Steve Rinella and Bryan Callen tackle hunting’s emotional impact, from Rinella’s wife accepting wild game after witnessing a close-range kill to debates on bear aggression—Joe Rogan calls black bears "dog-eating assholes" while they dissect hybrid threats tied to climate change. They contrast modern sedentary life with primal survival skills, citing the Unabomber’s critique of technology and Lewis & Clark’s untamed Missouri River headwaters, now altered by dams. A floating lawless city idea sparks gun control discussions, with Rogan arguing SSRIs may fuel violence while both defend martial arts and constitutional rights as solutions. Ultimately, the episode blends survivalism, psychology, and media trends to question how humanity’s detachment from nature—and its dangers—reshapes behavior and values. [Automatically generated summary]
But the thing is, no one would be able to really afford to do that much damage to themselves on a satellite phone until the price comes down a little bit.
I'm telling you, my wife had, we had a baby a month ago, and like I said, I've been sleeping on the floor next to the bed in a sleeping bag, and all night, I'm getting interrupted, and I can't remember anything.
And last night, at one point, I'm like, you know what?
I know I'll forget the bear meat.
I should go put the bear meat in my bag now.
So I'm like, but that's, you know...
Then you start thinking about, like, hours without refrigeration.
You know, there's so many, like, when you get Wild Game in a restaurant...
It's either imported, like come from Scotland or New Zealand and be deer, but the domestic ant, like the, I'm sorry, the indigenous animals here, you know, people have done wild game versions, like you can get elk or deer or whatever.
I went to Vietnam and did a piece about eating dogs around the Tet holiday because it's like really auspicious to eat a dog in the last days of the lunar year.
Well, I was writing my article and I had this line in there in my article where I'm like, you know, of course it's illegal to sell dog meat in the U.S. But in other, you know, some line like that.
And this fact checker was like, well, how do you know?
Like, show me...
Where you got that it's illegal to sell dog meat in the U.S. I'm like, well, I didn't.
I mean, of course it is.
You can't sell dog meat in the U.S. He's like, well, we need to see something.
You know, you got to back it up.
And I started looking into it in a real way, and I called someone from the USDA and other things, and there's nothing, man.
Like, California and New York, it's illegal to sell dog meat.
It's like the only two states where someone ever really pushed it.
In Michigan, the rule is you can't sell dog meat unless it's properly labeled.
And this guy from the USDA... Now, this is a conversation I had with a guy from the USDA, and he told me this.
He said that...
Within their guidelines, there's no reason you could not have an inspected dog production facility.
Of course someone's going to come after you.
The minute you did it, you'd probably have tons of people coming after you for different reasons, but there's nothing per se that's like one cannot commercially produce dog meat.
Yeah, but usually there's one strong, very severe flu, whether it's swine flu, or this year it's supposed to be particularly severe, so I guess they inject you with a dead version, but it still can give you a fever and stuff because it's a new agent in your body.
That's why in Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond says that agricultural societies breathe way nastier germs because animals mutate from the cowpox, smallpox.
And the minute that indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes, because they were small, always moving, so epidemics couldn't really build into those environments, usually you're kind of healthy being a hunter-gatherer.
That's right, because they leave their feces where they are and they move, whereas farmers live within their shit and Wild and in your own filth, man.
So when they would come in, these big agricultural societies, not only did they have systems of governments because they could grow more because they could grow their own food and stay in one place, but they breathed nasty germs, man.
In fact, by some accounts, the Native Americans, by the time after Cortez came back, or Columbus, one of them, Columbus came, and they were talking about huge populations in the Mississippi Delta and stuff.
You know more about this than I do, Steve.
Just gone.
When they came back in 15 years, nobody was there.
It was literally, and they think that the epidemic killed off 95% of the Native Americans.
It's hard to get back to sucking on those things, too.
It's strange, you know?
It's like, once you think of them as where the food comes back, I mean, where the food comes out for the baby, and then all of a sudden you're like, yeah, baby.
It becomes strange.
It's like, wait a minute, what is that place exactly?
It just takes, you know, there's like a state of grace where it's like for like six months at least after she stops breastfeeding, you leave them alone.
This was like literally you were 28. Your house was, he lived, he was doing news radio and he lived way out in the middle of nowhere and his house was so messier than mine and mine is messy but there was just, nothing was put away.
But the thing I always feel about TV when I'm watching dramas, I always feel like I'm watching people Like, often times I feel like it's being written from an angle where they don't really understand the world they're writing about.
Where it's like a bunch of dudes, like, imagining the South.
Like, I got it.
It'll be the hell heck, you know what I mean?
And it just kind of winds up being like, has any of you ever...
And I don't know, I'm not like, don't know much about this, but I know enough to know that it just feels like someone picturing what it would be like in their world.
Alan Ball was from the South, but he was a gay man in the South.
And I think if you watch True Blood, vampires, you know, that's his experience.
It's, I think, I don't mean to put, I know Alan, so I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think it's what, being a vampire in the South, like, that takes place is what it felt like to be gay when you were younger and it was a violent place.
True Blood, I think, was a book or something like that, but I think that at the end of the day, you can see so much of what it was like to be gay as a young boy growing up in the South.
I find it fascinating, and I've been really fixated on this lately, how pussified movies and television are getting to the point where the vampires that we have, they're not like vampires.
Why would you want to make this horrific monster and change its nature...
And turn it into this romantic figure.
But my point is that what I'm freaking out about is that there's this whole trend.
Like that Bourne movie.
You know that Bourne ultimatum or whatever the fuck it is?
The new dude.
The new dude is pretty fucking badass.
Jeremy Renner.
He's badass.
Okay.
He gets no pussy in the whole movie.
He saves everybody.
This girl's weeping.
She's all over him.
But there's never a kiss, never any desire on his part ever exhibited that he's even remotely attracted to these unbelievably hot women that he just keeps saving and they're falling in love with him.
And he's just kind of like blank and nonchalant.
Like, what the fuck is the message there?
Like, are we becoming...
Do we want our superheroes to be robot men there to service women and keep them alive?
And that's like the ultimate goal?
But no sex.
At the end of the movie, they're sitting on a boat together, and they're facing each other.
I think that's a really interesting observation, though, because if you actually think about it, like the TV shows I've seen, Even Homeland and certainly Breaking Bad, the sex is non-existent.
You hear about these, I think it was Ivan the Terrible in Russia when whoever the artist was that did the Winter Palace, I think it was the Winter Palace, this beautiful, this guy, it was a lifetime of 20 years of his, it's like his opus, this great artist.
I mean, if you look at it, I think it's either the Winter Palace or this church, this incredible church in Russia.
And when he was done with it, And he presented it to Ivan the Terrible.
Ivan the Terrible was like, this is the most incredible thing in the world.
There's a book called The Murder Room and the guy who specializes in sadism and serial killers, he wrote what's called kind of like the double helix of the serial killer's profile.
Yeah, there's something that snaps, allows you to get a thrill off of killing a bunch of people and there's a weird thing that happens to people with this whole royalty thing.
That's why Britain was – it benefited from the notion that they had very strong institutions.
And so when you had a royal person that you came in contact with, it was very important to observe ritual protocol and ritual sort of greeting and interaction because it kept the wall between you and the royalty because the entire society… To the benefit of the royalties.
Well, no, but also the whole society was built on not only the idea of this caste system, but also very central to the British character was that to esteem out of your class was actually considered heretical.
It was considered to the detriment of the entire community and society, right?
Whereas Americans were like...
All I'm thinking about is climbing the fuck out of this hole and getting to the top.
What's interesting, a lot of people believe that a society like ours, or at least how ours initially was born, is only built in response to suppression.
It's like you have to have...
A situation like England where they're completely suppressing you to the point where you're willing to take such a great chance but you already have a semblance of idea of order in society which is based on their system of kings.
And that's the weirdest thing is it's almost like the only way for us to have ever gotten to a position of power or a position of creating a culture, creating civilization is that somebody had to take control.
And ultimately we are these weird fucking alpha apes.
And we really want to be like led by like one person or like one group or one leader or at least have someone at the very top that we can all agree to clap for.
Yeah.
And until we fill that goal, then it becomes this wild fucking power struggle.
It's like the only way we can work together is through one person.
What's interesting though is the Founding Fathers had a rebuttal to that and George Washington most famously when they wanted to make him king said, I am not only going to not be the king because we don't have kings in this country.
We have presidents.
That are part of a structure, a structure that is directly responsible to the people, right?
But that was sort of the idea.
And King George, when he found out that Washington had refused the kingship and instead went and fucking retired, was like, that guy's the greatest guy of all.
That's the American character.
That was kind of sealed as – that was the great example George Washington did.
He said, don't ever call me king because that is exactly what we fought against.
Watching the Arab Spring stuff, I mean, I was always skeptical of it.
In one way, it was almost kind of embarrassing just understanding the history of some of those areas, the way Americans would so quickly forget our allegiances.
And so, you know, we're going against Gaddafi, and everybody's like...
Yeah, you know, the number one U.S. enemy, Qaddafi.
Like, forgetting that we were doing all kinds of things through there, you know, and in some ways supporting Mubarak, in some ways, you know, later...
But so quickly people wanted to make the jump that he was this logical enemy.
And that was frustrating a little bit, but the main thing is, when I was watching all that, I wanted to be optimistic, but I just feel like there's no way that this is just going to be smooth transitions.
And there's this competing idea, like, when you're an American, there's this...
Like, this competing idea we have between being pragmatic, you know, like we want these countries to be such and such way in order to secure our interests, but also we have this thing where it's like the only legitimate form of government is a democracy.
And as we're going to find again and again, I'm definitely not like a, you know, definitely not an expert on world politics, but I think we're going to find again and again that other countries being democracies isn't always going to serve our own national security interests, you know?
I think that we want to think that it's like, that it's dovetailed and it's not going to be that way, man.
It just depends on how you define it because one of the things, Rory Parker, I believe his name is a British MP, part of the parliament, and he's walked every remote village in Afghanistan, every remote village in Africa, and he said he'd never been anywhere, even the most remote village in Afghanistan, he'd never met anybody, anybody no matter how strong their tribal notions were, he never met anybody who didn't want some say and who governed them.
So that seems to be a human need and a human right and a human compulsion to have some say in who fucking...
Otherwise you get a guy like Ivan the Terrible who just amasses power.
We all have a natural revulsion for that.
We all have a natural kind of...
I do think you're right that human beings need an alpha, a leader, and they always find a leader, but I also think at the same time they want some say in that process and in the ongoing process, that is, who governs them.
It really feels like we talk about with kids, if you try to take a spoon out of their hand without explaining that you need the spoon, they'll hold on to that fucking spoon.
Human beings seem to have a resistance, a natural resistance to those that would have power over them.
I think the idea that you have to physically be in an area in order to observe or to respect the fact that a tragic incident has took place is observed.
I was watching some of that footage of the tidal waves in Japan and how they roll through, and it looks like just water, and you think, well, it's just water.
Because you're talking about like essentially a mountain falling into the ocean.
And causing this incredible blast of energy which carries this water, this huge tidal wave that starts in the middle of fucking, you know, wherever that is, the Canary Islands, and goes 500 miles an hour across the ocean and then slams into America.
I mean, look, they found many, many, especially near Spain, many, many sunken civilizations.
They found the one that they're calling Atlantis, you know, whether or not Atlantis is actually a physical place, but it's got concentric circles, just like they believe Atlantis did.
I just remember in college we talked about this and read this thing about this guy.
This guy, a German, had made a bunch of money in the California gold rush and then went...
You'll be able to find it on your little computer there.
And went and spent a bunch of time trying to locate Troy.
And they don't think that it was over Helen, but it was like a trade war.
And there's some mention of, like...
Some of the integral characters, like not Odysseus, but some of the Agamemnon or some of the higher-up kings, there's some historical allusion to who these characters might have been that got involved in that war.
But it wasn't like the face that launched a thousand ships.
I think it might have been a trade dispute.
But I'm telling you some dated stuff, man, because I was in college in the mid-90s, mid to late 90s, so that was what I knew then.
He had devoted the latter part of his life to identifying what Troy would have been.
And he had a somewhat accepted...
When I learned about this, he had come to a somewhat accepted...
Conclusion about what Troy was, maybe some of the principal characters were involved, where in fact, like some of the people that are discussed in the Odyssey or in the Iliad were in fact living people at that time, and they were engaged in a large, and there was a large battle and a siege of a city, and out of that was born that legend of the siege of Troy and the story of the Iliad.
People have written books and certainly articles about how Greece has never – hasn't produced a whole lot of artistic expression that's world-class artistic expression for 3,500 years or whatever, for a long time.
Mainly because, you know, some rare examples, but mainly because they have that legacy looming over them.
If you go to Athens, the Acropolis is right there looking over the city.
Yeah, but energy – I transfer energy to being something called inspiration.
You have no energy unless somebody provides you with a blueprint or the inspiration to do so, right?
One of the things they say is that if you can – a lot of times you can motivate yourself by defining what you're going to lose as opposed to what you're going to gain.
We're really good at dealing with things like, oh, I didn't get that, and then we just...
But they say that psychologists sometimes will tell you, if you don't do this thing that you want to do, what do you actually lose?
What are you not going to get?
What are you going to lose that you already have?
And when you start framing somebody's motivational incentives that way, they will tend to work a lot harder.
And I think you've got to continue chipping away at it.
Can you try to add to it?
But the Bigfoot thing, of all of our, you know, the species that we have, the endangered species that we have, and I'm talking about in North America, the ones that we knew we had and they went away, went away.
And some of the ones that we knew were hanging on, we still have a big problem with mortality on those things, and we find them.
Anything that can kill me, you can go fuck yourself.
If it might eat you one day, did you ever see that video of the woman in Russia where she's in a town in Russia and a polar bear has made its way into the town and is attacking her?
Everyone's screaming and throwing shit at the bear.
I know that the theory I'm familiar with is people suggest that it might begin to happen more as the polar ice cap recedes and polar bears aren't able to spend as much time out on the sea ice that they'll be coming inland more.
So I think there's been, my understanding again, there's been an increase in the distance inland that people have been encountering some bears and it's greater likelihood of bringing polar bears into what would be traditionally like Interior grizzly habitat.
And so some hybrids have turned up.
But I don't know.
They're not viable.
And I don't know if anyone knows in a bulletproof way that this wasn't happening before and it's happening now.
But I think just in a logical sense, if there's not going to be the availability of sea ice, bears are going to spend, obviously, more time on ground, which is going to bring them into when grizzly bears are out of hibernation.
In the spring is going to bring them into more contact.
So, I mean, that's what people say.
But a guy, you know, there was a guy not long ago, just a couple years ago, shot one and it was legit.
You know, he knew it was weird when he shot it and took it in.
He was a native guy.
He shot and it was checked out and that's what it was.
And do all this kind of crazy stuff and like, you know, they got their, they brush their teeth off in a different area and hang their toothbrush up in a tree because it might smell the thing or they don't go out in the woods if they're, you know, if their wife's menstruating, you know, they don't want to go out in the woods with her.
And you can go crazy or you can be like crazy in the other extreme and just like, you know, drag a, kill an animal and drag it back to camp and gut it and then leave the guts laying there for five days to ripen in the sun next to your tent, which would be like the other kind of Ridiculous.
Or you can kind of walk a moderate line.
And if you can do things without tainting your experience, but just little common sense issues, Not camping right on top of carcasses.
If you're cooking smelly food, like fish and fish guts and stuff, be careful about getting rid of that stuff.
Putting your food up in a tree, if there's trees available.
If there aren't things, then you put your food somewhere where you can see it and monitor it.
Lay sweaty clothes on top of it to enhance the human odor in the area.
I mean, just little things you can do that don't...
Ruin your time, but that you're generally trying to decrease the chance that you're going to have a conflict that's going to have to get the government involved, and they're going to come out and have to kill some bear because you've got trouble with you.
I think, yeah, and even the ones that don't have experience with humans, like if you go in a really remote area where you run into a bear, you run into a two-year-old bear, three-year-old bear, And it's reasonable to assume he has not had a direct interaction with a human.
You know, it's possible he just hasn't.
His parent, his mother could be 12 years old, and she's had a handful throughout 12-year-old life.
Because the little ones haven't accumulated a set of experiences that teaches them what's good and what's bad.
Just think about adolescence.
If you're going to get into a road rage incident, in some ways, a road rage incident with a guy that's 50 isn't quite as dangerous as it might be with a guy that's 18. The guy that's 18, you don't know.
He still might be sorting through some stuff, or he might be willing to...
Some of you guys know so much more about bears than I do, but people that look particularly dangerous bears, the bears to watch out for, are the ones that have been recently kicked out by their mother.
And the males will get kicked out and tend to have to go farther afield to find a home range.
Everywhere they're going, they're getting beaten up by a resident bear.
They don't have a good lock on available food resources yet.
It's very likely that they're hungry, they're inexperienced, they're pressured.
And when you encounter those, those are the ones that people watch out for.
I think that those black bears are more likely to end up in some tree in the middle of a town, the young displaced ones.
But again, I just generally, and you can cite examples of things that happen, like generally black bears are just not, I don't think of them as a dangerous bear.
I don't think a black bear is being any more dangerous than a deer being dangerous.
As much as I just said, you know, I'm not afraid of bears.
My dad's buddy got mauled because he was hunting bears from a tree.
And a sow with cubs came in.
And he didn't want to shoot the sow with cubs.
You know, most places you can't.
But that sow smelled something.
She smelled a person.
And her response was to shoot her cubs up a tree to safety.
And she shoot them up his tree.
So when they came past him on his tree, They started squealing, and then she came up and mauled his lower legs.
I remember one night we were sitting in our house, my dad got a phone call.
This guy he used to hunt with had gotten his lower legs mauled by this bear, and he eventually fended her off, was trying to fend her off with the arrow, and the two coves eventually came back down the tree, and then she let him be.
So, yeah, there are instances, but you can also, I mean, if you're just like cruising YouTube, I mean, there's plenty of places where you go find a deer to knock the hell out of someone, too.
I was reading this bear hunting book by this writer, Tony Ross.
He was talking about on Kodiak Island, in the Alaska Peninsula, areas that just have really dense grizzly populations.
Brown bear and grizzly is the same thing.
People generally say brown bear for coastal grizzlies and grizzlies for interior.
He was saying that the male grizzlies will come out, and when they come out in those areas, they might have a grizzly for every one or two or three square miles, so a lot more dense than most other areas.
When they come out in the spring, they're hunting cubs.
It's like there's so many of them, and they're so vicious that they come out, and a primary food source for some of these mature boars is grizzly cubs.
But he said, a weird thing is, and they'll kill those cubs.
He said, in all of his hunting, when they'll kill a grizzly or brown bear and skin it, you know, He said in all of his hunting, and he's talked to other guys too, he's never seen where a brown bear consumed the skinned out carcass of another brown bear.
And he mentions in this book, he talks to some other people he's talking about, some guy like in 20 years of hunting or whatever, yet they've never seen the carcass of an adult get cannibalized.
The blue whale will drown a female's calf because she'll breed again.
If not, she's not going to breed for years.
It's rough, man.
There's a lot of people that really try to dress up the animal world.
Everybody's always, oh, innocent, this.
It's like...
There's some wicked stuff out there, but those big boars, he was talking about this dude, Tony Russell, talking about these big boars, they'll go out and dig dens.
They come out early, and the females will come out later, so the females will be in the dens of the cubs, and those boars will go around doing site visits, and they'll dig cubs right out of the den and eat them.
Like, you can hang out in the woods so much, you know?
And...
You can hang out in the woods so much, and then when you look at all the things you've seen out in the woods, it's startling how few really weird things you see, but it's proportionate.
No one just spends a little dinky bit of time out in the woods and then sees tons of weird stuff.
You've got to put in the hours to catalog stuff.
There's a guy I know, he's a guy, Jay Scott, and I was talking one day, I was feeling cocky because I've seen three mountain lions while I was hunting.
Not running them with dogs, but just being there in the woods looking for games with his binoculars.
And that right there, you can't buy it.
He's a very honest guy.
That means, oh, that dude spent tons of time out there.
And some of the things that that guy that was in the footage, and I'm only going by, and on Grizzly, man, I'm only going by whatever I saw on that two-hour Herzog movie.
Like, Lord knows how many things didn't make it.
Yeah.
But he was out there and witnessed some amazing sights, man.
Timothy Treadwell's footage was all turned into this Werner Herzog documentary, but this is just a piece of what this guy got when he was living up there.
And I think a lot of people believe...
Look at that, they're going to war with each other.
The bear on the bottom is doing a real good job defending himself.
This for real, even though the other bear is bigger, what's going on there, the way the bear fights, is how they teach you to fight in jiu-jitsu, for real.
Foot on the hips, controlling his body, not letting him get all of his weight on top of you, shifting your hips so your feet touch onto his hips.
These are black bears, but on Prince Wells Island where my brothers and I got a little shack, the biggest bear I've seen out there And that's famous for big bears.
The biggest bear I've seen out there was a big, injured, old bear.
I don't know what happened, but he was just packing a leg.
And he was kind of in the autumn of his career, you know?
So he had been, like, probably the man, and now he probably just gets his ass kicked.
It's interesting to see where MMA is coming because if you're not prepared for someone's weapons and if someone hits you with something you haven't seen before, like I was thinking about Nate getting caught with those leg kicks over and over again.
I think Tarek Safedine is a really classical technical striker and Nate Markhart Although he's an amazing striker, the knockout of Tyron Woodley, that insane KO towards the end.
But I think that technically, if you look at all the best technical fighters, unless they're freaks of athleticism, unless they're just much faster than anyone else, they follow a certain number of rules when it comes to defending yourself, when it comes to carrying your hands, when it comes to how when it comes to carrying your hands, when it comes to how And one of them is you've got to respect everyone's techniques.
So you've got to respect leg kicks.
You've got to check leg kicks whenever possible.
And I think the idea is that Nate was going to eat a few of them and just tag them with a big punch.
That's a strategy that works.
No.
Tim Sylvia knocked out Rico Rodriguez in the same way.
Rico hit him with a leg kick and he was planted.
He decided he's just going to eat the kick and blast the punch and catch a guy.
So a lot of guys do that.
And a guy like Marco, who's got that kind of power, probably banked on that.
And then somewhere along the line, Safedine hit him with too many of them.
And that was probably the most sensational he looked.
So to go from that fight where he looks unbelievably good to this fight, just a little wake-up call.
Maybe just be a little bit more technical or conservative when you're fighting a guy like that and to realize that that kind of accumulation of eating those kind of shots really can pay off.
Like when people come up just uninvited to like talk politics or make a political incinuation.
I remember when we had our kid, we had to get a pediatrician.
I remember going to a guy who like...
Started making cracks, like just assuming that we're in the club, like we're in the left-wing club.
He just knew that we were in the left-wing club and started making cracks about right-wing people.
I remember walking out, I'm like, there's no way I'm going to take my kid to a pediatrician who, when I walk in, I want to talk about my child's health, wants to get in there with me and make assumptions about my politics.
It has nothing to do with the services I'm seeking.
And when I wanted to eat that guy's hamburger, the last thing I wanted to hear was, Was his, like, analysis of, I think it was like the Benghazi thing.
I didn't grow up in agriculture, but I grew up involved in hunting and it was around a lot of things.
I never had that level of surprise.
I think that when you take someone out for the first time, and my brothers have found the same thing with their wives or taking their girlfriends out or friends out.
There is a real reckoning that people have.
The funny thing is, despite someone's response, usually people, if you kill an animal for the first time and you're going to eat it, regardless of what you're going to do with it, you kill an animal for the first time, I don't want to say it's humbling, but it stops other thoughts.
You're alone with that thought for a minute.
But the interesting thing is, as much as I've seen that happen, I've never had anyone later Come to regret, I haven't done it.
It's always in some way strengthening for people to go see that life and death thing.
No one's ever called me back and said, that was just a terrible mistake.
For you, intellectually, knowing that this is a unique experience for most people, how does that make you feel when you see it through their eyes and the idea to you being so alien?
I think that I already kind of, in a way, I know what the experience is going to be for the person because I think in some ways we're talking about really base...
Aspects of human nature, you know?
And so I kind of can anticipate, like, if I take someone out on their first hunt and just kind of want to show them hunting first, what I usually do, you know, because, like, I respect you guys and want you to have a good time and respect your opinions on things, so I want to, like, take you on an experience that's going to be a good one, you know, that's going to be, like, an immersive kind of experience.
So I know that there's a certain thing that goes with that, like, just to kind of get away from stuff and be out in an area where you've diminished some of the noise and you're allowed to be in the moment.
It's just gonna put you in a certain spot.
And I think that it's like to take someone out on a first hunt, I'm not worried about a wild card scenario because I've done it enough to where I've seen that it just doesn't happen.
It's like people go on a kind of predictable journey on a hunt.
We gutted it out, drug it back, threw it in the skiff, and started motoring back toward our shack.
And no one was saying a word in the boat.
At all.
But then, within 45 minutes, within 45 minutes, it was enough time for her to process what she saw, and her take home was, you know what, I guess I'd still rather eat that thing Than, you know, an animal from a feedlot.
It was just like, it just took her a minute because she was like, and later I felt like, she's like, I feel like I should feel something different than I do.
It's so fascinating that you have this different point of view on death than so many people and for your wife to experience it in its most shocking form on the first pass.
I'm sure it would take a little while to intellectualize.
I just think that violence transforms you fundamentally.
For example, when you've done combat sports and you've gotten punched and knocked out or kicked in the head and knocked out or just put into a choke, you are different about your own mortality, your own relationships to other men.
Do you know what I mean?
When you've been taken to a man or you've had somebody do whatever they want to you and you realize, oh, I'm very vulnerable.
Or you get knocked out and it really hurts or hit in the body.
That, I think, fundamentally changes you in your relationship, not just to other men.
In the same way like when you have an intimate experience of harvesting your own meat, which actually requires a really loud noise, the killing of an animal and you see that blood and you feel that what just was alive and you're touching it.
Then you butcher it.
I feel like I approach – I don't know, man.
I don't even know how to articulate how it changed me, but I do think that something that is that intimately violent is going to… Why do you keep saying violence?
You know, that's the thing that I found, like, being out with you on that trip, and then that I thought of from having...
I'm hunting with Tim Ferriss once.
People that have been fighters.
I'm not a fighter.
I've been hit a couple times, but I've never beaten anybody up or anything.
Well, I beat up one guy in ninth grade.
I think that you bring a level of calmness just to the act of shooting.
Being able to get down and shoot.
Some people...
Are so unable to control adrenaline and fear, they become they can't shoot.
I got a buddy who guides and he was saying that one time he took this guy up and they were hunting tar in New Zealand and the guy shot and my buddy's watching through his binoculars where the bullet hit and he showed me that someone was rolling a video when he did it and you hear my buddy say, you're 20 feet high.
Yeah, for folks who don't know what we're saying, there's a scope on the top of the rifle, and if you're too close to that scope, it distorts your view, it fucks up.
You have to be just in the right spot.
And the first time we saw the deer, I couldn't get it in the right spot.
And then he went behind this little area and then came back out again, and when he came back out again, I was able to figure it out.
I pulled back a little bit.
I was like, oh, there it is.
But I was freaking out.
I was like, I can't fucking see this thing.
And if I lose this fucking deer because of this, I'll go crazy.
There's a lot of things that come out in hunting that I think are applicable to life and work and stuff.
But when you've been out there a couple days and you start getting accustomed to that, I think it's easy to go for a day and walk away and be like, oh, that didn't happen.
You get a couple days into something, most people, what I would almost call a work ethic, or something comes up where you're like, you know, we've committed ourselves to this.
We've put time into it.
We're out here.
And you just want to make it happen, and it brings out a level of drive.
That moment becomes such a gigantic, sweeping moment.
And that's why it's hard to stay calm, but it actually happens.
When you're building up with two days of fucking shitty camping, and one where it's raining and pouring outside, and it's cold every morning, and we're going to bed at like 8 because there's nothing to do.
It's one of those cool areas that really, and again, we're talking about the Missouri Breaks region.
It's one of those cool areas that really just kind of on its own resisted development.
There's some spots that were so stunning that early on people were like, this is Yosemite, Yellowstone.
The momentum was always going toward hanging on to it.
People went there like, this is special.
We got hot guys shooting up out of the ground.
We should early on make sure to not screw this place up.
And there's some great areas in the US, like I would argue Hell's Canyon, the Missouri Breaks region, that just remained pure just through toughness and tenacity.
Everybody went in there and tried to do something.
And it's like one of those places where you go and it's like, they tried to do that, didn't work out.
Like, one of the things that that place is known for is that horse thieves used to just go there because they knew they could go hide out.
It was useful to them just as a place to hide out.
And there were some campaigns where it was like, we're going to go into the breaks, we're going to find them all, we're going to hang them from Cottonwoods, and they'd go down there and root out the guys.
And it was a spot that held wildlife for a long time.
It was a spot where some of the Plains tribes could go down and hide out in there.
And on the muscle shell that goes into that area, it was one of the last places they had free-roaming herds in Buffalo and Montana.
It was just like a spot where people would try to get a grip, and it just didn't hold.
And now, there's some protections there, but it's not categorically protected like a place like Yellowstone is.
But after a while, people almost kind of threw their hands up in the air.
And the interesting thing we were talking about is because it's...
Oh, it'd be like a climate-controlled area where you dig down into the ground, and you'd have a cool place to store things, or it'd also be freeze-proof, because you go down the dirt ways.
And then there's still a lot of old structures there to have side.
But guys used to, you read about guys on the prairie that used to, they would in the winter hunt and dig down into the ground where the ground was frozen.
They would in the winter hunt and fill that with animals, fill it with quarters of meat and let that freeze in the winter.
And then pile canvas down or blankets on top of that, put dirt back on so it'd freeze.
And they'd dig that up months into the summer and that meat would still be good down there.
So even when you put fruit in it, if you're making fruit jerky, you put bananas in it to dehydrate or something, fruit loses vitamin C through dehydration.
There's some loss of it.
There's this amazing story about the French.
When the French started coming over here to engage in the fur trade and do all their exploring, and they were centered around a focal point of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Champlain, the guy that's now the father of New France, he had this idea where he was going to take orphans from Paris.
And bring them over and give them to the Indians, thinking that the kids already knew French.
He'd give them to the Indians, the Indians go take them off for a couple years, come back, and they'd be bilingual, and he'd be able to use these as emissaries, like ambassadors in trade.
And one of the first ones that we know about that he tried this with was this kid who's later, we now, people call him Etienne Brulee, gave them to the Indians.
And the first winter when Champlain and his people came over, they died like mad at scurvy all winter.
But this kid was supposed to go hang out at the Indians.
And so they would go out and fish through the ice and hunt.
And they were eating a meat diet.
But they had, I don't know, 24 fatalities that year.
The vast majority of the people all died.
The kid never died.
And everybody else was holed up in their cabins eating like hardtack and salt pork and stuff.
And this kid that was out roaming around eating fresh killed meat, He survived.
And then later went on to do all these amazing, made all these discoveries.
He was the first person to see Lake Superior, first person all over the Great Lakes.
Went down, all the way down the Susquehanna River.
Might have been the first white guy to ever lay eyes.
He'd come back for the trading season with the Indians and they complained that his morality had conformed to the tribes.
Like you're going to turn a 13-year-old Over to an indigenous culture and go away for a couple years and he's going to come back still acting like a French Catholic.
So what these guys would do in this area, like a lot of these tribes in the Great Lakes area, they would, sometimes they would just carry captives in the boat live and And then butcher them when you wanted to eat them.
Or they would raid an area and butcher everyone and just stack the quarters in the bowls.
So there's accounts of people talking about human legs stacked up in boats just as traveling food.
And then all that stuff you're talking about, like, making people eat parts of themselves and, you know, like, cutting off their fingers and making them eat your finger or, you know, like...
Having a big sport out of it.
Stuff that's incomprehensible now, man.
But people argue, you know, anthropologists argue that all that violence had some societal function.
Yeah, we were in New Zealand filming in New Zealand.
We went and looked at this island and this big lake and What they say is that the indigenous people in New Zealand and South Island, who hadn't even been there that long, but they had been there, some people had come from the North Island and conquered the people in the South Island and would keep stocks of them out on this island and staked out.
And when they wanted one, they'd paddle out and get them and eat them.
Just think about these people that lived like no one else in a big continent anywhere in the world.
They traveled the entire thing, and they had all these little tribes, and they were hunting, and they were all living this crazy sort of hunting-gathering lifestyle, like an entire continent filled with people doing it.
The episode that you shot Wild Buffalo in Mexico, that was a fascinating episode and it made me really stop and think about when you were describing the imagery of what it used to look like seeing buffaloes roam across the country.
It would be like the shadows from giant clouds, just like the entire land would be covered in buffalo.
And this is how it was for these fucking people that lived here for, what, 10,000 years or something?
For whenever the water, the ice thawed and became the Great Lakes.
It's funny that so many guys that hunt become interested in early cultures.
It's obvious that if you like to hunt animals, you become interested in hunter-gatherer societies.
But Just to look at it, not from that, just from how great the hunting must have been, but to look at it from other aspects.
To live with the Plains Indians, the proximity to death, unless you live in the most war-torn region of the world today, you probably can't fathom the proximity to death that you lived around.
It's so weird now.
Our culture is so easy and so soft.
I always meet people who are in their 30s and 40s, and they'll be like, I've never seen a dead person.
Like, you can go through life and not lay eyes on a dead person.
But I'd be like, if I knew someone I could really trust, and I said, when I die, I want you just to take my body.
Out to an area with a lot of bears and stuff and just chop it up real good and just stir it into the ground.
Just, you know, and like that way.
Even though I'd be dead and wouldn't even know what actually happened, it would just be nice to have it be that as I was dying, to be like, that that will happen to me.
I don't want people to stumble across my remains and call 911. Oh, yeah.
If they just leave you out there, it's like someone's going to then find you, then they're going to go out there and just be a big investigation and The question about finding animals, about finding dead mountain lions and finding bears, is that because when they know they're going to die, they go somewhere and squirrely and tuck away where no one's going to find them?
You get a bad hit on an animal, and if you get a hit on an animal with a bow or firearm, and he lives beyond that initial rush...
They're usually going to die tucked away somewhere.
They go into the thick stuff.
You'll find stuff tucked up under junipers.
This year, after we went out about hunting deer in Montana and found where a really beautiful big buck, I just happened to stumble into it.
Obviously, I feel like he'd been hit because he had a perforated antler.
Someone had shot at him, my take home, someone had shot at him and hit that antler with a bullet because he had a big bullet type wound on his antler, like a bullet hitting wood, but it cracked his skull plate.
I've never found a fresh, dead enough bear to really tell what its positioning was when it was dead.
But I've found a number of remains of bears, but never where I knew that this is its spot it had gone to.
But like I said, if you get a hit on something with a bow and you don't kill the meat, like you may be hitting the liver or hit it somewhere where it's going to live a little while, when you find it, you'll generally find it where it didn't die on the run.
It laid down and died.
And when it laid down, they're usually pretty careful to get tucked away somewhere.
The part you find most often when you see a kill that's been consumed is you find where the spinal cord enters the skull.
That thick-boned area right there extending up and to around the base of the antlers, around a non-antlered game, around a horned game, extending up to what would be kind of the space up between the ears.
It's just thick and doesn't get consumed.
But one time I remember we killed, my brother and I killed a cow elk.
This is in Montana, southwest Montana, an area with a lot of grizzlies.
We killed a cow elk and went back a week later to see what had happened, and grizzlies had been on it.
The only part we could find was just a disc of bone with the center of the remaining piece of bone was where the spinal cord passes into the skull, that heavy-boned area, the frame and magnum, I think it was the word.
And a donut-sized chunk of bone like that.
And you could tell that it didn't just go away.
That it wasn't like it drugged it somewhere we couldn't find it.
Because you could account for all that hide and all that bone in the shit that was left there.
It was all there.
And it was like a sow and some cubs or something got on it.
And it was all still there.
That trip, we went and killed another elk and packed that elk out.
And when we went back up there later on, the same thing happened to that one.
Yeah, as people say, like when they kill something, when people watch a bear, black bear or grizzly, make a kill, they'll eat that soft tissue first.
So they rip its belly open, lungs, heart, liver.
And generally, what they'll do is when they cover it with grass, some people even say that somehow when they cover it with a little bit of dirt or cover it in grass, aids decomposition.
It's said that they don't generally kill it and immediately start eating red meat.
Lions, different.
Like, lions don't like all that rotten meat.
Lions like fresh stuff.
But the bears like pretty rotten stuff, man.
I remember one time being, again, I can't remember what we were doing.
We were hunting for something or another.
On Prince of Wales Island, the shack we own.
I remember watching wolves.
You think of wolves eating fresh meat.
A wolf, throughout the year, takes seven pounds of meat a day to keep that thing alive.
But we sat there watching four wolves eating salmon.
This is after the spawning run.
This is in the fall.
And they're eating salmon that are so rotten that they're in a pudding-like consistency, a pudding-like state.
And just putrid, like, I can't even imagine.
Like, putrid, like, it would take, if you walk through one of these areas, one of these stream miles where all these sand were laying dead, I have a strong stomach.
You know, they say like hyenas, you know, there's a relationship in Africa between cheetahs and hyenas.
Where cheetahs will make a kill, they can't crush the bone.
And hyenas can go in and they can just hang out and wait because they know that when that's done, they'll be the first in there and they can crush bone.
And I don't know if this theory is in fashion anymore, but it used to be in fashion, that Early hominids, like early humans, seemed to appear in the fossil record outside of Africa at a time that was contemporaneous with the appearance of saber-toothed cats.
The thinking being that these saber-toothed cats weren't able to crush bone because of the makeup of their dental structure, their teeth.
They couldn't crush bone, and they were really effective predators, and people had become accustomed to following saber-toothed cats.
To scavenge bone marrow and things that they left behind.
I read this long ago.
I don't know if that's been debunked by other finds.
They're leaving kills out there.
We always hear the term apex predator.
There's a lot of benefits to being the apex scavenger.
Which is...
After the top dog does what he's going to do, who gets to be there first?
They call it the Breaks because it was that you're on the bench of the Great Plains and the Missouri Breaks is where the landscape seems to break and crumble away down into the canyon of the Missouri River.
And it does seem, you'd look at it, like you'd look at the breaks from the water, and it feels like, you use the term loosely, but it feels like you're in the mountains.
It's mountainous.
But it's almost like the opposite of mountains.
It's like, you know, mountains would be something that rolls up, like geologic pressures are pushed up.
But the breaks is the absence of It's like the absence of topsoil.
It's like when you're out and conditions are poor, you know, and you have, you know, especially cold with some humidity, like it was overcast, it was a little bit wet feeling, even though it's a very arid, dry area, it was a little bit, there was a lot of humidity on our trip.
It's just like the only time you're comfortable is when you're out and moving.
But it's a little bit paradoxical because when you get cold and uncomfortable, your inclination is to huddle into yourself.
It's harder to get out of your bag in the morning.
You're paralyzed by the cold and paralyzed by how uncomfortable you are.
But you notice that the minute you start hiking up a hill, You feel great.
And you could be out there all day and you're having a good time and you stop and you feel like hell.
And when you feel like hell, it's hard to get motivated to do it again.
And I think that something that comes from spending a lot of time uncomfortable is just that you get in your head that you just got to move.
And I think that when I've hunted in really cold weather, you try not to do anything You get up in the morning and you go immediately from your sleeping bag to be moving.
And when it's time to eat, you just stop for a minute and eat while moving.
You would never stop for meal time.
Because you just got to be on the move, man.
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So that's the only way you're going to be able to deal with that cold.
One of the things that we talked about when we did this trip was that I was never tired during the day.
Or I wanted to take a nap or something.
It's like the idea of getting up in the morning and just hiking around all day, but yet all the time completely alert, all the time completely like we were wide awake.
Whereas like, you know, if you have a regular job or whatever you do, after five or six hours you're like, oh, get me the fuck out of here.
You start yawning and stretching.
I didn't ever feel like I needed to take a nap.
And we got into this really weird regular cycle where we were going to bed at like 8 o'clock.
And I would go right to sleep.
And I would wake up early in the morning.
It was like this weird sort of natural cycle that you fell into.
I mean, just think about, just in a sense, like, how much we were just, like, our physical beings were shaped by that lifestyle, you know, of operating according to daylight hours, you know, being out in search of food.
I don't mean to get, you know, I don't mean to get all like, you know, New agey.
I don't mean to get all like, nostalgia, new agey, those are good words for it.
But, when you're out doing that kind of thing, you're out like hunting, on the land, using your senses, looking for food, you start making sense to yourself.
I think you could be like, it's safe to say that there's something about me that really thrives on this.
It's like there's something about me that just likes this kind of routine.
I mean, just think about what we know about selective pressures.
There's an enormous amount of selective pressure on being able to do that kind of stuff.
I think that now people would argue that the new life we have now in technology, we're under new kinds of selective pressures.
You know, there's probably right now those of us who are going to thrive, you know, those of us who are going to thrive are adapted to a technological society.
But now it's not tied in now to birth.
You know, it used to be that we had such low life expectancies and high mortality rates that it was the people that could thrive, the really good hunters, were the ones that had access to females, they had young.
Now, you know, it's kind of a given that You're going to have reproductive possibilities.
You can be the biggest loser in the world and not do anything, and you can still get people pregnant and have kids.
So I think that selective pressures don't work on us now like they used to.
But for a long time, we were shaped by you had to be a productive member of your culture.
You had to be a productive member of your clan.
In order to have the kind of cash aid that was necessary to be able to breed women.
Don't, because I was going to start squeezing rounds off blindly, which is wrong.
But I was so excited.
You know, and then you get addicted to that.
The other thing you get addicted to is that when you look, when you glass, when you take your binoculars and you're looking out, looking for like an antler or an ear or anything, you start looking at things more intensely and differently.
Like you have almost new eyes.
Like you're looking at things, you know, the way you don't usually look at things.
A human life, living and walking through a mall, that experience, and the human out there on the breaks, in the Missouri breaks, like, you want to talk about two completely different...
Well, yeah, Juan Enrique says that he thinks that part of maybe the epidemic of people who have hypervigilant central nervous systems and are becoming, like, weirdly autistic might be that we're evolving because human beings today experience more stimulus in one day than they did in a lifetime.
I mean, how else could you process the information that just comes from a television?
What are you designed to really see?
You're not really designed to sit in front of a fucking television and take in Lord of the Rings.
You're not really designed for that.
That's all these signals that are firing off your reward systems and Getting your dopamine levels and your adrenaline levels up and you're getting engaged in the action.
That's a crazy thing.
It's almost like it's a step away from a simulated reality, but it's really moving in that direction.
You get these gigantic thrill rushes from a giant television.
It's weird, weird stuff when you stop and think about the impact that it has on the way we...
Visualize our world.
Because so many people visualize their world as if it's some sort of like a plot in a movie.
I remember I took this class in college called political rhetoric.
We read various pieces.
Everything from Martin Luther King to the Unabomber.
And the new bomber had this point that I was, you know, as messed up as the guy was, he had this point that resonated with me where he talked about that he looked at, like, levels of difficulty.
And there'd be, I can't remember what way it went, if it went up or down, but let's just say a level one difficulty was, like, no matter how hard you try, you'll fail.
Okay, that's, like, absolute difficult.
There'd be level two is, like, if you try super, super hard, you have a slight chance of success.
On down to, if you don't try at all, you'll still succeed.
It would be like these five levels of difficulty.
His gripe with technology was that technology had brought human existence to the level five.
It's like you don't even have to try to succeed.
You're just going to be alive now.
You're going to be alive.
You'll reproduce.
You don't need to do anything.
You're just taken care of.
We've got food surpluses, social safety nets, everything.
And he argued that all of our...
As neurotic as he was, he argued that all of our neuroses came from...
That all that energy we were supposed to be spending to maybe survive was just now spent running amok in our brain.
We can't handle the free time that technology allows us.
If I'm not involved in something, if something's not stimulating me, whether it's training, doing something different, trying something, the hunting experience was a perfect example of that.
The ability to go and do the show and what you guys brought to the table was so much better than anything we could have ever come up with on our own.
I mean, the idea that you were going to take us in this fucking five-day camping thing with no cell phones and no internet connection, that's completely different than anything we would have ever done.
I knew it was fucking for real when we stopped at one of the spots where Lewis and Clark camped.
If you have any sense of history at all, and you're sort of trying to take this in, like how...
Bizarre it really is that several hundred years ago before the inventions of radio and the camera, there were some fucking people that were traveling across the entire river.
They were going down the Missouri River.
They were traveling across the whole country.
And they were right there camping where you're going to camp.
And it's still, like, there's some notable things that are different, but it still is kind of the same.
It's very reminiscent of it.
And there's a friend, there's a writer I've always admired a lot, the writer Ian Frazier, and he's written a lot about the American West, and we were on that river one time, and he was just saying, like, he just likes it that it happened.
There's a place like Lewis and Clark came here and camped here and he's like, and then nothing ever really happened ever again.
When I think about that, I often point out that you can go to sites, you can go to places.
One time I was on the phone with Ian Frazier one time and I was telling him, he said, where are you?
And I was in New York and we were trying to meet up.
And I explained to him that I was out in front of this bar like the White Horse or something.
He's like, you know, Dylan Thomas drank himself to death and died, right?
And he's like, yeah, Dylan Thomas collapsed, like drank himself to death there.
And on the one hand, it's like, wow, that's amazing.
But then you think like all the other stuff that happened, you know, people getting hit by cars and like, you know, people getting broken up with and falling in love and like all these layers upon layers of other activities that went on there.
In some way, it dilutes it.
It becomes hard to picture.
But to camp where Lewis and Clark camp and look at it, you go like, no, I get it, man.
It's not abstract for me.
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I can understand a little bit about what was on their mind.
So Lewis and Clark, when they got dispatched on their trip, and they went up, I can't remember if they left in 1802 or 1804. 1802 or 1804. They went up, and one of the things, they had many tasks that they were supposed to do, but one of the primary tasks Jefferson gave them was to find the headwaters of the Missouri.
So people knew the Missouri was a major artery.
But where did the Missouri begin?
And wherever it began, was there a viable way to go up and over out to the Pacific?
When they went up, they found the headwaters of Montana, or the Missouri, just upstream from where we were.
And the headwaters they discovered were three rivers they named.
They named the Jefferson, the Gallatin, and the Madison.
So it was the Secretary of State, Secretary of Treasury, and the President, I think is what it was.
They named those three rivers.
And that's what heads that river.
So those rivers head, like the Yellowstone heads up, Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park.
I'm sorry, the Yellowstone goes another way.
But the Missouri and Jeff head in Montana, and then they go and flow all the way out to the Gulf of Mexico.
I think the riverboat gambling is one of the craziest ideas ever, that they would allow you to gamble if you got in something floating and then they just pushed you out there.
My buddy used to, for a living, used to take rich guys, they'd buy a sailboat, and then you'd have to sail it to them, wherever they were.
But the problem was that when you do a winter run along the Atlantic, that's storm season.
So very few people want to actually take the sailboat when you buy it in the winter and bring it to you because they're going to get caught in storms.
My buddy did that.
My buddy used to just like – and he'd take a 32-foot yacht and he got caught in a storm off of San Francisco in the winter.
And it was at night and he had strapped himself in and he was trying – he turned the boat because he was caught in 20-foot swells that were submerging the boat.
So he would get submerged under the ocean and then pop out.
He did that for 14 hours.
Not only did he do it 14 hours alone but he had his crew underground because he was the captain.
For 14 hours he did that and he radioed for a guy to get him but the guy wasn't experienced enough so then they had to radio a guy who did it a lot in Alaska.
To tow them back in.
And they finally get that guy on the phone.
I guess he flies in.
He gets in his boat now.
He goes out, hooks onto him, and tows him to safety.
14 hours at night.
I said, how did you know to look?
He goes, I would have to hear.
I'd have to listen for when the swell was going to hit me because I couldn't see it.
So I'd have to listen.
I hear just...
And I go...
And I said, were you cold?
He goes, fuck yeah!
He was in a wetsuit.
He goes, fuck yeah, you're cold.
You're really cold, man.
Your face and hands feel like they're going to fall off.
And eventually they were pulled out, and he was just done with it.
He went to vet school, didn't go back out on the ocean anymore, and changed his birth date to the day that he got plucked out and now celebrates that as his birthday.
There's so much controversy attached, I don't have to tell you this, to the hunting experience, to the idea of killing your own food.
There's so much craziness on both sides.
But the people that are anti-hunting are the people that even eat meat and wear leather and are still anti-hunting.
It's shocking how many of those people there are.
It's such a weird thing.
I can completely understand your wife's point of view, not wanting to go and do the killing yourself, but the idea that there's something wrong with the people who do it.
One of the things that I saw about this Newtown, Connecticut thing, one of the tweets that I read, I read a lot of crazy tweets, but one of them I read where this guy said, if you're a hunter, tough shit, get a new hobby, no guns.
And it was like tag...
Like, hashtag no guns.
And I was like, what kind of fucking, what kind of crazy nonsense is that?
If you're a hunter, get a new hobby.
The idea that these people are willing to get, because of crazy people, whatever many, to get all rights to own firearms stripped away to the point where you can't hunt anymore, and the idea that someone would just propose that, that's the problem with voting.
The problem with voting is that guy gets to vote too.
Well, Tim Ferriss posted a cool article by somebody – I can't remember who it was and I read it and it was about – he said guns actually have a lot to do with why there isn't a lot of violence.
They neutralize violence in some ways.
It's sometimes in the sense that if you don't have guns, the guy with the biggest knife and the strongest guy is going to do what he wants and guns are – have always been sort of in a society.
They keep the strongest guy with a knife from raping somebody in front of 12 people.
Yeah, I mean, you can't have society in this form without some form of weaponry.
You have to be able to protect people against aggressive people from somewhere else, whether it's a local threat or a threat on a boat from another fucking country like Columbus and his boys.
I mean, that's just...
If you can't control them, if you can't stop them, they overcome the same way The Europeans overcame the American Indians.
It's really the same exact thing you're talking about.
You're talking about people being overcome by other people.
So it's better to have – it's sort of a balancing act.
It's better to have some sort of an ability to defend yourself physically and then society can move on.
And if you can't defend yourself physically just because of your mere size or you're dealing with some Shaquille O'Neal type dude that you just physically – there's nothing you can do about it, then a gun comes into play.
Well, they always say that conflict resolution in any society becomes paramount like in a – A society, you have to have a mechanism for conflict resolution because inevitably there will be conflict among men and so how you meet out justice and how you keep order is very important for any society if you think about it.
I think if you taught kids martial arts, it would stop almost all bullying.
Because kids would be involved in competition.
And when they're involved in competition, they're not thinking about picking on weak people.
They're thinking about how to advance their game so they can compete.
Whether it's jiu-jitsu or wrestling or boxing or any of those martial sports, I think if you teach as many people as you can how to do it, you're going to have a much more polite society.
But people look at that as being something they can achieve easily.
But the thing that I've been thinking a lot about lately on the issue is that it's the way that people look at constitutional issues.
I think there's a reluctance.
On the right, there's traditionally this reluctance to sort of disregard First Amendment liberties sometimes.
And on the left, there's this tendency to want to disregard Second Amendment liberties.
In the same way that someone – this guy said, oh, you know what?
If you hunt tough, figure something out.
You could look and say, you know what?
The Internet is used – For all these things, and 9-11 plotters communicated over the internet and various things.
So if you use the internet for communication, screw you, we're getting rid of it.
No one would ever make the case.
It can be used for evil, therefore it should go away.
It's a very good point.
You want to be in a situation where I'm like...
For me, First Amendment stuff is extremely important to me.
Second Amendment issues are extremely important to me.
I feel that just to do reactionary measures against our amendment rights and thinking we're going to solve some problem isn't right.
The same way I don't think it's right to suppress freedom of speech in order to solve a problem that might have come out of the right of assembly or that might have come out of freedom of the press, that someone incited violence through the press so they should be shut down.
Nor do I think that a firearms owner should be shut down.
I think it also fosters some cookie-cutter type thinking sometimes where people on the left just follow that predetermined pattern of behavior and people on the right follow that.
Well, the way they interact with the mind that they allow you to accept things in a way that you would normally have like giant red psychological flags going off left and right.
Instead, it just allows you to like deal with shit.
and that's one of the ways that for some folks it helps them overcome depression you know it's like these things are very unusual because One of the things that I've learned talking to my friends that are on these antidepressants, including people that absolutely need them and then people who've tried them and gave them away, is that they never know exactly which one's going to work for you and they'll switch medications on you.
They'll go, okay, let's try this.
How's that one?
And then a lot of it is just everybody's got a different setup and what works for you might not work for him and the only way to tell is they've got to fucking try shit out on you.
I have a real hard time with that when you're dealing with psychotic people that might have access to assault rifles.
Like when you have that – those things together and then you find out that 90 percent of all these school shootings are either someone who's on withdrawal from SSRIs or someone who's on them.
They were talking – they had these mental health experts on.
They were talking about how – like Jared Lofner, the guy who shot the Arizona – He had been symptomatic for 10 years.
I mean he was psychotic and symptomatic and it was very clear that – and the problem was he said that there's – in the law, you can't incarcerate somebody against their will unless they are – I would love to hear this.