#237 Steven Rinella - Founder of MeatEater

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Steve Renella, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you.

It's a privilege.

Come on.

Like, I always watch your,

I consume tons of your, the shorts you pull from your episodes.

Oh, thank you.

I like them, yeah.

Thank you.

I like all the

warriors, man.

Like, hearing them tell stories is a kick.

Yeah.

Man, it's an honor to do it.

You know, I just, I just think it's really important to document the last war.

I mean, I was in part of both of them.

So I think it's just important to document that stuff, actually, how it happened, instead of listening to some fucking newshead on the media tell us about what happened who'd never been there, or maybe they did a photo shoot there at some point in time.

But yeah, I've been tracking you for

quite a while.

So it's pretty surreal to have you sitting in here.

Thank you for coming.

Appreciate it.

But,

all right.

Everybody starts off with an introduction.

So here we go.

Steve Vernella, an American outdoorsman, writer, and TV host known for ethical hunting, wildlife conservation, and field-to-table cooking.

Founder of Meat Eater Inc., producing top-tier content on hunting, fishing, and outdoor lifestyles across TV, podcasts, and digital media.

Host of the Meat Eater TV series on Netflix.

You run the Meat Eater podcast, America's number one outdoors podcast and a top 10 sports podcast.

Author of 10 books plus three audio books on hunting, survival, and nature, including hits like the American Buffalo, In Search of a Lost Icon, and the Meat Eater Fishing Game Cookbook, and You're a Husband and a Father.

And so

being out there a little bit, talking to your team, we were asking for funny stories, and they had mentioned something about

something about a hunt.

I believe it was in South America for monkeys.

Yeah.

What is that?

Well, I got to hear this.

Yeah, I had a number of real life-changing experiences hunting down in South America with indigenous South Americans.

Some people use the term Amor Indians.

I spent time with some guys that are from the Makushi tribe.

or Makushi and Wapashon tribes in Bolivia and then the Chimane.

Sorry, Makushi and Wabashon in Guyana and the Chimane in Bolivia.

And we were on a river trip traveling up a river with some Chimane guys

and

they had a shotgun,

which is kind of a common armament down there.

And it would be that,

like I was with these guys, another trip I was with, just to give you a sense of the ammunition and stuff they use down there is

I was with these guys in Guyana one time that they weren't supposed to have a gun, right?

They weren't allowed to have firearms, but they had a firearm and they had a 16-gauge shotgun and they had 12-gauge ammo.

And they would, I'm not kidding, dude, they would sit there.

So at night, they like to hunt at night.

And they would take that, they had a 16-gauge casing.

It's got the same primer.

So they would take that 12-gauge shell.

Someone would give them these 12-gauge shells and they would cut it open.

And they had a leaf.

They cut it open, poured the shot out in a leaf,

got the wad wad out,

poured the powder out in a leaf,

pushed that primer pin out,

put the primer into the 12 gauge,

put the powder in,

and then they used, like they had this kind of waxy paper they'd use for a wadding, put their shot in, then they had a candle.

Instead of crimping it, they'd cut the crimp off and they'd melt a candle in there and drip candle wax in there to seal the thing.

No way.

So they could go take their 16-gauge shotgun out hunting.

I remember one night these guys,

I would go out with them sometimes.

One night I was, I just, for whatever reason, I wasn't like invited to go.

I remember they made two of these shells and they're gone for quite a while in the dark.

And

I never found out what happened, but a while later, they come back, make one more shell, and then go back out again.

So

that was, but these, these,

to get back to the question about the monkey, these guys in, in Bolivia, they really like

monkeys.

The handful of different groups I hung out with, there's different opinions about eating monkey.

It's either taboo or not.

But these guys like red howler monkeys.

So I go out with them in the jungle and they had they had found a they knew about a tree that was fruiting.

They had been scouting around and found a fig tree or not a fig tree, maybe some kind of date.

I don't remember the fruit.

I'm sorry.

But we got under a tree and we're just waiting under a tree.

And pretty soon you can see a howler monkey up in the tree.

And he shoots up there with a shotgun and down comes not only a howler monkey, but a howler monkey's baby.

And man, they

this guy comes back.

There's some stuff we like we filmed this off.

There's some stuff we didn't film or didn't

use the footage of, but they come back and they

kind of cook that monkey's head and eat it like an apple, walking around with it, kind of chewing the.

Are you serious?

Took all the intestines out in the river.

So they took all those monkey guts down and inverted all the intestines to clean them, to eat.

And

yeah, they just, and they cook everything to the nth degree.

So they smoke it, cook it, boil it.

Yeah, and sitting there eating that monkey meat.

And it was like, I can eat anything, man.

I'll eat anything.

But

eating monkey meat was, yeah, eating monkey meat was a was a tougher meal.

So they run around with a monkey head and eat it like

did you try that?

I didn't try the monkey.

I ate a lot of monkey meat, but I didn't try the monkey head.

I wasn't, I wasn't offered the monkey head.

You weren't, you weren't a bite at the moment.

No, but I remember just seeing it.

He had the little, the little monkey, and um,

yeah, just palm in it, you know.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

What about the skull?

No, just not like kind of like get like a picture that you're

picture that you're getting the skin off and the jowl meat and stuff, just kind of cleaning it up, you know, cleaning it up.

Yeah.

That's fucking crazy.

Yeah, it was, it was a wild experience.

And

the joke about that that I always tell people is

we run into a, they have, like our only marsupial here is an opossum.

They run into a,

we're out at night and we run into opossum and they just killed this monkey.

So we see opossum, which is not a esteemed food item here.

Once upon a time, it was.

Like people would even harvest them.

The commercial guys used to harvest them just for the fat, just for the shit.

Oh, yeah.

Didn't know that.

But we run into a possum.

I'm like, dude, if there's some Americans eat a possum, that possum's dead meat with these boys finding it.

You know, it was so funny.

There's this possum hanging on a tree and they can see it in the light.

And

I'm like, man, I feel bad for that possum.

And they're like, nah, just keep walking.

So it's like, monkeys, cool possums.

No one's going to eat that.

Damn, what's the craziest thing you've eaten?

I think that like eating monkey meat, and then

years ago, I did a story.

I went to, I was mentioning to you,

even though I promised not to do this, but I'm like, earlier, I was telling you, but earlier I mentioned having an opportunity.

We're talking about Vietnam vets, and I mentioned having an opportunity to go to Vietnam years ago.

I did a magazine story when I was doing magazine articles.

I did a magazine feature on

Thit Cho, which is like meat dog in Vietnam.

And it's

in the north of Vietnam around the lunar New Year.

So Tat.

Like, Tet is like an auspicious time to eat dog meat in the north.

And so I did a story about

I did a story about

that, like eating dog meat, the mythology of eating dog meat, the business of the business of dog meat in Vietnam,

how it's raised, how it's sourced, how it's served.

And went and ate for about a week and was never able to enjoy a bite of it, man.

It would give

a hot,

they would call it a hot food.

Like it was, it's a charged food.

They would call it hot,

meaning it's like a potent food.

But I would get hot, like hot flushes of guilt, dude.

Like I'd get like a sweaty guiltiness.

Damn.

Eating that dog.

And there's a common thing they would serve where you'd go into these places that would open.

It was funny because I was right on that lake where they where they fished McCain.

No kidding.

Oh yeah, you're sitting like that lake where McCain went down in.

And a guy in Vietnam mentioned, he was a guest of us once talking about McCain.

But it was that where he was, there's a street there that during the Tet holiday is all these sort of like, you'd almost put it like, it's almost like food trucks or like pop-up stores.

It's just all thit chill places that are open just for the tet holiday and you can go in and get

they'd serve like you go to that get dog five ways or dog three ways and it'd be like a prefix menu interesting of just different preps and um when i wrote that i published that story in outside magazine long long ago now and i remember it was the most they were they were saying that in terms of generating like vitriolic hate mail,

it was their number two.

I'll bet.

And the number one thing thing was at the time they said the number one thing was something they had written that was critical of the Boy Scouts.

So I was like, I was behind

in vitriolic hate mail.

But, you know,

that was a rugged bunch of meals.

And eating the monkey was

fine.

I would eat the monkey.

You know, I would do that again because it's such a pleasure to

hang out with guys.

You got to picture that.

you're with people that

their great-grandfather, their grandfather, their father, them,

they hunt and fish 250 days a year, maybe.

They spend some time doing these little

farm fields they cultivate up and down the river, but they hunt and fish.

I would ask a lot of guys, like, how many days, and they'd have to think about it.

They'd say, like, you know, two out of three days or whatever.

They hunt and fish.

Within a 50-mile radius, 75 mile radius for many many many generations I don't care how good you think you are in the woods

you can't compete yeah you can't um

you'll never catch them do you know I'm saying you can't catch them they're so good at like a specific set of things in a specific environment yeah I mean they they live in it and it's it's not pleasure or hobby, right?

It's survival.

It's just, you can't compete.

The stuff they see, you'll never see it.

The stuff they hear, you won't hear it.

Yeah.

Damn.

I bet you've seen a lot of that all over the world.

Yeah.

That, yeah, that.

So that meaning like if I can go and spend an evening or a day or whatever, go out at night with flashlights with guys that

know their business like that, like I'll do it anytime.

I don't care what I got to eat.

I bet you've learned a ton over the years, huh?

Yeah, yeah, I've learned a lot of it's not, a lot of stuff stuff you pick up, it's, it's not, it's not like you're learning tricks that you're going to integrate into your own program, but you're just, you're learning.

You know, um, you're, you're, you're, it's more like, it's more like building a,

building kind of like a database of information or an understanding rather than like picking up some little

thing though I did like I I have gone and I have gone and seen it's funny gone and seen people solve

seen how indigenous hunter-gatherers or hunter-gatherers, like see them,

like solve a problem that I have recognized in our own world.

Interesting.

We used to,

for a short period of time, I would sell snap and turtle meat

in Michigan.

And we would always get snapping turtles, you know, and I remember my dad would, how I was taught to do it and how I would do it later when I sold a little bit of snap and turtle meat is like you you cut snap turtle's head off.

And then

they have such like an ancient nervous system, you know, that they'll

for hours, I mean, for hours, like if you cut a turtle's head off and he's going to retract into his shell and for hours, you know, the expression like chicken with a head cut off, right?

Like, I'm always trying to explain that to my kids.

He's like, he's, he's dead, he don't know it.

But for hours, a turtle is

tensed up.

No kidding.

Oh, yeah.

So, like, I'd survive my old man would

cut his head off and go hang it by the tail, and then you'd pull, and eventually it would go limp.

And down in South America, I saw these guys, they got this big, they had set a net and they got this big

giant river turtle in it.

And

they

took a, they whittled a big long stick.

Have you ever heard of the fish processing technique called ikejime?

No.

So

it's you'll you'll, you'll catch a fish and brain it, and then they cut it by its tail and crack its tail.

So you're got you get an entry point into its spinal column, and they'll run a wire into it to just deaden the nervous system.

Well, these guys cut this big, long skewer,

and when they cut that turtle's head off, they ran that skewer into the

right into the backbone.

and

shoved that skewer down in that thing and that turtle just

no kidding i melted.

And then it cooked it right in its shell.

Wow.

And with something like that, I'm like, that's something I could wish I would have known about a long time ago.

Wow.

That's something I wish I would have known about a long time ago.

So there is stuff like that, but a lot of it's like, it's not transferable.

It's just cool to see it.

It's cool to witness it.

Just cool to understand how they do it.

Yeah, like as a writer, it's cool to know it.

Yeah.

You know, I'll write about that stuff.

How do you deal?

I mean, I could imagine that with the dog thing, you got a ton of

hate mail.

I mean, I could see that happening.

You know, I remember seeing some, but

surprisingly not.

Surprisingly not.

Yeah.

Well, surprise.

I've had a little bit of that from.

I'm always shocked at

how little of that I've got.

I've had to have the FBI look into a guy one time.

But they scared the hell out of him, you know, never heard from him again.

Good deal.

They went to his trash.

He was eating pepperoni peach.

He's not even a vegetarian, dude.

They're like, no, he ordered a pepperoni pizza.

Damn.

Dude, what a hypocrite.

I'm surprised you don't get more pushback.

I've had a couple of guys.

Actually, I had Bob Parsons on.

He was the CEO of GoDaddy and he had a

thing.

And

he had an incident.

But I mean, I don't think people realize

whatever, how good we have it, how sheltered we are here in America.

I mean, you go to the fucking grocery store and get everything you need, but you're talking about out in the jungles of Vietnam and Bolivia.

And it's like, dude, this isn't like pleasure or hobby for these people.

This is, this is,

this is their occupation and how they feed the villages.

Legitimate subsistence.

Yeah.

Legitimate subsistence.

On the issue of like hearing from, just to wrap that up, like on the issue of getting, being a hunter out in the public eye and getting harassed by animal rights extremists, it's like, there's nothing.

There's nothing they can take from me.

Yeah.

Do you know what I mean?

It's like what they do is what

a better target is someone that you can harm some aspect of their occupation.

Let's say you're an actor, you know, you're an actor and you're like a closeted hunter and actor, and there are some, because they're like, well, I'll be rejected in Hollywood if people know that I do this.

But

there's, you know,

there's no repercussion for me.

It's like, no shit, you know?

It's like, I'm not going to be like, damn it, I've been outed.

Yeah.

Well, hey, before we get into the interview here i got a couple things to crank out so

please first one being we got a patreon account we've turned it into quite the community they've been here for a long time a lot of them and um

so one of the things i do is uh i offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question so this is from justin larson justin okay

Stephen, given your expertise as a hunter, conservationalist, and advocate for ethical outdoor practices, do you believe that with the right advocate, we could implement mandatory hunter safety courses in schools to promote responsible gun handling and teach sustainable food harvesting from the land?

Mandatory.

I don't know, because like driver's ed isn't even mandatory.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

I like it.

It's nice to have it be available.

When I was a kid, we took it at school.

You would take it in the, you could go to the school and take it, but it was a weekend-long thing.

How long can people go on about this?

Because I'll try to be quick about the issue.

If there's been a trend in hunting regulation structure, A surprising trend is that

states have tended to over the years lower

barrier to entry.

When I was growing up in Michigan, you couldn't hunt at all until you took hunter safety.

You couldn't hunt with a firearm till you were 14.

Like we did not pay attention to that rule.

Like my dad was not interested in that rule.

You could be, you had to be 12 to hunt with a bow.

You couldn't hunt with a bow until you took hunter zed.

Now they leave it up to a family to decide when a kid can hunt.

And they make it that you can hunt for a number of years with a mentor who's within arm's reach

before you need to go and take your hunters ed.

I generally support, not generally, I support that, that, that deregulation

there to make it easier for people to participate out in the woods with their little kids.

I live in the state of Montana.

I think Montana's got it just about right.

A 10-year-old can hunt with their parent or a person designated to mentor them.

They can start at 10.

They can hunt two years, and then they're obligated to take hunter safety.

Gotcha.

So you can, so when my kids turn 10,

I hunt with them.

I'm their mentor.

They're right here with me.

Like they don't do, unless I say do it, they don't do it.

They're right there.

But we can do two years.

They can get hooked or not.

and then go down the path of doing the hunter safety.

And it's, it's like, it's, it's a great program.

It was too strict.

It was too strict and too big, brother, I felt when I was a kid.

So I like these, I like these moves to leave it up to a family to figure out when it's appropriate for their kid to get rolling.

Yeah, that sounds good.

That sounds, I mean, is that, is that when you started your kids?

Is that 10?

Yeah, well, I would bring them out with me and they could hunt pine squirrels and whatever else, but they, their first,

so my 10, I got a boy turning 10 now.

In a couple weekends, we have our, in our state, we have our youth waterfowl season.

So that'll be, well, no, because he was able to hunt turkeys in the spring.

This will be his first duck hunt coming up.

Oh, right on.

So we have a two-day youth waterfowl season.

It'll be his first duck hunt.

We have a youth deer season.

It'll be his first deer hunt.

That's what I did with my other two kids, too.

Cool.

And they all love it.

Yeah.

And it's nice to be able to get them going and not have to jump through all these legal hurdles.

to take them out and set them right next to you.

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Man, I'll bet your kids are dying to get out there with you.

Yeah,

I've been lucky in that way, man.

I've been lucky in that way.

I remember having kids and someone's standing like, what if your kids don't like to hunt as much as you do?

And I'm like, not many people do.

But I've been lucky because they dig it, you know,

It's fun.

I don't know that they always will, but they'll always carry it with them.

You know, they'll always carry, like, I like them to be a little bit,

you know, it's good that they're a little bit gritty.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I like them to have that.

Even if my daughter, whatever, she grows up and doesn't go near it, she'll carry some things from those experiences with her, you know?

Yeah, that's cool.

I think kids, they definitely need more grit.

It's,

I think it's, at least from my perspective, it's very apparent.

Yeah, no, I love it.

Yeah, I like it.

The thing I always tell people, like, if I, if I, like a measure of sort of a way, this kind of like very arbitrary individual way of kind of measuring like where your kids are at, like, if I hold, if I got something in my hand, you know, and I hold it out,

like, my kid would be like,

they don't, they don't go like, what is it?

Do you know, or if I'm like, no, try to eat that, eat that, take a bite of that, and eat that.

They'll be like, okay.

Damn.

And I just, like, I like deliberately tried to get that feeling on them.

Like, if I hold, if I got a snake, I'm like, no, he's cool.

He won't get you.

They're going to take it.

Wow.

You know, or whatever.

If they see something, like, they see a mouse run along, like, their instinct is to grab it.

Nice.

Is hunting onto the decline?

Man,

depends on how you depends on how and when you measure it.

So

it's remained remarkably in

not percentage, but this is this kind of a weird deal.

Not in percentage, but in actual numbers, it's remained remarkably consistent.

Oh, really?

Well, since the end of World War II, like World War II kind of gave us the modern day

outdoorsmen.

And my dad was a product of that.

Like my dad came home from the war.

There was even an editor at an outdoor magazine at the time that made some comment that like, how can you train an entire generation of men to shoot and camp?

and not expect them to hunt.

And my dad grew up, he was raised by Italian immigrants.

He was raised by his grandparents, south side of Chicago.

Came home from the war and got into it, man.

Like started bow hunting in the 50s, started, you know, deer hunting.

He just got into it.

He wanted to be outside.

He said everybody was stir crazy.

No one to be held tight.

He told me stories of like being lined up hunting rabbits and someone had shoot and everybody hit the ground.

Wow.

It was like that fresh, you know, but he was just, that's just what he wanted to do.

And that kind of gave us, there was other things that were happening culturally as you had, people had automobiles.

So people that would live in urban, suburban areas had a way to get somewhere.

Freezers were becoming a thing.

So you got a way, like if you killed a deer, like picture.

And normally, like if you killed a deer, you know, you had to either be really good, knew how to dry it into jerky and want to eat that.

But with the freezer came this idea that you could go and hunt geese.

ducks, deer, whatever, and bring it home and freeze it and then have, and then be able to periodically throughout the year eat fresh food.

And so it birthed the American outdoorsman.

And since those post-war years,

the number of hunters has remained remarkably static.

But obviously it's declined hugely in terms of, I mean, our population, you know, doubled, tripled, quadrupled or whatever the hell since then, I'm not sure,

has to have tripled.

So the percentages have dropped.

You look in California.

So California, New Jersey, it's less than 1%.

Are you serious?

Less than 1% of the population.

New Jersey doesn't surprise me.

California

population buys a hunting license.

Fishing participation is different.

But just speaking about hunting, other states are pretty robust.

There was a huge spike during COVID, you know.

Behaviors change.

So

hunters are kind of hard to count, right?

Like, like if I go and, if I go and buy a license in, if I buy a license in my home state of Montana, and we have a little fish shack in Alaska, if I buy a a license in Alaska, I just got counted twice.

I'm on the list in two places.

The one thing that's really easy to count is if you want to hunt migratory waterfowl, you have to buy a federal duck stamp.

People could go buy that duck stamp for no reason.

They're just collectors or whatever.

But by and large, you can look at like how many federal duck stamps were sold.

How many guys hunted ducks because they have to buy this federal stamp.

And, you know, they'll sell a million of those stamps.

Meanwhile,

13, 14 million people will hunt deer.

Deer's the most hunted thing.

Morning doves are the most harvested

animal.

Yeah, I was having a, I'm not a big hunter, but when I took my first deer last season, it was a little guy.

I was excited, but he was like, don't ever post that.

I don't know.

Is there a male or a female?

It was a male.

Out of the antlers?

Yeah.

Dude, come on.

They were little he was like don't post it that's i was like why not it's my first one i wanted to discourage your friend but he's giving you bad advice dude but um if you like if you were happy i was ecstatic dude you know i was like come on i thought it was awesome but anyways we were having a conversation and he was like yeah he's like hunting is uh hunting's on the decline ever since and you know this could be hearsay i don't know but he was like ever since you know smartphones came out he's like it's getting harder and harder and harder to get kids out into the the wild and he's like and now we're seeing this overabundance of deer and all this other game and i was like oh shit makes makes sense i was just curious what your thoughts were yeah it's it's you know like suburban deer and stuff i mean it's a very complex issue it's not just a lack of people willing to hunt them like anyone out there if you got a bunch of deer You got you have 10 acres, 20 acres, 100 acres, and you got a bunch of deer bugging you, and you put a sign up says, hunters, please inquire, the day's not going to be through and you're going to have someone banging on your door there are like you don't meet you don't meet hunters

who will tell you like i can't even scratch the surface of all the properties i got to hunt they're dying to hunt yeah or dying to hunt the the suburban deer problem is is is self-made it's not because there's no interest

It's because people are, people are intolerant.

They don't want like hillbillies and rednecks

running around their place.

Yeah.

That's what that's what that's about.

Gotcha.

And for some people and some and for some people in some suburban areas, they would rather they would rather entertain ideas such as like providing contraception to deer,

hiring taxpayer-funded sharpshooters to shoot deer.

They would rather do all that

than let some hillbilly on their place.

No shit.

That is the suburban area.

Contraceptives?

That is the deer point.

What the what is what?

what?

They can treat them with contraceptives.

Really?

Yes, try to, yeah.

They somehow like, they do it with wild horses.

Are you familiar with the whole wild horse problem?

No, I didn't know there was a problem.

There's like a, you know, the wild horse and burrow

in the arid west, there's these feral populations of wild horses.

And for a while, they were, you could commodity, you could commodify them.

And so they passed this thing called the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act, which is a huge mistake.

And now we have like, now we lose all kinds of wildlife habitat.

We lose desert bighorn habitat, mule deer habitat to competition with feral horses, just like horses running around.

They're not a native animal.

And so there's even legislation up right now to like up the amount of contraception, darting mares

with contraceptives

to try to slow the population.

This is something they're always toying with with deer.

It's more palatable than some dude killing it and eating it.

Wow.

It's just, it's lunacy.

So like the suburban deer problem, I'm like, it's a problem because we've decided to let it be a problem.

It would very quickly not be a problem.

Have you heard about this

shit?

I can't remember his name, this guy in Hawaii.

I guess there's all these deer that are just like...

Axis.

Yeah.

Axis deer.

They're just like taking over

everything.

Yeah.

And I think he shoots them on nods and.

It's

take as many as you can get.

Have you done anything like that?

I've hunted Axis deer in Hawaii long ago, but I haven't done any of the sort of like eradication stuff that they got going on.

Okay.

No.

Yeah, we were thinking about bringing him on, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

But anyways, yeah, so a couple more things.

Everybody gets a gift.

Okay.

So

Vigilance Elite gummy bears legal in all 50 states.

Oh, legal in all 50 states?

That was my first question.

There's no funny business in there.

It's not a vice.

oh okay but uh but they're made up i would have found a home for them made it made up in michigan and then i got you got you something else that's great i appreciate that

that is are you familiar with the uscc no i'm not okay should i be are you a concealed weapons guy well i have open i live in an open carry state but the other day i was doing an ffl transfer on a pistol and she suggested to me that i should get concealed even though i don't need it because then i don't need to do ffl transfer oh really no That's cool.

My old man had a, in Michigan, my old man had his concealed, but yeah, we're open carry.

So basically what USCCA does is they are, it's kind of like a, um,

so if you have to act in self-defense, you know, it's going to be an entire

disaster of a legal process.

Yeah.

And so what they do is they provide you the attorneys and

all of that stuff.

So it's, it's an insurance policy for concealed carriers in case, you know, in case something goes

goes bad or you have to defend yourself or your family.

And so they'll jump in.

They'll provide you with the attorneys if you want them.

They'll provide you with all the advice.

And they cover all of the all the legal fees up to a certain amount.

I can't remember what it is.

Yeah, well,

I'll eat some gummies and I'll read up.

Right on.

Right on.

So that's a lifelong membership.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Oh, sweet, dude.

Thank you.

Appreciate it, man.

All right.

So I love doing life stories.

Where'd you grow up?

Where'd I grew up?

I grew up in western Michigan, Muskegon County, Michigan, pretty close, about eight miles from Lake Michigan.

How into hunting were you?

Sorry?

Did you grow up hunting?

Oh, yeah.

My dad was a big hunter.

We were brought up in it.

We did a lot of normal stuff everybody does, you know.

But I grew up on a lake and had a lot of fishing and hunting opportunities around.

My dad had been,

like I said earlier, he was a big hunter.

He was into archery hunting very early.

You know, there was sort of like,

obviously, people used to archery hunt before the advent of, you know, before the introduction of the firearm.

And then archery hunting took a long vacation.

And then started, you know, people started toying with bows again in the 20s and 30s.

And

my dad was bow hunting even before some states were even having archery seasons.

So I was brought up around archery hunting.

We hunted ducks.

We hunted squirrels.

We'd hunt mostly within probably, definitely most of our, the vast majority of our hunting was within 10 mile, 10 mile radius.

We had a lake, and so I grew up fishing in the lake, grew up trapping muskrats, got real into fur trap when I was a kid.

But yeah, it was just totally immersed.

It was never like a thing that you, I, it was never a thing you decided to do.

It was just around.

It was,

I, to kind of give you a sense of like what that, what the community was like or how it was perceived, is I remember

I would wake up.

I remember waking up in the morning and hoping to look out my window in the dark, hoping to see that was raining and blowing so that we didn't have to go hunting.

And I remember feeling real guilty for feeling that way.

I feel like, oh, I hope it's real windy, so I don't got to get up.

I'm like, man, I shouldn't feel that way.

That's terrible.

Yeah, it was, it was just, it was just baked in, man.

It was baked in.

Everybody around there hunted.

I got a friend who's an outdoor rider, Pat Dirk, and he was talking about Wisconsin.

right across the lake from us, you know, very similar.

And he said, if you're not a, in this community, he said, if you're not a deer hunter, you sleep with one and um it was just

it was just a thing people just did it you know people did it everybody did it not the women what'd you like doing more fishing or hunting hunting

would you like more firearms or archery firearms really yeah why do you like firearms i like them i don't know i hunt bow when it's bow season

The real serious archers, like the way you measure a real serious archer is a real serious archer is bow hunting during gun season, right?

I bow hunt as a way to extend my hunting opportunities.

Gotcha.

A real archer,

like a real bow hunter, even when they could use a firearm, they're like, nope.

Like when I see that, I'm like, that's a bow hunter, dude.

Right on, man.

You know, and I'm like, I'm like, I use it to extend my seasons.

Right on.

Yeah.

I bow hunt when I can, but the minute I can grab my gun, I grab my gun.

Is it that much more challenging?

It's just different, man.

It's,

It's too hard to say.

Okay, I would say this.

If you're bow hunting during firearm season, hell yeah,

way more challenging.

But there's some great archery opportunities where, and no one is able to be out with a gun.

So then, um, I can't say it's more challenging because it's like giving you an opportunity and a behavior set and wildlife that you're not going to see during firearm season.

Like, deer, no.

Let's just take something like white-tailed deer, like, which are are they're all over here they're all over everywhere people hunt white-tailed deer in 40 some states um

they know

like when general firearm season opens they know the day before firearm season opens like unusual activity whatever and they go into lockdown mode um oftentimes right in high pressure areas so their habits just change So if you're hunting them a week before that with a bow, I can't tell you that it's more challenging because you're hunting deer that are acting more like deer, right?

They're out and about.

but if you were to if you were a purist

you're a purist and you're like even when gun opens

i'm out with my bow and i got plenty of friends that do it yeah way more challenging i mean the difference between i see a deer at you know i i catch a deer crossing something at 200 yards and it's just like he's mine for him it's got to be 35 40.

It's got to be that close.

Well, I mean, depends.

I got one very serious bow hunter, buddy.

I was having this conversation the other day, day like lifelong bow hunter the kind of guy that's going to hunt with a bow even during gun season and instead of his range going out out out like the better the gear gets everything he was telling me just the other night a guy named a white tail hunter named mark kenyon was telling me he's like

from now on i don't know how true he'll stay he says from now on i don't shoot more than 30 yards why

too much margin for error They got too much time to react.

You know, they got too much time to react.

They're already doing something.

Makes sense.

And the time it from that, the minute that, like, that bow makes a noise,

he's already responding.

Gotcha.

And you'll see people, there's a term people use called jumping this, like jumping the string or ducking the arrow, where if you look in slow motion, there's an arrow coming toward a deer and it looks like he, it looks like he ducked it

because he like scrunches and the arrows over his back.

What he's actually doing is he's loading up to spring.

so he hears it they're so fast you can't even comprehend how fast they are they're so fast he's already down

loading up to

take off and so that's why it gets really tricky at certain distance especially with fast animals like elk aren't nearly as fast but a white-tailed deer you know who's most famous i've never killed one with a bow but the most famous string jumping

thing is the axis deer.

No kidding.

That's that's that's what very like credentialed friends of mine have said.

That Axis deer,

you know, they'll point out maybe this is a thing that had in its native range coexisted with tigers, right?

They're like,

you think about releasing that string and that deer is already loading up, you know?

So that's their reputation, is their

way ahead.

You can't comprehend time.

But think about like, you picture that there's a fly sitting here, you know, and you're like, bam,

and he's already gone.

You think you're going fast in the fly's head?

You're going like this.

How he perceives time?

Yeah.

He's like, yeah, I should probably get out of the way of that thing.

At some point, I should probably move.

Have you,

I got it.

I'm sorry.

I just got a bunch of random questions.

Oh, no, please.

But have you ever done, we're going into fishing.

Have you ever done anything in Brazil?

or maybe Peru on the Amazon?

Have you ever done an Amazon fishing?

I fished in the extreme headwaters of the Amazon and Bolivia and stuff that eventually flows into the Amazon.

Yeah, but it would be like

headwater tributary stuff.

Yeah.

But never the Amazon proper.

Okay.

And I fished over a drainage divide into rivers that would like on ridge lines that would one side would go to the Amazon, but the other side flows into the Caribbean.

I've fished that stuff.

But never, I've never been like on an Amazon river trip, though I would like to.

Man, I've been dying to do that.

For peacock bass and stuff.

Yeah, for whatever.

Arapaima.

Yep.

Have you got one of those i've seen i've laid eyes on aropaima and when i was talking about those guys in guyana that like they used to bow hunt arapaima for the commercial markets and i've caught arowana which is like a small

much much smaller version of aroma much much smaller version of arapaima and i've observed ara paima but i've never even taken a cast at arapaima man that's cool i would love to do that yeah no i've never done it but it's it'd be sweet you know you see those pictures of them.

I think, what is the largest freshwater scaled fish?

That's the rumor.

That seems like you're adding a lot of like

things

because it can't be the largest fish, which is the whale shark.

So you got to be like the largest freshwater scaled fish.

Because in the Mekong Delta, there's a catfish that's bigger than the Aropaima.

No shit.

Have you gotten any of those?

No.

I've caught some big-ass weird catfish, but not that kind of catfish, no.

Right on, man.

Yeah, that's something I would love to do.

I would love to get into hunting, too.

It's just, yeah, fuck, you know, business gets in the way of just about everything.

Yeah.

You got little kids, though, now.

Well, yeah,

I'm warming my son up to fishing.

We've been at it for almost a year now.

He's come a long ways.

Now he's casting.

He can do pretty much everything but put the worm on the hook and take the fish up.

He's just

poking their eyes and shit.

It's hilarious.

I had such a good time the other day.

I was with my little daughter, and we went out and

shouldn't call her little anymore.

She's 12, but I took her out.

We caught grasshoppers.

I have this little grasshopper container that once belonged to my dad and we caught grasshoppers and put them in there and then went down to the creek.

And this is an area we're not allowed to kill cutthroats, but we pinched the barb and would hook grasshoppers and just send them downriver.

Nice.

Watch those fish come up and grab them.

It was fun, man.

Like I said, she'll carry that stuff with her, you know?

That's cool, man.

That's cool.

Well, actually, one more.

Where is your favorite place to hunt?

I mean, I like hunting all over place.

I really have a lot of,

I've had a lot of fun opportunities to hunt up in Alaska.

I have a brother that has been there for a long time.

And so when he moved up, I started hanging out up there as well.

I really enjoy being out in Alaska.

Between different kind of things I'll do, I spend maybe a month every year up doing different stuff there.

We have a little fish shack in Alaska that I bought 20 years ago with some, with

two of my siblings and a buddy of ours.

We just bought it on a whim at 20 grand a piece.

Nice.

Smartest thing I ever did.

Nice.

And we fish up there and do some hunting up there.

So yeah, I like that.

Not to, I mean, I love where I live.

I live in Montana.

We have a great time there, but I really appreciate

all my

some of my best experiences are up are up in the far north, yeah, up in Alaska.

Yeah, it's beautiful up there.

Do you do you like the adventure of getting into new ecosystems, new environments, to hunt?

Yeah, I'll bet.

I just spent a month in

after toying with the idea and toying with it and toying with it for decades.

I spent a month in Africa this year.

How was it?

Just life-changing.

Life-changing.

Went to Tanzania.

I met these dudes,

this guy,

a professional hunter named Morgan Potter.

He works for this place, Robin Hurt Safaris.

And I met

Roger Hurt,

a kid of the founder.

You know, he got tore up by a Cape Buffalo.

So he had come to the U.S.

for some medical care.

And

this other professional hunter married a woman.

Morgan Potter married a woman and they live.

So even though he spends half his year in Tanzania, he spends half his year by me.

And so we just got to hanging out.

And I had him come on my podcast, just talk about their life and the kind of hunting they do.

And once I knew, once I had some people I really trusted to go,

I went and it changed, I mean, like life-changing experience.

I kept telling people I was there so long I had to cut my fingernails twice.

It was, it was, it was, dude, it was just,

I mean, utterly life-changing.

Yeah, just the stuff I saw, other ways to live, you know,

I was blown away, man.

I'll be talking about that the rest of my life.

Do you, I mean, when you go on these remote trips like this, are you embedded with Indigenous people?

You get to see how they live, what they eat.

Yeah.

You got to hang out with the trackers, you know, and the way these guys,

the way these guys work because we were out.

Just to give you a sense, I mean, obviously, I mean, you know, you've been all over the world.

I mean, it's a huge continent, right?

Like, it's

the different ways that not only the different ways people live, the different climates and all that, there's very different ways in which wildlife is managed in Africa.

Tanzania has a very progressive view on wildlife management.

We were on an area

that's, we were on a hunting area that's the size of Yellowstone National Park.

It's a 2 million acre dam game concession.

There are human activities occurring.

It's not a peopleless environment.

Like there's guys that have permits to commercially fish there.

There's guys that do commercial honey harvest in there.

But it's like the government has said that this 2 million acres doesn't get developed and they make money off it.

They're able to make money off it by allowing hunting to occur on the place.

And so we're out in this like 2 million acre thing.

We're the only people around.

We would some days do 100 miles.

You know, wow, 100 miles in pickups

on just trails these guys hack out through the woods, you know, and you see just crazy stuff.

But yeah, there's guys out on the landscape, you know, you'd run into the honey season was just finishing up.

So there's guys out doing honey.

But we were with trackers

in this part of Tanzania

in eastern Tanzania.

I was spent some time in Maasai land, which is the Maasai tribe, where we were was like Bantu peoples.

But we were with trackers that the trackers they use are by and large large poachers that they caught.

So they'll catch poachers.

And if they're young and ambitious and good, they'll be like, listen, you know, you should come see us.

So the two trackers that I was hanging out with were both people that were brought up as poachers.

They were in the bushmeat trade.

snaring and hunting with homemade guns and poison arrows

in order to sell bushmeat.

And these dudes are now trackers and um

yeah it's it's unbelievable i said to our guy one time the professional hunter who in some ways in some ways acts as a liaison between you and the trackers you know like they

the trackers hold a lot of carry a lot of weight like their opinion matters immensely right and you're there you don't know And the professional hunter is kind of like, he's the, he's meant to be like, he understands you, like the white dude, and what you're hoping to accomplish and he understands the trackers and what they know and he's aligning he's aligning everyone's interests and he's also in charge you know i mean like he's there to keep you from getting killed um

but at one point we're going along and i would now and then make the i would now and then be like you have to explain like when they're looking at the ground i'm like come on like what are they what are they seeing And when I would do it, they would be like, okay, if you really need to know, one went, one walked, one Cape Buffalo walked right there.

One walked right there.

One walked right there.

One walked right there.

If you look at that piece of grass, you see how it stepped on it.

Look how it looks now.

That shit has about an eighth of an inch of dryness on it.

It wasn't, it wasn't laying there yesterday.

It wasn't laying there that night.

It was laying there this morning.

And they're probably bedded down over that way.

Wow.

And you're like, hey.

But at one point, I said to this guy, I've told people this a bunch of times.

I said to the tracker.

or to the to Morgan, the professional hunter, I said, man, I don't see what they're seeing.

You know, we're going through a burned area and we're trailing something.

I'm like, I don't, I don't see it.

Like, I was incredulous.

And he turned to me and he said, He said, Um, that's the point.

You can't see what they see.

And he's gotten to the point where he's totally fine with that.

No, kidding.

He just, he's like, He's fine with it.

If they say it's there, he's like, Okay,

right on, man.

If they say it's there, it's there.

When they say it's not there anymore, it's not there anymore.

I think that stuff's fascinating, man.

Just a, just a, I mean,

yeah, I've been all over the world hunting different stuff

but

but through my career but just seeing like

it sounds weird but man like I love being in third world countries and seeing you know how people live and survive and what they like to do and all that stuff

and

And it's just fascinating to me to

see how they live in Haiti or Yemen or Afghanistan, Iraq, all South America.

I mean, it's just, it's just fascinating to me.

And it also gives you an appreciation for how fucking easy it is here in the U.S.

You have the added thing in your life, though.

You've seen a lot of places where it's like there's poverty, but it's overlaid with conflict.

I've seen poverty, but I haven't seen it overlaid with conflict.

Yeah.

And so that's a, that's a,

what you're seeing is a very different version of poverty than

peaceful

peaceful poverty is one thing, but

wartime poverty is different.

And I've seen peaceful poverty too.

South America was all on my own accord.

And, you know, you know what's interesting is how, at least from my perspective, not necessarily in

where conflict is, but to see how happy people are, especially in South America, living in a grass hut.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Or a mud-walled hut.

And it's, it's like,

dude, they're just happy people.

You know, you go around America, it's everybody's bitching about

who knows what, politics, usually politics, but you know what I mean?

It's, it's, it's, it's, we have so much here, and yet we are so pissed at each other and so tribalized.

And it's, it's, it's, and then you go down there and it's

They're just, they're not even making ends meet.

And they have such a positive attitude.

I think that's cool.

I was telling someone about this the other day on my show, and I'll give it to you to think about for a minute too, is I took this class in college called Political Rhetoric.

And we read

Dr.

King,

Camille Paglia.

One of the things we read was the Unibombers Manifesto.

Have you ever read the Unibombers Manifesto?

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Okay.

Without in any way seeming like I'm endorsing, I'm not, I'm saying there's a point he raises.

in his manifesto.

If you can get you through it, it's very difficult to get through, but there's this point he raised, which has always stuck in my head since I was in college.

Is he talks about there's these different,

there's this way he sets out difficulty of task.

Okay.

And when he's laying out difficulty of task,

he stages them like one through five.

I can't remember if it's escalating or de-escalating, but the easiest difficulty of task or the most difficult task is something where if you try your absolutely hardest, you have only a slim chance of success.

Okay, let's say that's like, that's like level one.

On up to, you don't even need to try at all and you'll succeed.

Okay.

He said that humans do best

at two and three.

Like at two and three, it's that if you try really hard, you have a reasonable chance of surviving if you try hard.

But he says that's what was his gripe with technology.

He said technology has

landed us at five.

You don't need to try at all and you're fine.

And he says, that's where all of our neuroses come from.

Interesting.

Because

the thing that he argues, Kaczynski argued,

and again, without getting into like sending mails off or sending bombs off in the mail and shit, it's just an interesting point is he argues that the thing that we're supposed to be trying to do really hard is like to take care of ourselves and take care of our family.

But now that it's all a given, given we have all this mental room

we have all this mental room to be spoiled and whiny and bitchy because we we wake up and there's

we wake up and it's just it's all pointless it's all taken care of i'm fine yeah you know even if you don't know where your next meal is going to come from you probably know it's coming right it's an interesting point you know that was that was his gripe you know kind of hard to take it and again i always hesitate to bring up where it came from but i i need to be intellectually honest to say where the the point came from.

And going to other places and seeing other things demonstrates that.

My two boys share a room, which brings up all amount of bitching, you know?

And the other day

I'm saying to my 15-year-old, we're having the same damn conversation around dinner table, like them sharing the room.

I'm like, dude, you just came from a place.

They had been out there with me for a week.

And then my wife took my kids bumming around.

But I'm like, you just came for a place, dude, people were sleeping and you saw it.

You were there.

People sleep in grass huts they made for themselves.

He's like, good point.

Now that I'm done hearing about the room thing, but at least he's old enough to recognize like, yeah, you're right.

That's cool.

That's cool.

You know, back to the Africa thing.

I mean,

they take that.

I mean, I've had a lot of people in that talk that do big game hunting and they don't want to talk about it because they don't want the blowback.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and

but friends of mine, guests that have been on here, lots of people.

but from my understanding, I've never been on a hunt in Africa, but they take that shit very, they take conservation very seriously from what I understand.

I mean,

they have

contractors,

careers that hunt poachers, correct?

Yep.

Yep.

And I can only, I'm

anything but a subject matter expert.

I can speak to like.

I can speak to where I was in Tanzania, but in Tanzania, it's a remarkably different regulatory structure than what we have.

One of the things that makes

the United States of America so progressive and so great on wildlife-like a way that we've just achieved success with wildlife is that wildlife is publicly owned.

Okay,

the U.S.

citizens, the citizens of a state, they own the wildlife, and then agencies represent your interest in owning the wildlife.

It's democratically owned.

In Tanzania, that's not the case.

Like the government owns the wildlife so

they

and there's poverty there

what they how they can how they can protect habitat is by declaring these areas hunt areas

and they put a fee to the animals and they hold a bid process there's a bid process where a hunting organization

needs to go to the government and they these contracts were new I can't remember I think it's maybe the contract's good for 10 years

You come in and you're like, we will pay you, Tanzania, blank dollars to have access

to this parcel of land to hunt it.

So there's revenue for them.

Then they come and they have their biologists come out and do a survey of what's there.

And there's like, you guys are allowed to kill whatever.

I'm just going to throw out random numbers that aren't true, but let's say, you know, you're allowed five Cape Buffalo, you're allowed

30 Taupe, whatever the hell it is.

They'll come out with a list and they'll say that you are obligated to buy 40%

of that wildlife from us, the operator.

Okay.

So then when you get an animal,

what they call a trophy fee, your fee just goes to Tanzania.

That trophy fee does.

And so they're able to draw revenue from undeveloped lands.

The biggest risk they have is slash and burn agriculture,

which people, people, small farmers come in, they cook the forest, they burn it, they grow a crop.

They don't have money for inputs, they don't have money for fertilizer and other things.

And so when you cook the soil after a couple of rotations, what do you do?

You burn the next chunk.

It devours the wildlands, slash and burn ag does.

But you're able to come in and say with these areas, and all of a sudden now the government is able to make money

off of preserving habitat.

Next to the place we hunted, there's this big national park.

Guess how many, like, I'm not going to make you guess because you never guessed the right number.

There's a huge national park of equal size, almost equal size next to this concession.

Last year, that national park had 14 visitors.

One fourth.

What?

It had 14 visitors

to a national park almost the size of Yellowstone National Park.

14 people went and paid a visit to that national park.

Meanwhile, the hunting concessions meant money

for the government.

That's interesting.

So it's like you can, and that's where, like, a dude, as a dude growing up in America with holding certain American ideals about wildlife management,

wildlife being democratically owned, right?

Trying to, trying to foresee and prevent ways in which people might commodify wildlife so it wasn't available to like blue-collar people.

So opportunity, like you grew up with this whole ethos about how to protect the, the democratization of American landscapes and American wildlife.

And you're like, that's the way to do it.

Part of travel is you go and you say like, you realize there's other ways to skin,

there's other ways to skin the cat, right?

And they

have

got this other system and you could look at it and criticize it, aspects of it.

It's very hard, you know, like it's very difficult for a citizen of Tanzania.

to go out and do lawful hunting.

There's not like an avenue for it.

Like, that's too bad.

I regret it.

But it's a different place, different challenges,

enforcement issues, poverty issues, whatever.

They have found a way to preserve habitat and to preserve wildlife by assigning value to it.

And right now, that is what holds the line.

Like that is what holds the line to

burning it.

You know, burning it and depleting it.

And so it's just,

it's hard to condemn it.

You know, I mean, and I used to sit back, I used to sit like in my pompous, you know, somewhat pompous American seat and used to be like, oh, you know, pay to play,

right?

You got to pay to play in Africa.

That's not American, you know, that's not the American style.

It's like, it's not the American style, but it's a way to achieve conservation in that place.

Yeah.

You know, and

you also can look and be like, we've also, you know, in the late 1800s and early 1900s,

because of deregulation, I mean, we almost ruined, we almost ruined American wildlife.

Yeah, let's move into the history of hunting in America.

In the U.S.

Yeah.

First off,

people who hunted in the U.S., I mean, there's people debate the number, but...

somewhere between

there was people definitely here hunting 13 14 000 years ago.

People were maybe here hunting as much as 20,000 years ago.

People that came from Siberia

passed into Alaska very quickly, you know, at some point by 13,000 years ago, had like exploded across the landscape, and those were hunting cultures.

Only later, right, like

many thousands of years later, Europeans started to come.

And that's kind of where I'm very interested in native hunting practices, but kind of when we get, when we look at the decimation of American wildlife, that story begins with the colonials, right, coming in.

Just to get a little extra detail there,

there is an argument that is a, there is a very powerful argument.

It's not settled science, but there's a very powerful argument that when humans arrived here, they wiped out

They wiped out many species of wildlife.

I'm talking

the first Americans, Siberian immigrants.

They wiped out many species of wildlife.

People debate it, but to me,

to me, it's verging on settled science that humans had a huge,

were a huge contributing factor into extinction of mammoths, mastodons, short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, a host of things, like nine genera of animals.

kind of blinked out around the time humans arrived.

But then they had this huge period of, the historian Dan Flores calls it like Native America.

They had this 10,000 year period, 10,000 years of hunting in America had

the ensuing 10,000 years of hunting in America had one extinction, a flightless bird on the Pacific coast.

People hit harmony.

People hit where we weren't driving shit to extinction for 10,000 years on this continent.

And then boom.

Europeans show up and that story shifts, right?

To get into kind of the, like, to just give you a little little bit about like the first hunter.

They'll, if people that are like loosely familiar with American history will recognize the name Daniel Boone, like, no doubt.

I mean, we're kind of in Boone country right now, you know.

Um,

let's take a look at Boone for a minute.

So,

Boone, um, Boone's people came from England

at the time in England.

You, you weren't going to hunt, right?

The king owned the deer.

Uh, there was no sort of public hunting.

Wildlife was jealously guarded by the elites.

Hunting wasn't a thing.

Boone's family comes here, and all of a sudden, like, there's this rich wildlife resource out there, and they pick up hunting.

Like, these are people that these are not hunters coming to America.

These are very much like non-hunter.

The European colonists that come over are like not, they're not showing up as hunters.

They're getting here and they're learning from natives

how to utilize these resources.

And Boone is this interesting figure because he sits right at the beginning of colonial history or he sits right at the beginning of the you know the American experiment.

Like he in the years prior to the to the American Revolution, Boone becomes a deerskin hunter.

During the colonial period, Boone is also a interloper.

He's a poacher in two ways.

Boone is going, he's living in these settlements.

First, he lives in Pennsylvania, then he's down in the Adkin Valley in North Carolina.

He's forbidden for two reasons from

hunting where he hunts.

The British,

the colonial British, don't want American colonists who they view as like

the frontier people they view as like the worst of the worst

hillbilly

rednecks are these American colonists out on the frontier.

They question their allegiance and they don't want them crossing the Appalachian mountains and hunting in native land because it causes so much trouble with the Native Americans.

Like the British were somewhat friendly, were somewhat better than the Americans became at like dealing with Native relations.

So the British would say, you're not allowed to go over there.

And then it also violated Native law where the natives claim these areas.

Okay, the Cherokee, the Shawnee, like they claim these areas as their hunting grounds.

But these colonists like Boone realize they can make a lot of money

going into the Indian territories and hunting deer skins, which they're forbidden.

The British forbidden them from doing it.

The Indians forbid them from doing it, but that's their biz.

So like Boone going through the Cumberland Gap, you know, the first time he went through the Cumberland Gap, he's looking for deer skins.

And these guys have no, they have no cash economy.

You raise crops, you use, a family raises crops, the family uses 90% of those crops.

The only access you have to cash is you might sell a small amount of corn or whatever but all of a sudden they have access to a cash economy because they can kill whitetails

and we see then this thing that's this deer hunting era

late seven like late 1760s into the 1770s we see this phenomenon that we're going to see again and again and again where these guys come like with a commodity, whitetail deer, we see that they're able to like wipe places clean.

They're able to go into an area and literally kill everything.

And what do you do when that happens?

Go further down the trail and literally kill everything.

And from that point, we start seeing this like this

dewilding of America from commodity hunting, from commercial hunting.

And man, I got nothing but respect for Boone.

Like, I've done projects on Boone, studied Boone,

phenomenal woodsman, but that becomes the American tale

is

deregulation, commodification,

and all of a sudden you just realize that this inexhaustible resource we have, we just eat it.

We just consume it from one end of the country to the other.

Damn.

You know?

And

you've heard of Jim Bridger, like the mountain men era.

I mean, they pretty much, they pretty much wiped beaver out in the Rocky Mountains.

The Buffalo Hide.

I just finished a project on the Buffalo Hide Hunters.

The Buffalo Hide Hunters from the end of the Civil War to 1883, they killed the last 15 million buffalo.

Jeez.

Sold them all.

$2.50 a piece, $2.50 a piece.

And it's like, so when people, it's funny because,

you know, I tend to be in many aspects, I tend to be like right-leaning.

And then you hear like deregulation.

And I'm always like, yeah, you know.

In some areas, sure, but in some areas, we've caused a lot of trouble.

Like deregulation has caused a lot of trouble with American wildlife.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When did we start to see a turn?

Late 1800s, early 1900s.

You know, the name that comes up often is Theodore Roosevelt was instrumental in this.

By that point, you start seeing,

by that point, the first thing you start seeing is bans on selling wild meat in cities.

Like New York, have you ever heard of the Boone and Crockett Club?

No.

Okay, like Theodore Roosevelt was the first president of the Boone and Crockett Club.

When people talk about, you ever hear someone's kill a buck and they say it was a 180-inch whitetail?

What they're usually talking about is a scoring system developed by the Boone and Crockett scoring system.

It's a way to measure a deer's skull or measure a deer's antler growth.

Boone and Crockett Club, all these other organizations start out and they start trying to regulate harvest.

They'll come in and say, like in New York City, there'd be a ban on selling certain wild meats.

And then

they come up with a thing called the Lacey Act, which gave it some teeth, where if you broke, anytime you break a state's law and cross a state line, it becomes a federal problem.

Because you could have states, when they were trying to save wildlife, a state might come in and say, no more market hunting.

You can't kill ducks.

You know, you can't kill ducks with punt guns anymore and sell it, but they don't enforce it.

So then with the Lacey Act, it became like if you're down and you're in Chesapeake Bay and you're commercially killing ducks with a punt gun, but then you take them to New York and sell them, you now have a federal violation.

Gotcha.

And so that is when they were really able to start curbing the market hunters.

There's a great irony with calling the Boone and Crockett Club, the Boone and Crockett Club, because it takes its name from Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett.

The Boone and Crockett Club and people that came out of that organization, that influenced that organization, was instrumental in wiping out the wildlife markets.

But Daniel Boone and later Davey Crockett, they were market hunters.

So there's a kind of irony in the name.

Like we associate Boone and Crockett, like Crockett was a commercial bear hunter,

you know, and became a congressman, but he was a commercial black bear hunter.

And he also had military contracts.

When there was a military campaign during the Indian Wars, Crockett would hire on to shoot meat to feed the soldiers.

Interesting.

That was one of Crockett's early occupations is like feeding a marching army.

Wow.

Did not know that.

Kill enough shit for everybody to eat.

That was his job.

Right on, man.

Right on.

Yeah, he was a badass, too.

Not he wasn't a badass like Boone, but Crockett was a badass, you know, not like Boone, but, you know.

What made Boone more badass?

There's one time Boone,

Boone went over,

there's one point where Boone goes into Kentucky and

goes there with some guys,

a handful of guys.

They run into a bunch of trouble with Indians.

They get all their shit stolen.

One of them gets killed.

Okay.

Eventually,

one of Boone's hunting partners, like his brother and stuff, like they leave and go home.

Boone stays by himself.

Some accounts suggest that he's there so long he needs to make his own gunpowder with using wood ash, bat guano,

and sulfur deposits, right?

Stays there two years.

Two years?

Yeah, stays in the woods two years, much of it by himself.

Builds up a big loot, like builds up a big pile of hides, twice gets them stolen from him or seized, I should be a better word for it, seized by the natives,

and just hangs out two years.

He was like,

he loved being in the woods, man.

You know, Boone was a badass.

And, and, and, um,

it came at a great cost.

Like, there was always always these conflicts on the colonial frontier.

Boone was next to one of his kids when he was killed in Indian fighting.

Another one of Boone's sons was killed in Indian fighting.

A brother of his was killed.

Brother-in-law was killed.

Many, many, I mean, you know, many, many people in his family all like

gave their lives,

that that's the right word, made enormous sacrifices to live that lifestyle, very dangerous lifestyle at that time because there was active warfare in the colonial areas.

And yeah, and Boone, I mean, he just was hooked.

He couldn't picture living another way.

You know, talking about Theodore Roosevelt, I mean, he's the one that put all the national parks in place, correct?

Yeah, well,

a number of things.

They weren't called national forests then, but he was designated these like forest preserves and was instrumental in the national park program, too.

So like the public estate in many ways comes from Roosevelt.

There's a famous story with Roosevelt where he had authority to declare these, he had authority to declare

these wilderness preserves, whatever nomenclature they used at the time.

He had authority to do it.

He was losing that authority while he was in office.

There was legislation, like he was going too crazy, they felt, declaring all these, what would become our national forest system.

And there's legislation arising that's going to strip him of the authority to unilaterally create national forests.

Support for this legislation is so strong that he knows he can't veto it because his veto will get overridden.

So he creates this another huge pile of national forests.

They call it the midnight forests because his ability to make forest preserves was going to expire at midnight.

So in a flurry, he like sits up with his team and they just start making national forests.

And then turns around the next day and has to sign legislation saying he won't do it anymore.

And those are known as the midnight forests that he created.

Who was right?

I mean, he was hugely controversial at the time.

That's the thing people forget about.

Like, all politicians would want to be favorably compared to Roosevelt now.

Like, any politician is going to take, if someone says he's like a Theodore Roosevelt when it comes to conservation, they're going to be like, Thank you.

That dude was controversial at the time.

And who was right?

They carved him into

Rushmore,

right?

As the preservation guy.

Yeah.

So

he was right, you know, and it was not popular at the time.

That's the thing people lose sight of is like what he did at the time was some people supported, but a lot of people hated him for it.

And then now we recognize that it was a stroke.

It was genius.

It was genius.

Yeah.

I mean, what do you,

you know, we just had that

public land sale, you know, almost go through and the big, beautiful bill.

And I was way late to the game on that.

I saw a tweet from Jocko saying, pay attention to this guy, this guy, Braxton McCoy.

Do you guys know each other?

No, I know of him now for sure, but I have never personally met him now.

But great guy.

Amazing story, too.

But anyways, I saw a tweet that

he had thrown out through Jocko, and I was like, hey, I'll be in touch.

Brought him on.

He kind of told me what was going on.

And we released a preview.

It got pulled that night.

but um i was curious i mean i know you were a big player in that and and uh you and cameron haynes and a couple other people i follow were you know screaming at the top of your lungs like

this isn't a good idea yeah and um

and so i you know i just wound up jumping in last minute because i was like this this doesn't seem right are they selling this land glad you did yeah i'm glad you and uh i'm glad you didn't everybody else that did yeah yeah and uh well

all of uh the collaborations together got it pulled, and um, so, but I was just curious, you know, we were talking a little bit about this at breakfast, but I mean, what was your take on all of that?

Man, it's a it's a thing that comes up in different

forms throughout the history of the country: is this question of the legitimacy,

the intelligence, or whatever,

of having large tracts of federally managed public land that's open to everybody.

Maybe it's on a 10-year cycle.

My friend and colleague Ryan Callahan is a lifelong crusader for public lands.

And

he and I were talking recently.

And he was talking about it.

It's just like it's a 10-year cycle where

in some Western states, the majority of the land is owned by the federal government.

Some people look at that and they're like, what an enormous gift that half of the state or more than half of the state, whatever, is open to any American who wants to go out on that land to ride ATVs in certain areas, ride bikes, camp with their kids, hunt, fish, live an outdoor lifestyle.

You don't need to have money to own your own ranch.

It's just there.

It's there for us.

And not only that, it's not developed and it's not industrialized.

It's like, it's, it's

literally money in the bank and it's habitat in the bank, right?

It's just there.

It's an American treasure.

Other people look at it and they look at it and they see a huge loss in revenue because

you're not able to industrialize or develop that landscape.

So someone, you know, you're a political figure in a state.

What you want to do is you want to generate economic activity.

And then you see that there's these landscapes that aren't easily used.

Now, Now,

to be fair, on these federally managed public lands,

U.S.

Forest Service land, Bureau of Land Management land,

they do mine it.

They do do alternative energy on it.

They do oil extraction on it.

What's the big festival in California, the Burning Man?

The Burning Man.

The Burning Man is on BLM land.

So BLM land is like...

Is it really?

Yes, it's on public land.

I didn't know that.

The Burning Man Festival is on BLM land.

The BLM makes money.

The BLM makes money by permitting the Burning Man to occur on their BLM property.

All kinds of shit is happening on this land.

Cattle grazing, right?

It's a multi-use landscape.

But what doesn't happen is it doesn't get permanently developed.

So in states, you know, Utah is a hotbed of anti-public land sentiment in the political delegation there.

A lot of it comes from Nevada, where they want more land, you know, they want more land to develop.

And this, this public land system, this federal land system

stands in their way of having more areas to develop and more areas to produce revenue from, produce opportunities for friends and developers.

And

therein lies the rub.

There's some states where, like, I happen to live in Montana and in Montana, there is a like, it's political suicide.

It's political suicide, remains political suicide in Montana to advocate for large-scale sales of public land.

You can't do it.

You can't do it there.

In Utah, you can.

In Utah, you can't.

And so oftentimes federal land sales where they're like, or they want to peel off large acreages, there's like

in, I think it was 2017, there was talk of, you know, 3 million acres.

There was talk of 3 million acres this time of like, we're going to sell 3 million acres of public land.

That's usually coming from a you the Utah delegation well that's where it came from this time yeah they spearhead it and that is that is a hotbed this I'm not telling you like a controversial thing yeah I'm not I'm not putting like a spin on it um the intellectual architects of large-scale public land sales the intellectual architects of of that concept come from Utah Okay, this is not spinny.

It's just that's just the reality.

It was last time around when we went through this and reached something very similar three million acres i think it was 2017 jason chaffetz house of representatives in utah had it had legislation out there which they were calling it um they were calling like excess public lands they were going to sell three million acres and when you get into three million acres you're talking big tracts of public land yeah there's a way to there's a way to move public land like we have systems in place by which we can move public land like if you have a whatever there could be a military base that gets decommissioned there's a way in which that can be sold um and what these efforts usually are, are ways to ditch.

It's usually like a way, how can we ditch the process and do this right now large scale?

And that's usually what happens.

And

the last time and this time, we're identical in the response is

your normal groups that

the effort to push came from a faction of the American right.

It came from a faction of the Republican Party, like we should move to sell public land, large tracts of public land.

Of course, they know that

the tree hugger community, the bleeding hearts, of course, they know that they'll revolt, but it doesn't matter to them.

They don't have their support anyways.

But both times, what has happened is that people that they view as being their people,

people that probably normally support.

President Trump's agenda, people that normally are like very, like are right of center, they're like, no, not that idea.

I don't like it.

And then both times with Chaffetz and then this most recent thing was coming from, was being pushed from Senator Mike Lee.

Both times it seems they were quite surprised that their constituent base

hated the idea.

They hated it all right.

It was, it was, it shocked people, but I'm like, I was always feeling like, it shouldn't be that shocking because this is what happened last time.

And the response was the same.

It was like, oh, wow, all these, all these, we're just shocked that all these, these, these

Republican voters hate the idea of selling off public lands.

And they'll focus, they'll focus because like, oh, it's only 3 million acres.

But what people see lying there is you're kind of like, I'm afraid it's not about that.

I'm afraid that at this level, we're having a discussion about the legitimacy of federally managed public lands.

You know, and so people, they're not, they tend to not be interested in the details.

It's like American sportsmen, at the end of the day, American sportsmen want public lands.

And they're probably, and they're definitely intellectually capable of recognizing that it comes at some cost.

But

look at like what conservative, like if you look at like what conservative values and conservative means, it's like, it's not going anywhere.

It's in, it's, it's our federal land.

Right.

If we were to wind up in some national emergency, like we're wind up in an existential crisis as a country.

And we needed to utilize some of these lands for extraction or whatever.

Like we were in an existential crisis, like a World War II scale crisis for resources.

I think that you'd have a very different reception if you were talking about the need to industrialize some of our beloved landscapes in order to address an existential crisis.

But outside of an existential crisis, it's there.

It gets more valuable all the time.

It does more for the environment, more for people.

It's just a wonderful asset.

When you sell it, you sell it one time and you sell it at market value and that's it.

So

this is just a calculus that gets run and I promise you in 10 years there'll be another version of it.

Do you think so?

Oh, absolutely.

Do you think they'll learn their lesson?

No, I think there'll be another version of it.

And maybe someday public sentiment, I don't see public sentiment on it switching because it is a thing that galvanizes a huge group of people.

I got buddies that like, they don't hunt fish, they like to ski and they don't like the smell of it.

They don't like public land divestitures.

It's just, it galvanizes people.

Yeah, I didn't hear anybody who wasn't in politics that was for that.

Yeah.

Not anybody.

I have friends that are definitely, I have good friends and some like big hunters that are definitely that they look and they're like, you guys are too absolutist.

Well, I mean, where does it end?

We do 3 million acres right now.

Because that was the big thing, right?

It's just 3 million acres.

We're only going to do it out right outside of the cities.

And it's like, great.

Okay.

So that's 3 million acres that's going to become industrialized, going to come, become housing,

low-income housing.

And the bill, the language in the bill didn't match the rhetoric.

Because when people went in and mapped out, when people went in and mapped out what lands meet the criteria, you could buy islands, you could buy extremely remote islands in Tongass National Forest, where it were like,

would follow the criteria of what could happen.

Also, in the thing it has to go to the highest bidder.

In the end, even Lee acknowledged this.

In the end, he said that the way the legislation was written, the government of China

could have been like, oh, we'll happily take 3 million acres of America.

Whatever bid you get, a dollar more.

In the end, they couldn't prevent this.

I feel like that was an excuse on, oh, we overlooked this.

Oh, you fucking overlooked that.

You just happened to overlook that China's buying up all our farmland.

it allowed it was a pathway it was a pathway outside of military bases oh yeah you just uh you just happened to

you found that out last minute and that's what it was a pathway out it was a safe it was a face-saving mechanism but it was a pathway out not because your ass is about to get voted out of office because you've pissed off every outdoorsman hunter fisherman skier rancher in the fucking country

i'm sure that had nothing to do with it

but it won't it will it won't go away it won't go away and and

I know that

you also, from looking at your work, you love to look at things from a variety of angles, you know?

And

it wouldn't be honest to me

to not say like,

of course,

I understand the perspective.

I understand the frustration of...

someone in a political position being like, look at all the economic activity that under my tenure,

you know, all the economic activity that could be occurring under my tenure, and that I could go in front of voters and

be like, you know, that I had blank achievements and job creations in certain sectors if I could just develop that stuff.

Like, I get it.

I get it.

I get it.

I just, I just don't agree.

Yeah.

You know, I don't agree.

Yeah, me neither.

Me neither.

But, well, Steve, let's take a quick break.

Actually,

I'm going to have you show me how to shoot a damn bow.

Oh, you got a lefty?

No.

I'll show you anyway.

All right.

Cool.

Let's take a break.

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All right, Steve, we're back from the break.

Thanks for the lesson out there.

Oh, yeah.

I'm going to get one.

Yeah, they're fun.

I'm going to get one.

I'm going to get good at this shit.

Yeah, it's fun.

Next time you come, I'm going to outshoot you.

Okay.

I'm just kidding.

I wouldn't be surprised, man.

I wouldn't be surprised.

I'm not as disciplined as I should be about shooting.

I started shooting.

I've been shooting pretty good now,

but I shoot in prep.

I don't shoot recreationally as much.

Oh, like a train-up?

Yeah, I'll shoot like, you know, like hunting season's coming.

I'll start shooting.

My boy, he shoots league in the winter, you know.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

That's cool.

When hunting season's over, this is bad.

I hate to admit it, but when hunting season's over, I'll oftentimes I might not touch my bow for a few months.

Right on.

You know, I'm like, I like, to me, it's

I

shoot a bow in order to hunt.

You know, it's fun, but I just, whatever.

You like to hunt.

Yeah, I like to shoot.

Like, I like to shoot.

I like to shoot guns just for the kick of it, but, or just, I like shooting guns for fun, but I don't shoot my bow as much as I ought to.

You said you shoot a 300 windmag?

A lot.

The most time when you're hunting?

Yeah.

You know, what that comes from is

it comes from having.

It comes from this just kind of like desire to have one

thing that you take care of and know well and keep tuned up and and rigged up.

Yeah.

And then I can use it for all manner of hunting.

So I like to hunt coos deer.

You know, it's a small desert whitetail.

I mean, these things are 110 pounds, right?

And I'll take the same load

as I would kill a bull moose with.

No kidding.

Yeah, hunting with it, yeah.

Just shoot it back from the shoulder.

Watch out for the shoulder blade.

Gotcha.

Just punch clean hole in it.

So you do that for consistency.

That's what it stems from.

As much as I wind up messing around with all kinds of stuff, I just like I'm just comfortable with it.

Like, I, you know, I kind of like basically also you get, I just kind of basically understand the trajectory.

You follow me, and it's just a little bit ingrained.

No, I get it, I get it.

And it's just, it's, it's convenient.

We have our, like, my kids shoot 6'5 Creedmores because I got them started on something smaller.

Um,

and

those are great to shoot, you know, but I, but yeah, if I

and it's a little that that 300 windmag thing is a little bit a little bit perhaps antiquated as as bullets have gotten so good,

you know, like uniformity of bullets have gotten so good that

you can get away with shooting much lighter rounds now.

There you go, you know all this stuff, but like there used to be a lot of talk about a flat shooting rifle, but with laser rangefinders.

Yeah, it's not as relevant.

Like you wanted a point of, you wanted a gun at a 300 yards point of impact, right?

That like anywhere from zero to 300 yards, you're going to be within some number of inches of right

with a flash shooting gun, but with laser range finders, it's like just call your shot, it doesn't matter anymore, you know?

So it's a little bit, a little bit of it's antiquated, but yeah, that's what I'm currently, that's what I currently hunt with.

Yeah, I was, I was curious.

I mean, like I said, I'm not a big hunter, but I'm I want to get into it as soon as I clear up some time.

But, you know, I've been invited to elk hunts, mooth suns, bear hunts, gator hunts.

Told you I took my first deer last year.

But

I'm always like wondering and because, you know, because of my background,

people think I know all this shit.

I don't, you know,

and so I'm always wondering like, how the hell do you know what caliber to use on a big, on a big animal

versus, you know, something smaller?

Like, I've heard the most dangerous thing to hunt is water buffalo.

Is that true?

Cape Buffalo.

Cape Buffalo?

You know what I was talking about, Tanzania?

Tanzania has a caliber restriction.

Oh, really?

Which you you don't see in many states.

In Tanzania to hunt Cape Buffalo, it has to be a minimum of a 375 H ⁇ H.

Okay.

You know, so that's what I shot was a.375 H ⁇ H.

Right.

Or sorry, a minimum of 375.

So they set minimums.

But there's so many.

I mean, there's so many

really good.30 caliber.

Like really good.308 variations.

Yeah.

You know, but for like

moose is the biggest thing you're, the biggest bodied thing you're going to hunt in North America is moose.

And if you're shooting a 180 grain, a good 180 grain bullet,

you're fine.

It's going to work.

Yeah, you're fine.

That's, that's what I use.

Yeah.

And I just like, I just like the versatility of it.

But listen, man, there's guys that'll go

there's guys that'll go way deep on small little differences and things like if you get into archery, you'll find, you'll wind your, you'll wind up in all these conversations about like prepare yourself for the conversation about mechanicals single bevel

double bevel right all these things yeah and it all matters kind of but in the end if you put it where it's supposed to go

doesn't matter it doesn't

you know you make a hole through two you make a hole through both lungs on something that thing's got problems yeah yeah it doesn't matter what made the hole have you ever had an encounter where you shot

something and

it didn't drop, it came after you?

Oh, yeah.

Well, plenty of encounters where it didn't come after me, but I ran at, I one time shot a moose in a pretty,

yeah,

somewhat questionable shot.

That was with a 300 variation called a 300 short mag

with a 200 grain bullet.

And I shot a moose coming on.

They got a huge brisket, right?

I shot him coming on, straight on.

We called him in, so he's coming in.

He knows we're there.

And I shot him right like this

and didn't get in where I needed to get in.

And it buoyed off.

Went, I don't know.

We kind of, we chased it a little ways.

I shot at it again and didn't know, but missed when I shot at it running off.

Because once you hit it once, it's like, you know, once you hit it once, just put lead in it.

You're not going to, at that point,

you know, you already started a mess.

So you might as well do what you can.

Yeah, so you might take a shot you wouldn't normally take because it's the second shot and you already wounded it.

Anyways, I get up there

and through some through some incompetence, I had cleared my chamber.

Like I shot,

I had three rounds in a chamber

and sat down without a round chamber.

So I put one in the chamber.

Now I got one in the chamber and two,

one in the chamber, two in the magazine.

I shoot the moose.

I then rack around,

shoot at him again,

and then instinctively just rack around.

But then I run up to the moose

and I racked around.

So now I've spit out my last shell.

I ejected a shell, a live round, and I'm sitting there on an empty.

I'm sitting around an empty chamber.

And I'm not kidding, dude, the timing timing is so weird.

This is all filmed.

Like we, we've used this footage a million times.

But I get up to him and I realize he's kind of like getting up.

And I click

and man, he gets up and just comes at me, you know.

And

he

like he comes.

I'm trying to get away.

I got chess waders on.

I'm trying to get away and he bowls and he get he.

Runs over me.

He ran over you?

Yeah.

So then my buddy shoots him and kills it.

He's chasing me and my buddy kills it.

And I reach around and he'd got my back, you know?

And I reach around and

my hand comes up and it's got blood all over it.

And I think he's punctured me with his antler.

But then I realized because I'd hit him in the brisket that when he ran over me, the blood from his brisket

had

got up my back.

So I go like this, you know, and I'm like,

I'm dying.

Shit.

But it wasn't, I wasn't hurt at all.

I wasn't hurt at all.

Any close calls with bears or anything?

Yeah, a few little, you know, here's the thing is, is like everything seems like a close call.

And unless you could interview the bear,

you don't know if it was a close call or not.

But had one, had a number of little,

you know,

little mix-ups and things that could have been stupid.

There's

one time we were bow hunting elk.

And it was kind of a weird day.

And I remember sleeping on a, we were sleeping on a ridge, just passing the hot part of the day when nothing's going on sleeping on this ridge and something woke me up from a nap

and there's a bull a bull elk coming over the ridge and like I wake up and my bow is laying there and I and just me trying to grab the bow spooks the elk so I'm like God what are the chances that would ever happen you know I fall asleep again I hear something again and I wake up and here's a black bear standing there and the dude in the same spot okay

I go to grab my bow, he spooks, runs down the hill.

I just forget, forget about he's gone, he spooked.

Later that afternoon, it starts getting toward evening prime time, and we go down, we go down, happen to go the direction the bear went, but just coincidentally went the direction the bear went.

Get down to the bottom of this ridge where this, where this get down to the bottom of this hill where the hill goes down into a riparian area, and hear

nails on bark.

Something climbing a tree.

Okay

We I watched this bear go this way, so I'm I'm like, holy shit, it's the bear.

Like, I said, because I think he's still in the area.

And a black bear, you'll spook a black bear.

He might go in a tree.

So I run up there thinking I'll tree him.

And if I tree him, I can just get him with my bow because black bears will climb trees.

But I run up there and like, it's thick.

And I come busting in there trying to like be like a demon coming in there to encourage the bear to not come down, but go up the tree because I can hear it climbing.

And it's a, and it's a, there's a sow grizzly

standing against this tree.

And what I had heard the claws of was her,

was her woofing her cubs up the tree.

So when I come busting in, I mean, I'm busting, I bust in like, I mean, easy me to that painting you in the helicopter, you know, like

oh, and I start trying to back out of there in a hurry, you know, and, and she, that cub comes down the hill.

And I remember

she like legitimately, she legitimately,

I could could be hallucinating this, but like I know I saw it.

She she swatted her cub

to get moving.

She's like

like this, and it kept spilling out of the tree.

And that could have been like, Yeah, that could have been just dumb.

Pissed off a mama bear.

How the hell do you get out of there?

She left you alone.

She just got, I got lucky.

She went woofing up the hill.

And then a couple of things like that.

And then one time I was involved in,

one time I was involved with a bunch of other guys in like a legit bear mix-up

on a Fognack Island in Alaska.

And

we had an elk hanging in a tree and we were eating lunch under the tree.

This is a totally long story about just being an idiot, but we're eating lunch under a tree with the elk hanging in it that we'd left there for a couple days.

the corded out meat and this bear came in and and um and uh

my buddy yanni

he had sat down he had spray on his belt and he had his pistol sitting on his backpack and when that bear came in you know what he did so he's got the pistol laying right here

and spray right here you know what he did is he smokes it across the nose of the trekking pole

i mean like right like i'm there it's here and he whop crossed the nose and this other guy my buddy dirt fell on it

fell on it and rode it down the hill

fell on the bear i thought thought the bear was carried him down the hill.

Holy shit.

When he was trying to get out of the way and landed backward on its hump and rode it down the hill

into an alder thicket.

And we thought that it carried him.

We all read it that it carried him down the hill.

So all of a sudden, everybody's like lunging down the hill and he comes squirting back out of the alders running back up.

Oh my God, dude.

And

he rode it.

It's this dude named Dirt, Dirt Myth.

Damn.

He rode the bear.

Holy shit.

What did he say?

What do you got back?

I don't remember what exactly said, but it scared the shit out of us, man.

You know what's crazy about that deal?

So that's a draw permit on a Fognac island.

You have to draw an elk tag.

And they're not, those elk.

So if you're looking at a map, if you casually looked at a map, you wouldn't think, you wouldn't notice that Kodiak and the Fognac are separate islands.

There's a narrow strait that separates Kodiak and the Fognac.

Years ago, they brought up elt from Washington's Olympic Peninsula and turned them loose out there on a Fognac.

So it's a draw permit.

We had that mix-up.

The next year, some dudes, and you'd probably be able to track these guys down.

And one of my friends interviewed him.

These Navy SEALs, a Navy SEAL drew that permit.

They got attacked by a bear right there.

They killed the son of a bitch.

Damn.

They killed it with a pistol.

Have you ever seen that video?

I think it was that Russian, I think it was a Russian dude.

He has a side-by-side shotgun, and this grizzly keeps attacking him from all these different angles.

Oh, my kid was showing me that.

Yeah.

And I was trying to question how true it was, and he was trying to fish out, but I don't remember.

You should just tell it because I don't remember the details.

I mean, I don't know any details.

I just, somebody showed me the YouTube video, and I was like, holy shit, what would you do?

I do recollect my kid showing me something about this.

I was able to determine that it was a Russian somehow.

I think it said in the description.

I can't remember.

Maybe it was Reddit.

I can't remember what it was.

But yeah, I would like charge him.

And you could just, I don't know if the dude had a GoPro strapped to his head or whatever, but he's just running around on this side by side.

Then he'd come at him from another angle.

No, this is ringing the bell.

And I remember I try to teach with my kids, I try to teach skepticism.

And I remember like trying to, so my kid will come to me and be like, hey, is this legit?

You know, we'll watch stuff and try to figure out what we're looking at.

But I don't remember the details on it.

But

I got included on the bear thing.

I love those bears.

Like, I like,

I like,

I love grizzly bears.

I like them.

You know, they're scary, but I like them.

You know, I'm not, I'm not an anti-bear guy.

You get any other close encounters?

I love hearing this stuff.

Just little,

yeah, little like false charge.

Me and my buddy Cal, I mentioned him earlier earlier around the public lands issue.

He and I got false charged by a bear one time,

which was scary.

And I remember I had like a,

I made like a line, an imaginary line at which I would shoot.

We were hunting the grizzly bears, but it was a sow with cubs.

And I had an imaginary line at which I would

fire, you know, and she turned off at that imaginary line.

But again, man,

with those bears, it always seems like

everything seems close because you can just picture it, you know?

But

that's kind of my main little run-ins.

I've had them too where they're coming and you're just trying to scare them off, you know.

And I remember

one was coming and we were trying to shoot rocks out in front of it just to get it to not come into our camp.

And I remember it would run over to look at.

It would run ahead to look at what it was.

It's like, what the hell was that?

And I was like, that's not working.

Damn.

How do you determine where you're going to hunt?

I mean,

you know, like around here,

I've been hunting before.

I just never got anything.

And it was always on public land around the Midwest.

And their season in the Midwest is like bigger than Christmas.

Yep.

You know, and I'd go out and I'd be like, I'm out of here, man.

There's like 50 people over here.

I'm not doing this.

So I'm just curious.

I mean, how do you determine where you're going to hunt?

Because because you hunt public land.

A lot.

I mean, I hunt both.

You know, I hunt a lot of private.

I hunt private land.

I hunt public land.

I hunt everything

I can get to.

I kind of have a odd, not an odd setup, but like at this, at this point,

I've hunted for a long time, and I have so many friends that are really dedicated, disciplined hunters that

for me to do like research on spots is just very different

there's not many places you could point to there's not many places in the country you could point to where I couldn't within a within two phone calls

talk to a buddy that a buddy or a buddy's buddy that like knows the area real well gotcha you follow me so it just winds up being it it winds up being different and

I hunt we kind of in hunting

you know,

a way to split hunting opportunities would be that you have over-the-counter, what we call over-the-counter hunting opportunities, or you have draw hunting opportunities.

Over-the-counter means you go to the gas station or the sporting goods store and buy a license, right?

So, most white-tailed deer hunting in the East, most states, just buy a license.

But then there's a lot of draw hunts where more, there's greater demand than there is supply.

And so, to allocate it democratically, they do these lotteries.

And they're generally for a resident, they're very inexpensive.

If you're applying in other states, they can be more expensive.

But they're like, they're going to release 20 tags for said unit.

100 guys apply for that unit.

So no one, there's no individual that routinely hunts the spot.

Gotcha.

So it's kind of new for everyone every time.

Okay.

If I do that and I'm applying for a unit, like for instance, I mentioned going to a Fognac.

I had applied a bunch of years, eventually drew a Fognak, but but because of my

social circle and professional connections, I wind up

with a buddy of mine who's like, oh yeah, me and my friends have hunted it twice.

We landed at this lake.

You want to hike, you know, we found them over here.

If you can't find them there, go look here.

And it's just, it's just, it's a perk that I, that I can't act like isn't a big factor.

So a lot of the time that someone might normally spend needing to work from the ground up, which is what I would do when I was younger, A lot of times now I'm able to ask a lot of questions.

Gotcha.

Another thing is, is

there's other spots, particularly like public land spots that I like to go to.

It winds up being that

there's spots, I tend to go to spots I know really well

and

I understand seasonally what they're like.

I understand the impacts of pressure on those spots.

And those are the spots I go to often.

And there wasn't a reason that one of of the reasons I like them in return is I kind of understand the rhythms of the area.

Okay.

Do you know what I mean?

Like late November, it's going to look like this.

They'll have been there.

Like things that were there are probably over here now

because of pressure, weather.

When I say pressure, I don't mean barometric pressure, but hunting pressure, weather, whatever.

And so you just kind of get trained up.

But at a time, I had a very, you know, at a time when I first moved out west,

we just went out and figured shit out.

We were very comfortable with failure

and had a lot of time, not a lot of money, and just

went

and went.

And that's the guys like that, the young guys now that I look up to are the guys that are in that phase of their life or they're just figuring it out.

And they got, they're not, they're not bitter yet.

I look at my kid and his buddies.

My kid and his buddies, man, they're just in the exploratory phase.

Do you know what I mean?

They're like, we're going to jump at that bridge and go try to get ducks.

I'm like, man, that's cool as shit, man.

That's great.

And if they come back with nothing, they don't care.

They're just in the exploring phase.

And they'll someday be like me.

And

that phase will wind down a little bit for them.

And they'll kind of have their habits.

They'll have their habits and

their honeyholes.

It's gaining experience.

And it's a blast when it happens.

And I look back on it quite fondly.

But at this point, now I just kind of have, you know,

life's different for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's talk about hunting and health.

Being in the outdoors, the difference between game meat and, you know, the shit we get at the grocery store and wherever you want to start.

Yeah.

Outdoor fitness.

One thing I have, the other day I had to run, a couple days ago, I had to run in the airport.

I'd I'd left my bag and the dude's like

run and get your bag

um so I had to run back to another gate to get my bag and uh I don't run

so even just running around in the airport for a while and I'm like I got a shin splint dude from running

but I can like if I have a physical specialty like

to brag for a minute um I am very good at just walking for a long time like I'm I'm an expert I'm an expert just walker, like one foot in front of the other.

And that's like hiking.

Like I like to hike.

I can hike.

I can outhike people that would beat me up.

I could outhike people that would outrun me, whatever.

But like I've, I'm

hiking across rugged ground and hiking in hills and something, something I enjoy a great deal.

And I've that ability comes from just traveling in the mountains.

And so that's kind of a little bit of a, for me, like like a little bit of measure,

like the way people might measure fitness.

You might talk about whatever you can bench or you can deadlift this or do this or that.

For me, it's like,

if I was going to ask someone a fitness question that would, that would, if I was going to ask someone a fitness question that would mean a lot to me, it would be like, how long can you walk on how little water?

That's like something I'm interested in.

The food stuff, we eat, like when we're home, we only eat wild meat.

No kidding.

In our house.

So family of five, like when we're eating in our house, we only eat wild meat.

Now and then I'll come home and my kids will be like, don't tell mom I'm telling you, but we had a chicken.

You know, mom bought a chicken.

She doesn't want you to know.

But yeah, we're real strict about it.

Like we eat wild meat in our house.

Why is that?

Well, because it's just cooler.

It's a better, it's just better.

It's a, it's,

That's what I like to eat.

That's what I want to see my kids eat.

I can't sit and tell you with a straight face, I can't tell you chemically

like how it's different.

Do you know what I'm saying?

But it's like, it just, it feels very good to eat it.

But

I can't separate out the emotional, spiritual, psychological.

aspects of what it's like to eat your own food

and how good that makes you feel

compared to like the biochem,

the biochemistry aspects of eating wild meat.

Yeah.

Okay.

There's a ton of talk about that, you hear people talk about something being organic.

Well, if you're, I hate to tell people this, if you're hunting deer

in Wisconsin, okay, I have a lot of friends that hunt deer in Wisconsin, you're probably not eating organic meat.

Because those deer are in,

they're eating GMOs.

Those deer are eating GMO corn.

They're eating GMO soybeans, perhaps,

that if it was certified organic, you wouldn't be able to feed it.

Like, you can't control what that thing's eating.

Yeah.

If he, he could be raiding, like, you know, he could be raiding Old Lady Thompson's garden where she just put a bunch of, where she put a bunch of,

sprayed a bunch of glyphosate.

You don't know what it ate.

It's a wild animal.

So people would be like, oh, you know, it's organic.

I'm like, yeah, there's a lot of places you can, like, you know, you kill a caribou on the north slope of, you know, Alaska and some bitches

purely organic.

But a lot of game meat's not organic.

Migratory waterfowl,

that's a tough claim to make that it's organic, but it just feels good because everything we eat, when we're sitting around eating, everything we eat is like a story.

It's a celebration.

And we always acknowledge this is Rosemary's deer.

Right.

And if I don't bring it up, the kids will bring it up.

That's pretty cool.

Whose deer is this?

This is Rosemary's deer.

The other night, we got back from our fish shack.

We had a bunch of Pacific cod.

So the other night, I had two, one of my daughter was away with her friend.

So I had my two boys, my boy's buddy, my wife, and we ate, we were eating cod that we caught, we were eating carrots that we grew, we were eating green beans that we grew, we were eating zucchinis that we grew.

And

like, that's pro, that, that's pride.

Do you follow me?

Oh, yeah.

It's like we're, we're like proud of that, and it makes a cool story.

You know, one of the more interesting aspects of health is

the confluence of where your mental life and your physical life collide.

You know, it's just, it's exciting to us.

And I take an immense amount of pride in it.

Yeah, that's true.

Even if someone came and told me, even if someone came and told me that it wasn't good for you, it wouldn't change my perspective.

I got a buddy, a very avid outdoorsman named Parker Hall, and he likes to fish flathead catfish.

Flathead catfish eat fish that eat fish.

So they do a thing called bioaccumulation, meaning if there's heavy metals in the environment, like mercury or whatever, they bioaccumulate because when a little fish gets mercury in its system, it's stored in its fat.

And then imagine that you magnify it.

Where here's a fish that eats fish that was eating fish.

So all of that, when he eats a fish, he takes that load of mercury, okay, or whatever heavy metal we might be talking about, or anything, industrial solvents or all these things carry stuff.

But when he eats a fish, he gets that fish's stuff and it goes into his fat.

And then at the end, when he's five years old, six years old, whatever, he's got a lifetime of consuming stuff that was consuming stuff.

And so they get a heavy metal load.

And the states, they don't do this for domestic meat, but the states will often come out with,

they'll often come out with advisories.

Sometimes they're very detailed.

Don't eat more than one meal every month of yellow perch over 12 inches in length from Lake Washington.

It might be that specific.

I was saying to him one day, you're eating all these flatheads.

And he also likes flathead belly.

It's like it's kind of a sort of a flathead delicacy is the belly on a flathead, which they say is where the heavy metals accumulate.

This is a very turned into a very long story.

I was joking with Parker Hall.

And I was like, well, what do you think about like the heavy metal warnings on these big flatheads?

And he says, man, if I can catch and eat so many flatheads that it kills me, I win.

That was

where he was at right on now.

So even if, yeah, like even if I heard, and I've gotten sick from, you know, I've gotten sick from game meat.

It doesn't change my view on it.

You know, I just like it.

There's no, no one can tell me that's like, it's just good.

I feel best eating, like, I feel best eating vegetables

and, and deer meat.

And I like more and more, I like to eat food.

We eat like

when I cook for my family, which is whenever I'm home,

we eat food that you look at and you know what it is.

It either looks like something that came out of the dirt.

Or it looks like something that you chopped out of an animal.

Like that in my mind is, is, I can't tell you this scientifically, but that's how we liked it.

That's how I liked it.

That's the way to live.

Yeah, that's how I liked it.

So let's move into meat eater.

How did that start?

It's

that's a long story.

Again, I came up as a writer.

I studied magazine writing, became a magazine writer.

Out of magazine writing, started doing books.

Out of this came various opportunities in television.

The first show I did years ago, I did a show, a very short-lived, I did an eight-episode show for Travel Channel a long time ago.

I was paired with a production company called 0.0 Production to do this show.

The show tanked, but out of it, the guys I was working with, and 0.0 most famously worked with Anthony Bourdain.

They produced Bourdain's different shows over the years.

So I was working with that same crew of guys that worked on that show.

And they had all, in doing our stuff, they had kind of fallen in love with hunting.

And so we decided, well, let's just do our own thing that we own.

We'll do our own show.

It'd be like very simple, stripped-down show about going out, you know, on hunting and fishing adventures.

And so I had a little teeny kid at the time.

My boy, who's 15, was a baby, and I would read him mostly books about animals.

And I always liked, you'd be reading about a T-Rex or a polar bear or whatever.

And it'd be like, this meat eater, this ferocious meat eater, right?

Just like a thing.

And I was like, I just called it that.

It wasn't meant as like a advice.

It wasn't meant as dietary advice.

I was like referring to like these species that that's what they eat.

So we started doing this show and

we owned it.

We only licensed it out.

So we maintained the IP of it, right?

And then later did.

launched a podcast and called it that.

It was a meat eater podcast.

We had a show called Meat Eater.

Did some guidebooks

under that title and eventually kind of built up this, you know, built up a brand.

Built up a brand new brand.

It's crazy.

And then what's kind of cool about it is because we were doing a TV show,

we would get sponsors.

And so some of our very earliest people that gave us any kind of vote of confidence and backing, like there was an apparel company, First Light.

And I knew the guys that started first light and they just started it kind of out of their homes in ketchum idaho um these are like big hunters ski bums and they were making merino base layers for hunters and

so we kind of grew up together and then later

later on our company meater was able to was able to acquire some gear companies.

So we have an apparel company, First Light.

We have an American-made accessory company called FHF Gear.

We have a game call company, Dave Smith, or sorry, we have a game call company called Phelps Game Calls and a decoy company, Dave Smith Decoys.

And

those founders are still very much involved with their businesses.

So we've become,

you know, we become like media and product,

but the vast bulk of my time exists around.

the

media end of it being podcasts.

We still do print books.

um and and i work in all those kind of projects everything from i've done cookbooks and i'm currently working on an american history series um what's that about

market hunting

so did meat eaters american history volume one and that was that story of daniel boone and the deerskin trade awesome and that covered 1763 which is the end of the french and indian war

to 1775, so right up to the American Revolution.

And then did Meteaters American History Volume 2, The Mountain Men,

which covers

the beaver skin trade, which 1806, so two years after the Louisiana Purchase, the return of Lewis and Clark,

which launched the era, and 1840, when that era and that market collapsed because of silk.

the advent of silk replacing beaver wool as the way that hats were made.

So the silkworm kind of killed that market.

We just recorded Meat Eaters of American History Volume 3, which is called The Hide Hunters.

It picks up with all the displacement at the end of the Civil War and displaced veterans, Confederates and Yankees, going west and picking up the buffalo skin trade.

And it ends in 1883 when they killed the last herd in northern Montana.

And from there,

probably

from there, we'll probably jump up to the Great Depression and do the Alaska fur trade during the Great Depression.

I'm sorry, it'll pick up at the end.

It'll pick up at the,

it'll pick up during the Roaring 20s and it'll, it's closing year.

If we do the Alaska fur trade, its closing year will be the Great Depression.

Very cool.

You remember like the flappers, you know, like the Roaring 20s, every run around with all that fur?

A lot of that fur was coming out of Alaska.

No kidding.

It was like money, all these things, all these different eras we're talking about are

the potential for a life-changing amount of money for people.

And they're all markets that emerge and then die and emerge and die.

And usually there's usually a variety of factors that leads to their death.

With the Buffalo one, it died because they were gone.

And the craziest part about those guys is

some knew what they were doing and some were legitimately, they didn't know what they had done.

On the Texas plains, the hide hunters were convinced that a bunch of them had run into Mexico

and there was more in Mexico, more Buffalo in Mexico.

In northern Montana, they'd all gone into Canada and they held out hope

and they waited around.

One year, two years, and eventually it was like, you know what I think might have happened, dude?

Is I think we maybe killed them them all.

It's over, you know.

So, so that history stuff is something I

love working on, you know, the American history series.

We built one hell of an empire, man.

I don't know what I called it.

Yeah.

Um,

yeah, we make cool profit we get to make cool products.

It's fun, yeah.

How do you balance all the business and family and all that stuff?

One of my,

I'll tell you, like, if I have a

answering that question, that picture, remember the old cartoons where there's a dude with the devil and the angel?

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Like, if I carry with me a thing like that, it's about

what

I've done and haven't done for my kids.

The devil is saying,

there has been years in

all my kids' lives.

There's been years, the devil's like, dude, there's been years

when you missed half of their days,

right?

You worked half their days or traveled half the days they were alive.

And the angel says, but dude, when you were home, you were home.

Like you were all in.

You know, and that, that's a debate that, that's a debate that goes on.

I

Goes without saying, like, you know, I adore my children.

We have,

I have a very strong relationship with my kid.

I've missed my kids.

I've missed a lot of their lives.

But I've also spent some like extremely

impactful times with them where I'm able to just be immersed with them.

We just spent two weeks at our fish shack where they're like in my sight for two weeks.

When I'm home, I've pointed this out a bunch just to other

people that have young kids and stuff.

Like,

when I'm home,

like, what I like them, when I'm home, they see me serve, like, they see me serve the family.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, I clean, I cook.

When I'm home, I make dinner.

I lay dinner on the table, right?

I call them to the dinner table.

They eat family dinner whether I'm home or not.

They eat it with their mom or we all eat it as a family.

But like, I want them to, to know that, like, when I'm there, I'm there.

And, and, and that's one of the,

that, that is the sort of like, that's the compromise.

Is that hard for you to switch it off?

You know, long time ago, my wife came up with this rule where she said, um,

she's like, if it's, I remember sitting when we first had a kid, it's so funny to think about this now because he's like, like, little enough where they're like in the, hanging out in the bathtub.

And I remember needing to go out of town to work and I remember sitting there like weeping.

I was so sad when I had a little baby when I had to go out of town.

And my wife's like, you got to button, you got to button it up, dude.

You got to tighten up.

This isn't what it is.

Like you can't display, like you can't like display this

like lament, you know?

And then later she had said, if it's,

it's not going to be a big deal when you go

and it's not going to be a a big deal when you come home.

Meaning when you come home,

you merge into traffic, right?

Like, it's not like balloons and shit.

Like, welcome home, dad.

It's like you come in and you're, you're, you're, you're in it, you know?

And so, no,

I find it easy to come back.

A challenge I've had.

And due to all this pales in comparison, I was with the guy the other day.

I was with the guy the other day that came from your, that came from your professional world of military.

and his wife told me i was with him and his wife he told me that in the first three years of marriage they were together 200 days

so this is nothing like that it's nothing like that but i do find some parallels with with people that have dealt with that level of being gone um but no i don't my wife would tell you that i don't turn it off well i would argue that i've gotten better at it you know do you take your kids out with you now yeah that they're as old as i can get man any as i can get to business on business well i'm sorry I thought I meant to take him out in the woods and out in the field.

Yeah, both.

Both.

My older natural

exposing him.

My 15-year-old, I'm just now exposing him to

I'm now exposing him more and more to what I do.

He's very interested in it.

We never let him have any kind of social media.

Once he turned 15 and he was taller than me,

seemed weird to tell him when he's taller than me.

He's got like his learner's permit.

He takes a gun out of the gun cabinet and goes shooting skeet with his friends.

And it's hard to be like, you're not allowed to have social media.

You can take the shotgun, but no Facebook, you know.

So he has social media now and he likes to kind of post about his outdoor adventures, you know, and I encourage that

and keep a tight wrap on it.

But yeah, he's real curious in what I do.

He's, I'm not a photographer.

He's very interested in photography.

He's very interested in

communication.

So I'll be curious to see where that leads.

Right on, man.

But yeah, the other ones, man,

for me, the funnest thing now is to take them out hunting.

100%.

100%.

I don't even care if I get, like, to me, it doesn't matter to get stuff.

Just time.

Yeah, I just like to be my buddies are the same way.

Buddies of kids, after a while, they were like, you being the one that gets something.

No one cares about that anymore.

It's good to see the kids have success, you know?

Yeah, man.

That's like I was telling you at breakfast, I just, we've been, uh, I've been fishing with my son.

He's a toddler for almost a year.

This fall, it'll be a year.

It's been so fucking cool to watch him learn, figure out how to cast.

He learned in like a couple days.

I mean, now it's just

like trying to dodge bullets when he casts.

And all the untangling

hook in the nose.

But yeah,

it's just, I love watching him

reel a basset.

It's so cool, man.

I love being outdoors with my kid.

Yeah, it's good.

It's good to spend time.

It's good for them.

It's good for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But,

well, man, I just, I really appreciate you coming in.

I thought this was an awesome conversation.

Oh, well, thanks, man.

Like I said, I've always

admired your work and enjoyed watching the clips.

My boy likes watching the clips.

We have a good time.

He does?

Yeah.

Oh, we'll give him some stuff to take home.

Oh, really?

Yeah, man.

No, he likes it.

Yeah.

He likes, again, like me,

he likes hearing from all the warriors, man.

Cool.

Well, there's a lot more coming on.

Good, yeah.

But, Steve, honor to meet you, man.

Yeah, thank you, man.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Jerusalem.

Is there anything we didn't cover you want to cover?

Great, thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Yeah, that was awesome.

I really like that bow stuff, dude.

It's fun.

That's, I could see how that could get addicting.

Yeah, there's a lot of guys that find it like quite therapeutic to shoot, you know.

What is your, what's the favorite animal to hunt for me?

Yeah,

or maybe like the one you're most proud of.

Oh, yeah.

Well, I like hunting doll sheep, but I don't get as many opportunities to do it.

But like for day in, day out hunting, I like mule deer 100%.

I just love everything about them.

Love everything about them.

But I grew up on whitetails.

So it's funny because I got friends out there grew up out west and they're like, dude, that must be so cool.

Tree stand hunting whitetails.

But then we grew up tree stand hunting whitetails.

Like, that must be so cool to hunt the mountains for mule deer.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

It's like, it has a lot to do with that, but I like that.

And I've really gotten into,

I've been, I'm doing it for a long time, but I like to hunt moose.

I like to call moose.

Like on the 11th, I'll take off to go with my brother, Danny, who lives up in Alaska, to go call moose, you know, which is a total mind fuck.

Man.

It's a slow game.

It's a slow game.

Like a moose might take days to come to a call.

Like he hears it.

Oh, yeah.

And he might be like, yeah, eventually.

I'll eventually get over there.

Right on, man.

Yeah, it's kind of funny.

You know, you see them and they're like aware of you, but the time for them is different.

You know, Elk might heat just comes ripping in.

But Moose is like, yeah, I'll get over there in three days.

Is there,

I actually meant to ask you in the interview, but is there anything that you think the hunting industry is getting wrong, like in the public's eye?

Anything that pisses you off about the industry?

I think that, yeah,

there's a handful of things, but it's not anybody, but I think that a lot of the commentary around

a lot of the commentary around relationships with predators isn't accurate.

And I think that people are

what our ask needs to be on in the West on wolves and grizzlies.

Well, not just that, and not this West, upper Midwest.

What the aspect needs to be on wolves and grizzlies is it needs to be that like they're going to be on the landscape.

The ask, the days of it being that they're going to be gone,

that's not going to happen.

The ask needs to be that they be managed as game animals.

Gotcha.

It's like lamenting the existence of large predators

or just like, you know, this whole like smoke a pack a day, you know, shoot, shovel, shut up shit about wolves.

I don't think that that's productive.

Gotcha.

The ask is like, the ask is like, get them off the ESA.

What's that?

Endangered species act.

They shouldn't be, they don't qualify for Endangered Species Act protection, just like categorically.

When I started doing reintroductions on wolves and when they started doing protections on grizzlies, all the people, all the stakeholders came together and said, here's what recovery looks like.

Recovery will be this, this many breeding pairs, right?

This level of distribution.

We hit recovery on wolves and grizzly bears 20 years ago.

In some cases, even longer ago in some areas and but and and there's still is this faction of sportsmen that thinks we're going to go back to having those animals not out there preying on deer and it's dumb yeah like the ask is

delist

and manage as a game animal

um

that that's the thing that people gotta

And then in order to push their viewpoint, they kind of over, they like exaggerate human risk on things that there's not human risk.

There's not like a reasonable human risk.

Like, wolves don't

like wolves just don't fuck with people,

you know, mountain lions every now and then, but predators need to be there.

Yeah, they need to be managed as game animals.

Yeah, we need to have hunting, you know.

Like, it's ridiculous right now that there's no wolf hunting in the upper Great Lakes.

It's ridiculous.

Um,

they need to, you know, they delisted, then they listed again.

That needs to be a hunted population of wolves,

but

they're not going away.

What about like invasive species and stuff, like hogs down south?

And I mean,

I used to have a habit of asking guys that own land that had hogs on it that bitch about the hogs.

And I'd be like, if you could wave a magic wand, I've asked so many farmers and ranchers, I'm like, if you could wave a magic wand and they would really be all gone,

would you wave it?

And they're always like, I mean, I don't want them all gone

again and again.

You know, I was like, I don't want them all gone.

I mean, that's ridiculous.

Yeah, but, you know,

the

thing that hunters don't, if you're going to look at from a conservation habitat perspective,

non-native plants

are probably,

I think that you would probably get buy-in on that statement.

You'd probably get buy-in on that statement from most people that non-native plants are a greater risk to hunting in America than non-native wildlife.

It's a little bit,

there are cases where one could argue that because in the Mississippi system, the Asiatic carp species have to be having an impact on game fish.

There's no way they're not having an impact on game fish.

So that's a huge thing in that area.

Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes is a big problem, but non-native

habitat that is becoming that it doesn't support wildlife because it's got plants that wildlife can't utilize, like that's a problem.

Whole fucking hillside.

I mean, whole mountainsides

taken over by plants called like spotted nap weed, leafy spurge, whole mountainsides used to support animals or hillsides used to support animals now don't.

No shit.

I did not realize that.

Canadian thistle.

It's another one.

Like ecosystems that had game that don't have game because they can't digest noxious weeds.

Interesting.

I never thought about that.

Noxious weeds are a huge, will be a huge problem in the future.

I mean, they're already a huge problem.

Like, if you,

anywhere, if you went anywhere and talked to someone from like most states, if you went and talked with someone, it's like we got plant problems more than we got animal problems.

You familiar with like the pollinator crisis?

No.

Losing

Losing all of our pollinators.

Oh, like bees?

Yeah, I have heard of that.

From habitat and also habitat and then the fucking pesticides.

Damn.

Herbicides and pesticides.

And I'm not hacking it, dude.

Like people got to eat, you know?

If you wanted to live in a world with no herbicides and no pesticides, you should probably plan on losing about half the world's population to starvation.

Right?

It's like a real fucking conundrum.

It could be that anyone that's poor dies because we don't use herbicides and pesticides anymore, or we continue to like wipe out

insect species and wipe out plant species that are sort of the foundation of,

you know, all of our environmental shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Man, that's an interesting aspect.

I never thought of.

Yeah, it's, it's one of those, it's one of those hidden things.

And it's like, and a lot of people, um,

a lot of people aren't hip to it, you know, but I have have the like I have the luxury of of of I have the luxury of just like occupying a

world and occupying a conversation that you know some guy that works his fucking ass off and

you know gets to hunt a few weekends a year and he's happy if he can hunt four weekends a year it's just like he just doesn't have time for

hearing about all that shit you know yeah because he's got whatever he's trying to fucking raise his family and so there's people that just there's a lot of sportsmen that don't know.

And it's not necessarily like ignorance.

It's just like, it's just complicated.

And so they might be like, what's wrong with hunting?

You know, why are you not seeing deer?

And it's like, oh, fucking coyotes.

It's like, yeah, it's more complicated, dude.

That's easy, but it's, it's more complicated.

You know?

Interesting.

Yeah, the predator thing is a, is a,

and, and you wind up fighting both extremes.

Like, I wind up arguing.

Um, I'm always arguing with people that think that, like,

I'm always arguing with people that think that wolves fucking walk around eating granola or flowers,

you know, be like, no, dude, wolves have a major impact.

Coyotes have a major impact.

And then I turn around and I'm arguing with some guy that thinks it's the only thing that matters is that if we just killed more coyotes, the world would be overrun with wild game.

You're like, you guys are both fucked up.

Damn.

You guys are both wrong.

We want to grab some lunch.

Mm-hmm.

Cool.