Remi Warren’s Apex Predator—filming since 2023—reveals brutal yet efficient hunting strategies, like wolves inducing buffalo stampedes or river otters exploiting dive reflexes for four-minute breath holds. He contrasts trophy-hunting hypocrisy with conservation efforts, such as New Zealand’s invasive species hunts or South Africa’s giraffe paintballing to combat tick-borne diseases. Hunting demands elite endurance (Warren’s VO2 max rivals athletes’) and mental toughness, from tracking elk barefoot to packing out entire animals solo. Rogan and Warren critique critics’ ignorance, emphasizing hunter safety courses and ethical mentorship over misconceptions, while planning a Montana bow-hunt. [Automatically generated summary]
What you're doing on the show is you're essentially emulating a lot of tactics that various predators use, and you're using these tactics to get close and figure out how to hunt animals.
Because the way wolves hunt is they have to get the animals running first.
And tomorrow night's episode, we'll really see that when we look at the way wolves hunt.
But the reason that the wolf has to get the buffalo running is the wolf's essentially outclassed by the bison.
It's so much larger.
So if the bison's to say we're going to stand here and fight, then it can kill the wolf.
And it's the cost benefit analysis for the wolf to attack that bison while it's standing there isn't great enough.
So the wolves will actually get around the bison and try to instigate them to run.
Because if the bison makes the mistake of running, then they can hunt as a pack.
They can wear it down once they get it moving and then they attack from the back and they're safer and they're more successful.
So the bison know this.
So if they run, well, they're going to be in trouble.
But when a human hunter comes along using primitive weapons or whatever, the human hunter needs that animal to stand still in order to kill it.
So when the bison sees a human, it runs because that's how it stays safe.
So, you know, the point of this show is really dissecting the way nature does things.
And you look at, like, every animal is so specialized.
It does something really well.
And everything falls into a certain niche.
And as a human looking at nature, we look at it and go, man, what can we learn?
Like, humans are an amazing species.
And what I've come to realize is we've adapted a lot of the techniques and tactics that That a certain animal specializes in or does really well and use it for ourselves to become this essential top predator.
So, you know, looking at this, the Plains Indians, we looked at a George Catlin painting.
I mean, it makes perfect sense if you're sitting there and see the correlation between the wolves and the bison, and you come to this illogical conclusion that if we act like a wolf, the bison will stay there.
Well, you know, there's a guy named Dan Flores that's a good friend of Steve's as well, and he is a real bison expert, and he's written a very controversial paper on what happened to the bison.
And what he's saying is that he compares...
He's going to be on the podcast soon, as soon as he's done with his book, hopefully by sometime in the summer.
And what his paper is basically saying is that the Plains Indians, once they had figured out how to ride horses and shoot from horses, were already on the way to wiping out the buffalo.
And the reason why the buffalo were in such high numbers was because so many people, so many Native Americans, had died from smallpox.
And if you go back before the smallpox epidemic, the people that arrived in North America, like the Dutch, when they had made an accounting of all the different animals, they talked about turkeys and deer and elk and bear.
No mention whatsoever of buffalo.
And they were visiting all these same areas that 200 years later had millions of buffalo.
But during that 200 years, 90% of the Native Americans had been wiped out by smallpox.
During that and they were apparently like probably the number one predator of these bison I'm probably doing a really shitty job of explaining this that makes sense I mean they would do things like like the buffalo jumps mm-hmm where just drive Herds of bison off a cliff cliffs and they apparently the wolves would feed in because they're just be dead I mean you couldn't Take all that meat.
If you've got a small village, you're taking what you can use, there'd be dead bison everywhere.
And the wolves would come in and gorge on them.
I guess there was an account where there was wolves so full on food that you're just laying there in excess, just gorged.
Wolves were actually the inspiration for me to even think of this show.
I'm pretty fascinated by wolves, but one day I was out hunting elk in Montana, and I'd been hunting this one bull, and it was the first time I ever saw a wolf in the wild.
And I was really close, too.
I was like, oh, this is awesome, because this was before you really saw a lot of wolves.
And then I actually got a little video of it, and then I go and do my hunt, and then the wolf happened to be hunting the same group of elk.
That's got to be an amazing thing to see happen live because it's so rare to be able to be there.
I mean, you might see a wolf, you might see an elk, but to see a wolf kill an elk, like to be at that moment where it didn't matter if you were there or not, that was going to go down.
Well, when we talk about the American model of conservation, there's checks and balances and goes with game animals and non-game animals.
So when you reintroduce an animal into an area that it hasn't maybe never been in that area or it's been so long that it's been in there, they have to be managed as well.
Otherwise, the whole ecosystem comes out of balance.
Well, I watched this video about Yellowstone, about wolves in Yellowstone.
It was talking about the impact that wolves have had in Yellowstone and all these other animals that are thriving because of the introduction of the wolves.
And it's kind of interesting.
It's kind of interesting, but the reality of those animals is they're predators.
You're not talking about any other kind of animal.
You're talking about a predator.
It's like if you have a large amount of elk in an area or a large amount of deer, I mean, this is a completely different animal than having a large amount of wolves.
And when you're managing these types of animals with emotions rather than objective logic That's when things get weird because you've got a lot of people their version of conservation never would include hunting a wolf But if you get thousands and thousands of wolves in a state like you you have to hunt them because then they start attacking livestock like where I was up in BC where I Shot that moose there was The guy that I hunted with,
his neighbor had a cow get taken out by wolves in the middle of the winter.
It's like cold and there was not much for them to eat and they said, fuck it, let's just do this.
They took out a cow.
Can you imagine like you're in your house and you're hearing...
You're looking out and there's 20 wolves just ripping apart one of your cows.
We didn't see a single fucking person other than us the entire time we were there, and it doesn't give a fuck about you.
If you fall and break your leg and die there, so what?
Just a part of it.
You're just a part of this whole thing where everything is going to go.
There's bears there, there's deer there, there's all sorts of, you know, interesting wildlife, but it doesn't give a fuck about you.
I don't think people kind of understand that in a real, like, in a...
We really rationalize it or really like got it into your brain like this is reality Until you actually go into the woods to the real woods not Yellowstone not Central Park.
Yeah The real woods are a different animal it is and that's when you kind of understand if you've even I haven't encountered wolves in the wild I've seen what they've done and We talked about in the last podcast.
I took some photos of this moose calf that we had come upon that had been killed probably like the night before.
It was kind of interesting.
But I haven't encountered them in real life.
But the people that I know that have have a completely different opinion than the people that live in cities that think that you'd have to be an asshole to shoot a wolf.
I saw one in Montecito, which is, like, a rich suburb of Santa Barbara.
I was driving down, like, a residential road, and I saw this thing bounce in front of the road, and I thought it was a coyote at first, but I saw its tail.
And I went, whoa, that's a fucking mountain lion in this, like, suburban neighborhood.
Yeah, I think I've got, I must, my place in Montana, I think I have some kind of strange mountain lion breeding program going on because every year at the same time, there's just lion tracks all near the cabin, all over the place.
That started right when I, the year I first came here and talked with you, and it's just been continuing.
And I don't know what it is, but a friend of mine started chasing lions around there.
He said you would be surprised how many cats are living in this area.
And this guy showed me this tactic where when you're skinning it, you get your knife sharp and make your initial cuts, and then he dulls the tip on the concrete.
And so when he's skinning it, because what it is is he'll skin, he can skin closer to the, essentially closer to the skin and keep all the fat on the pork.
He's got some really unique ideas about farming and he was a guest on the podcast as well.
And what he does is he lets his pigs kind of run wild.
He sets up like a large electric fence and he moves that electric fence all over the place.
So these pigs, the way they eat is they root.
They eat acorns, and they eat like a normal pig would.
There's plenty of food in the forest, but they keep them intact in a certain area with this portable electric fence.
So they just keep moving the fence.
So the pigs will root out this area and forage in this one area, and then they'll kind of move them to another spot, and then they'll let them forage in that area.
And so these pigs have a dark meat, like a wild boar.
We tried doing that for a buddy's bachelor party, but we didn't get the fire hot enough, so we're all out here camping by this lake, and I brought this big pig, and I'm all excited about it.
Get it out, and now we all have a raw pig.
So we fired up the grills and made the best out of the situation, but everything's closed.
See, I've heard that the trichinosis comes from them eating rodents.
Hmm, so Technically they could get I mean there could be mice because they would eat the feed and the Mice would get in with the grain and everything and they can still get trichinosis Definitely I wouldn't quote me on that, but I definitely heard that a lot.
Well, I've watched my chickens I have domestic chickens and I've watched them eat a mouse.
Oh, yeah They found a mouse in the chicken house and they fucked that thing up man.
It was wild just because usually they're just kind of You know, they just like peck in and they'll, you know, they get real happy if they find a snail or something like that.
But they found that mouse and they just stomped that little fucker.
Yeah, apparently that's what we're I was studying their eyesight and they can spot medium-sized prey from up to two miles away two miles Isn't that fun?
I mean that's the thing that One of the things that just so much fascinates me about animals especially is they have capabilities That it's almost hard with all our technology to even replicate.
Yeah, if you really think about it There's a lot of weird stuff on this planet.
Dolphins using sonar and eagles being able to see two miles away.
There's just a lot of crazy things in nature that has taken us years and years to replicate some kind of machine or contraption where we can even compare to it.
Yeah, they say that the comparison is with skunk spray.
Because with skunk spray, a person can pick up parts per million in a way that you can't with any other spray, with any other smell, rather.
Like when you're driving down the street, like there's this area near my house, and as I'm driving on my way home, I smell skunks in this one spot all the time.
One of the things I always tell people is, especially if you haven't been elk hunting, most of the elk that we end up killing, I attribute to smelling them first.
And people that don't Elk hunt would never pick up on it.
But I'm hunting with my nose almost as much as I'm using any other tactic.
Humans have a natural innate ability, hunting ability, that is very comparable to animals that Have to hunt to survive.
And I say that, like, one of the things that really brought this to light was one of our last episodes of the season, we look at the river otter.
Well, it's a mammal that hunts underwater.
We're mammals.
Can we hunt underwater?
And I'm pretty much from the desert, so people are in the water, but I think of it as something that people have trained their whole lives to do or whatever.
You know, be efficient free diving.
So I go to Florida and kind of just try to uncover how humans compare to mammals that hunt underwater.
Turns out we have the same dive reflexes in other things as other mammals that hunt underwater.
And anybody off the street can initiate these reflexes.
The thing that our trouble is is our mind.
We have this mental threshold that we have to get over.
But once we get over that, Within two hours, I was able to hold my breath for over four minutes.
I did this freediving course, and the guy is like, we could take...
If everyone could just block mental things out of their mind, pretty much the average person off the street could easily hold their breath for three minutes.
And if you could completely clear your mind, pretty much everyone could hold their breath for four to five minutes.
It only makes sense that if buffalo have a natural instinct to avoid bipedal hominids, because they've seen that, okay, they get shot, get killed, and they know that wolves come around, okay, don't run, stay put, and we'll fuck these wolves up.
Like, it almost seems like all this information just gets passed on somehow or another through genetics, and that's how these animals manage to be here.
Well, it would only make sense that if we've gotten to 2015, the way we got here is by eating everything that we could eat up till now, including every animal that we could figure out how to hunt, and all those skills and all those abilities, especially the idea that your spleen starts releasing extra red blood when you dive underwater to allow you to stay.
It was one of the strength and conditioning programs they would do.
They would move rocks underwater.
BJ Penn had it on one of his...
One of the countdown shows to one of his big fights.
He would dive underwater and lift up a big rock and then move the rock underwater and drop it and come back up for air and go down and move it again, drop it and come back up for air.
I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of athletes are doing these breath holds before competitions because they're naturally creating more red blood cells, performance enhancing breath holds.
Yeah, that's one of the big ones that I've been really getting into over the last few months or a year or so, actually, is cryogenic therapy, where you go into this chamber that's 250 degrees below zero.
You put a surgical mask on, earmuffs on, gloves, you have underwear on, and you wear socks and, like, rubber crocs so that your foot doesn't touch the bottom, because you will get frostbite.
Anything you touch, you'll get frostbite.
And you step in this thing 250 degrees below zero for three minutes.
Okay, and you get out and you feel fucking fantastic when you get out you feel like you could jump over the building just wow You just everything just feels so good once you're because your body thinks it's gonna die if your body pulls all its blood into your internal organs and When you come out they actually do a temperature test the surface of your skin and the surface of my skin is usually somewhere around 30-32 35 degrees It's like it gets really cold.
And then immediately your blood just rushes back to all your extremities.
And the anti-inflammatory response is spectacular.
So people have pretty significant injuries, arthritis, even people that are close borderline and needing hip replacements, they've been able to put it off by doing this cryotherapy and mitigate almost all the pain.
Because it's funny, the mammalian dive reflex response, when your face hits cold water, it starts to initiate because that's closing those capillaries, and it's probably a very similar process that's going on with that cryo.
And I'm still doing that show, and I don't really plan on changing anything with that, because I still...
My bread and butter is going out hunting.
It's what I love.
But I wanted to...
Get a little bit deeper and do something different.
And by something different, I wanted to also do something that looks at hunting and any person watching the show, whether they're a hunter or not, could look at this and go, you know what?
There's something here.
There's something that shows me that humans are meant to be hunters.
And if I can...
Make one person think that and go, okay, well maybe hunting isn't so bad.
Then for me, that's a bonus.
Because it's something that I love.
I don't want to see hunting go away.
Because if I did, then that's my passion.
That's what I'm all about.
So if all of a sudden it disappeared, wasn't allowed or whatever, people didn't understand it, then for me I'd feel like I don't know what I would do.
I mean, you never really know because it's not guaranteed.
Just like mountain lion hunting isn't allowed in California, it makes no sense ecologically or whatever if people's emotions get involved with management or whatever.
It just seems like California is such an extreme example of people who don't have experience with wildlife or making those choices or definitely don't have experience with hunting.
The whole Department of Fish and Game out here isn't Fish and Game.
It's Fish and Wildlife.
It's one of the few states that has a distinction in the way it labels itself.
There's so many bad ideas that people have or just bad misconceptions about hunting, and a lot of it comes down to We look at hunting, or people look at hunting, a lot of times they look at the negative aspects of, like, trophy hunting.
Like, trophy hunting seems kind of gross to people.
Like, the recent one was that lady who was laying down next to a giraffe.
Like, why would you lie down next to a giraffe, smiling?
You know, the whole thing is very strange.
And the real fuck-up about it is that it puts out this image that confuses the real issue at hand, which is this was a large, non-breeding male...
That they were going to take out anyway.
They had already deemed through their conservation efforts that they were going to take this giraffe out and that they were going to use it to feed these villagers.
So her paying money to go and shoot this thing actually helps all these villagers.
It gives them food, then they take the money, they can apply the money to whatever, making wells or whatever they do with the money that they get.
From from hunters paying to hunt these animals There's a benefit to it because that animal wasn't gonna be around much longer anyway her stepping in and going but But then when you put it on Facebook and you're smiling and you're It's all so fucking confusing like to everybody else that goes well you're an asshole you just shot a fucking giraffe Who eats giraffes?
You know like no one's you're not like going over there to feed your family by shooting giraffes And then you find out, well, you actually can eat giraffes, and actually giraffes taste like a lot of different animals they're related to.
You go to the zoo, you know, I had this bit in my last special about giraffes being like the only animal that I don't feel bad that they're at the zoo.
And they just wander around like having a great old time.
Like, we're so confident that giraffes are nice that they let babies feed them.
When my daughter was two, I was holding her up in my arms, and she's got her tiny little baby hand out with a piece of lettuce, and the giraffe comes over, wraps its tongue around the lettuce, and takes it, and she's laughing.
They're so confident at the zoo in a giraffe's behavior that they'll let babies feed them.
I think people would assume too, like, oh, giraffes would be really easy to kill because they're so big.
I was working in South Africa, and on this place, there was a few giraffes there, and they would get this disease from ticks.
And so the guy would hire these professional hunters like myself or whatever to shoot, like, inoculate the giraffes with these paintballs filled with, like, we call it douse or drench.
It kills parasites.
So it's a paintball gun, so you have to get closer than you would with a bow and sneak up on these giraffes.
The drafts were the hardest thing on the place to inoculate.
Yeah.
They can see you coming forever, and they were skitterish.
They wanted these giraffes to survive, and two of the giraffes had actually gotten killed by power lines, so there's only a few giraffes left.
I don't know how it happened, or what, just whipping in the wind and killed both of them.
Whoa.
So, the guy was really set on...
Inoculate or dousing these giraffes.
So I went out there and...
I don't know why I... Because a lot I would...
There was a lot of other animals in this area that just weren't accustomed to the ticks there.
Because they might have been from another region and they kind of do this...
On these giant...
I don't even know what you'd call them...
Preserves in Africa.
If you go on a photo safari in South Africa or whatever, it's...
Essentially, there's places where, say, they bring in animals, and maybe that animal wasn't indigenous to that region, but they swapped with this game reserve area over here to kind of integrate breeding and keep the populations existing.
And so you bring in a giraffe to this portion of Africa that maybe...
Hasn't had giraffes for who knows how long.
And the ticks there will kill them.
They get these diseases from the ticks.
But there's a lot of other animals like that too.
So I'd go out at night or whatever and try to shoot these antelope with paintballs that would kill the ticks.
And I never saw the giraffes at night.
I don't know why.
Maybe I just...
It was kind of weird.
You'd think you'd find them.
They're huge.
Or maybe they're laying down.
Maybe that's why I didn't find them.
I don't know why.
I couldn't figure that out.
But they were the hardest things to shoot with a paintball gun.
So there it is.
Paintballing drafts is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.
Well, even in the places that aren't hunting, where they just are for photo safaris or what have you, you get, say you bring in, I'll pick a species, Kudu.
Kudu, there you go.
So, you bring in Kudu to this place where it could be 200,000 acres and people are going to come and take pictures of these animals.
Well, if there's no hunting there, even with the lions and other things that they have there, One of these populations may explode.
They cannot sustain themselves.
They have to manage these areas, too.
So a lot of times they do game captures, or they may allow some hunting that the people taking photos don't even know about.
But whenever you have these populations, it's the same as...
Managing animals in the state of Montana just on a smaller scale.
You have a limited amount of food supply.
You have X amount of animals.
These populations are growing at this rate.
The predators are only taking care of this much.
Therefore, excess has to be taken care of.
And some of those excess animals are animals that used to be near extinction.
And now, if you don't manage them, they'll all die off of wherever they're at.
And all that, it's a business on multi-levels too because the landowner now owns the meat, so then he'll either sell the meat or give it to people living there, working there.
It's funny, Ebola, one of my friends is a professional hunter in South Africa, and a lot of people didn't want to go to Africa after they heard the Ebola.
Well, Africa's such a large continent, from where he is to where the Ebola is, is further away than Atlanta, Georgia.
We did an image on the podcast recently where we pulled up, there's an image of Africa, the continent, and how enormous it is and how many other continents you could stuff inside of Africa.
And it's so shocking when you realize how big it really is.
Because on a map, there it is right there.
Look, China, United States, India...
Eastern Europe and a bunch of other shit in there, too.
He wrote an amazing piece about this woman, these young girls that are getting involved in hunting, and it's become a career for a lot of them.
They look real pretty, and they go over there, shoot animals, and pose with them, and all the pro hunters get on their side, and all the anti-hunters attack their Facebooks, and death threats, and it's almost like a dance that everyone's doing.
But what he wrote about it, which I thought was really fascinating, he was like, I think a lot of this is sexism.
It's because, yeah, it's because it's women and as much as, it's the same people, it's kind of a hypocritical way to look at it too.
Because they go, oh, a lot of the people that are doing this, maybe it's just me being hypocritical as well, but a lot of the people that do it probably look at them as women and go, you know, if it's a man, it's different because hunting is a man's sport and they see these pretty girls doing it and they're out of place or something.
It's also that they're attractive white women with blonde hair.
Yeah, exactly.
You just think, all these evil thoughts of racism and cruelty and just these monster Aryan women that are shooting animals and posing with big stupid whitened teeth smiles.
That was something that we had gotten into before.
We were trying to describe, like, the average hunter.
And I said, well, how many people, like, you know, like, a lot of hunters tend to lean right-wing, and maybe that's because of gun rights or Second Amendment ideas, or just because it's, like, sort of a traditional, you know, god guns and, you know...
Yeah, I think in this day and age, it's more about...
I mean, not that this needs to be discussed in depth, but I think homosexuality, it's more about if you really do care, unless you're dealing with some extremely aggressive individual that's, like, annoying with his gayness...
Like, just won't take no for an answer, which I have seen.
I have seen.
I know a comedian like that.
He's fucking brutal.
He's not so brutal anymore.
He's an older gentleman, I believe.
He's calmed down.
But back in the day, like, maybe 10, 15 years ago, I had a deal with him one night at a drunken bar in Montreal.
I was like, dude, you gotta get the fuck away from me.
Like, I'm not gay, you gotta stop.
He was brutal!
Brutal!
He was trying to get this other dude to come upstairs, and then he's like, what about you?
I think in this day and age, there's going to come a point in time where the person that is homophobic, or racist, or any other prejudiced, that person is going to be very rare.
Very rare and despised.
Like right now, there's plenty of people that you could hang out with that would share in your racism or share in your homophobia.
But I think because of the internet and because people are kind of understanding people a little bit better and motivations a little bit better, that's gonna be less and less.
But, if you say that you eat an animal that's not on the average, everyday menu, You know, if you're one of those weird dudes that go squirrel hunting, you know, oh, you piece of shit, how could you shoot a squirrel?
But pigeons were actually brought to North America as a food source.
When you look at pigeons that are in New York and they're flying all over the buildings and shitting all over the place, those pigeons were initially brought over as a food source.
Yeah, they'd eaten the cockroach, they'd gone back to the hotel, and that's when the reaction started kicking in.
It wasn't an instantaneous reaction.
So I don't know if maybe they have a less strong reaction from eating the cockroach than they do from eating shellfish, or if that's how their reaction normally is.
We documented the whole thing because it was just ridiculous.
And so I got sick and I don't know if it was from drinking water, but sometimes the gestation period of a lot of things you pick up.
I did drink out of one stream that my brother didn't and it might have been below an elk wallow.
Anyways, I get sick, and it happens to be this night that we had an insane walk back.
We got back, I think it was one in the morning, and we could have bivvied out, but the thought was, we set up a base camp, and if you bivvy out, you carry your camp on your back.
But then you still have to get all the meat back, and it was, in our minds, easier to just...
Do extra effort if we had to come out light, and then we would have room to carry meat so we wouldn't have to carry our gear and other things.
I was hanging out with this photographer when we went moose hunting, this guy Sam, and he was talking about this trip that he had went on where they had not brought enough food, and everyone on the trip had lost like 30 pounds, 20 pounds.
And it doesn't take much to do, because you almost come to a point when you're working so hard that you physically can't, you just get sick of eating almost.
They need some better, higher, you just need to bring sticks of butter or something.
There's certain people, man, they just, and a lot of them are hunters, like, Rinella's one of those guys.
It's just fucking tough.
Just, they have this mental toughness, the ability to endure discomfort that the average person just doesn't get, and I think it's accentuated by this life-or-death struggle that you experience on a day-to-day basis when you're hunting.
Yeah, you can kind of compartmentalize certain aches and pains and hunger and thirst and cold You just block that shit out and keep going or the average person sort of wallows in that stuff But you know you have you have to you come into this this you have to do these certain things where you're tasked with something It's probably a lot harder than The average person thinks you can do, but once you've done it once, a lot of this stuff's mental.
And that's the Apex Predator show that I've been doing comes back to a lot of shit's just mental.
A lot of times people start focusing on the discomfort, and it accentuates.
Their entire focus becomes this pain instead of doing the task, like blocking out whatever discomfort that you have, dealing with it, and get through it.
I noticed, and you, you know, I don't know if you've experienced this yet, but for me...
I've hunted a lot.
I almost like to punish myself.
I like it to be hard.
I like it to be a challenge.
I will actually create it.
I just did this hunt in New Zealand where I was hunting these fallow deer.
At any given time for the first few days, I could have shot a deer.
A lot of people don't realize, as hunters, it's not always the goal to just go shoot something.
It's part of the experience.
And so for me, I just kept passing up animals because the experience wasn't right.
Until the last day, when I was supposed to leave early, and I ended up, oh, I'm just going to be hunting for two hours and I don't bring any water.
And I ended up hunting all day and going...
I don't even know how far, 18 miles maybe, and I didn't bring any food, I didn't bring any water, and I'm hurting, and I ended up shooting a deer at last light.
And now, to me, it was an awesome experience.
It made the trip.
It made that memory.
The hardship made the memory.
And something that I, as a hunter, that non-hunters don't really maybe understand is having these antlers around.
And when the meat's long gone, I can look at that and remember the hardship and the journey and the adventure and these other things about the experience.
And the meat was a byproduct, but these are the memories that I, like you look at that moose and you think of something completely different than I do.
You remember how it went down.
You remember, you know, maybe the struggle or carrying the meat back or whatever.
So I may have a rack in my house that's sitting up on the mantle.
Why is that one on the mantle and that one Well, that one I had to work real hard for.
So I look at it and I think it reminds me constantly of what I went through.
So instead of, like, some people, they want a bigger deer so they could say, hey, I got a 190 buck and, you know, 190 inch and look, it's on my, you know, and they'll measure everything and look at his tines and look how big his...
For you, it was just, it's a more difficult pursuit.
I think when you've been hunting as long as you have, also, you kind of appreciate what you appreciate after the fact.
You have a real deep understanding of what it means to you.
Whereas to me, it's all pretty new.
I've only been doing it for three, not even three years now.
So it's like, oh, crazy.
We're shooting a turkey now.
Oh, this is cool.
We're going to go shoot this.
I'm going to eat that.
It's fun.
I enjoy it.
I love, you know, the turkey, I don't know if I'll do that again.
I might, I mean, it's not that I didn't like it, but what I didn't like about the turkey is you work all day and, you know, several days in a row to get a turkey, and you can only, it's like a meal.
So hunting isn't just about going out and acquiring meat.
Hunting is also about the challenge of the pursuit of the animal, being the hunter, being the predator out there trying to outsmart or out-hunt animals.
Defy their natural instincts, figure out how to avoid the wind blowing in their nose, figuring out how to approach them the right way, and to make it even more difficult, going after the bigger ones that are smarter, that have been alive longer, making it a more difficult task, and making the appreciation of the accomplishment much better.
Yeah, it seems like those trips are very strange, too, because you were staying in one of those weird cabins that they have set up there for people that can just use them anytime they want.
They can go up there and hang out in those cabins.
Yeah, because, well, yeah, because it's tough terrain, and if that's your sport, these groups, like, build these huts.
There's historical significance to some of them, too.
They were put in for culling expeditions back when animals were running rampant there because they're all non-natives.
I like to talk about New Zealand because it's a place that I've...
Come to love for a lot of reasons.
But when you talk about conservation, there is completely different than we think of it here.
It's almost...
It's a different world, and it's really hard to explain to people that don't understand it because the animals aren't technically supposed to be there, but we want them there, and they can't get rid of them.
So there's a completely different system in place there.
And if you're thinking that must be a mistake, that the deer were chewing their way through some vegetation that happened upon a mouthful of bird, think again.
Up in Canada, a group of ornithologists were studying adult birds.
In order to examine them closely, researchers used mist nets.
Usually draped between trees are designed to trap birds or bats gently so that they could be collected, studied, and released.
When a herd of deer came by, the deer walked up to the struggling birds and ate them alive right out of the nets.
Yeah, there's all sorts of speculation about that, but when we were in Alberta last year, one of the guys we were with, they had seen a female eat its own baby.
We started out doing a TV thing and you have these ideas of what should happen and that never freaking happens.
Ever.
Things always go wrong or something.
But that's why I wanted to take and look at it as a learning experience, not necessarily come out with these preconceived ideas of what's going to happen.
I just want to...
Act as this animal in the wild, learn from it, and then see what its life would be like.
And one of the things that I've come to the conclusion of is a lot of these animals that we see as being super efficient and easily surviving, it's a hard knock life for them.
It's not as easy.
A lot of animals scrounge and are hunting all day every day into the night just to get enough food to sustain themselves.
And then there's other animals that it is easier.
But for the most part, I've learned that these animals that hunt daily, it's not as easy as you might think.
You always see the highlight reel of the lion catching the gazelle, but it's pretty hard even for the lion to catch the gazelle.
It's a pretty interesting thought.
And then we go out as humans and it's a lot, essentially, it's a lot easier for us to hunt and catch things than it is for these natural predators or animals.
Yeah, it just goes back to that challenge of what makes it hard and why you do it.
I mean, there's people that only bow hunt.
There's people that bow hunt and rifle hunt.
There's people that don't traditional bow hunt.
And it's all based on the challenge and the experience for them, as well as a lot of ideals as far as Okay, well I'm a bow hunter and if you shoot with a gun, that's too easy for me.
But for me, I do whatever kind of hunting because I just love hunting.
Yeah, there's a lot of people that have, there's like a purity involved in like shooting something with a bow because it's much more difficult than shooting something with a rifle.
See, I'm cool with that, but sometimes for me, I don't like when hunters are against hunters.
Like, if you're, oh, you aren't a hunter because you shoot it with a rifle, and then, well, the traditional dude's like, you aren't a hunter because you shoot it with a compound bow, and there's a guy out there wearing no shoes going, you guys need to grab him with your hands.
And there's some other dude who's like, you gotta catch him with your teeth.
And that's, for me, if I'm hunting with a rifle, then I may try to find something that's bigger or pack into an area that's further or who knows what I do.
Just to make it more of a challenge.
And then there's some times where obviously the only intention is I'm looking for meat and I need that meat now.
But for the most part, yeah, either way, you're still out there hunting.
That I would have done different, but also I couldn't have done different.
Sometimes you have to do what happens in that moment and make a decision.
And for me, I didn't want to shoot a buffalo bedded down, bison bedded down, but some things went wrong during the filming of the camera guy was in the wrong place.
And if that bison got up and started walking off, we wouldn't be able to film it.
And so I made the decision to shoot it with my bow in that particular instance, and I had to live with that decision.
Yeah, I shot it where it would have been good, but the bow didn't penetrate hard enough.
The equipment was right.
Everything was right.
It was just one of those deals where a quarter inch left to right and maybe would have made a difference.
It hit the shoulder.
Just, yeah, the next day it was still alive.
And for me, I mean, there's guys that could maybe watch that episode and go, well, you're bow hunting and you shot it in the end with, if you haven't seen it, I'm giving away a spoiler alert.
But yeah, I ended up shooting it with a rifle the next day.
And for me, it wasn't about bow hunting or rifle hunting or being a purist in this form or following through because the natives who did that tactic would have only used primitive weaponry or whatever.
For me, in that moment, it was about...
Putting that bison down.
As hunters, we don't want to see an animal suffer as that or the other thing.
So it didn't really matter what I shot it with in the end.
I think we got back to the tents at 1.30 in the morning later.
It'd been just dumping rain.
We lost the blood trail.
And I also didn't want to keep pushing it because at some point you think, okay, well, it's not smart to track at night.
The only reason we were tracking it at night was because the rain was coming.
And then it just, there was good blood, and then we lost the blood trail and decided to come back the next day.
And luckily things turned out, but when I came away from that trip, there was a lot of things that I was like, ugh.
I like to make things...
I don't necessarily need to show people that I'm pounding my chest and be the greatest.
I'll show my failures as well.
I'm not saying that that was a failure or whatever, but, you know, even in solo hunters or other things, there's a lot of episodes where I don't get anything.
There's a lot of hunting shows that won't show that, but for me...
It's real.
It's hunting.
And I've missed things with my bow.
I've missed things with my rifle.
I've messed up, but I keep doing it.
And I think if I just edited things how it's always perfect, then I'm just kind of lying to myself, really.
I think if there was very few hunting shows out there, maybe that would be acceptable, like, to try to make it, like, the most exciting version of hunting possible.
But I think it's really important to portray it for what it really is.
What it really is is a difficult pursuit, even for an expert hunter like yourself.
No, things go wrong, and, you know, and then it also adds to the gravity of the situation.
You know, we come upon a bison and shoot it with a rifle and the bison drops.
And that episode in particular, I had quite a few people that weren't hunters at all, but I started watching the series.
And they said that it was like there was no warning.
The bison just died.
And they were like, I felt sad.
And I said, yeah, that's the pointless.
Like, you go through the, you felt the emotions of a hunter.
I don't necessarily feel sad, but I talk about it in the end, I say that the path of a hunter is a humbling path, and it really is.
Like, in that moment, you watch that, and you go, boom, this bison just is now dead, and you go, whoa.
Yeah, there's a feeling of loss, right?
Right, and then there's also the feeling of, I'm thankful for this bison, and now it's providing me with all this meat, and that is what it is to be a hunter.
You go through a range of emotions, no matter how many times you've done it, that life begets life, and now this bison is no longer an animal, it is a source of meat, and I'm going to use that throughout the year.
That's the real big difference between someone who's been involved in the taking of the life, whether you're a farmer that kills your own cows or whether you're a hunter that goes out and hunts the meat.
There's a much deeper understanding of what you're actually eating.
I don't think it's necessarily healthy that we could just go to a supermarket and buy a steak.
It just gives you a massive disconnect, and that's where all the self-righteousness from people wearing leather, eating meat, and getting angry at people for hunting, that's where it all comes from.
It's a sickness.
There's a disconnect, like a complete total disconnect from what you're doing by eating a hamburger.
You hired a supermarket hitman to go out there and kill those fucking animals and package it up so you can be completely insulated from the life-or-death struggle, and then you're getting upset at other people.
The idea of a meat-eating person who wears leather being upset at hunting is one of the great, bizarre hypocrisies of our culture.
I have a respect for my food in a different way that someone, an animal, is now food is not an animal.
But for me, meat is always an animal.
It's always food.
I respect it in that way.
And when it becomes meat, then it becomes something different to me, but it's still an animal.
I think it's kind of a weird story, but we had a horse that...
We'd use to pack out things and whatever, and it ended up breaking its leg, and we had to shoot it.
And so I didn't want to do it because it's like you have this attachment to this animal.
And then my other guy didn't want to do it either, but one of the guys that hadn't used the horses, we talked to him and said, okay, you need to put this horse down.
He shot the horse.
And I still felt like, okay, this is like now we have a ditto.
And so I don't know why, but I cut the back stakes out and ate the horse.
This is like people are gonna be like, that is disgusting.
That is sick.
But for me, it was like, okay, well now it serves a utility, a purpose.
Have you ever seen that picture of a mountain lion and a mountain goat that apparently got into a scrap and they both fell off the mountain onto a highway and they were both dead?
So the first episode, I emulated the alligator, learned from the alligator, and my goal was to, well, to learn from the alligator, but I was trying to grab a wild boar barehanded.
I'm going to study animals in their environments, learn what makes them successful, and challenge myself with nearly impossible hunts, giving me raw skills only obtained from experience.
I plan to immerse myself in nature and hunt like an animal.
You could actually do it the way you want to do it.
They're not going to fuck with you, where if you were doing this on, you know, fill in the blank, and name another cable channel, they would give you a hard time.
They're not used to hunting.
They would try to turn it into some bullshit reality show with predetermined endings.
I let it go, but I tied it up with, I had some P-cord, because the whole goal was I was trying to grab a boar.
I wasn't going to kill one.
And, or a pig, it could have been a sow, too.
Makes me now realize that strolling around in the swamp with just my head above water is a freaking dangerous thing, because this thing instantly charged me.
I mean, nothing that, um, nothing life-threatening, really, I would say.
I mean, I've had elk, like, wounded elk come pretty close to getting at me, but that was just because somebody messed up, and it wasn't, uh, it was pretty weird.
The whole relationship that football has to steroids is...
It's similar in a way to what the UFC has to steroids, but the UFC is more aggressively pursuing it, I think.
The NFL... If you look at football players from the 1960s, and you look at football players from 2015, you're like, okay, what the fuck happened?
What happened?
Did humans evolve?
Did humans become much larger?
Like, what happened?
Well, there's certainly, like, advancements in strength and conditioning programs, understanding recovery and how to enhance growth and all these different things, but there's also steroids.
Well, they're starting to realize now the overall effect of all these car wrecks and it's not pretty and it's interesting because there's this class-action lawsuit against the NFL and there's all these different people that are saying They're gonna start suing and all these different players that played for years and years and years that are now debilitated They're just their brains have come to toast.
Guys are starting to talk about it now, about how to mitigate it by not sparring as hard, trying to...
Spar less and concentrate more on strength conditioning drills or drill skill skill based drills for fighting because in the old days and Some some camps still do it this way.
They would just go to war three four days a week They would just glove up and beat the fuck out of each other and that's how they got better and that's how they learned and there's there's some There's some benefit to that.
It becomes normal to you.
Much like what we were talking about earlier about the mental aspect of just being tough enough to deal with certain situations and not freaking out and not being overwhelmed by Your thoughts, like, oh my god, I'm suffering.
Yeah.
That's similar in martial arts, too.
Like, one of the sayings in jujitsu is always, you gotta get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Because jujitsu, like, sometimes people panic tap.
They just get in a bad situation, it just hurts, and they just can't take it, and they tap.
There's some things you shouldn't fight off because like you have to realize as you get older especially, you realize, okay, the reason why I don't want to tap here is because of my ego.
But if I do tap, then I don't have to go to the hospital and get surgery on my fucking elbow.
But if I don't tap, I'm going to get my elbow ripped apart and then they're gonna have to reconstruct it because I've already done this before.
Yeah, those guys are, that's one of those things, they're in pretty good shape.
I mean, because you're running, it's a sport we're running all the time.
What I started doing was, I got like a soccer, I'm not very good at soccer or whatever, but running up and down hills with a soccer ball, like juggling it, because then you get, you like got to control the ball, so on your descent and things, you're actually working a lot harder.
That's a big one that I think there's a massive misconception in the public's eye.
They think of hunters as being these fat guys who drink beer and go out and shoot animals and laugh about it.
They don't realize, like, there's guys like you, like, you were talking about this the last time you were here, you have this insane VO2 max when they studied you for that Predator show, for your Predator show, I should say.
They tested your VO2 max, and you're in some elite endurance athlete territory.
I have friends that don't work out, and one of the most hilarious things ever was taking one of my friends who was a comedian who doesn't work out to the gym and trying to put him through a workout, just a fairly easy workout, and watching him just turn blue and gray and look like he was dying and heaving and coughing and hanging on to the...
The recovery time he needed in between sets was hilarious.
It's like, you realize, like, this guy just, here's what, this is what a body looks like when it's never been pushed.
Because I've taken out and hunted with a few professional athletes.
These guys are, Human specimens of the highest degree like they Physically and then they try hiking with me and Absolutely, they just don't get it that is like no.
I trained for this is what I do Right, he'll fit or whatever, right?
You put me in if I'm gonna go bench press like you bench press and this is not gonna happen But we're gonna have you pack on my back and I'll just hike forever.
Primarily for guys like you that are going to do what you did in Alaska, where you're going to walk hours and hours and hours with giant slabs of meat on your back.
That Kodiak Island, man, was the subject of that television show that was really controversial because it had James Hatfield from Metallica was the narrator.
It was like there was one scene where these guys were stalking this bear and the guy was about to pull the trigger on his bow and then they cut to commercial and then they come back and then all of a sudden the guy doesn't have a jacket on and his pack's not there.
It's like he's in the same scene.
But did he take his pack off?
Are you reenacting this?
Did you forget he wore a jacket?
There was a lot of fuckery, man.
And then I talked to this dude who worked on the set, and he was explaining to me how much fuckery was going on, and then it made even more sense.
I was watching some other Alaska show, and it was supposedly about, like, a wolf is coming to eat our cows, and we're gonna go kill this wolf, and then...
There's the wolf!
And then the guy gets off the horse and shoots the wolf.
And being a hunter, I mean, you can immediately spot bullshit, like, instantly.
And he throws the wolf on, and it was this wolf that had been shot days ago.
I mean, the thing had rigor mortis, its eyes were sunken, and it looked like they just pulled it out of the freezer.
Me and my brother were laughing so hard.
He's supposedly tying it on the horse and he's just like a frozen board.
There was one episode of the Alaska, the last frontier that I watched where they were fishing and it was like this really badly acted thing where they're like, there's a bear.
Well, you get a deeper understanding of life itself in the sense of actual biological life on Earth.
You get a deeper understanding of not just experiencing it from a video or reading an article about it, but from actually being there in the environment where these things live.
The other thing is you get to be a part of nature, not just a watcher of nature, not just a bystander.
Like even doing the Apex Predator show, I'm looking at the way an animal lives and then trying to see how humans compare and then go do it.
And the doing it part is completely different than the watching it part.
I can watch the great blue heron do something and there's the heron episode.
Obviously, there's some things that are ridiculous about it.
Like I decide to go into a river wearing stilts.
I go, this seems like you're trying to make entertaining television.
And at first I thought, is this going to be one of those things where it's like the filleted salmon type show?
No, that's the last thing I want.
So I look at the way the Great Blue Heron hunts and I'm bird watching for...
The majority of the first part, like watching the way these animals do something.
And by watching them, I thought I understood it.
And then I went and did it in a similar fashion where I'm now putting myself in the experience of dealing with things like water refraction, deep water, clarity, trying to sneak in and be on this elevated platform.
And the experience of doing it, I learned something about that bird that I would have never learned otherwise.
And it was like this light on moment where I thought, okay, even in the midst of these semi-ridiculous things, I'm learning something that I can't learn by observing.
And light refraction, from what I understand it with bow hunting, you have to shoot in the water like maybe six inches below where you think the fish is?
Yeah, so it varies on water clarity, angle of the sun, depth of the fish, and at some point I realized the fish were so deep that the spear wouldn't even really reach them with enough force for penetration.
I think guys like you are really important in the world of hunting because what you represent is what doesn't fit when these guys have this stereotypical idea of what a hunter is.
The stereotypical idea of what a hunter is to a person who doesn't know any hunters.
They want to think of them as these loudmouthed, drunken dummies who don't really care.
These Bubba-type characters.
And Rinella flies in the face of that, as does Jim Shockey, as do you.
I think it's...
It's really important that people don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Because this...
Yeah, those people are repulsive.
Yeah, the people who...
I mean, the assholes that laugh and mock these animals as they're shooting them, and people who are drunks are going out there, and irresponsible use of firearms and weapons.
You're right.
I agree with you as much as anybody that's listening.
Someone who disrespects the lives that they're taking and does it in this...
Really repulsive way.
I'm with you.
If you're an anti-hunter because of those people, if they were all like that, I would be like that too.
But that's not what hunting has been...
As it's been explained to me, and as I've experienced from guys like Ryan Callahan, from guys like you, from...
All the people out there that I've run into that are real hunters have been very respectful, very fascinated by it, intrigued, constantly curious as to the nature of these animals, and super respectful of the lives of these animals that they take.
Because when I first started, I've always wanted to get into hunting television, and when I first started trying to break into it, And I got a criticism because there was this model.
It was that Bubba Hunter guy.
And I wasn't that guy.
And so the person had told me, well, if you really want to do this, then you need to do whatever.
And I was on a hunt and I shot a deer.
And it was like I was told that I need to celebrate in some extravagant way.
Fist pumping type way.
And I did it for that moment.
And I immediately regretted it.
I felt horrible.
I felt like this isn't me.
And if this is what it is, I don't want to do this.
And I got...
It was like...
And that right there told me, like, if this is that industry and this is that, I don't want to be a part of this.
But then my thought was, you know, there's probably other people out there like me that if they had the chance to do it how, just be myself and do it, then they would recognize that and maybe change the whole way things are going.
And that's my goal.
I mean, it'd be awesome to be a part of the people that change the way people see hunters because I think there is the ability to make that change because there is a lot of us out there that respect nature, respect the animals, see it as a way of life and not just as some crazy bubba guy out there hooting and hollering and fist pumping and doing his thing and not respecting what we have.
The lack of appreciation for the life that you've just taken and also the lack of understanding of the complexities of the whole situation is also one of the disturbing things about the whole quote-unquote Bubba thing.
I took an animal, but I'm excited because of the challenge and what it represents to me.
Like, it went through this.
It's not always a solid moment, but it's an excitement in this very deep moment where you did take the life of an animal, and you need to respect that.
And for me, I always have, and I've expected the entire journey to get to that point.
And so for me to smile behind an animal, to me, means it's not disrespectful.
There's nothing wrong with you being with a big animal that you shot.
You're very happy it all worked out well and smiling.
Correct.
But people do.
They think, oh, you've got to be somber.
You've just killed.
You've just taken a life.
Why?
If you respect the life, if you're happy that it all worked out well, you're...
You're happy with your accomplishment and your hard work paid off.
Why can't you smile?
Is it disrespectful to the life that you've taken to smile?
It doesn't make the life any less significant if you don't smile or do smile.
It doesn't change anything.
But what I think you bring to the table and what guys like Shaggy or Rinella bring to the table is a level of I've never had
this opinion of hunting.
Until I listen to these guys in these podcasts I always had this really negative really stereotypical view of what a hunter is and now I kind of understand it and I've gotten that like guys on my message board There's guys on my message board that have evolved over the time They've been there where they were there years ago and they had this idea like all hunters are assholes and then as time went on They've kind of been exposed to all these different people and all these different conversations.
They realize oh We're just involved in this weird culture that has This compartmentalization of various aspects of life.
And the big one is where you get your food from.
So there's people that are criticizing people that do it themselves.
There's no better way for an animal to die than by a hunter.
There really is no better way.
If you shoot a deer or an elk and that animal is dead within seconds, that is the most peaceful way it's ever going to die.
The most pure way you're ever going to acquire meat, it's so much less struggle and less suffering than being a domesticated animal that's raised to be slaughtered.
It's so much better than being killed by a predator out in the wild that's going to slowly eat you asshole first.
There's no better way.
If you really, truly love animals, you've got to take into account a few...
Undeniable truths.
One is that populations need to be controlled, and they are controlled through the natural way with predators, but when we live in those environments, you have to pick a team.
If you're gonna say, team people, well then you're gonna have to control the predators as well.
And you have to control the game animals because, look, try living in upstate New York where you can't even drive down the road without slamming into a suicidal deer.
I mean, they have some places where they have to control the populations of deer So badly that they have, like in Pennsylvania, they don't even have a season.
There's parts of Pennsylvania where you could just go and just shoot deer all the time.
Yeah, and there's always the thing that always makes me laugh is the people that say, oh, we'll just release more predators to control, like if you're all about animal population control, like make it before humans, like before human, or what did they say?
It was fine before we got here.
And I always laugh and say, when is when we got here?
Before we got here, before people came across the land bridge, humans and animals have been, especially on any con, have been coexisting for a very long time.
And humans have been a prime hunter of these animals as a predator in the natural food chain.
Well, one of the main arguments with how human beings' brains developed to such a large size is because of hunting, because of the sophisticated methods that we need to employ to make sure that we kept eating food.
And one of the things that, like looking at Apex Spreader, it really kind of looks at humans and animals and how we've adapted and learned from nature.
If we were out there and, okay, well, yeah, our brains, it all comes back to we have...
Every animal out there can possibly beat us in a certain way.
Or whatever.
It's specialized in a certain way.
But it comes back to our brains.
We can figure out how to do what they do best.
And that's what this show explores.
How we figure out how to do what they do best and see how we compare to it.
And a lot of times we may not compare in a certain way.
But it comes back to using our brains and figuring out a way...
We've got, I want to do, so even, it's called Apex Predator, but sometimes titles of shows may be misleading because I also want to look at every aspect of nature, not just predators, because I think there's a lot of other animals that can teach us things.
So we're considering humans as an apex predator.
How did we get to this point by learning from nature as well as humans?
These changes that we've made.
So one thing that I would like to do is look at camels and the way they carry water.
Because humans are, a camel can carry water, and humans are one of the only predators that can carry water.
So you think of that as an advantage.
And how we compare to a camel, like how much a water can camel, how long they can go, stages of dehydration.
So I'd like to explore that.
And hunt in a desert situation for an animal that necessarily...
I wouldn't be hunting for camels.
End quote.
Trust me, that's not something I want to get into.
But another desert animal may be an owdad or something in a very arid climate.
What else?
I'd really like to look at the way mountain lions, they're so quiet when they walk.
And some of these, you look at some of these episodes, you just see it as a 30-minute episode.
And some of these episodes, I've trained for months to prepare to do this episode, the wolf episode.
I mean, I was training, running, doing a lot of things to prepare myself to be able to attempt to run an elk down.
And one of these episodes that we had slated an idea of, I was training for, was this mountain lion episode where I'd compare how mountain lions, like, the amount of noise they make when they walk is very little.
I've had them just walk past me and never heard a thing.
So I thought, let's measure, kind of measure how loud a mountain lion is when it's walking, and then us with our boots on, and then us with our bare feet.
And then go and do a hunt barefoot.
And so for months, I was training to harden my feet and get them tough enough where I could go in the desert and hunt an animal barefoot.
We ended up not doing that episode, so for months I was walking around barefoot.
Just toughening your feet?
Yeah, toughening my feet, so I'm going to have to do that all over again.
But that's one of them.
You got any crazy ideas?
Because there's a lot of cool animals out there that I'd like to explore.
Have you ever seen that dude from Dual Survivor that walks everywhere barefoot?
He's such a goofball.
It's like one of those shows where, you know, these guys like...
For sure there's some fuckery going on in the show.
For sure.
But this guy wears no shoes.
Like, this is his idea that, you know...
To really truly survive, you know, you're gonna have to go without shoes because occasionally you find yourself with no shoes and then you'd be fucked because your feet are soft, so he doesn't want to be in that situation, so his feet are always hard.
There's some crazies out there that are all about this like no shoe thing and there's dudes that talk about drawing like a fake sandal on your foot because you can't go into places, you know, like no shoes, no shirt, no service.
So they've got all these, like, tricks of making, like, a rope, a paracord fake sandal so people don't really notice that you're barefoot.
And then how to, like, get into it and start by going on varying terrain.
And I actually had to spend, while I was trying to toughen my feet, I had to spend some time in L.A. So I was, like, cruising down downtown L.A. near Skid Row, barefoot, and I thought, this is a good way to pick up a disease.
I guess, you know, actually in my day-to-day, I do have a lot of conversations with people that aren't hunters, but they're also people that are close to me.
I think when you really sit down and think about it, if you're talking to somebody like myself or people that are like-minded to me, there's a lot of things that we can pull from that if you just actually had a real conversation and take out all the bullshit of the, I don't even know, on both sides, I call it the hunting propaganda and the non-hunter propaganda, the things that you're told and you think or whatever.
You just actually have a real conversation about it.
There's something, it sounds like, oh no it's not, you're taking a life.
I get all the arguments, I understand the arguments, but I'm telling you, there's something, there's something even psychedelic about going into their world And hunting them, dipping your toe into the wild, the true wild.
There's something like boundary dissolving about that.
It changes the way I looked at the whole world.
It really did.
Like the first time I went deer hunting...
One of the crazy things about it was looking at this deer, locking eyes with this thing in the wild and understanding the roles that we have.
My role is the predator.
His role is trying to get the fuck away from me.
And then taking its life and killing it and eating it.
And I was like, this is a spiritual experience.
A deeply spiritual experience in a weird way that I didn't anticipate.
I anticipated it being Maybe somber and that I would have to get over the sadness of it all and then I might not even want to do it again Maybe I'll just become a vegetarian.
Those were like real considerations that I had but after the event I felt like there's a there's something that most folks are missing about this experience and I think it's because it's been very poorly represented in our culture by media by these the the stereotypical Bubba type by all these different Different pieces of information that have sort of filtered down to the average urban civilization inhabitant.
We don't have a connection to it, so we're basing our opinions on it just based on stereotypes, on these immediate depictions of what a hunter is.
False ideas but then when you if you actually got to talk to someone but it's also one of those things you talk about it we talk about we're sitting here talking about it but until you go through that experience you necessarily don't know what it feels like what it means what it means to you my mom's stepdad who called grandpa he is loves fishing big out like loves nature hiking other things Went hunting,
shot a bird, felt really sad, never went hunting.
But that was his experience.
So everybody maybe experiences it in a different way, but you really don't know until you jump in and do that experience.
Yeah, and it just depends on maybe your experience.
But also, I think it depends on your reason for going out there.
If you have never hunted before, and you say to yourself, I would like to go hunting because I'd like to eat less meat that I don't know where it came from.
Be more involved in that process.
If you went out and said, I have a goal that maybe one day I'd like to, in my house, only eat things that I've killed.
Even before you've even killed anything.
you go out with that mindset and then it becomes a utility thing it becomes like a part of your process for your life and i think it affects you differently because you go okay there's a reason for this there's uh like i'm eating animals anyways i'm killing animals anyways i might as well be part of the process you're killing them with your credit card or your money so Somebody else, maybe you aren't seeing it, but it's happening.
Because I get a lot of people on social media or whatever that have listened to, like, found me through your podcasts or whatever, and a lot of them have now jumped into hunting, and there's still a lot of them that are trying to figure out how to do it.
And I would say the main question I get asked is how I get into it, or how would someone get into it?
Really, I mean, the first thing, you've got to take the hunter's safety and do the legal requirements.
Because once you have that, then your barriers to entry are slowly getting less and less.
And then really just getting hooked up with somebody that hunts.
And maybe that's through hunting conservation organizations.
I think there's a big niche there that can step up and go to some of these events.
Because there's a lot of conservation organizations that you can join, say, Wild Sheep Foundation or Elk Foundation.
And you go out on these projects and do something for wildlife, like build a water guzzler, reseed an area that's burnt, do all these things.
Or conservation efforts that are done by hunters.
And you meet other people.
Because hunters, if you meet them in the flesh, are probably really willing to help you out if you're like, I really want to get into this.
And you've got to find the right type of guy, too, or woman or whatever to get you into it.
But the easiest way is to have somebody show you, like a mentor.