Aug. 26, 2014 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:58:24
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| is that the noise that's the noise that's the noise jamie's got a much more subtle than brian's fucking monkey noises hey everybody what the fuck's going on how you living huh this episode of the podcast is brought to you by blue apron blue apron is been responsible for at least three meals that i have every week now and uh other folks in my house eat it too blue apron is this new deal and this is what they do | ||
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| We're also brought to you by MeUndies. | ||
| MeUndies. | ||
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| I just buy underwear. | ||
| I would buy them online in bulk. | ||
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| I'm not scared of my own farts. | ||
| I cut them loose. | ||
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|
unidentified
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You are! | |
| He literally is! | ||
| That phone is pretty dope, isn't it? | ||
| I just haven't done... | ||
| I haven't really made... | ||
| I've been neglecting... | ||
| Not that I don't buy new underwear, but I haven't had a technological jump in underwear for so long. | ||
| Yeah, I haven't either. | ||
| You know, one of the things I learned from you, from hanging out with you, is the power of wool. | ||
| And I've been trying to find... | ||
|
unidentified
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Merino wool. | |
| Yeah, I've been trying to find good wool socks, like athletic socks. | ||
| Do they have them? | ||
| They do. | ||
| They have Merino blend. | ||
| You make it like a thinner Merino blend sock. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They have them. | ||
| Like athletic socks. | ||
| Well, I don't know... | ||
| I don't know if they qualify them as athletic. | ||
| I've never seen one that's meant for going to the gym. | ||
| They're always kind of meant for, they'll call them light hiking. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| That's what I need, some light hiking wool. | ||
| It seems like that's what you should have, right? | ||
| It would seem. | ||
| I mean, that's all I wear now. | ||
| It's the best for hunting. | ||
| But I'm still stuck in the ice ages, or what do you call it, the stone ages on undies, man. | ||
| But First Light, they make a merino wool boxer that people love. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| First Light's great. | ||
| That's L-I-T-E? Is it L-I-T-E? L-I-T-E, yeah. | ||
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| Yeah, the merino wool boxer. | ||
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| Me too. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want my balls bouncing around. | ||
| Especially when it's hot and humid. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
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| I use Ting. | ||
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| I just got my newest one recently, and I fucking love it. | ||
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| Alright, we're done with commercials! | ||
| Steve Rinella is here, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| We're going to get down to business. | ||
| We're going to talk. | ||
| Not even business. | ||
| More like bullshit. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
| All day. | ||
| Brian Cowan was going to try to make it here today. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, really? | |
| But he had some podcasts he scheduled in advance. | ||
| I tried to get him to cancel, but he couldn't. | ||
| Oh, that's too bad. | ||
| But he's very excited to come with us to Alaska, and that should be a nice, silly trip. | ||
| Man, I'm excited about that trip. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| When you get up into that, when I say that, when you get up into the alpine zone, like above Timberline in southeast Alaska, it really, like, you know... | ||
| It's cooler looking than the Ewok forest. | ||
| It's just amazing. | ||
| You go from old growth stuff where the three of us could all stand around It joined hand to hand, and you couldn't reach around these trees, you know? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And you climb a little higher, and it's like, boom! | ||
| It's just like wide open, and there's really nothing like it. | ||
| I mean, you can't fathom the beauty of it, you know? | ||
| Well, I've seen it on your show. | ||
| This is the same place where you went hunting blacktail deer, where you land on a float plane, and then you go up into the upper regions. | ||
| That was where the fog rolled in, and you had that nice deer in your scope, and you had weight. | ||
| That time when I was up there, there was a windstorm. | ||
| The wind was so bad, it made the front page news in town. | ||
| They kept saying 70-some mile an hour winds, blew down a bunch of foam poles. | ||
| The next day, a pilot came up to fly over to see if we were still alive and everything. | ||
| He just cruised around to check. | ||
| That's the thing is the weather. | ||
| So when we go on this trip, we could either just get... | ||
| We could either have the worst time or the best time, depending. | ||
| I mean, just depending on the weather. | ||
| It can be so just uncomfortable and miserable. | ||
| Or it can be just beautiful. | ||
| And there's places back in there. | ||
| Prince Wells Island is huge. | ||
| I think by some definitions, either the second or... | ||
| It's either the third or fourth biggest island we have. | ||
| What's interesting about it, that island is it has, you know, I think it's half the surface area as Hawaii, the big island in Hawaii. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| But it has like three times the coastline. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| It's just, you know, it's just a crazy like fjords and inlets and bays. | ||
| But there are places in this island that you can't really, there's no road system in a lot of it. | ||
| And there's places you can't fly to because there's no lakes to land. | ||
| And it's really hard to walk there. | ||
| So sometimes you're looking at, there's mountains there. | ||
| And you're like, I guarantee that no one, you know, you can't guarantee. | ||
| But I mean, like for a hundred years, it's probably no one has stepped foot on that thing. | ||
| Because you really had, we would have to get to one place and you'd have to get a boat and carry it through and go across to another place and then climb up. | ||
| Well, it'd be mostly just climbing. | ||
| Like you just, when you, if you fly over some of those mountaintops and you look around them, there's just no way... | ||
| I just know that no one's been there. | ||
| Unless you can land up there on a lake. | ||
| We'll land in a spot, and I want to just walk from there. | ||
| And I think we will walk up into stuff that people haven't walked there. | ||
| I mean, there's always some crazy thing you didn't know about, but we're going to walk into some stuff where people just have not walked. | ||
| You can stand around places there and say... | ||
| I feel very certain that I'm definitely the first guy to ever have his feet sitting right here. | ||
| I can't discount something that happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago, but there's just some wild stuff in there. | ||
| Right now, I got mixed feelings about it too, but the Forest Service up there just announced they're going to be opening up a cut up there, 6,000 acres of old growth. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| For clear cuts, yeah. | ||
| Wow, that's kind of fucked up. | ||
| Dude, I understand every single argument. | ||
| For and against. | ||
| I understand every single argument. | ||
| What's for? | ||
| What's the good aspect of it? | ||
| Economics. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| You used to have a thriving logging industry based around Tongass, you know, Tongass National Forest. | ||
| And it's just atrophied, right? | ||
| So it's a job creation thing. | ||
| I mean, that's the four. | ||
| The four is just people that live there having access to a good-paying job. | ||
| The downside is we have just a minuscule fraction of old growth left. | ||
| Yeah, I don't see why anybody would allow that. | ||
| I mean, I understand the economic thing, but I always feel like there's got to be another way to make money. | ||
| What's weird, too, is Tong has just said recently that over the next decade, they're looking to phase out old growth logging. | ||
| At the same time that they are announcing and pushing forward with plans to do a big 6,000 acre clear cut. | ||
| So they're sort of acknowledging on one hand that they want to get out of it or need to get out of it or can see into the future they need to get out of it. | ||
| And on the other hand being like, but we'll have one last hoorah, I guess. | ||
| One last party. | ||
| And you're dealing with how old you think these trees are. | ||
| I can't speak specifically to that particular area, but there's dog furs that are much older than the birth of this nation out there in cedars. | ||
| Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old. | ||
| That just seems fucked up to chop them down and make what? | ||
| It's sad, man. | ||
| Paper? | ||
| Everything gets so weirdly... | ||
| We've talked about this before on the show, how things get so convoluted. | ||
| One of the big, just to bring it back to us going on a hunt for sick of black-tailed deer, those sick of black-tailed deer, when we're going to look for them, we're going to be looking for them up in the Alpine, which they'll be leaving. | ||
| They'll be leaving around the time we're going there. | ||
| That stuff still has snow. | ||
| Where we're going to be looking for deer will still have snow in June. | ||
| Then it melts off, and there's long days, and it turns beautiful, and it gets very vibrant and green, and there's all kinds of succulents, and deer come up out of the timber to feed around in there. | ||
| Then in October, it snows, so you have a couple snow-free months. | ||
| In October, it snows, and those deer will all split. | ||
| Traditionally, what those deer want to do is they want to go down and spend the winter down in old growth because the old growth canopy allows for kind of a snow-free, sheltered understory where they're down on the ground and they'll hang out in that old growth timber. | ||
| So an argument against... | ||
| The cut would be that we need it for deer. | ||
| And a further argument would be the reason we need to protect deer habitat is because we need to protect the wolves out there. | ||
| And some people right now are trying to make a push to say that the wolves in the Alexander Archipelago, of which Prince of Wales Island is a part, that those wolves are genetically extinct, and they therefore deserve a level of protection, like their own level of protection, that they would get Endangered like their own level of protection, that they would get Endangered Species Act protection out on these When other people are arguing, it's just the same wolf, man. | ||
| I mean, it's like you got wolves all over. | ||
| It doesn't, like that population doesn't deserve any specific thing. | ||
| So it winds up being that people who might be pushing against the timber sale might wind up also be angling for protecting wolves out there from hunting and trapping And then you're left to be like, well, I'm not really comfortable with the timber sale, but I'm not really comfortable with you using biological lumping and splitting in order to close down certain sorts of hunting season. | ||
| So it winds up being that... | ||
| The enemies of your enemies aren't necessarily your friends. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Wildlife management is very complicated. | ||
| So anyways, we're going into that area and we're going to hunt some black-tailed deer. | ||
| There's a good healthy population. | ||
| It's still good. | ||
| Even a non-resident, you're allowed two bucks. | ||
| Do they have bear up there? | ||
| Is it black bear? | ||
| Yeah, but the thing about the bear is you'll see some bear droppings or bear scatter, bear shit here and there. | ||
| But those bears out there are so tuned in on the salmon runs that they really don't spend a lot of time feeding in those areas because they're down 2,000 feet. | ||
| Timberline there is like 1,800, 2,000 feet. | ||
| They're down 2,000 feet lower In the river miles feeding on salmon. | ||
| And we like to have that image of the bear grabbing a salmon out and he's all silver and shiny and healthy and floppy. | ||
| But long after the runs are kind of done, they're down there just feeding on rotten fish. | ||
| Laying around. | ||
| I've watched wolves there eating dead salmon. | ||
| I watched five wolves one time eating dead salmon that were the consistency of pudding. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Just mopping it up. | ||
| They must have unbelievable stomach bacteria. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| You can't imagine. | ||
| So... | ||
| There's not a lot of bears up there. | ||
| You see some berries around, but I think that so many of the bears are focused on that stuff. | ||
| One thing you find, some people say, in those islands in southeast Alaska, they tend to be either a black bear island or a grizzly island. | ||
| And it changes. | ||
| So you'd be on one island and it's black bears. | ||
| Another island's grizzlies. | ||
| And it's sort of this weird phenomenon that they don't readily mix. | ||
| You get in interior areas on the mainland where you have grizzlies and black bears coexist. | ||
| Oftentimes, the grizzlies will dominate the salmon streams, and you'll have more black bears up high. | ||
| So you could be standing on a mountain a couple thousand feet above sea level, and it's just black bears everywhere on top of the mountain feeding on blueberries, and you're looking down at primo salmon streams, but just big brown bears, big grizzlies down there. | ||
| And they kind of hoard the spot and the black bears don't get in there. | ||
| They just can't. | ||
| They're kind of enemies, yeah. | ||
| They'll eat them too, right? | ||
| They'll eat them. | ||
| The grizzlies. | ||
| The place that I was up in Alberta when we went bear hunting, they take carcasses after they cut the back straps off and the hams. | ||
| They'll take the body cavity and they leave it in certain areas where they know grizzlies are to keep the grizzlies coming to that area. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| Yeah, because they don't want the grizzlies coming to the... | ||
| The other baits, the baits they have out for the black bear, because if they do, they have to abandon that bait, because it's just too sketchy. | ||
| They have some photos, some camera trap photos of these fucking enormous grizzlies wandering in. | ||
| Just feeding up on black bears. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got a buddy who saw one time, he witnessed a grizzly kill a black bear. | ||
| Disembowel it and eat its liver. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's a very well-regarded hunting guy in Alaska who's written some good hunting books about Alaska named Tony Russ. | ||
| And I was reading his book on hunting Kodiak. | ||
| He's got a book on hunting brown bears and grizzlies in Alaska. | ||
| And a lot of his experiences are on Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula. | ||
| And he was saying he's never seen... | ||
| And just to back up for a minute, on Kodiak, if you map out a bear's diet, okay... | ||
| A bear, a boar bear, a male brown bear, grizzly, you know, brown bear, on Kodiak, if you map out his annual diet, what he's tuned into in the spring are brown bear cubs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's like, he wakes up, and he's hunting brown bear cubs. | ||
| He's not fucked up. | ||
| It's a sniffing part of his diet. | ||
| But what Tony Russ has said in all of his years of guiding, he's never seen where, when you kill a big, mature, boar brown bear... | ||
| He's never seen where another brown bear will come and scavenge that carcass. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Even with the thing skinned out and butchered, they recognize through smell or whatever, they will not mess with that thing. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| That's what he says. | ||
| Black bears do. | ||
| And this guy's seen a lot. | ||
| But he was saying nothing will touch those big boars, the body on them. | ||
| Is he too scared of them? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Even with something about them, the smell or something, they just know that they don't want anything to do with it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| When we were in Alberta, one of the guys shot a bear late at night, and they didn't want to retrieve it because there was too many bears in the area. | ||
| It was just getting sketchy. | ||
| They shot the bear right at the moment where it was getting dark out, and the bear ran off, and they said, we'll come back in the morning. | ||
| So they came back in the morning, and a big boar was eating the other black bear. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| So they were taking selfies, like smiling, while there was a bear behind them eating a bear carcass. | ||
| That happened to a buddy of mine where he got one and he shot one with his bow and tracked it in the morning and it was just gone. | ||
| It had been consumed. | ||
| So crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's the wild, man. | ||
| When we were up there, one of the bears, one of the boars, had attacked a sow, killed its cub, and left half the cub's body, and then the sow came back and finished it off. | ||
| She ate her own baby. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She ate her own baby in front of them while they were in the stand. | ||
| I've heard competing theories about that, that on one hand, the boar just is doing it because he wants to eat. | ||
| But there seems to be this upside where... | ||
| An additional upside besides caloric intake. | ||
| That a boar will kill a sow's cubs and she'll come back into estrus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when a sow... | ||
| A sow's gonna... | ||
| She'll have her cubs in the den in February or March. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| They're just little hairless. | ||
| She don't even know if she had them probably. | ||
| Just these hairless little things. | ||
| And she'll take care of them. | ||
| She'll emerge from her den with these little fur balls. | ||
| She'll stay with them all summer long. | ||
| She'll den with them again. | ||
| She'll come out again and usually at some point that summer she might get rid of them. | ||
| And so she's going to be off. | ||
| Like she won't cycle again. | ||
| Potentially for two years. | ||
| so if a boar has in his area he hangs out he's got a half dozen females apparently it's worth the risk to him that he might be i'm talking in a genetic sense it's worth the risk to him that he might be killing his own offspring which probably has no idea whether it is or not kill his own offspring offspring in order to to have that female go back into estrus and then breeder. | ||
| Or whatever kind of calculation. | ||
| He's probably not Obviously he's not making that calculation. | ||
| He's probably just going like, I'm hungry. | ||
| But an added benefit of it is apparently he might double back around and make love to the woman whose children he consumed. | ||
| Well, dolphins actually have a strategy against that, because one of the things that a lot of people are not aware, we think of dolphins as being really sweet and kind, and they're nice to people, but dolphins, they eat their own babies. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| They don't eat their own babies, but they eat dolphin babies. | ||
| And when a male dolphin finds a female that he has never had sex with and she has babies, they'll oftentimes kill the babies. | ||
| And they'll kill the babies to force the woman back to breeding again because she'll go on a seven-year cycle. | ||
| So when a female dolphin has a baby, she will not breed again for seven years while that baby is being raised and growing older. | ||
| Yeah, because they put a huge investment, apparently. | ||
| The strategy for female dolphins is they are sluts and they fuck as many dolphins as they can. | ||
| So that when the male comes around and he sees her with the baby, he's like, that might be my fucking kid. | ||
| All right, I'm not going to kill that kid. | ||
| Because that's what keeps them from killing the female babies. | ||
| Because they're thinking. | ||
| I mean, they're really intelligent animals. | ||
| They have a cerebral cortex that's 40% larger than a human being's. | ||
| As a matter of fact, anybody who's listening to this, check out Radiolab. | ||
| Radiolab has an amazing podcast. | ||
| The one that's out this week is called Hello, and it's all about John Lilly and John Lilly's work with interspecies communication. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| You know who John Lilly was? | ||
| No, no, I don't know that name. | ||
| Maniac. | ||
| Crazy man. | ||
| And these other scientists that worked with him actually wound up taking his research and bringing it to some new place. | ||
| Because Lily, he was also the inventor of the isolation tank. | ||
| He created a sensory deprivation tank because he was a pioneer. | ||
| Which you're a fan of, right? | ||
| Yeah, a huge fan. | ||
| Lily would take acid and set up a tank next to the dolphins. | ||
| And he would take acid, go in the isolation tank, and try to communicate with the dolphins. | ||
| So while the dolphins were like... | ||
| Make all these weird noises. | ||
| He would try to decipher those while he was on acid in his tank. | ||
| And he eventually went off the deep end with really getting heavily into ketamine and all these weird tranquilizers and drugs and became actually addicted to ketamine. | ||
| And that's when he lost all his funding. | ||
| Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him when it came to this dolphin research anymore because they knew that he was doing that. | ||
| And one of the women that he had hired to live with a dolphin, they had an apartment set up where it was underwater. | ||
| It was essentially, to her, it was waist high in water. | ||
| And she had a dolphin that she lived with for, like, six months in this. | ||
| And she wound up, like, jerking the dolphin off. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Because the dolphin would, like, hump her leg all the time and it'd be really distracting because he was a young dolphin. | ||
| So she says, look, I'm going to just take care of that for you. | ||
| And she would just jerk this dolphin off. | ||
| And then, you know, to her, it was like, look, he's got an issue and it's getting in the way of work, so I'll just take care of that. | ||
| But everybody else is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. | ||
| You're doing scientific research by jerking off dolphins? | ||
| Like, okay. | ||
| Yeah, I can see that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She might need a couple minutes to explain herself, man. | ||
| But the podcast sort of focuses on dolphin communication and the difficulty that they have. | ||
| Like, they know that the dolphins want to communicate with them, but they have that blowhole, and that's how they make their noise. | ||
| So it's really hard for them to make noises that mimic human noises, because they don't really have the ability to make M's and T's and all these different kinds of things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's a completely different apparatus, man. | |
| So in the podcast, you hear her talking to the dolphin and the dolphin trying to imitate what she's saying. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that right? | |
| It's amazing. | ||
| When you get into animal communication, so much of it becomes semantical or an argument of semantics where you'd say, well, we're the only thing with language. | ||
| And people would be like, well, you know, actually, X, Y, and Z has something. | ||
| Okay, well, I mean, we're the only thing with complex language. | ||
| Well, some animals are actually able to convey fairly complex things, like there's a predator above us. | ||
| And they're like, well, what I mean is they don't have syntax. | ||
| And you kind of wind up running out. | ||
| It's like the verdict's still out, man. | ||
| Animals do convey some complicated stuff. | ||
| My two brothers are ecologists, PhD scientists, and they kind of hate the conversation because... | ||
| Not resistant to, but they have a hard time with trying to use our terminology and use our language to describe what animals are up to. | ||
| For you to say that the dolphin doesn't want to eat the baby because it might be his baby, someone might argue that that animal probably has no comprehension of that. | ||
| Or even that they are not able to equate Sex with reproduction. | ||
| They're so intelligent, though. | ||
| I don't know how they wouldn't be able to equate that. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| I struggle with this all the time. | ||
| I really should have said killed. | ||
| They kill them. | ||
| I don't think they eat them. | ||
| They might. | ||
| They really hurt, but they kill them. | ||
| They bite them. | ||
| You know, I struggle with this stuff all the time because, you know, as a hunter... | ||
| I'm always weighing out, what are the things that we're after and what are their capabilities? | ||
| I don't want to fall into some trap where I just act like, oh, it's just like corn with legs. | ||
| So I am curious all the time about the capabilities of animals. | ||
| And I tend to be open to the idea that there's different sets of experiences that different animals have. | ||
| That some have perhaps more of an awareness than others. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a hierarchy, if you will. | ||
| And I think that the consensus is that dolphins are pretty high on that hierarchy. | ||
| Yeah, dolphins and orcas, of course. | ||
| Orcas are very high up on that. | ||
| And they eat dolphins. | ||
| That's what's really fucked up. | ||
| You know, I've been going through this with my kid, man. | ||
| He... | ||
| We just moved to the Pacific Northwest, and so I keep talking to my kid about everything's got a killer whale on it, you know, like stores, grocery stores, whatever, just like a common motif. | ||
| And I kept telling them it's a killer whale, it's a killer whale. | ||
| And I know that a lot of people like to call them orcas, you know. | ||
| And orca is some Greek word I think just means, cetitian just means whale. | ||
| It's a pretty generic term. | ||
| And some people say that killer whales used to be called whale killers. | ||
| And whale killer became killer whale. | ||
| So I'm always telling my kid, oh, it's a killer whale. | ||
| And one day my kid comes home, and he's just mad in hell because he learned that it's not a killer whale, it's an orca. | ||
| And I'm like, listen, man, I know what the person who told you that is trying to tell you, and I already know that, but I told you killer whale not because I wasn't aware, because I was trying to circumvent I was trying to come back around against what you would inevitably learn about its PC name. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| You know? | ||
|
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You were, like, planting in advance, planting the seed. | |
| I was like, dude, it wasn't that I didn't know. | ||
| I was just trying to fill you up with, just to open you to the idea that the animals get new names all the time, and it's just a PC. It's like a, what do you call it? | ||
| It's like a marketing term. | ||
| Orca's a marketing term for a killer whale. | ||
| I mean, it's not a whale. | ||
| It's a tooth whale. | ||
| Is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But a dolphin's a tooth whale, too, because it's a cousin of a dolphin. | ||
| Oh, I see what you say. | ||
| I thought... | ||
| Pardon me, I thought you were saying it wasn't a mammal or something. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| It's a cousin of a dolphin, right? | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| Like, taxonomically, where is it at? | ||
| I'd be curious. | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| I'd be curious to know. | ||
| Yeah, because I'm pretty sure there's a crazy video of one. | ||
| They're killing a whale while it's alive. | ||
| These killer whales are biting... | ||
| That's how most killing happens. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, I should say they're eating it while it's alive. | ||
| They're biting chunks of its face off, and it's just so hard to watch. | ||
| Because we think of these whales as being these beautiful creatures, and we think of... | ||
| I don't know why we have this weird idea of killer whales as being these really noble creatures. | ||
| Because I always think of killer whales as being the friend of man, and that's why when one does freak out at SeaWorld, it makes SeaWorld look so horrible. | ||
| Because in the wild, there's almost no evidence whatsoever that whales have ever killed anybody. | ||
| Yeah, but he's probably after a while, he's like, what am I supposed to kill then? | ||
| I'm a killer. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Whale. | ||
| And the instincts that they have. | ||
| The way I always equate it, one of the things I have a problem with zoos in general is that they don't allow animals to do their natural thing. | ||
| I really think that what zoos should be is get all those motherfuckers together. | ||
| You should have a giant piece of land if you're going to fence it in. | ||
| Let them in there and let them run wild. | ||
| And if people really want to see animals, what they should see is jaguars killing monkeys and the whole gamut. | ||
| And it sounds fucked up, but that's really what the wild is. | ||
| Because what we're doing by taking these animals and putting them in these weird cages, We're creating these closed-in ecosystems where these animals never have to compete, their food is given to them, and we're ruining their genetics. | ||
| I mean, those animals that are in zoos, they're completely incapable of ever being reintroduced into the wild, unless you take them, and it would have to be some really exhausting effort to try to reintroduce them to the idea of hunting their own food or gathering their own food. | ||
| But those fucking dummies that you have in the zoo, you've created these welfare monkeys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, these monkeys that just... | ||
| I shouldn't say welfare. | ||
| I should say, like, they're pets. | ||
| They're like dogs. | ||
| It's like expecting your dog to figure out how to go hunting when he's just sitting there wagging his tail waiting for you to open up a can of Alpo. | ||
| They don't know any better. | ||
| But what zoos use in their defense... | ||
| And, you know, some people... | ||
| We've kind of gotten away from... | ||
| A lot of people have gotten away from aesthetically, so like the bear in the cage kind of display. | ||
| But what zoos are always able to use in their defense is... | ||
| With cases like the panda, Florida panther, they're a genetic reserve. | ||
| So maybe they're not ensuring behavior. | ||
| They're not protecting behavior, but they're at least protecting the genetic reserve. | ||
| So they should hit the fan for some species, you have that. | ||
| And there's many, many examples of wild populations that have been supplemented through the zoo stuff. | ||
| But I know what you're saying. | ||
| When I take my kid to a zoo, I remember we were sitting there looking at this pathetic example of a grizzly bear. | ||
| I remember just kind of wanting to look at my son and be like, listen, dude, you're getting the wrong idea. | ||
| These things are badass, normally, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's just kind of sad. | ||
| Have you seen that show, The Hunt, that I told you about? | ||
| No, no, I didn't see it, but I remember you talking about it. | ||
| Pretty interesting. | ||
| I don't think it's on anymore. | ||
| I read about it after you told me about it, because the guy from Metallica was narrating it, and then he got... | ||
| Their band got punished and weren't allowed to play at a music festival. | ||
| Well, they were trying to ban him from the music festival. | ||
| So that never happened. | ||
| I don't think it... | ||
| What the fuck is his name? | ||
| Because he narrated a show. | ||
| Hetfield, right? | ||
| Yeah, James Hetfield. | ||
| Hetfield, yeah. | ||
| He's a good narrator. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| He's a hunter. | ||
| He hunts a lot. | ||
| And there's a photo of him with this fucking giant bear. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I mean, it's a perspective shot. | ||
| You know, they always put the bear in front of the person. | ||
| Yeah, where you get way back, yeah. | ||
| But this fucking bear is huge. | ||
| I mean, it's like a nine-foot bear. | ||
| It's enormous. | ||
| It's just the shoulders on this fucking thing and the head on this thing. | ||
| And he's standing in front of them. | ||
| People are like, oh my god, disgusting, evil. | ||
| What they don't understand is if you truly love bears, you've got to kill that bear. | ||
| Because if you don't kill that bear, that bear, those big giant bears, are responsible for decimating the population of cubs. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| And if you don't trim the big ones, if you don't kill some of the big ones, there's a photo of him with the bear. | ||
| I mean, that is a fucking big bear. | ||
| Oh, that's a giant, yeah. | ||
| Where was that? | ||
| Was that Kodiak? | ||
| That's Kodiak. | ||
| Yeah, he shot one up there while he was doing that show, apparently. | ||
| I mean, they are enormous. | ||
| Yeah, you're not... | ||
| You might see... | ||
| Like, someone might see that you killed a big male bear and be upset by it, but you're really not impacting the bear population. | ||
| You know, you're impacting that individual bear, but you're not having any kind of real long-term deleterious effect on the bears of that island, which are very, you know, it's a very stable, well-regulated population of bears out there. | ||
| I put in for that tag, I think, as a non-guided, non-resident. | ||
| So, like, if you want to go with a guide, you can go to Kodiak and hunt, you know. | ||
| You can just go book a trip and go. | ||
| So you just have to pay them and they have a certain amount of tax? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what it is. | ||
| You might pay $25,000, $30,000 for the hunt. | ||
| It's interesting watching it. | ||
| But a non-guided non-resident... | ||
| There's a very limited number of tags for non-guided non-resident, which means that I would have to go... | ||
| In lieu of a guide, because my brother's a resident of Alaska, I don't need to use a guide when hunting animals that you normally need to guide to hunt. | ||
| So I can go with him and hunt there. | ||
| And so every other year, they do a thing where you can apply for the spring hunt. | ||
| I always put in for that hunt. | ||
| And then when you told me about that show, I was bummed because I was like, now the odds of drawing that tag are probably going to for a long time go way, way, way down because there's probably going to be a ton of dudes putting in for the permit now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I could be wrong. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| But I feel like it's going to increase interest and now I'm like trying to think of a new place to start putting in. | ||
| I've never killed a grizzly bear. | ||
| I want to. | ||
| I really want to one time. | ||
| Well, you also have a weird thing where you want a grizzly bear to scratch your chest and leave scars. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Why would you say... | ||
| It meant a lot more to me when I was single. | ||
| That just seems like one of the worst requests ever. | ||
| Like, a fucking giant bear. | ||
| I mean, what is a full-grown grizzly whey? | ||
| What's the weight? | ||
| I mean, there's a magical number that gets thrown around a lot. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| When people want to say that a bear was huge, they say, it was a thousand pounds. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But those, I guess, are... | ||
| If you put a lot of 1,000 pound bears on a scale, they're 800 pounds. | ||
| They're 750 pounds, 800 pounds. | ||
| Again, that Tony Russ guy that wrote those books I was talking about, he's had an immense amount of experience and he kind of has a passage in there where he talks about the 1,000 pound bear and there just aren't a lot of them out there. | ||
| As much as you read people getting 10 foot 1,000 pound bears. | ||
| You and I laughed about this before because everyone that sees a mountain lion in the wild always says, big fucking boar. | ||
| You know, 200 pound boar. | ||
| I remember like I laughed because you saw a lion and you said it looked like a small one. | ||
| I was like, you're the first guy I've ever met that saw a small lion. | ||
| I've seen two of them. | ||
| They were both around the same weight. | ||
| The first one I saw was like a dog size, like 60, 70 pounds. | ||
| And the second one, it was a much quicker view of them. | ||
| But again, I thought it was a coyote until I saw its tail. | ||
| Then I noticed that this big bouncy tip It was in Santa Barbara. | ||
| I was in Montecito driving through a residential neighborhood. | ||
| And we're like, my wife said it. | ||
| I saw it first. | ||
| She goes, coyote. | ||
| And I go, oh shit, look at its tail. | ||
| And we're like, that's a mountain lion. | ||
| It was like, in that time, we saw it in the headlights. | ||
| Couldn't have been more than 70 pounds. | ||
| Yeah, you're a discerning individual to not have seen a 200-pound tom. | ||
| So there's the 1,000-pound bear. | ||
| But that bear we're just looking at is a huge bear. | ||
| I don't know what he weighs. | ||
| Well, did you see that video that's been going around lately of a bear that was walking around on two legs? | ||
| And people were saying, is this Bigfoot? | ||
| Is this what people are seeing? | ||
| Because it's absolutely a black bear. | ||
| And this bear, just for whatever reason, decides... | ||
| That's how he likes to get around. | ||
| He walked like a long distance on two legs. | ||
| Like, it's a crazy video. | ||
| No, I haven't seen that. | ||
| Pull that video up, Jamie, because it's... | ||
| The one in the neighborhood, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's like walking in this suburban neighborhood, and this fucking bear is on two legs like a dude in a bear outfit, like Yogi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, and I mean, he walks 30, 40 yards like this. | ||
| So if you were in the woods and you saw this bear doing that, you'd be like, I saw a fucking Sasquatch. | ||
| I know what I saw. | ||
| Especially if it was like dusk. | ||
| You know, look at this bear. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| You gotta be kidding me. | ||
| No, check him out, man. | ||
| Pull it from the beginning so we can see the whole thing. | ||
| Do it from the beginning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at this! | |
| Oh yeah, man. | ||
| I mean, if you didn't know any better, especially if it was thick woods and you saw that thing, you would fucking swear that that's a Bigfoot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because you know what? | |
| The shots you're looking at right there are often about as long as you see a bear. | ||
| Yeah, look at him. | ||
| I mean, look at that. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That is fucking crazy. | ||
| That's pretty wild that he likes to get around like that. | ||
| You would assume that that is a monkey. | ||
| That's an ape. | ||
| That's a fucking bear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that thing. | |
| Now, does he have a normal gait when he does get down on all fours or is he screwed up somehow? | ||
| No, he was running. | ||
| Oh, he was? | ||
| You saw him run on all fours? | ||
| It says his paws are injured. | ||
| Oh, his paws are injured. | ||
| Oh, he might have got caught in a trap. | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not both paws. | ||
| Well, it looks like his right paw. | ||
| It looks like his right paw is missing. | ||
| What state's he in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think New Jersey. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if he got caught in a trap, it's because someone illegally set. | ||
| I don't think that's the cause. | ||
| I mean, you can't trap bears in New Jersey. | ||
| But just the fact that a bear has that ability. | ||
| Can you trap at all in New Jersey? | ||
| I don't know what... | ||
| Yeah, there's some fur trapping there, but I don't know to what extent. | ||
| But there's no bear trapping there. | ||
| But isn't it possible that he got caught in another animal's trap and that's how he's still alive? | ||
| Because he only hurt his paw? | ||
| There's no trap... | ||
| That would be used for fur-bearing animals now that would cripple that thing to the point where he would do that. | ||
| If he got caught in a foot hold trap or leg hold trap, he would pop his foot out of there. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I mean, I can't rule out everything. | ||
| If that's what happened to that bear, and I have no reason to think that it is, If someone came down and said, absolutely, that's what happened to that bear, I'd be like, then someone was doing an illegal trapping activity, because that's not something that would happen. | ||
| Is it much more likely, because we're looking at a residential area that stood on something? | ||
| When I used to trap, I used to do this all the time, is I can snap my hand in most traps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Because the trap has more of a function of, I mean, this is going to get all, you're going to probably hear from all kinds of your listeners, but It has a holding function. | ||
| So it starves them to death? | ||
| No, not if you're... | ||
| No, because you have to check your traps. | ||
| Oh, so you go there and it's still alive and then you have to kill it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when I used to fur trap, I would check my traps every 24 hours, usually in the morning. | ||
| But anyways, what the trap largely serves to do is hold something. | ||
| And the way when you rig them... | ||
| If you do things right, you rig them with a lot of swivels and things, and so what you're trying to do is really limit any kind of damage to the animal. | ||
| And this isn't altruistic. | ||
| The reason you want to limit damage to the animal is the animal's less likely to fight the trap. | ||
| If you have a trap that causes nerve damage, bone damage, numbing, it's all the more chances that that thing is going to be working harder to get away. | ||
| In the ideal case, you're just trying to hold it with a foothold trap. | ||
| So it would try to chew its way out? | ||
| Yeah, people always say chew, but what they will do, and I've seen it happen, particularly with muskrats, which have very, very thin bones. | ||
| There's one that only has one paw. | ||
| I wonder what happened to him. | ||
| Where's that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have no idea. | |
| I just typed in bear trap. | ||
| National Park Service. | ||
| What do you think happened there? | ||
| Well, that's too high on his leg. | ||
| To be a trap? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So maybe that's a shot? | ||
| A gunshot or something like that? | ||
| Could've been. | ||
| He could've got shot. | ||
| He could've got shot. | ||
| He could've got hit by a car. | ||
| I mean, things meet such weird ends and injuries. | ||
| I've seen bears and I'm fairly convinced. | ||
| On Prince of Wales Island, I've seen bears that I'm fairly convinced had been shot just because of the sort of like wear on the shoulder it happened, you know? | ||
| Right, like it looked like someone just kind of hit its vitals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it just looked like. | |
| I could just be like, I could picture how that would happen. | ||
| I can't say that that didn't happen there, but that's not a trap thing. | ||
| What I have seen with muskrats anyways, muskrats have very, very, very thin bones. | ||
| And you'll see where you'd get muskrats that would, in trapper parlance, they'll say it would ring out, so it would just twist. | ||
| And get away. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So it just keeps spinning until it gets out of there. | ||
| So people say like a chew-out, but it's weird because people defending trapping will like to clarify that it's not actually a chew-off, it's a ring-off. | ||
| But they're still cutting their own arm off by spinning around until the tissue breaks off. | ||
| I never saw it on muskrats. | ||
| I never saw it on larger animals. | ||
| I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. | ||
| But again, like everything, there's good practices. | ||
| I don't trap anymore. | ||
| When I tell you what I'm telling you, I'm just telling you this from being a guy who likes to be clear about factual matters. | ||
| I don't have a real dog in the race on this, so to speak, right now. | ||
| But if you follow good practices on trapping, It's in your best interest to not have these sorts of things happen. | ||
| That you would set in a way that you don't have incidental catches. | ||
| Or bycatch. | ||
| You check your traps on a very tight schedule. | ||
| You rig them in such a way that you don't cause damage. | ||
| That if you did get something else into your trap, you would be able to release that thing unharmed. | ||
| But there are people who, for lack of caring, and there are people who, just for lack of technical expertise, screw these things up. | ||
| And oftentimes, you could get violations like what would be like a trapping-based violation from someone who wouldn't self-identify as a fur trapper, but who just got mad about some bear or whatever getting into his dumpster, and then he takes matters into his own hands completely outside of the law and decides to fix that bear and inexperately set a trap for it. | ||
| Now, there are bear traps, right? | ||
| Those big traps you see in those movies that catch the bad guy in his leg and he's screaming, ah! | ||
| Those are real. | ||
| There used to be a lot of black bear trapping. | ||
| People used to trap black bears all the time. | ||
| There used to be some grizzly trapping at a time. | ||
| People would trap them to sell fur. | ||
| They'd trap them to get them for scientific purposes. | ||
| They'd trap them to just catch them for pets. | ||
| They'd trap them to mitigate livestock risk. | ||
| There's a lot of trapping going on. | ||
| Right now, bear trapping... | ||
| Isn't a thing that goes on. | ||
| There's a bear trap right there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what's funny now is there used to be a lot of bear traps, antique bear traps on the market, but people still manufacture... | ||
| What would be a bear trap in order to sell it as a piece of false memorabilia? | ||
| Oh, like a flintlock gun? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So there's a lot of guys that make reproductions of old bear traps. | ||
| No one's intending that they're going to go set it for a bear, but people want to have a lodge. | ||
| You've got your cabin and you want to have a big bear trap hanging up in it. | ||
| So there's a lot of bear traps... | ||
| And you'll see where a dude will think he has something awesome, you know, and he's trying to sell it for a thousand bucks, and you look at it and be like, you can go buy those all day long. | ||
| For $150. | ||
| It's just, like, it's not old. | ||
| There's a comedy club in town called The Improv, and the front of the comedy club, at one time, they've abandoned it, but it was a barbecue place. | ||
| And the barbecue place, they tried to make it, like, with old tools in the wall, like an old saw, like, you know, those wooden handle on each side. | ||
| And you could look at it, and you're like, I know that shit is two years old. | ||
| I'm looking up. | ||
| It's all rusty and everything, but I know this is not a fucking antique. | ||
| They had one of those sickles that, you know, like the death dealer that, what do they call it? | ||
| Grim Reaper. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Grim Reaper. | |
| Grim Reaper was always supposed to have. | ||
| That was on the wall, too. | ||
| Like, trying to make it like some farm house. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Old-timey. | ||
| Old-timey wood walls, like a stained, you know, they made it look like it's old and weathered, you know, the wood. | ||
| Which some of me, this is actually from a hundred-year-old farmhouse, the wood that we have here. | ||
| This is reclaimed oak. | ||
| This is nice. | ||
| Yeah, I specifically went out of the way to get old wood because I felt like it'd be kind of cool, you know, because it's... | ||
| This is probably some weird energy and some old farm wood. | ||
| This is like real old thick wood. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, I like it. | ||
| Me and my old man cut down. | ||
| He's dead now, but when I was in high school, he was building a pole barn. | ||
| And we cut down an oak on this piece of property we owned across the road from our house. | ||
| This is a little corner lot. | ||
| And we cut down an oak. | ||
| He built the barn. | ||
| And I took that oak, the logs, and I took them down and put them on a flatbed trailer and had them milled in the lumber. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And took all that lumber, and years later... | ||
| He's been dead since, I think, 2002, 2003. I still haven't finished this. | ||
| But then I laminated all those pieces together into what looks like chunks of a bowling lane. | ||
| Ah. | ||
| And I'm still trying to make a damn desk out of these things. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| And I'm actively engaged right now in trying to move one of these slabs from Miles City out to Washington now so I can continue my now 12-year-long project of trying to turn me and the old man's tree. | ||
| So anyways, I'm a sentimentalist when it comes to wood, just like yourself. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| So you're going to make it like a writing desk, like where you do your writing? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think I'm going to make a wraparound desk, yeah. | ||
| That's a great idea, yeah. | ||
| But all the pieces I have together aren't as big as this desk we're sitting at, but it's still a nice, you know, big chunk. | ||
| I have a desk that I bought in 1993. It's a writing desk, and it's got two levels. | ||
| Like, one level, it's a very, it's old, it's oak, you know, but it's like, there was a place called the Writer's Store, and it was a store in Hollywood that was just all writing stuff. | ||
| It used to have, like, script programs for old-school Macs, like, you know, the oldest computer. | ||
| It means it's 1994 that I got this fucking thing. | ||
| And I've written everything I've ever written on this one desk. | ||
| Still now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I won't ever get rid of it. | ||
| My wife's like, let's get rid of this piece of shit. | ||
| I'm like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| This desk is going nowhere. | ||
| It's solid as a rock. | ||
| It's all oak. | ||
| But it's just, there's stains on it. | ||
| She said, it's disgusting. | ||
| It's got like coffee. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| This shit's perfect. | ||
| As long as it's in my office, you fucking leave it here. | ||
| It's got the patina of your sweat and labor on it. | ||
| Everything good I've ever written is all from that desk. | ||
| This is one desk I've had, and I'm never getting rid of it. | ||
| I just got this one oak desk that I've had from the beginning of my time here in LA, and I'll never get rid of that fucking desk. | ||
| So when you say that you've written... | ||
| Do you sit down and write? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Stand-up? | ||
| Well, I sit down and write. | ||
| This is what I do. | ||
| Most of the time, I write. | ||
| I used to keep an active blog on my website. | ||
| But when I started writing a book, I got a book deal a few years back. | ||
| And I started writing a book. | ||
| I stopped writing the blog. | ||
| And then when the publishers were just fucking trying to... | ||
| They were essentially trying to get me to write it like stand-up. | ||
| I remember you talking about this, yeah. | ||
| So I gave them their money back. | ||
| Which you felt like doesn't work for a book. | ||
| Well, I don't like it. | ||
| I've read George Carlin's book, which is essentially just his stand-up in book form, and Jerry Seinfeld did a similar thing. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| If I want George Carlin's writing like that, I want to see it. | ||
| I want to see George Carlin do his stuff. | ||
| I don't want to read it. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you. | ||
| There's some benefit, I guess, in reading it. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| It's better than nothing. | ||
| But it's not as good as... | ||
| When I write, I'm writing stuff because I know people are going to read it. | ||
| So the descriptives are very different. | ||
| The way it's spaced out is very different. | ||
| The way I set things up is different. | ||
| And so what I do now is I write as if I was going to write a book or a blog entry. | ||
| And then I go over it. | ||
| And then I extract ideas that come out of that. | ||
| Because I feel like... | ||
| I do both. | ||
| Like, I'll write down specifically. | ||
| I'll try to write as a joke, like thinking I'm standing on stage and, you know, set up punchline or beginning premise and then add in the jokes. | ||
| But more often, I just write. | ||
| Like, I'll write about something. | ||
| And then along the way, usually I'm baked, so I get silly. | ||
| Like, as I'm writing, like, these new ideas will come in. | ||
| You don't mean writing with characters and stuff. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Just writing as you're talking. | ||
| But I do that sometimes, too. | ||
| But you write as you're talking. | ||
| Yeah, I write not even as me talking. | ||
| I just write. | ||
| I'll write like... | ||
| I'll pick a subject. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Amphetamines. | ||
| Speed. | ||
| Adderall. | ||
| And I'll start writing about Adderall. | ||
| And then along the way, I'll have a really funny thing will come up in the writing. | ||
| I'm laughing as I'm writing it. | ||
| Because it just came out of nowhere. | ||
| Don't you feel like... | ||
| You're a really good writer, man, by the way. | ||
| I really love Meteor. | ||
| It's a really good book. | ||
| Oh, thanks, man. | ||
| I mean, I knew you're a smart dude, and you're obviously very articulate, but the writing is very descriptive. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| It's very fun to follow. | ||
| When you write stuff like that, don't you feel like sometimes, as you're writing, it's almost like it's not even you that's writing? | ||
| These ideas just sort of pop into your head out of nowhere, and then you're putting them down? | ||
| No, for me, I'm so aware of the process that there's no surprising thing to me. | ||
| One of my mentors, what I regard as one of the best American non-fiction writers out there alive now, is a writer named Ian Frazier. | ||
| What's his work? | ||
| He's got several books. | ||
| One of the books I hold up is just like one of the, in my opinion, one of the finest books ever written is his book Great Plains, which is about the Great Plains. | ||
| But he's a stylist, you know? | ||
| He was a humor writer for The New Yorker for a long time. | ||
| I had great fortune to... | ||
| I don't know if he would use this term. | ||
| I think he mentored me in some way. | ||
| I read his stuff and had the opportunity to hang out with him a handful of times. | ||
| He was saying that when he was growing up and he wanted to be a writer, he pictured that writers would be that you're sitting at a desk kind of chuckling to yourself as you You know, have all these fantastic ideas. | ||
| But when I write, I get so few words written every day, and every sentence that I write takes... | ||
| I have to write it and rewrite it and rewrite it so many times that there's never a thing where I feel like... | ||
| There's never a thing where I feel like, holy smokes, I nailed it. | ||
| Because it's so... | ||
| I almost look at it like if you're building a house. | ||
| Maybe when you get all done with the house, you can stand outside and be like, wow, there it is. | ||
| I did it. | ||
| But there's never a shocking moment because every nail and every board. | ||
| There's never a chance where something jumps ahead radically really quickly in a way that can startle you. | ||
| Now, the other night, I wrote... | ||
| My brother's getting married this weekend. | ||
| My older brother. | ||
| And I sat down to make some notes about my best man speech. | ||
| After I wrote my best man speech... | ||
| It's funny because this just happened to me last night. | ||
| After I did my best man speech... | ||
| I felt like, why can't I feel, like, I had it where I got, I was, like, talking about some funny stuff in my head and kind of writing down notes, and I thought of some way to actually, like, you're supposed to do in a best man speech, you're supposed to make it, like, hit right, like, hit the right note, right? | ||
| It's funny and you're dogging on them, and then all of a sudden you turn it, you know, and it's sweet and nice, okay? | ||
| And I found that turn, To make it sweet and nice. | ||
| And it just struck me as being perfect. | ||
| I was like, why can't the regular writing I do feel that way? | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Where I'm like, ha! | ||
| And I kind of want to pump my fist in the air. | ||
| Do other people that you know that are writers have those moments? | ||
| Those moments that I'm talking about where things just pop to you? | ||
| I feel like they do. | ||
| One of the things I follow on Twitter is this thing, John Winokur. | ||
| And it's just, I don't know how he does it, but six or seven times a day he's got quotes from great writers about writing. | ||
| How do you spell his name? | ||
| J-O-H-N? I think it's W-I-N, oh, John Winokur. | ||
| It's like writers on writing. | ||
| And I learned more about writing and writers from reading this thing because it's just like really cool writers talking about the writing process. | ||
| I'm sure he's probably hit one just within minutes. | ||
| Oh, at advice to writers. | ||
| Advice to writers. | ||
| Like here right now, just a couple minutes ago. | ||
| Or a couple hours ago. | ||
| When I write, I don't think of the audience. | ||
| After the fact, I think, well, I hope they like it. | ||
| So that's like a writer talking about... | ||
| Writing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this Twitter feed hits these quotes all day long. | ||
| So I learn more about writers, even though I went to writing school and everything, I learn more about writers following that guy's Twitter account. | ||
| And I do gather that some writers are blown away and have fun writing. | ||
| To me, it's agonizing. | ||
| I can't stand it. | ||
| That's the weird thing about doing TV, is I love having written, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When I write a book, I'm so... | |
| It's just like a deep, deep satisfaction. | ||
| I love having done it. | ||
| When I die, if they chisel writer into my tombstone, I'd be very happy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I hate the act of writing. | |
| Making TV is so fun. | ||
| Just in the moment, it's very fun. | ||
| I love going out and doing it. | ||
| But when it's said and done, I don't get that feeling like I slayed a dragon. | ||
| Like I would get from writing a book. | ||
| I know exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| When you're doing a television show, also, it's very different than most TV in that you're out there doing something that you enjoy anyway. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And there's a lot of people coming in on it. | ||
| So, writing is like me. | ||
| I mean, sure, I don't mean to in any way discount the role of an editor. | ||
| And I don't know if you do something similar with your stand-up if you show other comedians and stuff. | ||
| But you have a role of an editor. | ||
| So, I don't want to act like, oh, it's just all out of your head. | ||
| You know, my agent... | ||
| I work closely with, he influences things I do, my editor. | ||
| But in the end, it's like, kind of it's your thing, right? | ||
| TV's a whole bunch of people. | ||
| So you could go out and have a great thing, and then you turn it in, and the editor nails it. | ||
| So I can't go like, I made this amazing TV show, because it's like, there's the guy that produced it, the guys that shot it, the guys that edited it, right? | ||
| All that kind of stuff. | ||
| And so your sense of ownership becomes a little bit different. | ||
| You're like a stakeholder. | ||
| And not like the dude that owns the thing. | ||
| Yeah, there's so much going on. | ||
| There's music. | ||
| There's the way it's edited. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Extremely. | ||
| It really has a massive impact on how it comes off as a piece. | ||
| Yeah, I think as a host, you know... | ||
| As a host and as a person who has a lot of sway in the kind of things we go do, I still feel like I'm kicking in 10 or 20%. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| And 80-90% is a handful of other people who are throwing in on it. | ||
| Nobody works harder than people who work on your show. | ||
| Like those camera dudes, like Dodie and Moe and all those guys who have to fucking sleep in tents in the back of that fucking van where the llamas piss and... | ||
| I really kind of love it. | ||
| I love those guys. | ||
| We just had this guy. | ||
| We wound up liking him. | ||
| We had a camera guy come out with us for the first time and he was just getting beat up. | ||
| He admitted it. | ||
| It kind of became the joke where he's saying to Doherty, he's like, man, you guys got to do a better job of explaining what this is. | ||
| Dan's like, I feel like I said it's like rigorous hiking. | ||
| He's like, yeah, but that's not this. | ||
| I thought like walking on a trail or something. | ||
| But there's no language to explain it. | ||
| I don't know why those guys... | ||
| I do know why. | ||
| I think one could look and be like, I don't understand why those guys would subject themselves to that level of treatment. | ||
| Because I've had the opportunity to work very briefly in what would be like network television, mainstream television. | ||
| And I'm telling you what, it's not typical. | ||
| What you do. | ||
| What those guys do and the hours they do it is not typical. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| No. | ||
| I was shocked to hear like one time some guy was coming out with this and I knew it was going to be trouble because he's coming out and he's asking about what the hours are. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| We'll sleep at night. | ||
| 24 hours a day are the hours. | ||
| When you're sleeping on the ground in Montana and it's zero degrees outside and you're fucking huddled up in your tent, you're kind of working still. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because you would never be there unless they were paying you to be there. | ||
| Even though you're off... | ||
| Still, you're subjecting yourself to sleeping on the ground in Montana in a tent. | ||
| You're freezing your dick off. | ||
| You have to flex and squeeze under your sleeping bag to generate some warmth before you can pass out. | ||
| You're kind of working. | ||
| Yeah, like Doty, Giannis, Moe, they just... | ||
| They like to be in some way tortured a little bit, I think. | ||
| And they also just like to be working. | ||
| I don't think that they... | ||
| The other thing is, I don't think they really... | ||
| They're at work, but I don't know how much they think about it being at work. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| I think they just think of it as existing. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| I don't think they go like, oh now I'm going to work. | ||
| I think that they think of their lives more, their lives don't seem to, I don't think they think of their lives as having like, it's like, now I'm at work, now I'm at home, now I'm at work, now I'm at home. | ||
| I think like at home they're thinking about work stuff. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| I feel like more that they don't look at it like, you know, punching the old clock. | ||
| It's my guess. | ||
| Well, it was funny because Mo and I had a conversation once about another show that he was working on and one of the guys that was on the other show. | ||
| And he was taking great pride in describing what a coward this guy was. | ||
| And it was not even great pride, but he was enjoying it. | ||
| He's like, he's yellow. | ||
| He was talking about it, but it was like, here's a guy. | ||
| That's been working on your show for several seasons and he's fucking undergone some horrendous locations and climbing to the top of fucking mountains while carrying a 50 pound camera and the whole deal. | ||
| I mean, these fucking cameras are no joke. | ||
| And hiking, just carrying a gun hiking is difficult. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's all this sliding of the ground underneath you, and you're constantly going up, up, up, and you're, you know, essentially, like, you're doing, like, little mini squats all day long, and it's exhausting, and these guys are doing it with one arm holding a fucking camera. | ||
| Backwards. | ||
| Backwards. | ||
| It's like that old joke about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, you know, like, she did everything Fred Astaire did backwards or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, right. | |
| And heels or whatever it was. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, Moe's too good, though, man, like, We can't... | ||
| Mo's too good. | ||
| He's off doing other stuff. | ||
| It was like a treat to have him, but we're always trying to, but he's just in such demand. | ||
| He's nominated for all these Emmys all the time. | ||
| He won an Emmy. | ||
| He's nominated for an Emmy this year. | ||
| Well, your show stands out. | ||
| There's hunting shows, and then there's your show. | ||
| The only show that I've seen recently that does that as well, have you seen Uncharted, the Jim Shockey show? | ||
| No, but I know a lot of... | ||
| I know his stuff, I haven't seen that, but I know that... | ||
| That show is a highly respected show. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| I've heard Doherty was telling me he said it's phenomenal. | ||
| I watched it the other day for the first time. | ||
| He was off in Pakistan. | ||
| And it was really intense because one of the guys that goes with him all the time, his wife didn't want him going to Pakistan. | ||
| I mean, she was like really scared. | ||
| And she was like, you know, it's so dangerous there. | ||
| Please don't go. | ||
| He's got a wife and kids. | ||
| And so he stayed back. | ||
| And, you know, Jim Shockey went by himself. | ||
| And they followed the guy who stayed back going on this trip. | ||
| To hunt deer. | ||
| And when he went on this trip at home in Texas to hunt deer, he was talking about his dad and a real scene. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Crying. | ||
| And it was really intense. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| It was very, very, very intense. | ||
| But in a way that a lot of those shows are so fucking bad. | ||
| Long before I got involved in... | ||
| TV and outdoor TV. It was like a thing you would always hear is friends of mine, guys I respected, would kind of be sort of dismissing outdoor television as a genre. | ||
| But the thing was always like, but Shockey's legit. | ||
| Or some such thing. | ||
| I mean, he's been around for so long. | ||
| But he's a highly respected figure. | ||
| There's this annual thing called Shot Show, and I see him. | ||
| You can't miss him. | ||
| I mean, the guy's huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's kind of like the last great white hunter, you know? | ||
| Cowboy hat all the time. | ||
| Yeah, I see him and I always think I'm going to go up and say something to him. | ||
| I never have. | ||
| You never have? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| Really? | ||
| Oh, I would force myself to. | ||
| No, I never have. | ||
| I want to meet that guy. | ||
| And there's an amazing thing. | ||
| I mean, there's just some good clips of stuff he's done. | ||
| He's an articulate guy and goes to some cool places. | ||
| And you can tell his heart's in the right place, man. | ||
| I think he has an honest... | ||
| He has an honest affection for wildlife and wild places, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| He also enjoys the roughing it aspect of it. | ||
| Like, he enjoys going to these ridiculous remote locations and hunting these very odd animals, very exotic animals. | ||
| He did something when they flew into Russia and they took these fucking weird SUV things. | ||
| I mean, I shouldn't even say SUV. These weird... | ||
| All-terrain vehicles that look like these military vehicles, deep, deep, deep in the mountains, like a 12-hour drive. | ||
| Yeah, he's been to some wild places. | ||
| To get some fucking weird ram, you know? | ||
| It was really intense. | ||
| It was unexpected. | ||
| I just was flipping through the channels, and it came on, and I'd seen his other show before. | ||
| And so this Uncharted thing, I'd seen all these ads for it, but... | ||
| Man, they were in Pakistan, and they had armed guards with them everywhere they went. | ||
| Was that right? | ||
| Guys with AK-47s, and it was pretty intense, because it's a fucking dangerous, dangerous place. | ||
| And he's out there wearing the traditional Muslim garb. | ||
| He wears the clothes that those people wear. | ||
| Oh, no kid, really? | ||
| You don't want to stand out. | ||
| You don't want to stand out as being a Westerner. | ||
| Guys like the Green Berets, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he's wearing their outfits as he's hunting. | ||
| It's really intense. | ||
| And they're off in the fucking middle of, I mean, deep in the middle of nowhere, hunting some ram. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I'm glad you liked that show because it's good to hear something out there that caught your eye. | ||
| It's really well done. | ||
| It's really well done. | ||
| But there's that show, your show, and then the rest of them. | ||
| There's some of them that look like they're made with a home movie camera and it's like a guy who's never even thought about making a show. | ||
| Sometimes that's true, man. | ||
| There's a guy I was talking to who makes the hunting show and one day we were talking and I was shocked to hear that he's a registered nurse who has a full-time job at a hospital. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| And he makes a hunting show. | ||
| Yeah, he just burns it up, man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's just something he wants to do and he just finds a way to make it happen. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucking hard. | ||
| Some of them, too, it's like there's some of them that are the same show always, which is so bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing we have a conversation about is I wanted to go back and film next spring and I have a black bear permit for this regulatory year, which extends into next spring, for Prince of Wales. | ||
| I wanted to go back, and Doty was saying, we did a show out there on Prince of Wales last spring. | ||
| And went and found a lot of bears. | ||
| And in the end, I could have shot a bear. | ||
| I didn't because I just have this strange feeling sometimes. | ||
| Not strange. | ||
| Sometimes I just want to watch bears rather than shoot at them. | ||
| So we did a show about that. | ||
| And I wanted to go back this spring. | ||
| And Doherty was like, I just feel like anything we could have done out there, we've done. | ||
| And on one hand, I'm like, yeah, that's right. | ||
| We probably shouldn't go and do a show, an episode in the same place doing the same thing. | ||
| But on the other hand, I'm like, Bahamut, because some shows all it is, they don't do anything but hunt some lease they have for white-tailed deer. | ||
| Every single time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The whole show is looking at camera photos from camera traps and them talking about the different stands that they have set up and then them up in the stand with a bow and arrow waiting for a fucking deer to come by. | ||
| I mean, that is every goddamn show. | ||
| It's always whitetail. | ||
| It's always in a tree stand. | ||
| It's always in the same sort of farmland on the edges of these cornfields. | ||
| And it's the same show every goddamn week. | ||
| And I guess people just like watching people hunt deer. | ||
| Do you enjoy it? | ||
| I watch them every now and then. | ||
| I like thinking, like, ooh, I wish I saw that deer when I was that close. | ||
| I'll shoot the shit out of that deer. | ||
| I have to feel like you'd learn a bunch of stuff eventually watching it. | ||
| Yeah, you definitely learn stuff. | ||
| You learn stuff about wind and placement and trails they walk and their behavior, like how they can kind of anticipate where they're coming through and how to pay attention to their trails. | ||
| One of them was interesting. | ||
| It was how to recognize the difference between the doe trails and the buck trails. | ||
| The doe trails were going straight across this riverbed area where there was a lot of mud. | ||
| You could see these does, large populations of animals going this way, and you see these animals that are crisscrossing. | ||
| Those are bucks. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| They're catching the scent. | ||
| They're catching the scent of these does. | ||
| I hadn't heard that. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| No, it's interesting. | ||
| That was solo hunting. | ||
| I don't know a ton about whitetails. | ||
| I mean, I grew up hunting whitetails, but we grew up hunting whitetails not probably using our heads as much as we might have. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We didn't need to, I guess. | ||
| We got deer. | ||
| Yeah, the time we went at Doug's Farm in Wisconsin, man, there's so many fucking deer. | ||
|
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They're everywhere. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| And there you're not playing... | ||
| This is the distinction I always make in hunting is... | ||
| I try to find those places where you're mostly thinking about animals. | ||
| And not so much thinking about hunters. | ||
| Well, you focused on that on your show, too, though. | ||
| The difference. | ||
| Like, the one time that you went and you were elk hunting in Montana and, you know, you were on your way after an elk and you see another fucking hunter that's doing the same thing. | ||
| Multiple times. | ||
| They're everywhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you spend most of your time wondering about what other guys are doing and trying to capitalize on that or trying to anticipate the response of animals to that pressure, you know? | ||
| I so much rather... | ||
| Just be like in a one-on-one thing. | ||
| Next week we're going up to hunt moose up in the Brooks Range, you know, and it's one of the, you know, absolutely the most, one of the most remotest places, the most remote place in North America. | ||
| And up there it's like, there's really no, you don't have to factor in effects of other individuals. | ||
| You're just thinking about the animals, which is fun. | ||
| It's very rewarding, but it's just not what most people are up against. | ||
| When I was a kid and we were hunting whitetails, we really planned on people. | ||
| It was very important about where other guys were, what other guys' hunting schedules was like. | ||
| There's a guy we knew that would always say, if I see your guy's truck... | ||
| Coming down the driveway to the farm, I always go over to such and such place because I know that the way you guys move into your blinds, you're likely to bump a deer down such and such fence line. | ||
| So this guy's thinking about deer, sure, but he's thinking about it through the context of human activities. | ||
| So deer being scared by you into an area. | ||
| Yeah, he's like, you guys got that blind down in that area, and I know every time you go in there, you don't realize it because you're a dumbass, but when you go in there, you're bumping deer and they're going down that fence line. | ||
| So if I see your truck coming, I'm going to run over there. | ||
| Wow, that's interesting. | ||
| Which is a kind of thing. | ||
| And like elk, when I lived in Montana, our opening day plan was generally find out where elk are, where they've been for a couple weeks, and so the people will know they're there. | ||
| How are they going to leave that area within three minutes of legal shooting light on opening day? | ||
| And what saddle are they going to use when they pass out of that valley? | ||
| And you would pretty much plan that would be your thing. | ||
| I know where they're at. | ||
| I know that they're going to get bumped probably before legal light. | ||
| And where are they going to go after that? | ||
| I got a friend who has for the last 20 years been killing elk by. | ||
| He knows the spot that elk move into when they get pressured. | ||
| And he knows that some people can find these elk with spotting scopes. | ||
| And they'll find these elk on this mountainside. | ||
| He knows that there's no way to approach these elk on this mountainside without spooking them. | ||
| When he sees the elk have moved into this area, he'll watch them with his spotting scope, waiting to see someone else try to climb up and put a move on these elk. | ||
| When they start climbing up, when that guy sees them, he's going to go try to put a move on them. | ||
| He'll go down and ambush those elk three miles away from there. | ||
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Wow. | |
| And he waits until someone sees them because he knows where they're going to go. | ||
| Because he knows the path they always take when they get scared. | ||
| And he calls it the laundry chute. | ||
|
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Because he said they come spilling through their laundry chute. | |
| He's been doing it for 20 years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I really enjoyed that episode that you did this year in Kentucky. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that was cool. | ||
| We went elk hunting in Kentucky because the situation is very unique in that they've reintroduced, successfully reintroduced elk into Kentucky and instead of like what you're looking at a western hunt where you look at these great wide open spaces and timber and you can see them in the distance, Instead, you're looking at incredibly dense, like, southeast sort of kind of forests where these elk are like, you were, like, kind of creeping up on them. | ||
| And, like, it was hard for the camera guy to get a good view of some of these elk, like the elk you shot. | ||
| Like, there's so many goddamn trees there. | ||
|
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Oh, yeah. | |
| You're just seeing little portions of them. | ||
| It's funny because in that show, in the beginning of that show, we're standing there in the, you know, pre-dawn darkness. | ||
| And there's, like, the eastern forests are sort of like the cacophony of noise in an eastern forest that you lack in the west. | ||
| Bugs and frogs. | ||
| Yeah, I mean the biodiversity is so much higher. | ||
| Not on large mammals, but the biodiversity of just stuff. | ||
| Is that because of moisture? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Quality of soil, moisture. | ||
| Yeah, I would guess moisture as a huge part of it. | ||
| And probably the fertility of the landscape. | ||
| Like the... | ||
| You know, how nutrient rich the soil is at some base level probably is what's at play. | ||
| Because the Pacific Northwest doesn't have those sounds. | ||
| And it's very moist. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| That's why I was confusing. | ||
| I know guys that would be able to answer that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I know that, for instance, I keep coming back around. | ||
| You can tell I'm so excited about our hunt on Prince of Wales Island. | ||
| I know my brother, who is an ecologist up there, that elevation band where Prince of Wales Island is, is sort of the richest marine environment. | ||
| Of anywhere. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, so that latitude band is an extremely rich marine environment there. | ||
| So the fishing there must be incredible. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's just everything. | ||
| It's just abuzz with life. | ||
| Are we going to fish there when we're there, too? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| There's a possibility, but probably not. | ||
| It gets a little bit late. | ||
| Like, fishing peaks, like July, August, is phenomenal. | ||
| It just kind of... | ||
| Halibut? | ||
| Yeah, but they... | ||
| Halibut's so much better in July and August. | ||
| I mean, we were just up there for my brother's bachelor party and did phenomenally well on halibut. | ||
| Yeah, Doug was sending me pictures. | ||
| Yeah, we got some doozies. | ||
| Enormous. | ||
| Yeah, some nice ones. | ||
| They're like tables. | ||
| So, in the beginning of that episode, just kind of standing there and... | ||
| And to hear that noise of the eastern forest, you know, and then to have it be that you're looking for elk is so... | ||
| It just feels weird for anyone familiar with that animal. | ||
| Yeah, Jamie pulled up a clip. | ||
| Pull up a clip so people can hear it, because it's pretty cool. | ||
| It's you in the forest, like, on your show, where you were explaining it and talking about it. | ||
|
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To distinguish the smell of where elk used to be and the smell of where elk are right now. | |
| The smell of elk right now. | ||
| Seems to have like a warmth to it. | ||
| It's hard to explain, but you just kind of get a sense. | ||
| You'll smell it and you'll be like, that's elk. | ||
| That's not. | ||
| We're an elk word. | ||
| It's where elk are. | ||
| Here's a spot where Game's been bedded. | ||
| Little beds all over here. | ||
| It's hot. | ||
| It just makes sense. | ||
| Oh god, bolt frayers, bolt. | ||
| Yeah, those things are cooler. | ||
| It's like a ghost in the forest just shows up. | ||
| There they are, man. | ||
| It's so different. | ||
| It's so enormous, too. | ||
| So those things got wiped out of that area by 1820. You know, like Daniel Boone used to cross over. | ||
| To get down into the Kentucky hunting grounds, he would cross over to Cumberland Gap, which is very near there. | ||
| And then he would go to what we call the Bluegrass Hills. | ||
| And that was a more open environment and had a lot of elk. | ||
| And he would hunt the Bluegrass Hills for elk. | ||
| They'd hunt for deer and hunt for black bear, selling the meat and hides. | ||
| By the 1820, or thereabouts, the elk was just gone. | ||
| Okay, the buffalo got shot out. | ||
| Elk got shot out. | ||
| Deer remained. | ||
| Black bears remained. | ||
| Mountain lions were shot out. | ||
| Wolves were shot out. | ||
| And then they were gone for over 100 years. | ||
| And then they did all that mountaintop coal mining in Kentucky. | ||
| And after the reclamation process, they had chopped down, in the construction of these mines, they destroyed a lot of hardwood forests. | ||
| Deciduous hardwood forests. | ||
| Hickory, beach, oak, all kinds of stuff. | ||
| But when they reclaimed it, they left all these flat mountaintop areas that they just did in... | ||
| You know, grasses and other stabilizing vegetation, not timber. | ||
| And it created sort of this open savanna-like environment. | ||
| People recognized it would be a good place to put elk, and there wasn't a lot of resistance. | ||
| If you went into an agricultural area and decided, you know, we've got a great idea. | ||
| We're going to bring in thousands of seven, eight hundred pound herbivores and cut them loose out here, you would get a ton of resistance. | ||
| But the area is rural enough, and in the reclaimed coal country, there just wasn't a huge... | ||
| Interest in not putting them there. | ||
| So now they've got the biggest elk herd east of the Mississippi. | ||
| There's 10,000 plus elk running around in Kentucky. | ||
| But even still, elk are like 90% not recovered. | ||
| I mean, they were everywhere. | ||
| They were everywhere. | ||
| The weird thing about it is we could totally bring back way more than we have now, but you have a handful of interests that don't like that. | ||
| Auto insurers generally don't like it. | ||
| Agricultural interests don't like it. | ||
| But it's one of those things that we could fix, like that and the buffalo. | ||
| The only thing standing between us and restoring buffalo to more of their native range... | ||
| is popular conception, you know, popular perception of the issue. | ||
| The only thing standing between us and reintroducing elk to more and more of their native range is just selling it to the public. | ||
| Other problems we have You know, you look at something like acidification of the oceans, people are like, geez, I have no idea. | ||
| I don't know what... | ||
| There's no way, right? | ||
| It's impossible to fix this. | ||
| It's too expensive. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| We don't know the science. | ||
| We don't understand the science of it. | ||
| But some stuff, like, when it comes to bringing big animals back, oftentimes it's just a matter of do we want to or not. | ||
| And in Kentucky, there was enough people that wanted to where they made it happen. | ||
| And now it's a thriving herd. | ||
| They're even using that herd. | ||
| They pulled animals. | ||
| The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation spearheaded this thing and provided much of the money and labor for it. | ||
| They pulled animals from... | ||
| I can't remember if it was 17 or 20 source sites, moved them into Kentucky. | ||
| Now Kentucky's a source site for other reintroductions. | ||
| So they're pulling animals out of Kentucky now and using them to reintroduce herds and other places where they were extirpated from. | ||
| What other places are they planting it now? | ||
| They've got some going into, I know in Virginia, they're bringing some in. | ||
| I'm not sure if they brought some into North Carolina, but North Carolina had native herds. | ||
| It's just an amazing animal. | ||
| The meat is so incredibly healthy. | ||
| It's really like a breast, a pound of chicken and a pound of elk. | ||
| The elk will have less cholesterol. | ||
| It's healthier for you, less fat, more protein. | ||
| It's the best meat out there, man. | ||
| As far as eating? | ||
| The taste of it? | ||
| There's no bad elk. | ||
| They're just good. | ||
| Even the big giant ones. | ||
| Yeah, they're just good, man. | ||
| My brother killed one one time. | ||
| He had a really hard... | ||
| It was just tough. | ||
| He hadn't aged it, but you need a nice facility. | ||
| To be able to consistently age stuff, because if the weather's against you, you can't age it. | ||
| Most people don't have a walk-in cooler where they can go hang 400, 500 pounds of meat. | ||
| And that is what an elk is. | ||
| So if you get one and it's hot, oftentimes you've got to get it into a freezer, and it'll age a little bit in the freezer. | ||
| But anyways, he killed one. | ||
| The flavor was great, but it was just a tough, tough, tough bull to chew on. | ||
| Just a big, muscular animal. | ||
| And it's just tough. | ||
| And it was funny, because he... | ||
| He started, the only vegetable he was interested in eating, I'm going to tell you this, was boiled cabbage. | ||
| Because he's like, I only have so much muscle power in my jaw, and I can't waste any of my jaw muscle power on anything but chewing my elk up. | ||
|
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So he would eat boiled cabbage and his elk. | |
| Until he got done with it. | ||
|
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Let me tell you a funny story about this guy too. | |
| His aversion to waste. | ||
| A buddy of ours got married one time and his bride's Neighbors were out of town during the wedding ceremonies. | ||
| The bride's neighbor says, well, I'll open my house up if you got some out-of-town guests who need a place to stay because I'm on vacation anyways. | ||
| So they give this house where it's just for the groomsmen to hang out. | ||
| Me and my brothers were the groomsmen and some other guys, and so we get to stay in this house. | ||
| During our stay, he has occasion, my brother Matt, has occasion to peek in the guy's freezer and sees in his freezer that he's got an elk he killed four years ago. | ||
| It's dated from four years ago. | ||
| And he has a moral crisis where he's like, is it worse to steal or is it worse to allow such a beautiful animal's flesh to go to waste when this guy inevitably... | ||
| We'll declare this freezer burned and throw it away. | ||
| Like if he was going to eat it, he would have ate it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Three years ago. | ||
| Three and a half years ago. | ||
| So when we left, he had a bunch of that in his duffel bag and went home and ate it because he couldn't stomach the thought of that animal going to waste. | ||
| Like his reverence for it is so high that he can't allow someone else to trifle with it. | ||
| How many years is an animal good in a freezer? | ||
| I'm telling you what, man. | ||
| It depends on the animal. | ||
| Lean stuff like elk. | ||
| If you trim away... | ||
| Okay, lean stuff like hooved animals, hooved game animals. | ||
| If you trim away the fat, which we don't call fat, we call tallow, it's waxy. | ||
| If you trim that stuff away and you either seal it with a vacuum sealer and then don't mess with the bag, like don't poke any holes in the bag so that the seal stays good and treat it very gently so that the seal stays intact. | ||
| Or you wrap it in saran wrap and then wrap it in wax freezer paper. | ||
| You could not Pepsi challenge that stuff if it was a year old against stuff that was a month old. | ||
| What about two years, three years, four years? | ||
| I've done it at two. | ||
| Two is, for me personally, the longest out I've gone is two. | ||
| I've heard of people going more. | ||
| And at two... | ||
| When you thaw it and you look at it, you can tell something happened to it, but you can trim it up and have it be. | ||
| And I've served old stuff like that to my wife. | ||
| The only time it happens to me is if I wind up having something get kind of lost in my freezer. | ||
| If you don't practice good freezer management. | ||
| Like I try to do what would be last in first out, right? | ||
| But now and then just something happens and you lose track of something and you find some old thing. | ||
| I've served stuff to my wife that was two years old and she didn't flag it. | ||
| While eating it. | ||
| Do you use her as an experiment? | ||
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No, just do it. | |
| She'll call me out. | ||
| She eats more wild game meat than most people. | ||
| She eats wild game meat every night. | ||
| That's all you have in your house, right? | ||
| When we're at home, we just eat game meat. | ||
| Lately, we've been eating salmon and halibut, which you can't really complain about. | ||
| She's eaten tons of it. | ||
| Recently, I'm trying to get this overturned, but right now there's a moratorium on bear meat. | ||
| In your house? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you got tricking those. | ||
| Yeah, so her and my kids, she said that you will not serve bear meat to my kids. | ||
| Oh, wow, because of you getting that illness. | ||
| Because I got the worm. | ||
|
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I got worms. | |
| But you only get that illness if you undercook it. | ||
| It's like 150 degrees, right? | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| Isn't that what it is? | ||
| And I tried to explain that. | ||
| So, this spring we hunted black bears. | ||
| We hunted black bears in the Alaska range. | ||
| I took a guy hunting who you should have on this show at some point. | ||
| A guy named Rourke Denver. | ||
| He's a He's just leaving the service now. | ||
| He's a Navy SEAL commander. | ||
| He wrote a book called Damn Few, Making the Modern SEAL Warrior. | ||
| You remember a few years ago when that movie Active Valor came out and it was all active duty SEALs? | ||
| He's one of the stars in that movie. | ||
| Took him out bear hunting. | ||
| He grew up fishing and liked to fish a lot. | ||
| Hadn't done any hunting, but definitely grew up in the out of doors. | ||
| Obviously, over the last 13-14 years, they've been just... | ||
| He's been just consumed by training and being deployed again and again and again to Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| So he hasn't messed around outside, even though it was very important to him growing up. | ||
| He just, like I say, he's leaving the service now. | ||
| I took him out on a hunt, and we went up black bear hunting. | ||
| And in the end, we got on this big black bear and called him with a predator call, and he killed the bear, and we walked him. | ||
| It's a big boar. | ||
| It's like a six and a half foot boar. | ||
| And I said, and we're cutting it up, and I'm saying to him on camera, I'm like, I'm telling you what, man, if a bear is going to have trichinosis, it's going to be him. | ||
| And what I'm talking about was, Montana used to do free, they used to do free testing for trichinosis. | ||
| So you could send in a, they asked for specifically a golf ball sized piece of the tongue. | ||
| And you could send it into the MSU, and an MSU would send you the results on your bear. | ||
| The first bear I ever sent in for testing was from a 17-year-old black bear. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| And that bear meat came back positive. | ||
| Besides steaks and roasts, I had 83 pounds of ground meat off that black bear. | ||
| It was a big bear. | ||
| So I send the thing and it comes back and it's positive. | ||
| And once it's positive, you are excused from wanton waste laws. | ||
| So it's illegal to waste game meat. | ||
| They spell out in great detail what you're obligated to retain on an animal and use. | ||
| There's some areas in Alaska, for instance, where if you kill a moose, you have to bring the liver home. | ||
| It's specified. | ||
| Legally, you're obligated to salvage the liver. | ||
| So they sent a thing saying, we're not going to give you a new bear tag, but you're excusing if you want to discard the meat, you can discard the meat. | ||
| And I was like, there's no way I'm going to do that. | ||
| The only thing worse to me than getting trigonosis was throwing away this bear meat. | ||
| So I just got a meat thermometer, a nice one, and ate the whole bear. | ||
| I never got another bear tested. | ||
| And they told me, I read this thing, they did this study in Montana where these two counties in northwest Montana that have really high bear populations. | ||
| It's Lincoln County and Sanders County. | ||
| And they said that they've never tested a bear from those counties that was over six years of age that didn't have trichinosis. | ||
| So trichinosis is just something like you're not born with it, right? | ||
| You eat infected meat and... | ||
| You can track the disease, and then you wind up having those little cysts, the larvae in your muscle tissue, and it just is passed along through consumption. | ||
| It's the reason you're supposed to cook pork to well done, and now it's not really that way anymore because they've gotten it out of domestic pork so much because when they stop feeding pigs restaurant slop, they really cut trichinosis out because what they realize is when they're feeding pigs restaurant slop, slop you're inadvertently giving them rats and mice that are sort of caught up in the cycle of restaurant slop right and rats and mice are big carriers so once they got rid of then once they made it illegal | ||
| and they had like only the the usda inspected pigs are feeding on controlled sources not stuff from you know garbage pails i used to wash dishes at the summer camp when i was kid and every day a pig farmer came and got all the food scraps and he fed them and he was selling inspected pork so you can't do that now so now 90 some percent of the black bear cases or so 90 some percent of the trichinosis cases in the u.s come from bear meat i'm explaining all this to rourke | ||
| And the next day... | ||
| I'm explaining another interesting thing about black bear meat, how there's a lot of variability in black bear meat. | ||
| Some are great, some are not so great. | ||
| So I'm talking about when I kill a bear, I'm always really interested to get a taste of it to see if we're dealing with, if we got gold or bronze, right? | ||
| And we start a fire and it's raining. | ||
| And we start a little fire and skewer up just some pieces just to sample it. | ||
| And it's raining and we're feeding it the firewood and everything's wet and it's just a pain in the ass trying to get it cooked. | ||
| And eventually I kind of peel this piece apart in my hands. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, you know, we're cool. | ||
| We're cool. | ||
| So there's six of us. | ||
| We eat it. | ||
| I never think another thing about it, right? | ||
| So, the next day we cook some shanks, but we cook the piss out of these shanks. | ||
| Like, we make asabuco braised shanks and cook them for five or six hours, right? | ||
| We eat a whole bunch of that, eat some grayling, eat some rainbow trout, go home, a month goes by, and I get, the shit's real bad. | ||
| So, and it's like a weird kind of the shits. | ||
| So I sent a text message to the guys I work with saying, does anybody have like a weird kind of the shits? | ||
| Because I'm worried that we got Giardi or something or Cryptosporidia from water contamination. | ||
| And one of the guys writes back and he says, no, but man, do I got some bizarre muscle aches, you know? | ||
| Now, yeah, well, never mind that. | ||
| I'm worried about my shits. | ||
| You know, I'm not worried about your problem. | ||
| So a couple of days later, I remember I'm like crossing the street and I'm like, God, that's a weird feeling in my back, you know, and it just got worse and worse and worse. | ||
| And I eventually texted this guy and I'm like, what were you saying about muscle aches, dude? | ||
| And it wound up four of us. | ||
| All had it. | ||
| And when we started putting it together, it was like, we all have the same weird thing. | ||
| Intense muscle pain in our calves. | ||
| Intense muscle pain in our necks. | ||
| Fevers. | ||
| And we haven't seen each other for a month. | ||
| And we all got sick on July 5. So it was like, this isn't the common cold. | ||
| So there's an incubation period. | ||
| A month. | ||
| What happens is you eat... | ||
| The only thing that can liberate those larvae from their cysts is stomach acid. | ||
| So when you consume the meat, your stomach acid dissolves the thing and liberates the larva. | ||
| And you got boys and girls in there. | ||
| And it takes them forever. | ||
| It takes them weeks. | ||
| They build up their numbers, you know, they get kicking ass. | ||
| Then they get into your bloodstream, the larva do. | ||
| And then about a month into it, the larva start burrowing out of your vascular system. | ||
| And getting into your muscle tissue. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| When they start setting up shop. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| So, the CDC gets involved in this. | ||
| I was now in Kings County, okay? | ||
| They sent me a thing recently where no one in Kings County has had... | ||
| Well, like, last year in the whole country, there was like 11 or 12 cases of trichinosis in the whole country. | ||
| No one in Kings County had it in four or five years. | ||
| The last guy that had it, I think a guy in... | ||
| I think a guy in 2007 or 2011. I can't remember which. | ||
| Where's Kings County? | ||
| Seattle area. | ||
| He had it from making homemade mountain lion jerky. | ||
| Like the only guy. | ||
| So they're all excited. | ||
| And they want me to give them a piece of the meat. | ||
| And I give them a piece of that meat. | ||
| They come in the car and I go down and hand them a shank off this bear. | ||
| And I told her, I said, if you eat that, cook it. | ||
| And she tests it and they get back to me a while later. | ||
| And that thing had 868 larvae per gram. | ||
| Which is something like 460,000 larvae per pound. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| There's these blown up images of it. | ||
| And it's just like... | ||
| It's just larva. | ||
| So the whole meat is just infested. | ||
| It's just infested with larva. | ||
| That bear must be in misery all the time. | ||
| I don't know what he's thinking. | ||
| But I'm fine now. | ||
| So out of the four of us that get sick, I go down and they say in severe cases, if it attacks your pulmonary system, if the larva attack your heart, there's a medication you take. | ||
| I say, well, I'm just going to take the medication. | ||
| And they're like, well, you know, you might not need to. | ||
| I said, well, I want to go take it. | ||
| I go down, and that medication is $2,400. | ||
| Even with health insurance, it's $1,100 to buy the medication. | ||
| So the other guys are like, well, I'll just wait and see what happens to you. | ||
| We all get better at the same time. | ||
| And that medication only kills them in your stomach, right? | ||
| So for 6 to 10 years, depending on your source, if you were to eat me, So I don't know if that means I have 868 larvae per gram. | ||
| I just have a hard time fathoming that. | ||
| But we're all positive. | ||
| We're positive carriers. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So you, right now, have those things in your muscle tissue. | ||
| That's my understanding. | ||
| I read a lot about this, as you can imagine. | ||
| I was very curious about it. | ||
| I always thought when you got trichinosis, you died. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| I don't know what I thought. | ||
| I've been writing about this and talking about this on TV for 10 years. | ||
| Telling people, and by the way, make sure to... | ||
| But you know, they say familiarity breeds complacency. | ||
| I thought it was contempt. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, well then that's my new saying. | ||
| Because I felt like... | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| I can sit here right now and picture the piece of meat that I'm sure got me sick. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So... | ||
| I don't know what I was thinking, man. | ||
| So that's all in your body? | ||
| My wife's like, it's so embarrassing. | ||
| She's like, you're supposed to be like the meat eater. | ||
| I'm like, you know what, though? | ||
| And I was embarrassed. | ||
| And it's embarrassing, right? | ||
| But at the same time, I'm like, you know what? | ||
| Where do all the mountaineers die? | ||
| They die on the mountain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's not like, oh, you should be the last guy to die in the mountain. | ||
| You claim to be this big mountaineer. | ||
| It's like, well, you know what? | ||
| Exposure. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's just my way of hiding the fact that it was really stupid. | ||
| It was a stupid thing to do. | ||
| And I remember Doherty saying, are you sure you want people to know that this happened to you? | ||
| Because isn't it kind of embarrassing to you? | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, it's embarrassing to me, but I'm just going to talk about it. | ||
| Cookie bear meat. | ||
| So, yeah, my wife's like, no way. | ||
| We're just done with the bear meat thing. | ||
| And at my brother's wedding, at his rehearsal dinner, we're doing all wild game for his rehearsal dinner. | ||
| So I had smoked up a ham off this bear that I'm going to serve at his rehearsal dinner. | ||
| He says, don't tell anybody about the worm deal because it'll turn him off to the whole damn meal. | ||
| And I said, well, I feel now like I'll have to say this has been cooked, but FYI, I got trichinosis from eating this bear uncooked. | ||
| And he thinks that, he's just like, I'd rather you not serve it than serve it and bring it up. | ||
|
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Whoa. | |
| Because I think you should serve it. | ||
| And in the end, I decided not to serve it at his wedding. | ||
| I would have eaten it, as long as it's cooked to 150 degrees, especially smoked. | ||
|
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I know, but people aren't like that, man. | |
| People aren't like that. | ||
| I smoked that ham from that pig that we shot, and I did it in your method with the brine. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| It was some of the best-tasting meat I've ever had. | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| I'm telling you, man. | ||
| And that son of a bitch probably has... | ||
| I mean, not probably, but there's a very good chance he's got it. | ||
| They eat meat. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was so tender and delicious, but I've cooked a bunch of it, just put it on the grill, just seasoned it and put it on the grill, and it's amazing how tough it is. | ||
| Yeah, it can be tough. | ||
| You gotta chew through that shit, but it tastes good. | ||
| Did you get a grinder? | ||
| Yeah, I got a grinder. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I got a grinder for the venison after Wisconsin. | ||
| Callan and I, we made buckets of hamburger meat. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Oh, it's so good. | ||
| And you can grind up that wild pork, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd be curious just to take a piece of that wild pork and send it in and see if it has trichinosis or not. | ||
| Do you want me to? | ||
| I'll send it in. | ||
|
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|
I don't know. | |
| I mean, what is that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What would you do with the information if you knew? | ||
| Make sure I did what I'm already doing, I guess. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, when I cooked it, I cooked it, the smoked ham, I cooked for like fucking 10 hours or something crazy. | ||
| It took forever. | ||
| And you get it up to the right temperature. | ||
| Some people even say... | ||
| Like, Harold McGee's Science and Lore of the Kitchen, or Science and Lore of Cooking, whatever it is. | ||
| It's a great... | ||
| It's like the science of food and food cooking and ingredients. | ||
| It's a phenomenal reference book. | ||
| In there, he says it seems to be... | ||
| I think it was in his book. | ||
| He says it seems that there's evidence to suggest that freezing kills it. | ||
| Though the USDA still sticks to that guideline of cooking temperature. | ||
| But that, like, prolonged freezing kills it. | ||
| But... | ||
| A couple years ago, a couple guys got trichinoluses from walrus meat in Alaska. | ||
| Fucking walrus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, however that son of a bitch got it, but the walrus had it. | ||
| And they think that there might be... | ||
| This worm is Trichinella spiralis, I think is his name. | ||
| I got pictures of the thing on my phone, what the worm looks like. | ||
| So, they think there might be some northern varieties... | ||
| In walrus and polar bear that are less susceptible to freezing. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| And that perhaps that freezing is not to be relied on when killing these worms. | ||
| That it's a different northern variety that's just got more tolerance? | ||
| And again, man, this is just something I read. | ||
| Who the fuck is eating polar bear and walrus? | ||
| Wow, people like walrus. | ||
| Really? | ||
| There's a guy, you know, it's funny, I've never had it, but I've been arranging to have some because I drew a muskox tag for Nunavac Island this winter. | ||
| And when you hunt Nunavac Island, if you draw that tag, you have to hire what's called a transporter. | ||
| Because the only place to land is a Mikoruk on Nunavac, and it's a native village. | ||
| It's an Inuit or Eskimo village. | ||
| And your transporter can't do guide services. | ||
| He can't tell you where an animal is, but he provides transportation. | ||
| So you rent snow machines. | ||
| Or however you're getting around. | ||
| And he'll give you a place to stay when you're on the island. | ||
| It's called a transporter. | ||
| The transporter that I'm using is a walrus hunter. | ||
| So they're protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act. | ||
| So white guys don't go hunt walrus. | ||
| But natives who aren't administered by the Marine Manal Protection Act have their own self-governing body called the Walrus Commission. | ||
| And I think the Walrus Commission, I can't remember, meets in Nome or Kotzebue. | ||
| And the Walrus Commission will make decisions about what walrus harvest different coastal villages are allowed to have. | ||
| And out there on Nunavac, those hunters out there will periodically go and hunt walrus. | ||
| And the guy I'm using as my transporter goes on the walrus hunts. | ||
| So I've been encouraging him to make sure to have some, because I'd like to eat it when I come out, and I'd like to do a thing about that and hang out with this guy and eat walrus meat. | ||
| And he says he's going to make sure to have some on hand. | ||
| And are walruses, like when you hunt a walrus, you're allowed to eat the meat, but you're not allowed to hunt it. | ||
| But if someone could give it to you, could you bring it back? | ||
| I don't know about... | ||
| You can't bring the ivory back. | ||
| I don't know about transporting the meat. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| But yeah, I could go into his home. | ||
| And I don't even know the extent of it. | ||
| But I can go into his home and he can serve me a meal. | ||
| Just like people might go up to Nome or whatever and sample muck tuck from whale. | ||
| But no, I'm fairly certain that he could not give me the ivory. | ||
| Because there's the ivory band, so ivory has to have a cultural marking on it. | ||
| You're supposed to turn to artwork. | ||
| So a lot of times, sea otters were nearly extirpated. | ||
| In some places, regionally extirpated by the fur trade, particularly when the Russians had a strong presence in Alaska. | ||
| And now sea otter numbers are really recovered in a lot of areas. | ||
| But still, for natives that are allowed to trap sea otters, they can't just sell the pelt as a pelt. | ||
| They have to do something to it to make it a cultural item, at which point they can exchange it for money. | ||
| So if a native hunter kills a walrus, he can do scrimshaw on that tusk. | ||
| And that puts that tusk in a different legal framework than it would what they call raw ivory. | ||
| Hmm, that's fascinating. | ||
| So I know, but yeah, he can serve me a piece of walrus meat, but I don't know what laws govern me walking away with some, I have no idea. | ||
| Now, seals, they eat seals as well, and they're allowed to hunt and eat seals, the natives and the Inuits. | ||
| Again, it's self-governed. | ||
| I watched Bourdain's show, and he was with this Inuit family, and they were eating a seal, and they butchered the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, that was in northern Canada, right? | ||
| There's like an autonomous zone there. | ||
| The name escapes you right now, but yeah, I know what you're talking about. | ||
| And they were eating it raw. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That doesn't have trichinosis. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I don't know if people were surprised to hear that walruses had trichinosis. | ||
| What does a walrus eat? | ||
| Well, they eat a lot of, you know, clams, crabs. | ||
| I just don't know enough. | ||
| I don't know enough about how that thing got it. | ||
| I don't know enough about what kind of sea animals have that stuff. | ||
| I mean, was he eating a chunk of polar bear that he found frozen? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I would love to know. | ||
| When I had Lyme disease, I did tons of... | ||
| I could have gotten an honorary PhD in Lyme disease after having Lyme disease, and then when I got trigonosis, I started reading everything I could find about trigonosis, but that just got better one day. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| I quit reading about it. | ||
| You just felt better? | ||
| How long did it take? | ||
| Six, seven days. | ||
| One of the guys that had it, he was running 103.9 degree fever for six days, and they're checking him for dengue fever, West Nile virus. | ||
| He had no idea he'd even bring this up. | ||
| One of the dude's girlfriends is a doctor, and she says, finally, I think you boys got trichinosis. | ||
| I go into a doctor, and I'm like, here's what I think I got. | ||
| And they didn't know what the hell I was talking about. | ||
| Well, you said 12 cases a year in the entire country? | ||
| Yeah, they never see it. | ||
| And there's four of you. | ||
| One of them asked me how to spell it. | ||
| One thought I was talking about a venereal disease called trichomoniasis. | ||
| But I eventually convinced them, man. | ||
| Just like when I had Lyme disease, I walked around having to convince people that I had that. | ||
| Well, Lyme disease is really common, though. | ||
| Super common. | ||
| That I don't understand. | ||
| But it just depends on what that particular, I'll use the term, what that particular healthcare provider has run into. | ||
| And you go in and say, like, oh, I'm not feeling so hot, you know, and this and that. | ||
| I think I got Lyme disease. | ||
| It's just like not, you know, yeah, I think if you're in Hudson Valley, New York, you're going to walk in, they're going to be like, hell yeah, you got Lyme disease. | ||
| But in some places, they're going to be like, eh, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what you got. | ||
| Is it weird when you talk to some... | ||
| I mean, doctors are dismissive of things, like real dismissive, and then it turns out that you were right. | ||
| That's got to be infuriating, isn't it? | ||
| That's what I ran into, and I've told this story a thousand times, but when my boy... | ||
| Thank God he didn't get trichinosis. | ||
| He got Lyme disease. | ||
| He and I got Lyme disease at the same time fishing bluegills. | ||
| I was at my mom's in Michigan. | ||
| My mom comes up. | ||
| She was swimming with the boy. | ||
| My mom lives on the same lake I grew up on. | ||
| She was swimming with the boy down on the lake. | ||
| She comes up and says, why is his belly button all red like this? | ||
| I can't tell what happened there. | ||
| It turned into one of those bullseye rashes. | ||
| My wife, I send my wife a text image, like a text message picture of this thing. | ||
| And my wife right away is like, I wonder if he's got Lyme disease. | ||
| It looks like one of those bullseye rashes. | ||
| They talk about Lyme disease. | ||
| So she tells me to send it to his pediatrician. | ||
| Because I had him at my mom's. | ||
| You know, she wasn't there. | ||
| She's like, send it to his pediatrician. | ||
| I sent it to his pediatrician and be like, we're worried about what he's got Lyme. | ||
| She's like, well, just keep an eye on it. | ||
| But you don't keep an eye on those things because those things just go away. | ||
| They don't last forever. | ||
| So all of a sudden, then it's gone. | ||
| But clearly, he had it. | ||
| And so then we wind up going down there because then he gets another one somewhere else. | ||
| And we go down and we're like, we're really concerned he's got Lyme because he gets this bullseye rash. | ||
| And they're like, well, where is it? | ||
| I'm like, well, it's not there now, but it was there. | ||
| And he keeps talking about this and that and the other thing, different symptoms he's having. | ||
| We take him in three times, each time bringing up, I fear that this is what's going on with him. | ||
| When we pull him out of the bathtub for whatever reason in the hot water, he's got these damn circles all over him, but they kind of go away. | ||
| Eventually he's got Bell's palsy. | ||
| He'd take a sip of milk and his milk would run out the corner of his mouth. | ||
| And we'd go in there like, holy shit, he's got Lyme disease. | ||
| At this point, it's been going on for weeks, you know? | ||
| And what's funny is, this place, his pediatrician has a newsletter, and they had a newsletter article that was about Lyme hysteria, about how everyone's so hysterical about Lyme, being like, don't really need to worry about it, you know, everybody's getting hysterical about Lyme, like it's the new bogeyman, you know? | ||
| So in this altercation we have with the pediatrician, I'm like, I feel that your Lyme hysteria thinking and your Lyme hysteria article kind of colored your impression of what I'm telling you when we're coming and you're telling you, and we had to self-diagnose our child. | ||
| At which point they said, I want to have someone else in the room during this discussion. | ||
| They said that? | ||
| Yeah, because we were pissed. | ||
| Well, you easily could have sued the shit out of them if you were so inclined. | ||
| Listen, and I don't worry about thinking that stuff, but I mean, I... I entertained all kinds of ideas if he didn't get better. | ||
| But he responded so quickly to medication. | ||
| But it was unbelievable. | ||
| And meanwhile, I had all the same stuff. | ||
| And I thought it was psychosomatic. | ||
| I wound up having to do the... | ||
| Intravenous stuff. | ||
| You know, Dougherty, he was in the hospital with Lyme meningitis. | ||
| Well, when I ran into you last time we went hunting together, you were really skinny, and I was like, dude, you look like you lost a lot of weight. | ||
| I lost a ton of weight during all that. | ||
| You told me the whole story behind it. | ||
| I was even trying to drink milkshakes and stuff. | ||
| I was down at GNC trying to do stuff. | ||
| Weight gainer, all that stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I had some wilderness athletes send me. | ||
| I was just trying to do anything I could do to put on weight. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It knocked my dick in the dirt bad, man. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| I've heard nothing but horror stories about people getting Lyme disease. | ||
| Nothing but horror stories. | ||
| And then not only that, your body doesn't really ever get rid of it, right? | ||
| No, it's unclear. | ||
| The established scholarly consensus on Lyme, I think, is still this. | ||
| That there's no such thing as chronic Lyme, is what they'll say. | ||
| When I say they, I mean the medical establishment will say that Chronic Lyme doesn't exist. | ||
| There's Lyme disease. | ||
| When you go through treatment, like when I did the 28-day intravenous deal, they put a line that goes in your arm, up to your heart, and you inject these syringes in it. | ||
| When you get done with that, you do not have those bacteria in your body anymore. | ||
| If you go to a Lyme specialist and you tell a Lyme specialist, I have chronic Lyme, I met one. | ||
| I tried to get in to see one of these Lyme specialists, and she said, I don't see chronic Lyme patients. | ||
| I see acute Lyme patients. | ||
| And I had already done one round of antibiotics and I got worse during the round of oral. | ||
| And she's like, oh, you're chronic Lyme, meaning like, oh, it's all in your head. | ||
| What? | ||
| So I go to another infectious disease person. | ||
| I was talking to them and they said, well, it's like, it just seems kind of, it's an urban, chronic Lyme's an urban legend. | ||
| My finding wound up in some way burying out what she said would happen where I finished the stuff. | ||
| I think I got done with it sometime in September. | ||
| And by November, my symptoms were gone. | ||
| That's me. | ||
| My boy got better. | ||
| But I've since then met other people who are very credible individuals, who are not hysterical people, who've been through various rounds of treatment, and they're not getting better. | ||
| The arthritic stuff. | ||
| And Lyme's such a weird thing. | ||
| With my kid, you can't argue with Bell's palsy. | ||
| It's just right there. | ||
| But other stuff like- For folks who don't know what that means, if it's paralysis of the skin. | ||
| Yeah, facial paralysis. | ||
| I mean, he had bad facial paralysis. | ||
| So you can't argue with it, right? | ||
| It's just glaring. | ||
| And that's one of the key. | ||
| That's one of the bullseye rash, Bell's palsy. | ||
| But there's all these other things like arthritic pain, fatigue. | ||
| A lot of people think that all the time they were diagnosing chronic fatigue syndrome was people with Lyme's. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| People with Lyme disease. | ||
| My friend's dad got it from getting vaccinated. | ||
| They used to have a vaccination against Lyme disease. | ||
| But the problem with it, a small percentage of people that got that vaccination would have some genetic marker that would make them predisposed to getting fucking Lyme disease from this vaccine. | ||
| So this guy was terrified of getting Lyme disease, gets a vaccination against Lyme disease, got Lyme disease from the vaccination, and then they stopped making the Lyme disease vaccination. | ||
| So this poor guy has fucking Lyme disease. | ||
| And he's still fucked up. | ||
| He's an old guy. | ||
| It's her dad. | ||
| And he's, you know, he's jacked from this fucking vaccination. | ||
| I haven't checked this from multiple sources. | ||
| I just heard this or read this. | ||
| A couple of interesting facts about Lyme is when my son and I both got it, I remember being like, what are the odds? | ||
| Because you'd read that one or two percent of ticks carry Lyme. | ||
| So I'm like, we would have had to have been covered in hundreds of ticks for both of us. | ||
| To have, you know, statistically for both of us to have gotten it without even seeing any ticks. | ||
| Like, how could this be? | ||
| I later read that in that area, in New York, in that area in Hudson Valley, they've done some stuff where 60 or 70% of the ticks have Lyme. | ||
| And they used to chronicle 30,000 confirmed cases, you know, every year. | ||
| I think last summer they were close to 300,000. | ||
|
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|
It's just blown up. | |
| And it's not so much that it's blown up in new places, it's just that it's becoming much more common in other places. | ||
| And isn't there a direct correlation between overpopulation of deer and these ticks? | ||
| Some people say that because it's like in that thing's lifespan, you know, it gets on deer. | ||
| But I've heard other things that even just like rodents, you know, so like smaller furred animals. | ||
| I'm not really clear on that, man. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| I know that when you look at places that have it, you look at places that have a lot of deer, but I don't know if you had a third as many deer if you'd have higher or lower, if you'd have necessarily lower infection rates. | ||
| I can't answer that. | ||
| But Doug Duren, who you know, I think last summer, twice he got put on the immediate antibiotics. | ||
| Because now, when you find one of those ticks buried in you, if you go into a doctor, and if you're not weird about medication, the doctor's just going to give you a super heavy dose of antibiotics that kills it before it gets a hold of you. | ||
| If you wait like I did, it gets into your nervous system. | ||
| So I even had, for a day, I had amnesia. | ||
|
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|
Whew! | |
| Where I'm sitting at my desk and I get up to do something and I sit back down and I didn't know who wrote what's on my computer. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| I started... | ||
| I knew I had to write about a subject because I knew that before the amnesia kicked out. | ||
| I lost the whole day. | ||
| I lost like eight hours of time. | ||
| And I knew that I was supposed to write about a subject. | ||
| And here was a thing on my computer about that subject. | ||
| I started taking sentences... | ||
| First, I took a big block, like a paragraph of text, and put it into Google to try to find how I cut and paste, how I managed to cut and paste an article on the subject I was supposed to be writing about into a Word document. | ||
| But there's no match. | ||
| Then I just started taking little blocks of words in quotes, and there's no match. | ||
| I'm like, this is not from online. | ||
| Then I start thinking that one of the guys I work with, I thought this guy, Jared Andrew Kanis, who was near there, who works at ZPZ. I start thinking that he somehow is playing some joke on me where he came and wrote about what I was supposed to write about. | ||
| On my desk, I also have a book, one of my favorite hunting books, called Hunt High by Duncan Gilchrist. | ||
| And on it, I had written Mark Boardman, Vortex Optics. | ||
| I look at the book, I know the book. | ||
| I know who Mark Borman is, but I can't imagine why Mark Borman's name would be on a sticky note on that book. | ||
| And I look at my other hand, and on my hand I have LOP written. | ||
| And LOP is a term length of pull. | ||
| It's a firearm term. | ||
| And a guy wanted a length of pull off a firearm. | ||
| And I wrote LOP on my hand. | ||
| I looked at my hand like I didn't know who put that there, how long it had been there, what it meant. | ||
| And I tried to get home and couldn't get home. | ||
| You couldn't figure it out? | ||
| I got on the wrong train, got off at the wrong spot. | ||
| We were living in Brooklyn. | ||
| Got off at the wrong spot. | ||
| Came up, recognized a sport, recognized like a sporting goods, like a sports place called, I can't remember, it doesn't matter what it's called, like a sporting goods place. | ||
| And called my wife and told her that's where I was. | ||
| And then all of a sudden things started making more and more and more and more sense. | ||
| Dude, it was wild, man. | ||
| That's scary shit. | ||
| I thought I was dying. | ||
| We did an episode of that Joe Rogan Questions Everything show on Morgellons. | ||
| Morgellons is this disease that most doctors dismiss. | ||
| They think that the people that are saying they have this, that there's something wrong with them psychologically, that they have some sort of a psychosomatic issue, and that what they're really doing is scratching themselves until they create these abscesses. | ||
|
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|
Gotcha. | |
| And then sometimes even putting things in their skin and then claiming that these things have been growing out of their skin because they found like carpet fibers and stuff in their skin that these people sent in. | ||
| But then when we went to these conferences where these people would meet that have this Morgellons issue, you realize you're also talking about some seriously educated people and some of them that are doctors. | ||
| And one of the doctors that we talked to said there is a direct correlation between Morgellons disease and people who have Lyme disease. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| And what he said is... | ||
| Very intelligent guy. | ||
| He wasn't a nutter. | ||
| What he said is that he believes that there's a neurotoxic effect that you get from Lyme disease, from some strains of Lyme disease. | ||
| Because the way he said was... | ||
| If you look at Lyme disease, he goes, you're not looking at, like, if a tick infects you, you're not looking at just Lyme disease. | ||
| But it's possible you might have gotten 10 different things from that tick. | ||
| Oh yeah, man. | ||
| I learned about a lot of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that one of those 10 different things is causing this neurotoxic effect that literally is making you go crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when these doctors are examining these people and they say, oh, they're crazy, they think that carpet fibers are growing out of their skin. | ||
| No, they have Lyme disease, and the Lyme disease, along with all this other shit, is causing this neurotoxic effect, and that is what's making them think that there's something wrong out of their skin. | ||
| So it's not that they're just crazy, it's that they have a disease that's making them go crazy. | ||
| And that was pretty illuminating, because this guy was talking about seeing things, seeing worms underneath his skin of his eyes when he was looking in the mirror, and he goes, and I knew it wasn't there, but I'm seeing it anyway. | ||
| And he goes, I could feel it moving across my eye, but then there was nothing there. | ||
| And he's like, and it was pretty clear to me as a doctor that there was something going on with my mind that had a direct correlation between this disease. | ||
| So all these people that have this Morgellons, they also have this Lyme disease. | ||
| You know, I don't know if Dan Doty told me about this, but he all of a sudden has this excruciating neck pain. | ||
| And he goes down to an emergency room. | ||
| This is the same time this is going on with me. | ||
| He goes down to an emergency room. | ||
| They give him some muscle relaxers or something. | ||
| And he comes back home and it gets worse and weirder. | ||
| He goes down to another place. | ||
| And they tell him the same thing. | ||
| He got a pinched nerve. | ||
| And we're text messaging about... | ||
| I was like, hey, what's going on? | ||
| How are you feeling? | ||
| And I remember that when I was finally talking to a person who knew about Lyme, they kept telling me to move my neck and see if it hurt. | ||
| And I told Dodie, I said, you know what? | ||
| When I was down there, they kept asking me to move my head and does my neck feel weird? | ||
| Go down to that place. | ||
| So he just leaves his one doctor, takes a cab down to this place where I had gone, and they admit him. | ||
| And he had meningitis. | ||
| Spent, I don't know how, you know, four, five, six days in the hospital. | ||
| Wound up with the PICC line. | ||
| And meningitis from Lyme disease? | ||
| Lyme meningitis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| Because in your, you know, like an infection is in your spinal fluid. | ||
| I have a friend who died from that. | ||
| Died from meningitis. | ||
| He went to the hospital, went into the emergency room, and he was a comic. | ||
| And he was one of these, he was real busy. | ||
| He was like, fuck this place. | ||
| They're making me wait too long. | ||
| I'm leaving. | ||
| And he got out of there, got on a plane, flew to Hawaii. | ||
| When he got to Hawaii, he was dying. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| By the time he got there, it was too late. | ||
| Yeah, I was scared because I remember, but I guess there's different forms, but anyway, it's his. | ||
| They did a spinal tap and he was all messed up. | ||
| Meningitis is some scary shit. | ||
| I've had some of the weird, in the last three or four years... | ||
| I've had just some of the weirdest, like, freaky health things. | ||
| But they're parasites. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, man. | |
| Almost everything that you've had. | ||
| Giardia or something. | ||
| I got a colon infection. | ||
| From water. | ||
| And that was from the other show, right? | ||
| That was from, like... | ||
| The Wild Within? | ||
| No, I was doing Meat Eater. | ||
| So I had, like, I got really bad poison oak and was on steroids for that, but also got some kind of waterborne parasite. | ||
| And then the steroids combat your ability to fight infection. | ||
| I went up in the hospital, went up, like, shitting my own couch. | ||
| My wife's like, my wife's like, listen, you know, there's nothing now. | ||
| She's like, I felt bad about having you be there when I was having babies. | ||
| She's like, you got nothing on me now, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's hilarious. | |
| Just shit your own couch. | ||
| So, I couldn't even tell when it was happening, you know. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I thought, oh man, again, I thought I was going to die. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So anyways, I just had like, just the weirdest stuff. | |
| Dodie, I keep bringing up Dodie, but Dodie's like, you need to go to a shaman. | ||
| Because he thinks that there's some thing, like, I need to have, like, there's some sin I committed against the universe or something, and it's like, he thinks I need to go to a shaman to get right. | ||
| Doty did too much DMT. He did too much DMT. Trust me, you can do too much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You gotta be careful with that fucking ayahuasca. | |
| Yeah, that's hilarious. | ||
| That whole shaman thing is a real trip. | ||
| You know, the whole going to the jungle and taking that medication and having these spiritual experiences, it'll get you convinced that everything's all tied together and that somehow or another you've committed some sort of a sin against the universe. | ||
| I gotta let you talk to him. | ||
| I don't want to speak for the boy. | ||
| I'm already talking about him too much. | ||
| Dodie? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Dodie and I had a long, extensive conversation about his ayahuasca experiences. | ||
| And I've never done ayahuasca, but I've done DMT many times. | ||
| I did it again recently. | ||
| I did it last weekend. | ||
| And the DMT experience is essentially what ayahuasca is is an orally active version of DMT. Because the Amazon shaman and the people- What is derived? | ||
| It's from two different plants. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't know the first thing about this stuff. | ||
| DMT is dimethyltryptamine and it exists in thousands of different plants. | ||
| And the reason why you don't get it, like you don't get high when you eat it, is because your stomach produces monoamine oxidase. | ||
| So monoamine oxidase, what you need to do is take an inhibitor so that you could get it in an orally active form. | ||
| So most of the time, when most people get DMT, what they're getting is a synthesized version where they've taken Cochia viridis or all these different plants, they've extracted it down to the DMT and then you smoke it. | ||
| And what they do in the Amazon... | ||
| It's regulated in the U.S. or not? | ||
| It's illegal. | ||
| Schedule 1. The issue with it being a drug, though, is that it exists in so many different forms, you would have to make grass illegal. | ||
| I got you. | ||
| If you had Phalaris grass growing in your front lawn, you essentially have a schedule-run drug growing on your lawn in massive quantities. | ||
| So it can't be enforced. | ||
| But if they find the powder, if they find it synthesized and turned into a powder that you could smoke and freebase, then it's illegal, and then it's a Schedule I drug. | ||
| But it exists in your own human neurochemistry. | ||
| It's like making saliva illegal. | ||
| Yeah, now I'm with you. | ||
| It's literally that ridiculous. | ||
| The Amazon shaman have figured out a way to take the vine of one plant and the leaves of another, and they boil them together. | ||
| So essentially, they use harming, which is a natural MAO inhibitor, and they combine it with this plant, and they boil it into this potion, and that's what ayahuasca is. | ||
| So it's DMT and an MAO inhibitor together in this elixir. | ||
| You drink it, and you have... | ||
| What's close to the smoked DMT experience as you can get, but not quite as potent. | ||
| But there's not a synthetic version. | ||
| Of ayahuasca? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's all extracted from plants. | ||
| DMT, they don't produce it in labs. | ||
| I think you can produce it in a lab. | ||
| I think you can, but the precursors of it are very tightly controlled by the DEA. Yeah. | ||
| Like if they found out that you were buying a certain amount of this chemical that you would use to make the synthetic version of it, they would flag you. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| But the plants are legal. | ||
| So you could go online. | ||
| There was a guy that got arrested and they took all of his money and locked him up in jail. | ||
| I think it was called Happy Frog or something like that. | ||
| The name of his company. | ||
| I don't remember the name of his company, but he sold all these legal plants. | ||
| But the plants were all totally legal, but he sold them with the pretense that you could take these plants and extract DMT from them, and then he was arrested for that. | ||
| Because he was putting A and B together for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he was allowing you to find the source to do it yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But even though what he was selling was legal, I think he got off. | ||
| I'm kind of speaking out of school here, because it was a few years back, and I didn't totally pay too much attention to it, but it is in so many different sources. | ||
| And it's a hallucinogenic. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, it's a human neurotransmitter and an incredibly potent drug that's also the most transient drug ever exists or one of the most transient drugs ever observed. | ||
| So if you get, like if say if you smoke DMT, like I did it, like I said last week, you're blasted to the center of the universe for about 15 minutes and then you're back to baseline. | ||
| Like you're completely sober in 15 minutes. | ||
| Are you serious? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Your body knows exactly what to do with it because it's such a normal part of your chemistry that your body can bring it back to baseline within minutes. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's the weirdest shit ever. | ||
| And the weirdest aspect of it is while you're blown out, like blown out in this intense psychedelic state, you immediately think, I'm here all the time. | ||
| I've been here before. | ||
| I know what this is. | ||
| It's not unfamiliar. | ||
| It's completely alien but yet familiar at the same time. | ||
| So Doty, in all those ayahuasca experiences that he had when he was talking about all these flashbacks, all this craziness, what happens is you open up this... | ||
| It's a weird effect where if you do DMT and you have these powerful experiences, you open up this door. | ||
| And I don't know what the chemical effect of it is or what the mechanism is, but something happens when you open up that door where you can open up that door again, even in a dream. | ||
| And so the speculation is that what happens when people have, like, near-death experiences, when people have alien abduction experiences, when people have these crazy things they say happen to them, most likely what it is is some sort of a weird endogenous dump of DMT. Like, you know how something can happen to you when you get this crazy adrenaline rush? | ||
| They believe it's possible that something can happen to you when you get a crazy DMT rush. | ||
| That it's very difficult to access, but that it's a function of the brain. | ||
| And it's causing you to, for lack of a better word, it's causing you to trip. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But you might perceive it as a memory. | ||
| You could perceive it at, well, it feels as real, if not more real, than reality itself. | ||
| Because it's intensely colored and brightly lit. | ||
| And there's no borders to things, but yet there are. | ||
| It's very, very, very difficult to describe. | ||
| I'm doing a terrible job of describing it. | ||
| And all around you, it's alive with entities. | ||
| And these entities are communicating with you, both with sound and with visual cues. | ||
| It's a very, very, very weird trip. | ||
| If you think in a negative way or if you try to control it, they'll, like, literally shake their finger at you. | ||
| You go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| But then if you get it right, it calms down a little bit. | ||
| Like, it's like a lesson in how to think. | ||
| It's a very, very bizarre, bizarre trip. | ||
| The most bizarre out of all the psychedelics by far. | ||
| The way I describe it is mushrooms times a million plus aliens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's the mandala. | ||
| It's the center of the mandala of all... | ||
| This is how McKenna described it. | ||
| The mandala of all the different psychedelic experiences, the center of it, literally the fucking point zero, the event horizon of that is DMT. So do you feel like... | ||
| To do it, do you feel like you're being recreational or constructive? | ||
| Constructive. | ||
| I try not to do anything recreationally. | ||
| I smoke a little weed recreationally, have a drink recreationally. | ||
| But I think psychedelic experiences, they're so beneficial. | ||
| I've gotten so much benefit out of them that I don't... | ||
| I feel like it'd be a waste. | ||
| Do you mean personally or as a performer? | ||
| Personally. | ||
| Well, as a performer, eventually. | ||
| Personally first, and as a performer, I benefit from whatever I get out of it personally. | ||
| Because it's all tied together. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| But you don't think of funny jokes or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| The people don't tell you funny jokes that you can put into your act. | ||
| Nope, nope, nope. | ||
| No, it's all about correcting your bullshit. | ||
| It's almost like, alright, you haven't been here in a while. | ||
| Come on in, we gotta say it. | ||
| It's like going to the dentist. | ||
| Have you ever been to the dentist in like two years? | ||
| You're one of those fucking guys? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Sit down. | ||
| Sit down. | ||
| Let me see what the fuck you got going on here. | ||
| Oh, you got this. | ||
| Why are you thinking about this? | ||
| Don't think about that. | ||
| That's just stupid. | ||
| You're wasting your time thinking. | ||
| It's like they sort of explain to you the wasted paths that you're taking with your thinking and your mind and then even with your actions. | ||
| So how long do the 15 minutes feel like? | ||
| Well, I did several in a day. | ||
| So I did three or four 15-minute ones in a row. | ||
| So, you know, like, just blast off, come back to baseline, hit it again. | ||
| But would you be like, man, that was just 15 minutes, or would it feel like you were gone, like, days? | ||
| No, it doesn't feel like days. | ||
| It feels like... | ||
| When you're in the state itself, it almost feels like time doesn't exist. | ||
| Unless you think about it too much. | ||
| Sometimes I'm thinking about, I don't want this to end so quick. | ||
| And then they're like, stop thinking all this stupid shit. | ||
| You're wasting all your time. | ||
| Imagine enjoying a great movie and being like, man, this movie's going to end soon. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| This movie's only 10 minutes in and I know it's only got an hour and 50 minutes to go. | ||
| Shit, I wish it could go on forever. | ||
| That's a wasted thought. | ||
| Like, why not just be in the moment and enjoy it? | ||
| So it's, you know, that expression, be in the moment, is like so overdone and hippie and fucking yoga. | ||
| Like, so many people say things like that and it just makes you moan. | ||
| Like, oh, you shut the fuck up. | ||
| Because it's like... | ||
| It's so cliched and annoying when they say it, but there's wisdom in it, unfortunately. | ||
| There's just so many of these fucking fake spiritual people that clog up all these words and they ruin some of these definitions because, you know, oh, just be in the moment, find your center. | ||
| Oh, fuck you. | ||
| Okay, I'm not listening to your... | ||
| Like, I used to take yoga from this guy that was a total bullshit artist. | ||
| He was a good yoga instructor but he was intoxicated by the fact that he was teaching yoga and that all these people came to him and his ego would feed off of this yoga class to the point where he would say all these things and you would see people roll their eyes like my wife used to hate him because he was so cheesy. | ||
| And he would kind of hit on the ladies that would be there, and he wound up fucking some dude's wife, and it was like a disaster. | ||
| Left his wife, and she left her husband, and now they're miserable together. | ||
| He was like a fake spiritual guy. | ||
| And these fake spiritual people, they have this way of ruining a lot of really wise notions. | ||
| And one of them is living in the mind. | ||
| Because they're using it as a tool. | ||
| Well, you know, it's like... | ||
| Or they're claiming to be enlightened when really they're just a student on the path and maybe they have some good ideas along the way to enlightenment, but they're not quite there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of that, man. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| There's a lot of people searching, like these new age type people that are searching for some sort of a meaning. | ||
| And if you find the wrong shaman, you find the wrong yogi, you find the wrong guru, you could go down a bad path. | ||
| I mean, the guy who's the head of Bikram Yoga... | ||
| He's got all these rape allegations and sexual assault allegations. | ||
| He drives a fucking Bentley everywhere. | ||
| He's loaded. | ||
| He's got fucking gold-crusted Rolexes. | ||
| He's clearly not a spiritual, enlightened guy, but he's the head of this whole Bikram movement, which is filled with all these pseudo-spiritual people. | ||
| You know, I was sitting there one day reading a book, reading Al Sharpton's most recent book. | ||
| Why would you do that? | ||
| It's a long story. | ||
| Is it written in crayon? | ||
| No, my agent, my literary agent, represented Al Sharpton and did a book with Al Sharpton. | ||
| So I'm reading an Al Sharpton book. | ||
| And I'm sitting there and a guy's coming down the road walking a dog. | ||
| And he looks like he's like a yachtsman. | ||
| The guy walking dog is clearly a yachtsman. | ||
| That's his world. | ||
| And he comes up and says to me, you know, I had a meeting with him one time. | ||
| And he came up in a chauffeured car. | ||
| And he had a Rolex watch on. | ||
| And he proceeded to tell me how he lives on a $23,000 a year salary. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I don't know how old that story was. | ||
| I don't know how true that story was. | ||
| But it was kind of like he was sort of like pointing out the, you know. | ||
| Well, there was a guy once. | ||
| Like an apparent discrepancy. | ||
| Oh, there's a massive discrepancy. | ||
| There was a guy once that was on this radio show that I was listening to that was the head of a corporation that was approached by Jesse Jackson. | ||
| Because something had gone on, something where racial insensitivity, they had been accused of something that was racially insensitive. | ||
| So Jesse Jackson came on, and essentially the pitch was, you are going to hire my company to give seminars on racial sensitivity, and it's going to cost you a quarter million dollars a year, and if you do not, we are going to protest you, we're going to make it miserable, we're going to cost you far more than you would spend to have my company come in, the Rainbow Coalition, or whatever the fuck it was. | ||
| But isn't that extortion? | ||
| Is that illegal? | ||
| It's not illegal. | ||
| It is and it isn't. | ||
| I mean, it is illegal if you call it extortion. | ||
| But what he is essentially saying is it's within your best interest to align yourself with my corporation. | ||
| It's an out-of-court settlement. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| An out-of-court settlement that they profit from in an incredible way. | ||
| But he had all these crazy demands. | ||
| Like, he wanted to have shrimp cocktail. | ||
| Like, Jesse Jackson had all these very specific demands as far as the kind of food, the amount of food that he was to be given, what was supposed to go on, what kind of car he was supposed to be picked up in. | ||
| And, you know, you look at Reverend Jesse Jackson. | ||
| He's a religious man. | ||
| Well, where's he getting all this fucking money? | ||
| He is a wealthy, wealthy guy. | ||
| And he's wealthy by being what they call a race pimp. | ||
| And that's how this guy was describing it. | ||
| He's like, he's a race pimp. | ||
| This guy finds these scenarios where something goes wrong, moves in, and then extracts money from the situation. | ||
| I should send you my Al Sharpton book. | ||
| I won't read it. | ||
| You won't read it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Because there's a really good chapter. | ||
| There's one really good chapter in that book where he talks about how people's positions on things evolve over the years. | ||
| And I thought that was good. | ||
| Then there's a really horrible chapter where he talks about how his role in comforting Michael Jackson's family upon Michael Jackson's death, where he sort of presents himself as the great hero. | ||
| He's a fool. | ||
| I think my agent was like, you're the last guy in the world I would expect to read a Sharpton book. | ||
| But I told myself, well, here's the thing. | ||
| That's probably why I'm reading it. | ||
| Because all my life I've heard about this guy, I really don't understand who he is or what he does. | ||
| Well, he's to me... | ||
| It's just one of these names. | ||
| You know, it's like, almost like he's almost got a name like PETA. Yes. | ||
| Where people hear it and they roll their eyes. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| It's almost become like... | ||
| He'd cringe to hear someone say this, but it's almost become like he's almost a punchline. | ||
| Yes, he is a punchline. | ||
| For so many people. | ||
| So many pundits and commentators. | ||
| I realized that I was kind of a victim of that. | ||
| Or not victim mode, I was like, doing that. | ||
| I couldn't tell you what the guy did. | ||
| I couldn't tell you what he stood for. | ||
| But you thought of him as a punchline. | ||
| Yeah, I just knew that of him, you know? | ||
| Well, you know the Tawana Brawley, the case that got him famous? | ||
| Yeah, he talks about that. | ||
| Yeah, which is hilarious. | ||
| I mean, he represented a woman who made up a fake allegation of being raped by white people and wrote things on her body, and it turns out none of it happened. | ||
| She just made it all up, and he was demanding... | ||
| You know, justice and all this crazy shit. | ||
| And he was, you know, on every television show and all throughout, you know, the news cases and all this different shit. | ||
| And it turned out that what he was doing was just based on nothing. | ||
| It was based on all lies. | ||
| It was based... | ||
| The entire scenario jetted him into the public eye. | ||
| It was a fake scene. | ||
| Yeah, I can't tell you whether I read that in this book or whether one of the many people who saw me reading the book and had to come up and give me their two cents on the subject told me that. | ||
| Well, it's amazing that the guy became famous for demanding justice for something that never took place. | ||
| But it's a perfect analogy. | ||
| Where it's a perfect representation of who he is. | ||
| And also how bizarre our sensitivities are to race. | ||
| That this fucking clown is on MSNBC or CNBC or whatever the fuck he is giving his opinions on all these different things and his opinions are brutally dumb. | ||
| When he has to communicate, when he has to debate people who are intelligent or have nuanced opinions on these subjects, his clear and obvious bias and his cookie-cutter idea of racism in America. | ||
| Racism is a real issue, without a doubt. | ||
| But having a guy like that represent the black community almost fosters racism. | ||
| It's almost like if I was a racist and I wanted to make sure that people had a negative opinion of black people, I would take the most clownish cartoon versions of black leaders and feature them prominently on television in order to reinforce... | ||
| Reinforce these ideas of these cartoonish figures being, this is what represents the black community. | ||
| Isn't the black community silly? | ||
| And that's what happens. | ||
| Instead of getting a Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Cornel West, instead of getting these super intelligent, very articulate people with broad perspectives, you get this goofball with fucking conked hair and a stapled stomach. | ||
| He's a goofball. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And his many thousand dollar suits on television demanding, you know, reparations for slavery. | ||
| It's like, come on, man. | ||
| It's almost a setup. | ||
| It's almost like to engineer racism. | ||
| Jesse Jackson barely can speak English. | ||
| I mean, he's obviously an educated guy. | ||
| He obviously is articulate. | ||
| But if you're a professional speaker, which essentially he is, his ability to enunciate words is so sloppy and so confusing. | ||
| It's like, do you know how you sound? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you almost sound like you're doing this on purpose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, when you talk, you listen to him talk. | ||
| It's almost like he's too lazy to say the words in a way that everyone can understand. | ||
| He likes the cadence of it in some way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, they used to do... | |
| Does Neil deGrasse Tyson ever speak on... | ||
| Have you ever heard him speak on race? | ||
| Talk about race? | ||
| I never have heard him. | ||
| I mean, I only hear him talk about what he talks about professionally. | ||
| Yeah, he's talked about some other science-based things, not just astrophysics. | ||
| I've heard him speak on genetically modified foods and some misconceptions. | ||
| Oh, have you really? | ||
| Yeah, I've heard him speak on some other things that people have some misconceptions of. | ||
| You know, just sort of science-based stuff, but I haven't heard him speak on race. | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| He's a fun dude, man. | ||
| Yeah, there's that thing, the Incomprehensible Universe, that series. | ||
| It's an amazing series. | ||
| I think it's what it's called. | ||
| Have you seen The Cosmos? | ||
| The new version of it? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Because also, he made it very accessible. | ||
| This version, the story of Giordano Bruno, I think that's his name, the guy who was burned at the stake for suggesting that the universe is infinite. | ||
| And they were like, what? | ||
| You fucking crazy bitch. | ||
| We're going to light you on fire unless you repent. | ||
| That there's a brick wall. | ||
| There's a brick wall out there. | ||
| There's a ceiling out there. | ||
| And behind there is a door and God's out there. | ||
| And he was convinced that it wasn't the case. | ||
| But he did the whole Giordano Bruno thing. | ||
| He did it in animated form. | ||
| He made an animation of it, which is fantastic. | ||
| He also made an animation form, which you'd be interested in, showing how wolves became dogs. | ||
| And over the course of human civilization evolving, how these wolves who had become friendly with people had eventually gotten to the point where the people were feeding them and the wolves stayed close and then those wolves had slowly but surely morphed into dogs. | ||
| That's on Cosmos? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| There's so much wild stuff coming out of... | ||
| You know about those Russians that were taking foxes and doing selective breeding on them? | ||
| Just how fast you can change stuff, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| You can, yeah. | ||
| I mean, all you need to do is look at what they've done with dogs. | ||
| You know, the time that human beings have been, I mean, what is, the established timeline for agricultural civilization is, what is it, 10,000 years or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, 10, 11,000 years. | ||
| Anatomically modern, like, pick your number, but 100,000. | ||
| Yeah, so in that time, which is a blink of the eye, you've made a fucking poodle out of a wolf. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| You've made a chihuahua. | ||
| When Americans first passed into North America, there weren't, like, breeds of dogs. | ||
| It was just, like, the dog they had. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You know, they didn't have, like... | ||
| That's 1,400? | ||
| 1,400? | ||
| 1,500? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| 1,600? | ||
| Probably some... | ||
| I mean, it's a hotly debated number, but sometime between, like... | ||
| Our oldest sites are 14,000 years. | ||
| But people think there has to be sites we haven't found or will never find that are older. | ||
| Maybe 20,000 years. | ||
| But say when Daniel Boone came across America. | ||
| Oh, no, they had breeds. | ||
| They had breeds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| When did they start having, like, when is it established? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| That's so fascinating. | ||
| There's probably, like, I'm sure there's great stuff written about it. | ||
| But, you know, like, they had, so when the first Americans migrated into North America, they were traveling with a domestic version, you know, something that had been domesticated for quite some time, a domestic version of the Eurasian wolf. | ||
| And then they came down and here you had a number of wild canines, you know, wolves, which the animal they were traveling with could breed with wolves. | ||
| you now find that in certain cases wolves and coyotes they don't they don't i don't think they always put off viable young but they do think that there are hybridization events between wolves and coyotes so at some point these guys came down with this eurasian wolf there was probably almost certainly there had been some in you know some inbreeding of wolves and then out of that stock created lord knows what all you Because by the time Lewis and Clark... | ||
| When Lewis and Clark were out and they were eating dogs with Plains tribes, those dogs weren't showing... | ||
| There hadn't been dogs that came from Europe, from colonists, hadn't put dog blood into the dog blood, and they came and they had a dog that looked like... | ||
| What they now call in Vietnam like a meat dog. | ||
| Just like a mutt dog. | ||
| With multiple colors on them. | ||
| There was a recent thing where they've done a genetic study on certain hybrids where they've found a hybrid that's part coyote, part wolf, and part domestic dog. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really recent. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really recent. | |
| That kind of is surprising because one of the things people look at is why are... | ||
| Coyotes in the East are just different. | ||
| They're bigger. | ||
| They feel that there was hybridization events of wolves and coyotes that gave you a bigger coyote in the East and you have smaller coyotes in the West. | ||
| Yeah, this is from the Washington Post. | ||
| Coyote-wolf hybrids are prowling Rock Creek Park in D.C. suburbs. | ||
| What the fuck, man? | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Yeah, this is a coyote-wolf hybrid in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| Koi wolves. | ||
| And they've recently established that wolves have returned to California. | ||
| The first known wolf, you know, within X amount of years. | ||
| Coming out of where? | ||
| I'll find out right now. | ||
| Is it like the red wolves coming out of Arizona, New Mexico? | ||
| I'll tell you right now, because it's a totally new thing that they've proven. | ||
| It's from where they've established it. | ||
| The wolf's controversy will return to California. | ||
| It's on Popular Science Magazine. | ||
| Popular opinion is divided on how to manage the gray wolf. | ||
| So it's a gray wolf. | ||
| 2011 a male gray wolf called or seven left his pack in oregon and traversed 1200 miles to california where the sword travel isn't atypical for gray wolves the terrain or seven covered set him apart from the pack he became the first confirmed wolf in california in almost a century no kid yeah Yeah. | ||
| Had he been collared in Oregon? | ||
| He must have been. | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| It must have, right? | ||
| If they figured out where he is. | ||
| You know, a guy in Missouri one time killed one outside of his chicken coop. | ||
| He thought it was a coyote. | ||
| That thing had come from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. | ||
| Well, there was a guy... | ||
| Across the Mississippi. | ||
| They killed a mountain lion in Connecticut that turned out to be from South Dakota. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You hear about that fucking thing? | ||
| I'm telling you, I don't mean to say I was on this story long ago, but my entire life... | ||
| This debate about where mountain lions that turn up in the east, or where wolves that turn up in weird places, my entire life has been this battle between people who be like, oh, it's escape pets. | ||
| It's escape pets. | ||
| And now it's becoming clear in so many of these cases. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Things just leave now and then, and they have a very clear sense of purpose, and they travel tremendous distances. | ||
| Yeah, this is OR7. They actually got a trail cam photo of this thing in California. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And every time someone saw something like that, people would be like, oh, you didn't see it, or you saw an escaped pet. | ||
| And you'd think that every household had a mountain lion pet. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| To account for all the lions, the guys would be like, it was a damn lion. | ||
| Like, I found where something had killed a deer. | ||
| I went back the next day, and there was a lion sitting there. | ||
| I'd be like, it's an escape pet. | ||
| This is pretty proficient. | ||
| My whole life has been going on, and now, finally, I mean, the guys that have been pushing for this forever finally got to feel a lot better. | ||
| Now that through tracking devices, we're able to go like, yeah, a wolf decided one day, You know, to leave there and go down. | ||
| There's a grizzly that one day decided to mosey out of the Rockies and made it out into eastern Montana. | ||
| You know, there's an elk that did a... | ||
| Usually it's, you know, usually these wide-ranging predators. | ||
| They got wolverines that... | ||
| I was just reading a thing about... | ||
| They had a wolverine. | ||
| Back up a little bit because this one's being interesting. | ||
| They were doing a radio collar study in Alaska about a road. | ||
| Think about putting a road in into the Juneau area. | ||
| So they've been doing a study on animal movements in that area to try to anticipate how this road might impact wildlife. | ||
| Just to see about their migration patterns and movement patterns, they went in and collared a bunch of stuff. | ||
| They had a radio collared Moose, fall into a crevasse in a glacier, and then a radio-collared bear tried to go in there and get him out, and fell in and died. | ||
| And I think that was then scavenged by a radio-collared wolverine. | ||
| They also had a wolverine-collared bear get caught by a trapper 250 miles away in B.C., 250 miles it walked. | ||
| Wolverines are really rare to find, right? | ||
| They're rare to find. | ||
| I'm telling you, that's one of the last things of large North American fauna. | ||
| That's one of the last things I'm looking for. | ||
| You're looking for a wolverine? | ||
| I have not laid eyes on one. | ||
| My friends at... | ||
| I saw one caribou hunting. | ||
| My brother Danny was hunting spring bears one time and saw wolverines digging through the debris field at the base of an avalanche looking for critters that got swept up in the avalanche. | ||
| I've got a handful of friends that have seen one. | ||
| I haven't seen one yet. | ||
| Just badgers and wolverines, those types of animals are so bizarre. | ||
| Dude, I was driving down the Hall Road, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Road. | ||
| you know you're up if you go if you're on that road like the pipe the road that parallels the alaska pipeline dalton highway if you're on that road and you go west you're not gonna you know you depending on your line of travel you won't hit another road till you're in europe you know in russia and then you go the other direction you're gonna get way into canada before you hit a road i mean you're out in the middle of nowhere i'm not in the middle of nowhere but it's very remote relative to anything we can comprehend down here driving on that road | ||
| one time um all out steps the links okay and it looks like It's like a cat with a baby's face on it, like a human baby's face on it, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| And all steps of lynx. | ||
| And, like, it's level. | ||
| It's just like to have an animal look at you like that, just with utter lack of comprehension. | ||
| Like, I can't say this for sure, but more than other animals, you feel that he had never seen that before. | ||
| Never seen a person. | ||
| It's just like, usually you'll see an animal, he cuts out on the road, right? | ||
| And he sees a car, and he gets that like, oh shit, this ain't good. | ||
| Based on whatever experiences he's had or responses that he's witnessed from his mother. | ||
| Or some sort of, they kind of get tense. | ||
| They're gauging risk. | ||
| But just this thing steps in the road and just looks kind of like this look on his face. | ||
| And I'm anthropomorphizing here, but look on his face is like, now what in the hell is that? | ||
| Followed by utter lack of interest and just like left. | ||
| He's like, he looked, I don't know what that is. | ||
| I can't see this bringing anything good to me. | ||
| And then wandered off and it was one of the weird, like that's the only one I've seen. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| They don't even look real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, man. | |
| I'm telling you what. | ||
| It's so freaky looking. | ||
| They are so tall. | ||
| Like how tall? | ||
| This thing is like this high, man. | ||
| So like two feet high? | ||
| Yeah, leggy though. | ||
| Huge feet. | ||
| Just a weird look. | ||
| You know, they're like snowshoe hair specialists, man. | ||
| They like to hunt snowshoe hair. | ||
| So it has big feet so they can get through the snow. | ||
| Walk on the snow. | ||
| Quiet hunters. | ||
| Yeah, they're snowshoe hair specialists. | ||
| Cameron Haynes was telling me about bears that come out of hibernation. | ||
| And as they come out of hibernation, it's the same time where the moose are stuck in the snow. | ||
| Oh, that wet, sloppy snow. | ||
| And so the moose are like... | ||
| Plotting and these bears come out and they haven't eaten anything in months because they've just been hibernating but they see these moose and they can't help but kill them. | ||
| So they just go on these rampages killing every moose they find and just leaving their carcasses because they can't really handle meat yet. | ||
| Yeah, but they like to have the opportunity at it. | ||
| Their instincts. | ||
| Because when they do come out, they'll come out and eat grass for a while, eat vegetation, but they do spend a lot of time following that. | ||
| They spend a lot of time looking for what we call winter kill, just scavenging carcasses they can find. | ||
| And then they hammer, hammer fawns. | ||
| And that's something people used to not realize about Black bears is the high rates of fawn mortality you get from black bears on elk, moose, deer. | ||
| It doesn't seem like they really go after the healthy adults under normal circumstances, but they really find out that black bears just turn up and hit animals. | ||
| Calves and fawns in a way that no one ever thought before. | ||
| They smell that placenta. | ||
| It's like a dinner bowl. | ||
| Yeah, we used to have this idea of them as being kind of like the kinder, gentler bear, you know? | ||
| But they know these spots. | ||
| They turn up in these spots before things turn up there to drop fawns. | ||
| The second mountain line or third mountain line I ever saw, I saw cutting through a bunch of elk calves in a calving area. | ||
| You can just imagine how much a thing like that can clean house. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God damn. | ||
| When we were bear hunting, I got to watch bears fight. | ||
| We watched a fucking no-holds-barred brawl between this female bear with her two cubs and this male who had come into the bait. | ||
| She fucking went to war, man. | ||
| The babies climbed up the trees. | ||
| They were way the fuck up the trees, to the point where we were worried. | ||
| One of them got real squirrely. | ||
| He was kind of upside down on the tree. | ||
| He was way up there. | ||
| And they're really young. | ||
| And the adults can't climb because they get too heavy. | ||
| And this big male had come in. | ||
| And it was a big female. | ||
| And first, the babies ran up the tree. | ||
| And the female took off. | ||
| She left. | ||
| And then she just thought about it. | ||
| So, you know what? | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| And she turned around and attacked him. | ||
| Turned around and challenged him. | ||
| And they both went up on their back legs. | ||
| And they were just going at it. | ||
| Just... | ||
| And we were sitting there on the ground, because Cameron's fucking nuts. | ||
| He likes to hunt on the ground. | ||
| He likes to bow hunt. | ||
| No tree stand. | ||
| So we're just, there's like a tree that's fallen, and we're set up behind this tree, and we're watching these fucking, you know, six, seven-foot brown bears going to war right in front of us. | ||
| I mean, no more than 30, 40 yards away. | ||
| They were duking it out. | ||
| Yeah, and you gotta be wondering, like, in the middle of this fight, all of a sudden he comes rolling over and there's your ass sitting there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I was knocked up, man. | ||
| I had an arrow knocked. | ||
| I remember being such a little kid, one of my earliest memories, not earliest memories, but I remember being a little kid, and my dad got a phone call one night. | ||
| One of his hunting buddies was sitting on a bear bait with his bow. | ||
| And a sow came in with cubs and smelled them and shooed her cubs up a tree, but they went up past him in the tree, and then they started squealing and balling up there, and she came up and mauled his legs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| Yeah, he wound up in the hospital. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| So she was small enough that she could make it up the tree. | ||
| Well, she's up enough to get at his boots. | ||
| But I mean, most of them, I don't know... | ||
| I've heard that some black bears get too big to climb. | ||
| I mean, they can climb pretty good. | ||
| And I don't know to what extent, but your typical black bear can get itself up a tree. | ||
| She went up a tree, the one that we saw, she went up a tree a little bit, but only maybe 5 or 6 feet where her kids went like, shit, they were 50 feet up. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure it depends a lot on the circumference of the tree and whatnot, but for sure. | ||
| But grizzlies don't. | ||
| When they're young, but when they get older, they can't get up that tree. | ||
| Yeah, that's what they were saying. | ||
| Because they had tree stands there, but he likes to hunt on the ground. | ||
| But he said, if you see a grizzly, then we go up the tree stand for sure. | ||
| Yeah, there's a bunch right there. | ||
| It was kind of like that. | ||
| That's cute. | ||
| But it was crazy to watch them duke it out, like right there in front of us. | ||
| I mean, it went on for a while. | ||
| And then he would come back and she would chase him off again. | ||
| And then finally he gave up. | ||
| But then as it got darker, she took off, and then a bunch of bears came in. | ||
| When it's dark, that's when it's really crazy. | ||
| Alberta's flooded with bears, man. | ||
| They said that there's between, depending on who you ask, between three and eight per acre. | ||
| And they're dealing with 8,000 acres. | ||
| No, not acre. | ||
| Per square mile would be super high. | ||
|
unidentified
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Not acre. | |
| Per square mile. | ||
| That's what I meant. | ||
| And they're dealing with 8,000 square miles. | ||
| So he said, there's just bears everywhere. | ||
| And so the first time I got there, we sat down and we waited. | ||
| I'm like, where are all these fucking bears? | ||
| If there's so many bears, you'd think you would see one. | ||
| And then when you see one, and then you see another, and you don't hear them... | ||
| That's what's crazy because the ground is thick with leaves and pine needles and stuff. | ||
| So literally, all of a sudden, he's there looking at you from 70, 80 feet away. | ||
| You didn't even see him coming. | ||
| All of a sudden he appears because it's so dense. | ||
| There's so many trees up there. | ||
| I was calling turkeys one time and had a bear come behind me. | ||
| You know, like predators, when you're calling turkeys in the spring, you're making hen noises to track males, track the toms, but predators will come to that noise. | ||
| And I had a bear come in behind me that I never heard until I heard it breathe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| It sounded like a dude. | ||
| And you're on the ground sitting, right? | ||
| No, I'm sitting on the ground and I hear... | ||
| I mean, this thing was right there. | ||
| Like five feet? | ||
| I heard it breathe over my shoulder. | ||
| How many feet? | ||
| Yeah, like from, I don't know, five, six feet. | ||
| I'm just there. | ||
| But when I turned, I was scared, but that thing was more scary when I turned. | ||
| He like turned himself inside out, man. | ||
| Just took off? | ||
| Oh, yeah, it was amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You know, it's funny, we're talking about like bears climbing trees, black bears and grizzly bears. | ||
| I wrote about this at some point, but... | ||
| My brother and I were laying on this ridge one time hunting elk, and during the midday when it's warm, nothing happens. | ||
| We'll just go sleep somewhere and wait for the elk to come back out, because they go into black timber just to bed down. | ||
| So there's really no sense, and there's nothing you can do. | ||
| You just sleep. | ||
| And at one point I wake up, because I hear a noise, and I wake up and there's a black bear standing there, and he goes off down this ridge line. | ||
| I'm sorry, it just goes down off the ridge down toward the valley floor. | ||
| That night, we headed out to go hunt elk, and we happened to go in the direction that the bear went. | ||
| And my brother still had a bear tag. | ||
| I had filled my bear tag, but he still had a bear tag. | ||
| And as we're walking, I hear the noise of its claws on the bark. | ||
| Like a real loud, you know, like barks falling and scratching. | ||
| You can imagine what a cat would sound like or something, scratching up something. | ||
| I'm like, that must be that black bear. | ||
| So we go hauling ass up the tree thinking that we'll maybe get the bear up the tree and be able to check it out. | ||
| But we run up there and it's not a black bear. | ||
| It's a sow grizzly standing there and she's got two cubs that are about four or five feet up this tree and she's standing there at the base of the tree and she woofs at us like a dog. | ||
| Like a woof. | ||
| Barking. | ||
| And those cubs come down the tree and we're just standing right there, man. | ||
| You can never say it was close to getting scratched unless you got scratched because you don't know what's in the animal's head. | ||
| But reviewing it in my head, that was a very sketchy moment. | ||
| The last thing you're supposed to do is mess with their cubs. | ||
| And here we are just running up on there. | ||
| And when she got those cubs down out of the tree and they started going up the hill away from us, she was taking her paw and moving the cubs with her paw. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Pushing them ahead of her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| The same way when you're trying to get your kids to go where you want, your eyes have got your hand on their head or you're somehow trying to guide them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, she's like, get going, get going. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That was wild, man. | ||
| But she could have spun around and just scratched us back. | ||
| Well, they say that's the big reason why a lot of people, hikers, get attacked, right? | ||
| It's a female with their cuffs. | ||
| You're just coming across something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This blew my mind. | ||
| I just read that not a single bowhunter has been killed by a grizzly bear You know, while bowhunting, even though bowhunters get scratched up all the time, like every year there's some guy getting scratched up. | ||
| Not a single bowhunter's been killed by a grizzly bear in at least 20 years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, last year there was like three grizzly bear fatalities in Montana, Wyoming. | ||
| Well, that was one of the things you saw on that hunt show, was how difficult it is to bowhunt for grizzlies, because... | ||
| First of all, Kodiak Island was very windy. | ||
| These guys were taking shots and the arrow would just take off and miss the bear. | ||
| Windy and just miserable and wet. | ||
| You've got to get so close with a bow, man. | ||
| It's one thing being a stand and waiting for a whitetail to walk underneath you, but to creep up on a fucking giant 9-foot bear that's outside... | ||
| You've got to get within 30-40 yards of this thing to get an accurate shot on it. | ||
| And it's windy and everything there, but... | ||
| Now, in that show, when they're doing that, this happens a lot, but I know that shows don't show it, and outdoor writers don't write about it. | ||
| But oftentimes, very often, I can't say it's the majority of the time, but a very common practice when a guy's bowhunting brown bears is the minute that arrow makes contact with that bear, the guy's lighting it up with a 375 H&H. So they'll shoot it with a gun right after the- The minute that arrow hits. | ||
| Yeah, that's probably smart. | ||
| I mean, I saw that on a show, it was a bow hunting show, where this guy shot a fucking elephant with a bow, and the elephant turned, and he was like, fuck you, and the elephant starts running him, and boom, they shot him in the head with a rifle. | ||
| And he's going to call that, I hunted an elephant with a bow. | ||
| Like, the fuck you did? | ||
| All you did was piss an elephant off, and it charged you, and these guides shot the elephant in the head. | ||
| They killed the elephant. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not diminishing the balls it takes to get in there. | ||
| I watched a thing where Tom Miranda kills a big grizzly with his bow, and by any means, it was like... | ||
| He got a great hit on that bear. | ||
| That bear ran and fell over. | ||
| I'm not saying that's what happened. | ||
| I'm saying you hear about it so often. | ||
| You talk to guides so often. | ||
| And they even do it with rifles. | ||
| Even if a guy hits it with a rifle, he's going to start pumping lead. | ||
| Because it's so hard to anchor them. | ||
| And then they go in those alders and you don't want to lose them. | ||
| You don't want to go in there after them. | ||
| So as long as you take the initial shot, they consider you shot that bear, and then everybody else shoots it afterwards. | ||
| And the guide, you know, or whoever can do a follow. | ||
| I really didn't like watching them shoot the elephant. | ||
| There's something to me about shooting some animals where it's like, I don't get it. | ||
| Like, I don't know why you would travel all the way to Africa to shoot an elephant with a bow while these people behind you rifle it, and you're calling that bow hunting. | ||
| I couldn't shoot an elephant just because I don't have a context with the animal. | ||
| A cultural context. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| With North American animals, I find that generally when I go hunt something, I like to have experience with it and understand it. | ||
| For African hunting, for me to enjoy hunting in Africa, I would probably want to go there just to have a look around and be there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then maybe go again, just for me personally, then go again and I might enjoy hunting more once I sort of felt like I understood the animals. | ||
| Or I understood more about the biology and I just understood the area better. | ||
| It would make me feel more like what I want to have in a predator-prey relationship. | ||
| We're going down to film this year. | ||
| We're going down to Bolivia and we'll go out hunting with Amerindians or go along on a hunt with Amerindians. | ||
| They go out and do meat hunts for capybara, paca, they bow fish for fish a lot. | ||
| One of the things they like to hunt is they like to hunt spider monkeys. | ||
| And I've always vowed I'll never eat a monkey. | ||
| I used to always say that. | ||
| I'll never eat a monkey. | ||
| But now I'm going to be down there and these guys, presumably, they're going to get a monkey. | ||
| They're going to cook it. | ||
| And you're going to try it? | ||
| I can't decide, man. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not into eating primates. | ||
| I just feel like... | ||
| I can't decide what I'll do when I'm sitting there. | ||
| I'd have to be starving. | ||
| I ate dogs and didn't like it at all. | ||
| Well, you ate a coyote, which is crazy. | ||
| That didn't bother me in an emotional way, but I'm saying I tripped out emotionally about eating a dog. | ||
| So I can't imagine what I might suffer. | ||
| To be chewing up a primate. | ||
| I'm not into it. | ||
| I remember reading one time, and this explained this to my brother the other day when I was talking about this conundrum I'm in, where I was reading about a guy who was describing the hunt for monkeys. | ||
| And a dude hit a... | ||
| He was observing South American tribal hunters or Amerindians. | ||
| He was observing them hunting monkeys. | ||
| And a monkey got shot in the back. | ||
| And the monkey with a dart. | ||
| And the monkey reached around and grabbed the dart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| So, that image is so burnt in my head. | ||
| I don't know what I'll do, man. | ||
| I'll be curious if the guys I work with, if they want to eat the monkey or not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's so many weird things. | ||
| You go like this, though. | ||
| These guys are indigenous hunters. | ||
| They hunt. | ||
| They make their own bows. | ||
| They live in the jungle. | ||
| Any kind of thing. | ||
| If you went out and surveyed 100 Americans, 100 would say, by all means, if anyone... | ||
| Can justify hunting to be these boys, right? | ||
| They're hunting whether you're with them or not. | ||
| So it's kind of like you look at, well, the monkey's dead now. | ||
| Yeah, I guess I could see that. | ||
| What I couldn't see is going there with a purpose to go shoot a monkey. | ||
| I guess if I was there experiencing what it is like for them, and also if they offered me a monkey, like if it was part of like, you're taken into their home and they're cooking you a meal and they ask you, you know, they serve you what they eat, maybe then I would eat it. | ||
| Yeah, no, there's no way I'd shoot a monkey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by saying that, I don't think that one shouldn't be allowed and whatever, you know, it just depends on the consensus of biologists in whatever area, whether they can warrant it or not, but no, I wouldn't. | ||
| It's just like, I couldn't. | ||
| Yeah, I couldn't either, but I know that they have issues with baboons and people. | ||
| Dude, in Africa, it's just like, I guess, I can't get it, but in Africa, you get the sense that people view baboons almost like how you might, like, I hate to say it, but you might look at raccoons and opossums that are getting into your dumpster. | ||
| Yes, but they'll kill a baby. | ||
| They'll kill a human baby. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that right? | |
| They're stolen human babies. | ||
| I don't know the first thing about them. | ||
| Yeah, Cameron Haynes, who just got back from Africa, he shot a fucking baboon over there. | ||
| Shot a baboon with a bow and arrow. | ||
| And I'm like, why don't you shoot a baboon? | ||
| And he's like, they actually encourage you to shoot as many baboons as possible because they're overpopulated and they're really dangerous. | ||
| That's what friends of mine told me, man. | ||
| Do the guys in Africa eat the baboons? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No. | ||
| They don't eat the baboons, and they don't eat the hyenas. | ||
| They don't like the hyenas? | ||
| No. | ||
| They kill them. | ||
| They kill them whenever they can because they're so overpopulated, but they don't eat them. | ||
| But he ate a kudu. | ||
| He shot a kudu over there and ate that. | ||
| He said it was amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He said kudu is similar, I guess, in a lot of ways to deer, elk, in the way it tastes. | ||
| The word overpopulated is such a weird word, and it's such an abused word. | ||
| Whenever I hear that, I always get like, according to whose perspective? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good point. | |
| Because again and again, we're told, like, deer are overpopulated. | ||
| Like, yeah, I mean, from the perspective of some agricultural interests, deer are overpopulated. | ||
| From the perspective of auto insurers, deer are overpopulated. | ||
| From the perspective of Lyme disease activists, deer are overpopulated. | ||
| But from the perspective of a dude who likes to eat a lot of deer, you might be like, now's the good old days, man. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, this is perfect. | ||
| If I lived in some areas, there's some areas of western Massachusetts that are so flooded with deer, I would definitely have one of those crazy bumpers on my truck. | ||
| You know, they have those crazy big steel bumpers. | ||
| Brush guards, man. | ||
| Well, they make them specifically for deer, too. | ||
| To withstand a deer hit. | ||
| Yeah, there was one of them that we were pulling up photos of the other day of 18-wheelers that they have these giant ones they put over the front of their trucks because deer are so common in a lot of these areas where they're transporting stuff, and they had one where this deer had just... | ||
| It hit it, and the guard did its job, but the fucking entire truck was just painted with blood, you know, because it was going 65 miles an hour, and you hit an animal. | ||
| It's basically a bag of blood. | ||
| It vaporizes in such a disturbing way. | ||
| I recently wrote a thing about this on the meat-eater show. | ||
| Show website where I was talking about these recent controversies where someone will go and kill an African animal, kill a lion, pull a picture of a lion. | ||
| By the way, tell people where they can get that because I loved your perspective on it and I loved one of the things you pointed out about you've seen all these things where people are getting pissed off, these pretty girls that are going over there and shooting these animals. | ||
| A lot of it is sexism. | ||
| Oh yeah, man. | ||
| For a girl to go to Africa and hunt, pisses off people way more than for a dude to. | ||
| And also, for a wealthy person to hunt in Africa, pisses off way more people than a middle class person hunting in Africa. | ||
| Which is just weird. | ||
| It's so beyond the biology. | ||
| It's just weird... | ||
| You know, sexual stuff. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Envy. | ||
| Class envy. | ||
| However you want to think. | ||
| Like, whatever you want to determine about the legitimacy of hunting in Africa should really have nothing to do with the gender of the hunter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But this thing... | ||
| Like, one point I tried to make in that thing that I wrote... | ||
| You could find it if you just go... | ||
| You could probably even type in, like... | ||
| Stephen Rinella, African hunting controversy. | ||
| Go to themeater.com, you'll find the article. | ||
| But the point I make is, when people look at someone posing with an African animal, like a lion, I think people look at it and they feel like they see a dead movie star. | ||
| Because they don't know... | ||
| Like, all you know of that animal is sort of wildlife documentaries and then cartoon versions and The Lion King. | ||
| It's like, you feel like you're looking at that. | ||
| But in America, we drive down the road and we see just like contorted... | ||
| Pulverized deer carcasses. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can't escape it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I feel like it's never going to be as offensive. | ||
| When someone sees a dead deer, it's not as shocking to them as being like, it's the animal from the movies! | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And they killed it! | ||
| Yeah, the anthropomorphizing of an animal is a real issue when it comes to that. | ||
| It really feels to people more like... | ||
| I remember a friend of mine who worked in the environmental movement, or I shouldn't say that because that's... | ||
| She was a conservationist. | ||
| She worked in the conservation movement. | ||
| And she complained about, half-jokingly, about charismatic megafauna. | ||
| So much mental energy of Americans gets tied up in the preservation of charismatic megafauna. | ||
| And those things become such money sinks that we miss... | ||
| Opportunities to understand this vast suite of other creatures out there that doesn't make it onto calendars. | ||
| If I remember, I think she was speaking of the amount of research dollars and public interest and things that go into wolves. | ||
| Like understanding wolves. | ||
| And there's all the other animals that she calls non-charismatic megafauna. | ||
| You just can't get someone... | ||
| To, like, care about them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| And I think that's one, as far as conservation goes, I think that's one thing that conservation organizations that are based off of specific animals will always tell you is that they're looking at, like, apex or keystone, cornerstone species. | ||
| So, like, a group like the National Wild Turkey Federation or the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, they'll point out, they'll be like, yeah, this is about elk. | ||
| We have elk on our symbol. | ||
| You might think that we fetishize elk, but I can tell you this, what's good for elk is good for everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's one of the most demanding, least tolerant things. | ||
| And so if you preserve elk wintering habitat, you're also, at the same time, preserving the habitats of so many other species. | ||
| And you might not say the same thing about if you went and preserved the habitat of some animal with a more restricted home range or something. | ||
| It might not blossom outward to offer protection for all these other things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So that's one way in which the charismatic megafauna thing winds up playing out is people go like, yeah, but by helping him, I'm helping everybody. | ||
| So I'd like to have something for my calendar. | ||
| People have that aversion to trophy hunting. | ||
| That's one of the other things that drives people nuts about Africa is that people are going over there for bloodlust. | ||
| They're going over there just to kill. | ||
| They want to stuff it and put on their wall this beautiful animal that should just be observed and appreciated for what it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's something I struggled with. | ||
| And earlier I made a term about something being like a semantics thing. | ||
| Because if you go and hunt and you keep something, like you have right here in your studio, you have a deer antler. | ||
| You got like a deer skull, right? | ||
| By really any definition, you'd be like, well, that's a hunting trophy. | ||
| Does that make you then a trophy hunter? | ||
| Even though you ate the deer. | ||
| To be a non-trophy hunter, would that mean that you should have thrown that deer head in the garbage in order to be more pure? | ||
| Or is it more pure that you'd maintain that emblem and pay respect to the animal in perpetuity by having its head here? | ||
| It's like you kept a trophy. | ||
| You kept the meat and kept the trophy. | ||
| But when people hear trophy hunter, I think what that means in our culture is that someone just hunts for that purpose. | ||
| He just wants to go kill that thing. | ||
| And this is coming from a guy who's never hunted in Africa. | ||
| But so much of the controversy about Africa is that people are going there and killing animals just for the head and bringing them home. | ||
| In that way, you're probably trivializing the experience, but you're also not really looking at the broad picture of how game gets managed there and the importance that the commodification of wildlife plays in Africa, where here we have publicly owned wildlife. | ||
| And we have a really stringent system where we can legally protect stuff. | ||
| But in Africa, there's a great argument to be made for if it wasn't for the value of those animals to Westerners, if it wasn't for the hunting industry, those animals wouldn't be in those places where they are. | ||
| They literally didn't have those animals there before. | ||
| There's way too many forces and factors that would have led to those being ravaged ecosystems, hunting from people who are starving or who are wanting to graze livestock in those areas. | ||
| And the fact that you bring in a currency... | ||
| And you monetize them, enables people to preserve these large tracts of land and have animals on there. | ||
| So you can look at, like, what is Joe Blow's motivation? | ||
| Joe Blow's motivation might be he thinks it'd be sweet to have a zebra hide on his floor. | ||
| And you can condemn Joe Blow for thinking that. | ||
| But you really, to be fair, you have to look at the impact of That money that he spent to get it has on the broader economy and on the wildlife politics of that place. | ||
| So it's way more complicated than what any one individual's motivations were. | ||
| And it's just... | ||
| I just caution people... | ||
| And I'll tell you what, I've had my share of looking at... | ||
| Pictures of guys hunting in Africa and being like, dude, you just went out and paid someone and he showed you that. | ||
| And you're like, well, that's what one of those is and shot it. | ||
| I've felt that a thousand times looking at those pictures. | ||
| But it's one of those things that the more I've learned about it and spoke to people who've gone there and read about it, the more I've come to admit that, you know what, what's going on in Africa is vastly more complicated than what you're going to get From reading about internet controversies, people posting pictures. | ||
| You really need to study up on that stuff before you condemn it, because I think you'll be kind of shocked by some of the stuff you learn. | ||
| If anybody's interested in it further, we're just about out of time, but Louis Theroux has a documentary. | ||
| Theroux? | ||
| How do you say his name? | ||
| Theroux. | ||
| Louis Theroux has a documentary about African hunting camps where he kind of goes into great detail with these guys that run these camps about how these animals... | ||
| They essentially wouldn't be there if it wasn't. | ||
| They would be extinct. | ||
| We're out of time, right? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right, dude. | ||
| Your book. | ||
| The Buffalo book's published. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| You know, my first book... | ||
| Which never had a chance in the real world, Scavenger's Guide to Oat Cuisine. | ||
| It came out a long time ago, but I got the rights to it back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I published it digitally as the Scavenger's Guide. | ||
| I hope people go read it. | ||
| It never got read when it came out, not like my other books did, man. | ||
| And like I said, they just gave me my rights back. | ||
| How can they get it? | ||
| How can someone get it? | ||
| Oh, it's on every place you can buy digital books. | ||
| Okay, we'll put a link up to it after the show. | ||
| And I also put a link up to the Daniel Boone thing that you did, the animated thing. | ||
| Oh, sweet, man. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| That was just up. | ||
| Dude, time flew. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| Hey, thank you for having me on. | ||
| Anytime, man. | ||
| Anytime. | ||
| Wish you lived closer. | ||
| We do it all the time. | ||
| Well, you are kind of closer now. | ||
| And we're going to be real close when we're sharing the same tent. | ||
| Pretty close. | ||
| Alright, folks. | ||
| Thanks to our sponsor. | ||
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| Alright, you fucks. | ||
| We'll be back soon. | ||
| Tomorrow, in fact. | ||
| See you soon. |
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