#610 - Steven Rinella

Today's guest is a renowned outdoorsman.

He's a hunter.

He's a survivalist.

He has his own show, Meat Eater, on Netflix, as well as his podcast.

I had a great time learning about some of the beautiful and brutal aspects of our world.

Today's guest is Mr.

Steve Rennella.

Oh, you're having a little, huh?

You having a little bit of that?

I'm familiar with that product.

Oh, hell yeah, brother.

We just gave something to an Amish kid the other day.

Never read it, huh?

Did he like it?

What, Celsius?

I mean, when you gave it to him, did he dig it?

I mean, he definitely, he couldn't, he couldn't bend his arms for a couple minutes.

It hit him.

Because of why.

I mean, brother.

It's just unfamiliar.

I think, yeah, something like something, you know, you put that brain petrol that is Celsius into a damn Amish.

You know?

He might want to plug in something in.

I mean, he might.

I thought he's going to get.

He's going to put his finger in that.

He wants to find out what it's all about.

He's going to put his finger in that socket.

Yeah.

Oh,

I thought he's going to get court-martialed right there or something.

I don't know what was going to happen.

What was the circumstances you were hanging out with the Amish guy?

We finally got a hold of one.

Woodwork?

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

Yeah, we finally got a hold of one.

We've been trying to not capture an Amish or whatever.

I don't know what the terminology is, but we've been trying to

wrangle one, I guess, because you can't get a hold of them.

You know, you can put messages out there.

You can do message in a bottle or shit.

They don't reply to a lot of that.

And so finally, we had a guy who was on Rum Springer.

Yep.

He was on their kind of like, it's like spring break for the Amish.

And

he came to a comedy show.

There he is right there.

And while on Rum Springer, he looks young for Rum Springer.

He's young.

He got out there and he brought me this hat, too.

And he came.

Great kid, though.

We learned so much about it, but he'd never seen so many things.

It was unbelievable.

But he'd never had a hit of Celsius when we got it in him.

Hmm.

So

we'll see.

Now he's got his Rum Springer documented.

Oh, yeah.

But it might make it difficult for him to integrate back in.

Oh, I'm sure, dude.

Yeah, because people, well, maybe they won't, maybe his community won't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, mean, yeah, that's a good point.

I don't even know.

It'd be a good honesty test.

If they know, you'll know they violated.

How do they know?

Yeah.

It's a good point, actually.

So we're helping out.

Yeah, but it was just interesting to get to talk to somebody who'd lived like, you know, it's a total different life than the average American, probably.

Are you making the show right now or is this pre, are we pre-making the show?

Oh, this can be the show.

Yeah.

I mean, we can start into it.

Sorry.

Oh, no, I don't care.

And so that's one type of person who kind of has their own like way of living.

Yep.

And you're another type of person who has had a unique life and has like good good good transition was it no oh damn

um

i thought it was gonna be i think i don't know what's gonna happen but um

no you have a show on netflix called meat eater

and you guys are in your you guys are we made a lot we've been we've been we we got i got a 13th season of the show coming out we've made many many many episodes over the years yeah and they they appear in a lot of different places

yep we've seen some of them on youtube um i've gotten to enjoy some of them.

So thank you so much, man.

It's definitely exciting to watch.

It's really beautifully shot to you guys's show.

You went turkey hunting with Mike Waddell, I heard.

Oh, yeah, I did.

Yeah, I went down there and it was fun, but it's like,

I don't know, some of the tur, it's like

they just seem like an unwell bird.

What do you mean?

Turkeys.

Unwell in what way?

They just don't seem like they're

like a top, like

I don't want to say like they

on it, like I don't want to say uneducated.

They just seem like they

like they got picked last for gym, kind of.

Dude, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

About a turkey?

Yeah, if you look at a turkey, it doesn't seem like they, like, they can't do, they just are,

yeah, they just, I don't know, they weren't doing a lot.

Dude, it's a big-ass bird.

His head changes colors from red to white to blue.

He tastes good.

Yeah, he's basically the toe.

He fucking walks around the woods making insane noises.

Yeah.

which is.

But I mean, like,

it's an omnivore.

It can eat all kinds of, it can eat all kinds of stuff.

Okay.

Well, now you're selling me on it.

Yeah.

Wild elder nigga.

I mean, like, like.

What elder names are.

Name a better bird.

It's like, you could be like, oh, a bald eagle.

He eats a bunch of rotten fish from the side.

Like, like, a turkey, that's America's bird, dude.

Are you familiar with a gentleman named Ben Franklin?

Yeah.

Okay.

Do you know that Franklin didn't like the bald eagle as a national bird because it was a scavenger?

And he threw out some, it's debated how honest you it's bait.

It's debated if he was trying to be a smart ass or not.

Ben Franklin said America ought to go with the wild turkey because at least it's a vain bird.

What does vein bird mean?

It's beautiful.

He puffs his feathers.

The male puffs his feathers all out.

Yeah.

He's got a snood.

He's got like a, imagine like a pecker on your, laid across your face.

Okay.

That changes all the time.

It gets erect.

Wait.

It goes limp.

Turkey has that?

Yeah, dude.

It's like to just come in and like start disparaging a turkey right off the top of the bat.

You don't know me.

I'm just, okay.

I'm just it's like very, it's like, it's disrespectful.

That is a, that is a, that is the, the best, that's the best bird in our, in our country.

Okay.

Well, look, I didn't, no one's ever, first of all, lobbied for this animal in front of me.

Well, Franklin.

Well, not in front of you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

I didn't know him personally.

Yeah, yeah.

And you don't know how old I am.

Maybe I was there.

I'm with you.

But no, Waddell did not.

Waddell was just like, we're killing these MFers.

And he used some slurs.

I'll say that straight up.

He used a couple of slurs.

And I was like, I don't think those are for birds or Annimalia even.

But he was like, I think I,

I think I just had a unique

angle into it.

Tell me more about that nose wiener that they got or that nose goal.

That's called a snood.

Okay.

Bring it up.

They got.

See, you get into turkey anatomy, man.

They got a lot going on for them.

They got a snood.

There's not many birds that have, like, basically a

so they have a cloaca.

Like, birds have a cloaca, like called like a uni hole.

All their actions,

defecating, taking a leak.

Well, when they defecate and take a leak, it's kind of a single deal.

Okay.

I'll do that.

They have sex through the uni hole.

When they shit,

you can tell a male from a female by the shape of its shit.

Wow.

A male throws a J-shaped hooked shit.

So there's not many birds you can sex his shit.

Yeah.

He's got a snood.

They got spurs,

sometimes an inch and a quarter long for fighting.

Oh, yeah.

You ever been to a cockfight?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

They got spurs.

Look at that.

Some of those spurs are so big you can hang the turkey by the spur on a branch.

That's called a limb hanger.

That means he's huge.

Some got a, they got, like, pull up the beard.

Pull up the beard.

Pull up the beard.

They got a beard, which is actually a feather.

Look at that.

Hold on, let me see it.

When he's big, when that, when that gets so big that it drags on the ground, you know what you call him?

Rope dragger.

Oh, yeah.

So you got limb hangers, rope draggers.

Yeah.

Like, it's just, you kind of.

Okay.

I couldn't, you know, I could walk out of this room right now.

Okay.

And it'd be like, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

But I'm not going to do that.

Well, first of all.

Yeah, because you talk bad about the America's bird.

I appreciate that.

And look,

I'm glad that I.

I'm not going to get up and storm out, dude.

You might.

But look, you won't storm out without teaching me something.

I'll say that.

And I didn't know any of that.

Turkeys are great.

Yeah.

Their head changes from red, white, to blue.

It's kind of like they knew that they were going to be America's bird.

Oh, yeah.

They're the fucking Trace Atkins of birds.

When they get real excited, like when you see, when he's coming in and his head gets that whitish color to it huh

he is fired up okay so what does that mean when their head changes to different color you want look at this guy he's blue and white like blue and white he's torn between some feelings yeah blue and white he's he's in he's like

blue and white he's coming in You hunt him in the spring during the breeding season.

Okay.

Blue and white, he's coming in and he's, he's,

he's thinking, he's thinking about ass.

Okay, so he's looking for sex but yeah what else had us we were in the offseason they were in the locker room when we went to chase them they were not even on the field they were fucking back there you know getting uh physical there i mean we were in some i was like should we even yeah some of them had their towels around their necks they were sitting there texting their wives like it was there was the offseason if he's coming in like

he's coming in you see a blue head okay

And then all of a sudden, you know what?

And he's coming in.

He's all puffed out.

And another thing.

I know.

I'm sorry.

Well, they got, so they got the big, you heard the big gobble.

Bow!

Yes.

All right.

If you're, if you're telling a turkey hunting story

and you get to the part of the story where, like, picture you're telling a story that has a gun in it.

Okay.

And we get to the part of the story where the gun goes off.

You go, like, and I heard bang.

Right.

It's not what it sounds like.

Right.

But you go back.

And then, boom.

Yeah.

A friend of mine's Latvian, and when they hear, when they get to the part of a story where the gun goes off, they say, blouch.

Okay.

So if you're telling a turkey story and he gobbles it's hard to make the gobble noise so in the story you'd go

yeah but it's like

but if you when he's coming in like if he's coming in and he thinks he's coming into a hen you're making a hen noise yeah yeah so the noise that the man that that um like michael waddell was making and he makes that noise really well oh yeah he's he's the best of the best oh yeah i mean he was calling a couple of fucking but i mean even some busty chicks from the gas station he was like he was

Yeah, so he's making a hen noise and what's what's oh dude people were dudes were coming out of the closet when he was doing it.

I mean he'll fucking he'll call he'll he'll get you he'll get people going.

Oh, he's very good.

And what what like what would happen in what would happen in the natural setting there is the gobbler is just cruising.

Okay, and the gobbler is that big male turkey.

He's a big male turkey.

He's cruising.

And chicks are supposed to hear him.

Mm-hmm.

And like he doesn't, he's kind of got his little route and they're supposed to kind of come into him.

So he's on the highway, going down the highway and and they're kind of coming on the ramps.

Okay, the on ramps to catch him.

Oh, oh, so

what you're trying to do is you're trying to get him to be like, Well, I'm gonna go over there and have a see.

Like, it would, that's not normally what I would do, right?

But what is going on over there?

I need to go out of my way now to go have a see.

What's happening?

If when he's coming, you see like a blue head

and he's coming, and he's going like this.

You can't hear it.

Like, if you hear it, he's in range.

He's going.

Here's what it sounds like.

He's going.

He's doing two things.

He's spitting.

Okay.

He's making a noise.

We always goof on it and go like,

but it's like he's making a noise with his mouth.

Okay.

And he's taking his wings and

on the ground.

Okay.

And that is the, that is like extremely exciting noise to hear.

So the first part is with their actual, they do it with their mouth and the second part they do it with their wings on the ground.

And he's drumming.

Wow.

So it's a real mating call.

Yeah.

Like you'll hear him like, you'll hear him.

He's kind of like making, he's like doing a vocalization.

He's doing a vocalization, but like he's got his wings.

You hear on the ground.

Okay.

And you'll even see, you'll sometimes be going down a sandy trail or something.

You'll see the wing drags and you can tell that one's been cutting it out there.

And they do this little dance.

Wow.

Oh, yes.

Dude, it's the best thing in the world.

But if he's coming in and all of a sudden, his head turns red.

His head turns red and lifts up.

And if he goes,

game's up.

Oh, he knows.

He knows that you've, he knows that, he knows that it's not good.

Like, when you hear that noise, he's on his way out.

But what's the problem with.

Wait, when you hear what noise?

He's on the way out though.

When he putts.

Oh, when he putts.

His head goes, boom, red lifts up and puts.

He's gone.

But they don't do anything too quick.

But that's his way of saying, like, I don't like it.

Wow.

This isn't about ladies anymore.

Oh, it's about dudes being secretive, pretending they're women.

No, they're like an absolutely fascinating bird.

You know, I took

years ago.

Like, you've been out, you know, you know, Rogan.

I took turkey hunting with him years ago, and he wound up being kind of underwhelmed by turkeys.

There might be something like

some kind of like

offshoot of being a comedian.

Is it you can't appreciate turkeys?

Well, I think there's...

Do you think that there might be something to that?

That's a good question.

I think,

oh, I remember watching this.

He had Brian Callan, too, which was, that's hilarious.

Oh, yeah.

They didn't appreciate turkeys.

Drove me.

Yeah.

I know.

Turkey people do not like it.

If you do not like Turkey, talking to being

thinking about turkeys.

No, if you just said something bad about my three kids, I'd be like, yeah, I see that.

I'm like, yeah, that's fair.

But like with the turkey deal, no.

Right.

It's baked.

Yeah.

Turkey's baked into American history.

I didn't know that much about turkeys.

I think if I knew some of this, and maybe I didn't ask enough stuff, you know, I think if I'd have asked more stuff and I'd have known a little bit more of like the lore, I think I probably would have been more hyped about it.

Yeah.

Can I give you the one more lore bit?

Yeah, sure.

So

when at the time of like when Europeans arrived in North America,

there were turkeys.

They think there may be turkeys in like 34 states.

And then they were extirpated from many of those states because they were good to eat.

Everybody wanted to eat them.

People would hunt them at night.

shoot them out of the trees at night.

It was a popular food item.

Yeah.

And they nearly wiped them out.

And it got to where there's only turkeys hiding out in like the deepest patches of swamps, up in the highest mountain woods, you know, hiding out here and there.

And it got bad, right?

There was only a couple states where you're allowed to hunt them anymore.

And then they started putting them back out there.

You can hunt turkeys now in 49 states.

Wow.

You can hunt turkeys now in more states than had turkeys.

A cost to that of the bird is that people now take the bird for granted.

Like from a PR standpoint, I was talking about eagles earlier.

From a PR standpoint, eagles are kind of everywhere now.

There's still people who'll see an eagle and they'll be like, oh my God, an eagle.

They're like, but dude, you know, we have a little shack in Alaska and you might see 13 eagles in one tree.

Yeah.

So from a PR standpoint, they have a little bit of, they like, you risk overexposure as a bird.

Turkeys are so everywhere now that now we have like town turkeys.

With those wandering around like stray animals.

And so the mystique, it like it costs them some of their mystique.

And then people will get a sense from town turkeys, which aren't hunted.

They'll get a sense of that a turkey is whatever, that he's not cautious, that he's not careful, right?

Right.

That'll just use any crosswalk or whatever.

Yeah.

So a lot of times when people disparage the turkey, they're referring to some town turkey, but they don't know what a turkey who's out there busting ass.

in the woods

with people trying to kill him and coyotes trying to kill him and bobcats trying to kill him and red fox trying to kill him and possums eating their eggs and skunks eating their eggs and raccoons eating their eggs great horned owls blasting them out of trees and they survive through all that so when i think of a turkey i'm thinking of a persecuted turkey some people are thinking of a town turkey yeah it's just different

Yeah, I think I was probably thinking of like, yeah, I mean, there's a turkey right there.

It's almost

catching a bus to work or whatever.

I mean, that's fucking unbelievable that that's what's going on.

But no,

I didn't know.

I mean, I think that gives me like definitely a different appreciation for them.

I didn't know they had so much baked in.

Like there's such a thermometer of like sexual activity, and so many like little ratings are relevant right on them and the way that they operate and the sounds that they make.

They're a dynamic bird.

And that I'll agree to 100%, man.

So, all like, here's another thing about them.

Can I heat you with one more?

Yeah.

Most of the domestic animals that we utilize, okay,

when you go into a store and you see what's for sale down there for domestic meats, you know, whether you buy, even you buy weird shit, like you buy lamb, goat,

pork,

beef, okay.

That's all,

that all winds up being like Eurasian,

species of Eurasian origin that became domesticated.

And when you say Eurasian, what are you talking about?

You're talking about animals, animals that are indigenous, animals that are endemic to Europe and Asia became like the domestics that we know today.

Wow.

So when you see like a horse, that's a Eurasian creature.

Cattle came from a thing called the Oryx.

Okay.

Goats came from

other continents.

Sheep, other continents.

The turkey is uniquely North American.

Really?

Okay, so when the Spanish came, they took turkeys.

They drew turkeys from Mesoamerica,

brought them back to Europe, and turned them into like the white-looking butterball turkeys through selective breeding, and then brought those turkeys back to the New World.

But it's like the New World's contribution.

It's North America's contribution to the domesticated species that we know and love today.

Got it.

So if you go into a meat market and you're like, they got all the normal shit laid out, turkey is one that you're like, that's origin is here.

It's a new world creature because the new world didn't produce,

the new world didn't produce domestics.

Like they didn't, we haven't like effectively domesticated New World animals, but the turkey is an exception.

Wow, so that really is kind of our national national animal, huh?

Oh, yeah, dude.

You think it's our most national animal, not just bird?

I can't answer that.

I haven't thought about that before.

Yeah.

Damn, dude.

No, thanks, bro.

Yeah, I think it's interesting, like, yeah, to learn about that kind of stuff.

When I was growing up and stuff, I didn't have like a lot of influence in that kind of world, you know?

Like the wildlife world.

Yeah, I think hunting or something.

I mean, the first thing.

I mean, I saw a buddy of mine get shot by a couple brothers at Mardi Gras once.

That was like my intro to hunting, you know, like, and I was like, oh, shit.

Did he live or die?

Huh?

He lived.

Yeah.

Where did he get hit?

He got hit in the back, kind of right here.

Just a stray bullet.

Yeah, it looked like a 12.

Like aimed at him, or he just caught a bullet.

Aimed at him.

Oh, I got it.

Yeah.

Or like semi-aimed, I guess.

Yeah.

I mean, the guy looked like he didn't know what he was doing that much, but he was shooting.

Yeah.

That's, you know, I said, I wanted to ask you a question.

I wanted to ask, like,

how many years did you spend growing up in Louisiana?

When I was reading up on your background a little bit, and you spent time in Illinois, but also in Louisiana.

Yeah.

I spent time in Louisiana until I think I was maybe 21 or 22.

And

but yeah, we'd go up to Illinois in the in the uh in the summers and fish.

We did a ton of fishing and we would do a good bit of fishing in Louisiana, but um I just never really got into hunting.

The first time I ever went hunting was with Michael Waddell.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

What I want with Louisiana, have you

that was the last state I ever went to and I mean like went to went to was Louisiana.

Have you did you switch?

Did you switch to Gulf of America?

No.

You didn't switch.

No, I would be will.

I want to see how it pans out first.

Because Mexico,

bring it up.

Let's get a look at that big puddle, brother, because what I'm trying to see is where is most of the land around it?

Well, shit all over the place.

Northern, South America.

I think you do a year for each area.

Like maybe you do like everybody gets a year and then you look back and see how good that year was.

You do like, and then they get it.

You know what I'm saying?

You get one year to operate that MF, and then you see who really owns that bitch.

That's to me, that's like a fair way to do it.

Um,

yeah, the reason I was asked about it is: we, once I found out about Louisiana, we filmed a couple, we filmed a number of episodes down there.

I started going there with friends because we spearfished the oil rigs.

And

so,

right when all that shit was heating up,

okay,

we're like cutting an episode about that was filmed out in the Gulf.

And between the time I wrote the VO

and the time we recorded the VO,

all this shit hit the fan.

Okay.

So I'm sitting there and in my, in my script, it's Gulf of Mexico.

But then it switches.

So we're in the studio and I'm talking to my colleagues and we're trying to decide what way we roll on it.

And we tried doing like a joke.

We tried doing like the Gulf of, you know,

but then we thought, that's like a dated joke.

And in the the end after careful contemplation i was like i i can't switch yeah like i'm old you know i'm i'm half a century old yeah it's just it's maybe i'll leave it to the youngers but um for me i i i can't like i can't do it i can't switch yeah it just seemed kind of like i i think you got to figure out who's going to earn it i think you got to find some way maybe there's a competition each year and then between mexico and america and some of the other countries those are smaller countries that are touching it i think like Cuba.

It ain't going to be the Gulf of Cuba, though.

Yeah, they probably wouldn't let that happen.

But I think you have a competition each year, and whoever wins it, they get to name it.

Maybe it's a soccer game or something, and whoever wins it, they get it for the E.

Yeah, that's kind of fucking dope, actually.

Like a soccer tournament isn't really applicable.

Well, I think it's applicable, Steven.

And what I'm going to tell you is this, brother, that's as far as I got with that.

But

I think the soccer would be fun because a lot of people love soccer.

That's what I'm thinking, you know.

But yeah, maybe it's a fishing rodeo.

I think then they're, aren't they automatically going to kick our ass?

I don't know.

I was trying to think of something we'd win better.

Maybe it's a, and this would actually be, this is actually a great idea.

I think it's 10 events.

It's Mexico and America.

Yes.

Look up all the shit, man.

Yeah.

Swimming in there, hunting on the edge of it.

I wonder if we could get.

Spear fishing it.

Spear fishing and just fucking

somebody singing near the edge and seeing if officials swim up.

That's fishing.

You know, I was going to tell you about these.

I I told your producer this:

uh,

guys I work with were buying these Celsiuses,

and I didn't know that I didn't hadn't, I didn't really read what was on there, so I was drinking them all damn time.

Like, they were, I was drinking them like like uh like seltzers, and I was having a hard time sleeping.

And someone pointed out

to like, Well, you've been drinking those stupid things all day, and I was like, I thought I was drinking LaCroix or something.

It is good, I know that.

I'll say this straight up, baby bear: anywhere worth going

is worth going

in a boot.

Mm.

I put my feet in some boots and I say, yeah, baby girl.

I love that.

And I've found some perfect pairs of boots with Takovas.

Takovas crafts quality Western boots for everyone, from generational ranchers and lifelong cowboys to first-time boot buyers.

Takovas boots are handcrafted with over 200 meticulous steps for broken in comfort right out of the box.

When the leaves start changing, that means it's boot season.

Whether you're in the office, or you're out on a date night, or you're just meeting up for a casual hang, or you're just tickling a kid in the park.

Boots are great because you can dress them up or down.

I love them.

And right now you can get 10% off at tacovas.com/slash theo when you sign up for email and texts.

That's 10% off at

dot com slash theo.

Tacovas.com slash theo.

See site for details.

Tacovas point your toes west.

In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you can only pick two.

What if you could have all three at the same time?

That's exactly what Cohere, Thompson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high-availability, consistently high-performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds.

How is it faster?

OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

Cheaper?

OCI costs up to 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

Better?

In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.

This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free.

Head to oracle.com slash theo.

That's oracle.com slash theo.

Dude, let's listen real quick to Michael Waddell.

Play that.

Let's listen.

Yeah, he's good.

Let's listen to him.

He's going to make some turkey noises.

I think that's a good idea.

I like him, man.

He's a fun guy.

Oh, he's so great, dude.

I get to spend,

we go to a summer camp together every year with him and his family, and it's fucking hilarious.

I would say volume control.

and going from soft to aggressive if that's the way you want to call it or louder is important to find in a diaphragm.

If you get those

tones and you can control that, it don't have to sound perfect.

Um, my opinion on turkey calling, rhythm is more important

than

specifically the sound of it.

That's what I've been saying.

That's what I've been saying, dude.

I think one thing that would be cool, wonder if he could put together almost like a animal call orchestra where it was like you had this sort of like an orchestra pit, and somebody was like the conductor, and they had all the animal

idea.

It'd be kind of neat.

We got, I was hip on this idea for a while.

We didn't take it as far as I wanted to, but what I wanted to do is I got a directional, we bought a directional mic and I wanted to build a catalog of, I didn't know what I was, I never thought about what I was going to do with it.

We actually bought the damn thing.

I wanted to build a catalog of animal

noises.

Yeah.

So we picked up different noises and then kind of abandoned it.

I think because I didn't know what we didn't, I hadn't really decided what we were going to do with them.

I could think of something.

I just wanted them.

Oh, yeah.

Like a great catalog of animal noises that people wouldn't know.

You could do a couple things with them that come into my mind.

One of them is you

orchestra.

Yeah.

Create, have that.

A second one is people that are deceased, put a special headset on them.

It guarantees it'll play for 30 years or whatever.

They get to have that.

All the best animals of the world on the way out.

A third idea, I think it could be neat, would be if you created, oh, this would be cool.

You create one of those things.

I shouldn't say it'd be cool.

Who knows?

It might be horrible.

I don't think it's that great.

I'm going to say it.

What it is, is it's like one of those white noise machines, but it's all the fucking animals, dude.

And it's Steve Renella's fucking,

come sleep with Steve, it's called.

That's a great thing.

Now I got to check my wife on that shit.

I know every now and then, every now and then in the distance of the animals, you hear Steve's wife be like, it better just be you in there.

But that's what it's a special machine.

And it's all, and then every now and then, you can go to different regions of the world and hear them.

You can go to Africa.

Sleep with me in Africa.

Yeah, sleep with me.

Sleep with me in Asia or whatever.

Yeah.

Sleep with me in Alabama.

And every now and then, there's just some country dude.

And he's like, oh, something's.

I'm going to go fuck one of these things or whatever.

You're like, whoa, whoa, buddy.

But it's just like a unique way to fall asleep at night.

Are you hip to the are you hip to the app Merlin?

I've not even heard of it.

Yeah, you should check it out.

I've had people that design the app on

your podcast?

Yeah.

So is your podcast called Meat Eaters 2?

It's called the Meat Eater Podcast.

Meat Eater Podcast.

So

when you're out in your yard and you hear birds off in the distance, anywhere, and you open it up,

it just listens and tells you what birds

tells you what, it's a phenomenal app.

The reason I bring that up

is it's what is harmful to people's

self-esteem is when you're turkey hunting

and you're making, you're mimicking the noises.

So we'll open up Merlin

and be like,

is it picking you up or not, bro?

Is it throwing, is it saying there's a turkey over there?

Is it not saying there's a a turkey over there?

Yeah.

Like, I got friends that are very, that put enormous amounts of energy into learning how to mimic the call of a barred owl.

Really?

Yeah.

Like, you mean those.

What is it?

Yeah.

They go like,

I got a roll.

Yeah.

You do it loud as shit.

Okay, hold on, just give me a second.

Anyways,

they, yeah, like,

yeah, I'm not good at it.

Southerners are good at it.

It's a very southern thing.

Like, yeah, there's like Yankees that can do it, but they're not going to do it like a Southerner.

The barred owl, pull it up.

I just want to get a gander at it.

Sorry, you had it up.

Yeah, pull up Clay Newcombe.

Say Clay Newcomb, barred owl.

Or unless you want to hear the real thing.

No, I want to start with this man.

Well, he's a southerner.

Oh, yeah, he is.

Oh, this is me and Clay.

You see Clay and the birds, right?

Anyhow, definitely, dude.

You got to stay in school, brother.

What is fun is to open up Merlin and see who's got it.

And then get off a ways.

Yeah.

And so one of my buddies, who is a Yankee, he's a northerner, buddy Seth, like, he's a real good owl caller.

Yeah.

And it started realizing when he realized that Merlin,

like, when he realized that Merlin wasn't picking him up, wasn't putting him down as a barred owl.

He had like an emotional crisis and started redoing his shit and working on his shit until Merlin, he had to change his stuff until he could figure out why Merlin wasn't grabbing him.

Look, all I'm telling you is that motherfucker ain't registering on Merlin.

That's all.

Look, I'm going to shoot you straight.

That's crazy.

It's also crazy to be.

I actually, now this, I really understand, wanting to be this animal.

And my, my, being an owl.

Yeah.

Wanting to really get into their head.

And we had, I've had a little bit of owl, actually.

My sister's husband cooked two owls during Thanksgiving.

Well, he might want to keep, he might want to keep that more secret.

Yeah, I don't know if he did it.

He, I mean,

I haven't seen him in a long time.

That's what I'll tell you.

But he, it's not a lot of meat.

i'll tell you that

it's kind of like that like you see those women in little house on the prairie a lot of skirts not a lot of meat under there you know yeah no that's good that's a good way to put it you'd think it's going to be philadelphia under there but it's a little more arizona when you get on yeah see i'd tell you a good story my father told me but i don't and he's dead so they're not gonna do anything bad i will tell it i don't know why my father did this Okay, I don't know why my father did this.

But it talks about that, like a lot of skirt, not much.

Not much meat, yeah.

So

obviously, my father was from another

time.

My dad was born in 19.

He had me when he's old.

He was born in the Great Depression.

Oh, wow.

Like 1910?

No, not that late.

He was a World War II veteran.

Oh, wow.

Anyhow.

Thank you, Mr.

Ranneller, for your service.

He tells a story about sitting deer hunting with his bow and some, oh, there he is on the right there.

He tells a story about...

sitting deer hunting with his bow

and uh deciding to shoot an owl with his bow.

And he says he doesn't, and he feels like he hits the owl.

I can't account for why he would decide to do this.

It's not something I would do.

I don't condone it.

Shoots the owl and like hits it dead center.

But he said the owl doesn't even change tune.

Wow.

Because he realizes just it's all feathers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's all Brazil, baby.

No tip.

That was his only owl hunting story.

And he didn't, well, the owl escaped unharmed.

Yeah.

He's a motherfucker.

Bro, what are we doing?

What are we doing, bro?

Yeah, there you go.

If you don't think all of the world is a psyop, look at this MFer, homie.

Look at this thing right here.

You know, you want to know a current controversy about the barred owl?

Mm-hmm.

I love that too.

The noise that Clay was just making there and the owls are making?

Okay, do you remember back to...

Do you remember back to the kind of culture war issue around spotted owls?

Like logging in the Pacific Northwest and the spotted owl.

Well, I think they were tearing down their habitats, right?

Exactly.

And the spotted owl became, this happens to animals now and then, where a spotted owl stopped being an owl

and kind of became like a cultural emblem.

Oh, yeah, like when they put them on frontier airlines, like on their wing?

Yeah, sure.

It'd be like, like, like, wolves occupy this now.

Like, there's wolves as flesh and blood creatures, and then there's sort of the symbolism of the wolf.

Right.

So the spotted owl became a symbolism symbolism of

land use, you know, like land use controversy.

Meaning they're yet loggers in the Pacific Northwest trying to produce harvest, you know, harvest timber products, but there's this owl they're trying, this endangered species, this owl that they're trying to protect.

So the owl becomes this kind of like proxy symbol for whether we should cut trees or not.

I remember even in Dumb and Dumber, they had the, they went to the banquet where they were raising money for the spotted owl.

Exactly.

So it became like a cultural thing.

Barred owls are one of those species like Canada geese, white-tailed deer, crows that do really well,

that they benefit off people, right?

Like

the more people there are in more places, the more beneficial it is to that owl.

That owl does well in disturbed ecosystems.

They like people.

They'll hang out above your house.

They'll hunt in your yard.

Like we don't bother them.

Other things hate people.

But this thing that's gradually happening is barred owls, which were historically more in the eastern U.S.,

are colonizing

the spotted owls range and displacing spotted owls.

So there's this big push, and there was even federal money.

I don't know where it stands right now.

I think the current administration was rolling it back.

There was a push where they were going to go kill right there.

They were going to cull 470,000 barred owls in the Pacific Northwest.

To keep them from migrating?

To try to save the spotted owl.

The The spotted owl.

Fuck.

And I think they might have pulled that money.

I'm not sure.

But

just a little, like, you know, like wildlife politics.

Like, there's always wildlife politics brewing, you know?

Yeah.

And so there's this kind of thing, like, does it make sense?

You know, that you ask the question.

And it's not like people are moving them in trucks.

They're moving on their own.

So if, like, if this bird is getting there on his own.

Nature.

Yeah, he's getting there on his own, under his own wing,

spreading across.

is that

can you really call it that that's like colonization bad or or is it just that this natural like throughout your 45 years of life raccoons have gone north and west throughout your 45 years of life opossums have gone north and west barred owls have gone west all on their own

it's human in that they're sort of like our crop fields, our clearings, our developments don't bother them.

They're beneficial to them.

Right.

So we don't have an effect really on it.

Yeah.

So we're like, it's happening.

And they're talking about, you know, dusting off that many, you know, dusting off that many owls.

And

I don't know.

I mean, that's interesting.

Yeah.

It's like, how much do you want to mess up with what Mother Nature is doing?

You know, it says right here, yes, funding for the barred owl removal initiative was recently pulled in July 2025.

The Trump administration terminated three critical federal grants totaling about $1.1 million, which were essential for launching the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Services Planet, coal-barred owls across across California, Oregon, and Washington.

Who was going to do that?

Were they just going to send some?

How would they go about that?

Do you think that?

I applied for one of those gigs one time.

They were doing,

I just thought it was kind of interesting.

There's another animal that lives that is in more places than it was historically, the mountain goat.

And there was this project one time to, they were trying to get mountain goats out of Olympic.

Was it out of?

No, no, no, not out of Olympic National Park.

I can't remember.

Pull up a mountain goat.

It's a a great animal.

Now, you do not see a lot of these around here.

No, no, no, no, no.

But they were looking for teams of people to go do this mountain goat coal.

Yeah, of course they were.

And so we made like a team.

Get professional wrestlers, dude.

Get a profit.

We made a team to do the mountain goat coal, and our team was not selected because a part of the thing was they wanted you to keep your mouth shut.

And I think that they looked and they were like, this guy's not going to keep his mouth shut about that shit.

He's like a fucking writer.

So they're like, I think they saw through me.

i and i had a i had a crack commando team put together yeah but didn't get the nod oh because i think that they could see that like like let's say you're a writer and you're trying to get in the military they're like yeah i got a feeling this guy's gonna this ain't patriotism yeah do you know what i'm saying so i didn't get the i didn't get the job it's almost like armageddon where that team gets chosen to go save the world or whatever

you guys should have got the chance brother that'd be a great movie i had a crack commando team put together really who'd you get on it you get any diversity on it how do you attack no i didn't do no this was before.

DEI?

No, this was before.

You didn't do all that.

Now that I review it in my mind,

it was decidedly

a group of guys that you could mistake for me.

Okay.

That was my mountain goat team.

Yeah.

They're going to do the same, like, they're fixing to do the same thing in Grand Teton.

In the Grand Teton National Park?

Yeah, because

mountain goats are largely in the coastal ranges historically.

God, they're beautiful, aren't they?

Oh, yeah.

So you got like Idaho, Colorado, Utah.

They all have non-native mountain goat populations.

Oh, yeah.

South Dakota has a non-native mountain goat population.

And when you say non-native, that means that they just ended up there.

They weren't

from there.

They were drove in.

Ah.

They were drove in.

They were brought in.

You wouldn't believe, like, if you're interested in animals, man, you wouldn't believe how much humans have reshuffled the deck.

Of how animals exist.

Of where they're like, of distribution of animals.

In the world or mostly in America.

world too

yeah we have a lot like our country hosts african species in certain i mean totally wild feral animals we have african species running around in our country we have asiatic species running around in our country um

we've just completely reshuffled the deck like i was saying like at you know historically there was turkeys in 34 states you can hunt turkeys in every state but alaska now Wow.

Like we're always, like, we've been very good at moving it around.

And we used to have the ambition of moving it all around.

Now we have the ambition of trying to put it back the way we found it.

Yeah.

But for a while, the ambition was to like, oh, more, the merrier.

Spread it everywhere.

Just cut shit loose just to see what would happen.

Fuck.

Yeah.

All the time, man.

Just move it around.

See what happens.

That's bonkers, man.

Where is Grand Teton National Park?

It's not, I shouldn't say it's basically Yellowstone National Park.

Do you have a place in America that you feel

has the strongest connection to nature, kind of to just pivot a little bit?

Like, do you like where you feel like the most innately connected

is that a weird question kind of no it's not a weird question because I know that like some of the natives had like the black hills and stuff like that in the Dakotas like they had places where they felt like extremely collect connected oh yeah you mean like like places that had a that that had a spiritual like an aura or something to them yeah sure I just wondered if it was yeah I can't pretend uh

I can't pretend like I don't know what that felt like.

I don't know what that looked like.

I have things that mean a lot.

I have places that mean a lot to me.

I have places that mean a lot to me from a standpoint of personal experiences that have happened in certain places.

I had a place for a long time I told, like I told my kids, I was like, man, if I die, like I had originally said, if I die, I want,

I was like, this is going to be hard to pull off.

But like in a perfect world, I would have my body like dumped there.

Oh, yeah.

Just hidden away somewhere to be eaten and my bones strewn about by

bears.

Yeah.

Like, I thought that seemed like a cool idea.

It is kind of neat.

Yeah.

There's, there's a number, um,

there's a number of people that

Crazy Horse, his friends took his body and put it somewhere they don't know where it is.

Really?

Has anybody gone looking at it?

Ed Abbey?

Edward Abbey, the writer?

Edward Abbeylis.

So Crazy Horse, they hid his body?

His friends took his body.

He was killed in Nebraska.

They took his body and put it in a crevice somewhere.

They don't know where it is.

And no one's found it yet?

Ed Abbey's body was out.

Ed Abbey from...

You know, you ever hear Monkey Wrench Gang?

He wrote Monkey Wrench Gang.

Not from Desert Solitaire.

He was an environmental warrior.

He was an odd couple, huh?

No, no, no.

He was an environmental warrior.

You should read up on Ed Abbey.

Yeah.

He's a big figure in

defending the desert.

In a novelist.

Anyways, his friends took him and they dumped him.

And they don't tell anybody where?

I won't tell anybody where.

That's cool.

That sounds like the way to go.

So I wanted to have that kind of, I wanted to have a program like that.

And that, where I wanted it, was a spot that had, was a place that had like, that I had a deep,

what to me passes as a sort of spiritual connection to that place.

Then there's places I just like because

there's like, I like, I love being in Alaska.

I spend a month or so in Alaska.

It's kind of throughout different times of the year.

I spend a month or so in Alaska every year.

I love Alaska.

What I like about Alaska is it's,

you know,

it's a big place, but there's a lot of places where you can just kind of picture what time was along, like you can kind of picture what things were a long time ago.

Got it.

Yeah.

So it's like, because a thing that if you've,

as

an outdoorsman, as someone that likes nature,

oftentimes you find yourself.

Trying to imagine like trying to imagine a long time ago.

Right.

There's something like, there's some kind of continuity thing.

You know, people have been out on the landscape living, hunting and fishing and living off the land for since the beginning of human time.

And so naturally your mind goes to

like what, how did other people experience this?

Like, how did, what, what was the experience of other people doing these activities in these places throughout time?

Yeah.

So I like spots where you can kind of picture it.

Right.

It's still, you can picture it.

And there's a lot of places in Alaska.

You can go there and be like, you can feel it.

Oh, yeah.

Do you know what I mean?

You can feel it.

it yeah um like it feels so untouched by so many like just a lot of other energy and stuff yeah and it winds up being like you can imagine like you could go there's places you go and you can imagine like man some dude standing here

10 not 10 let some do whatever some dude standing here 7 000 years ago

be held like however he perceived it whatever his ideas of god were you know what whatever his allegiances were He, this is kind of what it looked like.

Right.

You know, it's what it looked like.

And those places mean a lot to me to be able to be like, man, like you could stand here

at all these points in time and be like, it's just, you can just imagine it.

And it makes this continuity similar because a thing that I'm very interested in is,

professionally and personally, very interested in like the experiences of

other people who

had aspects of a lifestyle that I live today.

Like I'm always fascinated by that.

That's why I could give a shit about Antarctica because there's no human history there.

Right.

So that's a cool thing about Alaska.

My brother's a fisheries biologist in Alaska, and he had a really interesting point that he made to me.

He's like, if you think about the

conservation efforts, environmental efforts in the lower 48, we are in

like someday what we're doing might be regarded as a recovery phase.

Where we're trying to like fix things.

We broke a lot of things, late 1800s, early 1900s, for decades, you know, we broke stuff.

And so for the most part, now when someone talks about conservation, oftentimes it's like fixing broken shit, bringing the turkey back, fixing broken shit.

Right.

Right?

Cleaning up rivers, cleaning up.

Yeah, it's a lot.

Yeah, like we're like, we broke a bunch of shit.

Like, we built a bunch of dams in the Pacific Northwest and killed all these salmon runs.

Now we're trying to fix all the shit we broke.

And so, for most of like most conservation work is oftentimes like fixing shit that we fucked up.

He was saying his work in a lot, he's been in Alaska forever.

His work in Alaska at times is like they're still doing,

they're still trying to describe what's there meaning there are salmon runs they'll go look at salmon runs people know there's salmon there like they've been fishing for thousands of years but no one's ever went and sort of like scientifically described the salmon run there are rivers where no one's gone and scientifically described what lives in the river got it right so they're still in a they're still in a phase of just trying to like write down what's there yeah

and we're in a phase of just trying to fix all of our broken shit right so in that way Alaska is cool.

Right.

Because it's still like in such an early process of being affected by humans.

Yeah.

And if we play our cards right.

Then we'll, what we learn here, we won't have to go through the same thing.

Yeah, if we play our cards right, when someone talks about building a big dam, you know, on the Yukon or whatever, you, you might look and be like, man,

we're spending a lot of down in what they call in Alaska, what they call the outside.

And the outside, we're spending a lot of time and energy trying to fix all the shit we broke by doing that.

Just so heads up

as you think about your plans just hey guys

do you have a part of um i know you've traveled extensively do you have a place that you feel like is like is the most dangerous for people to go

is that really a fair question i mean i guess every place is dangerous depending on what your behaviors are

yeah there's it's this is something i think about and talk about a fair bit there's a lot of like there's places where there's a high level of perceived danger okay

a thing i always try to point out if my wife thinks i'm doing like my wife often thinks i'm putting a lot of risk on my kids or doing too much, too risky as shit with my kids.

Because they're going to try to do it?

Or you're going to be taking them away, that I'm going to hurt them or drown them or whatever, you know?

Oh, yeah.

Like, she's always afraid I'm going to something like that.

That I, my recklessness will lead to my kids getting messed up.

Right.

Why do they need safety gear for Christmas every year if you're not trying to do something bad to them, Steve?

Oh, there's one of my little kids.

No, that's not my little kid.

That's my friend's kid.

Yeah, you don't even know whose kid it is.

That's my kid.

Okay.

Well, she's 12 now.

Daddy's future hunting buddy.

She has much more hair now.

I believe that.

I'm just saying the shirt is lobbying for a certain type of behavior in the future.

She is my hunting buddy nowadays.

Oh, that's awesome.

Yeah, we don't show pictures of our kids much anymore, but they're at all really, except for my older one.

Anyhow, what time is that time about?

Oh, she's always afraid I'm going to drown them or whatever.

Oh, yeah.

Reasonably so.

But I'm always like, man, the most important, or the most dangerous thing.

This is me, like, you're my wife, not me.

All right.

The most dangerous thing that's going to happen is us driving to the airport.

Sure, Steve.

Look, sign the papers.

Okay.

Sign the papers, and you can do whatever you want.

Okay.

That's what my attorney said.

Sorry, I was trying to role play a little, but that was a good role play.

You'd have to have more time with her, you know?

Yeah, I should have also went into it a little bit.

I didn't hold it at all.

All right, let's try it.

I'm trying to understand.

She just didn't meet her.

Let's try it.

But she brings up, so there's like high levels of perceived danger, but like, but then there's like reality, meaning driving down, driving down a highway is hazardous.

Yeah.

Like highway travel is hazardous.

Flying in single engine, we do a lot of flying in single engine aircraft.

That's hazardous.

Flying in single engine aircraft is

like a legitimate occupational hazard.

But where people's minds go, people's minds go to getting

attacked by wild animals.

Right.

Because

people don't want to, like, they're not thinking about that you're going to go in, like, when you go into a remote environment,

uh exposure

dehydration yeah exposure is like far more dangerous than wild animals but it's not

a pole sure it's not fun to think about right right it doesn't it doesn't occupy any there's no intellectual energy you can't put like intellectual or emotional energy into you think about exposure it doesn't have the same pr instead you're like well shit there's wild animals lurking in the bushes right and so people are afraid of things um

i'm see i feel like i'm I want to seem like I'm hacking out my wife.

I love her.

My wife carries pepper spray.

So my wife will sometimes carry pepper spray.

Of course.

Because there's black bears around.

Oh, yeah.

I've been in some neighborhoods.

But you, anyone in this country, most people in the major cities of this country, they're all within a 40 to hour drive of a black bear.

You're much closer to black bears right now.

Yeah.

Okay.

But you're not sitting here with pepper spray.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

So why when you go walk?

Like, why when you,

why does she feel, I'm like, you know, like you have black bears that come into the outskirts of New York,

right?

New Jersey has the densest black bear population in the country.

Yes.

And the densest human population in New Jersey.

She does.

Yeah.

So like they don't all, when they're golfing, they don't carry pepper spray.

Right.

It's not like you see Trump out there with pepper spray.

Why does my wife want to have pepper spray?

Yeah.

For black bears.

Like black bears don't matter.

They're not dangerous, but they're perceived as dangerous.

And certain environments make people feel like now they're in danger.

But golfers in New Jersey aren't carrying pepper spray.

Right.

Though they have probably have bears.

If you're golfing in some semi-rural New Jersey environment, you're within hundreds of yards of bears.

Right.

But they're not giving their energy to thinking about bears.

But you put someone at like a trailer

in the woods and all of a sudden they got bears on their mind.

Yeah.

So dangerous would be like,

I spent a month in Africa this summer and we saw a black mamba,

A snake called, you know, that's the most, that's the deadliest snake.

Like, they just kill you when they get you.

The guy we were with, like, you'll never see one.

Then we saw one.

So all we talked about was black mambas.

Yeah.

He didn't bite anybody.

Right.

But all of a sudden, like, anytime I sat down, once I saw that son of a bitch, I saw a puff adder, a black mamba, and a cobra.

Damn.

Okay.

What is a puff adder?

Oh, he's a bad mother liquor, man.

Pull up adder.

Pull up how he gets around.

Pull up how he gets around.

A puff adder?

Yeah, watch how he gets around.

You think of a snake doing a serpentine movement?

For sure.

Well, check his ass out.

Pull up him getting around.

Oh, shit.

He just wiggles along like a centipede.

Shody Bay got that fucking.

He's not even.

Look at that.

No, he don't need to do.

He doesn't even leave a footprint.

He don't need to.

That's what you call cutting corners right there.

That's the kind of employee that I need.

Dude, that dude just, he's got little, his scales just walk, man.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

I don't know if this is true.

You want to hear something they told me about that thing?

This Kenyan dude told me.

He told me that.

I don't know if this is true, but it's just great.

It's a wonderful detail.

He told me that puff adder

strikes so fast.

We just caught one crossing the road and got messed with a little bit.

Not up close, but distant messed with it.

That puff adder strikes so fast.

This guy was telling me this could be total lore.

Don't even look it up because I don't want you to refute it because it's too cool.

He says that he can hit a balloon twice.

He can hit a balloon twice before it pops.

Which I don't even know what that means, but doesn't it sound cool?

It sounds,

you know, like he can fuck fop before the balloon deflates.

I don't know.

Oh, yeah.

So he's got a bad venom.

So anyways, we see one of these.

We see a

black mamba who can cruise around with half of his length up in the air.

If he's seven foot,

his head, when he's cruising through the woods, when he's pissed, his head's at your navel.

Damn.

He's a bad, bad, bad dude.

Well, he's got some calves on him.

That's what's amazing to me.

You know, why do Indian people love fucking with these things?

Kill Bill, it's a black mamba that kills uh, that kills uh Michael Madsen's character.

Is it really?

Yeah, it's a black mama.

Anyhow, so we see this, we see these different critters running around.

And like, you're not going to get killed by a snake.

It's just like, it doesn't happen.

Right.

But it still looks like it's going to happen.

But all of a sudden...

Instead of me thinking like, oh, I might get like some amoeba from drinking the water or like, who knows?

Or a mosquito-borne pathogen.

Oh, that's out the window.

Instead, everywhere I look, all of us, me and my other guys I was with, we didn't take a step due without being like.

Because all of a sudden in our head was the perceived danger.

Meanwhile, you're with all these people that are born and raised there.

None of them's dead.

Right.

Yeah, they're doing fine.

Some of them have some emotional issues or whatever, but they're doing overall they're well.

They're not all dead from snakes.

It's just that's where as humans.

Oh, like that's where the head goes.

Your head goes to like.

Whatever's had the best advertising and and probably whatever's most recently been seen, those sorts of things.

So, when you say, like, the most dangerous place,

like to an outsider,

the Tanzanian bush felt dangerous for a reason that's probably not true.

Right.

It felt dangerous because one day we saw a black mamba.

And then, you know.

Or the Tasmanian devil, too.

Well, he doesn't live there, but sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's true.

Tasmanian tiger.

Right, yeah.

Tasmanian devils.

Yep.

I'm thinking of Tanzania, I think, or something.

I don't know what I'm talking about.

Oh, no, no, no.

You're right.

Yeah, but no,

Tanzania and the Tasmanian, that's the name, the island of Tasmania.

Yeah.

Tanzania

comes from Zanzibar combining with Tanganika.

Oh, yeah.

When those two countries came together, they were called Tanzania.

So Tanzanica doesn't exist anymore.

It's now Tanzania.

Tanganica doesn't.

Zanzibar does.

It does, but the Zanzibar archipelago was rolled into Tanganica to become Tanzania.

I'm a subject matter expert.

I spent a month there.

Did you really?

A lot of women will go to Zanzibar to meet men, kind of African men, a lot of women in their 40s and 50s.

Is that true?

Yeah.

That's what I know about the migration or whatever it's called.

But I, uh, or it's for, I don't want to say it's for sex, but I think people say it is.

I don't think that you're going there for that.

It's pretty buttoned up there.

Is it?

It's pretty buttoned.

No, I don't think it's like illegal.

I think it's they go there and it's sort of a popular space for courting of those of

African men and women who are kind of divorcees.

Really?

Yeah,

yeah, because my buddy went there and he was like, dude, it's not for me.

It wasn't for him.

See, my subject matter expertise is crumbling, but I'll point out I was only there one week.

Yeah.

So I only absorb so much.

And you don't fit either one of the parties that were that are mating there.

So I think I brought my own mate with me, man.

Oh, there you go.

Then

look, we know that a lot of fellas enter the room wiener first, baby.

Wiener first, baby.

The shark fin, baby.

That's how I am, baby.

And Blue Chew

is now available to put that, put the, put the,

the, the, bang, gang, gang.

Put the pang a

in your body.

And your shark fin, boy.

Woo!

Look out!

It's landing on the beach.

Blue chew.

It's a cheat code for your crotch.

stronger harder longer lasting like someone gave your downstairs a pep talk and a gym membership and now you're upstairs

guys it's not just about performance though this is about legacy or third legacy you know and we've got a special deal for our listeners as always get your first month of blue chew free just use promo code theo at checkout and pay five bucks for shipping that's it Join Blue Chew's mission to upgrade humanity one thrust at a time.

Head to Blue Chew.com for details and safety info and big thanks to Blue Chew for sponsoring the podcast.

Everybody knows there are things they can do to reduce monthly costs and improve their finances.

We all know it.

It's just finding the time to do it.

I mean, who has time to go through all their expenses and decide what to trim?

Luckily, Rocket Money can relieve some of that stress and help you feel confident in the financial decisions you're making.

Rocket Money.

It's a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings.

Yep.

Rocket Money's 5 million members have saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, with members saving up to $740 a year when they use all of the app's premium features.

Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your your financial goals faster with Rocket Money.

Go to rocketmoney.com slash Theo today.

That's rocketmoney.com slash T-H-E-O.

Rocketmoney.com slash Theo.

I'll say this, dude.

I remember the first time that I saw a snake.

It makes me think of what like my perception and everything was.

Like we're walking, I was with my grandparents.

We're walking and suddenly I just kind of felt something on my like I had some just boots were just fishing

and something wrapped around my leg like that.

And it was a snake.

Really?

Yeah.

And I was like, oh my God, I couldn't move.

I was so scared.

I'd never seen a snake outside.

You know, you'd heard about snakes.

And I mean, it had just fucking wrapped around, just like it was like my leg was a stripper pole.

And this thing had just came to just fucking grind on you.

Just straight out of hell to grind on me, you know?

And my grandmother looked at it and she's like, she goes, I remember, she's like, did you summon that?

She asked me.

Because my grandmother was out of her fucking mind.

And that's when I knew that it was just going to be a long life right there.

I was like, you think, and I looked in her eyes and I was like, she thinks I fucking

a child that she barely

ever even welcomes into town.

She finally takes you to catch some bullheads in the fucking Spoon River out here.

And you summoned a serpent.

She thinks I'm a fucking Jimmy Baker of fucking

fangled.

Is that tell what kind of snake it was?

I want to say it was a water moccasin, but that may have just been the lore of me growing up in Louisiana.

Because I don't know if they have those in Illinois or not.

You know?

No, I don't believe they do.

But I worked on a farm in Louisiana, and at lunch break, we would always just walk around.

If they had a boat that was turned over, we'd flip it over and there'd be a water moccasin under it every single time, dude.

Yeah,

that's a cool snake.

There is a they were scary, though.

There's like

an idea, and I kind of buy it that

from like an evolutionary standpoint, or we carry this sort of like this.

I want to preface this by saying I'm not a geneticist.

Okay.

We care, despite, despite your impressions, I'm not a geneticist, but

that we carry with us

this innate,

let's say this sort of genetic marker or whatever, this innate fear

of serpents.

Yes.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like, it does you well.

It does you well to be like, stand off.

You follow me?

100%.

Yeah.

Oh, dude, I think anybody would be creeped out.

There's nothing.

Yeah, there's something so.

Why are we so scared of snakes?

Do you know?

I want to look.

Let's look at a bunch of venomous snakes.

There's a.

But it feels, dude, when you see them.

Oh, they're not right, man.

And it feels so foreign.

Oh, I will say this.

We interviewed this blind girl one time, right?

And we're just learning about what it's like to be blind and some of like the different stuff.

And she talked a lot about animals and like getting to spend time with the animals and the feelings you get.

And she says that she doesn't get any feeling from a snake.

Like there's no energy that she gets.

Really?

And that's when I was like, dude, if a snake, yeah, Tanya Milocevic.

That's when I knew if a blind don't even like a snake, I don't like a snake.

That's a great idea to interview someone where you can just get right in because then you can ask all the questions you would be not, you'd ask all the questions.

Remember Howard Stern?

He used to have a show where he'd have a panel of black guys that white dudes could ask questions to.

Oh, that's great.

You know, like, like it was like,

I can't remember what he called it.

It was like, ask a black man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And now they, yeah.

It was called Ask a Black Man.

I can't remember what the shtick was, but he would just have dudes volunteer to come.

No, that's what we're doing.

Like idiotic white guys could be like, hey, you know, it's called

questions.

So it's an interesting interview format format to be able to have a person come and say, like, I will now entertain all your dumbass questions that you wonder, but don't ask.

Yeah.

And that, that are like, that I get sick of, but I'm going to sit here and indulge you for an hour.

And you can be like, well, what do you see?

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

She said that a lot of it was like memorizing patterns, like when you're going somewhere, like the more you go there, the easier it is.

Like, she said a lot of times it felt like she was playing like a video game in her head, like just remembering, like, almost as if you're like controlling somebody through a video game, that that's kind of how she would

like guide herself.

I thought it was pretty interesting.

I should do it again soon.

That's a really good, that's a really good interview deal because, because she probably, like generally going about her life, probably can't stand

people staring at her, wondering shit, asking her the same dumb shit over.

So to be like, yeah, I'm just going to sit here and just do it.

Yeah, it was great.

Hit me with it.

Hit me with it.

Have you ever taken a blind person on one of your hunts before?

No, man, but it's a thing.

It's a thing.

And I had a blind hunter on my podcast one time wow um to talk about what the experience was and uh

yeah i had a blind person on and what are they because they're just

i mean they got to feel like there's no chance when they shoot right you know

they had people help we we had a uh you know what i'm you know what i'm dicking up i actually just told you something that's not true Because we were gonna, we one time had a paralyzed, we had a paralyzed,

we were gonna have a blind hunter.

I don't think we did.

We had a fully paralyzed hunter who had to hunt with like an automation thing.

Wow.

Took a lot of assistance from his friends.

But he had been a hunter, had an accident, and then paralyzed from the neck down, developed a way that he could continue hunting with the help of his friends.

Wow.

That's pretty good.

With a mouth control apparatus, but it took a ton of assistance.

That's who we had on.

But a point I was going to make about that innate fear of snakes is if you could do time machine shit okay

and you talking time travel i'm gonna okay

this would be like a really good question to to have okay the good use of if you had like one pass one time pass

um here's a thing that would be on my list of i would be curious about

when human like

After the

sort of African diaspora and humans started colonizing the whole world, right?

The people that came, the people that became the first Americans

came in from Alaska.

You guys hear about the Bering Land Bridge, right?

The Land Bridge is the size of Texas.

It wasn't like a bridge.

It was like a landmass.

Like people,

people colonizing the New World would have been born and died on the Bering Land Bridge without thinking that they were going anywhere.

They were just living their lives.

Got it.

And slowly spread down.

And there's like Inuits, like a like kind of natives?

They became native.

The people that became the Inuits, by our understanding, the people that became the Inuits came much later.

Got it.

Okay.

They came from the Japan and the Aleutians and whatnot.

But these like Siberians came into the new world.

So by this point, you have hundreds of generations, hundreds of generations of people had lived in a snake-free environment.

Because they'd lived in the Arctic.

Hundreds of generations.

And then

they slowly,

generation to generation to generation, they slowly move down

the North American continent.

There's two theories that, like Alaska, you know, they don't have a snake, right?

There's two theories.

There's one that they came through the mid-continent and maybe emerged down around Edmonton, Alberta, onto the Great Plains.

That was a fashionable idea for a long time.

The currently fashionable idea is they came down the coast.

Okay.

So now you've had, you have hundreds of generations of people that would never have seen or experienced a snake.

Yeah.

And you got snakes down there.

But all of a sudden they spread southward.

Yeah.

And at some point, one of those sons of bitches is out just right.

Fuck.

He's out cruising around doing his deal.

And there's one laying there.

That happened.

Like that happened.

That happened.

If you could take your time machine

and go see that guy see that snake,

did he go, fuck,

or did he jump down and grab it

that was some good time machine shit right there well i'll say this if he was with someone else when it happened you have to cut that person's throat immediately i think because you would think they have something to do with this like they're in on it like that's what i would do you're like who the fuck you summon this yes yeah like yeah

your distant ancestor summoned that snake

yeah you would think it was like other world i don't know but you've probably seen fish but I don't know.

Do you just get that energy?

Yeah, like then you would be able to answer the question.

That's the way, the one way to be able to answer the question, do humans have some baked-in shit

or is it not that?

Right.

Yeah, you'd have to go all the way back.

There's probably another way, too.

You could take a child at birth, buy one,

sequester it somewhere.

Well, they do that all the time.

There's Indian babies playing with snake.

Yeah, but take one and sequester it so it doesn't get any information from any human beings.

Oh, yeah.

Let it become an old person and then throw a snake in that room.

Do they jump back?

That'd be easier and less expensive than time travel, but it wouldn't be as authentic.

And you'd run into like, uh, you'd run into legal

problems.

If they've been alive so long, are they going to not care anymore?

Like, I don't give a shit.

Because you've damaged them psychologically and stuff by locking them up in that room and shit, you know?

Yeah, they're like, I don't give a fuck if something's a snake.

Because then the detractors would be like, yeah, but he was so destroyed psychologically that this is not telling us anything.

Right.

Yeah, I think.

He's fucking with a

with a with a um yeah, a person you victimized out of this whimsical scientific study.

Oh, yeah.

I think at that point, you're really looking at the uh Elizabeth Smart of Reptiles kind of vibes, you know, and I don't think that's what we want.

No, it is going to be a time travel problem.

Yeah, we'll go time travel.

Um,

well, let's talk about a topic that some people think is kind of controversial.

Like

you you see a lot of people who will post photos with like big game, right?

They go and kill like a woolly, not a woolly mammoth or whatever, but like a deer.

A big huge deer.

A big old turkey.

Yes.

Rope dragon limb hanger.

Yes.

Rope dragon limb hanger.

You know, one that's just singing, you know, one in an Alan Iverson jersey.

You know what I'm saying?

Like a real fucking boss.

I'm following.

I'm following.

Now, I'm getting excited.

And they put a picture of it up.

Right.

Or somebody.

Somebody gets a deer, some with eyelashes.

Okay, okay, okay.

Because that's what, that's what.

Or lions and stuff like that.

Yeah, it's got an eyelash.

It's going to,

it's emotional for people.

Okay, so that's fair.

So yeah, I think I just want to know about some of that.

But then also you hear that people put up these, like, that some of these animals, they're going to die in the places that they're in.

And so for conservation, that they kind of sell off kind of tags or lottery.

So anyway, take me into some of that world kind of,

if you don't mind.

Well, I thought you were going to get into the ethics of

you posing with a dead animal in a picture.

But you're talking about like the sort of the conservation fun, like the kind of

there's a perceived conflict or like a um incongruity

around the notion that

how can you help a species

by hunting it, right?

How do you help a species by hunting it?

Um, wouldn't that be like that?

That's that would appear to people to be quite illogical, right?

How does killing it help it?

Right.

Is that is that?

Yeah, I think that's fair.

That really kind of boils it down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a phenomenal question.

I can see why it puzzles people.

But you can point to case after case after case of ways in which it has worked.

We began our conversation around turkeys.

Okay.

There's a saying that I like quite a bit.

It's not mine, but it's

success has many fathers.

But failure failure is a bastard's child.

Okay.

The success in restoring the wild turkey, many

people claim parentage of that success.

And there were many people that attributed efforts to that success.

All these different, like whoever state you live in, your state has a fish and game agency.

Okay.

I'll point out that your state's fish and game agency gets the bulk of its funding

from people buying hunting and fishing licenses.

That's how we fund the agencies that take care of wildlife in the states.

So does that.

But when they were restoring the wild turkey from nearly being wiped off the continent, okay,

the main player,

the main player that was involved in that nationally

is an organization that happens to have their annual convention in Nashville called the National Wild Turkey Federation.

The National Wild Turkey Federation was kind of a through line of the efforts to restore restore turkeys to North America, to recover the wild turkey, to put the wild turkey back on the ground and all the places where it had been wiped out.

The National Wild Turkey Federation is a hunting organization.

Okay.

So if you went and looked and you said,

here's these guys that put enormous amounts of expertise, scientific expertise, enormous amounts of funding, enormous amounts of

physical effort into restoring the wild turkey

to where they exceed historic levels.

Is it fair to go like, you just did that so you could hunt turkeys?

You'd be like, guilty is charged, right?

Guilty is charged.

Right.

There are other, because like turkeys are so widely available now.

But is that a bad thing?

It's not a bad thing.

That's what I'm saying it's not, but it's not always even that way.

Because for instance, if you look at, there's an organization called the Wild Sheep Foundation.

It's an American-based conservation organization that works to restore, recover, protect wild sheep species, okay?

Desert bighorns, Rocky Mountain bighorns, doll sheep, stone sheep, okay?

They work on behalf of wild sheep.

I have been hunting my whole life.

I apply every year to get a bighorn sheep tag in a half dozen states every year.

I have never drawn a bighorn sheep tag.

I have never hunted bighorn sheep.

It is likely, it is likely that I will die.

Okay.

Right.

There's a likelihood I will die and have never had the opportunity to hunt a bighorn sheep.

Yet, on occasion, I do things to support

the Wild Sheep Foundation.

So,

what am I guilty of?

Like, I aspire to hunt a bighorn sheep.

Yeah.

I recognize them as like an an integral part of the Western landscape.

I want to see more of them around.

I'm a hunter.

I would hunt one if I could.

I probably can't, but I want to see them back in their place.

There are many, many conservation organizations.

The most impactful like wildlife conservation organizations that do real work on the ground.

I'm not talking about lobbying bullshit.

I'm not talking about like,

you know,

I'm talking about like the kind of work where you're like putting effort on the ground, you're putting animals on the ground, you're improving habitat on the ground, right?

You're helping migratory animals, whatever.

That shit comes from hunters.

That shit comes from hunting-based organizations.

So you're saying that in this country.

Most of the wildlife and the preservation of wildlife here comes from hunters.

That's like we fund it.

We do the groundwork.

People that come out of that world of hunting move into conservation.

There are like environmental orgs.

There are lobbying orgs.

There are orgs that work in all these different ways that aren't, but like they're really effective on the ground stuff comes from hunters and anglers.

Wow.

It's just, this isn't like, this is like, this is settled science.

I mean, this isn't me giving you some spin.

I'm not giving you like a novel way to look at something.

It's just like, it's just the reality.

Well, yeah, I mean, your fish and game agency, what state do you rep?

It doesn't matter what the hell you answer me.

You're a resident of Tennessee.

Your fish and game agency gets the bulk of its funding.

So your fish and game agency handles like disease work, access work, enforcement of game laws.

They get their money from hunting and fishing licenses, the bulk of it.

Or they get money from excise taxes on sporting goods equipment, guns, ammo, whatever.

It's just like, we pay for it.

You know, there's guys that are, there's people that want to deny that reality.

But like I said, it's like, it's settled science.

You can't debate the nuts and bolts of it.

So this plays out in other ways that draw a lot of attention.

Like something like,

let's talk about Tanzania for a minute.

Totally different system than what we have in America.

But in Tanzania, the most effective way that they're able to, the most effective way that they're able to protect large tracts of wilderness habitat is drawing revenue from them by allowing hunting to occur on those places.

Got it.

It's like productive for them.

It's either that or it's slash and burn agriculture.

So it's like you're able to go into an area and by having people like Westerners, Europeans, Americans, whatever, come there to have an experience of going there and hunting and paying a big amount of money to hunt there warrants them being able to set aside large chunks of ground the government and monetize it and monitor it and then pay for uh anti-poaching efforts and other things that that protect it you might you might look at it and hate it you might look at it and be like i don't think that humans have a right to harm animals and like i'm not going to argue that perspective so you might look at it and be like it sucks that that has to be true And I'll be like, okay, it's fine.

Maybe in your opinion, it sucks that that has to be true.

But what I can't debate with you is, does it have to be true?

It's just true.

Yeah.

You know, you might hate that that's the way, but that's the way it is.

But that's the way it is.

Did humans always eat animals, do you think?

Yeah, since they could.

It'd be hard not to, I think.

I'm trying to think if y'all went back in time.

That would be cool, too.

You go back, some guy.

The first dude to eat meat.

He's been.

You'd have to go back some far ass.

You'd have to go back.

That's fine.

We can go back that.

There's an idea that like there's a, there's a, in anthropology, there's a debate about what time, at what point in time did you have behaviorally and anatomically modern humans?

This is, I'm, this is not, we're getting way outside of biblical understanding, but we're talking about like from the non-biblical science world.

Okay.

Okay.

So, so a

stepping outside of like the biblical confines and going into like purely scientific world.

Some people think that you could have grabbed a dude 75,000 years ago,

put him in, grabbed him at birth, and

he could learn to fly an airplane.

He could go to college,

do well, blend in.

You'd see him going down the street and wouldn't think anything of it.

Yeah, be a pie cap or whatever.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

That was a hunting.

That was a hunting

consumer of large quantities of animal flesh.

That was.

Yeah.

So

there's no doubt at that time period that people were really really snacking on animals.

Oh, yeah.

And then there's this other idea.

And you know how you wind up liking the ideas that confirm your own.

There's this other idea that the great

scientific understanding that

when we had, when humans had this kind of renaissance, like

we seem to have suddenly kind of figured a bunch of shit out.

And some people correlate that to us becoming predominantly

to eating huge amounts of animal flesh.

It's so efficient and so full of energy.

That was our intellectual renaissance.

Like that, that's when humans became bright and developed like religion and organizational structure and language and all that.

It's when we discovered meat eating.

Right, because we had enough energy not only to satiate our bodies, but then also for the rest of us to maybe flourish some because we finally had a new source that was really

replenishing us constantly.

We were broken from a cycle of needing to eat low-grade, low, low, low, low-grade, low-calorie food all the time.

Yeah.

Right.

So then you're constantly just sitting there snacking, whereas otherwise you can have a nice meal, then you sit back and kick it and think of something creative.

Like a deer is on a really strict schedule of like eating a bunch of low-grade food, sitting, ruminating, eating,

you know.

So deer's always.

So there's this idea, yeah, that's the idea that like, and of course I like it because it reinforces, like that, that's what I like to eat.

deer meat and stuff.

So when I hear that, I'm like, fuck yeah, bro.

That's right.

That's the truth.

Because we just like the stuff that.

oh, yeah, we want to support our own ideas and causes or our own truths.

What about pull up like a Neanderthal?

What was that called?

Like a man that was 75,000 years ago.

Was that Neanderthals?

Well, it would have been, it would have been Homo sapien.

Oh, God.

That must have been.

Well, no, it'd been like they would have been.

Did you have you ever had your, have you ever done like a

late 23andMe organization?

I've done 23andMe.

Yeah, they sold all my fucking information to this Japanese

Oh, yeah.

Just the other day.

My shit.

I'm getting.

You can still delete your shit.

Really?

Yeah.

I'm getting a bunch.

Because I would go, I would say, like, hey, I want to buy his shit and see what he's got going on.

And I, you know, so I had mine deleted.

You can have deleted.

I'm getting emails from like, you're related to this guy, you know, and it's like a fucking Japanese guy.

I'm like, this motherfucker.

Hey, they recently solved.

Where I live, they recently solved a 30-year-old murder case

from because so many people doing 23andMe, filling up these, these filling up databases

and so all of a sudden now also now they're like also now they're like hey we got a little ping a little ping on the map yeah

of like a family that seems because they had a biological specimen

we're gonna solve all those old crimes they had a biological specimen right and so just from people willfully going and doing this kind of work All of a sudden, you start popping all these like markers.

And then you got a, you got a bite a hair a sperm or whatever oh yeah and all of a sudden you're able to be like well it's not him but there's some some dudes a lot like him

that live in this town i'd be let's go have a look around that town when you do it they tell you what percent neanderthal you are yeah yeah i was lower than average neanderthal huh did it upset you uh

No, I wasn't surprised.

I just don't like, I don't have that vibe, you know?

I remember, I feel like, I feel like Joe was telling me, Rogan was telling me that he was high up.

I could see that kind of higher than average.

I could definitely see that.

I swear.

I hope I'm not making that up.

I swear he told me that he was highly.

I don't think he would deny that at all.

He's definitely like an Neanderthal guy that got struck by some fucking cool-ass lightning.

I could be.

I swear that's what he was saying.

But anyways, I was lower than normal.

But the point being, oh, yeah, there he goes.

More than regular people.

57% more Neanderthal.

Yeah.

That's classic, dude.

So, you know, an understanding is that, um, you know, they were

here's a weird deal.

I wrote this one time, and when I wrote this in the forward to one of my cookbooks, I was writing it.

You could have been like at a certain time, you could have been in Spain.

Okay, okay, you could have been in Spain, you could have been the Iberian Peninsula, you could have been in northern Israel, and see a campfire

often burning in the distance.

And

you would have had to have asked yourself, yourself

what kind of

what kind of human is that?

Do you follow me?

Like, you mean you would have had to be like, what race or class or something like that?

What kind?

What species of human?

Oh, like, is that somebody who's like kind of like Neanderthal dudes?

Somebody's a little more monkey.

Yeah, is it like Neanderthal dudes?

Is it like, like, the same way that we talk about somebody eating a monk, somebody eating a banana, somebody who has a sandals at least

eating one of me?

Yeah.

Like, the same way you got like white-tailed deer and mule, like where I live, you have white-tailed deer and mule dealer.

They're so similar.

Like, it takes, I don't want to say a trained eye to tell them apart, but you know, someone from another country would look, and it might take them a few days before they're like, oh, they're different.

Yeah, they're just going to see and be like, whatever, you know, deer, deer.

But at a time,

it'd be that, at a time, it'd be that you'd be like, oh, no, there's the one kind of

human, and there's these other kinds of humans.

Like, fuck, that guy's about 2,000 years.

Yeah, and they don't, they don't mix.

They get together.

They kidnap each other whatever they are bad breath all that yeah but uh when you see that you're like Joe having that like as high as 57% more Neanderthals because it's it's like it's it's you know we under duress I don't know was it like an act of passion that made you evolve no I'm saying that that drove humans and Neanderthals to interbreed was it coercion you think they're separate beings or you think there's one more advanced than the Neanderthals were Neanderthals were a far more successful species than we are?

Like Neanderthals were in Europe far longer than our ancestors were in Europe.

But aren't Neanderthals our ancestors though?

No, I wouldn't, you can't really, I wouldn't really,

yes, in that it seems like direct human ancestors, like

Homo sapien.

Yeah.

Okay.

It seems like at times they were able to have viable offspring.

That at times Neanderthal Neanderthal people that were in Europe far longer they were in Europe long long hundreds of thousands of years before

modern humans made the scene got it and because of everyone having a little bit of introgression from Neanderthals

this is not my field of study I'm just saying I'm just a curious onlooker let's take a look right here ancient human species including homo sapiens neanderthals dean denisovans yeah denisovans denisovans and others did interbreed as they encountered one another during the middle and upper paleolithic periods, leaving detectable genetic legacies in modern populations.

Dude, I didn't even know this.

I thought,

have you seen that chart where it's one man like that?

And then he has a deceptive chart.

He has a briefcase and then he has Nikes on or whatever.

That's a deceptive chart.

Dude, that's fucking, I can't even believe that.

This is one of the main things I talk about with my kids.

Wow.

Trying to explain.

They're like, what do you mean we came from monkeys?

I'm like,

that's not, don't look at it that way.

Yeah.

So, oh, what I want to start talking about in my next hour comedy is about the middle middle monkeys like why don't you ever see that middle monkey like you know what i'm saying like you'll see a monkey and then you'll see a dude you know who's a mechanic right but you never see that middle motherfucker you know what i'm saying what happened to them all the dude who's just scratching under one arm wrenching the other Fucking just, they don't allow him to work to register because he's just like, woo-hoo.

You know, but he can change a tire and a fucking, just with his lips.

You know what I'm saying?

You don't see that chimp, that chimp man, that middle man.

So I'm just amazed.

Yeah.

But dude, I never thought that you'd be sitting there and you'd be like, oh, shit.

Oh, yeah.

You'd be like, oh, oh.

You and your buddy, like, dog, let's go, let's go, let's go do a lab.

We better go figure out what kind of dudes it is.

But the fact that they, the fact that they inter, the fact that they interbred.

Well, I think that, well, you might have missed that part.

Oh, I would have known that.

Let me get to my point, though.

The fact that they interbred

leads to this question of,

was it a romantic bonding?

Was it like a romantic, and right was it something that was like under coercion it was coercion do you know what i mean yeah like was it like a like a sort of like conqueror's choice kind of shit yeah it was like when you know i mean or was it that they that they would like meet and and and over like like the capulets and you know from like uh romeo and juliet's family steven it was meet and come together despite the family condemnations and no

offspring no it was like when those nurses that don't treat people well at those hospitals take advantage of them.

That's what I think it was.

I do wonder.

That'd be another good time machine burner up a lot of years ago.

But here's the tough thing.

If a person who is more mentally advanced, hypothetically a Homo sapien, if they tried to,

if they tried to like, oh, here's just a Neanderthal.

Let's get a little bit of love, you know?

Because they're easy to trick.

Right.

Yeah.

But they're not easy to fucking just pin down and make love to, I bet.

Yeah, trick them.

But even if you trick them.

with shells and stuff, right?

Even if you trick them with a little wind chime or something, get their attention,

I bet you can't.

You're going to have to, how quick can you make love and still enjoy it and get away from them?

I wouldn't.

That's not a risk I'm taking.

No, it's time machine questions.

I'm not.

That's not a risk.

I'm someone that hasn't brushed their hair in 70,000 years.

I'm going to try to fuck them.

I'm out.

You know what I want to put out a call to?

You don't mind me doing a call.

for a guest I'm trying, I've been trying to find.

I don't know if you're going to be able to do your shirt, but I want to find them.

So it's like, I'm like using your, I'm using like your audience to find someone that I might not find on my own.

Okay.

What I've been trying to do for years is I've been trying to find a really, really good,

a really good Neanderthal.

You can say Neanderthal or Tall.

You sound a little bit smarter.

I understand.

My understanding is you sound a little better to say Neanderthal.

It's a valley in Germany.

It is.

It's a valley in Germany.

Yeah, and you sound a little more.

Like, I'm more likely to get a good guest by saying Neanderthal because they're like, this dude knows his shit.

I want to find a really good Neanderthal

behavioralist.

Hard R.

Neanderthal.

Neanderthal researcher to come on the show and talk about what they know.

But it can't be just like a writer who spent a month researching.

It's because our audience doesn't like those kinds.

It's got to be someone that like, it's got to be someone that lives and breathes it.

It can't be like an interloper.

Yeah.

Like I need like a legit,

a verbose, animated Neanderthal researcher.

I don't want some halfway house.

I want a fucking trap house that people have been shooting up in for 50 years with information about motherfuckers who would just like who could digest a stone if they need to.

Yeah, like that, like a really good Neanderthal person to come on the show.

And you just reach out to us and I want to interview you.

Okay, there you go, guys.

For Steve, they would like that.

And here's what I want.

Do you have a lot of Neanderthal researchers that listen to the show?

I mean, I bet we have some uh consumers who would rank high on a neander scale or whatever but i'll say this i want somebody who has a high amount on their 23mm an extreme i don't want they don't need to have that i know you want that's what i want i want the highest i want somebody who's 80

80 neander tall yeah the find the highest guy and when i get them i'm just going to send them over to you too steve because i think you would do well and because you might be able to notice some patterns that they have or behaviors

yeah who if whatever, I had low

who's the highest?

Who's the highest?

Somebody has to have the highest Neanderthal amount.

I know that there is a, I was reading a book.

I read a lot of anthropology books.

I can't remember if it was the Seven Daughters of Eve.

I was reading a book about human history.

And in it, they were pointing to some controversy

around this question.

Okay.

It's not always,

people don't always look upon this,

this is not something that everybody likes to talk about.

Really?

Where you see,

like, as much as I'd be whatever, proud of it or whatever, there are places, there are places in the world where these geneticists see more intols.

Yeah, more Neanderthal in certain areas.

And it's a sensitive subject.

It winds up being a sensitive subject.

So you might wind up having not only a fascinating show, but you might have have a show that courts a certain level of controversy i like that yeah but what i've found because i because i am interested in this subject i've found that there's a sort of trend in academics

to that we're there's a trend in academics of being that we're like rebranding neanderthals

so it winds up being like oh they had art oh they like wore jewelry

Oh, they were free divers.

Right.

They

do.

I mean, like, every, like, why do you think we're doing that?

Do you think?

I don't know why.

It's like, cause there's this idea.

There's used to be this idea that they were these like thuggish brutes.

Right.

You know, but there's like when you look, when you, if you kind of follow Neanderthal News, like I do, there's a theme.

Yeah, there's like a theme of this kind of like, this delight, like this kind of delighted realization about how like how complex their culture was, how complex their society was.

It'd be like, like you don't find, like, man, it turns out they were dumber than we thought.

Right.

That's not like a news story.

It would be like, oh, they appreciated the finer things in life.

Well, it's like the branding.

It's like, even when it goes back to like you were talking about the Bald Eagle, it's like just that PR, that spin.

I wonder if they're-they have a very, very good PR agency, Neanderthals, right now, or I have a good one on retainer, and they're getting a lot of good ink about that they liked art and movies, you know.

And it's like, it's like they're just getting cooler cools.

They're getting cooler cools.

Oh, yeah.

They love stand by me.

You're like, that's insane, dude.

I'm telling you, dude.

Start paying attention to Neanderthal news and you'll see what I'm talking about.

When I get my guest on, he'll tell you all about it.

Oh, I'll send you the episode.

I love that you're going to have that, man.

Dude, listening to two, dude, what would be better?

Listening to that.

Of course, I could talk about humans all day long, bro.

Listening to two Neanderthals talk about themselves, they wouldn't know a lot,

but they would try pretty hard.

That could be us, dude.

That's awesome.

That's really awesome, dude.

People say you look like Harry Connick Jr.

sometimes?

No, I've gotten,

I used to get Kevin Bacon.

That's who it is.

I used to get a dude from the dude from, remember the show where they would do all the crazy stunts to each other?

Oh,

Johnny Knoxville.

Oh, yeah.

Johnny Knoxville.

I could see that song.

Get that.

What else do I get?

Those are good ones.

Yeah, I don't see that one too clear.

Because I don't never get, I never do clever shit with my hair.

Yeah, yeah.

Johnny's hair is always kind of stylish and stuff like that.

Yeah.

So I think that Kevin Bacon, like, he doesn't get too clever with his hair.

I saw that.

He was kicking ass when I was a kid in the movie making business, man.

Oh, he's such a talented guy.

I saw the guy who was in Fight Club the other night.

Brad Pitt?

Nope.

I saw Edward Norton the other night.

Oh.

With some friends.

It was like at a little restaurant.

And I was like, is that Edward Norton?

And it was him.

I don't look like him.

No, you don't.

I'd love to look like him, Edward Norton.

I'm trying to think.

If you had to look like a woman, who do you think you'd look like?

That's a great question.

I don't know.

Sure there's one out there.

No, I'm sure.

But look, we get to pick.

That's why we're in this conversation, dude.

I didn't want to talk about it, but let's talk about it.

What I'm saying is, if you got to look like a woman, who would you look like?

It's kind of a good question.

Trying to think who I could see.

I'm not even like equipped, man.

I can't really think of what you're getting.

Am I getting it anything?

If I was a woman, what wound would I want to look like?

Or if I had to be a dude that looked like a woman?

No, dude.

What are you talking about?

I don't know.

I'm not talking about some fucking chop shop aftermarket woman.

I'm talking about some, I'm talking about a certified bone-in woman, like you're a woman from the jump.

Yeah, but what I'm getting at is there's two ways of looking at it.

You're saying that I remain a dude.

I remain a guy.

No.

Oh, I become a woman.

No.

What woman do I want?

You're a woman from the start.

Say somebody.

Oh, like going back, I was born a woman.

Yes.

And then I wanted to pick which of these women I wanted to look like.

Right.

Like, which woman would you be good at?

Which woman would you be?

I wonder.

It's a great question, actually.

I'm trying to think who you would be.

Let me think about it for a decade.

I'm just trying to think, man.

For some reason, the name Naomi Watts keeps coming to my head, but I don't know why.

It's just popping in my head.

Little pervert.

I know.

It's just popping in my head.

I don't mean it to.

Bring her up.

Oh, yeah it just popped in my head

i don't want to be held to it it popped in my head

dude it's not a bad choice she's great

naomi watts i like it just popped in my head i don't know

i look exactly like that anyways i'm in dude oh look i look that's what i look like yeah that's why dude there were some cuties in our neighborhood and that's why people started doing peep and tom and i'll tell you this If you grow up around busted women, nobody's getting that step stool out.

You know that shit.

Oh, there we are, right there.

There's you and Joe right there.

No.

No, that's not.

I'd be more like

one of those dudes and Naomi Watts.

Yeah, neither one of those is us.

I saw, what were you talking about?

I saw something you were talking about going on a safari in Africa.

Oh, did you notice this?

I did do that, but yeah.

Either way.

I noticed that.

That's what I was talking about.

the snakes and shit.

Yeah.

When I went to Africa, right?

So I went there like a couple times for some different safaris and stuff like that.

I felt like some of the people, when you look in their eyes there, it goes further back in time.

Does that make any sense to you at all?

I think that

it may have, but I believe that that would be your perception of that?

That would be your perception.

Right.

Dude, I talked to this one guy and I was like, this guy,

he just got damn just

back through.

I mean, it just felt like it went back to the, like,

just to where the fingers of existence first snapped right there at the damn sound.

You've gone hunting in Africa?

I did for the first time ever this summer.

You did?

Did you enjoy it?

Were you?

I

was a life-changing experience.

Like, in what way?

I hadn't been to that continent.

It wasn't like the going hunting there was life-changing, but one of the things I like about hunting is it immerses you and it immerses you in a situation and immerses you in an environment in a deeper deeper way than you would be immersed otherwise.

Because you're doing something very, like, very ancient and base, you know?

So

it wasn't the experience of being there hunting, but just the, I hadn't been, that was like, I hadn't visited that continent.

And so I got to go to a couple places.

And it was just, it was, it just scrambled up my head about, you know, when you see different ways of living, you know?

So in that way, it was, it was profound.

To me, it was profound.

Did you guys visit some like innate cultures there and stuff like that?

Yeah, like some very, yeah, like some really ancient cultures.

I spent a little bit of time in this place called Maasai Land

and met dudes, met Maasai dudes that are herders.

They'll live in structures they make themselves from native material and herd cattle and been herding cattle since,

you know, from our perspective, since the beginning of time on this place.

Did it feel like traveling back in time a little bit?

Yeah, it did for me for sure.

Just like those glimpses into like those glimpses into cultures that have

those glimpses glimpses into cultures that have have

remained

relative to our own that have remained very constant

okay so like that was that was yeah here's some photos of Masai folks

that was very eye-opening the dark Amish right there being out they're herders you know they're like um beautiful oh it's dude stunning

stunning do you think they have such a different relationship with existence than we do yes yeah me too oh 100 yeah like they send their they they send like the kids bust their ass they'll spend they'll send little kids out like when when they'll send their kids out to watch the goat herds man those kids don't drink water and eat till they come home at night they raise them to be tough tough tough you kick it more as a grown-up

Like kids will work real hard, you know, and as you get older, you get, you kind of get more of like, you get to kick it a little bit more.

But when you're a kid, you bust ass.

That was fascinating.

A lot about it was fascinating.

And I also liked the animals.

A thing that I've been,

there's a thing that I've like lamented in

conversations with my friends, in my writing, and all kinds of things.

I often, I spent a lot of time thinking about, studying, talking about, writing about

Ice Age America.

So our continent.

what it was like in the at the Pleistocene, Holocene transition.

So like humans that were here during the tail end of the ice age, the first people that came here, what were their lives like?

And they lived amongst this great abundance and diversity of wildlife that we don't have now.

Mammoths, Mastodon, short-faced bears, right?

All this kind of shit.

They had a giant, like a beaver that was the size of a black bear.

There was an American lion.

Fuck, man.

There was like

shit.

Multiple market shit.

But we don't have shit.

So

going there, like, that was the one continent.

that was the one continent where all the big shit didn't vanish.

Yeah.

That's the Africa is the one continent where humans and all this megafauna

never changed.

They,

for whatever reason, is the one continent where all the big shit didn't vanish.

So you still have that great diversity of wildlife.

So you can sit in the U.S.

Like if you're a guy like me who's really interested in history, you can sit in the U.S.

and lament

that

our elephants are gone.

Like we don't have like 9, 10, 11, 12, 20 species of ungulates running around at any given time.

Antelopes.

Yeah, like whatever.

But you go to Africa, you're like, oh,

that's what they were talking about.

Like, the ice age.

Yeah, you're like, the ice age is alive and well.

Like, there is an elephant.

There's a hippo.

There's stuff that weighs thousands of pounds.

thousands of pounds.

There's stuff that weighs tons, you know?

And so it didn't,

what happened everywhere else didn't happen there so that was to to go like oh it's not gone it's somewhere else but you can go and be like this is what it would be like i wrote down a list i i kept a list on my notes function in my phone i kept a list of like large mammals large mammals species that we encountered and i can't remember man by the time we were done we had like 27 i i i could pull out my phone and show you maybe i have it anyways I had like 27 large mammal species that I personally laid eyes on.

Wow.

That's cool.

And that would be like, that's the shit we're talking about, like in Ice Age America.

And so life-changing in those kinds of ways.

Yeah.

You know, I wonder if you had a brain scan whenever you see those types of things, right?

As a human, I wonder if there's a different reaction that happens in your brain as opposed to when you see different animals.

Like, does it take us back to a part of us that like knew those animals well or knew that they existed?

Like, I wonder.

There's a theory about that.

That, like, why do that, that,

you know, when you take babies and make them mobile, the animal things,

there's this,

it seems to me kind of a cockamame theory, but there's this idea that,

and it's this kind of like ancestral Africa thing, that those animals resonate with babies

because it's drawing back to some deep, deep

memory.

Oh, the animals that are on a mobile megafauna.

Oh, yeah.

I don't buy that.

It's always a giraffe.

I don't buy that shit.

But

I think it's, like I said, I think it's a little goofy.

But there is that idea.

Do you think Bluey resonates with, you know what I'm saying?

That's crazy.

You think Thomas the Train resonates like from prehistoria or whatever?

Well, it's just, it's just an idea.

But there is a thing that is that I do think about when I think about animals and deep history and shit that's gone.

As bummed as you can get, as bummed as you can get about animals that used to be around the aren't anymore.

Like the way little kids trip out about dinosaurs being gone.

As bummed as you might get about all that, the biggest animal to ever live, the largest animal to ever live on the face of the earth is here right now

and it is a blue whale yeah biggest animal ever live on the face of the earth so when little kids are like golly those dinosaurs like

the big ball system biggest animal to ever live is here yeah that's the dmx if you put your effort into it you go see the biggest animal that ever lived on the face of the earth dude that is crazy and it gives you hope that that that if he wants he'll bring those other ones back that they can do it with science if they can do it dude it's gonna happen soon yeah i don't i disagree but that's a different time Really?

We'll talk about that another time, though.

But dude, one thing I will say this, I went on a safari and we're there, right?

So the guy, it was like an amboselli or somewhere.

I think we were in, maybe in Kenya.

And the guy.

So you're on a photo safari.

Yeah, we were just like in, yeah, we didn't get, we got out, but only near the

place we were staying.

Got it.

Otherwise, we were just kind of in.

Cruising in trucks.

Cruising in trucks, yeah.

Oh, there was a Pride Alliance that kind of came around us at one point and they were just laying down.

Like they weren't bothering us or anything.

And the guy is like, do not stand up in here.

Everybody just stay.

I'm going to start the engine up in a little bit.

I'm just going to back out of here.

And they were like somewhere like six or seven feet away.

Like it was definitely pretty gnarly.

It was probably like seven or eight of them.

And this one woman's fucking phone goes off, right?

And it was a like a

It was like an iCarly ringtone or something.

It was like some.

I don't know what that means.

It was some TV, some children.

Okay.

And we're,

it was just like,

fuck, we were going to die.

And she immediately kind of just like, I don't know.

It's just funny.

Like, you thought it would have startled the cat and the cat might have done something.

Oh, for sure.

The guy just said, do not make any sharp moves.

Do not stand up.

And this lady's camera, like, phone went off and she kind of went like that.

And the guy just turned around.

But it's just like, in a moment's notice, like you can be wiped out because of ignorant, human ignorance, you you know human error

so again it takes up psychological space big old cats yeah yeah

but man uh yeah i appreciate you coming and talking man this is a lot of fun oh i enjoyed it yeah it was a lot of fun man i gotta um come over there and go on one of your journeys sometimes if you guys well i'll take you out to do something yeah do you guys go in montana yeah that's where i live yeah it is yeah dude i love to fish What do you like to catch?

Catfish.

You like catfishing?

I like catfish, but I would be willing.

I'm willing to catch other fish as well.

What's the kind of fish you'd most like to catch?

I would like to catch probably one of those big, long trout.

Big, long trout.

Like the ones you see in that Brad Pitt and his brother caught.

Remember?

Sure.

Those.

Those are awesome, dude.

We can arrange that, man.

I would be honored to take you out fishing.

I'm going to be in Montana at the beginning of at the, I think the first week of October.

I don't know if you're going to be over there or not.

Yeah, I might be.

What are you doing there?

I'm supposed to go to some seminar kind of thing or something.

Seminar?

Yeah.

I don't know what it's called.

On the undertholes?

I wish I hope so, dude.

If it is, and I can bring somebody.

Can you, yeah, please ask around.

I'm going to be like, I'll be like, hey, look,

if it is, I'll make sure to do some recon for you.

Yeah, I'd appreciate it.

No, yeah, that would be fun.

It'd be fun, dude, to go fish.

You know, I think, yeah, like, do you want to, do you ever do it?

Have you ever done a float?

Like, you want to float down a river and catch trout?

I've never done that before.

Yeah.

I've done, I've done

whatever the one, not the fucking

like, I've done fly fishing.

Oh.

Yeah.

I've done fly fishing.

You've done fly fishing.

Do you like that?

I did like it.

It was cool, man.

I only got to do it one time, but I think.

Do you like the water?

Have you ever

spearfished?

I've never spearfished.

I love to fish, though.

Well, I would be honored to take you fishing, man.

That'd be fun.

Cool.

All right, we'll do it.

Yeah.

That'd be great.

It'd be awesome, man.

Thanks for all your contributions to just helping people learn about the outdoors and the history of the outdoors.

I know you have a book out that's, or it might be your newest book about

when people are looking for beaver pellets and stuff across North America.

Yeah, so I'd.

It's about mountain men, right?

Yeah,

there's a new meat eater season coming out.

And then we have, I've been working on these things, these meat eaters American history series.

We did one on the long hunters.

So like Daniel Boone was a famous, he used to hunt this country.

Daniel and the deerskin trade.

so the late colonial deerskin trade, did one on the mountain men and the beaver trade.

And then our new one coming out now is called The Hide Hunters, and it's about the people that wiped out the last 15 million buffalo off the Great Plains at the end of the Civil War.

Fuck.

So it's these things about

market hunting history.

That's pre-sale.

It's not, that's available.

That's available for pre-sale right now.

But we just finished that, The Hide hunters so the meat eaters american history series that that's a lot of the shit we talk like like what you and i have been talking about it's a lot of

that's kind of a home for a lot of that information cool yeah like a lot of like human history yeah wildlife like how resources get exploited overexploited recovered those those

those series they're audio originals right um i do print books too but those are like audio they're audio stories like i we that that me and a researcher we like put them together i narrate them um and they kind of tell that story of america through like american history american movement through these kind of like keystone wildlife species that supported a lot of industry and economic activity at different times because for a long time that's what american economies were driven by was leather yeah fur and leather wow yeah is it interesting to see that like hunting has like taken away species?

Like, I mean, it's kind of.

Takes them away and puts them back.

I know.

Yeah.

Dude, we've done, we like speaking collectively, hunters,

as much as I hesitate to speak collectively, like the practice of hunting has done a lot of damage and has done a lot of.

recovery.

We've righted, like we collectively, historically, hunters have done a lot in the last century, done an extraordinary amount in the last century to right the wrongs of our fathers.

Yeah.

Well, I think it does feel like in the end, like the general feeling of a lot of hunters, it's not just about going out and killing something, it's about having a relationship with nature.

Yeah.

Anyone who's serious about it, that's what drives it.

Yeah.

That desire.

Like if you just have a desire to go out and kill something, it doesn't last long.

Yeah.

You can fucking do that in Memphis.

It doesn't last long.

Steve.

Steve Ranilla, thank you so much, dude.

And thanks for putting up with me today.

I appreciate it.

I appreciate the opportunity.

I look forward to us going fishing together.

That'd be a great time.

It was fun.

I got a bunch of friends going to be jealous.

Really?

Shit, I might bring one of them.

Bring a very good friend of mine, Seth.

He's a huge fan of yours.

He was shit in his pants, and I told him I was coming on your show.

Oh, that's cool, dude.

Yeah, bring, dude.

Yeah.

Maybe he'll fish with us.

Oh, yeah.

If he wants to come, though, he won't say anything weird.

He probably won't say much at all.

It already seems weird.

But it's okay, man.

It would be an honor, man.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it, Steve.

Now, I'm just floating on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.

I must be

cornerstone.

Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind.

I found I can feel it in my bones.

But it's gonna take

a little bit of time.