Jan. 17, 2014 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:57:07
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Hello, my friends. | ||
| How are you? | ||
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| A friend of the podcast who's been on before. | ||
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| I used to hand out the books. | ||
| The audiobook is actually even better. | ||
| Very inspirational. | ||
| Very interesting stuff. | ||
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| What is the new website that you guys have while we're on this? | ||
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| So all these people that have been saying, Dude, how do I get these MeatEater episodes, man? | ||
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|
unidentified
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It's ridiculous. | |
| Man, we get a lot of people asking about that. | ||
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| I'm sure you have a link on meateater.com, too, right? | ||
| I'm guessing. | ||
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| The. | ||
| The meateater.com. | ||
| Meateater sounds like it could be. | ||
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| Steve Rinell is here. | ||
| Let's not fuck around any further. | ||
| Cue the music, young Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Some pigs are going to die this weekend, Steve Rinella. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I'm 90 shots in. | ||
| My shoulder's made out of fucking hamburger right now from all the impacts. | ||
| Unless someone thinks we're talking about police, man. | ||
| We're talking about Seuss Scroffa. | ||
| Yeah, I thought about posting a photo of the targets that I shot saying some pigs are going to die, but I didn't think that that would be. | ||
| No. | ||
| That could be problematic. | ||
| Yep, Seuss Scroffa. | ||
| I'm glad you're here this week. | ||
| The Eurasian wild boar. | ||
| You know what's interesting, man? | ||
| All pigs in North America, so domestic, the kind you're baking, feral ones, wild ones, it's all one species. | ||
| Yeah, you told me that. | ||
| As much as there's difference, they recognize them all as one species. | ||
| There's some old world, like in Africa there's some other members of the pig family, and javelina or not, javelina are a peccary, so like when you hear javelina or people talk about pigs in Arizona, they're often talking about a peccary. | ||
| But yeah, all the pigs... | ||
| So, Charlotte. | ||
| No, that was the spider. | ||
| Wilbur. | ||
| From Wilbur to Hogzilla is Sue Scroffa. | ||
| That's so strange. | ||
| I didn't know that until you told me when we were in Wisconsin. | ||
| It doesn't seem right. | ||
| No, there's all these varieties, you know, but they roll all the dogs under. | ||
| I mean, you think that pigs look, you think that Wilbur are like the classic Well, they don't really exist. | ||
| The classic pink hairless farm pig. | ||
| I mean, he doesn't look as different from what we'd call a Russian boar, which is a variety. | ||
| He doesn't look as different as a chihuahua does from a mastiff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they would discuss those as being, what, canis, demes... | ||
| What's weird about the common dog is that they all emanate from wolves. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| That's so strange. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| That you take a wolf and turn it into an English bulldog? | ||
| Like how the fuck did that take place? | ||
| But I don't know, those boys in Russia that were taking silver foxes and just like selecting for behavior and stuff, they could move those things so fast. | ||
| Really? | ||
| They moved the traits, you mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't even remember the details, and if I did tell you the details, you'd look it up and then call me and tell me where I was wrong. | ||
| So I learned not to get too detailed with you. | ||
| But they could move dogs really fast. | ||
| Selecting for color, behavioral characteristics, it was amazing. | ||
| Just in a few generations, you know? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So they're very malleable. | ||
| I've always wondered how, I mean, I think it's a massive mystery, isn't it, how dogs were initially created out of wolves? | ||
| You hear so much contradictory stuff. | ||
| At a point in time, because I've always kind of followed this a little bit, and I've written about, I learned a lot about dogs. | ||
| I probably mentioned this to you before. | ||
| I wrote a piece about eating dogs in Vietnam, and so I had this kind of little summation in this article about the history of dogs. | ||
| And it went through the fact-checking process at Outside Magazine, which is very rigorous. | ||
| Like, if you say, my mom is my mom, they'll call your mom. | ||
| And, like, make sure it's your mom. | ||
| And I had all these things that I kind of, like, assumed were just true, you know? | ||
| And this fact-checker's like, that's, in fact, not true. | ||
| So I had to relearn my understanding of dogs. | ||
| And at the time, they were saying, oh, you know, it seems that dogs originated in China. | ||
| And, you know, like the oldest trace of dogs is there. | ||
| Since then, I feel like I've read that, you know, they definitely, the first Americans definitely brought, were traveling with dogs, brought them down in the new world. | ||
| But here there seems to have been some intro aggression from the gray wolf. | ||
| So they picked up some other characteristics from other things along the way. | ||
| Even though the guys that came through the Bering Land Bridge were not packing with them a dog that looked wolf-like. | ||
| They were probably packing with them a dog that was decidedly domestic dog-like. | ||
| It had already gone through some transformations. | ||
| They weren't just traveling with wolf dogs. | ||
| They were traveling with a dog that had been under selective pressure for 15,000 years. | ||
| Because I remember one time saying, oh, the domestic dog seems to go back 30,000 years. | ||
| The domestic dog seems to go back 50,000 years. | ||
| But people arrived here, it was debated, but sometime between maybe 15,000-20,000 years ago. | ||
| And when they showed up, they had a dog that was not a wolf. | ||
| But then there was introgression from wolves. | ||
| But this seems to be a really hot topic and people are always digging into this because genetics is changing everything we understand. | ||
| Things that we used to think were related are not related. | ||
| Things we think were not related are in fact related. | ||
| The whole mule deer thing, that mule deer seem to be a very new species since the Pleistocene. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they haven't been around long. | ||
| It was like a... | ||
| A hybridization event between black-tailed deer and white-tailed deer created the mule deer. | ||
| It's like our newest big game species and it's probably... | ||
| We'll be one that doesn't last long. | ||
| You know, it'll be like in the long term, you might look at mule deer and see them as this blip. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, just like a... | ||
| I mean, they're so susceptible to being out-competed. | ||
| They're very... | ||
| Habitat fragmentation's hard on them. | ||
| And they haven't been here long. | ||
| I mean, on the other hand, whitetail deer have been here millions of years. | ||
| They thrive. | ||
| They're super adaptable. | ||
| They can eat anything, live anywhere. | ||
| They're like amazingly... | ||
| Capable of surviving on this continent, and mule deer are like this new thing. | ||
| It's a bummer, like my favorite animal, I like the sun, you know, and the sun's only going to last four billion more years, it's going to burn out. | ||
| I like the sun. | ||
| I like mule deer a lot too, and it seems like, I mean, despite a lot of people's best efforts to prevent it from happening, it seems like mule deer are vulnerable. | ||
| It seems like they're slowly starting to die off, too. | ||
| There was an article about the numbers dropping and their habitat dropping and being diminished and they're being pushed out. | ||
| Yeah, and some things are hard to explain, you know. | ||
| But whitetails, they've always lived in the southeast. | ||
| And whitetails seem to periodically expand out and then for climatic reasons retract. | ||
| But they kind of keep that ancestral homeland. | ||
| I'm talking in very long term, that ancestral homeland in the southeast. | ||
| But at one time, whitetails made it all the way across the country. | ||
| And some climatic conditions or something happened and the population retracted, but it left this remnant population in California on the Pacific Coast. | ||
| And then there was a massive genetic barrier, you know, like if you took a bunch of dogs and separated them and put, you know, some dogs in South America and some dogs in North America and came back and checked on them in a long time, they're going to have gone in a little different direction. | ||
| And that became the black tail. | ||
| And then at a time, the blacktail seems to have extended its range eastward. | ||
| The white-tailed deer extended its range back westward, and there was a hybridization event where male blacktails were breeding with female whitetails and producing this hybrid mule deer. | ||
| There was a habitat retraction again, and blacktails retracted back to the coast, and whitetails retracted back the other way, and you had to spawn this thing we call mule deer. | ||
| How do they follow that? | ||
| Like, how do they know that this- There was all this guy, Valerius Geist, who's like the most interesting biologist- He's a guy out of Calgary. | ||
| And Valerius Geist has kind of like done so much work on Big Game. | ||
| He's kind of like the mule. | ||
| He's like, people are like, oh, he's the mule deer guy. | ||
| He's the elk guy. | ||
| He's the buffalo guy. | ||
| And he came up with a lot of interesting theories. | ||
| Like some stuff we talked about in the past where Valerius Geist came up with this idea that what happens to species when they colonize land that had been vacated by glaciers? | ||
| You know, and there's like certain things that go on. | ||
| And he was into founder effect, you know, where... | ||
| Imagine, like, one way we got different as people is imagine that just, like, four people struck off, you know, across the oceans in a homemade craft and landed there, and you had a male and a female, and they spawn a new, you know, they successfully breed and create a new population, but let's say they both just happen to be 6'7", you know, and 300 pounds, you have, like, this thing like the founder effect where... | ||
| A small little population can carry traits and characteristics that are maybe not totally, not a complete example of where they came from. | ||
| And so you have like a radical deviation when they spread out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So he got into this stuff with animals and why do animals seem to change? | ||
| Like when the bison arrived in North America, why did it all of a sudden have a six foot horn span? | ||
| And then shrank very rapidly. | ||
| So he got into a lot of these ideas, and he also did a lot of genetic work, like mitochondrial DNA so they can track female descent. | ||
| You should have him on sometime. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, he'd be the coolest guy to have on in the world, actually, Valerius Geist. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Where does he live? | ||
| Could I come listen? | ||
| Yeah, you can come in. | ||
| I would just listen at home like most people, right? | ||
| Well, you could just come in. | ||
| You could come in. | ||
| I'm sure you'd have questions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You could just sit there and drink coffee. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I'll be like... | ||
| Sounds perfect. | ||
| I'll be like, no, explain this to me, Mr. Geist. | ||
| Yeah, he's a great guy. | ||
| So anyways, he got into a lot of stuff with... | ||
| With deer. | ||
| And I bring all this up because we're looking at your fine specimen, your fine 4x4 muley sitting here on the desk. | ||
| It would never happen if it wasn't for you. | ||
| Boom, boom. | ||
| I was watching this thing that was talking about deer on television. | ||
| They were talking about the difference in the size of the bodies of deer from the far north, like Alberta in Canada, to the far south, like in Mexico. | ||
| And the further you go south, the animals tend to be smaller. | ||
| They tend to be smaller-bodied. | ||
| Yeah, it's the Prince, maybe you got, it's the Prince, Allen, is the Burger Principle? | ||
| It's got a name. | ||
|
unidentified
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Damn. | |
| There's a name for that principle. | ||
| And it would be that, if you look, like take the extreme like whitetails, like the biggest, like guys dream of going to Alberta to hunt whitetails because whitetails are huge. | ||
| They're like 400 pounds, right? | ||
| They're enormous. | ||
| They get big, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's crazy. | |
| That's an elk. | ||
| I mean, 400 is huge, but you know, you get deer to push it up. | ||
| Then you go down to Florida Keys, that's a whitetail. | ||
| Those things are 70, 80 pounds. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So there's this principle, the Bergman. | ||
| It's got a name. | ||
| My brother, he told me what the name of it is. | ||
| But some species seem to be a little bit exempt. | ||
| They say that mule deer don't do that quite as much. | ||
| You know, you get some really big mule deer in other areas. | ||
| They're not as tied to it, but just like a general principle. | ||
| And what they speculate it has to do with is heat retention. | ||
| So you have more, like, you weigh more than me. | ||
| I have more surface area per unit of mass than you have. | ||
| So if you're a really big deer, and if you're in the north, the thing you're trying to do is retain body heat. | ||
| And the animals, like people, shed body heat by just exposing parts. | ||
| Like when deer lay down, they lay down with their legs tucked in them. | ||
| Because you look on the inside of a deer's leg, very thin hair, very thin hair under the tail, right? | ||
| And when they're laying down, if it's cold, they're protecting those areas that have thin hair. | ||
| So a big animal has less surface area, so he's less capable of shedding heat and more capable of retaining heat. | ||
| A small, wiry animal has greater surface there and he's able to shed heat. | ||
| So one of the things you look at mule deer, like mule deer further south will have, tend to have bigger ears because a great way to shed heat is through your ears. | ||
| So they'll have thinner hair on their ears, bigger ears. | ||
| If you think about a radical version of it, just imagine... | ||
| Like the woolly mammoth. | ||
| The woolly mammoth is more closely related to the African elephant than he is to the Macedon. | ||
| In North America, at the tail end of the Pleistocene, you had Mammoths and mastodons. | ||
| And mammoths were not very close related to mastodons. | ||
| They're pretty close related to African elephants. | ||
| Mammoths live in the north. | ||
| They have essentially no ear. | ||
| They have just a very small ear. | ||
| You look at African elephants have those giant freaking ears because they can funnel a lot of blood through those ears and shed a lot of heat. | ||
| It's like you shed a lot of heat through your fingers and your ears, how they get so cold so fast because you push a lot of blood into those areas and it's cooling off in the air. | ||
| So that's one reason, that's like a theory of, if it is, I think it might be the Bergman principle. | ||
| Bergman's rule. | ||
| Bergman's rule. | ||
| Nice word. | ||
| Bergman's rule has one explanation for it. | ||
| I don't know if you'd ever really know the absolute truth, but an explanation for it is heat retention and heat dissipation. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| So the stuff that's on the northern extreme of its range, where it's butting up against, like the thing that puts the throttle on its existence, is cold. | ||
| He will tend to get bigger. | ||
| In mammals, he'll tend to get bigger. | ||
| But then there's all these other deviations, like how you get these huge reptiles on islands. | ||
| And then on islands, you tend to have dwarfing, like that Wrangel Island off Siberia had these little mini mammoths. | ||
| So there's all these other factors. | ||
| I don't even know why it's like that with islands, but I know with latitude that you get that. | ||
| And I think I even read from, maybe it was Valerius Geist, I was writing about how mule deer seem to not be quite as... | ||
| They seem to defy Bergman's rule a little bit more than some other species do. | ||
| Probably because they're a hybrid? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| The island dwarfism is a weird thing. | ||
| It's bizarre. | ||
| How it doesn't apply to lizards. | ||
| Yeah, those things get huge and other things get small. | ||
| You know another weird thing about mule deer, and this kind of fits here because we're in California. | ||
| Obviously, I-5. | ||
| So for... | ||
| Black-tailed deer are very, very similar to mule deer. | ||
| Columbia black-tailed. | ||
| So in California, you have Columbia black-tailed. | ||
| Washington, Oregon, you have Columbia black-tailed. | ||
| Eventually, you get up to the north of just north. | ||
| On the coast, you get to the B.C., Alaska border, and then you start calling them sick of black-tailed. | ||
| Sick of black-tails, man, you look at them, it's like they almost look like a white-tailed, but they're a black-tailed deer. | ||
| The Columbia black-tailed resembles much more a mule deer. | ||
| For record-keeping purposes, the divider between the range of the Columbia mule deer and I'm sorry, the divider between the range of the Colombian blacktail and the mule deer is I-5. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| So if that sumbitch jumps the road, he is, for record-keeping purposes... | ||
| He goes from being a Columbia blacktail to a mule deer. | ||
| So you look like all the record book Columbia blacktails are shot along the left side of I-5 on a northward direction because they're much bigger than anywhere else. | ||
| But they've got to divide it somewhere, so they divide it like that. | ||
| So in one thing's life, he could jump back and forth. | ||
| They're not even recognized as distinct. | ||
| If you look at the Latin name for them, the scientific name for them, they're Taxonomists don't recognize the difference, but we all do. | ||
| You look at me like, that's not a freaking mule deer, man. | ||
| I can tell by looking, but it's just these morphological differences. | ||
| These things you see, but they're not really betrayed in the genetics. | ||
| That's fascinating, man. | ||
| It's so interesting trying to track the history of these animals and that somebody actually did that and figured out. | ||
| Yeah, and it changes all the time. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| My old man He used to reject so much of this stuff because it would change. | ||
| He'd be like, well, they used to say this. | ||
| So I don't believe any of it. | ||
| Like, well, they were saying the best understanding and now this is the... | ||
| You know, it's not static, subject to change, but it's frustrating for people. | ||
| I'm glad you're on this week because this is a week that's pretty controversial in the news, this story about this black rhino that they auctioned off a hunt for. | ||
| This is some fascinating shit to me because... | ||
| Fill me in. | ||
| Do you know the story? | ||
| I know no more than what you said. | ||
| I've been at a thing all week. | ||
| Oh, you were at the SHOT Show. | ||
| Yeah, so I haven't even... | ||
| They auctioned off a hunt for a black rhino. | ||
| The winner paid $350,000 to shoot this rhino. | ||
| There's only like X amount of thousand of them left in the world. | ||
| And people are going fucking bananas. | ||
| Can I guess that they're using that $350,000 to put up enforcement? | ||
| Yes, for conservation. | ||
| They generated over a million dollars in the auction. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Allegedly, yeah. | ||
| And what they're saying is that this rhino had to go anyway because this rhino was an old non-breeder and he was very aggressive and he was trying to kill the younger males. | ||
| And because it's an extinct or because it's an endangered species, this was an animal that they were going to have to do something about anyway. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they would have either had to, I guess, put him in animal prison, or they were going to have to fucking shoot him. | ||
| So they decided to auction off. | ||
| They have this very specific animal that they've targeted, this old, non-breeding male. | ||
| And, uh, the guy who auction, who won the auction is now in fear of his life. | ||
| I mean, the press has he gone and done it yet? | ||
| No, not yet. | ||
| He lives in Dallas or just outside of Dallas. | ||
| And I know if I was going to pick what town he lived in, well, I was going to ask you about that too. | ||
| Cause Texas is a fucking strange place, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Um, you know, uh, It's a way different wildlife model. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Since being introduced to hunting by you, I've become pretty obsessed. | ||
| And I read about it all the time, and I'm trying to sort out all the different philosophies and try to figure out why people think what they think. | ||
| But what I'm... | ||
| Most fascinated by, in Texas, is these wild game farms. | ||
| This is a really weird thing they do. | ||
| I saw some online that were like fucking 70 acres, and they have a high fence, and people are pretending that they're hunting in these things. | ||
| Yeah, they'll sometimes set the animal out on the day. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But it's something of... | ||
| Let's come back around that, but I want to talk for a minute about the... | ||
| The rhino thing... | ||
| There are versions of that here, and we can talk about... | ||
| I can talk in a much more educated way or in a much more knowledgeable fashion about versions of that that occur here in the U.S. But, like, I've never been to Africa. | ||
| I haven't hunted in Africa. | ||
| I have ill-informed opinions about what goes on in Africa, but I recognize when it comes to stuff like this, it's... | ||
| There are so many contradictions that are hard to deal with, and it's really difficult for people to get their heads wrapped around why a guy... | ||
| Not knowing the person, I can't say that the person is saying who's like, oh, I would just as happily give you the money to help save rhinos. | ||
| But if this one has to go anyways, I suppose I'll come and get it. | ||
| I don't really know what his motivations are. | ||
| His motivations are not that. | ||
| He's a part of a big game trophy hunting group. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's not going to be able to bring it back into the U.S. probably. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what he was trying to do. | ||
| I don't know what he's planning to do. | ||
| I don't know, but I know I've been reading all these articles. | ||
| They interviewed the guy. | ||
| He's afraid of his life. | ||
| I mean, they're talking about skinning his children alive. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Animal rights people get pretty crazy. | ||
| Can I tell you about a parallel thing that goes on in the U.S.? Because I just can't speak to it there. | ||
| Like, I don't even know who... | ||
| Is it owned? | ||
| The Rhino? | ||
| I mean, is it on a... | ||
| Is it like on... | ||
| It's on a conservation. | ||
| It's on a concession. | ||
| Well, what they're doing is they have like, you know, X amount of thousands of them. | ||
| And they need money in order to maintain the property and enforce it. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let me tell you about a parallel thing that happens in the U.S. If you're interested. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In the U.S. we have... | ||
| We abide by the basic notion, this is like generally true in the U.S., that wildlife belongs to people. | ||
| So, if you have, let's take an imaginary elk, and this imaginary elk is on Yellowstone National Park. | ||
| And one day, the elk jumps a fence and lands on National Forest in Montana. | ||
| And he jumps another fence and he's on State Forest in Montana. | ||
| And he jumps another fence and he's on a big ranch in Montana. | ||
| Throughout that animal's day, he's always belonged to the people. | ||
| When he's in Montana, he's belonged to the state of Montana who's in charge for his management. | ||
| So we have this idea. | ||
| In a rough sense, we have this idea that we maintain here that wildlife is held in the public trust. | ||
| An individual can control Access to his lands for hunting, but the animal belongs to the state. | ||
| You don't get to make decisions necessarily about the things that are on your property. | ||
| And that's been something that Americans, and particularly American hunters, have always been proud of. | ||
| We have this North American model of wildlife conservation we always talk about, which is this idea of public trust wildlife, and that we manage it in long-term things because people have a vested interest in having more and more animals around for whatever purpose, viewing, hunting, etc., One of the things they do, though, and so you take an animal like the bighorn sheep, and the bighorn sheep at a time was pretty nearly wiped out. | ||
| I mean, they were hurting. | ||
| They were never hurting as bad as black rhinos are, but they were hurting really bad. | ||
| And as we got them restored, we started having limited numbers of tags. | ||
| So you might have a mountain range, and every year they determine that we can kill one sheep out of that range. | ||
| And people will, and I do this every year, people will apply for a lottery that's conducted by the state. | ||
| And you put your name in the hat, you pay a fee, They, you know, put all the names in there, draw one out, and be like, Dave draws a tag. | ||
| And this generates a whole bunch of money, and they use it for tranquilizing sheep that you can helicopter them to new areas and restore the species. | ||
| And all the funding comes from this kind of stuff. | ||
| One thing they realized a great way to make money is if you can get that up, let's say you can kill five out of that mountain range, they might wind up going, we're going to do, you know, we'll do four through the lottery, which is for everyone, like the common man's pool, but we're going to take one and auction it off. | ||
| Every year the one, the Bighorn sheep tag they auctioned in Montana, it goes for $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 every year. | ||
| I think recently it went for $380,000 or $400,000. | ||
| I mean, it's always up there. | ||
| I don't think it's broken a half million, but it goes up because if you go out in Montana and you go hunt six, if you go hunt the Missouri Breaks, All the record book bighorns come out of there. | ||
| The biggest bighorns, the biggest Rocky Mountain bighorns come out of the break. | ||
| So guys will pay a ton for what they call the governor's tag in Montana. | ||
| And it raises a ton of money. | ||
| And it does a ton of good. | ||
| But some people feel... | ||
| I see both sides of this argument. | ||
| Some people feel like that bit of money is not worth the damage you're doing by upsetting... | ||
| This idea of democratically owned and administered wildlife. | ||
| Like, most guys will put in their entire life for a bighorn sheep tag, and they'll pay the fee every year, and they have no chance. | ||
| I've been putting in for that tag for 14 years. | ||
| I've accumulated... | ||
| They started a bonus point system 12 years ago, and a bonus point system means that every year you put in, the next year you get a... | ||
| Every year you put in without being successful, you get a point, and they square your points. | ||
| So next year, my name will go in the hat 144 times. | ||
| If you did it for your first year, your name will go in the hat one time. | ||
| Even with my name in the hat 144 times, I don't think I'm even up to having a 1% chance of drawing a bighorn sheep tag. | ||
| Meanwhile, a guy can come in and he makes a bunch of money. | ||
| One guy that buys it lately made a lot of money selling sandwiches. | ||
| He comes in and he's like, I'll be buying one of those and I'll buy it next year. | ||
| And people are like, oh, that money is so useful. | ||
| And it is. | ||
| Other people are like, dude, this is not the country we live in because we're still kind of hurting from the idea of where we came from in Europe, which is like the Robin Hood model. | ||
| You got to be rich to hunt. | ||
| A lot of people don't know that. | ||
| The Robin Hood was actually based on hunting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't based on stealing money from the rich and giving to the poor. | ||
| It was based on the poor weren't allowed to hunt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He would go out and hunt the king's animals. | ||
| And he used to, I mean, even at the time when our ancestors were like first coming over, you know, they could kill you for hunting. | ||
| They could kill you for hunting. | ||
| I'm like, you had to be rich to hunt. | ||
| So when guys like, you think of like the story of Daniel Boone, man, he came out and he's like, geez, this whole, you know, his relatives came from England. | ||
| He comes over here. | ||
| He's like, man, this whole freaking country, I go hunt wherever I want. | ||
| So people really fell in love with that idea of freedom and, you know, and that you could kind of roam around and the animals were there free for the taking. | ||
| And now we're a little bit upsetting this model, but other people who are on the other side of this say that, yeah, but the money is so helpful. | ||
| And if it wasn't for big chunks of money like that, we wouldn't have recovered the bighorn sheep as effectively as we've recovered the bighorn sheep. | ||
| And it's not cheap. | ||
| Three or four hundred thousand dollars for a tag is incredible. | ||
| Yeah, type in Montana Governor's tag. | ||
| You'll see what it went for last time. | ||
| And do they sometimes fail? | ||
| I mean, they must. | ||
| I heard a story where the guys that buy it, Once you spend that kind of money, you want to rule out uncertainty. | ||
| And you know that you can picture the area, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You know, all that stuff we've loaded through. | ||
| Yeah, we saw a lot of- When a guy will buy the governor's tag, he'll usually hire some guys, or he'll hire some guys to go spend a couple months. | ||
| They'll put together a dossier. | ||
| On the animals that are in the area? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| They scout them. | ||
| When they find one, they stay on it. | ||
| There's guys that just specialize in this business. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| $480,000 bid. | ||
| The record for 2013. Oh, my God. | ||
| $480,000. | ||
| Somebody paid for the tag. | ||
| Look at those dudes going to war. | ||
| Yeah, his sack is kind of tucked up to the left. | ||
| He can't really appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah, we showed that video the other day of you talking about wanting to eat it. | ||
| So... | ||
| It's valuable to people. | ||
| It's a ton of money. | ||
| Not the sack. | ||
| No, not the sack. | ||
| But it really makes people mad. | ||
| There's a story, and I don't even know if it's true. | ||
| I heard it from enough people that tend to think it's true. | ||
| So these guys will go out and they'll get guys out there. | ||
| They find a tanker. | ||
| They want a ram that's scored. | ||
| That's got over 200 inches of horn or more. | ||
| And they find one and they don't let it out of their eyes. | ||
| They stay on it, stay on it, stay on it. | ||
| And eventually the guy comes out and they go, there he is, that's the one you want. | ||
| There's a rumor a few years ago this guy had done this and he'd spend all this money. | ||
| I'm just telling you unsubstantiated stuff. | ||
| I'm not telling you what year or his name because I don't want to say that and be wrong about it. | ||
| A high roller buys this thing, pays a figure rumored to be around $30,000 to have some guy check this out. | ||
| It comes down to it and the guy's like, third one from the front, third one from the front. | ||
| They go down on the goalie. | ||
| Get mixed around and he shoots and goes, oh, there's the wrong one. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Yeah, but rumor has it that this gentleman later bought another one and went out and got a... | ||
| Bought another one. | ||
| Went out and got a big fatty. | ||
| So he might have spent $500,000, $600,000. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God! | ||
| I... And, man, I see, like, it tears me up because, like, everything in life, it's so complicated. | ||
| I see both sides of it. | ||
| Like, I love our system. | ||
| I love the idea that wildlife is public trust. | ||
| And I think that... | ||
| There's no other way to explain the success of the richness of animals and the richness of wilderness habitats we have in this country when you look at how many people live here, how wealthy we are, all the technology. | ||
| Some of the other countries that would be sitting where we're at have destroyed their wildlife. | ||
| But we have... | ||
| A very, in place, like a very intact system. | ||
| And we've done a fantastic job. | ||
| And I think that one of the ways to explain the fantastic job we've done is that we've really held true to this idea that wildlife belongs to us. | ||
| And when you do damage to it, you're doing damage to this idea of, you know, an American treasure. | ||
| You're damaging other people's interests, you know. | ||
| Um... | ||
| So yeah, man, it's complicated. | ||
| So that's my long way of answering the rhino thing. | ||
| I bet you anything it is extremely complicated and that there's emotion battling logic. | ||
| I'm amazed that it's cheaper to kill a fucking rhino than it is a bighorn sheep. | ||
| That is mine. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| That's by a hundred grand plus. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| What's the ivory worth? | ||
| Not worth that. | ||
| I don't think they have ivory. | ||
| They have horns. | ||
| Their horn is made out of hair. | ||
| A rhino has a... | ||
| No, a black rhino's got a... | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, a rhino horn's not ivory, but it's... | ||
| It's valuable. | ||
| Yeah, but it's not ivory. | ||
| No, it's valuable because they're idiots, because people think that it makes your dick hard. | ||
| Like, I guess they haven't heard about Viagra, wherever the fuck they're trying out rhino horn. | ||
| I went the other day, I mean, just like three days ago, I saw the act I went to see the current head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service speak about some issues that we'll be facing this year. | ||
| And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is getting really involved in the rhino trade. | ||
| When they talk about all the money they're spending, they're spending money on enforcement, they're spending money on trying to battle the source, that you might somehow convince people that they don't want it. | ||
| All the things you would do. | ||
| I remember thinking about the millions and millions of dollars they're talking about throwing around. | ||
| I remember being like, Too bad you can't just go find any guy who wants to go get one. | ||
| You'd give him more money than he's ever going to make hunting him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the world doesn't work that way, because some other dude would be like... | ||
| But I remember thinking, you would make every rhino poacher really wealthy, and they'd just be like, okay, cool, I'll quit. | ||
| Yeah, but it wouldn't work. | ||
| Then other people would come up, well, I'm going to be a rhino poacher too. | ||
| No, I know, but I remember just thinking, if those guys could only know the amount of... | ||
| Because you know they're not. | ||
| No matter what, that business, the guys that are actually out there with firearms, you can imagine, the guy that's out on the ground, Hunting rhinos, being chased by people who have pretty much a license to, in some cases, kill them. | ||
| Like, I don't think that guy is a rich man. | ||
| He's making someone wealthy, but there's no way that guy is rich. | ||
| Not only that, it's just such a bizarre thing. | ||
| The idea of shooting this giant, majestic, endangered animal just for its horn. | ||
| They're not eating them. | ||
| They're not doing anything else with them. | ||
| They're just shooting them and taking their horns. | ||
| And there's no real medicinal value. | ||
| It's not like the rhino... | ||
| I mean, it'd be one thing if the rhino horn had this incredible anti-aging property and it turned you into a young person again. | ||
| Well, you know, they'd probably fucking kill every rhino they could find. | ||
| But it doesn't do anything. | ||
| It doesn't really do anything. | ||
| But it's probably, I mean, it's an issue of poverty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not that that justifies it, but I'm saying, like, I don't even know the guys that are out poaching rhinos. | ||
| They might not even have any idea who it is that... | ||
| They might have some vague awareness about the properties, but I don't know if they believe in the properties as well. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a little bit ignorant about who's actually wanting these rhino horns. | ||
| What I've heard, it's an Asian thing. | ||
| But it seems to be one of the most bizarre misunderstandings and miscommunications ever. | ||
| In this day and age, with all the information that's available, especially because it's always about penises. | ||
| It's always about guys getting erect penises. | ||
| It is a phallus. | ||
| Well, it's a phallus. | ||
| It's got to be just that it's a nice phallus. | ||
| But they grind it up for medicine, apparently. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| I mean, it's an amazing animal. | ||
| When you look at a rhino, to me, I mean, it's one of the closest things when you look like a Triceratops or a Stegosaurus or something like that, and you look at a rhino, it's like one of the closest things to that ancient time. | ||
| You look at this big, fucking, giant, armored animal. | ||
| It's a strange, strange animal. | ||
| You know, and the idea that people are killing it to make their dick hard is just so bizarre and... | ||
| But no, they're killing it to make money, and people are buying it to make their dick hard. | ||
| Yeah, and it's not even working, you know? | ||
| It's just so strange. | ||
| We should make a public service announcement right now. | ||
| We'll have them drop leaflets over China. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| Just bags full of Viagra. | ||
| Drop them with parachutes. | ||
| Just launch them. | ||
| Isn't it amazing in that way that there's stuff now that I'd be like, no, dude, this really does work to the point where it could cause trouble for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, try this. | ||
| Well, we have to go to a doctor because your dick won't go down. | ||
| It works on everybody, too. | ||
| It works on dying people. | ||
| You chew up a Viagra and you have a zombie dick in your pants scratching at your zipper trying to get out. | ||
| No, it's basically, you think that there would be no... | ||
| Do you think that the pharmaceutical industry would... | ||
| I mean, not the pharmaceutical... | ||
| What's the word? | ||
| The... | ||
| Like the aphrodisiac? | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| What is the term for like... | ||
| No, I'm saying what is the term for like... | ||
| Something that... | ||
| Like you want to eat Asian horn... | ||
| I guess an aphrodisiac. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That the aphrodisiac market for men would, you know... | ||
| The dick-hardening market for men would evaporate now that there are pharmaceuticals that are specifically tailored for that and are clinically proven to work. | ||
| Well, that's how the American troops get information about the Taliban from the Afghani warlords, is Viagra's, the number one method of payment. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, because these guys, a lot of these warlords, they're living the same way they lived back when Alexander the Great was run in Afghanistan. | ||
| Afghanistan has Kabul and then mountains, and mountains filled with villages and extremely primitive locations, and they're living old school. | ||
| And sometimes there's a guy who's a warlord who's got 20 wives, and his dick doesn't work anymore. | ||
| And they come along and they go, look, we got guns. | ||
| He's like, I got guns. | ||
| Look, we got women. | ||
| I got 20 wives. | ||
| And I can't even fuck them. | ||
| Oh, listen. | ||
| Check this out. | ||
| And you give them this bottle of pills. | ||
| And this guy's like, listen, these Taliban fucks, I never liked them. | ||
| They're hiding over there. | ||
| Those guys are over there. | ||
| How many more pills you got, man? | ||
| They fucking give these guys cases of Viagra. | ||
| They tell them everything. | ||
| They can't stop talking. | ||
| Yeah, you've heard of Big Mac diplomacy. | ||
| That's the way. | ||
| Viagra diplomacy. | ||
| That actually works. | ||
| I'm 40 years old in a month. | ||
| You ready to get in on the Viagra? | ||
| Is that what you're trying to tell me? | ||
| No, I'm just saying. | ||
|
unidentified
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What are you trying to say? | |
| Back to this Rhino thing, talking about... | ||
| Yeah, I just can't... | ||
| I just... | ||
| My head wants to blow up because I see all sides of it. | ||
| I do, but that's beautiful. | ||
| I think that's important. | ||
| The part I don't see... | ||
| The part I do not see, though, for me, is I don't... | ||
| I would never... | ||
| I don't have that desire. | ||
| To hunt one of those. | ||
| But so much of that kind of thing is, and it's hard for people that don't hunt to understand, so much of that kind of stuff comes from context. | ||
| You develop over time a deep context with an animal, and for me that familiarity and the hours you spend, the hours you log watching it, understanding it, reading about it, studying it, for me develops into something that produces a great desire to hunt the animal once I get to know it. | ||
| An animal that I don't know well I don't have that much desire to hunt for it. | ||
| But when I watch them and watch them and watch them, like bighorn sheep, when I moved to Montana, when I was born in Michigan, I didn't go out there being like, man, I cannot wait to hunt bighorn sheep. | ||
| But after spending years and years and years out glassing for deer, glassing for elk, glassing for bears, I'm like, bighorn, bighorn, bighorn. | ||
| And I really got to where I loved to watch bighorns. | ||
| I liked everything about bighorns. | ||
| And in time, I was like, man, I would someday love to have an opportunity to go hunt a bighorn. | ||
| And it was born from that. | ||
| So when I say that I have no desire to hunt a rhino, it would be to me like... | ||
| Hunting Martians. | ||
| I just don't have any familiarity with it. | ||
| Culturally, I haven't read about it my whole life. | ||
| When I go and look at calendars, hunters love wildlife calendars, and it's all the stuff we like to hunt. | ||
| You don't grow up looking at the rhino page on a hunting calendar. | ||
| I just have no context with it. | ||
| And this gentleman that bought this thing, I don't know. | ||
| I just don't know anything about him. | ||
| I'd love to talk to him. | ||
| He probably doesn't want to come on your podcast. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think he wants to. | ||
| But his name is Corey Knowlton. | ||
| And he's got a private security detail following around all the time now. | ||
| He's giving this interview with CNN. He's talking about the people who have threatened his kids because he has people threatening to kill him right now that I have to talk to the FBI and have my private security details. | ||
| Keep my children from being skinned alive and shot at. | ||
| A little hyperbole. | ||
| A lot of people are just talking shit. | ||
| I'm not going to kill your fucking kids, man. | ||
| They're not murderers. | ||
| But people get angry when they hear about someone hunting something as a trophy. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think that there's a big distinction between you wanting to hunt a bighorn sheep because you follow it and you study it. | ||
| But you eat the fucking sheep. | ||
| That's a difference, man. | ||
| There's something creepy about About wanting to shoot something just so you could stuff it and put it in your room. | ||
| Yeah, it's complicated. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It would feel very... | ||
| If I did shoot the rhino, I would eat him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's no way I wouldn't eat them. | ||
| Are they edible? | ||
| They must be. | ||
| Oh yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| So they eat elephants. | ||
| I know that you shoot an elephant in the villagers. | ||
| They like that. | ||
| Friends of mine that have hunted in Africa kind of marvel at the rapidity with which, like how quickly the animals get hauled off and consumed. | ||
| They said it was like... | ||
| Not a lot of waste, you know. | ||
| And there's some animals that you look at and you think they'd be really good and they're not very popular. | ||
| And other animals that you'd look at and you wouldn't think would be that great, and they're really popular as table fare. | ||
| I don't know what the reputation of rhino is. | ||
| But elephants are popular as table fare. | ||
| People like the elephant a lot. | ||
| My problem with elephants is... | ||
| That's my understanding. | ||
| They're intelligent. | ||
| That bothers me. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Intelligent animals, it bothers me. | ||
| I have no desire to hunt one. | ||
| But again, I have no context. | ||
| And I don't really understand... | ||
| For me to go hunt something, I also have to know that it's sound, that it's in a safe position. | ||
| And one nice thing about living in the U.S., I mean, there's some exceptions to this, but generally in the U.S., if you want to be ethical about your hunting practices in the U.S., you can generally look to the guidance of your state fish and game agency. | ||
| I mean, a state fish and game agency can't get away with, I mean, theoretically can't get away with and Practically can't get away with running a species into the ground. | ||
| It would be big trouble for them. | ||
| So generally, if you're looking and you realize that there's a population of bighorns and there's a hunting season for them right now, it's... | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I mean, it really is okay. | ||
| If they're finding a decline in that thing, they're going to curb it or cut it out all together and wait until it's growing again. | ||
| And then you can also look at their long-term goal of where they want animals, how many animals they think the area can support. | ||
| So it's easy in the U.S. because this stuff is watched so much. | ||
| Obviously, again, coming from a guy who doesn't spend any time in Africa, I know that in Africa, money talks in a way that it doesn't necessarily hear when it comes to small issues like wildlife. | ||
| You can buy your way into things that maybe you don't have any real ethical business. | ||
| Doing, you know. | ||
| In the U.S., it's just easier to kind of, there's a lot more information at our fingertips. | ||
| So for me, when I go hunting, I can really kind of read up and understand a lot about what I'm going after, where it's at, what the management goals are, what risks the animal has. | ||
| Is hunting it, you know, productive and helpful right now? | ||
| Is it potentially detrimental to the species? | ||
| And you can make your decisions. | ||
| It is amazing how good a job the Department of Fish and Game, or what is the actual group, what are they called? | ||
| Well, there's a state, so you have U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is a federal thing, and so they have a hand in managing migratory waterfowl, but most things are managed by, so every state has a, you know, you kind of like, just in general terms, you'd call them fishing game, but it's like, in Michigan, it's the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. | ||
| In Montana, it's Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. | ||
| But just as a euphemism versus fishing game. | ||
| So, you know, every state, the Department of Environmental Conservation in New York, so every state has a different name, but it's a state department that sets hunting and fishing regulations. | ||
| And on these state departments would be big boards, and the people that set it will be biologists, various figures, different stakeholders. | ||
| So you'd have, like, representatives from the hunting community, representatives who are outside of the hunting community, We'll all come together and come to some level of cohesion and some level of, you know, they'll find a happy middle ground when they set their quotas. | ||
| And they often, I mean, they meet every year to determine what can be done and not done. | ||
| And they can control harvest a number of ways by issuing tags, shortening seasons, lengthening seasons. | ||
| You can, if you want to slow down a harvest, you might move the season away from the rut. | ||
| You know, if you want to pick up a harvest, kill females. | ||
| You know, if you want to bring a population down because of various factors like agricultural interests, auto insurers, you know, generally want deer numbers lower. | ||
| Agricultural interests generally want deer numbers lower. | ||
| Landscape people often want deer numbers lower. | ||
| So to kind of factor like their concerns and you got the concerns of people who want, hunters want more deer. | ||
| They want to see more deer around. | ||
| And you figure all this out and there's all these management tools to try to find a way, you know, to tweak things. | ||
| Another thing is predator control. | ||
| If you have a population that's really hurting, you go in there and do predator control in that area, and sometimes you can bring some animals back from the brink. | ||
| It's possible to lose isolated populations. | ||
| It's possible to have a mountain range, and you spend a few hundred thousand dollars, a million dollars, whatever, moving some bighorns in there, and you find that you're just getting hammered by lions, and you're going to lose all the sheep and lose your whole investment. | ||
| You might go in there and hit those lions a little bit, save them, so... | ||
| There's so many tools at their disposal. | ||
| In general, there are exceptions. | ||
| In general, I think that... | ||
| I'm always amazed at how well the state fish and game agencies do. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was going to say. | ||
| It's probably one of the most efficient government agencies ever. | ||
| They're good. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The other thing about them is they don't get a lot of hard funding. | ||
| There's not many agencies that get so much of their funding... | ||
| From license sales. | ||
| So firearms taxes. | ||
| That's why there's a lot of conservation money out there right now because the gun businesses have been blowing up. | ||
| As people feel that their gun rights are under attack, they've been buying so many firearms, it puts money in the Pittman Robertson, I think it's called. | ||
| That goes to conservation stuff. | ||
| There's excise taxes on firearms, excise taxes on ammunition, excise taxes on sporting goods, all your license fees. | ||
| Every guy who ever hunts ducks or migratory birds has to buy a federal waterfowl stamp, state waterfowl stamp. | ||
| All this money plows in and creates money for conservation work, research. | ||
| And so these agencies are, in large measure, some more than others, are self-sustaining. | ||
| That's one of the funny things. | ||
| I know that you get annoyed by PETA as much as I do. | ||
| It's like, they're not spending the money on doing the stuff that hunters are. | ||
| Like, hunters are bankrolling so much of wildlife research and wildlife conservation. | ||
| And it's not just stuff that benefits the animals we're after, you know? | ||
| My problem with groups like PETA or the Animal Liberation Organization, the people that want to fucking save lobsters and rescue them from restaurants and throw them back into the ocean... | ||
| There's a lot of knee-jerk reactionary nonsense that's not based on the actual science of understanding the population of these animals. | ||
| That's what drives me crazy. | ||
| When people start getting angry at people hunting wolves, like this is a perfect example. | ||
| They've opened up wolf season now in a bunch of different places. | ||
| And the reason being is that people's livestock are getting decimated. | ||
| Elk populations are getting destroyed. | ||
| I mean, they have to move in to control it, but to a lot of animal rights people, all they see is bloodthirsty maniacs that want to kill beautiful wolves. | ||
| And they don't understand that, first of all, A, these wolves have been reintroduced to a lot of these areas, and then B, like, we're supposed to be the stewards of the land. | ||
| We're supposed to be the intelligent people that understand the numbers, and something has to be done about it. | ||
| This isn't something that people have decided, I'd like to kill a wolf, yeah, let's make it legal. | ||
| They're going, hey, we've got an issue. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Let's all meet. | ||
| Let's compare data. | ||
| Let's see what we got and see what we're going to do here. | ||
| Yeah, you get this idea like, oh, they've just one day decided to go and do it. | ||
| And I'm sure you have, on one level, you have individuals who are absolutely like, a guy opens up his regulation book. | ||
| He's like, well, I can buy a wolf tag this year. | ||
| That individual does not really need here. | ||
| That individual does not really need to understand. | ||
| It's nice if he does, but he doesn't need to understand the full picture because that individual is a tool. | ||
| Being used by managing agencies. | ||
| They're like, we need to get rid of some wolves. | ||
| We could bring back the days where we have like, you know, government agents going out and gunning for them, or we could open it up and have people actually pay money to go out and have the opportunity to try to do what we need to do anyways, you know. | ||
| So the guy that goes out, I can't always speak to every guy that goes out and hunts wolves. | ||
| I can't speak to his motivations. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But they're servicing a greater good in that they're being used as a tool that winds up being an economic driver, which kind of like points to the efficiency of wildlife management. | ||
| It's like you could hire the job out, which in some cases it does because there are, you know, we do have government trappers to do some wolf control. | ||
| But it's kind of nice that you can wind up turning like rather than you're paying someone to go out and do it, you can have people pay for the opportunity to go out and do what we know needs to be done. | ||
| And in these cases, we're going to have to lower wolf numbers. | ||
| Not that no one is. | ||
| No one's arguing for a new extirpation of the wolf. | ||
| That would be in the worst interest of the managing agencies. | ||
| The last thing Wyoming would want now, they get the wolf delisted. | ||
| People are suing to stop the delisting. | ||
| Wyoming gets the wolf delisted. | ||
| They go under control. | ||
| No one in Wyoming in the government Would like to see wolves wiped out and put back on the endangered species list. | ||
| It'd be the worst thing that could possibly happen for them. | ||
| There's no interest to extirpate them. | ||
| No one's arguing for extirpation. | ||
| It's just bringing them into control because we are puppeteers. | ||
| There's a lot of people living here and you're really balancing a lot of interests. | ||
| Again, it's like Like, so much in life, you really have to take, before jumping into the stuff, the emotional stuff, you really have to take the time to look at the stuff. | ||
| It's a long, complicated issue. | ||
| It's long. | ||
| There's a lot of factors. | ||
| And we haven't even gotten into ballistics. | ||
| Ballistics? | ||
| No, I was trying to explain to you all the different calibers. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| No, I'm saying it's like the whole world of... | ||
| That's kind of why I love all this stuff, man. | ||
| It's like chess or something. | ||
| Well, there's new things to learn, that's for sure. | ||
| Long before I ever even thought about hunting... | ||
| I would see a beautiful deer and I'd be like, why would anybody kill that? | ||
| It's so cool to look at. | ||
| And then you see a few people hit them with cars. | ||
| And one time I was driving home, I was doing a gig in upstate New York, and I had to drive home like 30 miles an hour. | ||
| At the most because fucking deer were everywhere. | ||
| It was madness. | ||
| It was in the middle of the summer and I've never seen more. | ||
| I don't think I'd ever seen more than like two deer my whole life until this day. | ||
| And then I'm driving home from this gig and it was fucking madness. | ||
| It was upstate New York. | ||
| Was it November? | ||
| I want to say it was the summer, but it was so long ago, I don't really know. | ||
| They were out and about. | ||
| Fucking madness, just jumping in front of the car, left and right. | ||
| You see them on the side of the highway. | ||
| And you see one get plastered by a truck and it opens up and you're like, that thing's made of meat! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I had no idea! | ||
| They were exploding. | ||
| I mean, I saw at least four of them that had exploded and wrecked cars, and it was one of the craziest things I'd ever seen in my life. | ||
| I don't know why there's so many of them in this one particular area of upstate New York, but it was really an infestation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People are so whacked out, too. | ||
| Like, in some of those areas in the Northeast, there's so many deer, and they're kind of like, well, maybe we can hire... | ||
| We'll get snipers to go out at night and shoot them, or we'll give them, you know, we'll put the deer on birth control. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Meanwhile, I got all these dudes being like, I got a great, I know the perfect way. | ||
| We'll open up, you know, a suburban, urban bow hunt. | ||
| People will pay to come out and do this. | ||
| Like, no, we'd rather pay. | ||
| I think, I remember reading this one thing that came out, I don't know what it was. | ||
| Like, by the time they did this deer, this town wanted to lower its deer population. | ||
| It was all said and done. | ||
| They had, you know, like a thousand or more dollars into each deer they got rid of. | ||
| Well, it's going on right now in the Hamptons. | ||
| Do you know what's going on in the Hamptons? | ||
| Massive overpopulation of deer. | ||
| So they're hiring snipers. | ||
| They're going to put suppressors on these guns and go in the middle of the night. | ||
| They're going to hunt at night so that people don't have to experience it or freak out. | ||
| And they're going to shoot these fucking deer because there's so many of them. | ||
| And then the other argument was, let's get them on birth control. | ||
| They're going to spend $350,000 to give fucking deer birth control. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| This is... | ||
| There was a TV show about this. | ||
| Well, it's all to prevent the harrowing experience that might happen to someone should they wake up in the morning and realize and see a deer run into their yard and tip over because it had a arrow in it. | ||
| And as upsetting as that would be, it's so much better to go out and just at night, quietly, snipe them off, you know, clean it all up. | ||
| There's a video of this happening in some other country of... | ||
| They showed these, um, that was a joke. | ||
| That video, lions released to deal with the deer population. | ||
| That was, that was like the onion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was it? | |
| Jamie's Googling shit. | ||
| Yeah, it's the onion, you fuck. | ||
| It was one of those fake onions. | ||
| There's a bunch of onions now, fake onion. | ||
| You know, the onion, if you don't know, is a parody website. | ||
| There's a bunch of fake ones that aren't nearly as good at, like, being obvious. | ||
| But they're so fake that they say the onion on them? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| They're just like national blah, blah, blah report. | ||
| But they're bullshit. | ||
| They're bullshit. | ||
| Like one of them had a report of the day that Colorado legalized marijuana. | ||
| 37 people died of an overdose. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Fucking, I can't tell you how many people sent me that. | ||
| I'm like, marijuana's not toxic, you dummies. | ||
| Like you'd literally have to smoke 1,500 pounds of marijuana in 30 minutes to die. | ||
| It's not killing anybody. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| But these people, you know, they read this online and they think it's true. | ||
| There's been a gang of those. | ||
| Yeah, has anyone ever died? | ||
| Like, have you ever heard? | ||
| No one ever dies from marijuana. | ||
| It's not possible. | ||
| You physically wouldn't be able to smoke enough to kill yourself. | ||
| The LD50, like, we actually were talking about LD50s. | ||
| That means lethal dose at 50%, lethal dose at 50%. | ||
| Oh, I gotcha. | ||
| I've heard that term. | ||
| You know, because my brother works in... | ||
| His work involves a little bit, not the use of, but the understanding of herbicides and pesticides. | ||
| I feel like he talks about LD50s on pesticides. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Marijuana is so high it's insane. | ||
| But there's a lot of things that have really low LD50s. | ||
| Ecstasy, for instance. | ||
| Like if you take, I think it's 10 or 15 times the effective dose of MDMA, you're dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If you're a 200 pound man, you eat 10 ounces of salt, you're a goner. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's not much. | |
| But think of how upset your body gets when you're snorkeling or something. | ||
| And you get a couple gulps. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Just you start retching. | ||
| Yeah, salt water. | ||
| That's a miserable feeling. | ||
| Well, it's also, if you want to, you know, if you have like some sort of a bowel issue and you want to clean out the old pipes, a little bit of, take some Epsom salts and some water, just a couple of tablespoons, gargle it and shove it down the pipe and it'll be like a broken fire. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| It's very effective. | ||
| I used to wash when I was, I got this job when I was 13. Washing dishes at a summer camp. | ||
| I was washing dishes for campers that were older than I was. | ||
| And there's a cook there, David S., I'll say. | ||
| And one day, he drank iced tea, and I put a bunch of salt in his iced tea to mess with him. | ||
| So he'd sip it, and he'd be like, salt, and he'd spit it out. | ||
| As retribution, he comes up behind me and kind of puts me in a lock and grabs my forehead and tips my head back. | ||
| And fills my mouth with poured salt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Gave me some sores, made me throw up. | ||
| That's dangerous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He probably didn't know that you could die. | ||
| David S. That fuck. | ||
| Where are you, Dave? | ||
| Dave S. I'll tell you the name of the camp. | ||
| Camp Pendaluon. | ||
| Where's that at? | ||
| West Michigan. | ||
| Is it still open? | ||
| Yeah, I have no idea. | ||
| I don't know why it wouldn't be. | ||
| Camps are fucking little, they're little like breeding grounds for criminals. | ||
| When I was a kid, I went to Boy Scout camp for two weeks. | ||
| It was just a bunch of inner city kids from Boston, alone in the woods with very little, very little guidance. | ||
| Like Lord of the Flies. | ||
| It was dangerous, man. | ||
| By three days in, I was there for two weeks. | ||
| By three days in, I realized, like, this is fucking dangerous. | ||
| You have to keep your eyes open in the middle of the night because it was dark as shit. | ||
| And kids were getting up in the middle of the night and tying kids to their beds and then leaving them in the woods, like dragging them out while they were sleeping. | ||
| They would wake up screaming alone in the dark, like in the woods. | ||
| There's no predators or anything in New Hampshire, but it was fucking... | ||
| No, it still brings out a... | ||
| The ruthlessness of youngsters. | ||
| Yeah, so there was all these activities. | ||
| I just hid and went fishing every day. | ||
| So you were in the Boy Scouts? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got up in the morning and just said, fuck all your fucking plans. | ||
| I'm going fishing. | ||
| I just took my fishing rod and vanished. | ||
| And they didn't care. | ||
| As long as I was back at the end of the day, they didn't even know I was gone. | ||
| Like, no one knew. | ||
| I did the archery things, and then I went and fished. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| I remember, you know, I work at... | ||
| I'm on the mass edit outside of the magazine and they're telling me that the most letter-generating article they ever ran was an article that was deemed to be critical of the Boy Scouts because there had been a number of catastrophes that had happened to Boy Scouts at scout camp. | ||
| Like a handful of things. | ||
| There was a lightning strike. | ||
| There was a drowning incident. | ||
| There's more things in there. | ||
| It kind of ran this article like Is your kid safe at Boy Scout camp? | ||
| And it really riled the organization up. | ||
| I think they were telling me I want to be the number one letter generating thing ever. | ||
| Well, they don't want to face the reality of the situation. | ||
| It's not 100% safe. | ||
| If you're going camping, it's not 100% safe. | ||
| Most likely, you're going to be fine. | ||
| Statistically, you're probably going to be fine. | ||
| But when you've got a bunch of inner city kids and they have fucking bows and arrows and pocket knives and they're wandering through the woods... | ||
| And there's only like three counselors. | ||
| There was like 30 fucking kids and three people watching us. | ||
| There was a lot of shit going on, man. | ||
| You know, they tried to wake... | ||
| They grabbed me in the middle of the night, but I woke up. | ||
| And I screamed, and I jumped out of bed, and they let me go. | ||
| And then there was just a bunch of little inner-city thugs. | ||
| And I was young. | ||
| I was probably like... | ||
| At the time, maybe 12, maybe 13, somewhere along. | ||
| But there was other kids that were like 16 and 17, and they were the ones that were doing shit. | ||
| And they were, you know, they were the Eagle Scouts. | ||
| They were the older fucking weirdos that had done this many times. | ||
| They had been camping three or four years in a row, and they were looking forward to it. | ||
| They were the warlords, man. | ||
| They covered your clothes with toothpaste. | ||
| Toothpaste doesn't come out of your clothes. | ||
| Try washing toothpaste out of your fucking clothes. | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| I dribble. | ||
| I dribble. | ||
| I have like, you know, vertical toothpaste. | ||
| They would fucking squirt it all over people's clothes and mash them together and throw it back in. | ||
| And you pull your clothes out and they're covered with toothpaste. | ||
| It was brutal. | ||
| Just a bunch of little criminals alone in the woods with very little supervision. | ||
| My old man was involved, was real heavily involved in Boy Scouts for a while. | ||
| And I think he'd become an Eagle Scout. | ||
| And I joined Cub Scouts as a kid. | ||
| But the problem, the way it was is, like, my dad was always doing such interesting stuff. | ||
| It would take us to do such interesting stuff. | ||
| It'd be like, you know, whatever Wednesday and there's a Cub Scout meeting. | ||
| And you could go do, like, nice things. | ||
| You know, like, if you didn't have a dad, it'd be great stuff, you know. | ||
| But on one hand, like, I could go over and we could do, like, knot tying and stuff like that. | ||
| Or I could go out deer hunting with my dad. | ||
| And so, like, he always, like, would kind of trump, you know, you could do, like, the way cool stuff. | ||
| So I never got involved in it. | ||
| But it was great for him because he was born, like, an inner city kid, you know? | ||
| And didn't like that. | ||
| He was born an inner city kid and wanted to somehow be out in the woods. | ||
| And for him, it was a perfect avenue into it. | ||
| But then for me, it was like a, you know... | ||
| You couldn't do as cool stuff doing that as I could hang out with my dad and his friends and his kids, so I never got really involved in it. | ||
| When I was in high school, I don't remember the kid's name, but someone wrote a really cool article, one of the kids in my school, about Boy Scouts, about the problem with the code of the Boy Scouts, because one of them was keeping your thoughts clean. | ||
| Was that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I forget the exact one. | ||
| Let's put up Boy Scout code. | ||
| So you get to thinking about something and you're like, man, I shouldn't be thinking about that. | ||
| That never works. | ||
| This guy was the guy who wrote this. | ||
| I remember reading this as I was a high school student going, this guy's got a really good fucking point. | ||
| The point was like, what do you give a fuck what I think? | ||
| Why are you trying to control my thoughts? | ||
| I'm not hurting anybody. | ||
| I might think something crazy and deviant, but I'm not doing it. | ||
| As long as I'm not doing it, why am I supposed to keep my thoughts pure? | ||
| Maybe it's fun for me to entertain ridiculous thoughts. | ||
| I know, because that's kind of like what self-control is. | ||
| Self-control doesn't speak to the ideas you entertain. | ||
| Self-control speaks to... | ||
| You get an email, and you're like, I'm going to write a really mean email back. | ||
| And it's so fun to imagine what you're saying to me in email. | ||
| You're like, I'm going to put it off. | ||
| And tomorrow you write a regular email and that is supposed to be adult behavior. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Control. | ||
| Controlling your actions. | ||
| You see someone who's an asshole in the car and you want to pull him out of the car and beat him to death. | ||
| But you don't. | ||
| You don't do anything. | ||
| You just go... | ||
| Yeah, and you drive down and you're like, yeah, I would pull his fingernails out. | ||
| I'd sew his eyes open and throw salt on him and make him stare at the sun. | ||
| I never go there. | ||
| I just go to bone breaking right away. | ||
| Snap someone's arm. | ||
| They don't want to fight back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent. | ||
| A scout is reverent towards God. | ||
| He is faithful in his religious duties. | ||
| He respects the belief of others. | ||
| Yeah, here's the big one. | ||
| Clean. | ||
| A scout keeps his body and mind fit and clean. | ||
| That was the one that this guy had a problem with. | ||
| I remember reading that and going, yeah, the fucking Boy Scouts are silly. | ||
| This kid's right. | ||
| But that's not what the fucking scouts were. | ||
| It wasn't when I was in the scouts. | ||
| When you were in there. | ||
| I went to, my branch was in Jamaica Plain, which is not a very nice part of Boston. | ||
| It's become more gentrified now, but in the early, late 70s, I guess it was 80, 1979 or 80 when I was in it. | ||
| It was fucking creeps. | ||
| What pushed you to get involved in it? | ||
| I mean, what was your, like, you wanted to get out? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I liked fishing, and I liked outdoor stuff. | ||
| I was always into doing stuff in the outdoors, and I did a lot of fishing. | ||
| I was always fishing. | ||
| So it was like a good avenue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Perceived as a good avenue to get out and explore. | ||
| I just thought it'd be fun, something to do. | ||
| I'd love to be an Eagle Scout. | ||
| I thought it'd be a cool thing to be an Eagle Scout, you know? | ||
| But then once I got in... | ||
| I was cool with the scouts until we went camping, and then I was like, get the fuck out of here, and then I was done. | ||
| You got terrorized. | ||
| I was so sad, too. | ||
| I miss my parents so bad. | ||
| I remember the first time I'd ever been away for like two weeks by myself, a bunch of fucking criminals in the woods. | ||
| I came home, I was so happy. | ||
| I used to get, I can't even imagine now, man. | ||
| I used to get homesick when I was a kid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I get the opposite of homesick now, you know what I mean? | ||
| But yeah, I used to get homesick as a kid. | ||
| Well, do you find, like, I find, I travel so much that when I'm home for a couple weeks, I'm like, okay, already. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| What's next? | ||
| I try not to be that, you know, I try not to, but yeah, you do, you get used to a certain momentum, you know, and you get home for a while. | ||
| My wife will sometimes point out, she's like, you haven't even been home a week and I can tell you, you know. | ||
| Well, I don't get, the one way I don't get that way is with my kids. | ||
| Like, I never want to leave my kids. | ||
| And whenever I go, like, anywhere, like on vacation, the thing that, or on a trip to work, the thing that always gets me is I hate leaving my kids. | ||
| I don't like leaving them. | ||
| But my wife? | ||
| I don't mind leaving her at all. | ||
| I love her, but I think it's good. | ||
| I think it's good to get the fuck away from people. | ||
| But just not little kids. | ||
| But if it was just me and my wife, I'd be fucking vacationing. | ||
| I mean, I'd be working. | ||
| I'd say vacation. | ||
| This is the wrong term. | ||
| It's going places. | ||
| It makes me appreciate her more. | ||
| It makes me appreciate my friends more, too. | ||
| I think there's a balance. | ||
| And I think when you're around someone all the time, you don't appreciate them as much as when you go away, you miss them, and then you come back. | ||
| I feel that's true for me. | ||
| I've got to watch what I say because I can't imagine. | ||
| I'm trying to picture if my wife's going to listen. | ||
| She's busy all the time, but I never know. | ||
| She might get a free minute. | ||
| Someone might tell her about it. | ||
| That's the real problem. | ||
| Those are the fucking tattletales. | ||
| One of those little bitches she goes to the gym with. | ||
| I just want to say, though, I love my wife so much. | ||
| If my wife's listening, you're my favorite person ever. | ||
| Yeah, but I think that there's a balance. | ||
| Part of the balance is appreciating things when you're not there. | ||
| When you're gone, you appreciate them. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| My wife was annoyed with me recently. | ||
| I discovered this Waylon Jennings song called Freedom to Stay. | ||
| It's like this dude, the narrator, Waylon. | ||
| You know, it begins where he's got his backpack and he ties his bandana on, you know, and he goes to the door and this woman's sleeping. | ||
| And he's going to go off and roam around, you know, and be a vagrant. | ||
| And he realizes that everything he wants is here. | ||
| And the refrain is kind of like, you gave me the freedom to go my own way, which gave me the freedom to stay. | ||
| And she got annoyed at you? | ||
| No, because I keep singing it to her and telling her how it's our song, you know. | ||
| laughter She liberated me from my desire to be a wanderer. | ||
| Oh, that's funny. | ||
| Well, you know, you live a very strange life for someone to be married to you. | ||
| I mean, you're constantly gone away hunting. | ||
| Yeah, I'm gone a lot. | ||
| And you also are gone in places where you don't get any cell phone service. | ||
| You're in the fucking mountains. | ||
| You're off in Alaska. | ||
| You're in New Zealand. | ||
| You're in these places where you're gone and you come back with this dead animal in a cooler. | ||
| My wife always asks, where were you? | ||
| Who had gone? | ||
| Who was with you? | ||
| Did you get anything? | ||
| And she usually likes to ask after I get back. | ||
| She often doesn't ask when I'm going, but when I get back, she likes to know those things. | ||
| My three-year-old wants to know what I kapowed. | ||
| Kapowed. | ||
| And if we're going to eat it now, he always wants to know that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I have a very nice existence. | ||
| I get to spend a lot of time going to fantastic places and doing cool stuff. | ||
| It's a very unusual life for a hunter that you've managed to figure out how to make a living doing that. | ||
| I know because I used to think I would make a living. | ||
| I thought I'd make a living doing... | ||
| I knew I wanted to make a living hunting when I was a kid. | ||
| I wanted to be a professional hunter. | ||
| So I trapped for a long time and got sold for... | ||
| Got really heavily involved in trapping and took lessons in trapping, read everything about trapping. | ||
| I was going to be a professional trapper. | ||
| The fur prices were so low when I quit trapping that it just wasn't going to happen. | ||
| And then I hit on this idea that I would write about that kind of stuff instead. | ||
| And so writing was kind of my plan B. But yeah, I thought that I would just live out... | ||
| When I was a kid, I had this dream or this fantasy that I would just live out in the woods. | ||
| Never talk to anybody and hunt. | ||
| And now I kind of make my living communicating. | ||
| The one thing that wasn't in my plan was I wasn't going to communicate. | ||
| Well, that's really funny because you're good at it. | ||
| And the fact that the writing came about in order to make it so that you can make a living hunting. | ||
| You're a really good writer, man. | ||
| Meat Eater's a great book. | ||
| Yeah, I enjoy it. | ||
| I remember when I was in 10th grade, I had this English teacher, Mr. Heaton, and I had written an essay. | ||
| I had written like a comparison contrast paper about Melville and Faulkner or something. | ||
| I can't remember what. | ||
| And for the English class, and he said, I'm going to submit your essay to a writing contest. | ||
| And I forbade him from doing it. | ||
| I can't even imagine why, but I told him I wasn't going to do that. | ||
| I didn't want to be in the contest. | ||
| But he sent it anyways, and then won second place. | ||
| And when I got this letter that I had to go to this awards ceremony, it mentioned a cash prize. | ||
| And I was super excited. | ||
| It was supposed to be $250 or something. | ||
| We go down there and the gal that won, the event was at this place called the Fronthal Center in Muskegon, Michigan. | ||
| The gal that won goes up and gets a check. | ||
| And then I go up and they give me a thesaurus. | ||
| And I was just like bummed. | ||
| So I thought I got $250. | ||
| And I was like visibly bummed. | ||
| And Mr. Heaton had come to the awards ceremony with me and he said something I'll never forget. | ||
| He's like... | ||
| There's far more than $250 worth of words in that book. | ||
| That was kind of my genesis as a writer. | ||
| Was the idea that the book is worth $250? | ||
| No, he meant that if you can capture... | ||
| No, not his point. | ||
| You thought you were going to get $250. | ||
| No, they just changed. | ||
| The budget wasn't what it was. | ||
| I never had a satisfactory answer to why I didn't get $250. | ||
| But I went there wanting my check and come out with this book. | ||
| I still have that thesaurus. | ||
| Do you really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, that's funny. | ||
| Yeah, I keep it in my box of, like, special stuff. | ||
| How did you wind up doing The Wild Within? | ||
| That was how I found out about you. | ||
| You were on a show on the Travel Channel. | ||
| It was called The Wild Within. | ||
| It was an interesting show. | ||
| The first episode I ever watched, you were going to take the same route that Lewis and Clark took, and you shot a moose and turned it into a boat. | ||
| Made a bull boat out of a buffalo. | ||
| Was it a buffalo? | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You shot it with a musket, too, right? | ||
| I mean, do you want, like, the show business story about how I did... | ||
| What made you decide to be on TV? I would periodically, as a writer, I would periodically get called by producers and developers about stuff I had written. | ||
| Or they would kind of summon you. | ||
| You might get a phone call or you get an email, not a phone call, an email through a magazine or whatever and realize that some guy at History Channel wants you to come down and what they do is they're desk-bound individuals and they're obligated to Going to these meetings, you know, and have, like, some ideas. | ||
| And so when they're putting together their portfolio of ideas, they would like to go contact writers or people who are out doing interesting stuff in the hinterlands, you know, and come in and kind of report about what's exciting at the time. | ||
| And I'd gone to a number of these meetings over the years about stories I had written, and every time you get the email, you're like, oh, my God, I'm going to be on TV, and it would never work out. | ||
| But eventually I signed a development agreement after I wrote my first book. | ||
| Scavenger's Guide to Oat Cuisine, which I just got the rights back to. | ||
| There's so few of those books out there, they sell on Amazon for like $130. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Miramax, their wine scene company, just gave me my rights back. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| In a move that would benefit them in no way whatsoever, just out of the goodness of their hearts, gave me the rights to my book back. | ||
| Why'd they do that? | ||
| As much as people like to talk about Harvey Weinstein being the worst guy on the planet... | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| I know that his company just gave me my books rights back. | ||
| Didn't even try to get money out of them, he just gave them to me. | ||
| I've never heard he's the worst guy on the planet. | ||
| A lot of people tell horror stories, you know. | ||
| I've never heard any horror stories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I don't have any. | ||
| There's a great book, or a great documentary, detailing a horror story that he dealt with. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| Yeah, it's called Overnight. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| That's a great movie. | ||
| It's a fucking great movie. | ||
| Yeah, and that guy was to blame in that thing. | ||
| Oh, fuck yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that guy... | ||
| The cover of it is him holding the camera to his head. | ||
| That's a phenomenal movie. | ||
| Folks who don't know, if you haven't seen it, it's about the producer, writer, whatever, of Boondock Saints. | ||
| Terrible fucking movie, by the way. | ||
| Don't you dare tell me that's good. | ||
| No, I won't. | ||
| Not you. | ||
| Whoever you are out there, you fucking freaks that like that. | ||
| People have told me that's good, and then I watched it, and I made it 20 minutes in. | ||
| I was like, this is a piece of shit. | ||
| This is a terrible movie. | ||
| I didn't know anything about the history. | ||
| I watched it after the documentary. | ||
| I was like, I watched it, I'm like, man, I gotta go see this movie. | ||
| But it only validates the movie. | ||
| You know what it came out of? | ||
| It came out of Pulp Fiction. | ||
| There's this whole breed of this genre that came out of Pulp Fiction. | ||
| But what they don't understand, Pulp Fiction is a fucking genius movie from a genius movie maker. | ||
| I mean, Quentin Tarantino is a bad motherfucker. | ||
| Dude, when I went to see that movie, it felt like... | ||
| Like, like, like, something came down from the heavens and touched my forehead. | ||
| I had never seen anything like it. | ||
| I didn't know anything about, like, cool movies, man. | ||
| I was blown away. | ||
| But it's so complex, and there's so many layers to it, and the timeline switched around. | ||
| I mean, it's, it's a genius work of film. | ||
| And then this fucking dummy came along and decided to make this shoot-em-up, and there's gonna be, why, fuck you, fucking, fucking, fuck, fuck, fucking, bang, bang, bang. | ||
| And it's just an assault on your intelligence. | ||
| It's shit. | ||
| And I just thought it was a piece of shit. | ||
| And then I watched this documentary on the guy who made it, and I was like, oh. | ||
| And being out here... | ||
| It's a great job. | ||
| I don't even know anything about the guy that made that movie. | ||
| It's a great job in that movie. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, the people who made it... | ||
| Like the guy who ever made it overnight. | ||
| Like, it was just a phenomenal job. | ||
| Well, the guys who made it were the guys who were involved with him in the beginning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Yeah, they were documenting this rise to fame. | ||
| They were supposed to be documenting this guy who worked at a bar. | ||
| Harvey Weinstein signs him to this gigantic deal and buys the bar. | ||
| And they're going to own the bar together and make giant movies together. | ||
| They just were convinced that this guy was brilliant. | ||
| Meanwhile, he's saying anti-Semitic stuff. | ||
| His ego. | ||
| The documentary is about ego. | ||
| And if you're a person who's planning on any sort of a career in show business, I think it's a must-watch. | ||
| Because I've seen those people. | ||
| I've never met him, but I've seen a hundred guys like him that didn't make it. | ||
| I've met a hundred of those guys that were convinced that they're the baddest motherfuckers. | ||
| I've met those guys. | ||
| I've met so many of them. | ||
| And acting and the film business breeds them. | ||
| Somehow or another. | ||
| The idea of acting, first of all, is responsible for a lot of disproportionate egos. | ||
| Egos that are not based on anything realistic. | ||
| They're just based on your ability to pretend. | ||
| And then, not even based on you being really good at pretending sometimes, but you being famous for pretending. | ||
| And these people, just because the camera's on them and people pay attention to them, have these enormous, insane egos. | ||
| I've seen it on sitcom sets. | ||
| I've seen it in movies. | ||
| I've seen the actors. | ||
| I've seen the madness. | ||
| The reality of life escapes them. | ||
| They are insulated from it completely. | ||
| And they live in this world where... | ||
| The camera's on them, and they have this idea that because the camera's on them, they must be special. | ||
| So because they're special, but there's no ego check. | ||
| Yeah, I understand. | ||
| You know, to get... | ||
| Okay, to put it in the honey terms. | ||
| Please, please. | ||
| Please, okay. | ||
| If you're going to go after a very difficult animal to track, okay? | ||
| Say if you're going to go after... | ||
| Himalayan tar. | ||
| You're going to fucking climb through the mountains. | ||
| It's an incredibly difficult task. | ||
| It takes a long time to get there. | ||
| You might not see one for days. | ||
| When you finally do see one... | ||
| This mule deer, this skull that's on the table is a perfect example. | ||
| You and I hiked around for days. | ||
| We walked seven hours a day. | ||
| We worked our asses off, man. | ||
| It's a haul. | ||
| So when that thing actually... | ||
| When I actually shot it and it dropped and then we brought it back, it was like... | ||
| Wow! | ||
| We did it! | ||
| We did something! | ||
| Whereas if that thing was in a pen, and I walked up and shot it in the face, I would have zero feeling of accomplishment. | ||
| Well, acting is a lot like shooting an animal in the face. | ||
| It's a lot like shooting a penned up animal in the face. | ||
| You're not really some special person. | ||
| You're just someone who's crazy, so you're good at pretending. | ||
| Because you don't really have a self-identity, so your self-identity can be manipulated or your personality can be manipulated in a role. | ||
| What you're saying has validity because you act. | ||
| I have. | ||
| I have acted. | ||
| I avoid it for that very reason. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Because I feel like those people are sick. | ||
| I feel like there's something about that occupation where you pretend to be like... | ||
| You know how many people I've met that play tough guys in movies so they think they're tough guys? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| They're fucking... | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I've met so many of them. | ||
| It's a sick way to make a living. | ||
| Some people pull it off and they become really sensitive people like Henry Winkler, the Fonz. | ||
| One of the nicest fucking guys I've ever met. | ||
| I'll tell you, I've heard that from multiple people. | ||
| He's a sweetheart. | ||
| Fly fisherman. | ||
| I've heard that from multiple people. | ||
| Wrote a book about it. | ||
| I've never met an idiot on the river. | ||
| That's his book? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've heard from multiple people what a... | ||
| Like, how surprised people are, what a great guy he is. | ||
| You talk to him, you would have no idea. | ||
| And he played a tough guy. | ||
| He could turn on and turn off electric appliances by punching the wall. | ||
| Well, he's a tiny little guy, too, which is really... | ||
| I mean, I'm a short guy, but he's tiny. | ||
| I mean, it's weird, you know, that this guy was like this tough guy on this show. | ||
| Like, how did that ever work? | ||
| Yeah, he would walk into a bathroom and bang the wall, and we would run out of the bathroom, and he would talk to Pinky Tuscadero in there. | ||
| He was good at it! | ||
| He was good at it, too! | ||
| The point is I've met a lot of really nice actors. | ||
| It's not a broad, sweeping generalization, but I think that the occupation itself is so unchecked. | ||
| Stand-up comedy, for instance, is very checked. | ||
| Like if you're a funny comedian, the reason why you're a funny comedian, you have to write the comedy. | ||
| You have to perform it. | ||
| You bomb. | ||
| You reassess. | ||
| You go back to the drawing board. | ||
| You have to figure out how to do it. | ||
| Once you actually get to doing it, there's a certain amount of humility. | ||
| Like after 10 years of doing it that almost all comedians possess. | ||
| When you talk to them about comedy, even if they're really good at it, they'll never tell you like I'm a bad motherfucker. | ||
| I'm the baddest motherfucker that ever got on stage. | ||
| You live a flop in such an immediate way, man. | ||
| Yeah, you die. | ||
| You fucking eat shit up there. | ||
| It happens so often. | ||
| It crushes your ego. | ||
| I can imagine you're just watching it happen. | ||
| It's like a movie. | ||
| You make it, there's all this excitement and stuff, and later it doesn't do well. | ||
| You're up there going, this is not going well. | ||
| I've never done it, but I can just imagine how humiliating it must be. | ||
| The way I describe it is like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. | ||
| It's actually probably worse than that because there's somewhere out there, there's someone that would like to suck a thousand dicks in front of his mother. | ||
| Nobody wants to bomb on stage. | ||
| It's just a horrible, crushing... | ||
| But along the way, one of the things that you learn is to be really good at comedy, you have to lose all of your sense of self-importance. | ||
| You have to lose all of that pretending you're something special. | ||
| Like, you're not something special. | ||
| You're just a person. | ||
| And the best way to do comedy is almost to be non-existent. | ||
| When you write and when you perform, there's almost no you in there. | ||
| Unless it's a self-deprecating aspect of it, like you're pointing out things that are silly about you, or pointing out ridiculous ideas that you might have had in your head at one point in time. | ||
| But other than that, when you're performing, you're never thinking, man, I'm up here and I'm killing. | ||
| You don't think of that at all. | ||
| In fact, you're almost like a passenger in this weird ride that you've put together. | ||
| Yeah, I got you. | ||
| And all you know is that you kind of know how to do it, and all you know is that you kind of have to keep at it in order to continue doing it, and that it's really fun to do. | ||
| But the moment you start taking it serious or attributing all of the success of it to you being super special and amazing and unique, you fucking suck. | ||
| But your comedy suffers. | ||
| Oh, it goes terribly wrong. | ||
| Yeah, because people know that. | ||
| They don't want to laugh at you. | ||
| Part of laughing at you is you have to be in the moment of what you're doing. | ||
| And if you're in the moment of what you're doing, the last thing you're going to be thinking about is how awesome you are. | ||
| That doesn't come up. | ||
| Whereas an actor, you can pretend that there's something really special about you. | ||
| Ready, action! | ||
| And then you do this role, and you play this guy. | ||
| It's all pretend. | ||
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| So the checking aspect, the being, the ego check, and the creative process, the tuning in, it's non-existent. | ||
| You're treated probably around you, you're treated with a certain amount of deference, too, that you're not going to get as doing stand-up. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They're treated like, we're treated like shit. | ||
| The comedians are like, well, you know, people like you if you're good, and they appreciate the, but no one, like, takes it seriously as an art form. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Which is one of the reasons why plagiarism was always so a huge problem with comedy, whereas it was treated with, you know... | ||
| If you think about plagiarism in literature, there's lawsuits and people's careers are ruined. | ||
| Oh yeah, you'll be disrespected. | ||
| Music, massive lawsuits. | ||
| People have lost millions of dollars just for a riff. | ||
| One of my favorite examples is there's a great song by the Verb, Bittersweet Symphony. | ||
| I don't know that song. | ||
| But that riff is stolen from the Rolling Stones. | ||
| So because of that, those guys made nothing. | ||
| They didn't make anything about that song. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't know that. | |
| Yeah, they had to give it all away. | ||
| I still like that song. | ||
| It's a great song. | ||
| Well, the lyrics are great. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| But there's no doubt about it that riff comes from the Rolling Stones. | ||
| What Stones tune? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't remember. | |
| Oh, you know this a little bit. | ||
| I think maybe you forgot. | ||
| I'm going to see you on January 31st. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| Is that sold out yet? | ||
| Should we talk about it? | ||
| Yeah, no, it's sold out. | ||
| It's been sold out for months. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's been the last time. | |
| What is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Last Time by the Rolling Stones. | |
| That's the song? | ||
| The Last Time? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| After I saw you last time, When I went to see you in New Jersey, we were driving home and my wife was saying to me, she's like, my face hurts from laughing at heart. | ||
| And I wanted to write a thing. | ||
| I wanted to write a thing like... | ||
| I envisioned writing something called The Only Happy Comedian. | ||
| I don't understand comedy at all, but you come at it from a position of strength in some way. | ||
| So much stuff is funny because it's from a place of self-loathing. | ||
| So many comedians do a self-loathing thing. | ||
| It might not be real, but it's kind of like... | ||
| It's just where it spawns from. | ||
| It's like self-hatred and I'm so pathetic. | ||
| It's funny that you build a whole act. | ||
| You can build a whole act and you're at a position of strength. | ||
| I don't know if you ever think of it that way. | ||
| But, like, you're up there, like, you seem, like, when you're up there, you seem somehow, like, in control and, you know, like a word you like, in control and powerful, but still funny. | ||
| And it's a weird contradiction, because we get from stand-up, we get to thinking, like, it's just like, yo, my wife don't like me, no one likes me, I'm awful, I can't do anything, you know? | ||
| Well, people have always said that you have to be nebbishy or fat or weird to be a comedian. | ||
| I was told that so much that I was insecure about my body when I first started doing comedy. | ||
| That's kind of what I'm saying. | ||
| You could be like, no, I'm fine. | ||
| If I wasn't doing this, I'd be fine. | ||
| I'd be doing something else. | ||
| The thing about comedy is that there's no rules. | ||
| There's no rules. | ||
| I mean, there's sort of laws to it, but there's no rules. | ||
| You know, there's laws, some of the laws are that it has to be funny to you, and that you have to learn it, and that everybody's different. | ||
| Like, there's Mitch Hedberg, who is like, you familiar with Mitch Hedberg? | ||
| Oh yeah, man, I got a good Mitch Hedberg story. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we'll get into that. | ||
| One of my all-time favorites. | ||
| But then there's also Sam Kinison, two completely different styles of comedy, two of my all-time favorite comedians. | ||
| It's all based on what is the world through your eyes. | ||
| What I find funny, it's funny coming out of me. | ||
| It's coming out of my mind. | ||
| But if you gave my act to Demetri Martin, you probably wouldn't be able to pull it off. | ||
| The more violent, physical, aggressive aspects of my act, it wouldn't work. | ||
| It works because it's funny to me. | ||
| It's obviously funny to me. | ||
| And I'm being honest. | ||
| When I talk about the things that I think are funny, it's because I've thought about it. | ||
| These are things that I honestly find amusing. | ||
| I'm not lying. | ||
| You don't sit around and think, what would be something funny I could say? | ||
| Never. | ||
| It jumps in your head, and you're like, I will convert this now into my comedy. | ||
| Well, it's taken a long time. | ||
| I would say there's stages of comedy. | ||
| The first stage is you're absolutely terrified, and all you're trying to do is get a laugh in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| And I think of jokes in that stage as tools. | ||
| All you're trying to do is get by. | ||
| Usually in the beginning, like when you're an open mic comedian, you've got five minutes on stage. | ||
| And those five minutes are fucking harrowing. | ||
| A ride through hell. | ||
| And when it's over, you're like, whew, I've got a couple laughs. | ||
| All right, good. | ||
| I didn't die. | ||
| And then occasionally you will die, and then you'll think about quitting. | ||
| And many, many times I thought about quitting. | ||
| I was like, fuck, I can't do this anymore. | ||
| It's too devastating. | ||
| You can't handle getting beat up like that. | ||
| The punishment that your self-esteem takes when you bomb on stage is almost overwhelming. | ||
| For some people, I've seen guys bomb and never recover. | ||
| I've seen them, like, their act diminishes, like they had some potential, there was something there, and then I've seen, like, one night where the fucking wheels come off, and then they never recover. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| It's almost like a beating that a fighter takes. | ||
| I've seen fighters take beatings, and not even just the physical punishment of it, but the confidence... | ||
| Destruction of it. | ||
| They never are the same guy again. | ||
| They never become that carefree, cocky guy again. | ||
| It just goes away. | ||
| And with that, so does their fighting career. | ||
| I've seen that happen with comedians as well. | ||
| So the beginning is just tools. | ||
| And then once you do that, then somewhere along the line, you go, okay, I'm pretty confident that I have some tools. | ||
| Now, what do I think is funny? | ||
| What would I laugh at? | ||
| This is what's funny to me. | ||
| And then you come up with stuff that's funny to you. | ||
| And then there's a stage three that comedians... | ||
| may or may not ever even get into. | ||
| And that is, how do you make your ideas funny? | ||
| Ideas like philosophy. | ||
| Like, how do you have a point of view and figure out a way to impart that point of view on people? | ||
| Like, for me, there's a thing I'm doing... | ||
| And just so I'm clear, when you're talking about moving away from just like jokes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, what does this do? | ||
| It's this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha ha ha. | |
| Maybe taking like philosophies or... | ||
| Trying to figure out a way to get an idea and to turn that idea into comedy. | ||
| Maybe a controversial idea. | ||
| Maybe an idea that you think is important. | ||
| Maybe just a thought. | ||
| Because there's a way to introduce an idea into someone's brain. | ||
| Give me an example of an idea. | ||
| Can you throw one out? | ||
| It's hard to do. | ||
| This is what I was going to say. | ||
| If you go on stage and say if you're a Republican and you're on stage and you start going off about gay marriage or this or that and you just give a speech. | ||
| If I'm in the audience and I have an opposing point of view... | ||
| I go, well, fuck you. | ||
| I don't like your opinion. | ||
| I think that's wrong and I think people should be able to do this. | ||
| But if you go on stage and say something that makes me laugh, even if I don't agree with you, even if I don't agree with you, if you make me laugh, I have to at least consider your idea. | ||
| I have to at least... | ||
| You've introduced... | ||
| Here's a perfect example. | ||
| I had a guy who came up to me who was a Christian, and I used to do this bit about Noah's Ark, that if you told Noah and the Ark to an eight-year-old retarded boy, he's going to have some questions. | ||
| So I had this whole bit about someone sitting down with this young retarded boy telling him the story of Noah's Ark. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it was a really long bit. | ||
| And this guy came up to me and goes, I've got to tell you, man, look... | ||
| I'm a Christian, and you started talking about Noah's Ark, and I started getting offended. | ||
| And he goes, but two or three minutes into that fucking bit, I was laughing so goddamn hard, I started thinking, what the fuck? | ||
| How is that a real story? | ||
| And he started laughing. | ||
| He goes, I just want to say congratulations. | ||
| You made me laugh at something that's completely opposed to my own beliefs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| This is a video where a guy came up to me after a show in Georgia. | ||
| Here, play this, because this is kind of funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You just dug it up with me. | |
| This guy told me he found Noah's Ark on a mountain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
you know, check it out and say, "Okay." And we actually fund expeditions to back up what somebody claimed. | |
| I'm going to tell you, the shots I'll show you will kind of blow your mind. | ||
| But our job is not to say what it is. | ||
| Our job is just to confirm what they found. | ||
| I'm confused though. | ||
| Do you really believe that it's Noah's Ark? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me tell you what I found. | |
| First of all, they did find a boat shaped object in the mountains of Ararat that's 515 feet long. | ||
| That should be enough for all the animals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
About 515 feet? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| For about 100 million species? | ||
| That seems better, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't know. | |
| Okay, it's about 515 feet. | ||
| Why don't they keep the hippos off? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you even get some hippos on a 550? | |
| Anyway, if you saw the shots, just the things that were found, it's a cool thing. | ||
| At the very least, you might be able to use some more material. | ||
| Isn't it possible that maybe it's just a boat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it could be. | |
| Well, why would anybody assume that that boat would make any connection in history to a crazy story about a dude who got all the animals to come on his boat because God talked to him, told him it was going to rain, and he was going to drown everybody because everybody wasn't paying attention. | ||
| Just think about all that stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it makes sense. | |
| How could that be Noah's art? | ||
| It's just wood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| You don't actually have wood there anymore. | ||
| Whatever it is, even if it's a boat. | ||
| Even if it was a solid boat, it's still a boat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's the interesting thing. | |
| Unless you found camel shit right next to rhino shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, actually, we do have samples of that. | |
| Do you have camel shape? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've taken core samples and found different species of animals of remains. | |
| We've got 12 anchors. | ||
| No, they didn't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
By the way. | |
| 12 anchors, again, should be about enough for hundreds of millions of species of animals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There was probably more than that, but what do you do when you find this on a 6,000-foot peak in the hills? | |
| But at the very least, I can just show you what they found. | ||
| Well, without a doubt, this earth has, over the last... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thousands and thousands of years have gone through some pretty huge cataclysmic events. | |
| I mean, they know for a fact that at one point in time, where Montana is right now, that's where all the megalodons were. | ||
| They find megalodon fossils, that gigantic shark, those huge teeth, they find them in the mountains of Montana. | ||
| And that's 600 million years ago. | ||
| So they know that no matter what, there's some crazy shit that's happened to this planet. | ||
| You know, without a doubt. | ||
| So it's very conceivable that at one point in time there was a huge flood in that region, and that's why there's a boat stuck up there. | ||
| It's very possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is pretty possible, but I can confirm we do have something that matches dead nuts to what the story is. | |
| I love that. | ||
| I use that term, dead nuts. | ||
| Yeah, you do. | ||
| I think Gilgamesh is the original one. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it's one of the oldest ones that we know of, but it's a coincidence. | |
| Yeah, well, I think, seriously, I think what the story of Noah's Ark is, what it really is all about, is that at one point in time, I think there was a huge disaster, and I think it's probably happened more than once, where, like, meteors hit, or, you know, a shifting in the core, ice caps, or something huge, where it's just, like, it kills, like, 90% of the people. | ||
| And the people that are remaining, they have a story. | ||
| A story of a great disaster. | ||
| And some people got away. | ||
| And those stories, the story of the great disaster and some person got away. | ||
| Over time, that person becomes the great hero, the savior. | ||
| And they talk about it around the campfire. | ||
| And his legend grows. | ||
| And when you have a story that's told in oral tradition for over a thousand years before it's ever written in ancient Hebrew. | ||
| And to this day, they only know three out of four words in ancient Hebrew. | ||
| To this day, 25% of all the words, they have no idea what it means. | ||
| And in ancient Hebrew, there was no numbers, so letters also doubled as numbers. | ||
| So you lose all the numeric value that's important in the text, like the word God and the word love. | ||
| They have the same numeric value, and that's very important for sentencing. | ||
| And when that was translated into Latin, it was translated into Greek, they lost all of that shit. | ||
| And that's all these stories that are distorted. | ||
| Thousands of years of people bullshitting around a campfire to the original text being indecipherable to what they have today. | ||
| How could anybody think that's real? | ||
| You would have to be fucking crazy to think that that really happened. | ||
| That God talked to one guy and got all the animals from all over the world and put them on a boat. | ||
| That makes zero sense. | ||
| When you know people are liars, you know people are weak, you know even most religious people are completely full of shit. | ||
| And if, after all that, you think that that story's real, that's insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When you actually see the evidence about a boat... | |
| Well, that guy obviously didn't listen. | ||
| Or, you know, the ideas didn't get into his head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But he was so kind about it. | |
| Kind? | ||
| He never threatened you? | ||
| He didn't want to kill you or anything? | ||
| Well, I can't. | ||
| Well, I don't think he was religious. | ||
| He was a documentarian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that right? | |
| He believed that he had found Noah's Ark. | ||
| Yeah, that was probably not the best example for a video. | ||
| But one thing... | ||
| The bones, they can't, they better not be there. | ||
| They didn't find you. | ||
| Because they only had two of each, so if they died, well, that could have been the unicorn's bone. | ||
| Yeah, if that's true, right? | ||
| If they died, then what the fuck? | ||
| Unless they bred before they died. | ||
| That could have been. | ||
| It was a long time. | ||
| But I'll tell you one thing, though. | ||
| You were kind of getting at this, like, the way the guy came up to you and he said, like, you were offending me. | ||
| But it was funny. | ||
| The second thing I struggle with is, like, you talk to really liberal people and you're like, yeah, Rush, you know, Rush Limbaugh is funny sometimes. | ||
| He's funny. | ||
| It makes him so mad. | ||
| Every time you're really conservative, people would be like, you know, Jon Stewart, he's, you know, he can be pretty funny. | ||
| They get mad. | ||
| They get real mad at you. | ||
| Like, they can't imagine. | ||
| But I remember, like, when you were doing part of your act, you were talking about when people get really mad at comedians for saying something controversial. | ||
| And you kind of, you mentioned, like, How come no one's mad at Johnny Cash for shooting a man just to watch him die? | ||
| That didn't really happen. | ||
| That's an important thing. | ||
| Johnny Cash didn't really shoot a man in Reno. | ||
| That didn't really happen. | ||
| The thing about comedy is it's an easy target. | ||
| For people that are looking to be offended, which is a lot of bloggers and people looking to find something to be outraged about, They'll point to comedy because comedy is a soft target. | ||
| A lot of comedians will say, fuck that. | ||
| There's an art form. | ||
| Yeah, no one's always wanting to kill novelists. | ||
| Unless you're Solomon Rushdie a long time ago. | ||
| People aren't always going to kill novelists. | ||
| There's the cartoonist that got stabbed in Holland. | ||
| Muslims. | ||
| People go after Muslims. | ||
| That guy was killed, right? | ||
| Yeah, he was murdered. | ||
| He's just a cartoonist. | ||
| Yeah, it's like the soft target of comedy is the idea that there's like this real subtlety to language. | ||
| And there's a subtlety to sarcasm and being facetious. | ||
| And you know when someone's being sarcastic. | ||
| But if you just see it written down on paper, you can, for purposes of being morally outraged, you can pretend that you don't know that it's sarcastic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can pretend that this is just a horrible statement. | ||
| And people have gotten in trouble for that many, many, many times. | ||
| Especially when you take something like on Twitter, like in a text form. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you try to pretend that that's a statement. | ||
| And you try to pretend that, oh, this is just someone who's, you know, this is an asshole. | ||
| This is a person who's just a really evil, mean person. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| This is a person who's fucking around. | ||
| Like, there's an art form to saying fucked up things that you don't really mean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you can say something fucked up, and I know that you're not serious, so I'll start laughing, and then we'll go, that's so wrong. | ||
| But we know it's funny because it's not a statement. | ||
| Yeah, no, I know exactly what you mean. | ||
| But there's like this PC police thing going on now where a bunch of people who... | ||
| And most of the time, when you pay attention to those people, because I find it fascinating, and I'm... | ||
| I try to consider myself to be a student of human nature. | ||
| And one of the things that I find about these people that complain so much about all these different things, and they find this moral outrage or find one thing to harp on over and over again, is they're usually extremely troubled personally. | ||
| They usually have overwhelming issues, like they're morbidly obese, or they're socially inept. | ||
| There's something wrong with them that's causing them to find this soft target and then lash out constantly at this soft target. | ||
| And then also if you look at what they do, a lot of people, what they're trying to do is stop someone from hurting someone's feelings. | ||
| And they're trying to say that what you're doing is mean and you're hurting someone's feelings. | ||
| So what I'm going to do is hurt your feelings. | ||
| In the most vicious and cruel way possible, you know, with these blogs and the writing, and I'm going to do to you what you're somehow or another doing. | ||
| So I'm going to be a complete, total hypocrite. | ||
| But I have a license. | ||
| I have this license of moral outrage. | ||
| I have this moral high ground that I'm going to stand on, so I'm going to attack. | ||
| And I'm going to, you know, to write this vicious, snarky column about a comedian. | ||
| And the idea is that they're trying to right the wrongs and trying to be the savior of what's good in the world. | ||
| But that's not the case. | ||
| What they're doing is just being an asshole because they feel like they have a license to be an asshole because they can take what you said and put it on paper and say, look, in quotes, Tracy Morgan said if his son was gay, he'd stab him. | ||
| In quotes. | ||
| So, fuck Tracy Morgan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Tracy Morgan's a ridiculous person. | ||
| Like, his whole act is a bunch of shit that he doesn't mean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a bunch of crazy things that have never happened, and he says a bunch of crazy things because that's his style of comedy. | ||
| Like, Mitch Hedberg's style of comedy is to say really preposterous things that other people wouldn't... | ||
| Like, my favorite Mitch Hedberg joke is, uh, somebody asked me if I wanted a frozen banana. | ||
| I said no, but I want a regular banana later, so yes! | ||
| You know? | ||
| Anybody else says that, it's a terrible joke. | ||
| But if he says it, it's really funny. | ||
| That's his style. | ||
| Tracy Morgan's style is, My son was gay, I stabbed that little nigga! | ||
| He doesn't really mean that. | ||
| It's not a statement. | ||
| He's not writing that down. | ||
| He didn't carve it in stone and bring it down from the top of a hill. | ||
| It's his art form. | ||
| But what's more upsetting than the people who are so volatile and do get so mad about stuff is... | ||
| The thing that politicians do, which is to feign that response. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You get politicians, you look at their career, they vacillate wildly between all these positions, but they love to get up and act like... | ||
| To act like the morally outraged guy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| By something that you know. | ||
| When you look in his eye, you're like, you don't care at all about that. | ||
| But you're feigning the guy who is that way. | ||
| And that's more upsetting than someone who really is mad about something. | ||
| Well, sometimes people are mad about something and it's just a perspective issue. | ||
| They just lack perspective. | ||
| Or they lack... | ||
| A lot of... | ||
| There's a lack of social intelligence. | ||
| And there's also a lack of... | ||
| Having nuanced friends. | ||
| Having friends that have good senses of humor, people that joke around about things, or say mean things. | ||
| Some of my favorite people, like Jim Norton is one of my favorite comedians, and he's my favorite guy on the radio, because he says ridiculous, evil, mean shit all the time, but he doesn't mean it. | ||
| He'll laugh after he says it. | ||
| But he's really smart about how he does it. | ||
| And he takes a tremendous amount of grief because of it. | ||
| Because people will try to point out some of the things that he says and then, you know, and accuse him of being, you know, homophobic or this. | ||
| One of the least homophobic guys you'll ever meet. | ||
| In fact, he will talk openly about how many experiences he's had with trannies. | ||
| He's had like all these transsexual experiences. | ||
| He's a pervert, complete total pervert. | ||
| But he's like, he owns it. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm with you. | ||
| And, you know, he takes grief because he's a soft target. | ||
| Because, you know, you can point to... | ||
| Look, they're looking for someone to say outrageous shit so they can be angry. | ||
| So who's more likely to say outrageous shit than someone who says outrageous shit for a living? | ||
| And some of the times they say outrageous shit and it doesn't work. | ||
| You know, it's not funny. | ||
| But Patrice O'Neill had a great point about that. | ||
| The late, great Patrice O'Neill. | ||
| Who's that? | ||
| He's a really funny comedian who died. | ||
| He's one of my favorite guys to talk about controversial points, because he always had a unique way of looking at it. | ||
| But his point was always that, like, when someone says something, and they're trying to be funny, and it misses, and it's fucked up, that comes from the same place as someone trying to say something funny, and it hits, and it's really funny, and you laugh. | ||
| Like, just because they miss, you know, with this attempt, doesn't mean they're like an evil, mean person. | ||
| They just failed. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good point. | ||
| They're not trying to hurt someone's feelings, they're trying to get a laugh. | ||
| And that's what comedy is. | ||
| There's a real art to that. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| I mean, that's a complicated idea. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| It's very complicated. | ||
| Well, you know my friend Joey Diaz? | ||
| Did he open up for me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Love that fucking guy. | ||
| No, man. | ||
| Funny. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| The funniest guy I've ever met in my life. | ||
| But he has this joke about transvestites. | ||
| He goes, I love transvestites. | ||
| They cook. | ||
| They clean. | ||
| You can beat on them every once in a while. | ||
| The cops come. | ||
| Who's going to believe? | ||
| Me or some dude with a wig and a black eye. | ||
| Okay, look, Joey Diaz has never punched a transvestite. | ||
| He's never had a transvestite over his house with a wig and had him cooking and cleaning. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| You could say that's a violence against transsexuals joke or a violence against transvestites joke, but it's not. | ||
| It's not promoting violence against anybody. | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| It's a fucked up thing that he's saying, and you know it's ridiculous. | ||
| That's a good joke. | ||
| It's a great joke. | ||
| It's one of my favorite jokes of all time. | ||
| But you gotta understand what it actually is. | ||
| What it actually is, is just... | ||
| It's just like Johnny Cash pretending he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. | ||
| It's exactly the same thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| I wish... | ||
| Is it Patrice O'Neal? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He? | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| I wish he was here. | ||
| Because there's some... | ||
| It's like... | ||
| You've been in a situation where someone said something... | ||
| That they wanted to be funny. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Let's say someone makes a crack about gays and it flops. | ||
| A way that it can flop is if they're so transparent that you see in them for a minute and you're like, wow, that really comes from a place of deep hatred. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| And it's not funny because in that, I got a glimpse into that. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If you make a gay joke, I don't know why. | ||
| From your demeanor, whatever it is, I know that you're not at home wishing you could go out and kill gay people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How do I know that? | ||
| It allows you to explore a funny idea. | ||
| But sometimes someone will say something like, man, this person really has a problem with black people who are in a power position. | ||
| It's like you see it. | ||
| It's intent. | ||
| The intent becomes transparent. | ||
| When someone is a kind person and someone's just pointing out hypocrisy. | ||
| Like, I have this bit making fun of Morrissey. | ||
| Morrissey is the lead singer of the Smiths. | ||
| Dude, but How Soon Is Now is a rock-solid song. | ||
| But I know your Morrissey bit and I laughed at it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was like the Noah guy because I could have come up to you and said, you know what? | ||
| I like How Soon Is Now, but that shit about Morrissey was funny. | ||
| He makes good music. | ||
| He does make good music. | ||
| But his idea that, you know, all... | ||
| You know, war is created by heterosexuals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not only not supported by history, but the point is, like, when I talk about that on stage, I make a big point out of the fact that I want to make sure that, like, I don't want anybody to think that I have any problem with gay people. | ||
| But I also don't want any gay people to just take random jabs at the giant mass of straight people and say, we're responsible for all the wars. | ||
| It's fucking, it's all ridiculous. | ||
| Oh yeah, the proof is that 10% of the wars were the gays responsible for 10% of the wars and it would upset the theory. | ||
| Well, all you'd have to do is look at history, like the Spartans, all the gay Athenians, the Romans, all the gay sex they had. | ||
| I think for a long time... | ||
| Those are fighting bastards there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alexander the Great is one of the greatest conquerors ever. | ||
| He's gay as fuck. | ||
| I think that one of the things about people that are in a group is they always want to assume that this is the good group to be in. | ||
| And the idea that all gay people are cool is ridiculous. | ||
| Because people are people. | ||
| There's a huge range of how people can behave. | ||
| Whether it's gay people or straight people. | ||
| There's a bit I do about... | ||
| I used to work out at this gay gym. | ||
| And these gay dudes used to hit on me all the time. | ||
| I used to work out at Gold's Gym on Cole Street. | ||
| Because it was so gay that because you were there, it was assumed that you must be gay. | ||
| Well, they would just... | ||
| You're a man. | ||
| It's like if you're a guy and you go to a gym and there's a hot lesbian working out there, you know, are you gonna just... | ||
| Dudes are gonna take a shot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're gonna try to find out how lesbian is you. | ||
| Yeah, I got you. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And... | ||
| The idea that gay guys are immune from sexual harassment, they're not going to sexually harass you because they're from this marginalized group. | ||
| So they would be different. | ||
| They would be kinder and sweeter and more and more. | ||
| Bullshit! | ||
| They're dudes with dicks. | ||
| They'll spike your drink just like a straight guy will spike your drink. | ||
| A gay guy will spike your drink? | ||
| Of course, there's got to be gay guys out there that will spike your drink. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you. | ||
| Gay guys would roofie you just like a straight guy would roofie you. | ||
| The idea that someone is really super cool just because they're gay is ridiculous. | ||
| It's just like the idea of someone being super cool because they're black. | ||
| Marginalized groups have a little bit of leeway with a lot of knee-jerk, reactionary, bleeding-heart liberals, which is why a guy like Al Sharpton is allowed to be on television. | ||
| Al Sharpton is a con man and an idiot, but yet he represents black people on television. | ||
| Because no one wants to say anything about him because he's black. | ||
| Because if you pick on Al Sharpton, you're picking on marginalized people and you are therefore a racist because he represents brown people. | ||
| Look at his skin. | ||
| He's a brown guy. | ||
| He's allowed to say... | ||
| But meanwhile, if you follow his career, I mean, the guy made his living off of, like, the Tawana Brawley thing where there was a fake rape where he, you know, he came out and had this gigantic protest and it turns out that this woman, Tawana Brawley, was never really raped in the first place. | ||
| She made it all up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he was the champion of all this. | ||
| It was attacking white people and attacking white America and the racist establishment that has allowed this to happen. | ||
| Actually, not really. | ||
| You're kind of a con man. | ||
| And what you're doing is you're taking advantage of a weakness in the system. | ||
| I just had occasion. | ||
| I'm not going to go into how it happened. | ||
| I had occasion where I just read the first and last chapter of Al Sharpton's most recent book. | ||
| No, like the second or third chapter and the last chapter. | ||
| I read the second or third chapter and it kind of changed. | ||
| It really changed my opinion about it for a minute. | ||
| And for a minute I was like, that's really like, he made an interesting point about something and expressed it really well. | ||
| And he kind of talked about an evolution he went through on an idea. | ||
| He explained what would be in politics a flip-flop. | ||
| He did a big flip-flop and kind of walked through how a public figure does a flip-flop and it was good. | ||
| Then I read the last chapter and I just went back to being like, oh, you are... | ||
| It was funny because I'm reading that book. | ||
| Oh, never mind. | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| No, never mind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| I'm sitting there reading that book and a guy comes up to me and this guy looks like a yachtsman. | ||
| He looks like a guy who owns a yacht. | ||
| And he comes up to me and he goes, Sharpton, I had a meeting with Al Sharpton one time. | ||
| He came in in a chauffeured car, and he was wearing a gold Rolex presidential watch. | ||
| And the first thing he tells me is how he survives on a $10,000 salary. | ||
| And then the guy left, walked down the street, and that was the end of his story. | ||
| That was his Sharpton story. | ||
| He's what they call a race pimp. | ||
| I think that's the best way to describe him. | ||
| Jesse Jackson has made a lucrative business out of going to businesses and saying, you don't have enough diversity in your businesses. | ||
| Hire me as a consultant. | ||
| He steps in as a consultant and gets an exorbitant amount of money to try to teach them how to hire black people in their businesses. | ||
| If they don't do it, he's going to protest them. | ||
| And that's the insinuation behind all of it. | ||
| And the only reason why it exists is because there has been racism. | ||
| The only reason why it exists is because black people have been marginalized. | ||
| That evil things have taken place and then 200 years ago black people were slaves. | ||
| All those things are absolutely true. | ||
| So there's this reality to what they're saying. | ||
| That there is racism. | ||
| There is inequality. | ||
| So someone who's coming along is capitalizing on that problem. | ||
| But it's not... | ||
| There's no Martin Luther King's life. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| At my house the other day, my wife was playing a Martin Luther King speech because Martin Luther King Day is Monday, and my daughter was like, who's Martin Luther King? | ||
| So my wife is playing this speech for our five-year-old. | ||
| Was it the Promised Land speech? | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| My God. | ||
| What a speech. | ||
| Goddamn, what a speech. | ||
| Man, it's like... | ||
| I remember a teacher played that for us once. | ||
| Especially when you hear what happened before he was assassinated. | ||
| He predicts it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, he knew it was coming. | ||
| That was an incredible speech, man. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Well, not just incredibly written, incredibly performed. | ||
| And while we were watching it, I was like, there's no one like this anymore. | ||
| Where's this guy? | ||
| Where's this guy that represents the black community? | ||
| A guy who is making these incredible points and is saying something that's so moving. | ||
| And then you look in the audience and it's so mixed. | ||
| There's white people next to black people. | ||
| And such an incredible time in our culture where people realized that there was these inequalities and there was this groundswell of movement to try to make the world equal and behind it or the figurehead of it is this incredibly powerful, incredibly intelligent guy. | ||
| Who's probably one of the greatest public speakers of all time. | ||
| Yeah, like an orator. | ||
| Yeah, just, I have a dream! | ||
| And you see him say it, and you're just like, God damn, it just gives you goosebumps. | ||
| And then you see Jesse Jackson. | ||
| You can't understand a fucking word he says. | ||
| He's mumbling through shit, eating shrimp cocktails, flying in private jets. | ||
| He's like, this is what's left. | ||
| This is what's left of these guys. | ||
| There's no guy like that. | ||
| You know, I... I'm not a fan of Obama. | ||
| I was a fan of Obama the candidate, of the idea of Obama, but Obama in office, I'm not a fan of. | ||
| I'm not a fan of most of what he's done. | ||
| I'm not a fan of the whole NSA thing, the spying on people, the use of drones. | ||
| There's so many things, it's almost too much to mention. | ||
| But one of the things that makes me so disappointed in him is his lack of anything that he's ever said that's inspirational. | ||
| The speech that he could have given. | ||
| The speeches that Kennedy gave. | ||
| Kennedy gave some fucking speeches that made you change your idea of what's possible for the future of this country. | ||
| But I don't get any of that from Obama. | ||
| I get these nonsense... | ||
| But it's funny because being a performer is really, I mean... | ||
| Being a performer is what launched him to where he is. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was because of that speech at the convention. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That and just the idea of who he was. | ||
| I mean, we were coming from... | ||
| Yeah, an amazing narrative. | ||
| But one of the earliest criticisms was it's performance. | ||
| It's performance. | ||
| But all speeches are... | ||
| I mean, they're performances. | ||
| It's hard not... | ||
| If you look at Hitler giving a speech, it's hard not even fathom how it would ever be that... | ||
| He's not just a lunatic. | ||
| How would it not be transparently lunatic? | ||
| But at the time, he would give these amazing performances that would get people... | ||
| Stirred up and, you know. | ||
| It's hard to grasp the context of Hitler because I don't speak German. | ||
| If I spoke German, maybe I could understand, like... | ||
| Oh, like all the maniacal, everything. | ||
| Yeah, it's so intense and so crazy, but the Obama speech is like, there's nothing... | ||
| Hold on, can we back up? | ||
| Please don't think I was doing the old, like, Hitler-Obama thing. | ||
| No, I didn't think you were doing that at all. | ||
| I just thought you were talking about powerful orators. | ||
| Yeah, no, it made me nervous for a minute. | ||
| Yeah, that's a touchy subject, right? | ||
| You're a Nazi. | ||
| Steve Rinell, a Nazi. | ||
| Front cover of whatever magazine. | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| We have a serious lack of these powerful, inspirational characters, these people that go on TV or give speeches that really have vision to them. | ||
| I mean, Obama had some of that as a candidate, but as a president, it's almost like he looks so tired. | ||
| When I see him on TV, he looks so goddamn tired. | ||
| And I remember when he was running, we had Bush and Cheney, and we were in war, and we were in a war that most people didn't support, and it was very confusing, and it was... | ||
| Coming out that the pretense of this war was incorrect and there wasn't really any weapons of mass destruction and all these lives and devastation and people were looking into Halliburton and the connection to Cheney. | ||
| It felt evil. | ||
| It felt like we were trapped with these evil old white dudes. | ||
| And here comes along this guy who's, you know, a single mother. | ||
| He comes from a single mother and he's half black and he's so intelligent, so well-read and so well-spoken. | ||
| And we thought this was going to be the change. | ||
| This was going to be the big shift. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it didn't turn out to be that at all. | ||
| It turned out to be just kind of more of the same. | ||
| But no more inspiration. | ||
| All that inspiration shit's gone. | ||
| I mean, he was so vibrant as a candidate. | ||
| And as a president, I can't remember a single time that he's ever, like, addressed the nation where I was like, that's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| Like, there's something there. | ||
| He's saying something that really gets people excited. | ||
| It's been so divisive. | ||
| But I always think, like, when I look at things that... | ||
| There's things that happen to candidates. | ||
| I think it has so much to do with money. | ||
| We get these figures going into the primaries. | ||
| You get these figures that buck the trends and Mavericks. | ||
| When I say Mavericks, I'm not referring strictly to McCain, but you get these people that come in and they're going to upset the status quo. | ||
| But then you have to play the politics game and you owe so much stuff for money. | ||
| And then you pay those debts and it's like corrupting. | ||
| And I think a similar thing happens to people often in office. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| Like, I can't imagine what it must be to be president. | ||
| And I say this talking about George W. Bush and Obama. | ||
| I can't imagine what it must be when you're president and someone comes in every morning and runs through the list of threats. | ||
| And you hear it and hear it and hear it and it's like threats, threats, threats, threats. | ||
| I... The paranoia that must exist, you know, I think it has to be really taxing on people. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| And every decision you make. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, it's going to be, it will be your legacy. | ||
| And you're like, it's got to be wrenching to just have to make those decisions all the time. | ||
| I mean, guys come out of office looking so rough. | ||
| Yeah, it's probably like... | ||
| But then no one wants... | ||
| You never have a guy do one term. | ||
| Real popular. | ||
| He's like, you know what? | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| I'm not doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's something, like, it's so intoxicating to be president. | ||
| Do you think that's it? | ||
| I think they, you know, probably don't let them, you know? | ||
| They probably, you know, look, man, we have a fucking deal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We got you into this mess. | ||
| Wouldn't it be funny, though? | ||
| Well, since George Washington, they say he could have won again. | ||
| He only had one term? | ||
| No, but people were like, do three. | ||
| They wanted him to keep rolling. | ||
| And he stepped down, and I think he might have been the last guy that wouldn't have been like, damn, I'll take another one. | ||
| Bloomberg took another one. | ||
| Jimmy Carter is one of the few guys that was president that I would really love to sit down with and have a private conversation. | ||
| Because he seems to be like a true humanitarian. | ||
| And he seems to be, out of all the people that were ever president, the guy who caused probably the least amount of loss of lives and the least amount of War and heartbreak seems to be Jimmy Carter. | ||
| He seemed truly like a kind man who wound up in this weird situation where he was the President of the United States. | ||
| He wound up in a weird situation out in the desert. | ||
| Oh, the hostage situation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, well, that's a crazy situation where the fucking hostage were released as soon as Reagan got into office. | ||
| I'm like, what kind of fucking weird deal did you guys make? | ||
| Did you guys keep those people hostage for political gain? | ||
| That's one of the most disgusting possibilities in the history of the... | ||
| Of power in the presidency. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| You know what I mean. | ||
| It's like the idea that that's a possibility, that they might have kept those people and used them as a political ploy is pretty gross. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| But probably did happen. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Like you said, who the fuck knows what it's like once you get into office? | ||
| Who has any idea? | ||
| I just don't think there should be a president. | ||
| I think the idea of having this one alpha chimp running the whole show is so fucking archaic. | ||
| It probably works when there's 50 of us. | ||
| You want to go parliament? | ||
| I don't know what I want to go. | ||
| I want to go internet. | ||
| I think we need to go hive mind. | ||
| It should be like those shows where people vote from home. | ||
| Every issue is always up on this thing. | ||
| Everybody at home is constantly voting on every issue. | ||
| It's not a bad idea. | ||
| The president should attack, not attack. | ||
| Well, I just think the idea of having one person or a figurehead that pretends to be the one person that runs a show is just so archaic. | ||
| Well, yeah, but we have a system of checks and balances, man. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| If you look at the wild vacillations that some countries go through, okay? | ||
| Venezuela, I mean, you rattle them off all day long. | ||
| People get frustrated with how slowly things happen in the U.S. That's the story. | ||
| The gridlock, nothing gets done, it's all idiots. | ||
| If you look at the gradual way, one might argue... | ||
| That all that gridlock and all that mayhem and things being so stagnant somehow works to our benefit from preventing wild swings. | ||
| Oh, we're this, oh, we're that. | ||
| We get a really serious communist, then we go from that to a real serious anarchist, then we realize that doesn't work, so we go to some wild-ass dictator. | ||
| I feel that kind of like these mild undulations, when you view it from a historic perspective, I think these mild undulations that we go through in politics are to our benefit. | ||
| I'm a little bit pro-gridlock. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Because if it was just so fast, I feel like we'd have more stumbles than we have. | ||
| But I'm kind of like generally like an optimist, you know? | ||
| I'm a general optimist too. | ||
| I just think there's too many people. | ||
| I think there's too many people, too many interests, too much money, too many different directions. | ||
| The money thing is really true. | ||
| Like this dude that just got the mayor of New York. | ||
| I want to go back to my show business story too at some point. | ||
| And I want to tell my Mitch Hedberg story. | ||
| And I want to talk about hunting pigs tomorrow. | ||
| How are we on time? | ||
| We're fine. | ||
| Okay, so... | ||
| Man, I lost my... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So the guy that just got elected mayor in New York. | ||
| I mean, he's not in there a day, and he's like, okay, no more. | ||
| We're not going to have any more horses pulling carriages around in Central Park. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right off the bat. | ||
| It's like, are you telling me... | ||
| You're now running the biggest city. | ||
| The one that, like, terrorists drool about. | ||
| You know? | ||
| The one that's like... | ||
| Like, balancing all these, like, ethnic groups and tensions. | ||
| And the one thing that's on your mind when you come in is that horses are pulling carriages in Central Park and it's mean. | ||
| How could that possibly? | ||
| It has to be that some dude wrote that guy a check. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And he's like, here's the deal. | ||
| I'm going to give you this check, but I don't want them damn horses in that park. | ||
| Because there's no other way to explain it. | ||
| And it shows kind of this weird ignorance and arrogance where if you talk to anyone who's involved in livestock theft and livestock issues, we don't have a horse theft. | ||
| We don't have a not enough horse problem. | ||
| There's too many horses. | ||
| Since the closure of horse slaughter plants, people are dumping horses. | ||
| Farmers will wake up and be like, wow, there's a bunch of horses out in that place. | ||
| Because there's just no way to get rid of excess horses. | ||
| You have all these horses that are unwanted, horses that are starving, horses that aren't being treated properly. | ||
| And you got these gainfully employed horses that are fed, stabled, cared for, veterinarian treatment. | ||
| And the guy would be like, the one thing we need is unemployed horses. | ||
| It has to be about some weird money things. | ||
| Or it could be he's just a bleeding heart liberal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He doesn't look at it. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| You think he's just a money thing? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Tell me what the fuck happened with the large drink thing. | ||
| How did that ever take place? | ||
| That was Bloomberg, right? | ||
| Yeah, but it wound up not happening. | ||
| Did it really? | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| No, they never banned Big Pop. | ||
| Jesus Christ, that drove me nuts. | ||
| The idea that you couldn't get a Big Gulp or a giant drink at a movie theater. | ||
| I remember one of those comedians, some comedian was doing something, he was doing like a thing where he was like, you're supposed to complete the sentence, like, it's so hot, you know? | ||
| And one of them was, it's so hot, Bloomberg had to go over to Jersey to get a Big Gulp or something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the nanny state stuff, I hate it. | ||
| I hate all the telling people what to do and not do for your health. | ||
| I hate it, but I could also picture how frustrating. | ||
| Because if you look at a guy who smokes a ton of cigarettes, in one hand, why? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You've got to be big enough of a man to walk away and be like, okay. | ||
| Or ride a motorcycle without a helmet. | ||
| I'm kind of like, why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| But then I'd say, like, you gotta be, like, a big enough person in some weird way to be like, okay, you go ahead and push on, and I'm gonna try to not want to, like, control your life. | ||
| Well, there's gonna be people who look at you and go, dude, you can't talk about cigarettes or motorcycles. | ||
| You got charged by a fucking moose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Alright? | ||
| I saw it. | ||
| I saw you get hit by a moose. | ||
| I watched it five times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was... | ||
| You describing it was harrowing, but watching it was way crazier. | ||
| When that fucking thing got up and started running towards you, even though I knew you were okay, I met you after the fact, I was like, oh, he's dead. | ||
| He's fucking dead. | ||
| No, we met... | ||
| Yeah, we met well before, but that's... | ||
| That was... | ||
| You know, if you do enough TV, like, that was... | ||
| What I did was so stupid that you'd want on one hand... | ||
| It was so dumb what I did, and I'll tell what I did in a minute, but what I did was so stupid That you'd want to then hide how stupid you were and not have it be on TV. Right. | ||
| But on the other hand, like, but it's compelling TV. Like, a guy getting run over by a moose is interesting, you know? | ||
| So it's your thing of, like, your ego where... | ||
| And now I'll tell you what happened. | ||
| We were calling... | ||
| You know Ryan Callahan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love Ryan. | ||
| What a great guy. | ||
| We were calling moose, and when you call moose... | ||
| That's excellent, but pinch your... | ||
| Go, like, pinch your nostrils. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's the cow. | ||
| That's a cow saying, I am coming into estrus. | ||
| And moose calling is effective right before the rut, right before the breeding season, because bulls know what's going to happen. | ||
| Like, the cows are going to want to be bred, and I'm going to breed them. | ||
| But the cows haven't really got rolling yet, so it's just all anticipation. | ||
| If they were actually all doing it, and the cows are really in estrus, and the bull's with a cow that's in estrus, he's going to be less likely to come to one calling. | ||
| So it's all a timing issue. | ||
| You've got to catch him right before he's ready. | ||
| Yeah, he wants it. | ||
| You're the first. | ||
| He's like, there she is, first cow to come in to estrus. | ||
| I'm going to go get her. | ||
| So we're out. | ||
| Ryan's mimicking the noise of a bull. | ||
| I'm sorry, mimicking the noise of a cow. | ||
| And what inspired him to begin doing that is we heard a bull and a bull makes a noise like this. | ||
| A bull will go... | ||
| So that's all you heard? | ||
| It's like a suggestion. | ||
| You don't even hear it, you feel it. | ||
| It's a suggestion of a noise. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It was like, what was that? | ||
| But it's very hard to determine where it was... | ||
| Not where, it's hard to determine how far away. | ||
| And we heard that and then we debated for a long time whether we'd heard it or not. | ||
| We're like, no, I know I heard a bull, I heard a bull. | ||
| Then it actually started to thunder a little bit off in the distance, which made it even more confusing because it was like, was it thunder or was it that, you know, noise? | ||
| So Ryan starts trying to lure the bull to us. | ||
| This is up in British Columbia. | ||
| He starts trying to lure the bull to us by roaming around making cow calls. | ||
| And he goes away from the bull. | ||
| And I stay put, hoping that the bull... | ||
| We'll come and he's going to want to see her before he gets too close. | ||
| So by Ryan staying about 75 yards further away, the bull might hang up in the vicinity where I'm at, you know, while he's trying to get a visual lock on the cow to make sure everything looks safe. | ||
| And we keep calling and calling. | ||
| And then I'm starting to think I was going crazy. | ||
| I never heard the bull in the first place. | ||
| So we start going in the direction. | ||
| Eventually we start moving in the direction where we think the bull is. | ||
| And sure enough, I see some brush clashing and he's in there rubbing his antlers on some brush. | ||
| And Ryan starts calling. | ||
| And now we're in his zone enough where he's coming to investigate and he's coming in and he kind of comes at me and I do like a really stupid thing where I take what you call a brisket shot. | ||
| And a brisket shot on a deer or a wild pig is devastating. | ||
| You know, you're coming in like the sternum and it is devastating to the animal, a small animal. | ||
| But a moose is just so much. | ||
| It's like layers of bricks and stuff. | ||
| Basically, the front of them made them. | ||
| And he goes down, and I go running over there. | ||
| And sure enough, he gets up and starts running. | ||
| And I'm worried. | ||
| The last thing I want to do is chase a moose. | ||
| But I'm worried that maybe he's not bleeding enough. | ||
| So I start running after him. | ||
| And I get up there, and I catch up to him, and he's laying down again. | ||
| And I go to shoot him in the neck. | ||
| And click. | ||
| Like I had... | ||
| I messed up my rifle and hadn't chambered around. | ||
| So it clicks and that bull got up and just turned and like came and boom, knocked me over. | ||
| Like coming at you like, you know, head down, horns down like a bull, you know, head down, horns. | ||
| And he punched me in the ass with one of his antler tines. | ||
| And I thought it punctured me. | ||
| So I ran away and Callahan shoots the moose down. | ||
| And I keep reaching around to feel where he had popped me so hard in the ass and knocked me over. | ||
| And my hand keeps coming back bloody. | ||
| So I'm trying to feel where he put a hole in me, and I'm thinking he'd punch the hole through my waders and into my ass tissue. | ||
| But then I realized that I got blood all over, because I'd hit him in the brisket, so when he ran me over, he smeared a lot of that blood on the back of my clothes. | ||
| So that was the blood I was feeling. | ||
| Scared the hell out of me. | ||
| And you saw that it wasn't a few days before that I got charged by a grizzly bear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a harrowing trip. | ||
| And you're talking about people smoking cigarettes and riding motorcycles with no helmets. | ||
| That moose deal was probably the closest. | ||
| You fantasize about bad stuff happening to you from big animals. | ||
| You're going to get mauled by a bear or whatever. | ||
| And what really gets you is little teeny things. | ||
| My hospital stuff has been... | ||
| Serious issues have been giardia, so drinking bad water, and Lyme disease by getting bit by little teeny bugs that are infected with bacteria. | ||
| And that's like... | ||
| My real source of trouble. | ||
| But when I'm laying in bed and I'm not thinking about microbes, I'm thinking about big giant animals coming to get me, you know, and that one came and knocked me. | ||
| In the minute, like, it's mixed emotions. | ||
| As soon as it happens, I'm like, that was the stupidest thing I ever did. | ||
| I can't believe that. | ||
| I'm so dumb. | ||
| And then concurrent with that is a thought of like, I am so happy that that happened. | ||
| That was an amazing thing, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And now, dude, as stupid as it was, now sitting there, I'm like, I love that that happened. | ||
| Because you're okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's pretty terrifying to watch. | ||
| Looking at it now, I wouldn't even be disappointed had he punched a hole in my butt. | ||
| As long as you lived. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But what if he hit your sack? | ||
| What if a horn? | ||
| I mean, think about that. | ||
| I already got two kids. | ||
| You're cool with a hole in the sack from a moose morn? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I keep telling. | |
| Half the days my wife is like, go down and get a bass sack to me. | ||
| Half the days she's like, no, wait, because we want another one. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It's a dead issue now. | ||
| Moose. | ||
| Crushed my sack. | ||
| Crushed my sack. | ||
| I'm a eunuch. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That would be harsh. | ||
| It was fun, man. | ||
| I mean, I love that. | ||
| You'll appreciate this because I was reading this book about human history called Lone Survivor. | ||
| Not Lone Survivor. | ||
| That's the SEAL story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's something like Lone Survivors. | ||
| It's by a geneticist. | ||
| A British geneticist. | ||
| What the hell's name? | ||
| Anyways, something like that. | ||
| Soul Survivors? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He talks about the suite of injuries that are common to Neanderthal skeletons. | ||
| Did I tell you about this? | ||
| No. | ||
| So, like, every time they dig up a Neanderthal skeleton in the mouths of caves and stuff, like, one, you find that they've been cut. | ||
| Like, their bone, they've been butchered. | ||
| So, they die and their bodies would... | ||
| Presumably their buddies or Cro-Magnon had a tendency to go eat them. | ||
| And they also find all these fractured bones, like busted bones, fractured skulls, fractured vertebrae. | ||
| Little survivors. | ||
| And you saw this in this book, and these guys kind of got wondering, like, why do they have this type of injury? | ||
| And eventually some doctor looks at the injuries that are common in Neanderthals, and he says, you know where I see that is rodeo riders. | ||
| And it's like the things that happen to people who are mixing it up with big critters. | ||
| And the theory that this guy puts forward, not Sykes, not the guy that wrote it. | ||
| Pull that up again. | ||
| What was his name again? | ||
| Chris Stringer. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't think Chris Stringer floats this idea, but he talks about a guy who floats this idea that they had a confrontational hunting style that Neanderthals did. | ||
| That they were in there, you know, tearing it up. | ||
| And Cro-Magnons had a little bit more of a, let's stay back, you know, we'll stay back and get them at a better time. | ||
| Well, Neanderthals are way closer to the rest of the animals than we are. | ||
| I mean, they were five feet tall, 200 plus pounds, big thick fucking bones. | ||
| You know what else he says? | ||
| They didn't have a lot of sexual dimorphism. | ||
| The males and females were much more similar. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, it probably had to be. | ||
| Yeah, females were in there hunting more. | ||
| Probably had to be survive. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| Yeah, they weren't, like, just structurally the females were similar. | ||
| And so having that little run in with that moose was kind of, I felt like a little bit, in a positive way, I felt a little bit like, maybe like, it was like a Neanderthal experience. | ||
| But the Neanderthal thing is weird, man, because they find out all these things that we used to think they didn't do. | ||
| There's evidence that once they came into contact with Cro-Magnon, it was like they started picking up some of the things that they were into. | ||
| There's evidence that suggests that they had been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and all of a sudden dudes show up, like we show up, and all of a sudden they kind of got interested in decoration a little bit, got interested in art a little bit. | ||
| I mean, it's a theory that they were somehow interacting with us and were kind of like stealing our... | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| Stealing our groove a little bit. | ||
| Well, I mean, you think about all the things that we use. | ||
| Guns, computers, this table. | ||
| We didn't build any of this shit. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| We figured it out from other really smart humans. | ||
| Yeah, you adopt. | ||
| And so they kind of came into... | ||
| Somehow, it was going on. | ||
| And there was some introgression. | ||
| He talks a lot about that in that book. | ||
| That there was... | ||
| There were... | ||
| He argues, and other people argue that this isn't the case, the argument there is that there was certainly some intro aggression. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard that, and I've also heard that it's a confusion, and that what it really is is common ancestry. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard all that. | ||
| So I'm not definitely... | ||
| When it comes to that kind of stuff, I'm not the guy... | ||
| Like, you do the same. | ||
| Like, I'm saying what some people say. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| And some people say that, and it's an interesting idea, and all that stuff changes so fast. | ||
| I always hate to be like, this is what it was, you know, but... | ||
| You're talking about, you know, what is the most recent version of Neanderthals? | ||
| 100,000 years? | ||
| No, they went out 30, 35. 35? | ||
| How the fuck could anybody know what the hell exactly happened 35,000 years ago? | ||
| It's too far. | ||
| He explains how... | ||
| He explains what they know so far. | ||
| Well, yeah, he explains how the people that have an opinion on it came to form their opinion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But for sure, look, I know men, and I know that if men lived with Neanderthals, somebody would have fucked one. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I know dudes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They would do it. | ||
| Even if it was sort of like an act of aggression, like you look at conquering forces, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| On one hand, they're coming into Congress because they despise them, but like dudes, conquering dudes will often find themselves, you know, like history's full of those examples, like a conquering army that's coming out to get like the worst people on the planet and all they want to do is annihilate them, but they also kind of want to have sex with them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, it's like... | |
| Did you ever see, there's one, I think he was an Australian anthropologist, very fringe guy, but he had this really funny take on Neanderthals that they were these super predators and that we hunted them into extinction. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he proposes that they didn't look like people at all, they looked like gorillas. | ||
| That Cro-Magnon hunted them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Did you ever see that? | ||
| No, but I don't know if I've seen that guy's ideas, but I've seen the idea that that's the case, and what people point to is that they always find butcher marks, not always, but it's very common to find butcher marks on those bones, and also find where they crack the heads open, presumably to get the brain out. | ||
| Yeah, I wish I could remember killing Neanderthals. | ||
| I forget what the... | ||
| It'd be like if you shot a Yeti now, or not a Yeti, if you shot Sasquatch. | ||
| People would be pissed. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I bet you that Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal weren't as different. | ||
| There might not have been as many differences between those two as there would be between us and a Sasquatch, if you haven't run into one. | ||
| Pull up Them and Us. | ||
| Pull up some images. | ||
| The book's called Them and Us. | ||
| And his proposal was the eye sockets were much larger, the features were more simian, the bone structure was much closer to lower primates than ours. | ||
| And we're just assuming, we anthropomorphize these animals and assume they had white skin like us and hair like us. | ||
| But he gives them black skin like a gorilla and decides that they were these really intelligent predators that hunted us down. | ||
| We hunted, widely discredited. | ||
| But this is the images Oh that's what he thinks they look like? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That looks like something you'd have in your studio. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, like a Yeti or something. | ||
| This is his crazy idea. | ||
| I mean, most likely horseshit, but really kind of fascinating. | ||
| Fun horseshit, though. | ||
| Yeah, we don't have any soft tissue from these fucking guys. | ||
| We don't really know what the hell was going on. | ||
| We don't have their skin. | ||
| We can't compare the color and texture. | ||
| We don't really know. | ||
| I think the picture will become more clear. | ||
| Eventually. | ||
| I mean, because they get such sophisticated ways of looking at stuff. | ||
| Well, there was that one misinterpreted idea that I think a Harvard geneticist was saying that one day it could be possible and there may be an ethical consideration that we would have to ask a woman if she'd be willing to give birth to a Neanderthal baby. | ||
| And then it became, you know, distributed. | ||
| Harvard geneticist wants women to give birth to a Neanderthal. | ||
| Looking for volunteers! | ||
| And, like, they're going to place a Neanderthal baby in your body. | ||
| Like... | ||
| You know, that's not exactly what they're saying. | ||
| You would get so many women that would do it. | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Just to become famous. | ||
| Look at what they think these things might have looked like. | ||
| Well, there's some footage of one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the idea is that, you know, we think that they looked like people. | ||
| He kind of goes out of the way to give them a real sinister appearance, though. | ||
| Well, look at the bone structure. | ||
| The differences in the bone structure. | ||
| Nah, yeah. | ||
| Thicker. | ||
| Yeah, he makes them look like monsters in a movie. | ||
| With little tiny dicks. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| How come they have little dicks? | ||
| I would think that thing would have a giant dick. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Why am I thinking about neonatal dicks? | ||
| Tell me about your Mitch Hedberg story. | ||
| You know, the more I think about it, I'm going to try to tell it real quick because it's not that great of a story, but I had this girlfriend who had this fellowship she got in San Jose, California. | ||
| And so I was back and forth between Montana and San Jose all the time. | ||
| And there's always this marquee above this comedy house. | ||
| Oh, you told me this story. | ||
| I don't think you told it on the podcast, so go ahead. | ||
| There's this marquee above the comedy house and it kept saying, like, Mitch Hedberg, you know, March or Mitch Hedberg, whatever. | ||
| And it was always in the back of my head, like, man, I gotta get my ticket, gotta get my ticket. | ||
| And one day it says, like, we'll miss you, Mitch. | ||
| I'm like, son of a bitch, I thought it was coming up. | ||
| And I thought that it meant he came and performed and went home. | ||
| And I ran up to the window being like, why'd you guys have it on your marquee that he's coming to March when he's already... | ||
| And she said, no, man, he died this morning. | ||
| It's kind of a weird... | ||
| It's not a great story. | ||
| It feels that way to me. | ||
| There's the thing right there. | ||
| That was all over the country. | ||
| Oh, it was? | ||
| Yeah, they did those everywhere. | ||
| I think they did one at the Laugh Factory. | ||
| The Marquis of the Laugh Factory as well. | ||
| Yeah, man, he was funny. | ||
| One of my all-time favorites. | ||
| And clean, too. | ||
| Clean comedian. | ||
| Yeah, isn't that funny? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you gone on to listen to the comedian, the storyteller Jerry Clower that I'm always asking you to listen to? | ||
| Yeah, I've listened to him. | ||
| You don't like it? | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| It's all about putting it in the context. | ||
| He's a funny guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, in the context. | ||
| I don't know why I thought. | ||
| Oh, I thought that just because, yeah, Mitch Hedberg. | ||
| Like, you could actually listen to Mitch Hedberg with your kid and your grandma. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He swears in the last one, the most recent one, he says quite a few fucks. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean... | ||
| That's not sexual. | ||
| Yeah, but yeah, he's just using them, you know? | ||
| Stoner humor. | ||
| Yeah, he was a brilliant guy. | ||
| A really unique comedian. | ||
| But to bring it all around... | ||
| I want you to bring around the pigs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what we're doing this weekend, man. | ||
| I'm fired up. | ||
| Like I told you, I shot 30 rounds today, 60 yesterday, and then 300 fucking arrows the day before. | ||
| My right arm is so useless right now. | ||
| I can't remember the last time my right shoulder was just sore. | ||
| It's good that you're shooting them. | ||
| I mean, that's a lot of shooting. | ||
| I mean, it's not a lot of shooting for guys that are really into shooting, but it's a lot of shooting. | ||
| It's good to get that level of proficiency. | ||
| I mean, just from repetition. | ||
| You learn how to do stuff through repetition. | ||
| I'm a big believer in preparation. | ||
| I don't believe in... | ||
| One of the things that I learned when I was young, when I was competing, when I was fighting... | ||
| When I wasn't in that good of shape, I was really fucking nervous. | ||
| But when I was in really good shape and I was really well trained, my nerves were considerably less. | ||
| And I think that's with everything. | ||
| You've got to be fully prepared. | ||
| Yeah, the guys I know the best at hunting, you go out and it has to be that you know you're going to Because if things get hard and things get bad and things aren't going your way, if you've already been going into it like you didn't know it was going to happen, it allows you to more quickly jump into that it didn't happen. | ||
| If you go into it like it has to happen, it will happen, it has to happen, then when things are sucky, you've You're still pursuing that narrative, you know? | ||
| It will happen. | ||
| When we were in Montana, you kept saying, we're going to get one. | ||
| You kept saying that. | ||
| We're going to get a deer. | ||
| You kept saying that, we're going to get a deer. | ||
| You said that many times. | ||
| I feel like what we're doing this weekend isn't going to be, you know... | ||
| Hunting wild pigs, I think there's going to be a lot of pigs. | ||
| This place, Teehan, Teejan, Teejan Ranch, I gather they have quite a bit of a pig population, enough to the point where people go out there and enough to the point where people go out there and do a guided pig hunt, and they do this throughout the year. | ||
| If there was none there, it wouldn't be that way. | ||
| Oftentimes, when I've hunted pigs, I've found that there's so much more fecund, you know? | ||
| Like a deer will go and a deer will go. | ||
| I've never used that word in my life. | ||
| What does that word mean? | ||
| Fecund? | ||
| They have a lot of babies. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So like you take another animal, a native animal around here and be like, you know, black-tailed deer. | ||
| Does it have to do with the premise? | ||
| Does it start with fuck? | ||
| No, fecundity. | ||
| F-E-C-U-N-D. So like fecundity is, you know, good at making babies. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like the root is fuck. | ||
| Someone's lying. | ||
| You know, deer's going to have one or two a year. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That pig's going to, a female pig's going to keep kicking off litters of, you know, six, ten, several times a year. | ||
| What a powerful animal, too. | ||
| If they're, I mean, they're really, they're really something, I mean, they've gotten, they've through our, you know, through, I'm trying to put together an idea that's not actually that complicated. | ||
| Thanks to us, and in spite of us, at the same time, they've managed to get everywhere. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, oftentimes we just do it, like we thought it was a good idea for a long time to go put pigs everywhere. | ||
| Now we're like, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to put pigs everywhere. | ||
| And, you know, there's not a lot we're doing to stop them. | ||
| That's not the case here. | ||
| Like, in California, they're treated more like a game animal. | ||
| You know? | ||
| The number, like, when people travel, more people travel to California to hunt wild pigs than to hunt anything else. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And they just don't seem to really cause the level of damage and hysteria that they do in some other areas, like in certain areas in the southeast and the Gulf Coast area. | ||
| I mean, there's pigs to the point where it's just really hard on agricultural interests, and it's kind of inexplicable. | ||
| How they seem to be there for so long and then explode into some level. | ||
| But in California, there's some pigs around and people generally appreciate them. | ||
| I used to hunt pigs at, not used to, I still do, but I have a friend who's got some, her family has some cattle ranches up around Sacramento. | ||
| And he's kind of got this little bit like, yeah, you know, sometimes I get too many and I need to get rid of some, but then we'll get a dry year and they'll all go away anyway. | ||
| And I'd like it if you went out and shot some. | ||
| If you see one, shoot one for me. | ||
| And they kind of are causing me a little bit of problems. | ||
| And you can tell he has this conflicted relationship about them. | ||
| But I put it to him one day. | ||
| I said, Glenn, if you could shake a magic wand and all the wild pigs would be gone, would you shake it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| You know? | ||
| So, he even admitted, like, they're a hassle. | ||
| He doesn't want a lot of them around, but he would never want to see them all gone. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And it feels kind of like the... | ||
| It's a great general... | ||
| It's a huge generalization. | ||
| But I feel like that's kind of been the relationship here. | ||
| There's a lot of hunters. | ||
| I get all kinds of emails from guys who live in California. | ||
| And they're like... | ||
| They went out pig hunting six times. | ||
| Never even saw a pig. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Hunting on public ground. | ||
| And these guys are wishing there was more of them. | ||
| And in other parts of the country, you got government agencies paying real money to try to wipe them out. | ||
| Because they cause such a problem with native species and agricultural interests. | ||
| But here it's a different vibe in California. | ||
| Have you seen the Pigman Ted Nugent footage? | ||
| I've seen clips of it, I haven't seen it. | ||
| I mean, I know everything, I know so much about it. | ||
| I mean, I have a show on that network, you know? | ||
| Yeah, they shoot, for folks who are just listening and don't know what we're talking about, they have, Pigman has a couple of episodes called Aporkalypse, where they shoot pigs at a helicopter's. | ||
| Lots of them. | ||
| He shot one with a bow and arrow out of a helicopter. | ||
| Did he kill it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| I knew that it happened, but I didn't know if it came to be that he got it and got it. | ||
| Well, he had to aim way high because the downdraft of the blades shoved the arrow down, so he had to judge it. | ||
| Recently, I heard that they're in a situation where they're going to be paying people by the hour to... | ||
| Kill pigs. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| I mean, they have millions of pigs in Texas, apparently. | ||
| Well, they have a lot of farmland in Texas, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they're... | ||
| It's like... | ||
| A weird thing about it... | ||
| The endangered species... | ||
| A weird thing about stuff like pigs and how, you know... | ||
| Just so, I don't know if... | ||
| I'm sure your viewers are somewhat up to speed on this, but... | ||
| Wild pigs are not native to North America. | ||
| People brought wild pigs to North America early on in the pioneer days or during the contact years. | ||
| They brought pigs to North America from their native in Eurasia, brought them here as a food source. | ||
| And they would keep some in pens and other people would have a practice where You'd go into an area and you'd just kind of turn pigs out. | ||
| They wouldn't scatter too far. | ||
| They'd fatten themselves on acorns and masts and grubs and various things. | ||
| And when you wanted one, you could take your rifle out and find a couple and shoot them. | ||
| And it was a way to produce meat where you weren't needing to provide it with all of its feed. | ||
| It was just a very sturdy animal that could fatten itself on land. | ||
| And inevitably, these pigs would get away. | ||
| So we've had wild pigs here about as long as we have had Europeans here. | ||
| Another version happened later where people brought them in as a game species. | ||
| When they would bring them in as a game species, they would bring them in from Siberia and other areas where you still had the original stock. | ||
| The original Sioux Scraffa was what we call the Eurasian wild boar. | ||
| They had been bringing in domestic versions that had been bred off the Eurasian wild boar. | ||
| And then people brought directly in the wild boar. | ||
| Now, if you look for a parallel with cattle, like the ancestral cattle is an animal we now call the oryx, but the oryx went extinct. | ||
| So we lost the wild version, but retained the domestic version. | ||
| With pigs, we had the domestic version that we humans created over long, long tens of thousands of years, coexisting with the wild version. | ||
| So people brought wild ones. | ||
| They brought some to New Hampshire in the late 1800s, early 1900s. | ||
| They brought some to California around that time and kind of put them out on the land as a thing to hunt. | ||
| And in time, we now have populations that are of domestic stock. | ||
| We have populations that are of Eurasian stock, so they look like a real souped-up European wild boar. | ||
| And we have populations that are various hybrids, so they demonstrate different degrees of it. | ||
| And they've been around a long time, and in some areas, there's way too many. | ||
| One troublesome thing that happens to me, and again, it's as complicated as shooting rhinos to save rhinos, Is it... | ||
| We've always had... | ||
| We've had over the last, you know... | ||
| 150 years we've been developing this set of ethics. | ||
| What are acceptable practices to use when hunting? | ||
| And we've made a general determination that certain things aren't acceptable. | ||
| We don't jack-light deer. | ||
| You can't use spotlights to go out and shoot deer at night. | ||
| We've built up these rules because we have ideas about what's sporting, what's the elements of fair chase, also what leads to too much harvest. | ||
| So If you make it too easy to go get animals, then you're going to have shorter seasons. | ||
| You're going to have fewer available tags. | ||
| And so they kind of balance technology to sort of make it that you're going to have whatever success rate. | ||
| Like a lot of elk hunts, only 10% of the hunters that participate in the elk hunt are successful. | ||
| 90% are unsuccessful because we have rules in place that make it difficult to do, to hunt. | ||
| There's so many pigs now in some places that we're like discarding a lot of the... | ||
| In dealing with that species, we're discarding a lot of the notions that we've held dear. | ||
| Like you would never go out in a helicopter and shoot deer. | ||
| It just would never be legal. | ||
| It would be frowned on by everybody in the hunting community. | ||
| But with pigs, it's like an exception because it's a non-native animal that we want to get rid of. | ||
| And so it really is like a... | ||
| It becomes kind of a cloudy issue. | ||
| Like when we're doing these like big game hunting practices that we... | ||
| We worked hard to get rid of in order to save North American wildlife from the pits where we had driven it in the early 1900s. | ||
| And now all these ethical practices are not really applicable to this animal. | ||
| So you see some things and see some things happen and your initial reaction is to be like, oh man, it's just ugly. | ||
| It's ugly. | ||
| But then you go like, but it's a really complicated situation. | ||
| There's a ton of pigs causing a ton of economic damage and it's really putting a hurt on people. | ||
| And it's putting a hurt on native species too. | ||
| Like we lose, like Hawaii lost ground nesting birds. | ||
| Many species of ground nesting birds because of pigs and rats, introduced species. | ||
| They just ate the eggs? | ||
| Yeah, and pigs are really hard. | ||
| There's like, you know, rare bird preserves in Florida where the number one problem they have in those preserves is pigs eat all the eggs. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because these are ground nesting birds and the pigs just vacuum them up. | ||
| So you bring like kind of these like practices that strike someone who grew up in the American hunting tradition and it's like, ugh, man. | ||
| I've even engaged in some things. | ||
| I've done things to wild pigs that I wouldn't do to any other animal. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Running with dogs and killing them in knives and digging them out of holes and chasing them into little fenced enclosures and killing them in there. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's their legitimate, honest problem. | ||
| Your last show that I watched, last night actually, you had a pig. | ||
| It was a whole head-to-hoof pig cooking, wild pig cooking special. | ||
| It was a really fun special. | ||
| Very interesting and very educational. | ||
| You want to hear the story of that pig? | ||
| Yeah, the pig had his balls removed. | ||
| Yeah, so this is crazy. | ||
| I've gone down to Florida hunting turkeys. | ||
| There's multiple subspecies of the American turkey. | ||
| It's all one species, but there's subspecies or varieties. | ||
| You have the eastern wild turkey and most of the east. | ||
| The Osceola turkey, which lives in the south half of the Florida peninsula. | ||
| Then you have the Rio Grande turkey, the Miriam's turkey, the Gould's turkey in northern Mexico, southern Arizona. | ||
| If you're a turkey geek, You might want to try to eventually have the experience of hunting all turkey subspecies. | ||
| I had kind of accidentally got four of them, and I realized that I wanted to go to South Florida and have a chance to hunt Osceola. | ||
| So I went down to hunt Osceola down in the swamps down there, and we're down there, we run into these guys who hunt pigs with hounds. | ||
| What their setup is, this guy has a big cattle ranch, and it borders a rare bird preserve. | ||
| The preserve, you can't even walk around. | ||
| Most of the preserve is closed to any human visitation at all. | ||
| You can't even take a walk to there. | ||
| But they have a guy who's a full-time pig hunter in there. | ||
| He goes around and kills pigs as a way to try to protect these rare bird species and give them nesting opportunities. | ||
| The rancher who likes to hunt wild hogs He goes and he usually kind of hunts along his border with the preserve because the pigs will come out of the swamps in the preserve and come up and hunt and root around on his land in the cover of night and then retreat back into the preserve where they're relatively safe and hide out. | ||
| So what he realized is he went through and put this fence in and put trap doors, one-way doors in his fence so that pigs could leave the preserve and enter his fence and But then they couldn't get back out. | ||
| It was like a fish trap door. | ||
| So now and then if he gets itching to go pig hunting, he'll go out at four in the morning and make sure all the doors are shut, like closes the doors up so the pigs can't get back through the other way. | ||
| And then he knows they're probably somewhere on his ranch, and when he starts chasing one of his hounds, they won't be able to make it back into their safety in the preserve. | ||
| And when he goes out, if he gets a boar, like an old boar, It's got his nuts intact. | ||
| He knows it's not going to be a great eating boar. | ||
| Because they just, they run themselves, you know, they're not like, they don't have a lot of fat. | ||
| They're full of hormones. | ||
| They're not, they're certainly edible, but not as good at eating. | ||
| So what he'll do is he'll do something that benefits everyone. | ||
| He will castrate that hog and turn it out. | ||
| Because now that hog cannot contribute to the population. | ||
| He's not a viable breeding member of the population. | ||
| And if he catches them again, he'll have what's called a barred hog. | ||
| Barred hog, which is a castrated hog. | ||
| So like a steer is a castrated male, cow, castrated bull, and a barred hog is castrated. | ||
| So we went out one night and caught a big boar with his nuts intact. | ||
| We castrated him and turned him out so that he could, as this guy put it, it would take his mind off ass and put it on the grass. | ||
| And then we stayed out, caught another pig, and this one had at some point in time, they didn't even know if they had it or another guy had done it, this one had been castrated. | ||
| You wouldn't even have known. | ||
| It was totally healed up. | ||
| But he had been castrated and those guys were like, that'll be a good one to eat. | ||
| So we killed that hog and kept it for food. | ||
| And we ate that thing, from honest to God, we ate its skin as pork rinds, took its intestines out and flushed the intestines and stripped them, made our own sausage casings, liver, heart, ate his nose and head cheese, ate his feet, like, ate every part of that hog. | ||
| Yeah, the head cheese. | ||
| Actually, the one thing I got left is one of the good parts. | ||
| I got one back leg frozen in my freezer. | ||
| I got one ham in my freezer. | ||
| I didn't know what head cheese was. | ||
| Barrel hog. | ||
| That's the word I'm looking for. | ||
| Barrel? | ||
| Barrel hog. | ||
| Well, let's look it up here. | ||
| Please. | ||
| I've even written the word. | ||
| I wrote a thing about this. | ||
| What is a castrated pig called? | ||
| Barred barrel hog. | ||
| Barred barrel hog. | ||
| B-A-R-R-O-W, Barrow Hog. | ||
| Barrow Hog. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Barrow. | ||
| Yeah, B-A-R-R-O-W. Yeah, and these guys love to hunt and they love to eat pigs. | ||
| It's a good little system they got. | ||
| The head cheese was so weird. | ||
| I'd heard that name before, word, description. | ||
| I didn't know what it was. | ||
| It's like a gelatin. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I made head cheese with the first wild pig I ever killed was in California. | ||
| I went out to hunt wild pigs, and I had never laid eyes on a wild pig, and I didn't want to shoot the first wild pig I saw. | ||
| So I went out one day without my rifle just to see some wild pigs, and the next day I went out and got one, and I wound up making head cheese with it, where it doesn't make a cheese, but it's like gelatinous. | ||
| So a lot of the cuts, like when you butcher an animal, a lot of the cuts that are chewier, that don't really make great steak, they're not that way because they have a lot of connective tissue and Fatty deposits, whatever. | ||
| They have stuff that like turns into collagen when you cook it. | ||
| Like turns into like a gelatin when you cook it. | ||
| So a head's full of that stuff. | ||
| And the bones have it. | ||
| And so you simmer that head for a long, long time. | ||
| And eventually you can pick off all the meat. | ||
| And a lot of the gristle and connective tissue and stuff turns into like a gelatin-like substance. | ||
| You can make real gelatin that way. | ||
| And now we just have a packet where you pour a powder out and mix it with water and mix gelatin. | ||
| But old-style gelatin and natural gelatin would be just derived as an animal byproduct. | ||
| So you take all the meat that you pluck off, the same way, you know, like hog jowl, if you ever had that. | ||
| You take the tongue out and chop the tongue up. | ||
| And there's all this other, when it's warm, it's liquid, but it sets up as gelatin. | ||
| And it's just all bound together with natural gelatin that you've derived by slow cooking the pig's head. | ||
| So it's like little bits of pig meat bound up in an Asperger bound up. | ||
| And then, of course, you season it and flavor it with all kinds of good stuff to eat. | ||
| And then when it sets up, when it's chilled, you can pour it out like a... | ||
| It looks almost like a fruitcake. | ||
| You know, it pours out in a mold, and then you slice it, and it's not cheese. | ||
| It looked great. | ||
| It looked great. | ||
| Yeah, my buddy that makes it, this guy, Matt Weingarten, the chef I hang out with, he puts all this amazing stuff to eat in there. | ||
| And he puts, you know, you can put, like, colorful things and, like, citrusy flavors and... | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| It looks great. | ||
| One of the things I really love about your show is that you occasionally do show recipes and how to cook, but also that you butcher the animals. | ||
| You cut quarter the animals, gut them. | ||
| You do all that on the show. | ||
| You don't shy away from that. | ||
| You see wild stuff on the show that you don't see on other stuff. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's amazing how much liberty we have How much the network lets us get away with? | ||
| Is it because it's on the Sportsman's channel? | ||
| Yeah, but there's another channel that shows hunting shows. | ||
| They won't let the people have bloody hands. | ||
| What show is that? | ||
| My understanding is not a show. | ||
| I've heard that there's another hunting network. | ||
| I've heard that it's protocol on other hunting networks. | ||
| You're not supposed to have bloody hands. | ||
| You won't see them gut animals. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| Because they think that it would make people turned off by hunting. | ||
| It's like, how you think people get turned off by hunting by seeing people eat what they hunt is beyond me. | ||
| But Sportsman Channel is really cool because they let us do stuff that, I mean, and it works to the advantage because people are like, you know what? | ||
| I get it, man. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's like you're showing like a thing that most people are hiding from, but it's the reality that... | ||
| Meat goes through a metamorphosis, you know, to get there, and it's sometimes gory. | ||
| So we, yeah, we get to show all that, and I love it. | ||
| But I don't think of it as just, like, gratuitous. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's like, it's instructional, really. | ||
| Yes, yeah, that's how I feel. | ||
| I don't feel it's gratuitous at all, but I think, I like watching you, like, when you ate that moose. | ||
| I like watching you guys cut it up and then eat it. | ||
| Yeah, dude, that meat was, like, unbelievable, man. | ||
| We had that marrow, cracked the marrow bones open. | ||
| It looked delicious. | ||
| It looked ridiculous. | ||
| Like, that meat was so tender and good. | ||
| And, you know, you get into the thing where you guys, when you're on TV, you know, you watch, like, morning shows, and they have a cooking segment. | ||
| The host, I was like, oh, it's so good. | ||
| Oh, it's so good. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Sometimes I cook stuff on the show that's not good. | ||
| And I used to try to be like, that's not good. | ||
| Like coyote? | ||
| Yeah, I was like, you know, it's not that great. | ||
| Because I want it to be that when something is good, I feel like I want people to believe me, and that was good. | ||
| It was just a phenomenal moose, man. | ||
| It looked unbelievably delicious. | ||
| Elk's widely regarded as, like, if you went and surveyed people who've tasted a wide variety of meats, elk is the one that people would be like, it's the best one. | ||
| Where we're going, Teehan, has elk on it, tule elk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, you got, like, Roosevelt elk, Rocky Mountain, these different subspecies of elk. | ||
| There's a very rare one in California. | ||
| Not rare, but, yeah, rare and a very small range. | ||
| That was almost wiped out. | ||
| It's back now because you have big chunks of property like that where they can find some refuge and people are working to maintain them and provide habitat for them. | ||
| So it's kind of a cool spot. | ||
| You'll go there and see an elk that most people haven't seen. | ||
| I hope we run into one because it's like the Thule elk. | ||
| Do you feel like the moose was right up there with elk? | ||
| I'm not joking. | ||
| It was one of the best pieces of meat I've eaten. | ||
| And to eat meat in the field... | ||
| We age meat because it tenderizes. | ||
| Fresh meat often tastes like iron. | ||
| Well, you eat some fresh meat. | ||
| Rich, there's like an iron kind of thing to it. | ||
| It just doesn't quite taste like aged meat. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| But when we were in Wisconsin, man, you were cooking those steaks, and it was phenomenal, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But sometimes it's pretty tough. | ||
| My brother lives in Alaska. | ||
| He kills moose every year. | ||
| The guy kills moose, eats moose all year. | ||
| He's a moose snob. | ||
| He won't hunt a lot of stuff. | ||
| He likes to hunt moose and doll sheep, because moose is good. | ||
| But he puts a moose in his freezer, just because he doesn't have a... | ||
| He doesn't have a locker where he can dry-age his meat. | ||
| He'll kill a moose because of weather and bugs and other issues. | ||
| He comes home and right away processes his moose and puts it in his freezer. | ||
| And he don't usually touch that thing for six months. | ||
| Because it will slowly age, like meat will tenderize in your freezer over time. | ||
| So when he calculates his year out, he knows he's going to kill a moose in September. | ||
| He doesn't plan on having the one he killed before be gone in September. | ||
| He plans on having the one he killed before be gone, you know, staggered. | ||
| So the one that he kills, he lets it slowly age in his freezer and it will tenderize in your freezer over time and then he starts in on the new one. | ||
| So when he kills a moose, he's still eating the moose from the year before. | ||
| That seems so weird because the way you ate that moose, it didn't seem like it needed anything at all. | ||
| Because it was an exceptional animal. | ||
| Oh, so that's unusual. | ||
| Yeah, those animals, like most animals, especially males and bulls, like most animals, not most, animals benefit, like ungulates, Benefit from aging. | ||
| You don't age wild pigs. | ||
| You don't age black bears. | ||
| A lot of critters you do age. | ||
| Deer, elk, moose, it all benefits. | ||
| Those animals all benefit from aging. | ||
| There's natural enzymes or whatever that the process is well understood. | ||
| I don't understand it totally well, but it's well understood that you hang it and there's a natural decay. | ||
| I'll put ducks. | ||
|
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If I kill a duck, I'll gut the duck. | |
| If I have like a wife or if I have a girlfriend or whoever doesn't want it or when I had, what am I trying to say? | ||
| Forget it. | ||
| I'll gut the duck and put it in the fridge. | ||
| Now I might need to put it in a paper bag because someone might not want to see the duck every time they open the fridge. | ||
| But I'll roll it up in a paper bag so I can still breathe and I'll put it in my fridge and I'll leave it in there a long time. | ||
| I might leave it in there 10 days. | ||
| And that meat gets to where you could scrape it away with your thumb. | ||
| The inside, the gutting where you've gutted the bird might start to even smell a little off. | ||
| But the meat is getting just perfect. | ||
| The flavor enhances. | ||
| It gets more tender. | ||
| It's just like aging. | ||
| So why was that move so good then? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Just what it was eating? | ||
| Just good. | ||
| We had a great piece off. | ||
| We were eating the most tender part of the rear leg. | ||
| It was just a great animal. | ||
| There's so much variability. | ||
| That's one thing about being a wild game chef. | ||
| I'm a wild game cook. | ||
| I think chef sounds a little more formal, but I'm a wild game cook. | ||
| One thing about being a wild game cook that's more challenging... | ||
| than being a regular cook is you're dealing with so much variability. | ||
| Like you get some great chef and he can do some amazing thing because he's got a purveyor, you know, and when he buys a pig, it's like the pig ate this for 72 days and then we ate this for 14 days and then we killed it on this day and chilled it at this temperature for these many days and, you know, and every time he buys a pig, the pig comes in his kitchen or his restaurant and he knows, he just knows what it's going to be like, you know. | ||
| Animals, you don't know what kind of There's age issues and what kind of trip they've been on. | ||
| There's all kinds of variability. | ||
| So you learn how to kind of control that and sort of bring the ingredients into line because some animals are good and some animals aren't. | ||
| I shot a mule deer one time that was just disgusting to eat things. | ||
| And then you get another mule deer and it's like, that is so good. | ||
| That one was delicious. | ||
| That's what I'm saying, man. | ||
| And then some, you know, it's like you don't know what they've been up to or there's just a lot of mystery with it. | ||
| But that moose was a phenomenal moose. | ||
| I've also had my buddy. | ||
| He was my buddy. | ||
| We had a fallen out. | ||
| I used to know this guy. | ||
| He killed a moose. | ||
| He brought the meat over. | ||
| I thought he'd killed the Loch Ness Sea Monster. | ||
| It was like, I'd never seen anything like it. | ||
| Just funky and nasty. | ||
| He had a cow tag. | ||
| See, one thing about shooting males on antlered game is you can get an idea of age. | ||
| The antlers betray the age. | ||
| There's a growth pattern they go through. | ||
| Like, if you see a forky deer or a spike horn deer, it's like, that's a one and a half year old deer. | ||
| He's going to be great eating. | ||
| When you're shooting antler lists, the clues are much more subtle. | ||
| What a guy looked at the tooth. | ||
| So he had a cow moose tag. | ||
| He went on and got a cow moose. | ||
| He later had someone look at the teeth and they estimated that thing to be 20 years old. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It was like you couldn't really chew it. | ||
| It tasted like a sea monster. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Because it's really hard to tell. | ||
| There's guys that really know their business. | ||
| Like Doug Dern in Wisconsin. | ||
| Doug Dern can look at a doe and tell you how old it is. | ||
| He's looked at so many damn deer. | ||
| He's looking at so many deer that live on his place that he just knows what their groove is, you know? | ||
| Isn't it a weird sort of symbiotic relationship that those deer have to farmers? | ||
| It's almost not really a wild animal. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Canada geese, crows, white-tailed deer love people. | ||
| Yeah, when we were at Doug's place, I mean, first of all, what a fucking great guy he is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love Doug. | |
| Man, he's one of the best. | ||
|
unidentified
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I love that guy. | |
| He's one of the best. | ||
| And I love his place. | ||
| Like a big... | ||
| I don't say this about many people. | ||
| I don't throw this around lately, but I was like, he's a big-hearted guy. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| It's not something I really think of when I'm describing other individuals. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I'm so glad you introduced me to him. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| And it was so cool, me and Brian Callen staying at his place, that he let us do that and filmed the show there. | ||
| Goddamn, there's a lot of deer up there, too. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I mean, we didn't see a lot of big bucks, but goddamn, we saw a lot of deer. | ||
| And you... | ||
| I told you about this, I think, or he did. | ||
| When he was a kid, if you saw a deer track, you ran home and told your parents. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| There are no freaking deer around. | ||
| Well, they've fucking grown in population. | ||
| We saw 16 the first day, right? | ||
| We saw about 16 deer, at least. | ||
| But, I mean, he'll... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's just... | ||
| That's like a real deery spot. | ||
| But they do have... | ||
| That's the perfect word. | ||
| They have a symbiotic relationship. | ||
| Whitetail deer have really... | ||
| Are one of the winners when it comes to development issues. | ||
| And then our good friend the mule deer, which to me, it's a more romantic kind of thing. | ||
| Mule deer, and some people would be like, oh yeah, but we have mule deer in my yard all the time. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But generally, they don't do as well with fragmentation. | ||
| They don't do as well with the stress. | ||
| They have some things they like to eat, and they're kind of wed to those things they like to eat. | ||
| And whitetails are like... | ||
| Hell yeah, mow that down, I'll eat corn, you know? | ||
| They're just like, they're always going to find something, and that place is just like a deer culture down there. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of places like that in this country. | ||
| Oh yeah, all over the place. | ||
| A lot of farmlands, right? | ||
| Like Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, a lot of farmland, a lot of crazy white-tailed deer. | ||
| Yeah, you got way, way, way more white-tailed deer than you had at the time of European contact. | ||
| Way more, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| But still, if every dude in America went out and shot a deer, we'd be running like a 200 million deer deficit. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So people say to me, like, so you think everyone should go out and shoot their own meat? | ||
| I'm like, well, we really couldn't. | ||
| We'd run out of critters. | ||
| It's going to always be like a fringe activity. | ||
| I think it's always going to be a fringe activity anyway, as long as society keeps going the way it is. | ||
| Oh, no, I'm not worried. | ||
| I'm not worried. | ||
| I don't stay up. | ||
| One of my goals, not a goal, but a thing I'd like to see happen is... | ||
| Rather than, I mean, we could definitely have more hunters. | ||
| I think we need more just to have political clout to defend our lifestyle. | ||
| But I also would like to see the people who have no interest in hunting come to, like, through understanding kind of the mechanics of wildlife, start to recognize it as that hunting is legitimate. | ||
| Useful practice and not the opposite, you know? | ||
| I think people that pay attention do see that. | ||
| I think for the most part, the real issue is that most people have this sort of periphery view of it. | ||
| They don't really look at it. | ||
| They don't get in there and try to understand, okay, what is hunting? | ||
| What's going on with it? | ||
| I know, like I said, my own personal transformation from looking at deer, like, why would you kill that beautiful animal? | ||
| To, oh, you have to kill him. | ||
| Okay, I get it. | ||
| To understanding what's going on. | ||
| Oh, well that actually keeps the population in check. | ||
| Well, if you don't do that, they run out of food. | ||
| Well, then there's the massive strain on the resources. | ||
| Well, there's no predators. | ||
| Yeah, wild fluctuations. | ||
| I didn't get it. | ||
| I had to look into it. | ||
| But when you do look into it, the only people that don't get it are the people that don't want to. | ||
| Whether it's for moral, political, whatever reasons, whatever bias you have coming into it. | ||
| If you look at it objectively, I don't see how you could... | ||
| I don't see how you can not get it. | ||
| No, I think anyone who looks at wildlife politics in a way that's, like, immersive and you have to come to understand it, you go ask someone who runs a wildlife agency, like a state wildlife agency or federal wildlife agency, and ask them what their job would be like without having hunting as a tool, and, you know, it would make them shudder. | ||
| Because you just, you know, it's going to be very difficult to maintain... | ||
| The portfolio of different species we have at the levels we have. | ||
| You'd have to be open to having really wild fluctuations, having cycles of disease, and things that aren't as pretty. | ||
| And also, why? | ||
| Why deny ourselves access to a renewable resource that generates so much revenue? | ||
| It generates economic activity. | ||
| It's self-sustaining. | ||
| It helps pay for itself. | ||
| And it's fun. | ||
| People don't want to say that for whatever reason. | ||
| They don't want to say killing animals is fun. | ||
| Seems like it's a mean thing to say. | ||
| Yeah, I love hunting, man. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| You're not being mean. | ||
| It's an exciting activity that speaks to your DNA. I always tell people, I'll talk about the food element of it. | ||
| I wouldn't hunt if it wasn't for the food. | ||
| I wouldn't hunt if it wasn't for the fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's both. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| And you can watch The Meat Eater online now, finally. | ||
| You can pay for them. | ||
| For the longest time, you can only get them on DVD. But now, if you go to meateater.vhx.tv or go to themeateater.com, you can get them. | ||
| They're selling them as a bundle. | ||
| And Volume 4 is the bundle that the two-part episode with me and Brian Callen in Montana... | ||
| I should say Brian Callen and I... And if you use the code word Rogan... | ||
| No, no, you shouldn't say that. | ||
| No? | ||
| Why's that? | ||
| Just picture that you're saying it without Callan. | ||
| What would you say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh, Brian Callen and I? No, picture you're saying it. | |
| Me? | ||
| You wouldn't say it features I. Brian Callen and me? | ||
| I would say Brian Callen and me, though. | ||
| Yeah, picture what you'd say without the other guy there. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| You would say me. | ||
| You would say me, but you would say him first, right? | ||
| Yeah, but I'm talking about the me, I thing. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| I meant, I was just saying the, um, I was just trying to put him first. | ||
| Oh, you were worried about the sequence, not the pronoun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes. | |
| Not the pronoun use. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Yeah, you're correct, though. | ||
| Me is the right way to say it. | ||
| I fuck that up all the time, though. | ||
| I don't even pay attention to it. | ||
| I know the rule, but I don't care about it. | ||
| I ain't concerned with it. | ||
| You ain't. | ||
| Volume 4. Use the code word ROGEN. Get them all, though. | ||
| It's a great fucking show. | ||
| It's not just a great hunting show. | ||
| It's a great show. | ||
| I was saying it to my wife the other day while I was watching. | ||
| I was like, this show, it's almost like I want more people to see it. | ||
| I wish more people would see it because it would open their eyes as to... | ||
| Your approach, it's a more intelligent philosophy behind it. | ||
| You see all these hunting shows like, well I'll tell you what, there's a big buck came out, I'll tell you what, we shot him with that gun, I'll tell you what. | ||
| You don't have any of that stupid shit in it. | ||
| It's interesting, it's fascinating, you're a well-read, introspective guy, and I love the narration on it too. | ||
| It's a great fucking show. | ||
| Thank you, man. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I would watch that show if I wasn't in it. | ||
| I would watch it. | ||
| I do watch it. | ||
| It's a great fucking show. | ||
| You are in it sometimes. | ||
| One of my favorite shows ever. | ||
| In my inbox right now is the first cut of an initial pass on the Wisconsin hunt. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, awesome. | ||
| We had a good time in Wisconsin. | ||
| That was a lot of fucking fun. | ||
| We'll have to talk about that someday. | ||
| Yes, we'll talk about that before it comes out. | ||
| Meeater.vhx.tv. | ||
| And again, use the code word ROGAN and you'll save five bucks. | ||
| And Volume 4 is the one with Brian Callen and me. | ||
| You nailed it. | ||
| Audible.com. | ||
| Thank you to Audible.com. | ||
| Go there. | ||
| Download some cool shit. | ||
| Go to Audible.com forward slash Joe. | ||
| Get yourself a free audio book and 30 free days of Audible service. | ||
| And thanks also to Onnit.com. | ||
| That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any supplements. | ||
| We will be back. | ||
| We have a very full week next week. | ||
| A lot of shit going on. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| I got Neil Brennan, John Hackleman, and Peter Schiff, the economist, is going to be here on Wednesday. | ||
| That should be interesting. | ||
| What is he, economist? | ||
| He's an expert on the economy. | ||
| John Hackleman, trainer of many, many great fighters, including one of the greatest ever in Chuck Liddell. | ||
| And Neil Brennan, our pal, stand-up comedian and co-creator of The Chappelle Show. | ||
| All right, folks. | ||
| We love you. | ||
| And Steve Rinell and I are going to go bring home the bacon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Literally. | ||
| See you soon. |
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