do that i mean if you were there he's not spearing from montana he's spearing off a screen yeah but he's there he might as well be some present so i mean you won't be able to throw the spear i guess out of those 12 000 tags Steve. It's like 590 were speared over the last four days. Very low odds. That's like 5%. Yeah, but his party was spearing them left and right. So there are guys that will go like 30-some years and not spear a fish,

and they're mainly not getting fish because they're not using cameras. On a clear water year they may get one chester chester chester what about what about uh i'm all for it what about like tech fish sonars when you're when you're sitting there perch fishing i like that stuff okay i feel like this is very analogous to that man or with those uh what are you calling the the live scope your live scope or something yeah it's true i do feel a little guilty doing that but i like it all i can tell you is it's very hard to spear surgeon and even with cameras you got to put weeks in of scouting and like

it's it's hard so you know going back to that my family you ever hear a guy named shakespeare yes he's got a line, Doth protest too much? Okay, so he hits his head on the block. The sturgeon hits his head on the block. I don't know what that means either, Chet. So my family speared two sturgeon over three days, the opening day

and Sunday. Yeah. My cousin Jake speared one off camera. I was there with him. Is Jake who speared one with Giannis? Ike was. Ike was. Yep.

Okay. So Jake, my cousin speared one opening day. He hadn't gotten one in like, I don't know, four or five years. Not even using the camera. He used the camera oh okay he saw it pushed it under the ice and somehow hit it just blind yep they missed that day too my other brother missed second day we're sitting there i'm sitting with my brother ike and his girlfriend and he misses and he's all bummed which is pretty typical and it's 20 minutes before missing is missing is like as the thing that happens yeah very off camera it's like most of the time you're gonna miss but when you say off camera you mean

on camera on camera yep that could get confusing yep yeah sorry Sorry about that. So yeah, on camera fish are very easy to miss, but we're sitting there, it's 20 minutes before, it closes at 1 p.m. every day. So the quota doesn't, it closes at 1, so people have to check in their fish by a certain time so they don't go over the quota. Got it. So it's 20 minutes before the season closes and we're sitting there and Ike goes or tatum goes who's that his girlfriend tatum t-a-t-u-m yeah tatum goes and ike goes and i look at the screen and see nothing so i'm like what the heck and i look down and there is a sturgeon a foot under the ice right where that cake is you know it didn't hit its head on the cake but it's a foot under the ice really and it's you know i gotta get the i gotta pull up how long it is right now uh it's 68 inches long 74.3 pounds or 73.4 pounds and which is like

a big fish but not huge but when you see that thing sneak up on you a foot under the ice it's the most surprising thing it's like zero to a hundred but it's like right under i mean it's like if it shot straight up it'd come out of the hole. Well, it's off to the side a little bit. And I could, I want to give all the details, but it'd just be too long. There was a crack, a big 14 foot long crack that opened up right next to his shack that wasn't there the first day i believe that that sturgeon was following that crack oh because it came along and it was suspended which they they never that never happens huh so he sits there grabs his spear and kind of under the ice but just jabs the heck out

of it i didn't think he was going to give it enough oomph, but he hit that thing hard. Just a perfect shot. And once you spear a sturgeon like that close to the ice, it's chaotic. You've got decoy lines down. You've got another line down holding your siding X. You've got your camera line down. He's trying to hold on to this rope,

and this big 70-pound fish is fighting. I'm sitting there trying to pull all this rope and this big 70 pound fish is fighting. I'm sitting there trying to pull all this stuff out of the hole. And Ike's like, Chet, nobody cares about that stuff right now. Just get the gaff. So I get the gaff. He gets a fish up. I gaff it. And, you know, it's just hooting and hollering and very rare, you know, to spear a sturgeon. I speared one on the Fur Hat Ice Tour

that Meat Eater did with my family a couple years ago, so you can go watch that. Called Spearing Dinosaurs. Spearing Dinosaurs. Man, he's on a roll. He is a, whoever edited the Meat Eater one, they called him a lucky bastard, and I find that to be pretty true.

Damn. Then we took it to schmitty's ore house and had a couple of beers that's a good way to bring it full circle back i wish you to pick me up one of those shirts chester i gotta get you one and you need to come back there i know you're putting in for the upper oh me and yanni are in big time on the draw every year man we're accumulating bonus points on sturgeon uh here Here's one we're going to touch on real quick. It's so upsetting to me. We all the time have

video game people. I'm probably going to want to regret this later if I just want to cash in. Phil's a video game person. Video game people are always trying to get us to collaborate on a video game. Zero interest in that. Zero. Sorry, Phil.

I really wanted to play as Steve. Oh oh yeah like to do a video game anyways now there's like a metavert like you know facebook changed his name to meta yeah why did they do that because you're gonna get into all this virtual reality stuff where you make up it's like you make up a little thing you know people like make up those little emoji people versions of themselves? Yeah. Okay, imagine you make one of those. You did that, right? No.

Imagine you had one of those. We just did that, Seth. It's imagine you had one of those, but that's how you lived your whole life. You stay in your house, and you're like, I'm going to go to a concert. And then you put on goggles, and your little emoji person goes to a concert. And it seems like you're at a concert. know there is but you're looking through a screen there are some super bowl commercials that were like live this happy virtual life everybody's very excited about this stuff they're very excited you can just sit at home and be a total loser and be just a pathetic loser at

home and you could look as good as you want. You could have everything you should have had. And you go and interact and make virtual friends and live in the metaverse. Apparently Zuckerberg is very excited about this. I hate it. He changed his whole outfit to meta. You can buy virtual real estate. Oh, God.

Really? Is that Fahrenheit 451 with the lazy boy in the seashell you know where where like it's it's either that or it's uh well i forget what it was but it's a very famous uh novel and the whole thing is like they have all these folks that are just like plugged in with what they describe as like a little seashell earpiece and they're just hanging out in these like lazy boys basically and like just existing in that virtualpiece. And they're just hanging out in these like lazy boys, basically. And like just existing in that virtual reality.

I think you're thinking about that movie WALL-E. No. No. I'm going to look it up. Yeah. Anyhow, they, of course they've now have a hunting version,

but it's like, yeah, it's like a, it's like a it's like built on a blockchain technology a hunting version hunting metaverse come on dude gotta be a lot of nfts you know someone in our universe has a character on one of these games that's great i don't care okay who's this ain't me you want me to say no yeah remy he's into it oh yeah he's into it or not i don't know if he's into it. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's into it. Or not. I don't know if he's into it. Might just be one of those things people do.

Because they're like, man, that's not a bad deal. I don't know. Are you in one, Tom? Negative ghostwriter. If you want to do something for yourself, buy our book, Outdoor Kids and Inside World. That book's going to become more important than ever once everybody moves into the metaverse. Yeah, I agree. I'm going to sell that book packaged with a hammer.

Where you can smash a bunch of that shit and read the book. Outdoor Kids and Inside World. Available for pre-order now. Book books tearing it up on pre-orders it's the it lays out the case for having your kids and your family become radically involved with nature moving down oh quick question someone wrote in with can you get trichinosis if you're cleaning a bear and get the blood all over you and you have an open wound on your skin, can you get trich from it? Uh-uh. Like it has to go through your stomach.

Doesn't your stomach acid have to digest the? Yeah, you got to get like a certain number. You got to get some amount of the cysts in your stomach and your stomach acid liberates the cyst. Then it has to go through your vascular system. But're just messing around with bear meat and bear blood isn't going to do it are there like super long-term effects of like that happening to you it can attack your heart and screw you up yeah but it's very rare yeah but when i had it that's what i was reading about is like the cases where people get it bad as they get too much of that that that parasite load gets

too heavily into the muscle the heart muscle do you have any idea like what your specific load kind of was or if like you're the severity of your case no but the meat i ate had um a half million cysts per pound if you ate if you sat down and ate a 16 ounce pot roast till i don't even half a million sis loaded because the cdc came and got a chunk of my bear meat and hauled it down to atlanta to their lab and that's what they were that's what they came back to me with um you know how everybody's always trying to end Bobcat hunting and lion hunting here and there? This makes me proud to be a Michigander. They're increasing as Bobcat numbers continue to climb. They're expanding longer seasons, more units.

The Bobcat has firmly reestablished itself. Good connectivity among units. So they're opening up hunting and trapping opportunities in Michigan for bobcats in order to meet the good news of bobcat numbers doing great, still recovering from the timber boom when they logged live and piss out of that state and killed all the wildlife off as we recover it, people are rewarded with expanded opportunities. Anything to think about that,

Spencer? Did you see me there when you were a kid? No, but I, uh, the first Bobcat, yes, but not down where I lived.

The first time I heard of a Bobcat where right where I live was actually on a farm where I would trap Fox and raccoon. And the farmer's nephew was sitting in his tree stand and saw two bobcats together. That was the first reported, and that was in the 90s, the first reported incident anywhere near my home of bobcats. You could catch one bobcat a year north of us, but we never focused on it because they were only worth 15 20 bucks

because they're not like the western cats western cats right now even though fur prices are super down someone just sent me a text last night that they just sold a bunch of their cats for 450 bucks wow so spiking up not where it was a few years ago but high high this article is on our website one state might expand bobcat hunting and trapping. It talks about the future of Michigan's seasons. Tell me the headline again. I feel like that could have been written better. One State Might Expand Bobcat Hunting and Trapping Seasons. That's a piss poor headline.

One State Might. It just doesn't have like a real like, you know what I mean? Well, it's in the context of we've recently covered how a lot of other states are going the other direction like arizona colorado california illinois indiana so when you see this on our facebook page you're like whoa who's doing that yeah what i do like about it corinne and i were emailing or corinne was emailing me this morning about the opposite like i guess it's underselling an article is okay but correnn was talking to an anthropologist. Crenn and him were emailing about a headline that came out, and he was saying that the science, when popular news journals, popular news sources cover anthropology, archaeology, they often oversell

and try to create these sort of fantastical headlines out of something that the science just doesn't support. Clickbait. So recently, like, there was this article, perhaps Neanderthals didn't suffer a dramatic kill-off. Right? And he's like,

I'm not aware of anyone who felt that they did. A guy in Wyoming just got busted for selling poached game meat. And it's funny, he wasn't even selling it as game meat. He's shooting mule deer

and antelope and quite a few of them. And selling it as organic beef jerky. So they had suspicions about this dude and this dude sells access on his ranch for $350. So some undercover game wardens from

Wyoming book themselves a couple days of hunting on his ranch. And as they're wandering around they notice burn piles full of carcasses. Red flag. He's so secretive that he tells the undercover wardens what he does. Smart. He's like, what I do, you see, I shoot antelope and deer and sell it as organic beef jerky.

And they're like, you don't say. So they were able to put a pretty solid case against him. And did you hear we got the ball rolling on this? No. His ex-girlfriend tattled on him. Go figure. Good for her. I didn't see that.

His ex-girlfriend told on him. His ex-girlfriend. I know a great saying about that, but I can't say it because it's too dirty. I'm dying to know. It's the blanking you get for the blanking you got I think we get it hey folks exciting news for those who live

or hunt in Canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. 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 um you guys in the great white north can 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-icked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out

if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Okay, speaking of law enforcement, we're going to hand it over to our very own Katie Hill, who's going to lay out our first ever inaugural Meat Eater Investigates. She's like Bob Woodward.

That's the compliment of a century she's the bob woodward of the of the of the wildlife world thank you so i wrote this story about finding saiga antelope horns for sale on major online retailers um amazon etsy and ebay and i found out how because you were searching for them? Yeah, it's kind of a strange story. So I was working for a different international conservation media outlet. And Katie now works for us. She's on the editorial team.

Yes. It's her first time on the podcast. In the trenches now. Plug the article, like how you like to do. Yeah, so the article is called Major Online Retailers Acted as Black Market for Endangered Animal Parts. article like how you like to do yeah so the the article is called major online retailers acted as black market for endangered animal parts great writing from katie and a great graphic from our own hunter spencer this is katie's first time on the podcast yeah i didn't do a good job setting

that all up sorry about that it's covered now okay go on thanks yeah so i first found out about saigo when i was working for a different uh conservation outlet run by a bunch of b and c guys and i was trying to i was building like a twitter and instagram profile for them and trying to populate those profiles b and c boone and crockett yeah okay yeah trying to kind of build up the two profiles to make them actually something you know worth looking at and i found out about saiga and pretty shortly after, you know, it doesn't take long to figure out that they're super endangered and they have like a long history of endangerment. They're kind of all over like the Eurasian steppe grasslands. Also, their horns are used pretty heavily in like traditional Chinese

medicinal practices. And so their horns are now kind of considered one of those taboo international wildlife trafficking issues. Do you know what Corinne nodded knowingly when you said that? I didn't. Are you familiar? I mean, Asian folks use all kinds of... Oh, it was that kind of like, it was like your nod was more like a that doesn't surprise yeah not surprised at all um yeah so my sick twisted brain like decided

that i was gonna see how long it would take to find some online like you know would you have to descend into like the bowels of the internet to find this stuff or like where where would it crop up like you'd want up on the silk road exactly exactly um so i just fired a simple google search saiga horn for sale and the first search result came from amazon i was like i was like no freaking way you could add it to add it to your cart exactly one time versus yeah and you can imagine what this has done to like my suggested search items on amazon now like so um i wild it was it was a lot well i at first i the first natural thought was like well there's no way these are real and also like made a point in the article that they don't really look like

saigohorns they're like lacquered really heavily they don't really look like saigohorns. They're like lacquered really heavily and they're black. And saigohorns are more of like a camel color. So it's kind of hard to tell if they're legit or not. But so I went to this store on Amazon. What was the price tag on it? They were one pair was about like $2.35 and one pair was like $2.10. Katie had screenshots of all of these listings in the article too.

Yeah. Then I went to the store because I was like, well, what else is this guy selling? It was listed to, the guy was listed in Russia. And the store was full of mounts, pelts, full body mounts, shoulder mounts of just a really eclectic mix of species. And so I was like, well, how much of this is legal? And so I started cross-listing. I decided I was going to like audit the whole store.

And I started cross-listing the store with the CITES database, the Convention for the International Trade of Endangered Species. And as I was doing this, more and more pieces kept cropping up. The store kept growing. And so I decided I was going to – You mean like while you're looking at it, his collection is growing? Not actively, but I would like go check to me. Well, because of course I'm checking to make sure this stuff is still there. Oh, but his holdings are- But his holdings are increasing. Exactly. Like the store grew. Which made you think it wasn't like something that was kind of half-assed.

Exactly. He was active. Exactly. So I made like a hard stop. I was like, all right, I'm going to stop stalking this guy's Amazon store on like December 2nd. And as of December 2nd, my- Why did you want to stop stalking his Amazon store? Because I had, like, I had to write the story and eventually I had to like, I couldn't keep like- You were done waiting for it to get better. Yeah, exactly. I was done waiting for him to reform. And so that final audit that I did, he had 164 pieces of taxidermy from CITES-listed species. And so I got in touch with Amazon, and they replied and gave a statement and then proceeded to pull down. They said they pulled down some of his product.

And after the story published, I went back in and looked. And his store that had been probably close to like, he had like 400 listings on the store. It was down to 10 listings. So they pulled down a ton of stuff. And it's hard to tell like what they pulled down, what was sold. Like, you know, it's hard to tell what they pulled down, what was sold. It's hard to know exactly. But right before we were set to publish, I also decided on a whim to go see if eBay and Etsy also had any Saigon Horn for sale. issues with ivory trade and trying to suppress the ivory trade on eBay. And so I dug in there and they had probably like 30 to 40 listings for Saigon Horn. And then Etsy had maybe 10. And so I got in touch with both of them as well. And neither of them made statements,

but Etsy did pull down their Saigon Horn listings. So. So when you call, what'd you call it? customer service over at Amazon, or did you kind of like back channel a little bit? I back channeled. I used their public relations, like their media relations contact. Yeah. What other critters did you find that they were selling parts from that they shouldn't be?

Yeah. So I found there were a lot of birds, a lot of birds that are on like the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Give me an example there was there was an eastern imperial eagle which is a cites appendix one species like a full body full body really yeah there's uh screenshots of that in the article too um and then a uh what was it called a white-tailed eagle as well. Where two kind of really, really

endangered. The international trade of these animals is seriously locked down. I got this question for you. And I might be putting myself in jail right now. I don't know. When my old man came back from World War II, he was

in North Africa and he came back with this big-ass dagger that has a big ivory handle on it. Okay? I would love to find someone that can help me figure out what it is. An ivory handle and a leather sheath that's like a translucent leather. I have no idea. That's badass. Well, if all of a sudden I died and someone did an estate sale, all of a sudden here's ivory on the market. And you'd kind of look and be like, I don't know.

It doesn't feel like malintent. Book him, Dano. Book him, Dano. What does that mean? Three hots and a cot. Go to jail. That's from the old Hawaii Five-0 show when they would get somebody. Oh, book him.

Book him, Dano. Yeah, so like if you see an eagle, I mean, where's the stuff coming from? You know what I'm saying? Like how is it not that just whatever, some crazy guy had some stuff, and then this guy bought it and right yeah like do you know that it was a guy he said like listen man there's a hot market i want you to go shoot an eagle and we'll stuff it and sell it on my website it's hard to tell yeah um all i really can say to that is that the way that cites works um so if the, like say that stuffed eagle, the stuffed Eastern Imperial eagle, um, if that mount were created before the Eastern Imperial eagle was listed under CITES, which was in 1977, if those products were already in existence before the listing occurred, then they are legal for trade.

Oh, that's how they cut it. So that's why you see a lot of vintage ivory products that are very, they sell for incredible amounts of money. Really? I think so. So is my old man's knife maybe super valuable? It probably is. Yeah, don't sell it on eBay, though. It's a pretty healthy hunk of ivory on there, man.

Antiques Roadshow. Yeah, definitely. That's a good idea. So if it's, I mean, if it was from before, I mean, I can't speak specifically to ivory because I think there's a lot of separate rules that apply, but at least with CITES

listed species, if those products were already in existence before the listing date, then they are technically legal. That's how they're able to sell a bunch of, like uh pianos with ivory keys yeah because old stuff yeah like i when i was a musician man i bought a piano and it had like ivory keys on it still so like puts the ivories back into tickling the ivory sure does

exactly so do you have is it yours what's your suspicion like on the stuff that this guy was selling is your suspicion that this was not stuff he picked up from some old estate sale but that this was like stuff that people were doing because they could market it i think it was probably the latter i mean a lot of the species were largely endemic to eastern europe and western asia got you and they didn't look like old like things that people have been smoking cigarettes next to for 50 years. Some of them really did. Oh, they did? Some of them were disgusting and some of them looked pretty new and well done.

There were a lot of like really just really crappy pelts. A lot of like, they almost looked like key chains made out of the talons. Got it. Off the birds. I don't know if you've ever seen a Siberian musk deer before. No. But it's like a deer with fangs about this long. You seen one of those, Tom?

Not in a while, but in Mountain. Yeah. I didn't buy it, though. It's gone now, but I was on this sweet website. I was on this sweet page on amazon yeah guy went dark on me weird it disappeared so have you gone have you taken this and um have you thought about going and trying to find some of the real dark stuff like like rhino horn do you think that like do you think that you'd find that it was that easy

to get the things you hear about like every day like i don't know i don't want to do that on my company laptop i can tell you that um i i think so there was one website that i found in this whole searching process that was really strange um they sold like dried, they were selling abalone shell. Those are definitely not. I think there's some restrictions on abalone shell. Like dried ox gallbladders, like really weird stuff. And they had, they were selling bags of saighorn for like $14.5 million a pop. Yeah.

Yep. So. For a bag of them. Yeah, here I can find them. These were good deals then because I saw like on eBay it was like 500 bucks for one pound of Saga horn.

You found one of those right now? No, that's from Katie's article. Katie, next time if you like all that internet sleuth try to find us a deal on a really huge punt gun. Like a huge punt gun. I'll take any requests for dark web dealing. How long of a punt gun do we want?

I would say minimum like seven and a half feet. That's when it catches your eye. That's something. Good eight foot punt gun. Someone else is going to have to pay for shipping on that. I'm not paying to ship that. So are you inspired now to make – are you just moving on? Or do you think you're going to do more stuff in this vein?

I don't know. I mean, it was definitely interesting to see that that stuff does exist right under our noses on the websites that we, most of us like use pretty frequently. This is like the age old adage of, if you see something, say something. It's so nerdy, but it's definitely true. I don't know. We'll see if I stumble across any other strange stuff. It would definitely be kind of an interesting follow-up story. What was the statement that amazon made um they just kind of reiterated their seller policy on animals and animal products which is that they

abide by all national and international law um and they don't condone selling cites listed animal products and they sort of distance themselves by saying something about like third party sellers. Yeah, because there is. Yeah, they you know, this stuff wasn't like, you know, available through Amazon Prime. This was like a suggested item. Yeah, exactly. They didn't sign off on any of this stuff. They aren't willing to put their name next to it, which I totally understand.

That's that's a constant story and perspective from the tech world, whether it's publishing, selling, where you have a platform like Amazon and people say, well, I bought it on Amazon. But Amazon is also like a home for third-party sellers to do what they want to do, meaning you could also go find, you could go to like wherever, iTunes and find objectionable material that people have posted to iTunes. And people want to say like, well, Apple. And Apple would say, we're just a publisher.

Exactly. It's not our material. Yeah. industry and all of its um trouble spots and hot spots it often like narrows down to places trying to where possible find some distance between their platform and the people who are living on their platform absolutely sometimes people buy it and sometimes they expect a little bit more well but i mean if you put it you know from, not to like, you know, advocate for what they did, but I mean, they have millions of sellers on their platform. Yeah. And I mean, I can't even imagine how big a team they would need to have to like scrape every single listing for anything prohibited, you know, drugs, animal products animal products people like anything along those

lines yeah i talked to a guy who i talked to a guy one time i might screw the stat up maybe one of you guys can find the stat one of you fast fingered little fellers answer um he worked at youtube and he was and he was part of his focus was like keeping advertisers happy about what stuff their ads are applied to. I think he's telling me that every minute, 400 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube. Can you imagine being in the office that's like in charge of what is it? 500 as of February, 2020. Every minute, 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube, and he's supposed to make sure there's nothing objectionable. Holy cow.

Yeah. And that's why, hence, when you get your stuff flagged on a social media platform, you're like, I don't really get it. Because there's so much machine learning in there now, and it's like looking for certain markers and traces, and now and then it obviously hits something that isn't. Yep, exactly. Yeah.

So, I mean, they definitely skipped over this particular store. Yeah, you could put up an infomercial about Saiga horns and probably sit there for some number of days. It'd probably be active for some number of days before someone found it. Absolutely. Yeah. Katie, crush it with this story. It's not often we do stuff where I'm like, Vice would be jealous of this or New York Times would be jealous of this. It's not often.

It's not often. They wouldn't come to our website. That eagle getting that house cat? I stand by my statement. New York Times probably burned up. They didn't get that. It's not often that they would be really jealous. They would, in fact, be jealous of this. If you want to read it again, Major Online Retailers Act is Black Market for Endangered Animal Parts by Katie Hill.

That's a saucy headline. I was going to ask, what's the read on that headline? That's saucy, but it holds up. It holds up. Well, we had to go through many rounds of edits, get PR from Meat Eater involved to make sure that they were cool with it. And that was where we landed. Make sure they were cool with how saucy that headline sounded. Correct.

No blowback, though. A minor. From the saucy... From the sauce police. Yeah. I like that. Sauce police. Sa saucy. From the sauce police. Yeah. I like that. Sauce police. Saucy.

Tone down that sauciness. Well, thanks. Thank you. You should come on. Next time you write an article, come tell us about it. I would be happy to. Thank you. Yeah.

You know what? We could do this. You could write an article. It could be something like Steve's dad's dad's dagger actually isn't that interesting. Or something, you know? What I could do is I could try to sell it on Amazon and see how much money I could get for it. My first object is I want to know what ivory it was. It's a big chunk, man.

I feel like you could get that figured out, though. I mean, they must be able to use... Did you say you could get that figured out, though. They must be able to use... Did you say you'll get it figured out? I'll do it after we're out of here. I'll bring it in. I'll leave it on the table here for a while. Whether or not it's ever tasted blood, I have no idea.

That could be part of the analysis. Alright, Tom, you ready? Yep, I'm ready. Enjoying it. Now, I'm going to give the background of how I know you. Because when I was a little boy. Not too little. No, but you were like at the forefront of making videos.

You used to, I feel like, I don't know if I ever saw you at one of the trappers conventions, but I definitely like your series, particularly the water trapping, VHS tape, which this, what brought this whole thing on

is I was just home visiting my mom over Thanksgiving and she doesn't like to get rid of anything. She's got like a display. She's got, you know those old police monitors? Of course, yeah. Okay, that thing was on my entire growing up, the police monitor. And it goes through all those flashing lights, and it like picks up.

Oh, I turned it on, and like nothing's happening. I'm like, oh, they must have changed whatever they do. But pretty soon, there's a girl going into anaphylactic shock on my police monitor and like they still use those things no one turned that thing on for a million years regardless below it is all the old vhs tapes and in there i'm like holy shit my tom miranda water trapping vhs tape which was probably the most like at the time this might be a wild statement at the time it had to been one of the most, like at the time, this might be a wild statement. At the time, it had to have been one of the most, probably the most, like widely distributed pieces of trapping media in the country.

I was pretty blessed back in those days. You know, it was the right place at the right time. A lot of big time trappers didn't like me though, because I was taking all these secrets of the trapper and putting them out there on video. Instead of bringing it to your grave. Yeah. Instead of actually trying to sell it through my catalog, I sold it to video rental stores. And so guys could go in and rent it for a dollar. And I sold tens of thousands. I won't say any more about the sturgeon, but quite a few, quite a few of these videos. And yeah, it was great. I made trapping lures and wrote books and was an actual

trapper. Yeah, Tom put it like he was trapping trappers. That's right. That's exactly what it was. Well, you know, you find out after a while that the fur prices fluctuate. You know, one year raccoons are $10 and next year they're $40. And so the year they're $10, you catch $100, and the year they're $40, you catch $10. So you really never really get ahead in the fur industry, you know what I mean? But in the trapping side of it, as far as for the other trappers, if you were a good trapper, and if you made good catches, and you were legitimate, they would order your books, they would order your videos. And when people learned how to catch their first fox or their first raccoon or mink, they would think, wow, you know, this guy taught me how to do it.

And so they would buy your products. And it basically is like how you gain fans on your meat eater podcast. I mean, you know, people like listening, so they come back. Same thing was that, you know, back in the mid-80s when I did it. It was, I thought it was like revolutionary because I would look look at all those books and i had all the books man um like bob gilsvick had that famous hardcover book that everybody in the world had national trappers association put out a book but it would be that on your videos all of a sudden it'd be there'd be like it seemed like you just made it yourself right right there you'd set up a camera. You'd have all the equipment, and you'd make a. Yeah, it was pretty much how to. Oh, I like step-by-step just emulated what I saw.

That's good because it worked, right? Yeah, and I got the equipment. Like I was telling you last night, using a tile spade, having big old squirt bottles full of lure, all that kind of stuff, man. I love that stuff. Well, and the long-lining principle was to cover as much ground as It's as many sets and just keep adding new sets at the end of the day. You pull the sets at the beginning, your trap sets that are unproductive. Maybe you've already caught the animals in that area or the surplus is what we always go for. And then you move down the line and you just continue to repeat yourself to try to keep an average number of

animals per day. And the whole premise of the videos was to teach a quick, effective set that you could make that would handle, especially the water trapping, a water fluctuation, because when it rains, the creeks go up. And you want to keep the trap working as long as possible so you have the maximum chance of taking an animal in that one set. And if you set 10 traps, if you can catch four animals out of those 10 traps within two days, that's a pretty good average, especially if you're running 200 traps or 300 traps. And a long line trapper would run traps. I mean, at one time I had skinners that skinned my catch. So I just ran the traps all the time and then guys skinned them for me. You hired your own skinners?

Yeah, absolutely. That's how you make money. Really? Absolutely. Seth used to be, he used to skin for a fur buyer. Well, that's a hard way to make money. What was the deal you'd strike with your own skinners? Well, you paid them by the piece, you know, you paid them by the piece.

But they had to do it to your specs though, obviously. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, we had, we would wash the pelts, we would skin them, we would dry them and then dry them and then tumble them. And, you know, we basically, they were the spotless best pelts we would skin them we would dry them and then then dry them and tumble them and you know we basically they were the spotless best pelts they could be because you're always going to get the best price for the more prime furs but the always the put up furs you know there's some things you can control and some things you can't control if you catch one that's half prime

you can't control that but if you put it up right, you know, it's all about presentation. You know, I knew you, um, when I, when I became aware of you, I, I associated you very strongly with South Dakota. Um. Chamberlain, South Dakota. Absolutely. Yeah. I didn't even realize till later you were born in Columbus, Ohio. I was.

Yeah. Were you born in a good, um, like was, was your, uh, were your parents into the outdoors and. No. Um, my dad deer hunted once, uh, were your parents into the outdoors and. No. Um, my dad deer hunted once in a while, but he worked, he, he worked for Western Electric. My mom was a stay at home mom. I lived in the suburbs, but there was a, there was a railroad track near my house and a river system that went by.

It was called the Big Walnut Creek. And so, um, how I actually got into trapping wasn't from any of my family. It was the next door neighbor. I saw him walking down. He was four or five years older than me. And so how I actually got into trapping wasn't from any of my family. It was a next-door neighbor. I saw him walking down. He was four or five years older than me. I saw him walking down the railroad tracks with a basket on his back. I was 11 years old, so I followed him, you know, secretly to see what he was doing.

And he had hip waders on, and he was going along the creek, and he was setting muskrat and raccoon tracks. Oh, really? Eventually, we talked, and eventually I was carrying his pack basket and doing the hard work for him and just learning. And eventually he got a girlfriend and I got the trap line. Hmm. And that's how it worked. Hmm. The blank and you get it.

Poor guy. Blank and you get it. I always make that fatal mistake. I don't know why. At that time, what was your introduction to bow hunting? Well, I mean, everybody was buying these recurved bows of Fred Bear back in the late 60s. And it was 1969 when I started trapping. And, of course, I had to have one and shoot in the backyard.

But that was mostly archery. Was it then with him and the outdoor rules, kind of like a hip thing? It was a hip thing. It was a hip thing. It was a little bit of a fad kind of a thing back then, of course. He was promoting it. At the time, Bear was doing a lot of these videos or films that he did, and then he would travel around to different gymnasiums and places where he'd play his films and talk about bowhunting. That was really when the Fred Bear Company got really big

and bowhunting really took off. Were guys that were, at that time when people were getting into archery, you know, it was new. A lot of states didn't have dedicated archery seasons like they do now. Were people into trick shooting or were you training to hunt big game? At the time, I was young, so I was just enjoying the sport. You know, the feel of the bow, the flight of the arrow, you know, hitting on a target. You know, I didn't never really went bow hunting till I was in my early twenties, you know, I mean, because I was a trapper and trapping season is a full-time job. You know, you've got to run your traps every day.

You got to skin your catch. So you really don't have a lot of time to actually hunt. How did it wind up that you became so entrenched in South Dakota? And then with that, tell people about becoming a government trapper and what that all meant. Yeah, well, in the early 80s, I saw an ad in the Furfish Game magazine in the back for a guy's name was Odon Core. He lived in Miller, South dakota and he gave trapping lessons and at the time i was really thirsting for information on all the animals on all the trapping i had never been out west and trapped as i was thinking south dakota there was a book out at the time by gerald wheeland called uh long liner fox trapping long liner fox trapping

too long liner coyote trapping long liner m mink trapping. So this guy worked out of- Do you remember that one, Seth? Mm-hmm. I don't remember that one. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I remember the name. Very, very accomplished trapper. Well, I ended up taking lessons from Odon Corp in Miller, South Dakota. I learned a lot. I mean, I learned a real lot. And the main thing I learned was that there was no secret to it. It was just all hard work. It was just repeat. It's like a Xerox, like a copy machine. Find whatever location works, whatever set works, and whatever area works, and repeat that over and over and over living and be as successful as a person that I could be by just being a trapper. And so I had heard of a possible job as a

government trapper in South Dakota. And I went there and applied and I got the job. But at the time I was making my own trapping lures and I hadn't started writing books yet or any of that, but I was on the cusp of starting my entrepreneurship as a trapper. So what's the job description? Of a government trapper? Yeah. And what was the job title? Yeah, I mean, I was an ADC specialist, so animal damage control specialist for the state of South Dakota. I got a state pickup truck. I had an office. I had a secretary. They gave me a bunch of traps. And I had 10 counties that I had to trap in. And so anybody that called, if there was a skunk under your porch, a beaver dam in a culvert, a coyote killing your sheep, any of that I had to go address.

And 10 counties in South Dakota, they're big counties like Montana, you know, I mean, it's like a big, big area. And so I was driving 10, 12 hours a day answering all these questions. And that's when I decided that I was going to learn how to fly and do this from the air. In the 80s in that area, were you encountering any mountain lions or not yet? No, there were more out in the Black Hills. I mean, we had some on some of the drainages, but I wasn't being called in on any of those types of calls, not where I was at. Chamberlain's on the East river of, uh, of the Missouri river, right at I-90.

So, um, it's kind of in South central South Dakota and all my counties that I was responsible for were East river. We talked about this a little bit last night. Um, someone, uh, the guy that raises sheep, he goes out and there's a dead one laying there and his mind right away is coyotes. Okay. Call Tom Miranda. He'll come and give me a receipt.

So, but literally like your phone rings or your secretary's phone rings. That's right. And then it's up to you to at some point in time over a 10 county range, go out and see what's up. Absolutely. Yeah. Go find out if it was really animal damage, you know, did it, was it really a coyote? Did this thing just die in a coyote or a fox eat on it later? So, you know, you're looking for throat, you know, puncture wounds in the throat. You're looking for how this thing died. Was it drug, you know, while it was still alive, you know, et cetera.

You know, what's the fence look like in the area? Does he guy have any guard dogs? You know, what, what's the scenario? How many empty sweaters are in the pasture? You the guy have any guard dogs? What's the scenario? How many empty sweaters are in the pasture? I mean, you're looking for all those things. Empty sweaters is ADC lingo for dead sheep. Absolutely. Like a little pile of wool.

Tom, what would you do with the animals that you caught? Were you able to skin and sell them? When we took vacation, we were allowed to sell them, but I always caught and skinned my animals. And, um, yeah, it made me a little bit of an enemy of some of the people that worked in the system with me because I was, I came from the fur trapping part of it when I got the job. And to me, it was a waste if I didn't, even if they were, you know, mangy or whatever, not mangy. He said he pelted out coyotes in August. Yeah. You know, just because that's what I did. Yeah.

You have a hard time just throwing them in the ditch. Yeah. And you end up with, you know, I was ending up with, you know, quite a high number of animals that I was turning into the state. And a lot of the other trappers were just leaving them lay, you know, and they're like, you know, giving me a call and saying, Hey man, you know, like you're making us look bad. Let's just cool your jets on this stuff.

Cause I was a new guy. I was a new, I was a new, new guy in town. So anyways, I learned over a course of time that, you know, there is a little bit of a protocol, you know, that you needed to do. And I just was trying to do my best, you know, like I tell everybody, you know, I'm not the best bow hunter. I'm not the best trapper. I'm not the best writer. I'm not the best anything, but I'll outwork anybody. And that was the whole key to it. I just worked until I was successful. There's a great quote by a writer. His name was like Apple, R.W. Apple. You remember him? He has a quote where he said, I can write faster than anyone who can write better than me. And I can write better than anyone who can write faster than me.

That's true. That's a good position to be in. That's a good way to make it full circle. I grew up two hours from Chamberlain and I feel like a lot of the ranchers and farmers that I know in that area now in 2022, if they were contacting a wildlife damage specialist, it would be because of a bunch of geese that are really causing havoc on their beans or corn or whatever. Did you deal with a lot of geese that are really causing havoc on their beans or corn or whatever. Did you deal with a lot of geese in your day there? I didn't. There was some concern mostly north of where I lived.

The trapper that was north in Gettysburg, north of Pierre, they had a little bit more of a goose problem than what we really did in my area. As you get farther south, there's only four or five landowners that really you know, really along my side that controlled that land that was right along the Missouri River. And there's a lot of state land along there, too, that, you know, public hunting land and things like that, that the state didn't want controlled in any of that anyway. So, yeah, I didn't have that. But, I mean, we did blackbird stuff. I mean, yeah, we did a little bit of everything. You know, the Red Wing blackbird stuff was always a hassle.

What, as a crop, crop damage? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We used cannons to scare the, scare them away. Red Wing blackbirds? Yeah. How do you associate them with just hanging out in cattail marshes? What, what would get them in trouble? Just too many of them around.

You know, they'd all be, you know, there'd be tens of thousands in flocks, you know, flying around and stuff, so. But doing what to, what damaging what? Well, I mean, this just didn't want them around I guess you know I mean right like in yeah Just in New Jersey this I used to do some Work for a sweet corn farmer, and he had cannons, and it was yeah blackbirds were but red wings I don't know some of these could have been starling yeah Yeah, the ones he had problems with was were starlings God

But yeah, they just can't scare the shit out of you because you didn't, they'd like go off every so often. They just shoot them just to scare the birds. Yeah. They're like propane cannons. What were some of the oddball critters that you dealt with? Like, for example, the only civ cat I've ever seen in my life was around Chamberlain. Did you encounter any really rare stuff like that? Oh, yeah.

What? Lots of civ cat. Civ cat. Yeah. Civ it. Yeah. Yeah. They're like a spotted skunk, a little tiny thing.

And, yeah, they go everywhere, in the attics and under houses. And really, it's a unique skunk smell. You know, it's not the same as the striped skunk smell. It's unique. It's a little sweeter, actually. Of course, when you're a trapper and you make trapping scent, it smelled like money to me. But to the people that, you know, to the people that had a problem with them, it was – and you had to be careful because you couldn't – if you scared them, they'd spray. And, I mean, it didn't – the smell lasted for a long, long time.

Then you have an unhappy customer. Yeah. Or not a customer, but a – Yeah. Back in those days, I used a product called, that was Skunks Unlimited. And basically, it was a pole with a syringe on the end, and we put acetone in the syringe. We would talk to the skunk and then press that needle into its side and inject it with acetone, and it would just die. So if he's up in an attic or something, that's how you'd...

Yeah. Because you couldn't really throw, you'd try to throw a blanket over or something and then try to carry the live trap out where the animal wouldn't know. But skunks are just, some of them are quick with the trigger finger, if you know what I mean. Yeah, for sure. Hey, what percentage of, when people call and they're like, a coyote killed my sheep, what percentage were actually killed by coyotes? I'd say when I was there and I was working it, I'd say under 30%. I'd say maybe even 20%. Most of them died of something else.

Now I'm not saying that they weren't run by coyotes and run into a fence or whatever, running them around, chasing them around, but actually throat marks killed and eaten. And normally when there was actual predation, it was mostly in the spring after the female had had the pups and it was the females that were doing the killing, not the males. Yeah. Tell people about that little system you'd use with the putting the sheep in an enclosure and playing a tape. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, when we had a bonafide, especially in the spring, when we had a bona fide kill, coyote kill, I would try to get the landowner to bring his sheep as close to the barn as possible, yard them up, if you will.

And then I would use a radio in the corral or whatever at night to keep the coyotes from coming in on the sheep. And then I would patrol the periphery, the outside edge, because that's what the coyotes would do. And that's where I would put all my traps and sets. It's very difficult to know if you've shot, if you've caught or shot the right coyote, you know, how, how do you know which one is the coyote that actually did the damage? Um, so that's, that's, and so you might catch in some areas, you might catch 10 or 12 coyotes on that outside of that fence, you know, and you're just, you're just figuring that one of those was probably, and you know, normally when you check them, when you catch them, it's the female, you know, if you open up her stomach and you see some wool in there, who knows if she was

raising pups in a den, she gets where she gets herself in trouble. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, tell these guys the story of when you went to see Jimmy Houston for career advice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no doubt. So, so yeah, part of my claim to fame is having a TV show on ESPN for almost 20 years. And so how it basically started was I was a trapper at the time and I was getting a lot of animal activist calls. People were calling, calling me a killer. And the PETA group put me on the top 10 list of evil people for wildlife because I had sold so many of these how to trap videos. I mean, these VHS videos were just everywhere. And so I decided that, you know, I'm going to do a TV show on trapping. I mean,

that's got to be a way to get the word out that trappers are, you know, really conservation minded and really helping the, all the nesting birds and all the things that we do. You know, there's, there's really a, a specific purpose for a trapper. Uh, so anyways, um, I decided to go see Jimmy Houston because he had a TV show, uh, on ESPN. And I thought, if I'm going to get my word out, that's where I need to be. And so I went down to Oklahoma to a sports show, stood in line, wait to get Jimmy Houston's autograph. Yeah. I'm 22 years old. Oh, you were young. I was young. Yeah. Anyways, I get, I get Jimmy Houston. Real quick. How, how old were you when you did the government trapping job? Yeah. Yeah. 24. I meant to say 32. I meant to say 32, not 22. Okay. 32. So you were, you were already like big time into the

trap. I was all through this. I was at the end of the trapping just about. I got you. And this is roughly what year? 32. So yeah, it was 1989. Okay. Yeah. So I get out and see Jimmy Houston, get in line.

And I tell him and I finally get up there to sign my hat. I said, Jimmy, I said, I want to do a TV show on trapping. What do you think? You know, you're so, show's so popular. He goes, ugh, he rolls his eyes. He goes, no, he's going to what? He goes, you're never going to get any sponsors for that. He goes, you'll never get a network to take a trapping. What do you think? You know, you're so, show's so popular. He goes, oh, he rolls his eyes. He goes, no, he's going to watch. He goes, you're never going to get any sponsors for that. He goes, you'll never get a network to take a trapping show. You know, he goes, that's barbaric. And I said, no, no, no, that's the point. That's why I want to do it. It's not barbaric. You know, we use,

we used traps that have gaps between the jaws. We, we, we're conservationists. And he goes, you know, he goes, do you do anything else in the outdoors? And I said, I like bow hunting. You know, I like shooting a bow. He goes, there you go. He goes, that's what you need to do. And so that's when I decided to start, you know, actively going after. Just based off that. Yeah, based off of that.

In fact, that same year I went bear hunting in Saskatchewan and made my very first hunting video. It was called Big Timber Bears, a Saskatchewan bow hunting adventure. It was in 1989. Who did you hire to shoot it, to film it? A guy that worked for me just went up there and filmed it for me. So you took your VHS instructional know-how and started producing what might be more. Did you view that first bear hunting thing, did you view it as entertainment or how-to? Entertainment. So you transitioned because the trapping stuff is yeah the trapping stuff is meant for an audience of people they're like i want to learn how to do that yeah well and i mean my tv

shows now are based around how to you know but i mean it's a it's about an adventure and that's what the the big timber bears was i mean and when I eventually did get on ESPN in 1992, actually, I was on Sports Channel America in 1990 and 1991. And when I did get on ESPN in 92, the show was called Outdoor Adventure Magazine. It was hunting, fishing, and adventure. So it was a magazine format show. And, you know, ESPN called me the crazy bow hunter that'd do anything once because I did bungee jumping, skydiving, rock climbing. I flew many different types of airplanes. But I also hunted with a bow and I also did fishing.

So it was a very highly rated show for five or six years. Yeah. ESPN was like where you went in those years. ESPN was where you went for outdoor program. Absolutely. It was on Sundays, right? Saturday mornings. Saturday mornings. Yeah, Saturday morning. And then eventually went to ESPN too and that was for outdoor programming. Absolutely. It was on Sundays, right? Saturday mornings. Saturday mornings. Yeah, Saturday mornings.

And then eventually went to ESPN, too, and that was on Saturdays and Sundays. Yeah. When you were doing ESPN, were you doing a commissioned show for them, or did you have to go find all the financing on your own through sponsors? No, it was 100% financed by me, totally. Yeah, we didn't do it. It wasn't like the History Channel and some of the stuff that's done today. Yeah. We had to buy our airtime.

First, you had to get approved. Yeah. You had to be an approved producer. Then they had to have a time slot available. And then you had to tie that time slot up. And they were very, very focused on ratings. Ratings were everything to them. That's how you kept your time slot.

Yeah. Otherwise, you were out. And there were so many other shows that wanted to be a part of that. There was only eight shows on a Saturday morning. So even though it was time, even though you were buying the slot of time and had to finance it through your own sponsorships and advertisers. Absolutely. It was competitive to hold it. Absolutely.

Yeah, not like it is today. With Outdoor Channel or Sportsman or whatever, you just buy a slot and you can put anything on there. I mean, they had specific—I mean, we weren't even allowed to mention, you know, Realtree or whatever sponsor we had. We could show logos and labels, but there was no gratuitous advertising. Got it. So it was very, very strict. That's a different landscape, man. And, you know, those shows were some of the best outdoor shows that were ever done.

If somebody ever really wanted to go back and look at, you know, what they had at the time. I mean, if you look at Fly Fishing the World and, what, Walker's K Chronicles. I remember that show. And some of those other shows. You know, there were some really top-end shows. I mean, they were really the eight best shows that were produced in that era, pretty much. And there were a few shows that cycled through. The Wayne Pearson show cycled through.

And there's a few other guys, Charlie West. And there's a few other shows that cycled through where they were on for a season or two or three, then they were out and new shows came in. They always were trying to get new blood, but there was a staple or a stable of producers that they went to and used. And it was a very exciting time for me

because it was real, it was, I mean, I say that I went from little league to big league, you know, because I basically wasn't a TV guy at all. And within two years, I was on the number one place that you could ever be for an outdoor show, you know? And you learned to edit your own stuff. Yeah, I edit my own stuff. Yeah, so it's, yeah, I mean, a trapper.

I mean, I'm a trapper. So you do it all yourself. You know, you just learn that. And I knew that I would put the right amount of work into it. Now I hired guys to edit other shows and I learned a lot of computer editing and things from them, the techniques of how to use the computers. I mean, I edited AB roll, all the ESPN stuff was pretty much AB roll till maybe the last three or four years when we went to the avids and the other types of nonlinear editing, pretty much everything was, you know, onto one inch tape or, you know, digital beta cam type of stuff. So we were shooting on tape, editing on tape. Did ESPN show kill shots all the way until the end of 2010?

They did till the end, but at the very beginning, they didn't. In fact, we had to cut away from the kill shots which i complained about immediately after i got on there which i had no credibility with them because i was new and i had no you know didn't have any pull whatsoever but we fought it for a couple of years and finally they allowed me to use a bow and show the impact if the arrow would go all the way through the animal and so i I started shooting 85-pound bow, heavy arrows. Because I wanted the arrow to go all the way through. Are you serious?

You changed your getup? I had to because I wanted vindication, man. I mean, you know, it's like you can't take the kill shot away. I mean, that's what everybody wants to see. I always remember that you shooting, explaining in some of your videos when I used to watch them, that you're just shooting like super heavy bow. I actually found out about you in my Christmas stocking. Very cool.

One year I got a DVD of your, my mom got me a DVD of yours. Which one was it? DVD? Yeah. Not VHS? No. See, these young people. Young people these days, Hayden.

They don't understand. I don't remember. I feel like it was like Territories Wild. Oh, yeah. I remember that one. Yeah. So you said you used to. You still should be watching my DVDs.

Oh, I do still. It's not DVD form anymore. 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,

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out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet onxmaps.com slash meet welcome to the to the onx club y'all to that point man it's like super interesting how these like two groups of folks know you have like the folks that know you as you know the the the trapping how-to dude and then you have folks like me and chester who know you as like like a proto remy warren kind of like it like just the adventure bow hunter you know well i knew him as trapper too did you know you did oh you do more trapping than i do man you're better on the voice than me more well-rounded

yeah the uh would do you like identify like at this point as like you know a trapper who did this bow hunting thing in order to make uh like his content more available for people or do you find yourself identifying like a lot is like that bow hunter now well i mean i identify as both only because i guess i can. To me, the reality of it was when I was growing up as a kid, my parents allowed me a huge latitude. When I was 11 years old, I could go out at 3, 30, 4 o'clock in the morning and run my trap line by myself with a pair of hip waders down a river that might have been flooded out from rain or snow or whatever. And when I had homework, my mom would still let me skim my catch. You know, it wasn't the home, the school wasn't as important as what I was learning outdoors.

My parents gave me this latitude that eventually allowed me after high school to go to Michigan. You know, like I tell everybody, I bought my first Jeep CJ with Trap and Money. I bought my first property with Trap and Money. I built my first cabin with Trap and Money. I bought my first airplane with Trap and Money. That's what I was enjoying and doing. But my dad, when he raised me, he talked to me about always being the best. You've got to make your bed every morning. You've got to be the best that you can be at what you're doing. And when I switched, it was very difficult. I was at the top of my game as a trapper. But when I realized that I needed to do something to keep trapping around, then I was going to have a larger audience if I could get on TV and tell people about it. Even though I couldn't do a trapping show, I could do a bow hunting show

and I could promote that way for trapping and for the industry as well as for wildlife and conservation. And so that's what I did. And I did it the best I could. You never felt like you were slumming it as a bow hunter? Absolutely not because I ran with the adventure thing. You know, it's like what I always say to everybody. It's like I want to go hunt, go somewhere I've never been and hunt an animal I've never seen, you know, except I don't want to hunt that crazy antelope you're talking about. Get your Saigon horns at topbranded.com. But, yeah, so that's the, But yeah, so that's what I did.

And so that's how the Super Slam all came about because I just started one animal at a time. Of course, Chuck Adams, the first bow hunter to take the 27 at the time, North American Big Game Animals, was a guest on my show, TV show on ESPN, for a couple of years. He had a sponsor that also sponsored my show. So he would come on the show. He would come on the show and he did tips on the show. And I got to know him. And I can remember interviewing him and talking with him about some of his hunts. And I was like, I'll never do a grizzly bear.

Dude, I grew up reading Chuck Adams articles, man. Yeah, absolutely. But one thing led to another. And every year you've got a quota of shows you've got to do. And every year you'd get one, two, three more species. And there was just a point in time when I started looking back and thinking, wow, I've got 12. At the time when I started, there was only 20.

To actually go for the slam, there was still only 27, and then there was 28, and then eventually 29. Yeah, what did they add? Caribou? They added the Central Canadian Bear Ground Caribou first, and I'd be guessing at the date, but I think it was, it might have been in the late 90s. So that might have been 28 when I started. But then the last one was the Thule elk.

I think that was 2008 when they added that one. Do you see them adding any more anytime soon, or do you think it's 29 pretty soon? Well, they're dropping off, unfortunately, because, like, you can't hunt the Quebec Labrador caribou, which is one of the five caribou subspecies right now. Just because their numbers are so down. Yeah. And I know caribou are cyclic by nature, but, you know, I can remember hunting in Alaska for the, the barren ground caribou and, and, and hunting the Mulchatna herd. There's 400,000 animals in the Mulchatna herd, you know, there's probably not even 10,000 animals in the Mulchatna herd now. I mean, it basically disappeared. So, I mean, these caribou are cyclic creatures.

You know, and one of the things I would add to what we were talking about, about the Cites and the Sagahorns and all that is, you know, I think a really good article would be about the political side of Cites. Because the reality is there's a lot of political influence. If you know, there's a lot of people that are pseudoscientists or biologists that have more political motives about what animals are hunted and what animals aren't, and maybe they have a political motive that maybe no animals should be hunted. Take the polar bear, for example, in North America.

They're on the threatened list of CITES, so we cannot import polar bears into the United States. But we can hunt polar bears. You can go to Canada and hunt polar bears, but you can't import them into the United States. What that does— Yeah, can't you hunt them in the— Canada, yeah. In the— The Arctic?

The Inuit—what's that called? Nunavut? Nunavut, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They kind of have their own autonomous zone and they run wildlife regulations. You can hunt them anywhere in Canada or other countries that border that have polar bear populations, I think, except Alaska. But you can't import them into the U.S.

Well, the U.S. hunters are the most prolific hunters in traveling and hunting. And if you look at just the, they were put on put on the polar bears were put on the threatened list because of the supposedly global warming was thinning out the ice sheet and they were having less habitat because they hunt seals on the ice yeah yada yada but it's speculative exactly polar bear numbers are currently strong but it's speculative that they'll they'll crash exactly so there's somewhat of a political motive behind it. It's not science. And now there's taxidermy shops that have come out with imitation polar bear mounts, like a replica. So you can actually buy a replica polar bear mount.

So you can go to Canada, shoot a polar bear, and have a replica mount in your trophy room. Where do you leave the bear while you can't get it into the U.S.? Well, it can stay in Canada. So a lot of them get them tanned as rugs and give them to people, or a lot of them get them mounted anyway, and they put them in stores or places like that. And they're like, someday I'm going to come get my thing. I don't know if that will ever happen. That's a problem. I don't think you'll ever be able to bring them in.

If they were shot, the thing is, is like when I shot my polar bear, it was the last year before the thing went on, and I shot mine in 2007. With your bow, obviously. With my bow my boat yeah all my animals with the bow so um the the thing was is mine was one of the last ones back that i had so i had the real polar bear in my in my uh trophy room but you know it just suppresses the the amount of money that the inuit peoples can make i mean this polar bears it costs well the my polar bear hunt costs $27,500. It costs $6,000 for the flights to go. And then plus you're tipping your guide and you're spending money as you're there. I mean, these Inuit communities are totally dependent on the

Canadian government for money unless there's this influx of capital from these people that will come and hunt or fish or this and that. So, you know, they've lost a lot of income over the fact that, you know, you can't bring them back. A lot of guys don't hunt. It's easy to get a polar bear. I was on a four-year waiting list before I got to hunt mine. So there were people that wanted to go up there, but there still was limited amount of tags.

Got it. I think when you talk about the society saying, I mean, you bring up a valid point because you have these things like the Endangered Species Act, right, which I completely support and it's done a lot of tremendous work. CITES has done a lot of great work. It's like inspired by like an honest need. But I do find, and we report on it all the time, inevitably you have cases which in my mind weaken those structures because you have people who learn how to manipulate them politically um they want one thing and they talk about another thing and so like we've covered endlessly here is like grizzly bear delisting wolf delisting right

um it's you had species go on the endangered species act as threatened. They hit recovery, but people, some people just cannot stomach the idea that someone would go hunt them. So they don't want to debate whether they've recovered. They want to debate these like obscure, um, legal issues, right? With, and if you heard their private conversations, no doubt their private conversations are, I just don't want this.

I don't want anybody to hunt them. I don't care how many there are. And they'd be saying the same thing if there were a million of them. They're just never going to like, they're not going to give up that point. They're never going to say what they actually think. And they're always going to say something

that they don't think because it allows them to advance what they do and then it creates all then it creates people like me people like you who then um wind up feeling like a little bit like you're being sold a bill of goods and you become suspicious about the whole damn structure absolutely which is like i always try to prevent myself from falling into the trap of being coming like suspicious of esa suspicious suspicious of the act i think the act was a needed thing i don't like it when it gets manipulated absolutely you know and the thing is to me it's another prime example of what happens that people don't realize is the hiding

behind the science thing is like in africa for example i do a lot of hunting in africa i've been many times to Africa. There are groups and organizations that do scientific research, like on leopards, for example, which is very nocturnal and sneaky animal, not very rarely seen in the wild in the daylight. But they'll set up trail cameras in these areas that are flash cameras. And once a leopard's got a picture taken once with a flash camera, he's never going to walk by that camera ever, ever again. And so these people over the course of so many months will say, well, we only got, you know, there should be in this area 50 leopards, but we only have pictures of three. So the populations are really going down. Where in reality, these are

some of the places where I hunt and where we hunt leopards. And we know, we have pictures of hundreds of different leopards in the same area. But there's the science, the people, the hunters have an agenda. To them, we have an agenda. To these people, we have an agenda. We want to say there's more than enough to hunt. Where they want to say there's less than enough. So what is the real number? It's probably fair to say you both have a substantial bias.

Más o menos. less than enough so what is the real number it's probably fair to say you both have a substantial bias uh muscle manos come uh walk me through because like following your career is like following um to look at your the history of career it's like looking at the history of media you know particularly like a focus on outdoor media, but just like media in general. Eventually ESPN moves on, right? Because the ESPN we know today, which is intensively professional sports, right? Absolutely. So what happened to you then?

Like, how did you continue to always adapt and be one step ahead, you know? Well, when ESPN was purchased by the Walt Disney Company, they started to change their values and things. And they decided at a point in time, not that they were so much anti-hunting. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. I won't say either way. They decided to go back to a stick and ball network, which is what they were founded on originally. So, like you say, they went back to like a total sports network. And so, yeah, for the guys, I mean, I made it all the way to the very end. In fact, when they decided to break up and take the outdoors away,

I had signed a five-year contract and I still had two years left in my contract. So they couldn't actually get totally rid of the outdoors. And there were three or four of us that had longer term agreements with the network. And they didn't just buy you out? No, they let us run all the way to the end. And part of it, too, that demised the ESPN model was the fact that soccer became more and more and more popular. And at 7 o'clock in the morning in our country, it's 1 o'clock in the afternoon in London or over in Europe when the soccer games are going on. So they could make a lot more money on a soccer game because of the tennis shoes sales and the commercials and all the things they could do. So the soccer games would run in the mornings instead of the outdoor shows.

You ever try to watch that game? Negative. Holy shit, man. That's a hard game to watch on tv man except when they say they need to shrink that whole area way down and the other problem with watching it is how many hail marys they do like it'll just start getting interesting and one of them will kick the ball way the hell down the other end you don't have any idea who's gonna get it it's like oh man they don't it's just they just that's going to get it. It's like, come on, man. They don't.

It's like, oh, it's getting too exciting. You got to clear it. Viewers are paying attention. They just kick it way back down. Oh, my God. I played soccer, Steve. Those guys drive me nuts, man. It's great. If anyone who works for the most popular sport in the world wants to take

some tips from Steve Rinella, there you go. Hey, they do. Listen, I know. I can't think of specific examples. I know where they have changed rules to make a better viewing experience. Can anybody back me up on this? I can't think of them, but I've heard of it. That sports, like the NFL or whatever.

Football's made some changes. They've changed the rules to make it better to watch. They've changed the length for the extra kick and stuff like that. Yeah, so soccer, they should make a rule. You can't just hail Marriott down to the other end of the field right when things are getting interesting. Either that or tie one arm behind the back of the goalie. That would work. What's that?

Tie one arm behind the back of the goalie. Yeah, get some more points going on. That's right. Yeah, just a little side note. We'll leave that in, Phil. So when that collapsed, but like at the same time, I don't want to say collapse, but then like Outdoor Channel was like, right?

Like filled the void. Yeah. And at the time there was a network called Versus, you know, which eventually changed its name to, I don't even remember, NBC Sports, I think it was there. Oh, I didn't know that that's what Versus did. Yeah, yeah. Did you do anything there? Oh, yeah.

Well, what happened was is I had sponsors that had longer term agreements than my network agreement. Oh, that creates a pickle for you. Yeah, especially when, you know, we were doing, you know – well, ESPN that I was on was 120 million households. So it's like how do you replace those households with an outdoor channel? You don't. So I ended up doing a deal with Versus, which eventually became the NBC Sports Network, and the Sportsman Channel, what was just kind of fledgling. And I went to all my sponsors. That's where we started, the Sportsman Channel. what was just kind of fledgling. And I went to all my sponsors. That's where we started, the Sportsman Channel.

So that's what I did. And so I made a deal with Versus and a deal with the Sportsman's Channel, and I alternated shows. So basically I would do all my full run of shows before the season, and I would start with show 13 on one network and show one on the other network. And that's how I alternated through to air on two networks. Because, you know, that's almost taboo to have a show air on two networks at the same time. You know what I mean? Huh? That's how I did it. Really? Yeah. And you've been at, you've been distributing there for a long time. Yeah. Well,

I was, I was there, I was on versus, I think we're three years. And, and then I switched from sportsman to outdoor and now I'm just on outdoor. How many shows you make in a year? I'm down to eight right now. I'm the king of reruns on the network. I spend a lot of money producing my shows and places I go, you know, because I've done all the African big six with archery tackle. I mean, I collect species.

So I have over 170 some species right now with bow and arrow and all filmed. And so, yeah, so I, I'll go back a few years and pick up some of the older shows and maybe add a little bit more commentary to them and then just rerun them. And so the, so in first and second quarter, I'll, I'll rerun some of my older shows that are really cool. The better ones, the cream ones, and then I'll do the, do the shows for the, for the fall. Of those 170, how many are in your house? Over 100, you know, but I've quit mounting stuff today.

I don't mount everything anymore. Just because of the cost or what? Well, where are you going to put them? What are you going to do with them? You know, after you die, where are they going to go? Sell them on Katie's website. For a dollar each. Put them on Katie's wildlife store. No, it's not so much that. I dollar each yeah katie's wildlife store it's it's

not so much that i mean what i've been doing it's not that they're going to waste or anything what i've been doing is a lot of the i've become popular enough and known enough that a lot of the outfitters are the places that i go hunt um they would like to have them and so they'll take a picture of me with the animal like a hero shot and then they'll have it mounted and put it in their in their lodge and then on my picture next put a couple in the meteor office yeah there you go yeah it works out good yeah big fox especially the new one the new one you guys are gonna get right yeah you're gonna land a jet in there with my my rooftop shooting range i should keep quiet about that we're gonna cut that one out do you um when you're uh do you like try to think how to do you have a lot of the one so you have a hundred animals in your thing but do you have a lot that are that are tucked away

here and there that you can't bring back home for legal reasons no not really i mean probably in south america you know there's a lot of animals that you shoot down there that you just can't export no matter what. You know, like copy borrows, different types of species like that. Well, you can't bring a copy borrower home? No, no. Or like a white-lipped peccary.

Can you bring a paca home? A paca? No, I don't think so. Oh, really? Oh, I've hunted some of that stuff down there. We're working on that stuff right now for this spring. Yeah, we're going to go hunt uh oscillated turkeys yeah yeah i'll become a world slam holder good for you does that make you

jealous are you a world slam turkey holder i i have five of the six yeah are you gonna bow hunt no then i'm definitely not jealous i'm gonna become a shotgun world slam holder. Yeah, I want to bring home the tail fan. Oh, yeah. I mean, most people bring the whole damn thing home and get stuff. I just want the tail fan. Probably the spurs.

Probably just eat it right down there, probably. Yeah, eat it there. How's it looking? You looking into that, bringing that tail fan home? Tail fan's looking good. Some other complications with getting guns down there though well because you didn't get on it quick enough no oh no it's not definitely not it's not true it's the it's money it's expensive different than going to hunt coos deer in sonora

from what i'm finding out it's really hard to get information on it, Steve. Oh, so we just have to use their shotguns down there? Yeah, because it's just a different, anyways, it's a different area from where you guys go. Cuts back on the headaches just to use their shotguns. Absolutely. When's the last time you killed a big game critter with a gun? Ooh, that's a great question.

Thank you. I've shot, well, I've shot, I mean, I guess people wouldn't consider coyotes, um, you know, cause I did a lot of hunting for coyotes, but I used to host a show on ESPN called Cabela's Sportsman's Quest. And the first year that it aired in 1996, um, they wanted me that we had sponsors that wanted me to use a gun. And so I shot three species on that show. I think I thought I shot an elk, a mule deer, and a pronghorn with a rifle. Did you like it? And then the next, no, I told them I didn't want to do it anymore.

You just don't like it? Yeah, just, you know, it's not that I'm against gun hunting. I'm not. It was just not my wheelhouse, you know. I like the bow hunting. I like to be known as the bow hunter. And just it was too easy. I mean, you know, for lack of a better way of putting it, you know, it was too easy.

No, that's not offensive to me. That's a good thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to get kicked out before the thing's over with. Yeah, we still got to do the trivia episode. So you just like, it's just, you like that, like, up close, difficult, heart pounding kind of. I think bow hunting is a conscious decision to make the hunt harder than it needs to be. You know, at 200 yards, a guy can shoot, you know, or farther.

A lot of people have got these 1,200-yard shots. But, I mean, at 200 yards is when my stalk begins, you know. And I need, and I'm not the best, you know, I'm not a Randy Ulmer or someone who can shoot the whole out of a lifesaver at 100 yards, you know. Cameron Haynes, somebody like that, you know and i need and i'm not the best you know i'm not a randy almer or someone who can shoot the whole out of a lifesaver at 100 yards you know cameron hayne somebody like that you know i'm i'm uh i'm losing my eyesight as quick as you are from what i hear with all that with all that like that 29 with that 29 archery the super slam yeah what was your average shot distance if you had to guess 38 so you shoot a lot you just like you get in there yeah i don't like what's a long shot for you 80 is a long shot for me okay yeah and i and it's questionable where i might hit that's still a poke though man it's a poke yeah yeah yeah yeah and the the and those are shot you know when i

started doing more international hunting and more mountain hunting, you know, going after the sheep and goats and stuff like that, you've got to be able to make a longer shot or it's, you know, especially filming it. But, you know, I mean, the method to my madness was everything had to be on camera. I mean, that was the claim to fame for me. I mean, I'm the 17th archery super slammer. So I'm the 17th guy to complete the archery super slam with a bow and arrow, of course, if it's archery, but I'm the only guy to have all the kills on video. So I filmed all the hunts. And so my DVD set, the Venture Bowhunter Super Slam has all 29 arrow impacts on it. It's a three DVD set that has all the stories behind all the 29. I had to go- Where do people find that? You can get it on my website at tomranda.com, but I mean, it's sold at a lot of different stores. Cabela's sold it for 10 years. I don't think they carry it now,

but it's because it's an older video. I finished the Slam in 2011, and the DVD came out soon after that. What's that one called? It's called Adventure Bowhunter Super Slam, my quest for the Super Slam in North America. But it's all bundled together. It's all bundled together. Yeah, it's all three in one set. In fact, I also have Adventure Bowhunter Dark Continent, which is the African Slam, 34 species hunted,

including the African Big Six, which is elephant, hippo, rhino, Cape buffalo, lion, and leopard, plus all the other planes game. And then I have another one called World Hunts. It has 44 hunts on it, arrow impacts of a lot of different kinds of sheep and species and whatnot. I need two more animals to finish SCI's Conservation and Hunting Award. It's the highest achievement that you can get in bow hunting. What are you missing? Believe it or not, I turned in all my animals thinking that I was going to get it a year and a half, two years ago.

And the SCI came back to me and said, where's your introduced animals of North America category? And I'm like, introduced animals of North America? Are you kidding me? They go, you have to shoot 18 species in the U.S. that were introduced. And so I have two left to shoot. What are those? Like sea kadeer and hogs? There's a whole list that you can shoot.

There's two. I'm going to shoot. What are those? Like Sika deer and hogs? It could be any. There's a whole list that you can shoot. There's two. I'm going to shoot, I think the last two, I think I'm going to shoot a Scimitar Oryx and maybe a Saika deer. I think those would be two cool ones to have. Like the Maryland ones. Yeah. Yeah.

I got a few of those with a muzzleloader. There you go. There he goes cheating again. I missed them with my bow. So have you done like a, like Neil guy and yeah yeah yeah that's what i've been doing those kind of hunts and i got how many introduced big game animals do they say are in the u.s i think there's 40 some on their list but as a bow hunter i only have to take 18 so yeah cow man A lot of counting. Well, it's a lot of, yeah, it's a lot of ticking the boxes to do those things. I mean, the SCI award platform, when I finished my 29, the Super Slam, the North American ones, you wonder, well, what are you going to do now?

You know, what's the next on your agenda? And, you know, I had the SCI people, they called me and they said, we have four people that have completed the world hunting award ring with a bow. We think you could be number five if we can come and measure your trophy room. Now I was a life member of SCI, but I had never scored any of my animals. What do they mean measure the trophy room? They want to come in and count my species, see what I got, you know. So they came, two guys came from Tucson, spent two days in my trophy room on scaffolding,

measuring animals that I had, looking at photos. And we basically chronicled the animals I had. Then they went back to Tucson and called me a few weeks later and said, you need 36 species to finish the World Hunting Award ring. And that was my next goal. It's like, okay, I'm going to go for the World Hunting Award ring. And it took me, it took me three years, a little over three years to get it. In 2016, 2016 i got the world hunting award ring i'm the fifth guy to ever get it i have all my kills on video let's say you weren't there's nothing left to like there's no sort of like outside validation stuff left right there's no more lists or yeah everyone on the planet dies whatever um what would you want to hunt for then like like, like what, like, what do you like besides

the sort of like getting a certification of some sort, like what, what, what is fun to you or what's worthwhile to you? Well, I think once you've shot everything that you feel like you can, you know, that, that, that goal for me of, you know, going somewhere I've never been and hunting an animal I've never seen.

I think once I've completed that list, it's just going to go back to the basics. So I'd be whitetail hunting, you know, going somewhere I've never been and hunting an animal I've never seen. I think once I've completed that list, it's just going to go back to the basics. So it'd be whitetail hunting, you know, I mean, that's in everybody's backyard. It's something to do, you know, and it's fun. And whitetails are somewhat some of the harder animals to get. I mean, you can look at all the other species that are out there and a five and a half year old whitetail is not an easy customer you know i mean really even like from a global perspective it's good answer it's so true spencer likes that answer loves that is there any kind of archery small game thing that you're into

there hasn't been because there hasn't really been any platform for it you know like going out and shooting rabbits or something i mean guys do a lot of that kind of stuff for fun or, and there's a lot of different places. I mean, like if you go to New Zealand, for example, they have a list of about 20 different animals that you can hunt down there and they include a lot of the smaller stuff, possums and, you know, rabbits and stuff like that. But for me, I, it's, it's been a business for me. You know, I think that's one of the reasons that my kids never really got involved, even though I took them on trips. I always had cameramen with me. We were always producing.

We always had to get the kill shot. You know, I had to get the hunting shot on video. So it was more of a business for me. And so my hunting, especially my bow hunting, has never really been a sport that I took up and enjoyed and went out and hunted. It's always been a sport that I took up and enjoyed and went out and hunted. It's always been a business. It's something that I had, I had to go out and I had to make a show about it. So you don't do like, you don't, you don't just go hunting. No. Really? Isn't that crazy? But I, but I collect books, you know, a lot of people think that's, oh my gosh, this guy's a nerd, you know, but I, it's,

it's like hunting. Try to find some of these old pirate books in the castle in London. You know what I mean? So it's like hunting to find some of this stuff. And, you know, and it's another obsession, you know. I mean, hunting for me has been, bow hunting has been an obsession. You know, it's been an obsession to find a new species, find a new place to go get it. A lot of people, if there's any people that really complain about, you know, Tom ran to this and Tom Miranda, that it's the fact that I don't do a lot of self-guided stuff. You know, I don't do a lot of, um, of, you know, that type of hunting. And it's like, well, he can never

shoot anything if you didn't have a guide with him. I mean, I hear that all the time. Does that criticism sting at all or don't you care? Well, you know, it, it, it would, it stings for me because I'm a trapper, you know, and I know exactly how to do all of it. But when you're trying to make a show, how can I go to Oregon and hunt black tail deer thinking I know it all? I live in Florida. Do I know everything about blacktail? No. But when I'm doing a TV show about it, if I've got a good guide, a good outfitter who can talk to me, I can learn from him and my audience can learn from him. And so that's how my shows are set up. I travel to this new place. I'm going to hunt this black, Columbia blacktail deer. I'm going to learn all about them and video as many of them as I can and get one with a bow

on video. And that's the premise of my shows. And so that's the business side of it. And that's why the shows that's, and I spend a lot of time and effort putting those shows together so that when people will watch them again, I mean, look how many times Duck Dynasty reruns, you know? So a lot of my shows replay and my ratings stay great and the networks are happy. So and I enjoy doing it still, which is a good thing. I think, you know, I've made my money at the end of the day. If I decided I didn't want to do it anymore, I quit. Do you feel like you're removed from the experience because you feel like it's the business of it? It comes back to my father and what he taught me about work, you know?

It's the work ethic side of it. I enjoy it for the work ethic part of it, you know? You like to work. I like to work. I'm a workaholic for sure, 100%. And that's why I take on way too much, way more work than... That's why I edit my own show.

I mean, for heaven's sakes, I could turn it over to somebody else to do it. But I don't... They might do a better technical job than I would, but they won't tell a better story. And my, my job is to connect with the audience of the story. So that's why I do it myself. How the hell did you, um, uh, like why rare books? I got to realize you had some, you know, I got to know I was doing the outdoor adventure magazine show. I got to dive, do some shipwreck diving and some different things. I did a lot of different scuba divings and tri-mix and, you know, all these different types of diving.

And I got to dive some Spanish galleons and stuff like that. And so, like, I got, like, really interested in this stuff, like these old ships and cannons on the bottom of the reef. And so I started looking for books about treasure salvage and treasure hunting. And, like, you know, I live in Florida, you know, we've got the Treasure Coast and, you know, and pirates. You know, there's islands nearby where I live in Florida that were thought to have been, you know, homes to pirates. And so there was one thing that led to another. And eventually I did get more and more and more into the pirate books. And then I started finding out that there were old manuscripts and old books about pirates from way back. And so I started looking for some of those. And, um, when you find them and an old

book is super cool because you can smell, you can smell the dampness in the pages, you know, and you can see, you can see how, you know, just the, how the cover is and the, you know, the, the leather bindings of it. And it's just, they're so neat to have and to hold that history. And especially today where people are burning books and banning books and going to digital books and things, you know, these pieces of history, like I have a Sir Francis Drake book I bought. I paid quite a bit of money for it.

It's a one in five copy. It was just one that wasn't- One in five known copies of this book that I have. And it's, you know, the other four copies are in institutions, you know. And this one happened to be for sale at a castle in England that was wanting to sell. The owners were just going to sell all the books and it happened to be one that they had that I bought. So, you know, it's pretty cool. Do you read a lot of those old books?

You know, some of them are so valuable I don't so valuable, I hardly look at them a little bit. Let alone touch them and go through them. But no, I've read quite a few, and I've learned a lot of history. And the more people find out that I have these books, the more people that contact me about information that's in them or photos. A lot of these old pirate books and ship books, shipwrecks and, you know, voyages of discovery. They have a lot of really nice maps in them, old, old maps, you know, from the 15, 1600s. They have a lot of different things in them that other people want, you know, other TV shows want. So I can take them out and take photos and make copies of these things that they can use. So, and, um, a lot of times,

you know, I buy some, you know, there's some old codgers that have been out trying to find pirates and different things and their family will contact me and I'll buy their old manuscripts where they've been out looking for the pirate and digging and finding graves of pirates and stuff like that. So, I mean, I'm building some material to maybe someday have a really cool book about the whole era of it and about the collecting side of it. What's your most valuable book? And where is it located? Well, I have a first edition, Buccaneers of America.

It's in Dutch, and it was written in 1678. It's not nearly my oldest book, but it's very, very difficult copy and it's in an original binding. And so, yeah, it's, um, what's something like that worth? Yeah. It's, um, I, you know, I'll tell you, it's more than a couple of three polar bear huts. Let's just call it that. Do you read Dutch? No. No.

But, you know, part of being a, you know, that's part of the obsession part of me, you know. So I have to have the first edition in Spanish. I have to have the first edition in French. I have to first have the first edition in English. I heard you say mas o menos. Do you speak Spanish at all? Un poquito. He knows the basics. That's right.

You've also probably written your Master Trapper's book. It's probably the most exhaustive thing. To read? No. The most exhaustive thing on trapping in America that I know about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's from the mountain men to the modern day, like, long liner dudes.

Yeah. Yeah. Dude, I said, like, I love that thing. I said, like, when I'm going to bed at night, I'll lay there and put my new spectacles on. And I'll just start, like, I don't even read it front to back. I just skim through it and read all kinds of junk. Look for people I figure must be in there and there they are. Guys I grew up reading

and stuff. It's like it's a huge book called Master Trappers and it's profiles on eras. Hudson Bay Company. The Mountain Man era. But as you progress, it's profiles on justas hudson bay company the mountain man era but as you progress it's profiles on just like every notable trapper and then not every but many of the notable trappers all elements

of the business animal damage control government stuff interspersed with tom's like evolution school boy trapper professional trapper trapper, on into phasing out of that and into the hunting world. I mean, it's a really interesting book, man. Yeah, thanks. If I didn't know you were reading it at night in bed, I would have put a fold-out map in it for you. No, it's solid, man.

I think it's a phenomenal book. I became aware of it because some of the equipment I buy, I'll buy on Minnesota Trap Line products. We've talked a bunch about, like, the MB, you know, Minnesota brand traps and whatnot. You'd go on there. I had no idea that dude. Yeah. He's chronicled on there as well.

Yeah. Tim Kaven, yeah. That dude, his history as a trapper. Absolutely. And, like, wildland firefighter. chronicled on there as well yeah tim cavan yeah that dude his history as a trapper absolutely and like wildland firefighter but i had no idea that he was as like bound up in that whole thing you know the book was uh it was a labor of love i started it in 2014 um actually because the trapper predator caller magazine called me and they said uh would you consider writing a book uh about trapping a little bit of the trapping history for us? And I said, you know, that's a big thing. That's a lot of work.

I'm not sure that I want to do that. And they go, well, we would sell a bunch of them and we think you would be the guy to do it for us. Your name on it would really make a point for us. And anyway, so I agreed to do it. I did a contract with them. And then like a few months later, they said, no, you know, the trapping business is going down. We've decided that we don't want to do the project anymore. Well, I had started it and made the outlines and everything. That seriously happened. And they end eventually, eventually Trapper Predator Call Magazine was sold out and was bought by other people. So it was like there, I think there was more to it than just the trapping business going down.

But anyways, I shelved the idea until, oh gosh, 2020. And I get this call, this phone rings like eight o'clock at night. And I look at it and I don't recognize a number. And normally I don't take it, but I'm like, I don't know who this is. I'm going to take it. So I took the call and it was from some, I can't remember the man's name, but he was from the National Trappers Association. And he said, I'd like to talk to you about if you can come to the Trappers Convention this year, 2020 Trappers Convention, which was in July. Well, obviously, it was the COVID thing. There was all the COVID thing. Or maybe it was 2021. No, it was 2020 when COVID hit in March of 2020. So yeah, it was like in July was when the event was going to be, but it was eventually canceled.

But anyway, he says, I said, man, I haven't been to a trap convention in a long time, dah, dah, dah. And he's like, well, he goes, we voted you into the Hall of Fame, the Trappers Hall of Fame. Well, I hadn't set a trap since 1994, you know? And here I'm getting voted

into the Trappers Hall of Fame. It's like, well, what's up with that? And they go, well, it's just all the years of you promoting trapping through your TV shows and the fact that you were one of the first guys to do the videos and everything. So anyway, I hang up the phone room and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be in the Trappers Hall of Fame. This is great, which was just a huge honor to me. I mean, that's as good as it gets. And I thought, you know, I'm going to bring that book out. I'm going to bring that book out and look at my old notes of it from 2014. So I did, I brought that book out and I looked at it and I know, I'm going to bring that book out. I'm going to bring that book out and look at my old notes of it from 2014.

So I did. I brought that book out, and I looked at it, and I looked what I had going, and I thought, it's COVID. All my trips are canceled now. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. Did you have a team of people that you worked on it with? No, I did it totally by myself.

It was sitting in my trophy room. Seriously? Yeah. I seriously did that. You wrote all those profiles? Everything. Start to finish. Never hired anybody to help you?

Nope. Damn. Dude likes working. I do like working. You know, it was good. But the thing is, is the book is about, you know, there's history in the book. But it's really, the book is actually a tribute to all the people that I learned how to trap from, from the early, that gave me interest in trapping. I mean, there's, there's a part in there about Jeremiah

Johnson's movie, you know, the Jeremiah Johnson movie. I like that part. Yeah. There's parts in there. I think parts of it that people that touch all the trappers that, you know, that have the, because there is a romance to trapping. There's a little bit of a romance to it for people who have done it before to look back. And because trapping every morning is like Christmas, you don't know what you're going to catch. You know, was it going to be an empty trap? Are you going to have a silver fox in it? What are you going to get? So it's kind of an, the book is kind of a motivational book to take somebody who used to trap and to bring back all those memories. And it was a tribute to the guys I learned how to trap from or the books I bought, the books I read,

the people that influenced me. Oh, man, it's a nostalgic enterprise, man. There's a hundred ways. Tell people where to find you and how to find your book. And I don't know, that's a long list of ways to find you, but hit people with how to track you down on social media, how to find your adventure bow hunting book, Master Trappers, you know, how to track you down on social media how to find your adventure bow hunting book master trappers you know yeah how to delve in mostly if i'm on social media i have a i have

a small instagram thing i for some reason i'm not that good on the phone so i'd use a little laptop and on the laptop i do facebook and so my facebook adventureunter. You can find my page there. I have lots of videos on there. Or TomMiranda.com, which is where my store is. That's easy to find. TomMiranda.com. I have over 500 TV shows on my website that you can watch for free. And in my store, I have my books.

I have the Super Slam book I wrote in 2011 when I finished. People can find your books on Amazon too, right? Or is it too, right? I can't remember. Yeah, there's some. I've never seen them on Minnesota Trapline products. Yeah, you can get them from Tim Kaven at Minnesota Trapline products. And order them direct from you. Or direct from me at TomMiranda.com. And the Trapline book is there too. And I sign all the books that anybody that buys a book from me on my website, I sign for them. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So I'm almost into my third printing.

So I've sold two full printings of those trapper books. That's great. It's been really, really good. And lots of people have really sent me some long, heartfelt messages about how it really brought back the old days and the trapping to them. How cocky are you feeling about the trivia show we're going to record next? I don't know if I'm going to be that cocky about it, but I might have an answer or two up my sleeve. What do you think, Matt? I'm expecting a strong performance, Spencer. I have to. Our most well-traveled guest, our most accomplished bow hunting guest, I think that sets him up well.

I'm going to whoop him. He's seen a lot. We also recently upped our... Now, let me teach you something here, Steve. We have a big announcement coming up on the trivia episode that we will tell you about on the trivia episode.

Remember our conversation about overselling stuff? That's my job. A big announcement that Steve is not going to reveal right now. All right, ladies and gentlemen, Tom Miranda. Hey, thanks. Check the next. We're not done with Tom. We're going to do media to trivia, game on, suckers.

It'll serve up to you soon. And I'm expecting a dominating performance from Tom Random. I like it. Stay tuned. Thank you.