Donnie Vincent and Joe Rogan explore sensory deprivation in float tanks, contrasting it with hunting’s raw immersion—like tracking a mountain lion 26 km or witnessing wolves’ intelligence in Alaska. Vincent defends ethical hunting as habitat-preserving, citing bear fat’s purple hue from blueberries and elk antlers revealing life histories, while rejecting trophy hunting hypocrisy like Cecil the Lion’s exploitation. They critique factory farming’s hidden animal death toll and modern hunters who waste meat, advocating for responsible culling of invasive species (e.g., Hawaii’s steroid-like Axis deer) over ideological extremes. Vincent’s films, blending storytelling with wilderness ethics, offer a visceral counter to sanitized outdoor media, urging curiosity over dogma. [Automatically generated summary]
When everything's just peaceful and you can just sit there and you can't hear your mother or you can't hear your girlfriend or whatever and it's just quiet.
I mean, obviously, we all know the rat race right now.
None of us...
I mean, it's why I go to the mountains.
It's the same thing.
Sitting there in peace.
And my mind has been doing this for years where early on when I would go in the Arctic or early on when I'd go into the mountains or something like that, everything was frantic.
Like, I had to do things really quickly.
I wanted to cover a lot of ground.
Everything, packing, moving, everything was so frantic.
And then when I started realizing that if I would just stop and slow down and look at the very tiniest details around me, no matter where I was or who I was with, then I started having a great appreciation of my presence.
And so I'm sure something like that is just because of the darkness and because of the floating, it's just hyper-extended into that presence of You can trick yourself into thinking that nothing else is going on in your life.
I think that we take this attitude that we have in the city when you're dealing with traffic and massive amounts of people, and you sort of have that same momentum when you go into the mountains.
And if you do do that, you're not going to appreciate it the same way.
I would go, I thought I had to accomplish something.
So I'd go to site A and hunt there.
And I'd try to, as horrible as this sentence is to say, I'd try to kill as fast as I could so I could get out of there and go to site B and site C. And then I started realizing, I actually had a friend of mine, he's like, man, I think you're...
I think you're hunting too much.
I think this is going to catch up with you and the experience is going to start to degrade for you.
But it was almost like I was trying to accomplish really fast goals.
And when I started slowing that down and saying, hey, I don't want to go to the Arctic for seven days and try to knock all these things off my list in seven days.
I want to go to the Arctic for 30 days.
And now let the Arctic come to me.
Now I just want to sit still and be quiet and not chase the Arctic down, but I want it to come to me.
Well, I think people who don't have any experience in the outdoors and certainly people who don't hunt, Don't understand it.
And their version of it, they're getting either from movies, where hunters are always portrayed as villains, or they're getting it from these outdoor TV shows, which I don't think do a good job of representing what it actually is.
Even the really good ones, like Ranella's show, which I think is the best show out there.
And I just don't think that you get a real sense of what it's like.
What I think you did that's really interesting, and one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on, is you're doing films.
Like, you're doing an hour-long film about a hunt.
And in that, you really get an understanding of the environment.
You take great shots, or whoever your cameraman is, great shots of the environment.
Super talented.
Close-ups on leaves floating down a river, and you get a real sense of it, which is missing.
You're still getting a blink of multiple weeks in the wilderness, but at least you get a feel like, oh, this is something very different than what's being portrayed.
This is like this intense...
Almost spiritual experience in this very bizarre environment that surrounds civilization.
And we think of it, you know, in these weird terms, but when you're out there in it, it's very difficult to capture what that's like.
And I think you've done an amazing job in doing that.
Jamie's put some of your stuff up online here where you get a chance to see it, but...
And this piece right here was specifically done for Nat Geo because they have the National Geographic Society, which is the magazine, and then they have National Geographic, which is the TV show.
And so they wanted to do...
They hit me up for a bunch of TV shows.
They wanted me to, you know, come and find Bigfoot.
They wanted me to...
Those motherfuckers!
They called me for everything.
They would call me and say, where are you right now?
Where's your cabin?
And I'd say, I don't have a cabin.
And they'd say, well, surely you're skinning a beaver out right now.
And I'd say, no, no, no.
I live in Wisconsin, just out of Minneapolis, and I'm walking my Labrador down the street in shorts.
And so they said, well, they really want to do a TV show.
And they wanted it to encapsulate hunting to some degree.
But the society, the magazine was against hunting.
The TV show would allow it.
So they wanted me to do a no bullshit sermon, if you will, download, looking down the barrel of the camera and just said, this isn't going to go public.
This doesn't have to be pretty.
It's not going to be edited well.
But just please tell us why you hunt.
We try to explain it so that we can bring it to our producers and say, this is why he hunts.
And so I did this, had my little temper tantrum there, and in doing it, realized it made me really question, you know, I'd say, okay, so you want to know why I hunt?
And then it made me take a step back and say...
Man, for the love of God, I really don't even know.
I don't know why I hunt, but I can explain some of the areas.
It doesn't explain why I'm a hunter.
It doesn't explain exactly why I hunt, but I can tell you I love the adventure.
I can tell you I love the really clean protein that I get for me and my family.
I can tell you that our ancestry unequivocally comes from 100% groups of hunters and gatherers that's around the world.
I can tell you all of these points.
I can tell you that I love seeing antlers of all sizes and the hides, and I can tell you I love watching grizzly bears eat blueberries and watching salmon come up a river to spawn.
I can tell you all of these things, but I don't know if all of those things make me a hunter or if I'm just experiencing all those things because I am a hunter.
It's just very difficult to articulate.
It's very difficult to articulate how much you love something, yet you're willing to engage it in such A heavy way, such a violent way that you're willing to step in, kill it, cut it up, get your hands bloody, because really that's what it is.
We love it so much that we're willing to expose ourselves to the elements, put ourselves in these places, let the arrow or the bullet go.
Watch an animal die, which is never an interesting thing to watch.
I say interesting, but it's just not a pleasurable thing to watch.
But this is how we engage as hunters into these environments.
And so I was trying to convey that to Nat Geo in a seven-minute piece.
And Kyle, after he put it together, he's like, I think we should release this.
And I said, hell no.
Hell no.
I talk about PETA in it.
I talk about Being a vegetarian in it, which I'm not against vegetarianism.
PETA is a joke, but he insisted, so he finally won the argument.
I mean, if we are really the stewards of nature, if we're really the top of the food chain, and we most certainly are, and we're conscious, and we have a conscience, we absolutely should be ethical in our treatment of animals and take care of them and be kind to them.
The problem with PETA is that's not really what they're about.
They're the animal liberation organization.
That's what they really are.
What they're about, they don't want any animals to be pets.
They don't want people to have pets.
This sounds radical, but it's absolutely true.
In fact, PETA euthanizes thousands of pets a year.
They kill pets, and they kill them quickly.
They don't keep them alive very long, and the idea being is that For the critics, the idea that's been bandied about is they don't want these animals to live and breed and stay pets.
They want animals to only be wild.
And that's fine.
But there's thousands and thousands of years of domesticated animals.
And if you want to let those animals loose...
And have them wild, you have a whole, another series of problems.
Unless you want to kill all the golden retrievers and all the chihuahuas, they're not going to survive in the wild.
That freaks me the fuck out, that we can take these alien creatures that are essentially as smart as us, probably, and put them in swimming pools and justify it.
And that the only time they've ever killed people in recorded history has been in those swimming pools.
I've been fortunate to have remarkable engagements with wildlife in my life.
But two years ago in BC, I had one with a killer whale.
And it was wicked.
And to this day, I regret not making the decision I'm about to tell you about.
But we had been...
I'd been bear hunting on the coast, and we were in a boat cruising back to the harbor...
And we found two pods of killer whales, three big bulls, and a bunch of cows that were hunting.
And we kept, as they would come up, they were chasing salmon, and as they would come up, we would just get closer just to film them, or even just to see them.
And then they'd go down and...
So I don't know if it was just happenstance of where we were, but we came up and we were just kind of waiting for the whole pod to come up.
And all of a sudden, just 50 feet from the boat, here comes the huge dorsal fin of this bull, comes right at our boat, Bumps into our boat.
I'm standing in the crow's nest, essentially.
I'm on the roof of the boat looking at this thing.
He comes up, bumps into our boat, and he just glides his left side all along the boat.
So his left pectoral fin is probably under...
Our gunwale, if you will, or under our hull.
And so he's just dragging his fin and he rotates on his side, dragging his dorsal fin along our side, exhales, covering our director of photography, William's face in his spray.
And as he's doing this, he goes, he hugs the bow of our boat and he never, ever breaks eye contact with me.
He's staring at me out of his left eye, literally rolling his eye over and he just cruises all the way around the boat.
And I also didn't want to have some sort of shallow water blackout because the water was so cold.
So I didn't want to dive in and have all of a sudden...
I didn't know how my body would react because I hadn't been in the water yet.
And then also I was like, I'd watched Blackfish or whatever that film is where they killed a bunch of folks in SeaWorld and in BC. And so I was just like, well, what if there's got to be a first?
Wolves never killed anyone either.
And then some young lady went jogging in BC and son of a bitch, we have number one.
I get furious that this is a giant business, that they take these things and they buy them from other organizations.
And I've had real problems with it for a long time.
And my friend Phil Demers, he was a trainer at Marine Land.
And he's been on the podcast many, many times.
And he's involved in these constant lawsuits with Marine Land.
He was a walrus trainer and he also trained killer whales and, you know, he's given us some real insight into the horrors of what it's like in marine land and even in SeaWorld and what they're doing and how they get these orcas and how they're treated and how bad it is for them to be trapped in these environments and how their dorsal fins go limp because they never have to deal with current, so they atrophy.
Yeah, I think anyone, honestly, treating anything with ethics, right?
Particularly animals.
Of course, hunters are animal lovers.
You know, we rescue dogs, we rescue cats, we...
It absolutely goes without saying, which is where the contention comes from.
That's where the questions come from.
I get as many letters from non-hunters and from people that think that they're against hunting or have maybe damning questions than I do from hunters themselves.
I get letters from hunters, I'd say.
You know, you're a badass or you really inspire me or, you know, I'm really happy that I can have my kids watch your films.
Like, I don't let them watch hunting TV, but when we sit down and they want to see something, they want to ingest something that has hunting in it, you know, we'll watch your films.
And so I think that's really cool.
But I get a lot of questions from non-hunters and then people that have some contention with it.
It might be a little bit higher than that, but it's no more than 5%.
And there's a lot of people that are just on the fence, and they're just sitting there going, well, I eat it, but I don't kill it myself, but I somehow know they're angry that someone's doing it themselves.
Before I ever thought about hunting, my thoughts about hunters were that they were cruel people that liked to kill animals.
Why would you kill animals?
It's not necessary.
You can buy meat from a store.
This is the very shallow thinking that I had, you know, decades ago.
Then, you know, as I started getting older and really considering what I do with my body and what kind of food I put in, and then the internet was a big one.
Because the internet came along and I started watching those videos, a lot of them that PETA puts up, of factory farming.
Oh.
Terrible.
It's not just terrible.
It doesn't make any sense.
This is like human beings at their very worst.
That we've treated these things as the most...
I mean, not just as a commodity, but we've ignored their feelings and their thoughts and the fact that they have instincts and needs, and that we've stuffed them into these tiny little cages.
It's a sickness.
Then you see the cruel, inhumane treatment that some of the people that work there...
You know, and people that work in farms will tell you, look, this is very rare, and these are isolated instances, and this is terrible.
That's well and good, but there's also ag-gag laws that prevent people from filming.
Agricultural gag laws that prevent people from filming on these factory farms because they don't want people to know how horrific those conditions are.
So there's some truth to it.
I mean, maybe they're isolated instances.
Maybe it's a small percentage of the farms that do treat their animals like that.
But it's significant enough that they're worried about the impact on the economy to the point where they're passing laws that keep people from filming and showing people what it's like in these places.
But if you have any wherewithal at all, if you have any being, any soul at all, and maybe this is the wrong Idealization or the wrong picture I'm building in my head.
But if you make yourself the cow just for a second, if you remove yourself just for a freaking second and just say, like, is this how I would want to be treated?
Is this how I would want to live?
Is this how I would want to die?
Then you start to ask yourself some pretty big questions that are relatively easy to answer.
And we have a lot of people on the earth right now.
And it's going to continue until...
Something big happens.
But if you can remove yourself from your own ego and from your own comfort and try to visualize at all what these other animals are going through, even animals you're hunting, it's going to make you better and more cognizant of being ethical and treating everything with absolute care, even in killing it.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of contradictions there, though, right, with hunting, because, like, if you really care about the animal, why would you kill it, right?
I mean public lands in particular, it's absolutely wild.
But it's also very weird because a lot of the funding for that wildlife comes from people that buy hunting tags and hunting equipment in order to kill those animals.
So the way those animals are sustained and the way the wildlife are protected and the way that the wardens and game rangers are paid A lot of it is through the hunters who want to go out and kill the animals that live on it.
So a lot of people are like, okay, this is wild, sort of.
Sort of.
It's protected by people that want to go in that water.
And then in certain instances, go in and remove a few animals.
Or in certain instances, like if you're in Alaska or something like that and hunting a stable caribou herd, you can go in and remove...
You know, not everything is based off of sole management, right?
As animals encroach where people are, we need to cut their numbers down because humans have taken up so much land.
But...
There are other populations that are trending in relative harmony.
If they have big, huge scales of land and we're not drilling for oil or whatever, where you can go and remove a few animals in a predator and prey scenario and it works just fine for the herd.
It works just fine for the population and actually, in a very small way, helps the population by removing certain animals for an age class or a sex class, things like that.
But that's the difficulty.
We're preserving the habitat So that we can go in and engage in the wild, right?
I mean, I think also a lot of people, they think you buy your gun, you buy your bow, you buy your tag, you go to Utah, you leave with an elk.
Well, that is how it works for like 15% of the people.
But there's a whole contingent of 80% or 90% of people that buy their bow, buy their gun, buy their pickup truck, get their hotel room, get their tent, hike 20 miles into the wilderness, Strike out.
Listen to a lot of quiet, look around, hike out, get back in their truck, drive home, send me an email saying, where is it that you find elk around September 15th in Utah?
And so there's, and still those people are engaging and still, you know, and there's all different wise, there's, you know, there's fly fishermen and elk hunters and, and there's people that just want to take photos.
And so everyone has their different engagement, but that's really what it's about.
And we have, what, we're trending towards 8 billion people on the face of the earth now?
So, well, large-scale agriculture and farming and animal agriculture as well has created this environment where people can thrive in these cities where they're not growing any food.
I mean, California, where we're at right now, is one of the weirdest places on the planet Earth.
All that shit is something someone's put there, and when they're using pesticides, they're killing things, and when they're using those combines, they are grinding up bunnies and fucking rats and mice and killing countless bugs.
So the idea that you're getting away without killing any sentient life, it's bullshit.
And even look at, so the corridor of the Mississippi River, right, used to be solid wetlands, and our wetlands is how we recycle water.
It's how we, that stinky biomass that you smell, that's clean water being made.
That's detritus material being processed.
Mississippi River used to be completely lined with these wetlands.
Farmers have one in, and obviously it's not the farmer's fault.
This is just as soon as we started agriculture, 13, 14, 15,000 years ago.
The stopwatch was hit.
We went one direction.
You cannot go away.
We were hunters and gatherers.
We could only raise so many children.
We had to move with the food.
We had to move away from our excrement.
We had to keep a small population.
But the second we figured out how to grow corn and rice and stay in one place and raise more than one child, and now we're close to our excrement, literally the stopwatch to something that is going to be a fantastic event.
I don't know if I'm going to see it.
I don't know if you're going to see it, but something wicked is coming.
Well, explain that too, because a lot of people don't understand that when you use, when you grow vegetables on a plot of land over and over and over again, you deplete the soil of all the minerals.
Yeah, because you're not letting anything die there, right?
You are pulling from the earth.
You're harvesting the plant.
Nothing is dying.
Nothing is returning back to the earth.
So then the next year, you don't have that detritus material creating all the goodies in the soils, the bugs, the microbes.
You don't have these funguses.
You don't have these symbiotic relationships that are working with all these insects and microbes.
So that create your soil to be a living system.
We've As we push all that into the plant and we harvest it and we just keep doing that repeatedly, well, there's less and less of this biomass in the soil.
So we have to then go in and fertilize with nitrogen and phosphorus to give our plants nitrogen fixation, things like this, to grow these plants.
Then we harvest them.
Then rains come.
There's erosion.
All of these soils.
So we lose some of our top soils, which brings us down to even more other different levels of soils that need even more chemicals brought into them so they can actually grow something.
But all these soils that are heavily laden with nitrogen and phosphorus pour into the Mississippi River.
And people know about this.
I'm not saying anything that hasn't been extremely well documented.
And then pushes down to the Gulf of Mexico.
The sunlight hits it.
All of this algal blooms happen.
All this algae hits this nitrogen and phosphorus.
It grows it just like it grows a corn stalk.
The sunlight hits, it has these huge blooms that needs oxygen to function, so it creates these huge hypoxic zones, right?
You've heard these things called dead zones.
Fish can't live in them, and so anyone that hangs their hat on being a vegetarian, and I know there's reasons for being a vegetarian.
I know there's people that refuse to do it.
They don't want to kill the animal themselves, and they're not going to buy from a factory farm.
I probably have more in common With vegetarian people that don't want to kill their own animals and aren't willing to eat factory-grown food than I have with some of my hunters, with other hunters, it seems.
I know what you're saying.
I'm so focused on conservation and habitat and being aware.
It's not ever-present, but I have this awareness of when I go and hunt someplace that You know, am I actually doing something good here?
You know, I went a few years ago to Newfoundland to hunt woodland caribou and the population was really down.
And so I got invited to go there and so I started looking into it because the population was down.
I was like, man, should I even really be doing this?
Through my research, I found out this population of caribou is really cyclic, and as they fall really low, they thrive.
It's one of the best times for the caribou, and actually when their populations are at a huge boom, they do the worst.
Yeah, so their habitat resource just starts to be overlaid, and then they have another bust.
So I went and did it.
There's a constant yin and yang.
And as a hunter, as a vegetarian, even if you want to claim veganism, all of these things, we should be asking ourselves big questions.
This whole thing, everything lives here in a gray area.
There is no black and white.
I'm not against vegetarians.
I'm not against vegans.
If a vegan comes up to me and says, how in the hell can you kill an animal and wear leather shoes?
I say, shh.
Shit, that's a really good point.
Let me ask myself, because I'm going to have to sit down in a quiet float tank and think about myself.
I should be asking myself some of these big questions, and as should they.
I just think there's a lot of information that we should keep asking ourselves.
Because if the population of human beings continues exponentially, which it will, until this major event that everyone thinks is coming, Hunters should almost be the first ones to give up hunting, if it trends towards that someday.
If it gets to be there's not enough wildlife or wildlands or something fantastic happens, hunters should be the first ones.
They should be on the front line of being aware of the habitat and the resources and say, hey, you know what, we need to back off.
And I've seen it before.
It's actually really cool.
A few years ago, this is a micro instance, but a few years ago, actually a few years ago, I say it's a long time ago, 1991, a huge blizzard hit in Wisconsin on Halloween Day.
And the Wisconsin Deer Hunters Association Shut down whitetail hunting overnight.
He said there is no deer hunting this year.
It's canceled.
It's done.
There's no legal deer hunting this year.
And then all of these deer hunters were taking their tractors out on these public lands and on their private lands and plowing areas for the deer to walk around and the deer to move around.
And so there's all sorts of instances about it, but you get what I'm saying.
I think we have to keep asking ourselves these questions as we move through our time and space.
And what you said about, you know, what you're essentially saying is that people, and this has always been my problem with people that proselytize or people that are really into proclaiming that they have the moral high ground because they eat only vegetables.
That high ground is filled with holes.
You're going to step in one of those holes if you keep talking.
Because the more angry you get at people that hunt and the more angry you get at people that eat meat, you have to understand that if you're eating vegetables, just by fact that you're buying them from a factory farm, you're buying them from large-scale agriculture, you're absolutely responsible for death.
And the death of fish, I'm glad you brought that up, because those dead zones in the ocean, that's a gigantic problem.
It's a gigantic problem, and it's a problem that's caused in large part by large-scale agriculture, as you said.
I think that one of these problems is going to be solved by factory-created meat.
The problem is how many other problems are going to be created by that.
So if you think our population, if you think our human growth is exponential now, now we can get rid of the land.
Now we don't need the land.
Now there's no value for wild places and there's no value even for farms.
Now we can get rid of all of that and billionaires, you know what billionaires love?
They love money.
And so billionaires will buy up all this land because they already have all the money to buy the land.
They'll buy the land, they'll get the farms, and they'll get all the wild places out, and they'll build even more houses because you can eat some beige-colored gruel or laboratory-designed meat, and we can get even more people.
When you run an arrow through a bull elk and that thing runs 20 yards and falls down and dies, there's this weird feeling that you have.
There's a weird feeling of loss that goes along with this weird feeling of happiness that you're successful.
There's no one or zero.
It's not a binary experience.
It's not clean.
It's like life itself.
Life eats life.
And if you want to claim the moral high ground because you're a vegetarian or if you want to claim the moral high ground because you're a hunter I think I think you're missing the big picture that there is all this weirdness to life and that there There is this thing that we do that we consume and that every other animal does as well That's the thing that What always strikes me as being strange is people have a real hard time with people eating predators or people hunting predators.
Like bear hunting is one of the number one most surefire ways to get people angry at you online.
And there's a lot of ignorance attached to it, particularly with black bears, which are responsible for literally killing 50% of all the moose calves and all the deer fawns and elk calves.
Because some biologists are surmising that they actually can tell time with their nose.
So when they walk in, you know, like you and I are driving on the road and we go, oh my god, do you smell that skunk?
Well, he's sitting there, as he strolls through the neighborhood, he's going, oh my god, a skunk was hit by a car this morning.
But yesterday...
A little fat kid threw a cheeseburger out of the window here, and two days ago, a woman with really strong perfume walked on the sidewalk with a poodle.
So there's so many layers to what they're taking in, and everything has its essentially different strengths because of how long it's been present in that area, that they can almost kind of read a book as they're strolling through their environment.
I think they're just making summations off of like how powerful their noses are and that they're picking up so much information that they're picking up old information, current information, brand new information.
And I mean, if you think about that, all of that information coming in their head in an instant, every instant, every time they breathe in.
So I think scientists are probably making a summation that these bears have to process this information as they're going through because otherwise they'd run scared all day, right?
One way, we did it because we were kind of having a dinner party at a cabin.
And so we made just these little tiny medallions.
And it was really funny, too, his reaction.
So then we just pan-seared it with butter and garlic and onions and just ate it like little, whatever, chicken McNuggets, if you will.
And he ate that, and he's like, well, yeah, I mean, you combine anything with butter and onions and garlic, it's going to taste good.
And I'm like, do you hear yourself?
So, I mean, it's going up to a chef and be like, oh, yeah, you made me codfish, but you used dill and mayonnaise, and yeah, you're a liar, you know?
So then that night, we made this big roast, and we seared it on all sides, right, and seasoned it all up, made a nice rub, and put it in this broth with vegetables and everything, and He ate that.
And of course, he's like, well, I mean, you made a rub and you seared it.
And I'm like, well, if you suck at cooking, it's not the bear's fault.
Bear meat's delicious.
I'm not telling you to eat it raw off his skeleton the moment you're skinning him, but if you take the time to prepare the flesh when you're in the field and then cook it well, it's amazing.
Yeah, Rinella was telling me that it's literally the greatest meat on earth.
Like, when you have a bear that's been eating nothing but blueberries, and he did an episode of Meat Eater once where he shot one, and as he's opening it up, you see purple fat.
And it made me think about my own diet, quite honestly.
Because if this thing tastes so good and smells so good because of what it's eating, like, if you're eating, like, fucking cheeseburgers and fries, like, that's gotta be in your fat.
You know, you're dismantling an animal or something like that.
You actually get to see these things.
And yeah, if you have the same perspective or wherewithal that we were talking about a few minutes ago, that's when you sit there and go, wait a minute, you're not just mindlessly skinning this bear.
You're sitting there going, does my fat look like Skittles?
I mean, they need to be controlled in certain areas.
Certain areas, there's probably a decent balance because there's not a lot of food, so they might not be focusing on moose calves, right?
Because there might not be a lot of moose or something like that.
But in areas where there's great overlap, it's definitely...
They don't get killed a lot, right?
And so people don't hunt them a lot in general.
And people just, you know, they instantly go to the ungulates, right?
They instantly go to the deer and the moose and caribou, things like that.
But yeah, they definitely need to be managed.
The place I hunted, I was bear hunting last week in BC, and the place I was hunting hasn't really been hunted in like 10 years.
And you just know that these bears are so terribly successful at stealing mule deer fawns and moose calves in this area.
And I've seen it before.
And you just see them like...
I killed a grizzly bear a few years ago.
That was...
I shouldn't say I killed it.
It charged us.
And so the guy that I was with, he had to shoot it.
And so he killed it.
But as soon as the bullet hit the bear...
He pooped out two cow moose calves.
And we had seen a cow with two calves, two twins, and then he was just cruising up and down the river, and so he definitely got them.
And then when we killed him, he'd...
And then I wasn't even really thinking much about it, just didn't have this wherewithal of what was going on, and it was kind of intense.
Um, situation when it went down.
But later on, we were talking to the biologist about it when we were having the bear skull and hide and meat sealed.
And, um, and we told him that he pooped out a calf.
And he's like, oh, fantastic, because there are grizzly bears and black bears that are really successful fawn and calf killers.
And then there are others that aren't, right?
They're kind of individualistic like we are.
And so he's like, it's really good that you remove this big old boar who was a successful calf killer because he would just fixate on that in the spring.
And really, It does not take, like a lot of people might think, oh, there's millions of moose.
No, there aren't.
And you go up in these areas, like people ask me all the time when we're up in Alaska, they're like, oh, when you get off the airplane, there's got to be just animals everywhere.
No, there are no animals.
You get off the airplane in the Arctic and you take a look around, there's nothing.
You find them when you find this little micro niche of habitat.
But by and large, there's nothing there because there's not a ton of resources there.
I think people think it's the Serengeti, and it's not.
So if you have a successful grizzly, And he's preying on moose in a particular valley, he could really do some damage.
And where I was, and I just hunted mountain lion for the first time in BC this winter, and I was talking to the biologist there because I had great contention about doing it.
Why is that?
I didn't want to run them with dogs.
I didn't want to shoot out of a bait in a tree.
It just had never interested me.
And so a buddy of mine just got his first hunting concession in BC. He's been a guide his whole life, but he now has his own concession.
He has black bears and mule deer.
It's the guy that I was also just bear hunting with.
But he said, hey, will you come up and do a lion hunt?
And I said, no, man, it's not for me.
And he's like, well...
You know, you're kind of being a hypocrite right now.
And I said, well, what do you mean?
He's like, well, you're always preaching that people should ask themselves big questions and people should kind of dive into, you know, this tornado or this storm and experience things and ask themselves and like actually challenge their thought process.
So who better to come up and go on a lion hunt?
And if you have prejudice about it, why don't you come up and do it?
And so you can see if your prejudice are real or not.
I had this fox and a hound scenario built up in my head.
I felt for the same stereotypes that non-hunters and anti-hunters were falling forward.
I was like, oh, these houndsmen are kind of redneck.
You know, they treat their dogs like crap and they're sending their dogs into this lion fight and it's going to get rough and these dogs are going to get beat up and scarred up and then finally you treat this lion and the hunter comes waltzing in with no barrier of entry whatsoever, no physical suffering whatsoever, no mental suffering whatsoever comes waltzing in and shoots this thing out of a tree and takes some photos and then skins it out, leaves the flesh and moves on with their life.
And so I go up there.
I meet the houndsman.
And first of all, my friend, his name's Ben Storek.
He's a very gracious hunter.
He's very aware.
He's very kind to animals.
He has tremendous wherewithal, which is why we continue to hunt together.
So I go up there.
I meet his houndsman.
Great guy.
His hounds are part of the family.
Sleep in the cabin with him.
Great dog food, great medical care every single night when we'd get home.
And the scenario in which I killed a lion was also very rewarding for me as a person.
We tracked him.
I'll use kilometers because that's what we were doing there.
But we tracked him for like 21, 22 kilometers just by his track.
And it was really cool because this lion had tore his back right track.
So it was kind of like a movie.
We'd see his tracks in the snow, and there's always a dime-sized spot of blood in his track.
And it was pretty cool because we went and spoke with some ranchers along this river, and they're like, yeah, he's a sport-killing deer, which I didn't believe, but I just wanted to hear the ranchers' kind of summation on it.
And they didn't want him...
The ranchers were, I was really surprised, but the ranchers were like, you know, we want you to kill this cat because he's sport killing these deer, but we want Ben to be very measured in how he takes cats because they really love cats in this area, and they just want Ben to be cognizant of the animals he removes, which he is anyway.
And so it was just a really rewarding experience for me.
And then I got to hang out with the dogs afterwards.
And then when I went and spoke with a biologist, that was eye-opening as well because the houndsman we were with, he kind of guessed the cat to be like five or six years old, which would be very old.
He turned out to be three.
Which is amazing that they go from a kitten to this thing was like 175, 180 pounds.
That big?
That big in just three years.
And the biologist even told me he had one come in earlier that year that was over 200. It was like 202, 203, which is about as big as they get.
And it was radio-collared.
And he's like, oh, this is going to be wicked because we have the radio-collar.
I'm going to be able to call the biologist that radio-collared.
This thing, it's 200 pounds.
This thing, it's got to be like five or six, seven years old.
He called the guy and the thing was, just had barely, he was like just over two years old.
That's what freaked me out, because I'm sitting there holding this thing's scun-out body.
Scun-out body?
It weighs the exact same as a deer.
It's the same thing as a deer, but the proportions are way off.
The thing is so much shorter.
The meat goes all the way down to their paws.
They can jump 30 feet out of a tree and land.
You and I would be rolling around on the ground going, oh my god, look at my femur.
These guys just kaboom!
They're off to their races.
They weigh the same as a deer.
You drop a deer out of a tree and it's going to have four broken legs.
These things just land and Yeah, they're freaky animals.
And so I was going to say, so the sport killing, so the biologist told me with the area where there's a lot of wolves, and so the wolves, the lions are so much more successful at killing than the wolves, that the wolves just become somewhat lazy, and they'll get in these little packs and they'll literally find a big tom and they'll just follow him.
And so what this cat is doing is scientists have observed him killing deer, and he'll literally kill and cache deer and sheep so that when the wolves find his caches, the wolves will eat, and so then he can go and eat in peace himself.
Yeah, so the British Columbia government shut down British Columbia grizzly bear hunting because they equated it, and I guess they're probably correct, with trophy hunting, right?
Where hunters were killing these animals.
And just taking the skulls and hides and leaving the flesh behind.
And I don't know.
I've never...
Have I... I grizzly bear hunted in BC once, but I was actually more on a sheep hunt.
But yeah, just this notion of like the gentleman that killed Cecil the lion.
Like if you're really going to kill an animal and just take its hide, then I have a pretty significant issue with that.
And so I just hope these hunters, the guys that were hunting the grizzly bears, I wonder if this was more of a hunter-instilled issue than people are even bringing light into it.
Because if people were killing grizzly bears in British Columbia, taking their hides, taking their skulls, and taking all the flesh, I feel like we'd still be grizzly bear hunting in British Columbia.
There's no way he would have got to that position.
He must have got there in a car.
And then they have this lion there, and he's perched up on the lion like he did some amazing thing.
And meanwhile, that's probably one of those caged lions anyway.
It is.
So many of those high fence hunts where they let these lions, they have them all caged up in a pen, they throw cows over the dead cows, over the pen, over the wall of the pen, the lions tear them apart, and then they pick one and take that one out into the wilderness area, which is all fenced in anyway, and then they let it loose.
And the lion stays in the area because it has no idea what its boundary is, what its territory is, what other lions are in that area.
So a lot of times they sit still and they wait for a while before they figure out what their territory is.
The hunter comes in, shoots it, stands on it, takes a picture.
If you told me, you said, hey man, I went into Tanzania, I went into the wildest part, and backpacked in, and set up camp, and I was there for 40 days, and I killed an eight planes game,
and I worked with the locals, and I shared meat with these different tribes, and And man, we found a pride of lions, and there was a giant maned male, and there was another sister pride over here, and we snuck in and we killed him, we hunted him, we killed him, we skinned him out, we took his flesh, and we went on an honest hunt, and we engaged the wild here, and we removed an animal.
Yeah, it's not necessarily to trap the animals, although the animals can't leave.
It's to keep the poachers out.
It's to preserve these areas because people with greed will kill anything to get a few dollars in the marketplace for market meat and then certainly to sell a hide to maybe even an even more fat hunter that...
Or a person that calls themselves a hunter that wants a lion on their wall that doesn't even want to engage in the process, right?
They'll buy the skin or something.
That's why there's trade in tiger skins and things like this.
So in these concessions, if you called me and said, hey, will you come down and shoot a giraffe?
I'll pay a million bucks to come down and shoot a giraffe.
The answer is no.
I don't want to kill a giraffe.
But if you called me and said, hey, we have restored this habitat in this whole river delta, and lo and behold, the giraffes have absolutely taken off, and they're very, very successful, and they're decimating the vegetation here, and they're starting to fight each other with great severity, and we're finding dead bulls and stuff.
We need to remove 10 animals from this herd.
Will you come down and shoot 10 giraffes with me?
100%.
Absolutely.
Like if I can come down and contribute to the ecology of an area, either as a hunter or as somebody that's just removing animals with a high-powered rifle to create some more balance, I'm all into it.
But if I'm going to pay you $70,000 to get a big maned lion so I can have my photo with a big maned lion that I can show my friends and be like, oh, yeah, that's when I was in Botswana and that's all.
I could tell you that story and no interest in it.
And I think some of that stuff is maybe really poisonous for hunting.
But anyway, and then he pan-seared a bunch of it, and it was like in a roast, if you will, but he did it all in a really hot cast-iron skillet, and it was phenomenal.
And then I just heard somebody the other day, what was I listening to?
I was reading something about polar bear hunting, and somebody was remarking that polar bear was really good to eat.
And so I think there's a lot of misinformation out there about what is edible and what is not edible and what is good and what isn't.
Trimethylene oxide is a common chemical in living things.
It's colorless, odorless, and produced by normal metabolic processes.
When a fish or shellfish is killed, however, it breaks down into trimethylene, which is the chemical responsible for that fishy smell that we know so well.
If your cut of fish isn't too far gone, as the flesh is still firm and only a few days thawed at most, a quick soak about 10 to 20 minutes in a bowl of milk will help get rid of that odor.
Yeah, but again, it's so charged in the public eye in terms of how people perceive it.
It's one of those animals, and I think it's because of these movies that people grow up with, these movies where these animals are our friends, and they're looking out for us, and they're our buddies.
We've done ourselves no service by doing that, by creating these films that have poisoned little kids' minds as to what these animals are.
And what these animals are are opportunists and predators, and they are there to remove the weak and the limping and the babies and anything else he can get his hands on for population control.
They were both vegans, a husband and wife couple, and they're both also triathletes.
And they were doing these races, and they were having a tough time recovering from their races.
And they actually owned one of the largest vegan food companies in the country.
And they went to go see a friend who was a medical doctor, a friend of theirs, and he said, hey, look, I think you guys need to get some really high-end animal fats in your systems to help your bodies recover from these races.
And they started doing that and their symptoms, you know, like their soreness, whether it be back pain, hip, knees, I'm assuming that was all from the races, started to go away almost instantly.
So they started kind of delving into their psyche and their questions and they started kind of revisiting their philosophies, if you will.
And I don't want to get the story wrong, but I think while they still owned the vegan food company, they started Epic Meats and they thought, can we find meat that is responsibly grown and sourced for people that don't want to kill it themselves?
And they went down that road.
They ended up actually selling the vegan food company off because people found out that they owned both.
And I think there was obviously some problems there.
But they just found really good sourced meat and they do all field harvest.
And so we did a commercial production for them, a branding piece for them to kind of highlight how they treat their animals and how they kill their animals because they kill them Rather than putting them on a truck and loading them into corrals and doing that whole thing, they literally drive out with the same tractor that they feed them with, and they have them on huge pastures so that they're actually reclaiming the ground.
And it's really cool.
When they do ranches, they'll go in and test all the soils of these ranches and the grasses, and then they'll retest them after one year, three years, five years, and they're finding even better soils and better grasses as these animals have spent time there because they're doing More fertilizing and the grasses are being reclaimed and then they shoot the animal in the head with a high-powered rifle and so they do just lights out, boom, done and then that's how they butcher them.
What was that place in LA? Was it called Harmony Cafe?
Is that what it was called?
What was the place where the people owned it?
Gratitude.
Cafe Gratitude.
Right, that's right.
There was a place in LA that was owned by these people.
It still is, but they were vegans for a long time and they were having health issues as well and they decided to butcher their own animals and start raising their own animals and butchering them.
And I think they wrote about it on a blog And they were just trying to explain themselves, and vegans went fucking crazy.
The people that owned the restaurant went crazy, and they got a bunch of death threats, and it became this giant issue with them.
I get where they're coming from.
They have this rigid idea of what's happening, and they don't want an animal to die so that they can live.
I get it.
But their perception of the ethical purity of their deciding to just eat vegetables...
And the actual health consequences in terms of how many people can get by and what your physical dietary needs are, how many people can get by on just eating a vegan diet, especially if you're not super careful and using algae and all these different things to get B12 and fat-soluble vitamins.
You can get by, but is it optimum?
For most people, according to most nutritionists and people that aren't ideologues, no.
And some people that are in the vegetarian world, they want us to think that we are basically herbivores and that we can get by and that our desire to consume meat is just because of the sickness that we have and this evil nature that, you know, human beings sometimes are possessed by.
The whole reason why we became a human being in the first place as opposed to one of the lower primates, a lot of that is attributed to our consumption of meat.
Yeah, it would be super hard for a vegan to get into that, though.
I mean, man, they would have to have some sort of desire on their part to see the cycle of life.
It's not something you could just take some flower child that's only eating sprouts and say, hey, I'm going to go shoot this mule deer through the lungs with a fucking...
Yeah, I mean, they would have to be on that path themselves.
It's just—it's an interesting byproduct to me of society.
What we've done with this really incredible infrastructure that we've created where we can get food to these 20 million people that live in LA and No one be a part of that Preparation in terms of you know getting the animal killing it serving it, you know Butchering it cooking it serving it we cut all that shit out and go right to buying the meat that's already cooked Yeah,
and we've done it so much and it's so much more prevalent than any of the other steps you know most of the Most of the consumption that most people in this country, like when we're talking about eating meat, I would say maybe even, what is the number?
I would like to know what the number is, if I had a guess, of how many people even cook their own meat.
I mean, how many people are getting most of their meals from a store or a restaurant or fast food?
They're in a plant-based gang, and that's really what happens.
What it is, is not necessarily even a problem of diet.
It's a problem of human nature, is that people love to stand on the moral high ground.
They love to point down to all the other people, whether it's a religious issue, like you're not eating halal, or you're not eating kosher, or you're eating meat on Good Friday, whatever the fuck it is.
They just decide that they have this moral high ground that you don't have, so fuck you.
I'm doing it right.
And it really comes from our own questions of our own existence and this messiness that we're all inherently aware of, that life eats life.
I know some vegans too, and I actually know some vegetarians that, you know, it was an education for me, but I had some vegetarians hit me up for meat, you know, and I was like, uh...
Oh, you're a vegetarian.
And they're like, well, yeah, yeah, we're not going to eat this meat, but we'd love to have some fish or deer meat from you.
Like, oh, okay, now I'm starting to...
This was a while ago, but I'm like, oh, okay, now I'm starting to get it here.
There's certain people that just aren't thinking that much.
And then there's certain parts of the hunting culture that are really abhorrent.
There's people that think it's...
Funny or fun to shoot as many animals as they can and they don't they don't have any consideration to you know that this life has been taken so that your life can be Nurtured or you get nutrition from this animal and they're not thinking of it in terms of this cycle of life They're just thinking of in terms of you know just like The worst aspects that you get like in a movie about hunting and for me like Doing it.
You have northern lights at night if you're lucky.
Massive moose and caribou.
Watching caribou migrate and grizzly bears eating blueberries.
I spent so much time with wolves up in these areas and really engaging with the wolves and stuff.
Just...
It's just always fed these experiences to me, and that's what really started to mean, that's what really mattered the most to me, was being in these areas, taking a deep breath, being super present, being super aware, and seeing all of these different things that were...
Filling my soul, right?
True soul food while I was hunting a moose or while I was hunting a caribou.
And then maybe being successful on a moose or a caribou and skinning it out and feeling the weight on my back because I'm getting it back to camp.
And the northern lights are overhead.
Or if they're not out, the stars are out.
And I'm hearing wolves howling.
And I lived with a pack of wolves one summer in Alaska when I was up there doing research.
I was doing research for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and I ran a research camp, a genetics camp, from June through September, May through September, whatever.
I did it five years in a row, and one year, a pack of wolves moved into my research camp.
Whoa.
Oh, it was whoa.
I mean, whoa.
I went fly fishing one night, and I was standing on the bank of a river casting, and it was an eerie little river that I was on.
It was pretty quiet, but it had a good flow, and I was waiting for salmon to come up, and I was fly fishing for grayling.
And I just kind of had this eerie feeling.
I was by myself, and I just had this eerie feeling that I was being watched, and And I happened to look behind me and there's a big alder thicket, right?
These bushes that are probably 10 to 12 feet high, have green leaves on them and these twisted gnarly, almost like a, you know, Boo Radley type tree, like gnarly branches.
And I was just staring in the alders.
And there's grizzly bears where I was, so I was just trying to mine my...
And I'm, you know, I'm walking on wolf and grizzly bear tracks as I'm fishing.
So I was just staring back in the alders and it was like a movie.
So my eyes were starting to truncate down on the leaves and then all of a sudden it came to this little opening.
I could see a wolf's face staring at me through the alders and she was probably 10 yards away, something like that.
And so I saw her and when I looked at her she was just staring at me.
And I just looked back at her and I just said, hey, you know, I just said, hey.
I said, hey, mama, what's going on?
And I just kept fishing because I wanted her to know that I knew.
And I turned my back on her and I kept fishing.
Well, lo and behold, she comes out on the sandbar with me.
And she starts walking down behind me.
And it was funny because if I didn't make eye contact, she was totally chill.
But if I made eye contact, she would snarl at me.
She'd raise her lips up and give a little deep-seated growl.
So you think just by the way you were talking to her that she realized that you weren't even interested in being a threat and she was confident that she could get the fuck away from you?
I ended up spending a whole summer with her and all the other animals in the pack.
So the next day, I hear her howl down the river.
So I'm just messing around, so I howl back to her.
She howls back to me instantly.
I howl back to her.
All of a sudden, I see her.
She's now standing exactly where I was standing the night before.
It's all a true story.
She's sitting on her butt, sitting upright like you would see a German shepherd sitting, staring at me.
So I give her just a little coy little...
She lays down.
She maintains eye contact with me.
And then she's just sitting there staring at me.
And then she sits up again.
And I howl again.
Just a little one.
She lays down again.
She's just maintaining eye contact.
Then she leaves.
That night.
So the area of the tundra that I was on is greatly impacted by even human foot traffic.
So you have to be really careful where you step because, you know, your footprint will be there for a long time.
So we'd walk on these little planks that we made out of 2x4s that would sit up on logs that we put in place.
And I had a tent where I slept, and I had a genetics tent where I did all my stuff, and then I had a cook tent, things like that.
But right in front of my tent, I had this little platform where I would get dressed in the morning, because I would literally live for five and a half months in a little two and a half person pup tent.
So I'd get out in the morning and get dressed on this little piece of wood, and then I'd walk to breakfast or whatever, or to the river.
In the middle of the night, the alpha male was sitting on my little platform and he howled right outside my tent.
It was about a researcher, a book by Farley Mowat, of a researcher that went up to the Canadian government.
They were thinking that wolves were decimating these caribou herds.
And so they sent this biologist up there to research the wolves to see how many caribou they were killing and basically what the biologist found out was that the wolves weren't killing any caribou.
Zero caribou.
They were killing redback voles and they were fishing and they were doing other ways.
They were eating small animals which is basically a very large part of what wolves do.
They eat very small animals and occasionally kill caribou, occasionally kill moose, things like that.
In certain areas they can be really hardcore predators.
In other areas they eat a lot of mice.
But that's how these wolves are engaging with the actor in this movie.
They're kind of inquisitive.
They're coming around.
And so these wolves, they were just always present.
Even I would go hiking just to get some exercise, and literally three or four of them would go with me.
And they'd hang back like 50, 60 yards behind me.
But I'd hike for like 10 miles and they'd do the whole thing with me and return back to camp with me.
And then it started to really grow because we have this research gear that's in the river so that we can count, speciate, and sample the salmon as they swim through to go spawn.
But after the salmon spawn, they all die, right?
And so they would spawn, die, and they'd come back and they'd wash up on my gear.
And so I'd have all these, that's why the wolves were there.
They wanted to eat the dead fish that were coming back down.
And so as I started to toss fish off on the banks of the river, usually I would just toss them back into the river, but I'd toss them on the banks, the fresher fish.
And the wolves started eating them.
And then our relationship just kept growing and growing and growing and growing.
And I ended up spending like three and a half months with them.
100% 100% 100% and actually I feel bad saying this and I hope I don't offend anybody but I was working with two Inuit guys two Eskimo guys and they wanted to shoot all these wolves I kind of lied to him and I just said, man, like, have you ever seen wolves behave like this?
And they said, no.
And I said, well, you know, some of your guys' beliefs, you know, fall that your ancestors move on into the animal kingdom, right?
And they're like, yeah.
And I said, well, is there a chance that some of these wolves could be some of your ancestors, you know?
And I know that's not true.
At least I think I know that's not true.
But they're like, yeah, yeah.
So I just was trying to convince these guys because they wanted to blast these things.
And so I just convinced them not to shoot the wolves.
I steered them down a path of where their minds may have gone anyway.
But I spent time with those wolves and I've had, you know, in the idea of management, like when we were in the short that Jamie was just playing Who We Are that we played, you can see some wolves in there.
And a few years ago I got surrounded by a pack of wolves in the Arctic with the crew.
And it filmed really beautifully.
And it was one of the most remarkable engagements I've ever had in the wilderness.
And they were definitely...
Their body language was definitely looking at us as though...
Are we food?
Right?
So that was one of them.
But we had like six or seven wolves come in behind us.
So this wolf would be in front of us.
Two or three others would be behind us.
But you can see they're not attacking us.
They're not even hunting us.
But you can just see like they're wondering...
You know, is there a play here?
Right?
Is there a play here?
And I mean this.
I'm not being a tough guy.
There wasn't an ounce.
I didn't have a...
Not a fiber of my body was afraid at any point.
And there's probably six, seven wolves around us within ten yards.
And they're communicating.
They're doing this little like...
So they're talking to each other.
And then they just moved off and it turns out that...
The moose that I was stalking, I think they were stalking too.
There was a big bull that was bedded.
And if they weren't stalking him, because I think they would have had their hands full with him, but if they weren't stalking him, then they were just moving in that general direction.
They were for sure hunting.
And I've always had a tremendous respect for them.
I've always had time with them.
I've always had time with them.
I've had wolf tags in my pocket before.
This kind of falls under the same idea of conservation, like these wolves right here.
I had a wolf tag in my pocket.
I had my bow.
I could have arrowed any of these wolves easily, multiples of them probably.
But I don't want to kill a wolf here because they know when another wolf is gone.
And when the pilot picked me up, he asked me if I'd seen any wolves, and I said, yeah, we saw a lot of wolves.
And he's like, oh, they're now, you know, he's not, I'm not telling you, he's running surveys here, but he's like, yeah, there's a lot of wolves here, there's a lot of predation on moose here, so we're trying to really cut the wolves down here.
And I saw a lot of wolves, but I also saw a ton of moose.
And I saw a ton of cows, and I saw lots of calves and lots of big bulls.
So everything seemed to be functioning in that area.
And I also saw a ton of redback voles, right?
They look like mice with little short tails.
And I know where there's a lot of redback voles, I know that wolves do extremely well eating them.
And so you see these little tunnels, right, in the tundra and stuff.
And I think wolves eat a lot smaller of prey than people think on average, right?
We see sensational things.
Of small dogs or wolves.
And we filmed...
I don't know if...
Did you see the dingo hunt that we filmed in Australia?
It's literally never been filmed before to our knowledge.
Everyone that we talked to that is dingo researchers.
They want to know exactly where this was because they'd never seen this behavior.
And see this behavior right here?
That was them actually coming in to hunt us.
But you can see the whole crew sat down.
Everybody was totally committed.
They're trying to kill that calf right there.
And still that calf is monstrous, right?
So there's four or five, six of them there.
and then they chase, they stampede the whole herd directly right into us.
That's what you're seeing right here.
And the herd actually comes to like 15 feet before they split around us.
We're all sitting on our butts.
And then the dingoes actually turn their attention to us, and they come in around us.
You can see us instantly looking at us as if we're a meal, but like wolves, like grizzly bears, like black bears, very quickly they look at you and they go, yeah, this is not going to work out for me.
And the idea is that they're going to chase them and wear them out and that one of the calves is going to be separated and they're going to take it down.
And likely elk as well, in that form, for a fucking million, maybe even more years.
These things, this is what they've done.
They've done it forever, and to be around them when they don't know you're there.
We did this film for Under Armour, me and Cam Haynes, and we went elk hunting in Utah, and we were in this...
This wooded area watching these elk that were in this meadow by a stream, and we sat there waiting for a shot opportunity for like an hour or so, watching them.
They had no idea we were there, and some of them were 15, 20 yards away.
And I was like, this is the crazy, just to be around them when they don't know you're there is so amazing.
Like, I'm talking to the art director at Men's Health.
She's in downtown Manhattan.
They have no idea what life is about.
So she's like...
Yeah, Donnie, so what we're going to do is we're going to have you and your crew, so there's three in my crew, and then we're going to have a photographer, photographer's assistant, and then we'll have the writer with you.
So I'm just like, alright, so I'm stalking bull elk, and I've never elk hunted before, so I have no idea what I'm doing other than what I've read about, and so I'm stalking these bulls with six people.
And they asked me, like, hey, do we have to wear camouflage?
I said, no, you don't have to wear camouflage.
And they said, well, what, is there anything we shouldn't wear?
And I said, just try not to wear anything with really bright, stark colors, and try not to wear any bright yellows, because that's the spectrum that elk see in.
And the photographer assistant shows up with just, I mean, like, canary yellow pants, skinny jeans.
And I'm like, hey, they're from Ojai.
Where's Ojai?
That's here, right?
Yeah.
In Southern California?
Yeah, so they're from Ojai.
But it was wicked because we got to 18 yards from the 6x6.
And so we're sitting there, and all of a sudden the elk looks to its left really sharply.
And so I look over, and there's a coyote 10 yards from us staring at the elk.
And then all these guys are seeing the coyote, they're seeing the elk, and then everything runs away.
And I turn around and look at these guys, and they're just like, whoa!
Like, the one photographer, he's like, that was a literal monster.
And it was like a three-year-old six-by-six, you know, four-year-old six-by-six.
And he's like, that thing?
And, like, I just shut up and I'm just listening to these guys and they're just jacking.
And now two of the three of them want to hunt.
They'd never hunt in their lives.
Now, the writer, Michael Easter, he really wants to hunt, and he's actually going to go on another hunt with me, I think.
Next year, I'm going to spend like 40 days in the Yukon Territories, just walking from one end to this concession that a friend of mine has like four and a half million acres, and we're going to try to walk from one half kind of to the other half, if you will, and hunting our way through.
Just kind of do a journal hunt, film the whole thing beautifully, try to, and tell a story.
And he wants to go along and write a book about the experience.
He's been on a cavalier's tear over the last few days with all sorts of different hats on.
I think that what I was saying to these guys is without even having to have a tag, you guys could guide these people and it wouldn't be a dent in the resources.
It wouldn't diminish the population.
But it would be...
It's an educational experience.
There's ripples that come from that.
Those people are going to go back and tell other people about it.
It's one thing to go to the zoo, but you go to the zoo, it's the most unnatural environment in the world where animals are looking you right in the eye and they're not freaking out.
When you see one in the wild, and their noses are flaring, and they're smelling the air, and their ears are twitching left and right, and they're scanning for noises, and you realize, like, wow, this thing is out there fucking earning, hustling, you know, eating grass, trying to stay alive, and if it gets to, you know, like, that elk that I have out there was nine years old.
It's a nine-year-old animal that's out there surviving against mountain lions and bears and just figuring out a way to get through and keep surviving.
Get through those winters, make it to spring, keep going, keep going.
And if you sit down, you know, I'm sure you were sad when you killed him, but you sit down and I'm sure you were euphoric as hell that your plan finally worked.
Because you've watched it fail 2,000 times.
So you sit there with your kind of holy crap moment of this actually happened and he's actually dead now.
And, you know, you have the sorrow of taking an animal's life, but then you sit there and you have any perspective at all.
You think about those nine years, just like you just did.
You think about any minute of those nine years.
And the same was like sheep, you know, or like...
Your water buffalo back here, this is horned, right?
So they don't lose it every year.
The elk cast their antlers off every year and grow new ones, which is, I think it's fastest growing biological substance known to man, right?
But these things have horns, so it's made out of fingernails, so you literally can sit there with your buffalo.
And drag your fingernail or a bighorn sheep or a doll sheep and drag your fingernail through these little crags and you see these splits and cracks and you're like, you know, what was a bad winter and what was a great spring and when did the wolves chase you and when did you almost lose your life in a fight and when, like...
I wish, you know, I wish we could kind of hold on to these things and kind of go through a little montage of what this thing lived through, you know, but that's the only thing we can do is insert ourselves into the wilderness for a short amount of time, or as much time as we can afford and convince ourselves that that's where we still live.
I mean, just the relationship that we have with nature, I think, has taken such a bizarre turn because of cities.
I think that what we've done also in our relationship with animals by putting them in these little animal prisons that we call zoos and having people go and stare at them in some very unnatural way, we've really distorted nature.
The majesty of wildlife and nature.
And the only, in my opinion, the only real way to appreciate what an animal is, is to see an animal in the wild, to see it in its habitat.
And until that happens, until you do that, you really...
You could see a giraffe at the zoo, and they're pretty majestic.
They're really crazy, and they're one of the weirdest animals, too, because they let little kids feed them.
I mean, they're so confident in their behavior.
I had a bit about it in my act, in that, like, you say that animals don't belong in the zoo.
I'm like, I agree with you, except for giraffes.
Giraffes don't seem to have any fucking problem with the zoo.
And my joke was that they're like, another day with no lions, and they're just wandering around having a great old time.
I mean, they're so confident that, like, when my daughter was two, we brought her to the zoo, and they'll let a two-year-old hold a piece of lettuce up for a giraffe.
If you saw, the first time I ever saw him, I was with my friend Mike Hawkridge and my friend Ben O'Brien, the first time I ever saw a moose in the wild.
We pulled the car over and it was like that scene in Jurassic Park when Jeff Goldblum sticks his head out of the Jeep and he's like, wow.
Like you see one in the wild, you realize how big they really are.
And this thing was just walking through this open field in the woods.
And we were like, holy shit, look at the size of that thing.
Filmmaker killed by giraffe while working in South Africa.
And that's, you know, back to the grizzly bear hunting thing.
That's the unfortunate thing, right?
It's all those people that close down hunting.
Mm-hmm.
I would venture a guess.
That anyone that voted on that ballot has never seen a grizzly bear, or been a grizzly bear territory, or participated at all in understanding how that ecosystem works.
Well, it's also, if you talk to the actual wildlife biologists, and maybe even more importantly, the people that are in the field on a daily basis, there's no problem with the grizzly bear population in British Columbia.
In fact, it's thriving.
It's a giant animal that eats a lot of meat, and it's out there taking out a lot of calves right now as we speak, and now that they can't hunt them, they're very likely to have a situation where they're going to have to hire people to shoot problem bears.
The first eco-tour that goes down where a boat full or a bus full or a hiking group watches a boar kill and eat triplets.
Kill and eat three football or watermelon-sized cubs and rip them to shreds and eat them while they're bawling and trying to get to their mom and then have him kill their mom.
Once that goes down, they'll be like, okay, I think we might have a couple too many bears here.
But that happens every day, even in a great, not every day, but it happens often even in a good population.
But now that they've shut down any killing whatsoever, these things have no predators other from old boars that become giant bullies on the block.
Because apparently there is some sort of a movement to try to educate people and get them to understand what they've done by making this hunt illegal.
But What I would like to see is people also be educated on the fact, like what you said, that these animals are actually edible.
And that maybe part of the problem is the fact that these people are just taking the head and the hide and leaving behind the meat.
And if you were responsible for not just taking the meat but showing that you're consuming it and then teaching these people how to cook it and how to prepare it and make them realize, like, you should be using this thing In its entirety as a resource.
And don't just think about it as this fucking rug or this, you know, skull that you're going to have on your wall.
Because if people, and some people do think this, I get letters like this all the time where people say, let me get this straight.
after we post a picture of me with an animal in my backpack, elk antlers or whatever.
They're like, oh, yeah, I can see it.
You know how many meat in that backpack?
And I tell them, like, look, my first four backpack loads were meat.
I'm taking the head out last.
That's how we do it.
The head goes out last because it's the least of importance.
It holds the least importance.
And so the hide and the head go out last.
And if you take a picture of a backpack full of meat, it looks like a backpack because the meat's inside.
So it looks like you're wearing a backpack.
And we purposefully did one last year in Nevada where you can see the elk's hoof sticking out of the top of the backpack so people realize, like, we are moving quarters.
And we publish these photos.
So people will write and say, see, let me get this straight.
You kill the deer, you take its life, you take its hide, and you take its antlers, and you just take it home and mount it, and you leave everything else to rot.
I've had people at my house before that have never eaten elk, and I've cooked it for them, and they're like, holy shit!
because it has a there's a feeling you get from eating it to it almost like his energy in it like it charges you up yeah it's it's such a potent protein and so delicious I said that would leave that behind I mean that should be a crime yeah I mean I if if anything I've seen it go the other way I I've seen hunters argue over their share.
Like if you're sharing an elk with a friend or you went on a hunt and one of you killed elk, it's like, well, how much do I get?
You know, it's like I've seen guys argue over that more than anything.
I sent elk meat to the writer of Men's Health, who was writing the article, because I ended up killing the elk.
Two days after he left, he had to go on another story, and I ended up killing Alex.
So he's like, hey, will you send me a box of meat so I can try it?
Because I feel like I was really part of this hunt.
And I did so, and he's just like, yeah.
I mean, he wrote about it in the article, but it's in the last paragraph or whatever, but he sent me a text message, and he's just like, are you freaking kidding me?
This is the finest thing I've ever eaten in my life.
Yeah, I always tell people if you really want to start hunting, you really want to do it, it's so difficult to get started.
It's so difficult to even find the resources to take the first steps.
And people that say, I want to bow hunt, I'm like, listen, man.
First of all, you need to learn how to shoot a bow.
And second of all, by saying that you want to bow hunt, what you're saying to me is, I want to practice 300 days a year with my bow.
I want to really learn archery.
I want to learn the proper form.
I want to learn mental control.
I want to learn...
to keep your mind in the moment while you're under extreme anxiety and facing an animal, to understand how to range an animal, what's the proper yardage, where's the proper shot placement.
You're talking about a lifestyle.
You're talking about literally changing your life.
This is not...
Don't say I want to go bow hunting like I want to go deep sea fishing on a chartered boat where they put the bait on the hook, drop it in, and I just reel in the fish.
That's possible.
But saying I want to go bow hunting, like, you know...
They see you do it and they go, oh, you bow hunt.
Yeah.
Okay, but I'm crazy and I've been obsessed with this shit for years and I practice every day and you go to my backyard, I've got fucking rubber elk sitting on a hillside and I shoot at them every day before I do anything.
Now you have to actually get out of your truck and take a bunch of steps into the wilderness and hope you can even just get back to your truck, let alone finding an animal, a legal animal, sneaking into within archery range.
Killing him quickly, dismembering him, getting him on.
That's the other thing that freaked me out when I first went hunting.
I was in shape as far as like jujitsu and martial arts shape, but fucking hiking with a backpack on in altitude and you're going up and down and up and down at seven hours a day.
You're like, oh, okay.
You've got to be conditioned for this shit.
I think the way to do it, if somebody really wants to, is really wild pigs.
Wild pigs with a gun is probably the first way you should do it.
Yeah, I mean, it's an awesome way to get started, too.
You go wild pig hunting, you're doing good for the environment.
This is an invasive species that devastates ground-nesting birds, all sorts of plant species.
And if you're dealing with agriculture, like, wow, I mean, then it's really, you're talking about a massive financial burden on farmers, but with a rifle.
That's the way to do it because it's so much easier if you have a rifle rest and someone can take you to a range.
The learning curve is so much shorter than with a bow.
I actually studied tigers right out of college in Bangladesh and Nepal.
And I would see Axis deer there.
And they were...
I mean, the jungle there, though, is real.
So that's why they're looking at everything, right?
Because you look at a tiger in a zoo, and you're like, there's no way.
That thing can hide.
But then you go to their jungle and everything's green except for all the palms that die turn bright orange.
And they all have really long, sharp fronds that look like a tiger stripe.
So you see his little blotches of orange and black all...
disappearing into the green and so but we would see the deer and the deer would know like when we were going into an area to either we had a cat that was radio collared or we're going in to look at a particular piece of habitat the deer were just like on pins and needles like we'd get even remotely close and you could see him we are dealing a lot with islands and you'd see him leaving the island on the other side like they'd be ditched in the swim to the next island Wow very aware they're extremely aware How crazy is it that somehow or another the tiger evolved to develop those stripes that look
Yeah, see, like this is from, I don't know where this picture was taken, but this reminds me of like in Nepal, in southern Nepal where I was, the Royal Chitwan National Forest.
They have this grass that grows like 20 feet tall and, I mean, just absolutely disappear.
And so, but yeah, so my dad, the gift to me was my grandparents got him a subscription to Outdoor Life Books.
So he'd get all these books that were penned by these gifted authors.
One of them was named Jack O'Connor, who's inspired my entire career, but I'd read all these things.
And so I just thought, I want to spend time outside, so I might as well get a wildlife biology degree and then do research and live outside and things like that.
And as odd as it was when I was in college, I was still hunting a lot.
And I had family and friends sit me down and they're like, hey man, you got to like buckle down on your studies.
And I wasn't disagreeing with them, but they're like, you need to stop hunting.
Stop hunting so much because I'd literally, I'd go to the Arctic caribou hunting by myself and I'd come home and go to classes and then I'd leave to go to Alaska on a black bear hunt and I'd come home and go to classes and I'd just save as much money as I could, didn't party, didn't drink with any of my buddies, didn't, you know, didn't do anything lavish.
I just literally kept going on trips and, you know, it's kind of basically what's led to my career today.
But it was funny that I, you know, these kind of things traveled in parallel, if you will.
When did you start making films and when you did it did you make them with the intention of trying to relay like what I was explaining at the beginning of the podcast that what you do best is you you as much as possible in an hour you're relaying the whole experience yeah as opposed to what you're gonna get When you see a hunting television show, or especially what you're going to get when you see hunting in a movie.
So we started in 2012, and I had some guys that approached me to host a hunting TV show.
And I said, well, what's that going to look like?
And they said, well, we'll pay for your trips.
We'll get all your sponsors and stuff lined up.
You'll be fully sponsored.
We'll split the sponsor dollars with you.
We'll buy your airtime, X, Y, and Z. These guys were pretty wealthy.
I was like, this sounds like an absolute dream to me.
But I said, I want to control how it's filmed, where we go, how we hunt, and the gear that I use.
And they said, 100%.
Well, very quickly, within like the first eight days, those things started to go out the window.
They said, we want you to go here and hunt with this guy because he's super popular and we want you to kill this animal.
We want you to wear this clothing.
And I was like, no, I never do any of this.
I'm not doing any of this.
So I said, you know what, you guys, I appreciate the opportunity, but I'm going to walk away from this gig.
And so I walked away from it.
And then I ended up meeting up with Kyle, of whom you met earlier, is in your green room right now.
And then another guy named William Oltman, who's our director of photography now at Sigmanta.
And I met up with these guys, and through a series of weird circumstances, we ended up filming together.
And we just started kind of going on trips.
But when we started going on trips, our intention was never to do a TV show.
Our intention was, how can we tell a story about what we're doing?
Because really what we're doing ends up with having a really fantastic tale.
It doesn't have to be a huge tale.
It doesn't have to be Moby Dick.
But there's a story whenever you're going on these hunts.
And so...
We just decided, like, how can we flesh this out?
So we just went on these trips.
We filmed them as beautifully as we could.
We filmed them as completely as we could, right?
A lot of guys, when they go on these trips, they'll film, okay, you arrived, and now you're hunting, and then you kill an animal, and they're just trying to, like, get a little piece of it.
Well, we would try and film everything.
And then when we got done, we started putting together our first film, and we thought, okay, we'll put together a film.
We'll see what the audience kind of thinks.
And then we'll just play from there.
We'll just go from there and see what happens.
And so I started writing the film, writing the script, all the dialogue that was going to live outside of what was already naturally occurring on camera.
And I brought it into Kyle's office and I was like, yeah, so read this.
And he picked up my notebook and he's like, dude, I've never, ever heard you talk like this.
I've never, it was, I think, probably a little bit macho and a little bit sensational, a little bit like being actual delivered, like delivering a line and trying to convey something on film that wasn't me.
And he's like, I've never, he's like, why don't you write like how you talk in the office?
Like when you're ranting and raving and talking about wildlife and talking about your experiences, write like that.
Like paint a picture for us, you know, and answer some questions maybe that you have of your own.
So I started writing in that manner, and then we released our first film in 2012, or 13, The Rivers Divide.
It was a story about a deer that I was hunting for two years in North Dakota, and it just took off.
It is a weird thing when you watch a lot of these shows and people have a piece of property and they have trail cameras and they have all these different names for these deer.
If you have two sons, you don't go, yep, so there's my skinny boy, the one that does okay in school, and here's a little fat one that we can't keep peas on the fork with.
But these are my two kids here.
You're like, no, this is Bob and Jeff.
And so when we're deer hunting with these animals, when you're on lanai, you don't have this opportunity.
But if you were there...
All year long, you might be like, hey, I saw the buck with the crooked.
You might be like, I saw Crookedhorn.
I saw him again tonight.
Rather than saying to your wife or your girlfriend or your buddy saying, hey, I saw that one buck that I'm hunting with the crooked.
Instead of going down that road, you start nicknaming all this stuff.
I hunted a few years ago in Colorado, 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago.
I hunted cow elk.
I went on a cow elk hunt, but I literally, the hunt lasted three minutes.
I hiked up in the pitch black.
I hiked up to like 11,000 feet.
Sun came up and there was a huge cow elk at 30 yards and I shot her.
And I was like, all right, that's...
Done.
And so I cut her up, cleaned her up, and I just had always went to Alaska during September and not in the Elk Mountains.
And finally I was just like, I need to do this.
And it was awesome.
I had a good and bad experience.
Great experience with like the morning that I killed was sensational.
It was misty, rainy.
The bulls were screaming.
Everything was very wild.
We were way back in there.
It was really sensational.
Really, really impactful.
But up to that point, the area that I was hunting, the Shell Creek Range in Nevada, they only have a few tags there.
But when you get a tag, everyone hires basically all of their family and friends to come and help because it's such a rare tag.
So there's 30 guys to every tag.
And so I saw four-wheelers and side-by-sides.
And there's complete...
An utter intrusion, negative intrusion, by hunters into this wilderness.
It's ridiculous, and it needs to be stopped, in my opinion.
Like, you should have to leave all your motorized vehicles on pavement and go into the mountains on foot.
That's my opinion.
But this area that I was in, they had something like 400 miles of improved two-track roads that guys had literally just like they see something over here they want to get to.
They just start driving their side-by-side right across the sagebrush, and they just start beating this stuff down.
And pretty soon there's a road.
And so this area started out.
I'll just make these numbers up because I don't remember that.
But they started out with like 100 miles of dirt roads in this mountain system.
Basically expanded to 400 miles of dirt roads because people just trying to access wherever they want to go with an ATV really started to impact the elk to where they were getting pushed out of their winter ranges by people on ATVs.
And they're getting bullied so badly by people that were accessing the area by ATV that they just recently closed down something like 200 miles of roads.
And I think they're trying to even close down even more.
As far as I'm concerned, it should be closed down.
If you want to go and ride your ATV, go ride your ATV. If you're elk hunting, leave the ATV on the road.
Yeah, and I'm not talking about, like, if somebody that's handicapped or somebody that's truly debilitated wants to access this area, absolutely, by all means.
I'm talking about able-bodied people.
Middle-aged and young men that are not doing their...
I mean, I've heard people that have been hunting, and they, you know, in a quiet area, and then all of a sudden five people come by on horseback in front of them, you know, that they're with an outfitter, and the outfitters, I mean, they took the time to hike 19 miles deep into the backcountry, And, you know, it's a hard haul.
And then the next thing you know, some people come in on horseback and, you know, they got pack mules and all sorts of other shit.
There's a fucking caravan of animals and people and they're spooking everything out.
Well, it's also rewarding to do it on foot because you're going deep into this area that's hard to get to.
And when you do get there, there's nothing there but you.
If you're the type of person that's willing to hike in 7, 8, 9, 10 miles, the deeper you get, the further you're going to distance yourself from everybody else because most people aren't going to do that.
You know, and people think that it's this, and I'm not, I mean, you know, in certain areas of the country, it's more difficult, but people think if you killed an animal on public land, like, you're a real hunter, because you had to deal with other hunters.
So, you know, it's like, when you're accessing, when you're going deep, and there's not ATVs, there's not side-by-sides, and you can actually hike into an area, you can get away from these people, right?
You can get away from what people are willing to access, but...
People like to celebrate public land because you weren't on a guided hunt.
People want to disparage accomplishments for people that do things that the wealth is a barrier for entry.
Yeah.
The problem I have with that is, first of all, the wildest of the wild is the place where people can't go.
And the other thing is, if somebody said, hey, I'm going to give you a tag for Nevada for some private land area that is just an unbelievable elk hunt, but it's a private land, but I'm going to give it to you.
You're not going to go, well, I'm not going to do that because it's private land.
Yeah, most people are only saying that they wouldn't do it because they can't afford it, and so they want to disparage anybody who can because there's a barrier for entry, and that barrier is financial.
But those areas where you go, if you can get into these private places, those are the areas where they're really wild because there's no fucking people.
And then the other thing is, I mean, I know a guy who did that who hired these people to sit on this one fucking bighorn for months.
They hired these guys to basically be full-time employees to scout this one gigantic bighorn, track it around, follow it, keep an eye on it, and then finally the season opened and this guy trudged in there and killed it.
I've talked about this a little bit before, but when we were kids, like if you went fishing with your dad or hunting with your dad or whatever, like let's say you went down to a little local lake here in California or whatever, and you guys were going bass fishing.
You guys go bass fishing and you're catching bass or whatever, and then all of a sudden one magical Sunday morning...
You or your dad hooks a monster bass.
And you, you know, you guys, grab the net and you're, you know, have the energy in the boat, right?
Grab the net and reel, you know, keep your rod tip up, you know.
There's a lot of energy around this big fish that's going to be really hard to land.
It's such a special occurrence.
You finally get the net underneath him.
You get this big bass in the net and you're, you know, you're hugging, you're high-fiving, you're, oh my god, we've come to this lake 30 times.
It's the biggest fish we've ever caught.
That, that, And then you take the pictures and you go home and you tell your mom, you tell your friend, you're like, oh my god, and he came up and he ate the frog and we set the hook.
And you tell that whole tale and you have that energy that lives around that fantastic experience.
And these guys are trying to buy that.
That's a really remarkable experience.
When you go elk hunting and you stumble into a really big bull or you do your homework and you keep truncating down the information, you keep taking steps into the wilderness down until you find this really massive bull.
You slip in.
You have the wind right.
You're hidden in a bush or against a rock.
And here he comes and you can't believe it.
You've done your homework and you've truncated down this experience.
And here he comes and you come to full draw and he, for whatever reason, stops at 30 yards.
And you find your pin and you just...
And you watch your arrow zip right through him.
And you're looking around for somebody to tell.
It's just a huge experience.
They're trying to bottle that up, write a big fat check, and try to experience that in one afternoon.
What you're saying mirrors what I hear from guys like Steve Rinella and people that are really accomplished hunters that are very ethical and have the right mindset is that this is supposed to be difficult.
Yeah, the experience is supposed to be, you're supposed to hike all those miles.
You're supposed to go up and down those mountains.
It's supposed to be exhausting.
It's supposed to be hard to get close to one of these creatures.
It's supposed to be difficult.
You're supposed to not know what's over the next ridge.
That's part of the reward.
And if that reward isn't there, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
But if you're doing it, we say if you're doing it well and good, it doesn't matter, you know, it shouldn't matter.
Like, if you're an ethical, if you're hunting for the right reasons, you're asking yourself these big questions, it shouldn't matter if you pick up a rifle and you shoot them at 100 yards, or you pick up a recurve and you shoot them at 10 yards.
Because I know recurve shooters that can only shoot like 15, 18 yards.
I know recurve shooters that can shoot 50, 60, 70 yards.
And, you know, so we're all different.
We all like to, you know, some people really enjoy shooting their rifles.
Some people really enjoy shooting their bow.
I don't think we should split hairs there.
Just realize that the bow hunter maybe had to go to the next level of immersion to get himself next to that animal.
And, you know, the rifle hunter, you know, there's a slightly less barrier of entry, but it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it.
Well, rifle, I've heard it argue, and I agree with them, that rifle hunting on public land is probably more difficult than bow hunting on private land.
And certainly more difficult than bow hunting on public land, because bow hunters have, that's the reason I started bow hunting, was have access to public land prior to the rifle season.
To extend my season, to go in the woods when it's quiet and no one else is around and see animals acting naturally, rather than seeing this orange army and seeing everything running for its life.
I think, and we should probably wrap this up, we're about three hours in, but I think I would want people, if they're really curious about this, Endeavor I really would want people to start with your films because I appreciate that I think that what you're doing if they have the time to sit down and watch that whole thing what you're doing is you I think you represent the best Just the best slice It's so hard to get that slice in 22 minutes and I think Rinella does an amazing job in doing it in 22 minutes,
but I think what you've done by turning these into films and by really giving yourself the opportunity to relay your appreciation, the wonder and the awe of nature and your immersion into that world and to do so in such an incredibly creative way and Beautifully visually stunning way that I think you've done an amazing service and I think I think it's a great place for people to start
to get a look at them and for people that that do hunt I think they will really appreciate if they haven't seen your stuff before I appreciate that man like it's uh we definitely suffer for the work like writing the music the shooting it like We want to represent ourselves with absolute purity, but we also realize that there are people that have questions, so we try to write and behave in a manner that, like you've done today several times in a podcast, you say, hey, explain what a concession is.
People don't know what a concession is.
Well, if you can write in this certain manner, give them some sort of an education while you're telling them the story and do it poetically, and that's...