Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
Still out? | ||
Okay. | ||
Two, one. | ||
Oh, and we're live, ladies and gentlemen, with the creator. | ||
Are you the creator of this? | ||
No. | ||
Of Rybrain? | ||
Yeah, now I'm thinking Yeti. | ||
I was like, oh, I don't go that far. | ||
Rybrain, though. | ||
Rybrain. | ||
Cheers, sir. | ||
Thank you, sir. | ||
The clink. | ||
The famous... | ||
The Yeti jingle. | ||
The Rambler clink. | ||
unidentified
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Ooh. | |
What a great invention. | ||
You guys were just getting hammered and throwing anything in there. | ||
For folks who haven't been properly introduced, my friend Ben O'Brien is here. | ||
He was in the podcast from Paradise when we were in Lanai. | ||
One of my all-time favorites. | ||
I mean, the island or the podcast? | ||
The whole thing. | ||
It was all awesome. | ||
The whole damn thing. | ||
But people are drinking those Cat Ladies now. | ||
Which is... | ||
It's not to be advised. | ||
That's a terrible idea, dude. | ||
When I saw Dudley making that, I was like, what the fuck are you doing, man? | ||
He poured tequila and Red Bull into a glass of red wine. | ||
And we were looking at him like, what is that? | ||
And people... | ||
Hashtags are wrong, man, when people are hashtagging. | ||
Of course, I do it sometimes just to poke fun at everybody, but I've had probably a dozen people like, man, I tried the cat lady last night. | ||
Yeah, people are just drinking it just to say they drank it. | ||
Which is just, don't do it, people. | ||
Don't do it, but rye brain is actually pretty good. | ||
I can get that. | ||
There were some meat, some Traeger, some bows involved, and stuff just got put together. | ||
I've had these before. | ||
They actually taste good. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But there's like no benefit that you get from Alpha Brain when you mix it with whiskey. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
It's like all the science we put into Alpha Brain, all the non-science from whiskey. | ||
Out the window, folks. | ||
It's all out the window. | ||
Well, I mean, we've made zero leaps forward, but we're good where we are currently. | ||
I think maybe it might balance us out, though. | ||
It might. | ||
Maybe it keeps you from getting too stupid. | ||
Which, that's an achievement. | ||
It's a big issue with whiskey. | ||
What is this whiskey we got here? | ||
I don't know. | ||
Jamie just kind of threw it out there. | ||
This is some shit that some dude gave us at the comedy store. | ||
It's called Angel's Envy. | ||
Oh, that sounds like a... | ||
I think angels are really envious of whiskey, though. | ||
I mean, you're hanging out with God. | ||
You can fly. | ||
You're like, God, I wish I had some of that whiskey. | ||
Meanwhile, you buy it in a store. | ||
Angels don't have money? | ||
Maybe that's how it balances out. | ||
It's got wings on the back. | ||
Maybe they're trying to co-market with Red Bull. | ||
I don't know. | ||
Those are always the wings on the back of a stripper that cries a lot. | ||
And Angel and Envy are both names of strippers. | ||
That's true, dude. | ||
I've never seen that. | ||
That's a really good point. | ||
Yeah, the wings on the back is always a weird move, right? | ||
Listen, if you're drinking whiskey with Alphabrain, you can do whatever you want. | ||
You can put whatever kind of whiskey you want in there. | ||
You're very open-minded. | ||
Yeah, the Alphabrain cancels it out. | ||
It could be the worst whiskey in the world, and the Alphabrain makes it better. | ||
Have you taken this anywhere, this rye brain? | ||
I have not. | ||
I'm really counting on your listeners and Dudley's fans to do that. | ||
I want it to be organic. | ||
It's going to spread. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's going to spread. | ||
The next time you go to some exotic location and they have a rye, like if you're in Nepal. | ||
I'm going to Northwest Territories with your boys on your hat there, the Eastmans. | ||
Oh, you really? | ||
In like a week. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
What are you doing up there? | ||
Caribou and doll sheep. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
So we're doing a film about their, a Yeti film. | ||
Yeti presents film about their family history. | ||
In the Northwest Territory. | ||
It's like technically what part of Alaska is that? | ||
So that's, it's east of Alaska, right east of British Columbia. | ||
It's up toward the Arctic Circle. | ||
So we'll fly into Norman Wells and go north from there up into the McKenzie Mountains, which are about as far north as you can get before you hit the Arctic Circle. | ||
So we'll be sniffing the Arctic Circle most days. | ||
But it's still, it's still Alaska, right? | ||
No, no, no. | ||
It's not? | ||
It's its own territory. | ||
unidentified
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Really? | |
Yep. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
Same as Yukon. | ||
I mean, you think Yukon Moose or whatever. | ||
They're all their own territories outside of Alaska. | ||
Oh, so Yukon is not Alaska? | ||
We'd have to look that up. | ||
I don't want to be... | ||
Right. | ||
I'd have to look at a globe and then Google it. | ||
I'm not questioning like I know. | ||
I don't know either. | ||
But Northwest Territories is its own territory. | ||
It's not Alaska. | ||
So who owns that? | ||
Canada, I guess. | ||
Really? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Oh, so it's like past Alaska becomes Canada again? | ||
Yeah. | ||
God, this is getting real deep. | ||
I should have known to come in on this package. | ||
You're like, tell me the history of Northwest Territories. | ||
So here it is right now. | ||
unidentified
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There it is. | |
We're looking at it on a map. | ||
So, Yukon Territories. | ||
Okay, so the Yukon is slightly east. | ||
Or east, rather. | ||
East. | ||
And then the Northwest Territories, of course, is further east above Alberta. | ||
Wow. | ||
So you're getting up there into the true Arctic. | ||
So it is connected to Canada. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But it's also connected to Alaska. | ||
It's not. | ||
It's next to the Yukon. | ||
unidentified
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It's part of Canada. | |
It's one of the latest provinces. | ||
I had it right. | ||
I'm getting confused. | ||
I was doubting myself. | ||
Yeah, I thought that the British Columbia section, until I saw British Columbia, I thought that was part of Alaska. | ||
You can read the Wikipedia, and it's always really dramatic. | ||
The wild, mountainous, and sparsely populated. | ||
It's crazy that it's north of northern Alberta. | ||
People are like, you know what? | ||
It's just not fucking cold enough here in the winter. | ||
We've got to keep going. | ||
Well... | ||
They have lakes. | ||
They have lakes for like a month out of the year. | ||
Oh my gosh. | ||
I think when we're up there, we were talking about last week, I think when we're up there, it'll be daylight 24 hours a day. | ||
Oh wow. | ||
I believe. | ||
Now when you do that, do you bring one of those eyeball cover things? | ||
Uh, yeah. | ||
We'll have to. | ||
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
A mask, eyeball cover things, or whatever. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, you have to, right? | |
You have to. | ||
You have to, unless you're really, unless you can get in a tent and just kind of zonk out. | ||
But it's 12, I think it's 12 or 13 days up there. | ||
So by the time you get to day 5 or 6, you're, I mean, you're living out of your backpack, you're carrying probably 50, 60, 70 pounds in your pack, hunting, climbing every day. | ||
So, I mean, it's, by the time you get laid down, I don't think it matters what's going on. | ||
Now, when you do something like that, how much gear are you guys bringing? | ||
Are you living entirely out of your backpack? | ||
So, in the float plane, the plane takes you to base camp, which I think in this case is not a float plane, so it'll be a wheel plane. | ||
We can take 50 pounds. | ||
50 pounds each. | ||
50 pounds each. | ||
Plus your body weight. | ||
Plus your body weight. | ||
And then six days in, they will either come in a helicopter and pick us up and move us if we're not having any luck, or they'll just drop us more gear. | ||
So the plan would be take 50 pounds of essential gear and then have other gear as backup back at base camp. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
So you fly into base camp. | ||
It's like, for me, it'll be like Austin to Denver, Denver to Edmonton, Edmonton to Norman Wells, hop a charter to base camp, and then from there fly out into the hunting area. | ||
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
How many days travel is that? | ||
It's like two days and change. | ||
Two days solid of just flying? | ||
Just flying. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
Because you're overnighting. | ||
I mean, they run like one, out of Norman Wells, they run like one flight a day or something. | ||
One or two flights a day. | ||
You have to be really dedicated, this kind of experience, to travel, just travel for two days. | ||
I want you to do it, man. | ||
It's like the only way to go, though. | ||
Really? | ||
It's not the only way to go, that's douchey to say, but it's like the best, most... | ||
When you get back, you're like, man, that sucked, but I wouldn't want to change it. | ||
Something happens to people when they do those exotic location hunts. | ||
Like when they go sheep hunting and they risk their lives. | ||
I've seen some video of you guys when you were in New Zealand. | ||
That was gnarly. | ||
Rescuing your lives with every step. | ||
It's the whole time, too. | ||
It's not just like, oh, we got up to this one area where the sheep live. | ||
We were in New Zealand with Green Tree. | ||
When you get up into, so there's like Beechwood Forest, so you're looking at like a 3,000, 3,500, 4,000 foot mountain, right? | ||
We stayed in a little hut in the River Valley. | ||
And so when you're down there, you're looking up, you're like, oh, that's where the tar live, huh? | ||
Oh, 3,000 feet from where we are right now, vertically. | ||
And tar, for people who don't know, is a crazy looking animal that looks like... | ||
Himalayan tar, yeah. | ||
It looks like something out of Lord of the Rings or something. | ||
It really does, yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It looks like a woolly mammoth, but just a miniature version of it. | ||
Yeah, really crazy, wooly, furry, shaggy hair. | ||
Yeah, goat, essentially. | ||
Like a goat slash sheep. | ||
But, I mean, the funny part about all that is when you first... | ||
There it is right there. | ||
I've seen an image. | ||
That doesn't even look real. | ||
They look like where we were. | ||
You would look across these little alpine valleys and you'd see them. | ||
It looks like a black bear. | ||
It looks like a giant black bear. | ||
And you're just thinking, where am I and what is that thing? | ||
God, so it really doesn't... | ||
Because I'm not like, you have some really cool adventurers on this podcast. | ||
That's not me. | ||
When I see that thing, I think, what the fuck? | ||
unidentified
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And where am I? It's wild looking. | |
Yeah, and they live up in the Alpine. | ||
So there you've got the Beachwood Forest, which is probably, if I would just say hiking, straight up for about an hour and a half or two hours. | ||
And is that an invasive species for New Zealand? | ||
They're feral. | ||
Or not feral, no. | ||
They're non-native. | ||
So all the mammals on the island there are non-native. | ||
All of them. | ||
And they all were introduced by, and I wish I had really looked up some of the specifics, but they were all introduced by some other countries. | ||
Europe sent animals over there. | ||
Teddy Roosevelt sent some animals over there like, hey, here. | ||
You're going to want these. | ||
And so the problem over there, to get on a whole different subject, is that The people on that island, the residents of New Zealand, don't value those animals as part of the landscape. | ||
They're just... | ||
I mean, feral would be a good term just to the way they view them, to the value they have on them. | ||
We have moose and mule deer. | ||
That's part of our ethos as a country, right? | ||
And our ecosystem. | ||
Yeah, and our ecosystem. | ||
They've been here before we were, at some level. | ||
And so over there, they'll jump in a helicopter and mow down like 40 red stag on a weekend because... | ||
They want to control the population, one, because there's no winter kill, no predation, all that stuff. | ||
But they also just don't see a big red stag the way we see a big elk. | ||
They just don't have the value for it down there. | ||
Well, it's also, the weird thing about having no predators is, how do you handle that? | ||
Do you bring in predators? | ||
Like, if they don't, they risk disease, and there's all sorts of weird things that can happen, like they have in lanai. | ||
Yes. | ||
Yeah, and so that's it, right? | ||
And we've done that in this country with bringing down the Northwest, what's it, the Timberwolf. | ||
We brought him down and put him in the States. | ||
While that may seem like a good solution, when we were in British Columbia hunting moose together, we saw some calf skeletons. | ||
Yeah, I showed that picture on the podcast. | ||
It was kind of fucked up. | ||
See how that thing had just been decimated by those wolves. | ||
And I saw in Montana one time, I saw them run in circles. | ||
They run in like concentric circles. | ||
They just run like a bullseye pattern when they're hunting, I feel like, the packs. | ||
unidentified
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And I just watched. | |
I had killed my elk on the first day of this hunt. | ||
And I was watching. | ||
And you would show there would be a different wolf kill like every other day in this valley. | ||
And it's like the wolves were just running in circles. | ||
And I did see a couple wolves fighting in that trip. | ||
unidentified
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Oh, really? | |
Trying to call them in, yeah. | ||
You saw them fighting each other? | ||
Yeah, two of them. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
And it was like 1,200 yards away and I had a rifle and I was thinking about it. | ||
But I mean, what you see when you see a dead fawn every day you go hunting, it's pretty new. | ||
It may be not new to that day, but new to that week. | ||
You start to think like, How? | ||
If this pack worked this valley for a full year, what could they do? | ||
Right. | ||
And there's numbers to that somewhere. | ||
Some people have figured out how many elk a year a pack of wolves can kill. | ||
But on the other side, before the wolves were reintroduced, there was an issue with overpopulation. | ||
Right. | ||
So that's where I think that's probably where hunters come in. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
You know, I value that animal. | ||
I'm willing to pay you for the opportunity to help you conserve that population. | ||
Right. | ||
But that becomes very problematic for people. | ||
Like when you start talking about wolves... | ||
unidentified
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Yes, it does. | |
Because wolves look like dogs. | ||
It does. | ||
And you don't eat them. | ||
Wolves are another one of those ones. | ||
Black bears, too. | ||
I mean, I think it's, you don't eat them. | ||
I mean, you eat bears. | ||
I think wolves more than any animal. | ||
Yeah, wolves way more than any animal. | ||
I was talking to, there was a gal at my work that I was talking to, and she lives in Austin, Texas, and is very, not a hunter, but works at Yeti, and so she's around hunting. | ||
And we were talking about wolves. | ||
And I just said, look, I don't have a really hardened opinion on wolves. | ||
I've not spent enough time around them. | ||
I just know that they're meat processors on four legs. | ||
They give no shits about anything. | ||
They're not just eating. | ||
They don't just eat what fills their belly. | ||
They eat, and then they eat more, and they kill more, and that's all they're wired to do. | ||
I've seen that in action, so that's all I really know. | ||
I don't know whether that's good for an ecosystem, bad, whatever. | ||
And she just said, well, I didn't really know that. | ||
Hunting has really bad wolves. | ||
Wolves seem to have a good PR agent, and hunting and management have a terrible PR agent. | ||
So I think that that's part of the problem, that there's a sect of people that are really glorifying a wolf for good reason. | ||
I mean, it's an awesome animal, a majestic animal, but at the same time, there is a juxtaposition to that that needs to be told, too. | ||
Well, I think a big part of the issue is that people know that they virtually wiped them out in North America at one point in time. | ||
And I think people feel guilty about that. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, then they should feel guilty. | ||
They should feel ashamed about the mallard duck and the elk. | ||
People don't know about the ducks. | ||
And the whitetail. | ||
Yeah, but we brought those back to the point where the numbers are higher than they've ever been before. | ||
Right. | ||
Those same people don't know how that happened, though, right? | ||
Those same people aren't aware of how. | ||
They just see whitetails around. | ||
They're like, oh, that's annoying. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Hit one with the car. | ||
They don't know that at the turn of the century, they were almost all gone. | ||
Because we market hunted them to hell. | ||
And so I think that's, there's just, it's just education, man. | ||
I just think people need to seek the other side, which I always try to do, and you do all the time. | ||
Just seek whatever the other side is, and hunting is not always the way to go. | ||
Yeah, but it's inconvenient because it's hard. | ||
Say if you're a vegetarian or a vegan, you're going to get your information from animal rights activists, and it's going to be biased in that direction. | ||
Or if you're a hunter, you're going to get your information from hunting and conservation groups, and it might be biased in the other way. | ||
I think wolves are a good thing because they're awesome. | ||
You know, I don't not like wolves. | ||
Well, and I think no hunter is like, wipe the wolves out. | ||
I've never heard that. | ||
I've just heard, like, what's the carrying capacity for this state, this region for wolves, right? | ||
How many can there be? | ||
And I know in a lot of cases, you know, the biologists would say one thing, like, okay, 100 wolves in this area. | ||
And then when it ballooned up to 1,000, they argued for hunters to come in and help put that population down. | ||
They were still a pushback. | ||
Like, well, wait a minute. | ||
We said, we agreed upon, Scientifically and biologically, you know, we... | ||
Yeah, the problem is that it's negotiable at all. | ||
It should have been like once the wolves hit 2,000, then you start a hunting season. | ||
But then the real issue is it's incredibly hard to shoot a wolf. | ||
It's not as simple as you go out and find a wolf and kill him. | ||
They're really smart. | ||
Think about tar in New Zealand. | ||
If they're overpopulated in the area, you can't just walk up the hill and crack a couple. | ||
That's a pretty big feat. | ||
So they jump in a helicopter. | ||
Do they gun down the tar that way too? | ||
Really? | ||
God damn. | ||
So how do they determine whether or not they should be gunning them down? | ||
It's, you know, and I don't know, like, the holistic method that they use, but I know our guide up there this year was just talking about he would go to the sheep stations or the ranch owners or some of the areas. | ||
Some of those big mountain areas are owned privately. | ||
And some of the areas where they were down a little bit lower, they would just say, go out today and kill 100. And that's what they would do. | ||
And it was not... | ||
It didn't seem to me to be too scientific in the way they went about it, but... | ||
It's a private landowner telling you, hey, this is an infestation, essentially. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And my argument to them was like, why don't you just... | ||
These animals are here. | ||
They're not going anywhere. | ||
They're not going to swim over to Australia. | ||
Why don't you just treat them like we treat our wildlife? | ||
Why don't you just accept them? | ||
And there were some people down there that agreed with me wholeheartedly. | ||
Some people in the guiding outfitting community. | ||
It's like, why don't you just accept these animals as part of your landscape and treat them like that? | ||
And I think that's a swelling opinion down there, for sure. | ||
Well, how do they accept? | ||
I mean, would they just treat them like they're pests? | ||
I wouldn't say pests, because they do have some value, because hunters from around the world would go down there like we did. | ||
But don't they have a lot of, a lot of that is on public land, or excuse me, private land, in those high-fence places? | ||
That's basically stag. | ||
You can't really, it's hard to high-fence for shammy and tar. | ||
They just live in places where you'd be dumb to put a fence. | ||
If you tried, you'd be dumb. | ||
But stag, that's a big issue. | ||
Stag is a whole different deal down there. | ||
Yeah, I mean... | ||
Is it because they're so big? | ||
Like, people want to go there and get a big rack of antlers? | ||
To their discredit, like, they have harvested the bad parts of our hunting culture and marketed it. | ||
Really? | ||
They have. | ||
And I think there's a lot of people down there that would push back on that, on that idea, but yeah... | ||
But explain what that means, by the bad parts. | ||
And not just the American hunting culture, because there's a lot of Europeans that go there, too. | ||
I think the parts of the trophy hunting, the, hey, come down here and work on this 500-inch stag, we've got it here. | ||
And they have agents that go around and sell those deals. | ||
And for 500-inch stag, what we're talking about, folks, is the size of the antlers, not the size of the actual animal itself. | ||
Right. | ||
People get super obsessed, and they fetish... | ||
Numbers like you know the score and what a score is for people don't know they take a tape measure and they go over very Specific sections of the antlers and they calculate all the measurements together and when they do that they come up with some number and there's these Milestone benchmark numbers like a 200 inch whitetails a huge deer or a 400 inch elk is a huge elk it is they get stags that go to 500 and more what? | ||
That's insane. | ||
Is it as big as an elk? | ||
Like the animal? | ||
Body size, not quite. | ||
Close, but not quite. | ||
Wow. | ||
And one of the sheep stations we hunted with originally, they farm, they essentially farm red deer. | ||
I mean, red deer and stag, same thing, are walking around in these... | ||
They're the same animal? | ||
No. | ||
Down there, red stag, red deer's basically the same thing. | ||
But you find red deer in Europe and they're different. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
Parts of the same genus. | ||
Why do they call them a stag? | ||
But isn't a stag a male? | ||
Stag and hind, hind being the female. | ||
H-I-N-D? Yep. | ||
But you would call the animals a red deer? | ||
I've heard it called... | ||
I've hunted it in Europe, and they call it a red deer there, so I'm not sure... | ||
Those deer came from there anyway, so I'm sure it's the same species. | ||
So they came and they dropped them off in the 1800s just to turn the whole place into a giant, like, hunting provision, right? | ||
At some level. | ||
Yeah, at some level. | ||
I'd love to read the history of that. | ||
I don't really... | ||
I haven't gone that far back. | ||
How crazy is it that before they came, there was no mammals there? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Like, what a weird patch of land. | ||
It's a weird, like, New Zealand is definitely coming from where we come from and all the things we have, and we just find it normal that we can hunt. | ||
How many huntable species are there on this, you know, on this continent? | ||
Going down there is just such a weird... | ||
And they celebrate the outdoor culture. | ||
They celebrate hunting and fishing almost in the way that we do. | ||
And they have public land, much like we do. | ||
And their public land is more revered and more well-managed and better taken care of, I think, than our public lands. | ||
And it's more usable. | ||
And so they have all these similar properties that we have in America. | ||
But at some level, I think they just got poor luck. | ||
They don't have native mammals to, you know, they don't have the bald eagle to put on their mast. | ||
They just have these, you know, essentially shammy, tar, and... | ||
But tar, they're not native either. | ||
No, none of those. | ||
Shammy's not native. | ||
None of them. | ||
None of them. | ||
They also have Canadian geese that are not native, right? | ||
Did you know that they used to have the biggest eagle in the world? | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, they used to have an eagle called the Host Eagle, and apparently they killed them off in the 1400s, and they were so big, there's speculation they used to eat people. | ||
I'd kill them off, too. | ||
They had a 14-foot wingspan, I think, is what we figured out. | ||
I'm not exaggerating. | ||
If you've ever been over there, it really is like, it's a place where that kind of eagle would live. | ||
That's what it looked like. | ||
Holy shit. | ||
That's what a host eagle looks like. | ||
We're looking at an eagle that's literally the size of a big person. | ||
My lord. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Badass of the week. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Look at the size of that fucking thing. | ||
And so this host eagle... | ||
That can't be it. | ||
Look, that's Gandalf. | ||
I mean, look, if it's as big as a person, like that picture... | ||
Go to that first picture again. | ||
Like, yeah. | ||
Look how big that thing is. | ||
I mean, if that thing spreads its wings, that is what it looks like. | ||
If you've been over there, the landscape over there in some of the alpine areas, it looks like a place where that would live. | ||
That would kill you. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That thing, if they caught you hiking, you'd be fucked. | ||
It would just pull you off the cliff and just drop you off. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
That's not a real host eagle. | ||
The actual host eagle. | ||
That's the problem with Google Images. | ||
We're getting all kinds. | ||
We got Gandalf riding an eagle. | ||
Is that a golden eagle right there? | ||
That one with the emus or whatever the fuck those animals are. | ||
Is that an ostrich? | ||
It's a fox. | ||
Daddy's care, that one's care. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
So when did it go extinct, Jamie? | ||
What does it say? | ||
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
Look at the size of the fucking thing. | ||
There's a dude standing next to what, the skeleton of a host eagle. | ||
And who is that dude? | ||
That dude is awesome. | ||
Look at him. | ||
Yeah, he looks like a wizard. | ||
Oh, he really does. | ||
Look at his robes. | ||
That's an ancient intellectual. | ||
It really is. | ||
Back in the day, I was a scholar. | ||
1600 A.D.? Is that what it says? | ||
The real thing actually lived on Earth. | ||
And of course it was known as the Tiger of the Skies. | ||
Tiger of the Skies. | ||
Dude, that's not that long ago. | ||
1600? | ||
Holy shit! | ||
I thought it was 1400s. | ||
The Tiger of the Skies. | ||
Six feet tall. | ||
Oh, it weighed only 35 pounds? | ||
And it had a wingspan of 10 feet. | ||
Wow, that's crazy because they're hollow bones, I guess. | ||
35 pounds doesn't seem that much, man. | ||
How do you go back to that picture? | ||
How the fuck is that thing 35 pounds? | ||
There's nothing six feet tall. | ||
Ten foot wingspan. | ||
That thing's only 35 pounds? | ||
That seems wrong. | ||
I don't know, man. | ||
Like a turkey's heavy. | ||
Like you pick up a turkey. | ||
Yeah, you can get a turkey in like 25 pound range. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Look at the size of that thing. | ||
Oh, no. | ||
You see how big it is. | ||
Every time I'm hanging around you, I hear about these like evil mystical animals and Well, I think the real concern was that the host eagle, they might have killed it off. | ||
The local New Zealand folks might have killed it off back then because they were eating people. | ||
I do not blame them in any way. | ||
See if that's the truth. | ||
That might be a lie. | ||
We need to know about this host eagle. | ||
I do need to know. | ||
We hunted at a place called Haast when we were over there, so maybe there's a connection. | ||
Maybe we're really finding. | ||
Maybe find some ancient eagle skull. | ||
Big ol' hook bone. | ||
Just see if it ate people. | ||
Relationship with humans. | ||
You can Google that. | ||
See where it says relationship with humans? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Could have been possible. | ||
Even smaller golden eagles are capable of killing. | ||
Yeah, they said they kill humans, which scientists believe could have been possible if the name relates to the eagle. | ||
Given the massive size and strength of the bird, even smaller golden eagles are capable of killing prey as big as sick deer or bear cub. | ||
Yeah, that fucking thing killed a few people. | ||
For sure. | ||
Like a baby. | ||
You didn't think, yeah, like a baby. | ||
You don't think that a predator like that did not learn what it could and could not go get. | ||
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Okay, so the sculpture's goofy. | |
Okay, the sculpture. | ||
Is that the sculpture we were looking at? | ||
Maybe. | ||
Yeah, it was an approximation of it. | ||
It says it's 7.5 meters, 25 feet tall. | ||
No, that wasn't 25 feet tall. | ||
Oh, with a wingspan of 11.5 meters. | ||
38 feet. | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
That's the art park that we're looking at in New Zealand. | ||
That's just a giant sculpture. | ||
Of the animal. | ||
Okay, I get you. | ||
But there's a really cool eagle that lives in the rainforest called the Harpy Eagle that eats monkeys. | ||
You ever seen that one? | ||
I don't want to know about this stuff, man. | ||
I think that's the biggest... | ||
Because I'll probably find myself in a rainforest in a couple months, be looking up for harpy eagles all the time. | ||
Well, there was a dude that was trying to put a camera in a harpy eagle nest, and he got attacked by a harpy eagle. | ||
Well, that dude shouldn't have been doing that. | ||
Well, he's a scientist. | ||
Well, that's what he does. | ||
Should have worked in a movie theater or something. | ||
That's his fault, dude. | ||
That was his thing, man. | ||
We've got to stop looking at these terrible winged beasts. | ||
The Harpy Eagle's cool looking because it's kind of white. | ||
Look, and we were talking about this when we were in Lanai. | ||
I have a problem swimming in the ocean because I feel like I look like a seal all the time when I'm in there. | ||
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Right. | |
And I feel like sharks will, they're like, look at that. | ||
That looks delicious. | ||
The guy just got both his legs bitten off yesterday in Florida. | ||
See? | ||
Yeah. | ||
This is awareness, man. | ||
Chomp. | ||
Chomp. | ||
And you're done. | ||
So now I'm scared of the skies thanks to this. | ||
Did you know that the bull shark swims so far upriver that they live in freshwater and they've been found as high as Illinois? | ||
They go upriver to fucking Illinois, and they're the most aggressive sharks. | ||
I heard that. | ||
I've heard that before. | ||
I used to live right on the Illinois River. | ||
Well, they also are the reason why the movie Jaws wasn't inspired by a great white shark. | ||
It was inspired by a series of attacks by bull sharks in freshwater rivers in New Jersey. | ||
We gotta talk about something else. | ||
It's freaking me out, Joe. | ||
And they made the music? | ||
Like, ah, it's terrible. | ||
It gets in your psyche, that stuff. | ||
What would the music be for one of those big eagles? | ||
Same. | ||
It would be death metal. | ||
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He'd be out in the field and you'd hear that death metal music. | |
I've seen too much. | ||
Over in Nepal, they have these big things called longergears. | ||
It's a Nepali griffin. | ||
It looks like a big old vulture. | ||
Look that thing up, see what the wingspan are on those. | ||
But we'd be up on some mountain glassing for sheep, and there'd be a giant thing with an eight, nine foot wingspan. | ||
And you could see, the creepiest part to me was, you could see their heads moving back and forth like they were looking for shit. | ||
And they take and kill baby sheep. | ||
I saw a video after I cut back and I was kind of freaking out about these things. | ||
And it's a vulture? | ||
Yeah, it's like a Nepali. | ||
They call it a langergar. | ||
And when we were there, they told us, oh, you're going to see griffins. | ||
So it had a variety of names, like everything there seems to have. | ||
But it looks like a vulture. | ||
It's like a giant vulture. | ||
I didn't know that they hunted. | ||
That's interesting. | ||
I watched something on like Planet Earth about them and that they showed them in packs and they eat bone marrow. | ||
So they would get a bone off the ground, fly up into the air and strategically drop it onto the ground so it would crack open, fly down, eat the insides. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I wonder how they figured that out. | ||
The same thing, you could just see their brains churning. | ||
A lot of times you see an animal in the sky, a bird in the sky, and you still get soaring around, but you could see the predatory brain of this Langergar as it flew above us, just churning as it looked around for what to get after. | ||
Well, they say ravens are stupid smart, like as smart as chimps. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, you think about this bird. | ||
I mean, this bird's brain the size of what? | ||
I don't know, a lemon. | ||
But it literally found out, I want to get inside that bone, I'm going to fly up and drop this son of a bitch and eat the insides. | ||
Well, somewhere along the line, they figured a long time ago how to drop things off cliffs. | ||
Absolutely. | ||
They've been doing that with goats and stuff. | ||
There's a ton of videos of them grabbing goats and pulling them out like eagles in particular. | ||
Whoa, that's the longer guy? | ||
What is that thing? | ||
That thing looks fucking evil, man. | ||
Holy shit! | ||
Look at the face on that thing. | ||
I think when I was over there, when we were in the mountains, I just wrote like a whole page about this longer yard we saw. | ||
I don't remember it being that color. | ||
It wasn't that color. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
That looks like one in the zoo. | ||
Oh my god. | ||
They were jet black, the ones we saw. | ||
Imagine how scary that looks, but just being jet black. | ||
Coloration? | ||
What is that, a bone in its mouth? | ||
A swallowing hole? | ||
Yep. | ||
Ugh, primitive creature. | ||
Just no, like, complete emotionless eyes. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I vividly remember looking up at some point and seeing this thing floating in the breeze and looking around and thinking, that thing is savage. | ||
How big did they get, Jamin? | ||
What a weird name, Lumbergeier. | ||
How do you spell it? | ||
L-A-M-M-E-R-G-E-I-R. Over there they described it, originally our guy described it as a griffin. | ||
But a griffin's like a mythological picture, right? | ||
Yeah, I know. | ||
That's why I was thinking I'm going to see this mythological picture. | ||
That's what it was. | ||
I was waiting for something to land and talk to us. | ||
That's a place in New Zealand that's a perfect location if they ever decided to do some sort of a Jurassic Park type situation. | ||
Well, even Lanai. | ||
Right. | ||
Four feet tall. | ||
Nine foot wingspan. | ||
There it is. | ||
Wow. | ||
Again, look at this weight. | ||
Fifteen pounds. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
Nine foot wingspan. | ||
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What is that? | |
Whoa. | ||
That's the wise old wizard vulture. | ||
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I don't want that. | |
The Egyptian vulture. | ||
I'm going to have dreams about this podcast. | ||
That's its closest relative. | ||
What the fuck? | ||
Isn't it crazy that nature just designed a really creepy, shitty looking animal to come down and eat all the dead shit? | ||
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Where's that picture from right there? | |
I don't know, man. | ||
Looks old as fuck. | ||
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Whatever it is. | |
Looks like it could be in Nepal or Tibet. | ||
Overhunting has led to the endangerment of the species. | ||
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Hmm. | |
It's weird how nature has evolved these animals, or they have evolved, to develop that weird look. | ||
Like, vultures look disgusting. | ||
They do. | ||
But look at that thing's face. | ||
There's something about the way nature has evolved, or they have evolved. | ||
And they're not, yeah. | ||
They've evolved to look scary. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Cute animals are delicious. | ||
Right. | ||
A rabbit. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Yeah. | ||
Delicious. | ||
Deer? | ||
Deer. | ||
Delicious. | ||
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Delicious. | |
Gorgeous animals. | ||
Right. | ||
Like if you eat a bear, like some people think bear are cute, but you got to cook the shit out of it. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Can we, let's address something right now. | ||
Okay. | ||
Bear meat is good. | ||
It's very good. | ||
It's very good. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It can be very good. | ||
Depending upon what they eat. | ||
Depending on what they eat and where you're at. | ||
Like if you're going in September to Prince of Wales, Alaska and you shoot one and it's just been eating salmon for a couple weeks. | ||
Clams on the beach. | ||
You don't want to eat that thing. | ||
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Right. | |
But if you go somewhere where good vegetation and it's, well, it's got a lot of fat on it, it can be good. | ||
I would argue it's not to be celebrated. | ||
It's not that good. | ||
It depends. | ||
Apparently, if you eat a blueberry bear, it's one of the best meats ever. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Rinella raves about it. | ||
See, if Rinella does, I've eaten a lot of bears, and I like eating them. | ||
I wouldn't throw them away or whatever. | ||
So I would continue to hunt them, but I've never had that same feeling of like an elk tenderloin or elk backstrap. | ||
Or axis. | ||
Or an axis. | ||
It's not in that category. | ||
So I feel like maybe we overcompensate a little bit because there's so much pushback on bear hunting. | ||
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Right. | |
We start talking about how great it is. | ||
How great it is. | ||
It's really good, but it's not like, it's not, it doesn't get to that next level. | ||
Have you had smoked bear ham though? | ||
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I have. | |
It's very delicious. | ||
That's pretty damn good. | ||
But that's one of those things where it's like it's smoked, it's brined, it's treated. | ||
And that's the biggest thing, right? | ||
Most meats that you're going to go hunting for, you look at the cut of meat and you treat it accordingly, right? | ||
And so there's no, you have to, obviously because of trichinosis, you have to cook a bear all the way through to a certain temperature. | ||
So that may be, because I love rare meat, that may be my problem. | ||
I don't know. | ||
But I think maybe a little bit we could address the fact that hunters are a little bit overcompensated for the fact that people are pushing back on them so much. | ||
And then they're like, I love bear! | ||
It's good. | ||
Right. | ||
But I wouldn't choose it. | ||
It's not my favorite. | ||
I wouldn't choose it over a lot of other meats. | ||
Not to say it's bad. | ||
Like if someone told me you have to pick one animal forever, I'd probably say elk. | ||
Yeah, and bear would be pretty far down the list. | ||
Yeah, it wouldn't make it in the top three or four. | ||
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Right. | |
It would be all... | ||
Well, that's, again, the thing that you just said. | ||
Like, I like eating things medium rare or rare. | ||
That's where they taste the best. | ||
Yes. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And so, look, I'm not... | ||
I would never put somebody down for... | ||
I love bear meat. | ||
I eat it all the time. | ||
That's great. | ||
I just... | ||
That's a point I've always kind of thought in my head. | ||
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It's not the best. | |
Yeah. | ||
I've always thought in my head like, mm, okay. | ||
It's like people like largemouth bass fishing, but if you go to a restaurant and they have largemouth bass right next to Chilean sea bass and you pick the largemouth bass, you're kind of an asshole. | ||
You're lying to yourself. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like, come on, man. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It doesn't taste that good. | ||
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It's okay. | |
It's edible. | ||
It's edible. | ||
It's really good. | ||
I mean, if you... | ||
It's a bad example because largemouth bass tastes... | ||
Bear tastes way better than largemouth bass. | ||
We're going down the track. | ||
Like, largemouth bass just doesn't taste that good. | ||
Bear tastes better than largemouth bass. | ||
Have you had largemouth? | ||
No. | ||
It's okay. | ||
It's like there's some delicious freshwater fish. | ||
Delicious. | ||
You go to Alaska, and they're everywhere. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
But yeah, I'm not much of a fish eater anyway. | ||
John Barklow from Sitka was in Vegas this past weekend. | ||
Love that dude. | ||
Yeah, he's a great guy. | ||
Him and Dave Brinker were there. | ||
And he was talking about how... | ||
I love that guy, too. | ||
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I know. | |
I don't want to leave him out. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Love you guys. | ||
Miss you guys. | ||
Love you guys. | ||
But John was talking about how he actually enjoyed brown bear meat. | ||
And I was like, really? | ||
And he's like, he goes, it tasted like a mule deer roast. | ||
He goes, I made it and I gave it to people at parties. | ||
And he said, he cut it up into cubes and put little toothpicks in it and handed it out as hors d'oeuvres at a party. | ||
And people were eating it and they're like, wow, this is delicious. | ||
What is it? | ||
And he goes, it's a brown bear. | ||
And people got mad at him. | ||
Of course they did. | ||
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Of course they did. | |
It's a person. | ||
I love that he did it. | ||
I love that he did it, though. | ||
I fully support that idea. | ||
Right, but I would assume that if someone like John, who works for Sitka, this is probably the number one hunting gear clothing company in the world. | ||
And John is a wealth of knowledge. | ||
Yes. | ||
All the way through. | ||
And, you know, had a considerable amount of experience in the military. | ||
I would imagine the people that would come to his house for a party would be normalized. | ||
What would happen in LA if you did that? | ||
God, they'd go crazy. | ||
Yeah, there'd be riots. | ||
Yeah, you should see the look on people's faces when my kids tell them that they've eaten bear. | ||
Because, you know, when the kids are like five and six, like, I've eaten bear! | ||
I ate a bear! | ||
It was awesome! | ||
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Woo! | |
Do they have that, like, fierce look in their eyes? | ||
Like, you just had, like, I ate a bear! | ||
Yeah, they think it's fun to freak people out. | ||
I do like that part of it. | ||
And your daughter's so cute. | ||
That's a wonderful thing coming out of there. | ||
It's weird, right? | ||
The bear thing is a very strange one, and I definitely don't like hunting them like I like hunting anything else. | ||
I struggle with that. | ||
As a hunter, I feel like coming on and talking as a hunter, I don't want to... | ||
Disparage. | ||
Disparage anything, but I also just want to be 100% honest about every part of it. | ||
And hunting is this really complex activity, and I feel conflicted about it almost every time I go. | ||
Like, not about killing the animal or hunting, but just about little parts of what's going on. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And so bear hunting... | ||
Which also, sometimes you just want to... | ||
Like, Ranella said this once, and I never understood it until it happened to me. | ||
He's like, I just want to watch them sometimes. | ||
I don't really want to hunt them. | ||
What is hunting anyway? | ||
Is hunting killing or is hunting getting close enough to shake their hand? | ||
Or is it the whole thing? | ||
Yeah, it's the whole thing. | ||
I think my opinion on that specific point is... | ||
One I would go back to, I always ask myself two questions. | ||
Why are you going? | ||
And does this hunting benefit the place and the animal that you're hunting? | ||
And if I can't answer those questions myself, and I always strip away conservation and meat from the first question. | ||
Well, you have a very good way of looking at this. | ||
I think it's very honest. | ||
I think this is super important. | ||
Is that conservation is essentially a side effect of hunting. | ||
It's a byproduct, right? | ||
And to pretend that it's the whole thing. | ||
It's almost like a weird... | ||
It's a disingenuous approach to the argument. | ||
It really is. | ||
People saying you shouldn't be hunting will say, well, hunting is conservation and hunters are the best conservationists. | ||
Okay. | ||
Part of that's true, but it's not... | ||
Part of it is true, but it's not really why you're doing it. | ||
And here's the biggest point to make. | ||
There's semantic chinks in that armor, right? | ||
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Right. | |
We've built up over the years as hunters, like, they use organic meat and conservation as this, like, armor, right? | ||
Right. | ||
That insulates why we go. | ||
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Right. | |
And I think there's just chinks in that armor that if we don't recognize those points, especially the conservation one, I think that's a bigger deal. | ||
Like conservation, hunting is a tool for conservation. | ||
It's the same way as translocation is a tool for conservationists. | ||
You can move the animal to get him away from a certain situation, reintroduce the animal. | ||
That's one way. | ||
Or bring in hunters and help banish the population that way. | ||
But that first question, right, is why do I go? | ||
And I always say it's like, We've had experiences, you and I, together in the woods that we couldn't replicate anywhere else. | ||
Like, you've done a lot of cool shit. | ||
And there's some, like, when you ran down the road after I shot my moose. | ||
Like, there's just something about that for me that is way more fulfilling and enriching to my life than any other thing I've experienced. | ||
I haven't experienced everything, but all the things that I've done. | ||
Well, it's so primal. | ||
Right. | ||
And so it's that. | ||
It's learning about animals. | ||
You're in the woods, too. | ||
You're also in a really almost like you're a visitor in an alien world. | ||
Exactly. | ||
And so you learn about these animals. | ||
You develop skills. | ||
I feel like you wouldn't develop any other way. | ||
And on and on it goes. | ||
I mean, there's probably a hundred reasons that I discover a new one every time I go. | ||
And so I always say, like, that's the answer to the first question. | ||
Why do I go? | ||
It's not like, man, I'm real hungry and I want to control the population. | ||
I'm aware as I go hunting that those two things are byproducts of my efforts. | ||
And they're always going to be byproducts in my efforts, unless I'm poaching. | ||
You know, there is a biologist, a state wildlife biologist, federal biologists that determine what tags go where, what animals. | ||
They're moving pieces of the puzzle around to keep this thing the way it is, right? | ||
Keep it healthy, keep it stable. | ||
But they're also looking at what's the economic impact of that. | ||
All that's going on while I'm out there thinking, I've got to kill this big buck. | ||
But I'm not thinking, while I'm out there with my bow, I'm not thinking... | ||
Well, I'd like to kill that one because that'll really stabilize this area. | ||
Right. | ||
I'm out there and I'm, ah, kill that one because I really like backstraps. | ||
I know those two things are happening, but they're almost like, you pull that away from what's actually going on and focus on why you're there. | ||
Like, why did you go to Lanai? | ||
If somebody said, why'd you go, what would you say? | ||
Two reasons. | ||
One, to bow hunt for meat. | ||
For sure, because I wanted to eat axis deer. | ||
And two, because I think that it's great practice. | ||
One of the hardest things about bow hunting is just you can practice all day on a target, but it's almost like never sparring. | ||
Like you could practice all day hitting a heavy bag, but you've never hit a person. | ||
Right. | ||
Like once you're in front of a person, things get weird. | ||
Well, and there's a chink in the armor, right? | ||
So you say, I practice on an animal. | ||
That's terrible. | ||
I would say to that, like, that's just another chink in the armor that we all know is happening. | ||
Like, if we were conservationists, we would never pick up a bow. | ||
Yeah, but I'm not practicing on an animal like I've never practiced before. | ||
Practicing may be being the wrong term. | ||
Like, there's something in there that, like, the experience of stalking an animal is pretty visceral. | ||
And if you've never done it, you can shoot in your back or the hell you want. | ||
Well, I say practice in terms of, like, when you compete as a young martial artist, it's not really practice, but it is. | ||
Like, you're involved in competition. | ||
So, like, are you hunting or are you practicing? | ||
Well, you're definitely hunting, but that hunting is practice. | ||
For other hunts where you don't get nearly as many opportunities as you do in Lanai. | ||
Lanai is one of the best examples of a place that has no predators and a real problem with overpopulation. | ||
You weren't with me and Dudley that one time where me and him and his son were hanging out and we were there at last light and we were watching these axis deer come off the mountain and we saw I don't know how many hundreds. | ||
I mean, it might have been seven, eight hundred deer coming off this mountain. | ||
And we were like, what the fuck? | ||
It was just crazy. | ||
There's ten more. | ||
There's five more. | ||
There's six more. | ||
There's eleven more. | ||
There's a herd of twenty. | ||
Like, what the fuck? | ||
It got to the point where we're like, this is crazy. | ||
So in a place like that, I feel like you have a great ethical argument for they are going to shoot these animals, period. | ||
And the only other way to get around it is you bring in wolves. | ||
And if you bring in wolves, guess what? | ||
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Then you have wolves. | |
Then you have wolves. | ||
These people also have dogs running around on the streets. | ||
You know, like pet dogs. | ||
Those dogs would get fucked immediately. | ||
They're going to get killed by wolves because wolves want to take out all the possible... | ||
You can't have wolves on the nigh. | ||
It's a stupid idea. | ||
Hey, everybody, we're never gonna do that. | ||
But, so, it's one of, in terms of, like, since the animals are there, and there's no talk of eradicating them because they have a real value, the people that live there live off of them. | ||
Like, all those folks that we were hanging out with, like Roman, and a lot of the people that work at that place, they eat Axis all the time, and it is, without a doubt, not an, it is the opposite, it is the most delicious game meat in the world. | ||
If it's not I gotta say it's number one. | ||
If it's not number one, it's number two. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's amazing. | ||
It's so good. | ||
Like, we ate it at the restaurant. | ||
They served it at the restaurant. | ||
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Oh, yeah. | |
Remember the burger we had at that one lunch? | ||
Oh, my gosh. | ||
Insane. | ||
And then the steak place at that place, terrible. | ||
Terrible meaning good. | ||
Terribly good. | ||
Like, so terrible, I can't get it out of my mind. | ||
Those sliders are insane. | ||
Oh, yeah, that's what it was. | ||
They were sliders, yeah. | ||
But the restaurant serves tenderloin, and it is phenomenal. | ||
It's so good. | ||
So that's one thing I always try to separate. | ||
And I try to do it only because I think... | ||
I try to look at it from someone else who's a non-hunter and is hearing us talk or hearing me talk or whatever. | ||
And maybe thinking, like, that's a weird part of that. | ||
Like, that's strange. | ||
And so I feel like if I can say... | ||
Yes, the meat is delicious. | ||
Yes, they gotta kill these things. | ||
Yes, the local people value the animal because hunters exist. | ||
They wouldn't just gun them down because hunters will pay to go out there. | ||
All those things, I think, set aside... | ||
What am I there for? | ||
Like, we were, that group of hunters we had in camp was probably, I mean, I've hunted with a lot of awesome, talented folks, was probably the most skilled group of hunters I've ever been around. | ||
Well, think about who we have. | ||
We have John Dudley. | ||
He's arguably, if not the best bowhunter in the world, he's in the top three. | ||
I think it's like, it's like John, well, there's like top four. | ||
Like, John, Cam, Remy, and Adam. | ||
Adam Greentree. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Of all the people I've hunted with, that's the top four, I would say. | ||
They might be the top four in the world. | ||
They might be. | ||
If they're not top four, they're in the top ten. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Come see us. | ||
If you think you're better, come see us. | ||
It's a clan of killers. | ||
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Yeah. | |
I mean, and then you got Shane Dorian, who's a great bowhunter, too, and the best big wave surfer in the world. | ||
You gotta say about Shane, he's fanatical. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
I'd be like, hey, Shane, you want to go take a break and get a sandwich? | ||
And he'd look at me like, what? | ||
Yeah, he's like, no. | ||
We could be hunting. | ||
Why would we be eating sandwiches? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
He was out there all day. | ||
Every day, all day. | ||
He didn't even come in. | ||
He didn't come in during lunchtime when everybody else was in because it was 95 degrees outside. | ||
He's out there on his hands and knees crawling through the bushes. | ||
Just crawling. | ||
Hoping to find one slipping. | ||
Just crawling. | ||
Just forever to crawl in. | ||
So for me, one reason to do that... | ||
Stripping away all the things that I know to be right right in my own mind Was that was those people getting them all together and then like meeting Roman and meeting Brandon and meet Alec all our guides and all the locals that were there like Those are things I and I learned more about The quick twitch muscle on a guy to hear oh my god than I've ever learned so I feel like I've learned something I spent time with these people that that made me better at not just hunting but everything and Well, for people who've never been around an access deer before, they evolved with tigers. | ||
So tigers hunt them. | ||
I mean, you've never seen an animal more fast in your life. | ||
How about that one deer that we shot? | ||
I shot at this deer. | ||
It was 60 yards away. | ||
It was looking at me, and I was like, I think I'm going to shoot it. | ||
It's just standing there. | ||
By the time my arrow got there, it was four or five deer away. | ||
It was swimming to Maui. | ||
It built a boat and it was rowing over. | ||
So 60 yards away, the arrow's going 275 feet a second. | ||
And it was nowhere near it by the time it got there. | ||
It's like, bitch, please! | ||
They're so fast. | ||
They're faster than any animal I've ever seen. | ||
Well, that lets you say, like, what a weird scenario to be hunting an animal that has been trained by tigers to avoid you. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
You know, what a weird thing. | ||
So, like, that's my appreciation. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That little exchange of, hey, me and tigers both hunted this thing. | ||
unidentified
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I know. | |
Like, that's something cool to me that's outside of this thing. | ||
So, you talk about that all day. | ||
And then the meat. | ||
Look, if you're a person who values animal protein, if you like ethically sourced animal protein, there's no better way to get it than a place like Lanai. | ||
All the pieces are in check. | ||
Do they need to kill them? | ||
Yes. | ||
Is there an overpopulation problem? | ||
Yes. | ||
Does it provide jobs for locals? | ||
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Yes. | |
Yes, all the good things. | ||
I mean, there's a lot of positive sides to it. | ||
And again, if you're someone who enjoys bow hunting, like, look, it's an uncomfortable thing for some people, but I enjoy it. | ||
I like it. | ||
I like getting my meat that way. | ||
I don't like, I feel bad if I get bacon from a store. | ||
I feel like... | ||
What are we talking about, like, as predators? | ||
Like, we are predators. | ||
Like, you look at, you know, it's been millions of years we've been killing and eating things. | ||
unidentified
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No, humans are herbivores, and that's all a lie. | |
I don't know. | ||
I've done some reading. | ||
You don't have to be a predator. | ||
Look, you don't have to be a predator. | ||
You could live off of... | ||
But aren't we, though? | ||
Some people. | ||
But look, you could live... | ||
My point is, if you wanted to, I don't want to disparage the way anybody lives their life. | ||
You could live off of just pure vegetables. | ||
By the way, there's a real moral and ethical argument if you are a vegan to eat mollusks, folks. | ||
Because mollusks are more primitive than most plants. | ||
They don't communicate as much as plants do. | ||
They don't have any sense of feeling. | ||
They have no nerve endings that would allow them to feel pain. | ||
They're incredibly simple organisms. | ||
The only thing that we have against them in terms of like when we think about them as being an animal versus, you know, like a plant. | ||
People think eating a plant is cruelty-free. | ||
Eating a mollusk, you're killing a living creature, right? | ||
But that's just because they move. | ||
But a fucking Venus flytrap moves too, and it's probably ten times smarter than like a scallop. | ||
Like, they're not smart. | ||
It's hard to regulate that morality. | ||
It is, but I mean, I just want people... | ||
If you're uncomfortable with eating chicken, I get it. | ||
But eat clams and oysters, and those things are good for you. | ||
They really are. | ||
And it's sustainable, and the animals themselves are not feeling shit. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The moral entanglements of all of it is just... | ||
And like, you know, we say, we humans, we wake up in the morning and you consume everything. | ||
Like, you're just consuming. | ||
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You breathe air, you pump out CO2. And every other animal does too. | |
They just wander around, chewing on the grass. | ||
We're just consumption engines. | ||
And like, for us to separate out one part of our consumption and then like, beat the crap out of it, even though we've been doing it for two million years, is in and of itself kind of weird. | ||
Well, you know what I think happened? | ||
Is your mic on? | ||
That was so weird. | ||
That was very loud. | ||
It was weird. | ||
It was like it was in my ear. | ||
Jamie's on the ride brainer. | ||
He's getting crazy. | ||
But I think part of the issue is that people over the last hundred years or so have been so removed from where the meat comes from that when they can find a direct connection like, oh, you went and you shot a moose and then you ate that moose? | ||
Like, you killed the moose? | ||
Like, you didn't have to kill that moose. | ||
Like, that becomes problematic because people aren't used to someone killing things. | ||
People that they know in particular. | ||
No, and I enjoy the ideological conversation. | ||
I just enjoy the conversation. | ||
I enjoy it because I think it's part of a human condition. | ||
It's part of who we are and what we do. | ||
So yeah, we should probably fight about it a little bit and disagree because it's pretty damn important. | ||
This is an important piece of our humanity. | ||
It is important. | ||
That we're talking about. | ||
So I feel very strongly that hunting is the essence of who I am as a human and has made my life better. | ||
But I can see how somebody else would say, you're killing stuff. | ||
I can too, and I also think that those people are important. | ||
I think so. | ||
I think having vegans and having animal rights activists and having to be able to have dialogue with them, it also makes sure that you keep people honest, like people that are hunters. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like, you know, like... | ||
Because we all know unethical people. | ||
There's people that are unethical. | ||
Absolutely. | ||
I always think about it, you know, if you look at the trend of hunting, in the 70s, hunting was doing great. | ||
And then in the 80s, it started to tick down. | ||
Fucking Bambi. | ||
That's what happened, bro. | ||
Well, I would say three... | ||
We talked about this before, like three things. | ||
Bambi, maybe Walt Disney. | ||
He was maybe a dick. | ||
I don't know. | ||
And then urbanization. | ||
Right. | ||
Which correlated with the decline in hunting. | ||
And then hunters being the third one. | ||
Messaging. | ||
We're bad PR agents. | ||
Some of them are bad PR agents. | ||
Not all of them. | ||
And then there's people like Grinella that are amazing at it. | ||
We're way better now than we were five years ago. | ||
We're better tomorrow than we were yesterday. | ||
But I think in general, if you look at that line graph, right? | ||
In the 70s it was going nicely. | ||
In the 80s it started to decline. | ||
And I think 2011 was the first time it actually went up. | ||
Oh, really? | ||
The number of, I think it's licensed sales or number of hunters participating. | ||
I wonder what caused that. | ||
I bet it's like the organic food movement. | ||
There was a study that said Locovores, they're talking about more women, they talked about returning military members. | ||
I remember reading the study. | ||
I think those were the top three. | ||
But I think Locovore was probably pushed out there as like, the way to reverse that second point, the way to reverse the suburban and urban rise, was to take that suburban male or female and say, you can hunt and get your food. | ||
Right. | ||
And then that's a way to kind of reverse the decline. | ||
And I think that's probably what was happening. | ||
Hmm. | ||
Well, everybody wants to go with locally sourced, locally raised, grass fed. | ||
People are trying to go to farmers markets and connect with the people that are actually growing the animals. | ||
And this is like one step better than that. | ||
Instead of having an animal that's in captivity, go out into the forest. | ||
But there's a rude awakening for a lot of these people that think they're going to just go ahead and try it. | ||
It is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
That's the other problem. | ||
It's the Grand Canyon. | ||
I would love to procure my own elk meat, and killing an elk is like being on two sides of the Grand Canyon. | ||
There's no bridge to be built there. | ||
You've got to take it one step at a time. | ||
And for most people, they don't have time for that. | ||
They don't have the want to do that. | ||
So I would say, what is it, like 14 million hunters in the world or something like that? | ||
Or in our country. | ||
How many non-hunters who don't either have the wherewithal to get educated or want to, or just don't fall into the anti-hunter side, like the agnostic crowd? | ||
How many of those are there out there? | ||
Right. | ||
I don't know. | ||
But it's hundreds of millions of people. | ||
There's a lot of them. | ||
Well, urbanization, one of the things it's done, just careers, just careers in cities, it's eliminated almost all of your free time. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
And if you wanted to go out and procure your own meat, first of all, if you wanted to do it with a rifle, that's going to take a tremendous amount of time. | ||
Absolutely. | ||
But if you want to do it with a bow, multiply that by a factor of, like, maybe five or ten. | ||
Maybe ten. | ||
Ten is probably pretty honest. | ||
Honestly. | ||
And then you're talking about one of the hardest pieces is access, right? | ||
Right. | ||
Even if you get with John Dudley and you learn how to be a great archer, and you understand that in your suburban area there are some places where there's deer that you may kill, you've got to get access to those places. | ||
And then when you're done with that, you've got to figure out a way to get that thing from dead deer to meat and all the other things. | ||
It's just so complex. | ||
How would you ever expect somebody just to have a desire? | ||
You were like that at some point. | ||
Well, Rinella opened the door for me. | ||
So you're lucky as hell to have that, right? | ||
Super lucky. | ||
Forever grateful. | ||
Because when he took me into a wild backcountry Montana deer hunt. | ||
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Yeah, you got kicking the nuts the first deer hunt. | |
In the Missouri Breaks, in October, nine degrees out, freezing your dick off every night in a tent. | ||
It seems like lifeless Steve Rinello. | ||
That's kind of what it's like. | ||
He loves it. | ||
He loves suffering. | ||
He loves it. | ||
But I love that he loves it. | ||
He's as legit as they come. | ||
He really is. | ||
I think that's it, right? | ||
There is just this big gap, and my father got me into it, but my brother doesn't hunt, but he has respect for it and understands what's going on. | ||
I think at the time that I was introduced to hunting, my brother was more interested in going out with his friends than Saturday mornings were not for getting up early. | ||
And so we're essentially the same person, but I just went this way, and he didn't go that way. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
So it's a weird... | ||
So you could be in the same house with somebody and go a different way. | ||
Well, Rinella has a real good way of looking at it, too. | ||
He's like, I don't expect people to go out and get rid of their own sewage. | ||
Why should I expect them to go out and hunt their own food? | ||
Like, you don't have to. | ||
Well, I think he probably said this at some point, or somebody smart did. | ||
It was, like, I choose, I believe it, I choose for meat to be the one thing that I grabbed a hold of to bring into my skill set. | ||
I don't knit my own clothes. | ||
I don't make my own shoes. | ||
I don't build my own houses. | ||
We were just looking at some construction stuff a little bit earlier. | ||
I'm like, dude, what? | ||
Yeah, what are they doing? | ||
What are they doing? | ||
I couldn't do that. | ||
I just picked this one thing because it's also part of my passion. | ||
You couldn't just ask someone who's a construction worker to go hunt, get some meat. | ||
I know you have a desire for that. | ||
That's just another hard part about hunting, and non-hunters by proxy are essential to hunting, always. | ||
In industry, in opinion, because we could legislate ourselves out of being able to hunt. | ||
That could happen. | ||
Hunting is a privilege, man. | ||
That's not a right in a lot of ways. | ||
So that's another whole nother can of worms, but it could it could go away Yeah, I think the the issue is that so many people are opposed to it because they're so removed from the realities of the wild and They just feel some sort of moral superiority by either not eating meat entirely or by not killing their own meat They're not killing their own meat is really ridiculous. | ||
Like my wife was having a conversation with someone They were out to dinner with a bunch of people while I was on an elk hunt and The guy was eating a steak. | ||
A guy from England. | ||
In England, they don't hunt. | ||
Or they do hunt. | ||
They use, like, foxes and horses and shit. | ||
They wear, like, tweed pussies. | ||
Yeah. | ||
No, sorry, England. | ||
We love you. | ||
This guy's carving a steak, and my wife goes, he's actually out elk hunting. | ||
And the guy goes, he hunts? | ||
That's deplorable. | ||
The guy said, that's deplorable. | ||
While he's carving a steak. | ||
I was saying something the other day, like... | ||
And I got a lot of, like, people were looking at me like I was weird at work. | ||
One of my buddies at work was eating a chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A. And I look on the bag and there's a cartoon chicken on the bag. | ||
And in my mind, I'm like, that's like building a swimming pool by the lake. | ||
It's fucking weird and irony that we're like... | ||
Saying, hey, I'm eating a chicken, but here's a cartoon version of it so we can celebrate the fact that we just murdered this chicken and we fried it up. | ||
That doesn't make sense. | ||
Like a swimming pool with a lake is probably smart because there's parasites in the lake. | ||
The rye brain's wearing off. | ||
Time for a refill. | ||
Yes. | ||
We can put chlorine in the lake. | ||
As long as you know what I mean. | ||
Well, we definitely like to cartoonize these weird... | ||
Is that a word? | ||
Not really. | ||
Cartoonize? | ||
Personalize? | ||
No. | ||
Well, anthropomorphize is you take an animal and you give it human characteristics. | ||
Personify? | ||
No. | ||
Cartoonification. | ||
Is that a word? | ||
Let's just go with it. | ||
Just turning it into a fucking cartoon. | ||
We're creating drinks, we'll do what we want. | ||
A sweet little cutie pie, when really a chicken is a ruthless little fucking dinosaur that lays eggs for you every day. | ||
But is it weird to be eating a chicken, and like, there is on the bag where that chicken came from, it's like a picture of the chicken. | ||
Right. | ||
It seems like a weird way to handle it. | ||
It is weird, but we like cartoons. | ||
People love cartoons. | ||
Well, that's like the personification of animals, I think, is part of the bear situation. | ||
unidentified
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Yes. | |
Because my kid, my son's nine months old, and from before he was born until now, there's cartoon bears everywhere, and there's like this, you know, personification of these cute little creatures that come along with being a little baby. | ||
Right. | ||
And then you look at so many Pixar and DreamWorks films that personify animals. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think that's, I mean, there's some indoctrination into that, right? | ||
There has to be. | ||
There is, because in those magazines, or rather those movies and books even, those animals are never like eating each other. | ||
Pooh Bear never goes up. | ||
I mean, if Yogi killed a hiker, if a hiker fucked up on one of the episodes of Yellowstone and just took a wrong turn and Yogi's eating his ribcage, a bunch of people show up and- Like Pooh Bear and Yogi are just fucking going at it. | ||
Just ripping it apart. | ||
Eating cubs. | ||
Yeah, eating some dude asshole first while he's screaming and- Swatting at it with his fucking hiking sticks. | ||
And they're playing the circle of life in the background? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, I feel like there's some indoctrination, and maybe that's what happens. | ||
I just don't know. | ||
I have no idea why bears get this thing, because bears are around. | ||
It's not like there aren't bears around. | ||
They're in almost all states, aren't they? | ||
Yeah, but what it is is people that don't experience them firsthand, and when they do experience them firsthand, usually they're in their car like, look, a bear, and they drive by. | ||
My friend Tommy... | ||
That one bear that was walking on its hind legs, and that was cute. | ||
Oh, that one that had a broken front paw? | ||
Yeah, I've been friends with that bear. | ||
They called them, like, petals or something like that? | ||
That's awesome. | ||
There was, um, my friend Tommy, who lives in Connecticut, sent me a picture of these bears that were in the middle of the street duking it out, uh, in Connecticut. | ||
Like, they're invading Connecticut now, and they don't have any pressure. | ||
So here's the thing about bear hunting as opposed to anything else. | ||
Like, California's weird in that they don't hunt mountain lions, but what's good about that is California has very little deer. | ||
Now, it's not good if you like to hunt deer, but it is good if you like to drive down the street and not slam in a fucking deer. | ||
Like, Iowa doesn't have mountain lions. | ||
But they do have a shit ton of deer. | ||
And when you drive late at night in Iowa, you gotta have your foot on the gas, ready to hit that fucking brake at any second. | ||
Nah, you just get the ranch hand grill guard and just plow them up. | ||
Mad Max grill. | ||
People, like, everywhere you look, in, like, Iowa and Montana, these people have pickup trucks with these battering ram front grill things that they put. | ||
Well, how many deer did we kill in Lanai? | ||
Were you in any of the deer? | ||
We must have hit... | ||
With a car? | ||
Oh yeah, with Brandon's truck, I think we hit at least two or three deer. | ||
Did you? | ||
While we were on Lanai. | ||
We were there for five days. | ||
We never hit any. | ||
Roman's a better driver than Brandon. | ||
He must be. | ||
That's what's going on. | ||
Brandon, if you're listening... | ||
We never hit any. | ||
We didn't even hit one. | ||
Yeah, we hit multiple. | ||
But they were telling me about them. | ||
They were like, people just slam into them all over the place. | ||
So there you are. | ||
I'm sure the insurance industry would really enjoy. | ||
Well, in Cam's town, last year, a guy died because a guy in front of him hit a deer. | ||
Oh, right. | ||
And the deer flew through the air and went through his windshield and brained him. | ||
Oh, that's poor luck. | ||
That's a shit luck. | ||
That's like having a longer guy. | ||
Do you hear a story like that? | ||
You're like, I would have ducked. | ||
Do you hear that? | ||
You're like, pssh, I would have ducked. | ||
unidentified
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That guy's a pussy. | |
I'd have been like, I don't know. | ||
People think stupid shit like that, right? | ||
In the moment, I would have been driving my car and I would have seen this deer flying through there and I'd be like, well, it was a good run. | ||
Like, there's a... | ||
There's nothing I can do about an airborne deer. | ||
Like, that's just bad luck. | ||
Yeah, 150-pound blacktail. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Hurling through the air. | ||
What the hell? | ||
Full of antlers and hooves. | ||
Yeah, I'd have been like, well, I lived all these years without this happening. | ||
That was lucky. | ||
That's probably more lucky, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But that's, I mean, you know, you start to, like, break down those things. | ||
Like, more animals, less animals, the value of them, and all these things. | ||
What a complex freaking thing to have to figure out. | ||
I always just get, the more you read, the more you jump in, the more you go, you know, going to New Zealand. | ||
Going to, you know, Northwest Territories, going to Nepal, you go to these places and you just realize that everybody has the same essential problem. | ||
Like, how do we cohabitate? | ||
How do we live with these things that we were in some ways meant to consume? | ||
Like, there's evidence of two million years ago in Tanzania. | ||
Humans, early humans, hunting. | ||
And so 100,000 generations of people have lived on a hunter-gatherer diet. | ||
Then you had the Industrial Revolution. | ||
A couple generations of people kind of were introduced to a new diet. | ||
And then the last couple generations, you have processed foods. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
And so everywhere that I've ever been, you find people struggling with that thing. | ||
It's just not us in America. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Right, but you can exist on a plant-based diet. | ||
I mean, I know a lot of people that do it. | ||
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Absolutely. | |
It can be done. | ||
And I'm sure in those 100,000 generations, there was plenty of people that didn't, you know, exist on the hunter-gatherer diet alone, but the majority of humans... | ||
I wonder how many there were, honestly, because I feel like people were just really super opportunistic back then. | ||
I mean, if you were just trying to survive and struggle, I don't think you could say, like, hey, I don't want to eat that rabbit because I feel bad. | ||
No, that rabbit is... | ||
The way I live. | ||
And then you have to wear its pelt, and that's a different deal. | ||
I was writing a piece one time, and I got into reading about these basket weaver people that were in Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, which is really close to Vegas. | ||
And you should go if you've never been up there. | ||
Basket weavers? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Basket maker or basket weaver people. | ||
Are they like Native Americans? | ||
Yeah, they were essentially a roving band of nomadic hunters. | ||
I can't think of the year. | ||
You can probably look it up and find it. | ||
But there was different generations of this essentially roving band of tribes. | ||
In that area, next time you're in Vegas, it's like an hour drive north. | ||
There's a bunch of petroglyphs there that depict deities and sheep and all these different things there. | ||
And you could just go visit them? | ||
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Oh, yeah. | |
You know what's fucked up about those petroglyphs, man? | ||
They're not protected. | ||
There's a ranch in Texas that a buddy of mine went to, and he's like, you could just go over there and touch these things, and they might be 5,000 years old. | ||
I did that when my wife and I went up there. | ||
You could have had a can of spray paint. | ||
How fucked up is that? | ||
It's strange. | ||
It's strange that you wouldn't find a way, but also probably... | ||
It's probably okay because it's a natural place. | ||
You don't want to put fences up or have a guard standing there. | ||
It's actually pretty badass that no one's fucked with it so far. | ||
You go up there and you see these things and you're like, holy crap. | ||
So I started reading a little bit about those people, and they were part of a nomadic band of hunters, gatherers, that lived in caves and essentially followed desert bighorn sheep, much like Indians of the plains followed buffalo. | ||
So they essentially followed these things into this valley. | ||
Eventually the Anasazi Indians move in. | ||
They start cultivating the land and planting crops, and you get this, like, oh my gosh, agriculture and hunting. | ||
Which one is better? | ||
What do we do? | ||
And so the whole story of that interaction is interesting to me because it's kind of the evolution of our culture, right? | ||
Hunting has created this social structure, ways for us to communicate. | ||
It's created all these things, ways for our body to grow and expand as we were, you know, early humans. | ||
Ways for our brain to expand and grow and function differently. | ||
And then you have this like, oh, it's a lot easier to plant crops in the ground than it is to go kill a sheep, right? | ||
Guys? | ||
Anybody? | ||
Is this easier? | ||
So then you get into this weird thing about what do we do now? | ||
And so I think their story was very much like the Anasazi Indians. | ||
They go in, and they cultivate this area, and as long as they can grow crops, that's what they did. | ||
So this nomadic band of hunters kind of settled in this area. | ||
I'm sure they still hunted to get meat, because they have to, because you can't grow. | ||
A whole year's worth of food for a valley like that. | ||
But I think agriculture kind of won out a little bit in that scenario. | ||
And as it would, it's an easier way to live. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
That's an evolutionary, easy way to live. | ||
I mean, the whole thing is filling your belly. | ||
That's the whole thing. | ||
And everything, you know, you can do to do it, whether it's with deer, or whether it's with corn, or whether it's with tomatoes, or whatever you can grow. | ||
And, you know, you just have to eat. | ||
I mean, that's the whole picture of staying alive back then. | ||
That's not our whole picture today. | ||
So that's where it gets really complicated. | ||
And that's where I think that hunters have done a really good job over the last... | ||
X amount of years, describing to people, like, if you're going to eat meat, this is the most ethical, the most cruelty-free, and the most natural way to do it. | ||
And you're talking about an animal that literally, like, okay, here's a perfect example. | ||
That deer, that mule deer that you're looking at right here, that deer had no idea I was alive until it died. | ||
And it died instantly. | ||
It was boom, one shot, it dropped. | ||
Right where I shot it, and that's it. | ||
And then it becomes steak. | ||
You know, and it becomes delicious food that we ate. | ||
And that's way better than any other animal that you're ever going to buy in a store. | ||
I don't care if you're talking about farm-raised, grass-fed, you know, locally sourced. | ||
I feel like your evolution as a hunter has been accelerated more than most, probably because that's how you do everything. | ||
But you went from, when I first, when you first hunted in British Columbia, it was three years ago. | ||
Three years ago? | ||
Yeah. | ||
To where you are now, I mean, you've evolved in this, like, what you see as hunting and in our community and in our world and doing different things. | ||
And in some ways, you evolve from, when I was a kid, we just shot deer. | ||
Oh, here's a spike. | ||
Here's a four-point. | ||
You shoot this deer, and that was a great day. | ||
We drag it off and eat it, and it's great. | ||
Now, I understand way more about what I was doing then and what I'm doing now. | ||
And I think what, at Hunters, we need to be cognizant of and comfortable with is you change. | ||
Your sensibilities change over time. | ||
You don't become a trophy hunter. | ||
You're not a trophy hunter, but you do appreciate The difference between a small antlered animal and a large one, in terms of its maturity and how awesome it is to see a 380-inch elk or a 200-inch deer, your pursuit is different than it was when we shot that moose. | ||
It is also, but also part of the pursuit that's different is that I understand that the benefit of going after mature animals is if you're getting a mature deer, you're talking about a deer that's five years old, that deer has had five breeding seasons, has spread Spread its genes. | ||
And by killing it, you're going to give a chance to the younger bucks that are coming up to breed. | ||
So it's done its part. | ||
It's spread its genes. | ||
It's created its progeny. | ||
And now you'll take it out of the mix. | ||
And this is the right way to do it because then you ensure a healthy herd. | ||
Especially for bear. | ||
That's the big argument. | ||
You want to take out the dominant males. | ||
Because the dominant males actually eat the cubs. | ||
They're marauders. | ||
Animals. | ||
That's the craziest part about it is, by shooting a boar, you're going to save the lives of many bears. | ||
In many ways, it's kind of a catch-22 because you're talking about controlling populations. | ||
Well, isn't it a catch-22 that a younger deer tastes better? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And so you're out there like, I really love access to your meat, but when we're over there, they're like, we have certain call bucks and there's certain things you want to shoot. | ||
It's like, I really love access to your deer, and if I was out there just for meat, I would have shot the youngest deer. | ||
Probably not the youngest, but I would have picked a certain age group. | ||
Yeah, but I'll tell you, here's the argument against that with axis deer. | ||
That deer I shot was not young. | ||
That was a big-ass deer, and that fucking thing's delicious. | ||
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It's delicious. | |
Like, if they're better than that when they're younger, I don't even need that. | ||
It's a fact that a younger animal is more tender and is a better cut of meat than an older animal, for sure. | ||
In most cases. | ||
It's not all cases, but that's the general... | ||
That giant elk that I shot where you saw the antlers back there? | ||
They're all delicious. | ||
That's amazing! | ||
I've been eating that thing for eight months now. | ||
It's fantastic. | ||
Yeah, I do the same thing. | ||
Elk is great no matter what. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Even a seven-year-old elk. | ||
Yeah, you're talking about two animals that it'd be hard to mess it up. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But in general... | ||
That's the fact of the matter, right? | ||
See, I don't like that argument, though. | ||
You know why I don't like that argument? | ||
I don't mind chewy meat, and I like eating what I kill. | ||
So, like, it feels good to me on top of it tasting good. | ||
Like, if I eat a deer that's a six-year-old deer, there's two things going on. | ||
One, there's a satisfaction that I know that a six-year-old deer is very difficult to hunt. | ||
Yes. | ||
You know, so most of the places where you hunt, other people are hunting as well. | ||
A six-year-old deer has seen people that are hunting deer, period. | ||
That's right. | ||
So that deer is going to be on point. | ||
That's a tough deer to kill. | ||
So by killing that deer, you get extra satisfaction. | ||
That's one. | ||
And then on two, you're eating this animal that you have this connection with. | ||
So it tastes good because of that. | ||
I like meat that tastes like meat. | ||
I don't want filet mignon. | ||
I like a deer steak. | ||
It's the best. | ||
A sirloin from a mule deer. | ||
I'd prefer that. | ||
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It's the best. | |
and organic meat, right? | ||
And you said, I'm going for, I understand both those principles. | ||
I'm going hunting. | ||
Everything's great. | ||
You're shooting that six-year-old mule deer, right? | ||
If you remove conservation, you're probably not going to shoot that six-year-old mule deer. | ||
Right. | ||
Because you're going to get a younger deer that's easier to kill, more tender, more delicious than you're going to shoot that mule deer. | ||
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Right. | |
You know Eduardo Garcia, the chef in Montana? | ||
He gets shit from other hunters because he'll shoot a spike on purpose. | ||
He's like, look, I'm here for the meat, guys. | ||
He goes, I'm grocery shopping. | ||
That should be, in general, that should be okay, but there's principles that say shooting a mature animal is more beneficial to the herd. | ||
So... | ||
That's yet another complexity that we should all just say, like, man, this is here, and we've just got to continue to talk about it. | ||
That's important. | ||
I think the way you approach it is very important, because you're entirely honest about the good and the bad and the bear thing. | ||
It's not the best meat. | ||
It's good meat. | ||
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It's good. | |
But it's not as good as elk. | ||
Yeah, I'm not going to stand up and be like, hey... | ||
Pussies. | ||
Eating a bear is the best thing ever. | ||
It's not. | ||
Some people love it, though. | ||
I don't know if they're telling the truth. | ||
They're telling the truth, but I would assure them if they would dabble in some other meats, they'll find one that's better. | ||
I'm pretty sure. | ||
Well, I guess it depends entirely about the way to preserve it. | ||
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And taste. | |
Prepare it, right? | ||
Taste or whatever. | ||
But the thing about this, an argument for hunting bears is different than the argument for hunting any other animal because you do eat them and you need to kill them because they don't have a natural predator. | ||
The problem with bears is, especially if we went in Alberta, Jesus Christ, they are everywhere. | ||
People that think there's a shortage of bears need to go to Alberta. | ||
People that want to have one of those experiences where you walk away from that and be like, Did I just do that? | ||
Yeah, are there 20 fucking bears hanging out over here? | ||
I've been sitting there with Cam. | ||
Like, I wish we could get Cam. | ||
Call Cam. | ||
Cam, please text in. | ||
He's at work right now. | ||
Quit your job, Cam. | ||
Quit your job, Cam. | ||
Been telling you for years, quit your job. | ||
You're too cool to have a nine-to-five. | ||
Uh, it's... | ||
He's got a seven-to-five. | ||
Oh, my lord. | ||
Takes two hours lunch to go work out and run the mountains. | ||
Well, that's... | ||
Savagery. | ||
It is savagery. | ||
He does pretty good for having a 7 to 5. He's a goddamn savage. | ||
I gotta get my ass together. | ||
He's a legit savage. | ||
I know. | ||
Every time I'm complaining about anything, I think about Cam Haynes getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning to run. | ||
You think about that, like, 198th mile. | ||
You're like, fuck. | ||
205th. | ||
He's gonna do 234 this summer. | ||
It only gets worse. | ||
My dad was an ultramarathon runner growing up, and it just gets worse. | ||
It's like smoking crack. | ||
Oh, they just get deeper and deeper into how much they can endure. | ||
That's probably a terrible analogy. | ||
Dude, I'm scared of it because I keep running further and further distances. | ||
I'm like, what am I doing? | ||
And I'm doing it more and more often. | ||
What am I doing? | ||
You're feeling the runner's high. | ||
Well, it's a little bit of that, but it's also like I feel improvement, and I'm an improvement junkie. | ||
Yeah, I feel you on that. | ||
I know that I can keep... | ||
I'm pushing further. | ||
I'm going further distances. | ||
I feel better when I hit the top of the hill. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But my dad, like when I was a kid, I remember my dad just being, you know, a regular... | ||
He must have been mid-40s, maybe. | ||
Late 40s. | ||
And he mowed... | ||
We had a fairly small backyard, and he mowed a little circle. | ||
And he would go out after working his jeans and his loafers and jog around this circle. | ||
What? | ||
I remember looking out there and being like, what are you doing, man? | ||
How big was the yard? | ||
It was like... | ||
Maybe an acre? | ||
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I don't know. | |
It wasn't very big. | ||
He was running, like, just little circles in this yard. | ||
Let me get to the end of the story. | ||
You'll get it eventually. | ||
But that was his way to run. | ||
Right. | ||
And so, after a while, he started running, you know, got running shoes and started to get into the actual sport of running. | ||
And then it seems to me, like, three or four years later, he was like, I think I'm going to run this 50-mile race in the mountains of Maryland. | ||
JFK 50-miler. | ||
And had he run marathons? | ||
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No! | |
No! | ||
So a 50 mile race is like what? | ||
It was not like- Six hours? | ||
Seven hours? | ||
If you're in really good shape? | ||
Eight or nine hours, I think. | ||
Eight or nine, I think, when he started. | ||
Or maybe ten. | ||
I think 12 is like the cutoff. | ||
Isn't it interesting? | ||
Like 8 hours for 50, for 100, it's 24. Of course it is. | ||
It's like, listen, bitch. | ||
75 miles in. | ||
unidentified
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Fuck this. | |
My dad used to run. | ||
He used to run in places. | ||
It was like the JFK 50-Milers up over this mountain. | ||
It's not like... | ||
I remember he used to tell me stories of people falling and busting themselves all up on these rocky cliff trails. | ||
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Yeah. | |
And he would come in and... | ||
This is going to make my dad sound weird. | ||
He's not. | ||
He's awesome. | ||
But he would, like, save his toenails. | ||
All his toenails would fall off during the race. | ||
And he would, like, save them, put them in a little jar. | ||
Oh, God. | ||
His memories. | ||
Did he save his boogers, too? | ||
No, no. | ||
Just toenails. | ||
And he was almost like this, like, I can take that. | ||
Right. | ||
I could take this thing and then he ran 50 and then I think one time he ran 100 and then he ran the entire C&O Canal one time 183 miles and I was like I think it was in maybe a senior in high school and I had like had to drive to the checkpoints and like give him food and stuff. | ||
So he never started until he was in his 40s? | ||
God maybe 50s it was 40s probably I would say yeah late 40s. | ||
So what did he keep does he still do it how old is he now? | ||
He would still do it if his knees would allow him to. | ||
He's mid-60s now, 65. His knees are fucked up. | ||
But he'll still bike and he hikes all the time now. | ||
So he still has that need to push. | ||
And when he gets around one of his buddies in particular that they ran together, they're like old army buddies and talking about this experience that they shared together. | ||
Like, remember that one time on Mile 94 when you trip and fail and And it's just like they're telling old war stories. | ||
It's like this visceral thing that they share. | ||
It's really cool. | ||
He did it past... | ||
I mean, maybe it's a midlife crisis, man. | ||
I don't know. | ||
Yeah. | ||
He wasn't predisposed to run 100 miles until he decided that he wanted to. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's weird, right? | ||
That compulsion is a very odd one. | ||
The need for suffering. | ||
Cam's got it bad. | ||
It becomes a thing. | ||
Yeah. | ||
He's got it bad in a weird way. | ||
I remember my dad, he got a knee surgery. | ||
What kind? | ||
It was ACL, I think it was. | ||
Or was it the scope of his knee? | ||
He had knee surgery. | ||
Oh, scope. | ||
Scope's an easy one. | ||
They cut his knee open. | ||
I can't remember what. | ||
I don't want to say the wrong one. | ||
But he had knee surgery in there. | ||
Like, give it four or five days before you're up and moving around. | ||
And he was like jogging around the backyard on day two. | ||
Limping around. | ||
You could just tell he was in pain. | ||
Oh, that must have been meniscus. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Something like that. | ||
Some tendon of some sort. | ||
But it was just like you could just see. | ||
This dude is... | ||
If he can't do this, man, it's not good for his psyche. | ||
If he can do it, he's a happy guy. | ||
Well, there's something that happens to you when you push yourself like that, where it makes regular life easier. | ||
And that's part of the addiction. | ||
That's real. | ||
When I went to Nepal, man, that's exactly... | ||
When I came back, I was like... | ||
I brought back a sheep, I killed and all that stuff, but the perspective was what? | ||
It was real. | ||
When you were telling me how you were hallucinating when you saw a baby. | ||
I did. | ||
Tell me about that. | ||
Alright. | ||
So, how high were you? | ||
We got, we'll have to start. | ||
We were, there we were like 13,000 maybe. | ||
13 or 13.5. | ||
13,000 feet above sea level. | ||
Yep. | ||
Which gets sketchy as fuck. | ||
It's sketchy. | ||
It's not something to mess around with, I found. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Especially on this trip. | ||
So we were hunting blue sheep in Nepal. | ||
Blue sheep? | ||
Blue sheep. | ||
What does that look like? | ||
Look it up. | ||
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Look it up. | |
It looks kind of like an all-dad. | ||
It's got these like... | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
It's got really, really... | ||
You can really see their annuli, like the age rings and their horns. | ||
They go straight out. | ||
They're short and stocky. | ||
It'd be... | ||
Cool to look at them. | ||
They're a cool animal. | ||
And it's one of those things where we went to hunt them and I didn't really have much of an idea of what blue sheep was until we started getting into the thing. | ||
There's one. | ||
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Oh, wow. | |
A boral is what they call them over there. | ||
Wow, what a cool looking animal. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, mine wasn't quite that big. | ||
And that one looks like it might be at a farm. | ||
Because it's mowed grass? | ||
Yeah, maybe. | ||
But don't the goats mow the grass? | ||
That looks like more... | ||
I saw a very disturbing video of a goat eating a whole bucket of chicks. | ||
Of little baby, uh, baby chickens. | ||
Yeah, it was on... | ||
What were you watching? | ||
It was on an Instagram page. | ||
I think it was... | ||
Okay. | ||
Either it was Jimmy Jew or Clown and the Homie. | ||
Yeah, that's it right there. | ||
Look, this fucking goat is just sitting there eating... | ||
This is on YouTube and what's the name of the video, Jamie, there? | ||
Um... | ||
Amazing goat-eating, alive baby chicken. | ||
So there's several bins of baby chicks, and this goat is just standing there, and it just reaches in, chews one down, and the goats aren't carnivorous, so they don't have the teeth for this. | ||
And this baby chick's trying to fucking claw its way out. | ||
Look at this. | ||
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Watch, watch, watch, watch. | |
He reaches in. | ||
Oh, he's just like, I'll get one. | ||
Oh, I can't catch it. | ||
He lost that one. | ||
That one lived. | ||
But look, he gets one. | ||
Here we go. | ||
I got you, bitch. | ||
And he just starts chewing. | ||
Just starts chewing. | ||
Like, what? | ||
What is happening? | ||
Oh, look at this one. | ||
Wild Impala fights back as its guts fall out. | ||
I feel like we're really making the case to be Predator Hunter. | ||
Yeah, look at this. | ||
This Impala is getting chewed apart by this wild dog. | ||
Oh, my God. | ||
Don't do it. | ||
Don't stop it. | ||
Oh my god, but it's just lying. | ||
Oh, it's in, it's in the cavity. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
That's like where the bacon is. | ||
Oh, now it's up on his feet. | ||
It's terrible. | ||
unidentified
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Oh my god. | |
Africa. | ||
You're a dirty mother. | ||
Look at this. | ||
This Impala's like, come on, bitch. | ||
You ain't eating me. | ||
I'm stabbing you, motherfucker. | ||
I know I got weapons on my head. | ||
He's like, look at your tail. | ||
Look at this showdown. | ||
His guts are literally hanging out to the ground. | ||
And it's standing up. | ||
How tough are these things, man? | ||
I mean, I would not want to get gored by that impala and horn. | ||
The dog doesn't either. | ||
Are they on a road? | ||
Yeah, they sure are. | ||
There's a road right there. | ||
Paved road. | ||
Look how it just circles them, too. | ||
Looking to catch them on the flank. | ||
Isn't it just messed up that, like, wolves and coyotes, they hit the back legs first? | ||
Yeah. | ||
They cause that shock and blood loss? | ||
I'm a big fan of cats, because at least cats will grab you by your neck and kill you. | ||
unidentified
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They really will. | |
This motherfucker is not doing that. | ||
This is weird. | ||
There's a whole minute 30 left of this. | ||
Oh, there's more! | ||
A bunch more come in. | ||
He's like, that's it. | ||
That's a wrap. | ||
Oh, and they just grab the guts. | ||
Look how much more is falling out now. | ||
Oh, how can it be alive? | ||
Oh, I have no idea. | ||
I don't understand. | ||
And they're just going after the legs. | ||
Here comes another one. | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
It doesn't know what to do, man. | ||
Oh, God. | ||
unidentified
|
It's so crazy. | |
Why are we watching this? | ||
We're having some vegan dinner tonight. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, Jesus. | |
There's like, what, six of them? | ||
Three, four, four, six, seven? | ||
Seven wild dogs. | ||
unidentified
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It's dead now. | |
Hopefully it's dead. | ||
Look at the chunks. | ||
Oh, they just pulled the guts out in one hunk. | ||
There's one watching. | ||
Look how fast they tear that fucking thing apart. | ||
Look at that. | ||
It's just body cavity now. | ||
Holy shit. | ||
unidentified
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What is the head? | |
Did they drag the head off? | ||
Yeah, man. | ||
They're no jokes. | ||
And those guys are nothing compared to hyenas. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's hard out there, is the point. | ||
Like, if you get hit by an arrow, it's way better than that, folks. | ||
That was like three minutes of terror. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We're going for the vitals. | ||
We're going for double lungs. | ||
We're going for a heart. | ||
It's going to end nice and quick. | ||
See, now this is the biggest problem with the internet. | ||
You get from like, what's a blue sheep to that shit? | ||
Like, two clicks? | ||
Yeah, well, you can go way deeper than that, you know? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I saw a guy chop his dick off the other day. | ||
What? | ||
Just for a goof, I was looking at different hashtags online, and I looked for hashtag triggered. | ||
I think I might have wrote hashtag triggered in something, so I looked for hashtag triggered thinking I could find a post that I wrote. | ||
Oh, good luck. | ||
There's millions. | ||
One of them was this one dude chopping his own dick off, and they somehow or another got on Instagram. | ||
And I was like, how did that- It got on Instagram? | ||
Yeah, nobody caught it before they pulled it down. | ||
Look, there's no way they can take down everything fucked up. | ||
Just hashtagging it though, that's savage. | ||
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You think the guys were like, they're like, well... | |
We're getting ready to get this done. | ||
What do we do for the hashtag? | ||
Because we've got to market it. | ||
Like, we've got to have people... | ||
Triggered. | ||
Hashtag triggered. | ||
Yeah, they have to market it. | ||
Isn't that funny? | ||
Marketing. | ||
Marketing is a big thing, right? | ||
You know what? | ||
I was reading some... | ||
Self-mutilation? | ||
Some fucking YouTube... | ||
Not even YouTube, rather. | ||
Some Instagram person was talking about what they do to market their brand. | ||
And all they were like a fitness person. | ||
I was like, get the fuck out of here, man. | ||
You have a brand? | ||
You have 10,000 followers. | ||
Are you a brand? | ||
Or are you just some dude who does squats? | ||
Yeah, you can't be like Tuesdays, arms and back. | ||
That's my brand. | ||
That's my brand marketing scheme. | ||
Working hard on my brand. | ||
It's like those kind of phrases, people use those a lot. | ||
They won't do something because it's off-brand. | ||
That's an extra level of douchiness, I feel like. | ||
Really? | ||
It's not like my brand? | ||
I won't put that up because it's off-brand for me. | ||
Oh, it's not like my brand. | ||
unidentified
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Right, exactly. | |
That'll fuck with their... | ||
They're putting out there. | ||
Yeah, that seems quite preposterous. | ||
Social media. | ||
So, tell me about seeing the baby in Nepal. | ||
Oh yeah, let me finish. | ||
So you go up there, you're looking for this blue sheep. | ||
Yeah, so we're looking for the blue sheep. | ||
So I'll start off by saying that we were hunting in a very rural, when I say rural, it's like six days walk from the nearest road where we were at. | ||
Six days were the walking. | ||
And I said, how many days walk to the paved road? | ||
And they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
We don't know. | ||
We couldn't gauge that. | ||
And so we're in this remote region of Nepal, in this district called the Rokum District. | ||
And to say that the Rokum District is full of this, like, primal, these primal people and animals, I mean, it is really just out their place. | ||
I think... | ||
You know, to be out away from civilization, that was the furthest I think you could feel. | ||
I mean, we were out there. | ||
And the people there were part of a civil war, the Nepali Civil War, from 1996 to 2006. This district was maybe the epicenter of the rebellion. | ||
There was a Communist Party rebellion against the government, against the monarchy. | ||
And so the people there are... | ||
Amazing, because they've lived in this abject poverty for their entire lives. | ||
And not only that, they've lived through this Civil War in recent times. | ||
I think we think about Civil War as this, like, thing we go to see at a national park. | ||
So anyway, we're with these people, we're hunting, we go into, we get helicoptered into 10,000 feet, which is this just knob in the middle of nowhere. | ||
We hike about a full day to our base camp, which is this little village called Dule Yarsa in the middle of, of course, nowhere. | ||
It's like this terraced village. | ||
And we meet our Sherpas and meet a bunch of locals. | ||
And from there, we go up. | ||
We're going to do, I think we had two or three more days of hiking just to get to the area where the blue sheep live. | ||
So you're hiking from about 10,000 feet. | ||
And at our highest, we are probably 16 or 16 and some change. | ||
And so the first day, we go up and we acclimate. | ||
We sight in our rifles. | ||
We're hanging out. | ||
And we go into this lady's little mud, dirt hut, essentially. | ||
It's just like probably half the size of this room with a goat standing in the corner and a little fire pit. | ||
We're sitting around this fire pit. | ||
And she starts telling this story about how right where we were sitting during the rebellion, the police, the government police came in and shot six men right where we were sitting and buried them out back. | ||
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
And this is like, this lady must be in her mid-50s and she looked like she was 80. I mean, she's just like, it was this transformative thing for me sitting there listening to this being translated like, holy crap, where are we? | ||
And in the midst of that story they were passing around, they had made this moonshine, which they called Roxy. | ||
It's just like made in a ceramic thing outside of where we were at. | ||
And so we were all just drinking it. | ||
I wasn't thinking much about drinking it. | ||
And then we had one more day before we left. | ||
The next day, everybody was sick but me. | ||
I'm talking shit your pants, puke out the tent. | ||
We had two or three people shit their pants the next day. | ||
It was the Kathmandu flu. | ||
Everybody that wasn't native to that area got sick. | ||
I didn't on the first day. | ||
So everybody recovers. | ||
The next day we're going up the mountain. | ||
We're going up. | ||
We had probably climbed about 2,000 feet. | ||
We go over this pass and I'm feeling good. | ||
I feel like everybody else is probably feeling pretty crappy. | ||
And we're going down this ravine and this river valley to go. | ||
We're on these like two or three foot wide goat trails probably. | ||
It's like if you go to the right, you're dead. | ||
If you step two feet to the right, you're dead. | ||
You fall off and you're dead. | ||
We've got 24 Sherpas and porters. | ||
We've got three or four mules with all our camp gear going up this mountain in a string of people, probably 30 people long. | ||
I'm generally in the middle, and we stop at some point after we had crested this high point. | ||
And we're going down. | ||
And I remember feeling pretty good. | ||
I got my trekking poles. | ||
I'm going. | ||
It's warm outside. | ||
And I'm going. | ||
I'm like enjoying the view and looking around just thinking, oh my god. | ||
And then I remember pretty quickly being laying in the snow. | ||
Oh, I'm laying in the snow. | ||
That's cool. | ||
I had no recollection how I got there, what was happening. | ||
So you're hiking, and then you wake up. | ||
I was laying. | ||
I don't know that I lost consciousness, but I just didn't... | ||
I don't think in my mind I understood what was going on. | ||
I kind of maybe stumbled back against this rock wall and then just slumped down in the snow. | ||
I don't think anybody saw it. | ||
And so I kind of stood up, and I'm like... | ||
You're okay. | ||
You're good. | ||
You fell down, whatever. | ||
Maybe you're getting a little weird. | ||
And I keep going. | ||
And we had a little problem with the mules. | ||
These mules were going over this snow pass, and the mules couldn't get through it. | ||
So they had to turn these mules around and send them back. | ||
They couldn't get through it because the snow was too deep? | ||
Yeah, I got videos of snow's too deep, and you're talking a trail half as wide as this table, maybe. | ||
And they're trying to get these, and you're, you know, a thousand feet down to the river. | ||
And so, we stop. | ||
We all stop a second time to let these mules go back by, and I had to hang onto a bush on the side of the trail as they went by. | ||
And I got back up on the trail. | ||
You're hanging onto a bush for dear life. | ||
Well, I mean, you had footing. | ||
But we had filmmakers with us that were doing all kinds of crazy shit, like hanging off cliffs and doing stuff I would do. | ||
To make video? | ||
Yeah, to make film. | ||
Dedicated. | ||
They were. | ||
And so we stopped. | ||
We start going again. | ||
Most everybody gets out in front of me. | ||
I'm slowing up and I'm feeling dizzy. | ||
And I'm like, man, okay, maybe I just stood up too fast. | ||
Probably didn't eat enough today. | ||
I'm going. | ||
We're going. | ||
And at some point, I just, like, it snapped in the room. | ||
It was just, like, spinning like crazy. | ||
And I was thinking, and I knew about altitude sickness, and I knew that I live in a place that's basically sea level, and I was at a place that was 13,000 feet, and I've never done that before. | ||
Did you prepare for it at all? | ||
If you can, I mean, there's not really any... | ||
I trained, I did, for about... | ||
We didn't really know we were going to go until later, so I trained for about a month and a half. | ||
But not... | ||
You can't train, like, there's no... | ||
They told me before we go, like... | ||
Altitude sickness, there's no predictor. | ||
You could be a rookie or you could be a veteran. | ||
You can get it like that. | ||
It's part of the way your brain loses oxygen at those altitudes, and there's no real predictor for it. | ||
And so I don't think physically I was having any problems. | ||
And I don't know that I had altitude sickness. | ||
But anyway, the effects were... | ||
I kind of sat down. | ||
I just couldn't go anymore because I couldn't get... | ||
I wasn't about to walk on this trail and I couldn't freaking stand up. | ||
And so our medic slash interpreter slash... | ||
Uh, producer, cameraman, um, Ben Ayers comes back to me and starts talking me through. | ||
He's, you know, this dude's climbed everywhere, been everywhere, um, and is a medic. | ||
And so he's talking me through a little bit of the situation. | ||
He's like, this is not good. | ||
Like, if you're too dizzy to walk, no good. | ||
So let's get some water in you, let's rest, let's get some food in you, see what happens. | ||
Meanwhile, up the valley go the rest of the crew to the next camp. | ||
So him and I spent like 20 minutes just going really slow and I just couldn't do it. | ||
I was like, I can't stand up, dude. | ||
I can't catch my... | ||
I can't get my head to get back on my shoulders. | ||
And so we sit down and we're sitting there and I look across this little bowl in this valley and I see this wolf. | ||
I'm like, oh, cool, man. | ||
That's a wolf. | ||
Get my binos out. | ||
I'm looking. | ||
I can't find it. | ||
Put them back. | ||
Look over. | ||
I was like, Ben, there's a wolf over there. | ||
I think I see it. | ||
This thing is laying down. | ||
He goes, shit. | ||
I was like, crap. | ||
There's no wolves here, man. | ||
I was like, oh. | ||
There's no wolves in all of Nepal? | ||
He's like, you're not going to see a wolf here. | ||
Basically, I don't know. | ||
They don't exist there. | ||
They don't exist where we were in that district, in the hunting area where we were. | ||
It's like, that's not, nope. | ||
So you were hallucinating. | ||
I was hallucinating, but it was not one of those, like, you see it and then you shake your head and it's gone. | ||
It was like, uh, looking at it. | ||
And it was, you know, just this, like, what could have been a stump, but in my mind it was a freaking wolf. | ||
And I was losing my shit a little bit at that point. | ||
I'm like, this is not good. | ||
And so then, I'm sure in his mind, he's thinking Diamox is a pill you can take to help with altitude sickness. | ||
And he's thinking about, okay, are we helicoptering this guy out of here on day two? | ||
What are we going to do? | ||
Because it's, you know, pulmonary edema, cerebral edema. | ||
That's nothing to mess around with. | ||
And it was only day two. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, day two of the actual trip. | ||
We were four or five days into being in Nepal, but day two of the trek in. | ||
And so we sat there for a while and I'm just looking and I remember just looking after like 10 minutes and still being there. | ||
Like, fuck. | ||
This is not good. | ||
And so we get up to go and I'm like, I can do it, man. | ||
I'm going to do it because I don't want to leave. | ||
I want to hunt. | ||
And we get going a little further down this trail. | ||
And at this point I'm trying to like find some levity in the situation. | ||
Joking with him. | ||
He's joking with me. | ||
We're just like trying to be normal. | ||
And when I know that my head's not normal. | ||
We're going real slow. | ||
And I look on this, like, side hill of this trail, and there's a fucking baby. | ||
And I thought, that's... | ||
unidentified
|
I thought, come on, baby! | |
Like, I didn't say anything to Ben about... | ||
Was it naked? | ||
I feel like it was a really big, naked baby. | ||
It might have had a diaper on. | ||
Ha ha ha! | ||
Like, how big? | ||
Like, as big as me? | ||
I mean, like, it's like three feet tall. | ||
I don't know, Joe. | ||
unidentified
|
This is some dark shit we're getting into. | |
So it was unusually sized... | ||
It was like a baby that... | ||
If you saw it on the street, you'd be like, whoa. | ||
What a whopper. | ||
That's a serious baby. | ||
Science should be studying this baby. | ||
I didn't get that baby. | ||
So this baby's just on the side of the road. | ||
And so I'm thinking like, I'm not saying nothing to Ben because this baby is like my ticket at home. | ||
unidentified
|
Like this baby. | |
If I'd be like, hey Ben, there's a baby right there. | ||
He'd be like, cue the chopper. | ||
Right. | ||
See you, buddy. | ||
Right. | ||
You can't make it. | ||
And this baby, it wasn't like the wolf. | ||
It wasn't like I saw it and I stared at it. | ||
Like, I saw it and then I looked back and it was there and I looked back and it wasn't there. | ||
So I kept going. | ||
I'm like, you know what, baby? | ||
If you're really there, fuck you. | ||
You shouldn't be up here anyways. | ||
It's not my fault. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
You got harsh? | ||
Yeah, I got harsh with it. | ||
What a fake baby? | ||
What a fake baby. | ||
I'm like, I'm just going, man. | ||
I'm not... | ||
Whatever, baby. | ||
Stay there. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
So I didn't say anything to Ben about the baby, like, right off, and we're getting going, and eventually I just kind of collapsed, and I'm like, look, man, you know, I was talking positively, and I wasn't hallucinating any more than the baby and the wolf, which is enough. | ||
And we get down, we get going down this ravine, and the camp, you can start to see camp, guys putting camp together. | ||
And, um, essentially he was like, just give me your pack, give me your trucking poles, give me everything. | ||
And he held my shoulders and just kind of one step, one step, one step. | ||
Wow. | ||
For a solid hour and a half or so until we got to camp. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
A lot of breaks, a lot of just him and I talking about, well, here's the scenarios. | ||
Are you, is this really, you know, is it acute mountain sickness or are you, you know, what's going on? | ||
Did you get sick like the other people got sick? | ||
Yes. | ||
So that happened the next fucking day. | ||
So do you think it was because of drinking that moonshine? | ||
I think we got sick because of the moonshine. | ||
It could have been water in Kathmandu. | ||
It could have been anything. | ||
How were they making that moonshine? | ||
I have no... | ||
I have a picture of it. | ||
It looked like in this big ceramic thing. | ||
Probably spitting in it. | ||
Yeah, the goat was walking over there licking out of it. | ||
But we all did it. | ||
Everybody in there got some level of sickness that wasn't used to that area. | ||
It wasn't used to being in Nepal and eating the food and drinking the moonshine and all that. | ||
So who knows if it was the moonshine. | ||
That was my guess. | ||
Could have been anything. | ||
So we finally make it to camp, and we're doing a film, so they're filming me while I'm all messed up. | ||
And I was kind of out of it. | ||
I remember coming down this switchback trail to go into camp, and I remember not... | ||
Much like when I fell, I was like, I'm aware that my feet are hitting the ground, and these trekking poles are hitting the ground, and I'm aware that I'm doing this, but I feel like I can't control it. | ||
I feel like I could be floating through the air just as well as walking. | ||
It was a weird, like, head-detached-from-body feeling. | ||
Wow. | ||
It was gnarly. | ||
At the end of the day, I think what they thought was like it was the sickness that everybody else got coming on at the same time as altitude and it was just my body was fighting this battle against itself. | ||
So we got back to camp. | ||
I think I just kind of sat in a chair for a while and said a lot of weird stuff, and they filmed me. | ||
What did you say? | ||
I think I said, like, at one point I think I said, what's the name of this mountain? | ||
Because you've got to know the name of what's going to kill you or something weird, like, dark. | ||
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
Like, this mountain's out to get us, Joe. | ||
Were you thinking about your family? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Hell yeah. | ||
Right? | ||
That's the first thing you think about is you're in a bad situation in the woods. | ||
Like, why did I come here? | ||
Why do I have to be this adventuring asshole? | ||
Yes. | ||
That, 100%. | ||
I think I was more focused on levity and more focused on, like, making jokes and, like, making it seem okay. | ||
Right. | ||
Because that's the only way that my mind could wrap itself around. | ||
Like, oh, hey, you dumbass. | ||
You trained for a month. | ||
You went to Nepal. | ||
What are you doing? | ||
You're an idiot. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Like, you got a kid. | ||
You live in Texas. | ||
This is not it. | ||
What the fuck? | ||
What the fuck are you doing? | ||
This is your brain and body telling you, like, hmm, dummy, don't do this. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
But at the same time, like, I'm here. | ||
It's amazing. | ||
These people, this place, the feeling, the spirit, like, you know, you got to get through it. | ||
Like, if there was anything to get through, then you, it would be this. | ||
Right. | ||
And so I got hardened to that fact. | ||
And I think, you know, eventually I had some water and I went to sleep. | ||
And I woke up in the middle of the night and Ben, the medic, was in the tent clutching his little medical bag and was sleeping in there with me. | ||
So I feel like that's serious. | ||
And I think they had a discussion while I was sleeping about, do we just, does he wake up in a helicopter? | ||
You know, does he wake up going back to Kathmandu? | ||
Which was probably the right conversation to have. | ||
That's a Bob Seger song. | ||
Waking up in Kathmandu. | ||
Damn! | ||
That's a good song. | ||
That's really, really where I'm going to. | ||
A baby and a wolf. | ||
Did you tell anybody about the baby? | ||
Yeah, they knew about the baby eventually. | ||
Eventually. | ||
But right at the moment when the baby was there, I'm like, listen, baby. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
Let's make a pact. | ||
I'm going to keep you under wraps for a while. | ||
So you're basically tripping balls. | ||
Yeah, I don't know the science of it. | ||
Somebody smarter than me could tell you what actually was going on, whether I was just a pussy or there was some actual scientific stuff going down. | ||
I gotta fork a joint since it's illegal. | ||
It's legal here in California. | ||
This is hitting me hard. | ||
Keep going. | ||
I'll keep going while you're doing that. | ||
So, the next day... | ||
unidentified
|
There's more to the story to tell. | |
There's probably so much to tell. | ||
But the next day... | ||
We get up, and I'm feeling okay. | ||
Feeling pretty weak. | ||
It's like, ah, this is not... | ||
I'm still not... | ||
Pretty poisoning weak? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like that weird thing where you feel like you can't really make a fist? | ||
Yeah, like achy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Kind of. | ||
So we did a little bit of filming in the morning, and it was like, hey, O'Brien, can you make it up for this acclimation hike, right? | ||
Can you go up this hill right here? | ||
unidentified
|
What it was? | |
Okay. | ||
Uh... | ||
Can you make it up this hill right here? | ||
If you can, we'll let you keep going. | ||
So they give you a test. | ||
Yeah, I could test you, O'Brien. | ||
And so, I get up there. | ||
I go with one of the guides, Raju. | ||
Let me get up. | ||
We start hiking. | ||
We get up over this rise. | ||
I'm feeling pretty good. | ||
I'm like, shit. | ||
Okay. | ||
That was a bad moment in time. | ||
I'm going. | ||
But we're back. | ||
Sheep. | ||
Come on, sheep. | ||
Let's do it. | ||
And we're going. | ||
I think we probably had a five or six hour hike into the next camp. | ||
We started getting into sheep country at that time. | ||
And we're hiking. | ||
And I'm feeling pretty good. | ||
And we get to a spot where our main guide, Mon, had spotted some sheep and so we get to where he had spotted some sheep and I'm feeling tired I'm like that we're going up as we go so we may be there 14,000 feet or 13.5 at that point and We sit down, and he's glassing his sheep, and I remember glassing them, and like, oh, okay. | ||
They're like, so far up, you can't imagine going that far to get them. | ||
And then my stomach just like, oh, no. | ||
Oh, God. | ||
My stomach is completely screwed. | ||
Does your butt start going? | ||
You get that muscle, that butt muscle. | ||
You know that butt muscle, like when you're holding a weight that you're going to drop? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That's what I was doing. | ||
Like, oh Jesus! | ||
Let me say this about shitting your pants. | ||
Everybody on this trip was okay with it, because it was happening. | ||
Right. | ||
It was, shitting the pants was like a... | ||
It's not like you're on a plane. | ||
Yeah, and it was like, our camera guy, one of our main camera guys, Renan, who's an amazing person, a whole other podcast about that guy, he shit his pants, I think, during, like, day one. | ||
And I don't know how many pairs of pants he had, but I remember watching him scrubbing the shit out of his pants, thinking, oh shit, that's going to get interesting. | ||
But by the time we got into sheep country, we were all okay with the occasional shart or whatever's going on. | ||
Right. | ||
I think it's fine. | ||
Because your body's just like, you're realizing that your mind has a directive, but your body is dealing with some pretty extreme conditions. | ||
And I wonder, I always wonder now looking back on it, like how well I would have done if there wasn't sickness. | ||
And like I had some stuff like go to Kathmandu and it's just dust and dirt and all this craziness. | ||
And I had going into it like respiratory issues and then sickness and then visions of things. | ||
And so by the time you get in there, you're like, shit. | ||
You know, it really makes you respect the fuck out of Jim Shockey. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
For people who don't know who Jim Shockey is, Jim Shockey is extremely respected in the hunting world, but let's just step aside with that. | ||
He's an amazingly accomplished hunter. | ||
But maybe even more important than that, he's got a show called Uncharted. | ||
And his Uncharted show is so good. | ||
It's so good that it really shouldn't be considered a hunting show. | ||
Because what it really is is him exploring cultures in the most remote parts of the world. | ||
Jim goes to these strange villages in the middle of Russia that no one goes to. | ||
I've got all kinds of stories. | ||
Like, last time I was at Jim's place up in Cannon, I'm like, what you doing this weekend? | ||
I'm like, ah, fly home, hang out with the family. | ||
What are you doing? | ||
unidentified
|
He's like, ah, bison in Poland. | |
They have bison in Poland? | ||
unidentified
|
I think that's what he said. | |
I could be mislabeling. | ||
Not that it freaking matters. | ||
But it's the same kind of thing. | ||
Right, and when I was... | ||
I saw Jim about a month before we left for Nepal, and Jim had been... | ||
If you can find the full episode of Jim's Nepal hunt with his crew, it is... | ||
They film, they're like doing self-filming, and it's kind of... | ||
It's how I felt, just like you're just a... | ||
You're just a mess. | ||
You're just a mess. | ||
And I said to him, I was like, I'm going to Nepal, Jim, in like a month. | ||
And he goes, what? | ||
I was like, what can I expect? | ||
He's like, it sucks. | ||
It sucks. | ||
And when somebody like Jim Shockey, who's traveled the world... | ||
Literally the world. | ||
...it says, it's going to be terrible for you, little fella. | ||
I was like, oh no. | ||
This is real now. | ||
I'm going to be in trouble. | ||
Yeah, Jim Shockey has a... | ||
A video or an episode of his show where he went to, I think it was Mozambique, where they were hunting crocodiles. | ||
unidentified
|
The crocodile one. | |
Because the crocodiles eat all the people that live and work in this village. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
It is so crazy. | ||
These poor people. | ||
These people live under the threat of monsters on a daily basis. | ||
Like, half the people in the village are either missing arms or they have a chunk taken out of their leg. | ||
And while they were there, they lost a woman. | ||
She was going down there either to fetch water or to wash her clothes. | ||
And she got taken out, and these people were screaming and weeping. | ||
It was so hard to watch, man. | ||
To watch a bunch of people wailing. | ||
Just wailing. | ||
Because they knew this woman that they loved got taken under by a monster. | ||
Do you remember the end of that? | ||
Yeah. | ||
The end of it where they cut the croc open and pulled, what was it, like a shoe or something out of the croc's belly? | ||
Something like that. | ||
A shirt or a shoe? | ||
Yeah, something like that. | ||
I remember we were talking about that. | ||
Later on, and they're like, that should be on a different channel. | ||
Yeah, it's so good. | ||
It should be on Discovery or whatever. | ||
What's his son's name that films it? | ||
Branlon. | ||
Branlon is a bad motherfucker. | ||
He is a bad motherfucker. | ||
The whole family. | ||
Eva, their daughter. | ||
But you know how... | ||
Here's my criticism of outdoor, in air quotes, TV. There's episodes like Rinella's that are just brilliant. | ||
I mean, Rinella's show... | ||
Or shows, rather, like Rinella's. | ||
Rinella's show is just a brilliant show. | ||
I mean, it easily could be on any other network. | ||
It's shot by 0.0. | ||
The same people that shoot Anthony Bourdain's show. | ||
The same people that shoot a ton of award-winning, Emmy-award-winning shows. | ||
It's a brilliant show. | ||
And then you got these... | ||
Things that look like they shoot them with trail cams, a bunch of dipshits. | ||
You know, the Lord blessed me when this bull came over the ridge. | ||
You're like, okay. | ||
There's a rampant anti-intellectualism, like an embraced... | ||
Sort of like fake simplicity to it. | ||
Yeah, there's like heartland pandering that goes on all the time. | ||
It's pandering. | ||
Pandering is a good way to look. | ||
But then you've got Jim Shockey, who has this like legitimate appreciation for these cultures. | ||
That he visits all over the world. | ||
I mean, he goes to these incredibly remote places and communicates with these tribespeople that live in the jungle or in the mountains or wherever it is. | ||
And you could tell that this is a guy, Jim is like, what is he, probably 60 or so? | ||
He's getting up there, yeah. | ||
And he realizes that he's lived a long life, he's experienced a lot of wild and amazing things, and now at this point in life, what he really desires are extreme experiences. | ||
Of a human kind and also of a wild kind, like in nature. | ||
And there's like a different level to him. | ||
The outdoor TV thing is funny just because I do appreciate and have friends that fall into that... | ||
Bubba zone. | ||
Bubba zone. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And I appreciate what they do. | ||
It's not for me. | ||
I don't watch it and I'm a fan of it, but I appreciate other Bubbas like it and it's a thing. | ||
It's hunting. | ||
Right. | ||
But, I will agree with you. | ||
He's on another level. | ||
There's just a different level. | ||
You could watch Rinella's Coos Deer episode, where he just kind of like, the whole theme is like sitting in silence. | ||
And like, if you're looking for the right... | ||
And talking about his dad, talking about growing up, and there's no music. | ||
It's one of those brilliant episodes. | ||
Oh, it's wonderful. | ||
And so you could watch something like that, and then every once in a while you'll see one where you're like... | ||
What the fuck is going on here? | ||
And it's like there's such a juxtaposition between what Steve and Jim and some of these other, like Heartland Bowhunter, these guys are able to even cinematically produce. | ||
Yeah, Heartland Bowhunter, they do a really good job with their editing and their footage. | ||
They do a really good job. | ||
And Remy, like Solo Hunter is really great. | ||
Tim Burnett. | ||
Yeah, Tim Burnett. | ||
And so there is this really good, and I don't know if they're pulling up The ones that aren't so good or they're being brought down. | ||
I'm not sure. | ||
I don't think it's either or. | ||
You know what another one of my favorite is Western Hunter? | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's an amazing show. | ||
And Nate Simmons is fucking so good on that. | ||
And I would say as a hunter, it's hard. | ||
All you care about is hunting. | ||
You just want to read, read, read. | ||
There's a lot of bad information. | ||
On television, you mean? | ||
Television. | ||
But then you've got Western Hunter, which is a lot of really good information. | ||
It's public land, and what he does is go deep into the backcountry, hiking, sets up camp, and does it the hard way. | ||
That's the real hard way. | ||
There's a lot of... | ||
Man, it's hard to tell people to tune into a show if they've never had any appreciation whatsoever for hunting. | ||
It'd be hard, yeah. | ||
What show do you tune into? | ||
There's three. | ||
I feel like Western Hunter... | ||
There's a few Into the Backcountry's really good, too. | ||
But Meat Eater's probably the one I would send them to. | ||
I'd be like, the narration that you're going to get and the intellectual understanding of how to present these subjects and how to... | ||
Yeah, you know I mean that's what's important to me like as I get along in my life and career and like I have a son now and I'm trying to figure out what I want him to know and It's important to me that there's people like Steve Rinella out there representing my thoughts and feelings in a way that I probably couldn't. | ||
So I don't want to struggle with that. | ||
If he says, hey dad, let's watch an outdoor channel, I don't want to be like, oh, I don't know, man. | ||
So I do appreciate Steve for what he does, and there's a bunch of them that are really good. | ||
I guess I would say, at the end of the day, I've always struggled with Being in a room full of hunters and watching the Outdoor Channel because we're hypercritical of every little thing. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like, why'd he draw? | ||
Why didn't he draw? | ||
Well, there's that, but that's different to me. | ||
You don't think that flows into the actual, like, the quality of the content and how you enjoy it? | ||
No, because I feel like if I'm watching Nate Simmons or Steve Ranallo or Remy Warren or any of those guys, I don't think anybody should be second-guessing what those guys do in the field. | ||
Because you have a level of proficiency. | ||
Right. | ||
To me, that's like the layman watching a UFC fight and go, why didn't Conor punch him there? | ||
And I'm like, listen, bitch. | ||
Are you fucking crazy? | ||
You don't think he knows when to punch and when not to punch? | ||
Like, this is a stupid way of looking at things. | ||
So if you would compare UFC to hunting television, there is no meter for how you get on hunting television. | ||
You have money and you buy airtime. | ||
You're there. | ||
There is no qualifier. | ||
Well, explain that because most people have no idea. | ||
So, on the Outdoor Channel and Sports Channel. | ||
If you want to put a show on Comedy Central, you have to make a deal with Comedy Central. | ||
They've got to be like, oh, this is good. | ||
For real producers, for real writers, you have to package it. | ||
They're going to invest in it. | ||
It's a big deal. | ||
They're going to launch it right after Tosh.0. | ||
And they're going to be invested in it, too. | ||
They're like, if this goes good, we do good. | ||
Everybody can buy it. | ||
And the cable channels that are... | ||
Outdoor and Sportsman's channel is that the business model is not that. | ||
You pay the network for the airtime, essentially, and you deliver them content. | ||
They have very little oversight over what you deliver them. | ||
There's rules, you know, how many times you can show a kill shot, there's like, there's, there's... | ||
unidentified
|
What? | |
They have rules? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, there's rules. | ||
What? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Hold on. | ||
They have rules on how many times you can show a kill shot? | ||
I'm fairly sure. | ||
So you can't, like, shoot a deer two minutes into the episode and just... | ||
unidentified
|
For 30 more minutes. | |
Just watch the close-up on the deer's eyes as the arrow goes to its body. | ||
Close-up on the arrow as it hits the rib cage. | ||
It's a good thing we brought that red camera, Jim. | ||
All death metal and deers dying. | ||
Feet up in the air, kicking. | ||
Chicken over the egg. | ||
There could be a show like that. | ||
I mean, there's a lot of nutty fucking shows. | ||
There's a few that are kind of metal-inspired, like Fear No Evil. | ||
But so there are... | ||
Oh, God. | ||
Right? | ||
There are... | ||
unidentified
|
I'm trying to be diplomatic here, Rogan. | |
There are some really good shows, but you pay... | ||
And there are some shows that are owned by the network. | ||
But that is the minority. | ||
The majority of shows are people who are paying for airtime, and then companies come in and sponsor their show and pay that for their... | ||
Isn't that weird, though, that a network on actual regular DirecTV, like you can get to a channel 605, 606, 604. You know what's interesting? | ||
The hunting channels, which are, like, I would say... | ||
Overwhelmingly Christian, like in terms of viewership and in terms of the people that are on the show, are literally two or three channels away from black dicks and white chicks on DirecTV. | ||
The porn channels are like 596, 597, and then you go 604. It's like, hey, y'all, we're out here representing God's great earth and the beauty and the bounty of Jesus Christ out here in the forest. | ||
unidentified
|
Well, you're always two clicks away from something terrible. | |
Black poles and white holes. | ||
Next on DirecTV. | ||
Click, click, click. | ||
unidentified
|
Jesus has blessed me with this turkey. | |
We were two clicks away from Longergeier and a freaking hyena massacre. | ||
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
You're always two clicks away. | ||
But that's the internet. | ||
This is television. | ||
That's true. | ||
Those lines are gonna get super blurred. | ||
They're gonna get super blurred. | ||
They're more blurred now than ever before. | ||
Stephen Colbert said that the president of the fucking United States uses Putin's dick, like he uses his mouth as Putin's cock holster. | ||
unidentified
|
What? | |
Yes. | ||
But Stephen Colbert is very religious, right? | ||
unidentified
|
He is. | |
He said that? | ||
When did he say that? | ||
He said it on television recently. | ||
Yeah, his idea was he was going to... | ||
This is the inside story. | ||
He was baiting Trump to respond to him. | ||
And finally, after he said that, Trump did respond, called him second rate, not funny, all these things. | ||
Ratings dying, ratings bad, all this stuff. | ||
And then Colbert gets on TV and he goes, Mr. Trump... | ||
Out of all the things that I know you don't understand, the one thing I thought you did understand was show business. | ||
Oh, he's trolling him. | ||
He's like, you responded to me. | ||
That means I win. | ||
He trolled the president. | ||
unidentified
|
He did! | |
He trolled the president. | ||
The fact that the president is trollable is an issue. | ||
He's trolling as well as being trollable. | ||
Yeah, that's true. | ||
Like, Joe Scarborough and his fiancee, do you know that whole story where the president tweeted that the woman came to Mar-a-Lago, but she had facelift surgery, and she was bleeding very badly, and he did not hang out with them. | ||
He tweeted that last week. | ||
I gotta get back on Twitter. | ||
It's so bad that Scarborough left the Republican Party. | ||
What is happening in the world? | ||
Scarborough's like, look, if you guys are gonna support this, he goes, I'm not a Republican anymore. | ||
He goes, I'm going independent. | ||
He goes, I still have Republican values. | ||
I still belong to the GOP. Economically and socially. | ||
But I'm not gonna do this. | ||
We live in strange times. | ||
The strangest... | ||
The strangest of times, Joe Rogan! | ||
That's why my tour is called Strange Times. | ||
Go to JoeRogan.net for its house tour. | ||
See you in Utah this weekend. | ||
We'll be there. | ||
Oh, you're gonna be there. | ||
I'll be there. | ||
Yeah, we're gonna be there for a total coincidence, my wife doesn't believe it, but the total archery challenge is actually there at the same time. | ||
All hunting is total coincidence. | ||
Total coincidence. | ||
Joe's wife. | ||
I can't believe this, baby. | ||
It's amazing. | ||
Can't believe I'm doing a show in the wilds of New Mexico in September. | ||
I always wanted to visit this Native American reservation, and it turns out that they invited me to hunt bison there. | ||
I mean, I don't want to go, but I don't want to... | ||
There's 75 people coming to the show. | ||
I don't want to be disrespectful. | ||
Well, strange times it is. | ||
I do every once in a while flick on CNN or something, but I'm not one of those people. | ||
I've seen people in my life that get so wrapped up in that stuff that it becomes their reality. | ||
I've never been affected by anything Donald Trump has done in my daily life. | ||
The healthcare thing is a different deal, but... | ||
But I think in my daily life, there's few things that directly affect me other than something that seems existential, other than the environment and freaking healthcare. | ||
Right, but that doesn't even affect you where you feel it. | ||
You don't feel it if you ignore it. | ||
That's part of the problem is that we don't, like on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't touch your skin. | ||
It doesn't make your nerve endings respond. | ||
So you can choose. | ||
There's a choice, right, man? | ||
man, you can choose to not, you can choose to create some sort of bubble for that news and politics and let only what's important in. | ||
That's kind of what I try to do. | ||
I don't know if I'm always doing it, but I don't just turn it on and sit there and watch CNN and think, ah, Russia. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Oh, man. | ||
If I see a Russian on the street, I'll punch him right in his face. | ||
Well, you saw that news report where the reporter, he admitted that this whole Russian thing is kind of bullshit and it's just for ratings? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And I was like, well, I'm a journalism major. | ||
I'm like, of course it is. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Of course it is. | ||
Of course it is. | ||
unidentified
|
If it bleeds, it leads, Ben. | |
Yeah, I don't know what's real anymore. | ||
I really don't. | ||
I don't want to ever say, I mean, I want to look into things for sure. | ||
It's not that I'm not thinking about it, but man, I watch House of Cards too much. | ||
What you drinking there, Joe Rogan? | ||
This is not a sponsor, is what's important. | ||
It's Zevia. | ||
Do you know what Zevia is? | ||
I do not. | ||
I would like to know. | ||
It's a Stevia-flavored soft drink. | ||
Mmm. | ||
Yeah, it's 100% no sugar. | ||
This one is their energy drink. | ||
I think it has 120 milligrams of caffeine, which is like a good cup of coffee. | ||
Not a Starbucks venti, I think it has 200. So it's not quite a Starbucks venti. | ||
Not even a grande, but it has zero sugar, and it actually tastes really good. | ||
Would you like one? | ||
I would, yeah. | ||
Oh, young Jamie. | ||
Let me chug down this Rybaran. | ||
Let me get this motherfucker a Zevia. | ||
Yeah. | ||
They make really good soft drinks too. | ||
Do we have any soft drinks in the fridge or just the energy drink? | ||
Throw some of those soft drinks in the fridge for the next... | ||
I feel like as the first time visiting California, I gotta do shit like drink this Zevia. | ||
Yeah, people in California just don't respect you if you haven't been here. | ||
They're like, oh, you don't even know what to do here. | ||
I've been to your many great airports, but never... | ||
Like this morning, I went out and got like a parfait. | ||
Ah. | ||
Yes. | ||
With granola? | ||
Yeah, there was some granola in there. | ||
And then I got, I went to the pool a little bit and did some emails. | ||
Nice. | ||
And drank a sparkling water. | ||
Did you see any hoes? | ||
There were, no, they were in different areas. | ||
You've got to travel. | ||
If you're going to travel, next time you've got to land in Beverly Hills, or at least go to a hotel in Beverly Hills. | ||
Well, we have the rest of today. | ||
I really need to see the comedy store. | ||
I poke my head in there. | ||
Damn it, I can't go there tonight, though. | ||
Unfortunately. | ||
Yeah, we would have been... | ||
Are those cold or no? | ||
Oh, they are? | ||
Oh, beautiful. | ||
So it is grape soda, but it's zero sugar. | ||
Try one of those. | ||
It's good. | ||
They're delicious. | ||
And by the way, not a sponsor. | ||
I was gonna say. | ||
Man, I get in trouble all the time for shit. | ||
They're not in trouble, but people accuse me. | ||
Send me one of those bitches. | ||
They always think that for whatever reason, I'm getting paid for stuff. | ||
People got mad at me about that Yeti thing that I did. | ||
Which, by the way, my friend Ben worked for Yeti. | ||
I'm gonna be honest here. | ||
This is a Yeti Rambler. | ||
He'll send me some Yeti things. | ||
But I bought Yeti shit before he even worked for Yeti, and I was telling people how amazing Yeti You made that very clear to me, too. | ||
I was like, man, I work for Yeti now. | ||
You need a cooler or something? | ||
Yetis, bro? | ||
I already had two Yetis. | ||
Big-ass ones. | ||
Back off, O'Brien. | ||
I already got Yetis. | ||
They're the best. | ||
If you've never had one and people go, they're so fucking expensive. | ||
You're right. | ||
You're right. | ||
You don't have to have one. | ||
But I'm telling you, if you have the money and you want a crazy fucking cooler, they are the shit. | ||
This is very good. | ||
How do you feel about the ones that... | ||
There's one that... | ||
That totally copied Yeti, like in every way. | ||
But I mean, they copied the way... | ||
It's very flattering. | ||
The way the logo is, and someone was saying, hey man, this one is like half the price, and it does just as good. | ||
I'm like, okay. | ||
And then there was like this battle after I posted that in the comment section of Instagram where people are like, they're copycats. | ||
You know, that's... | ||
There is debate. | ||
I mean, it's a good, robust debate on what's the better cooler. | ||
It's funny that Yeti has kind of... | ||
Well, yeah. | ||
I created the premium, cooler category, and when you create a category like that, and become a business like Yeti is, you're going to have people that follow along. | ||
unidentified
|
Copy, for sure. | |
And they kind of need us, and we kind of need them, and it's whatever, but as long as they're not infringing on the things that are intellectual property and things of that nature. | ||
Patents and shit, yeah. | ||
As far as that goes, I know as a company, man, we look forward. | ||
We have stuff we're coming out with now, things we're doing. | ||
We're not worried about people that are copying us because I'll just continue to follow along. | ||
Yeah, I mean, look, coolers are coolers. | ||
It's all good, but when I find something that I like that's good, I like to tell people about it. | ||
And for whatever reason, people always assume... | ||
Why is that such a hard thing to get their heads around? | ||
Well, because they're cynical, and they should be, because people are full of shit. | ||
There's a lot of people that are full of shit. | ||
There are. | ||
But I swear to fucking God, if there's ever a time where I have an ad, like the ads for my podcast, everybody knows their ads. | ||
People pay for those ads. | ||
When we were talking about it, that was my argument. | ||
I'm like... | ||
People pay for ads and Joe reads the ad. | ||
He never just throws in during a podcast like, ah, let me just pull out this. | ||
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
It doesn't happen. | ||
And that's why people listen. | ||
If I talk to Zevia, I have zero. | ||
I bought this. | ||
I ran out. | ||
I ordered these all on Amazon.com. | ||
I paid for them. | ||
It's very delicious. | ||
Yeah, they're fucking great. | ||
I drink this shit all the time. | ||
You know why? | ||
unidentified
|
It's good for you. | |
Because it tastes good, and it doesn't have any bullshit in it. | ||
Like, this is all just zero calories, zero sugar, you know? | ||
I mean, it's grape soda, but it's clear because you don't have any... | ||
Look, see, it's grape, but look, clear. | ||
It looks like fucking water. | ||
It's like the Zima, right? | ||
Yeah, it's great. | ||
I used to love Zima. | ||
It's not a Zevia ad. | ||
I don't have any fucking... | ||
Nothing to do with that company. | ||
They're not a sponsor. | ||
But isn't that the whole world? | ||
Like, facts are... | ||
You know, people assign their motives to facts and, like, everything. | ||
I could say... | ||
I work for Yeti. | ||
I could say Yeti's a great cooler. | ||
It's the best I've ever used. | ||
I use him all the time, more than any normal person. | ||
It's my job. | ||
And I've found it to be... | ||
I'm proud to work for the company because it's something I can stand behind. | ||
I've still had people be like, ah, whatever, man. | ||
Right, you're just shilling for your company, bro. | ||
I'm like, I just... | ||
But isn't it smart, though, that people are that cynical? | ||
I mean, look, but here's a perfect example. | ||
I rant and rave about the glory of a 1965 Corvette. | ||
I don't work for 1965 Corvettes, okay? | ||
It's just like there's a reality about certain things that are awesome that people have created that I celebrate. | ||
And I don't say, I'm not going to talk about Zevia because they're not a sponsor, or I'm not going to talk about Yeti because they're not a sponsor. | ||
It's interesting to me. | ||
It's all interesting. | ||
I like... | ||
I like when people get it right. | ||
You have this podcast where you're closing 1,000 episodes and if you remove all consumer products from the conversation, it would suck. | ||
The problem is people boil down innovation to a consumer product. | ||
They boil it down to... | ||
A material possession that somebody has to purchase. | ||
Right. | ||
I'm not looking at it that way. | ||
I'm being honest. | ||
When I'm looking at something that someone creates, some new innovation, I'm looking at it like, oh, look what they did. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
I wish I could have figured that out. | ||
I don't even think that because I'm not an inventor, but I do get excited about cool shit. | ||
On the archery side of things, Bluetooth. | ||
I heard about that. | ||
Is that real? | ||
See that link I sent you? | ||
That is real. | ||
It's real. | ||
What's it called? | ||
What's the name of the company? | ||
Breadcrumb Tech? | ||
Bluetooth Nox. | ||
The problem is, I'm shooting 86 pounds, son. | ||
You're too strong for that shit. | ||
I'm blowing right through animals. | ||
Look, man, listen. | ||
There's not going to be any Nox poking out where you can track those things. | ||
I've had a lot of people tell, you know, through me to tell you just to dial it down a little bit, Joe. | ||
unidentified
|
Do they? | |
Yeah, a little bit. | ||
For real? | ||
Yeah, for real. | ||
I've had a couple people say, like, Joe, you can't be promoting shooting that much poundage. | ||
I just want you motherfuckers to check out the gun show. | ||
My ears go this way. | ||
I don't understand why people don't... | ||
It doesn't factor into their mind that some people are stronger than them. | ||
It's true. | ||
Like, if you pull 60 pounds, I don't feel bad about... | ||
I'm not upset at you. | ||
Look at these things. | ||
unidentified
|
Look. | |
So they shoot this arrow, and then with your phone, you can track the knock through a Bluetooth device that has some sort of a GPS locator on it. | ||
Oh, you shoot it in the grass, which I do often. | ||
He missed it. | ||
That's Brandon Bates. | ||
Brandon Bates from RMEF, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. | ||
Good man. | ||
I think he's got an America hat on. | ||
unidentified
|
America. | |
I got an America case for my phone. | ||
America. | ||
Nothing better than that. | ||
Wait till we have the new studio and have America flag in the background. | ||
That flag we got sitting back there, Jamie? | ||
Goddamn glory! | ||
Have you previewed the new studio? | ||
Nobody knows anything. | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
There's not a new studio. | ||
When it comes, it will be epic. | ||
You guys don't worry about it. | ||
But these knocks, it's going to be a good way to find arrows for sure, but what's interesting is it'll be a good way to track animals if you shoot an animal. | ||
Like a lot of times, People shoot an animal, and the animal runs, and it's in thick cover, and you can't find it. | ||
It's dead. | ||
It died quick. | ||
An animal can run 200 yards inside of a few seconds and die immediately, and you might never find it. | ||
So if you shoot exactly where your aim and you put a hole in each of its lungs? | ||
Yeah. | ||
With a two inch diameter range broadhead or one and a quarter, whatever it is, it can run 100 yards. | ||
Perfect example is that place we were at in Texas. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
This place had these scrub oaks that were six feet tall and you could not get into. | ||
And the animals, you would shoot one. | ||
The guys were talking to us about pigs. | ||
Like, yeah, we had a pig contest. | ||
We shot three, lost two. | ||
Like, what? | ||
What? | ||
unidentified
|
What's wrong with you? | |
And it didn't make sense until you go there. | ||
You go, oh yeah, how are you going to find that? | ||
You can't even get in there. | ||
Why would we go there? | ||
Why would we do that? | ||
Well, they just needed to trim that stuff. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We should have talked to them about that. | ||
I think they kind of knew, but they were putting it off. | ||
But it was just like, Jesus Christ. | ||
We have so much bush. | ||
Well, any place you hunt, especially when you think about a recovering game, even in Lanai, you think it's a fairly flat place. | ||
If I shoot a deer, I'll see it go down or whatever. | ||
It goes behind a bush or it goes over a rise and you go and you're like, oh, crap. | ||
Well, how about the place that we were at the last day where the grass was six feet high and the animals were in the grass? | ||
When you were trying to dropkick deer and stuff. | ||
They were waiting. | ||
What's crazy was, Ben and I were there, I shot at this one deer, and other deer that were like 30 feet away from us jumped out of the bushes. | ||
Like, they were hiding. | ||
They heard us talking, they knew we were there, and they just laid low. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, they, like, they laid low, and then you shot an arrow, and they were like, I know what that sounds like. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And they ran off, and we knew they didn't cross into the next little paddock, like, the next across this road, so I circled around and got up on this, like, mound so I could see into the grass, and I could see them in there. | ||
unidentified
|
They're just, like, talking to me, like, shit, what do we do? | |
Like, that's Joe Rogan. | ||
And I was trying to get you to go in there, but you were what, like six feet away from these things by the time... | ||
By the time we got to them, I was no further away than 15 feet. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And you're talking an axe deer that has swords growing out of its head. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Multiple points. | ||
It was pretty crazy. | ||
But they're just... | ||
Animals evolved to experience whatever the... | ||
Dangers of their environment are and their dangers are 100% people. | ||
Yeah, that animal is probably four or five years old been around people for four or five years It's like oh I get it when people around they're trying to eat you man people have never got me in this grass Yeah. | ||
Nobody has ever been able to do it. | ||
So how did you, how did the Nepal thing end? | ||
Did you get it together? | ||
I did get it together. | ||
I think we left off at, I started to get sick. | ||
Well, the whole next day I was puking, shitting, and just, I had the flu everybody else got, but I just got it like two days later. | ||
And so, it was that day, it was the first day we'd seen sheep. | ||
So we were three, I think, four days into the trek. | ||
And we were camping somewhere at 14,000 feet. | ||
The next day, the other guy that had a tag, Cole, goes up, shoots a sheep. | ||
They climb up 2,000 feet, 60-mile-an-hour wind bursts, microbursts, frostbite conditions. | ||
These guys, when they came back, looked beaten. | ||
Cole Kramer, who we went with as a Kodiak Alaska bear guide and a mountain hunter and is hardcore as he gets. | ||
And I looked at his face when he got back, and I had just been in my tent all day puking and trying to stay alive. | ||
And I looked at his face, and he's like, oh my god. | ||
And I thought, I can't make it over there to the latrine, let alone up this mountain to kill a sheep. | ||
And so I kind of had resigned myself to like, this is it, man, I can't. | ||
I wish I was healthy enough to do it, but I don't want to get up there and then have issues and not be able to get a helicopter rescue. | ||
And so, we talked about it, but the worst part, and I'll just have to tell this just because it's like the low point of my trip there. | ||
The third night in it, when we got to camp, I was puking in the vestibule of my tent, and all the Nepali guys were, are you okay? | ||
You okay? | ||
No, I'm not okay. | ||
I'm puking. | ||
And then I fell asleep, woke back up. | ||
I had to go to the bathroom. | ||
Ben, the medic, is there. | ||
He's kind of helping me to the bathroom. | ||
I'm like, I'm not going to make it. | ||
I can't stand up. | ||
So I literally just kind of like huddled over in the snow and pulled my pants down and just right in the middle of camp. | ||
Just let it go. | ||
And I just remember just thinking, oh my god. | ||
And I look up and there's all these porters and sherpas with their headlamps. | ||
So I'm like, you okay, Mr. Ben? | ||
You okay? | ||
I'm like, look at me! | ||
I'm dying. | ||
And so that was the lowest point of the trip. | ||
And that, I think the next day, Cole killed his sheep. | ||
The day after that, I went up the mountain in midday just for another acclimation. | ||
Could I make it? | ||
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
We got into a group of sheep, didn't make it happen, but I went up the mountain, basically. | ||
Probably 1,200 feet, just a good climb. | ||
Went back down, they're like, okay, tomorrow is kind of the last chance because we're almost out of areas to hunt these sheep. | ||
And we went up the valley, I want to say like eight miles? | ||
I got it written down somewhere. | ||
Wow. | ||
Eight miles. | ||
After being on death's door two days before. | ||
And I wasn't, to be 100% honest, I wasn't carrying a pack or anything. | ||
I just had trekking poles and a bino harness, and I was just like... | ||
One foot, one foot. | ||
And we got into these mountain passes in these valleys where there was like, you know, two, three feet of snow and it was frozen on the top and you were just like, every step you would crunch two feet down. | ||
Like, boom, boom. | ||
And it was just hours of that. | ||
And there was a time during that where we, we summited this, probably the highest peak we were at, which was mid-15s, close to 16. And I was just like, I can't, this is, I hope the sheep are right there because this is it. | ||
Like, this is as far as I can go. | ||
And we rested and we glassy sheep and there they are like a mile and a half away. | ||
Down this other giant ravine and up on this other flat. | ||
And I remember even the guys we were with looking like, he's not going to be able to go over there. | ||
And I just remember thinking like, this is what, I'm doing it. | ||
Like, I'm just going to go. | ||
And we slid on our butts like down the side of this mountain, me and two guides. | ||
Slid on our butts down the side of this snowy, icy bank. | ||
Got up, walked a half a mile, popped up over this ridge, there at the sheet bar within 300 yards. | ||
In about 20 minutes, I got on a big ram and shot him. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
And there was no celebration. | ||
There was no... | ||
I wasn't even happy, I don't think. | ||
Because you were so out of it. | ||
Yeah, I think I just kind of slumped over on my pack. | ||
I was laying prone. | ||
I just slumped over my pack. | ||
Okay. | ||
Did you eat it that night? | ||
Yeah, they ate the whole thing. | ||
Not all that night, but... | ||
Did you eat any of it? | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
I was too sick. | ||
Like, the spices, those curry spices, even the smell of that curry spice, I couldn't even take. | ||
unidentified
|
Really? | |
So I ate a good bit of it. | ||
Oh, they curried up your sheep? | ||
They put that on everything. | ||
But even the tent smelled like that. | ||
So, like, the cook tent, I couldn't even really be in there. | ||
It was... | ||
I ended up just eating rice for a couple days. | ||
I just couldn't... | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
I couldn't stomach... | ||
It was just such a gnarly experience. | ||
So everybody ate your sheep? | ||
Like, you didn't even bring it back? | ||
No, you can't bring the meat back here anyways. | ||
So the point was, so they had mostly already eaten Cole's sheep within a day and a half or two days. | ||
What are wolves? | ||
How many people are there? | ||
There's 24, 25 of them. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
Oh, yeah, they're burning through that thing. | ||
And not only did they eat eyeballs, so Cole had shot a sheep and he was caping out the head, taking the hide off the head. | ||
Pop the eyeballs out and I think jokingly handed to one of the porters like ha ha eat this and I watched that dude put it on the end of a stick and put it over fire and eat it. | ||
Yeah, why wouldn't they? | ||
I mean, that's meat. | ||
So they I didn't see this personally, but they were picky. | ||
Yeah, they took the punch that the gut sack and and cut it open flapped out the insides and And took it back and cooked that too, you know? | ||
It's kind of like a haggis, tripe kind of thing. | ||
And so, I mean, they just like, they just devoured the thing. | ||
Would you go back? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'm going to Northwest Territories. | ||
That's going to suck. | ||
There won't be altitude involved. | ||
Will it suck as bad, though? | ||
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
No, and I think about, like, I often think about, like... | ||
What if? | ||
I'm glad it happened the way it did because I got so much perspective. | ||
Like on the way back, because we still had two days to hike out to get back to get picked up to go back to Kathmandu. | ||
It was two and a half, three days hike out. | ||
And hiking out, the first day we were hiking out, after I shot my sheep and I had a night's rest. | ||
And I remember getting back at like midnight, I don't know, we got back at like 10 p.m. | ||
and had left at 6 in the morning from killing my sheep. | ||
And I was just so like emotionally, spiritually just, I'm fucked. | ||
And I remember thinking, well, tomorrow they're going to give us a rest day. | ||
And the guide was like, nope. | ||
It's too hot. | ||
We're all getting sunburned. | ||
I had blisters on the roof of my mouth. | ||
From the sun, my whole... | ||
The roof of your mouth? | ||
Yeah, from like... | ||
Going up and the sun bouncing off the snow hitting the roof of your mouth. | ||
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What? | |
Yeah, blisters on the roof of your mouth. | ||
So you got sunburned on the roof of your mouth? | ||
I did. | ||
That's insane. | ||
I've never even heard of that before. | ||
Yeah, I feel like that's a pretty common thing for guys that go to that elevations, hikers and stuff. | ||
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Wow. | |
It might not be. | ||
So do you have, like, sunscreen on your lips and your face and all that jazz? | ||
Halfway through I did. | ||
But, like, I didn't really think about that. | ||
Because I was hot, but I was in the field burning up. | ||
But, like, there's photos I look at now and I'm like, my lips are cracking open and bleeding. | ||
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Wow. | |
Like, it was, yeah. | ||
And if you watch Shockey's episode when he was in Nepal, it's similar. | ||
Like, they're self-filming and it's like this... | ||
Pretty visceral. | ||
Did you get something out of that though? | ||
Other than the survival? | ||
Yeah, I got so much out of that. | ||
I've written this now. | ||
I probably wrote like 20,000 words on the trip, but I got this amazing feeling. | ||
First, being around people that are that, primitive is the wrong word, but that removed from society. | ||
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Right. | |
They don't have, they don't really even have the option to be modern. | ||
Like they don't have, they couldn't get a, they couldn't get a chainsaw if they wanted to. | ||
Like they have an ax and they need to chop wood. | ||
And like just being around that level of just primitive people and that they're, primitive is the wrong word. | ||
I'll think of something better than that. | ||
But their spirit was so infectious. | ||
Like, they're happy people. | ||
And you have these Sherpas and porters who, you know those big Sitka bags, the big roller top bags? | ||
We took one to base camp because they told us, oh, we can leave it. | ||
We won't take it in the hunt. | ||
These guys would take, like, a 90-pound suitcase, put it on top of their head, and just go walking up these trails I was describing like it was nothing. | ||
Put it on their head? | ||
Yeah, they'd balance everything in a basket on their head, all these porters. | ||
A 90-pound bag. | ||
And they would do more than that, 200 pounds. | ||
What? | ||
Yeah. | ||
On their head. | ||
Head strap, basket back here. | ||
200 pounds. | ||
Yeah, if not more than that. | ||
What kind of disc issues do those guys have? | ||
They don't care. | ||
I mean, like, and they're wearing, like, these guys are wearing, like, sandals, and some of them will be wearing, like, old sneakers, and they're just wearing, like, whatever clothes that they would be able to gather. | ||
And they're doing these amazing things, and when they take a break from something that you or I could never conceive of doing, they're like, happy as could be. | ||
Their perspective on life is only hardship and poverty. | ||
That's all they know. | ||
That's the only thing they'll ever know. | ||
But yet, they're happier than I think maybe I could ever be. | ||
That's a big part of Sebastian Junger's book, Tribe. | ||
A big part of it is how living easy and not sustaining massive amounts of difficulty, like most people do in these impoverished communities, is one of the reasons why people aren't happy. | ||
Is that people actually need struggle, which is very counterintuitive for a lot of people. | ||
It is. | ||
And I remember coming back, there was a bunch of moments, and I could describe all these moments where I'd be at my wits end just thinking, I'm just a regular dude. | ||
I'm not some adventurer. | ||
What am I doing? | ||
Right. | ||
And I'd get to a point where I'd be just completely exhausted. | ||
And I would look over and here would come this porter, this, you know, 25-year-old kid with a basket strapped on his head with, you know, 100 pounds of stuff, wearing sneakers, and I got $400 Italian boots on and sick gear, and I'm like... | ||
And it would always come at these opportune moments where I'd look over and I'd see that and be like, oh, crap. | ||
Like, this person is... | ||
Here I am. | ||
I am in physical pain and things are happening, but, like, to have the mental fortitude that those people have... | ||
And they don't even know they have it. | ||
That's just how they're wired. | ||
And so I came back after the whole thing. | ||
And I remember hiking out, being in the front of the group all of a sudden, really feeling good. | ||
My pack's back on my back. | ||
I'm energized again, thinking, this is the best feeling in the world. | ||
That feeling of overcoming that thing and being on the downhill slope. | ||
I'd go back just for that feeling if I could catch it again. | ||
I think a big part of the thing of that is just you don't really appreciate what it feels like to be healthy until you're not healthy. | ||
I don't advise anybody to get food sickness or food poisoning. | ||
But one of the things about it is, man, once it's over, you realize, you go, God. | ||
Being healthy is so critical. | ||
It's like everything. | ||
It doesn't matter your status, your money, your friends. | ||
None of that means shit if you're unhealthy. | ||
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Yeah. | |
I mean, the people in Nepal live in this... | ||
They just went through a civil war in the recent decades. | ||
And these people were at the epicenter of it. | ||
And they're, you know... | ||
Our trip gave them jobs. | ||
It gave them purpose. | ||
It gave, like, there's a lot of things. | ||
Our main guide, Mon Bahador, didn't have shoes until he was, like, 13. And they used to go hunting, and they would build their own guns. | ||
And he described to us a couple times where, like, he remember hiking and hunting sheep, and, like, the gun would blow up on his back and blow his shirt off. | ||
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Stuff like that. | |
They were, like, making primitive muzzleloaders and using matchsticks as powder, I feel like. | ||
So there was all these stories like that. | ||
Perspective. | ||
Perspective. | ||
And like, you can't... | ||
And look, people say, oh, you trophy hunted that sheep. | ||
Maybe. | ||
But there was so much more to it that if anybody would ever want to... | ||
What does that mean, though? | ||
You ate it. | ||
We ate it. | ||
Yeah, I mean, what does that mean? | ||
What it means is people make a distinction that you did not have to bring that animal back in order for you to survive. | ||
That's right. | ||
So that's the only way they allow you to hunt. | ||
Well, they're assigning motive to me then, right? | ||
If they call me a trophy. | ||
And I would say this. | ||
I would say, look, you go into a war-torn area of the world where after the war... | ||
They don't have a lot of chance to make money. | ||
Like, the tourism has kind of died once you've been through a war. | ||
It's really not a happy place to be. | ||
And plus, the place we were hunting in the... | ||
I think the Doropatan Hunting Reserve is like the only hunting reserve in Nepal. | ||
And it's heavily regulated. | ||
Like, there's 19 blue sheep tags a year. | ||
So you're thinking, like, everybody that goes... | ||
How many people a year go to Mount Everest Base Camp? | ||
Thousands. | ||
I don't know what the number is, but it's thousands. | ||
I think we were probably within a couple of dozen Westerners that had been to that area post-war and had brought 24, 25 jobs, plus the people that prepped that, plus all that stuff. | ||
So, like, seeing that is pretty powerful to me. | ||
And shooting that sheep and not even giving a shit whether the horns made it back or not. | ||
I mean, somebody could question my motive all they want. | ||
But within the system and the structure that's set up there now, hunting is one of the more valuable things that they... | ||
one of the more valuable tools they have to get better at everything. | ||
Their lives, that they're having... | ||
It's their resource. | ||
Yeah, it's their resource. | ||
Yeah, and we can look down upon that, but it is a natural resource along the same veins as if you live in an area that has fracking, that's a natural resource. | ||
If you live in an area that they dig minerals out of the ground, that's a natural resource. | ||
It's not a good or a bad thing. | ||
It's just the reality of their environment. | ||
And so there's so many, I think that there is arguments against what we did. | ||
If somebody like broke it down, like I always try to break it down from the other side, I think people say like, why don't you just take pictures of it? | ||
What are you doing? | ||
You just go up there, pay 20 grand or whatever you pay for a hunt like that. | ||
Take some pictures. | ||
Well, part of it is the challenge. | ||
People don't understand how difficult it is to do what you did. | ||
To do what you did and then have this final accomplishment, which is to get close enough to an animal where either it doesn't know you're there or you get in a good place where it can't wind you, it doesn't smell you, and you can take it out and kill it. | ||
It's hard to do. | ||
It's insanely hard to do. | ||
I've got all my own personal reasons for wanting to kill that sheep. | ||
And I would also say, like... | ||
Present a better plan, then. | ||
Are you going to pay what hunters are willing to pay? | ||
And are you going to be a part of conservation regulation the way that hunters are, as a trekker and a photographer? | ||
Like, give me a better idea. | ||
Okay, but here's the problem with that. | ||
Their response to that could easily be, you know, what about if you decided to hunt people? | ||
If you paid a million dollars to go hunt a person, and that money fed all these tribespeople in Mozambique, is it okay to go out and hunt people? | ||
No, you surely still have an ethical and moral obligation to do it. | ||
But to them, to animal rights activists, you have an ethical and moral obligation to let that sheep live. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'm on your side, but I'm just saying... | ||
No, I like to see both sides. | ||
Like, I really do, like... | ||
Because we only ate it there because we didn't have a freezer full of back straps and because That thing didn't occur the way it normally occurs for me. | ||
There was like some complexity in that of that Yeah, my mind right crap man, you know Am I really over here just to collect this sheep and bring it home and show people but you're also filming yeah, we may oh we made what will be hopefully an awesome film and so At the end of the day, I check myself, and I said, did you do it for the right reasons? | ||
And after I look back at the trip, I'm like, man, there are a hundred reasons why I did it, and they're all good. | ||
And what we did was a good impact on the place we went, on the animals that we hunted. | ||
To me, it's all good, and I would love to have arguing with somebody that feels differently about that. | ||
Plus, you go to trip balls and see a fake baby and a fake wolf. | ||
People pay a lot of money for that shit. | ||
Yeah, man. | ||
Mushrooms are expensive. | ||
And you might not see a wolf. | ||
You might not. | ||
You might not see a baby on the road. | ||
I'm sure there's still a wolf-shaped log in Nepal or something. | ||
Somewhere. | ||
Some rock that looks like a baby. | ||
It had to be something. | ||
It was a wolf. | ||
I'm not crazy. | ||
We've got to wrap this up, man. | ||
Let's do it. | ||
Ben O'Brien, what is your Twitter that you don't use again? | ||
My Twitter's at BenjaminOB, but I never use that. | ||
So Instagram's always the better way to... | ||
And it's BennyOB... | ||
Yeah. | ||
B-E-N-N-Y-O-B-3-0-1. | ||
How did you get to 3-0-1? | ||
That's area code where I grew up. | ||
Oh, holla! | ||
Holla! | ||
Shout out to 3-0-1. | ||
Yeah, man. | ||
I created that handle when I didn't know it would be a thing. | ||
I thought that nobody would ever see that. | ||
Oh. | ||
Well, now it's a thing. | ||
Now it's a thing. | ||
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Let's do it. | |
Well, we blew you up when you had that competition with the people you work with. | ||
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I did. | |
All right, folks, we're out. | ||
We're out for a while. | ||
We'll be back next week with a one podcast with my friend Ari Shafir on July 18th, which is the release date of his new Netflix special, which is going to be fucking amazing. | ||
It's a two-part special, Childhood and Adulthood. | ||
Right? | ||
Is that what it is? | ||
That's what he calls it? | ||
What does he call it? | ||
Ari Shafir. | ||
Look up Ari Shafir on Netflix. | ||
All right. | ||
See you soon. |