Ted Nugent, a rock legend and bowhunting icon, marks his 6,680th concert while defending hunting as a disciplined, conservation-driven practice tied to wildlife management—like preserving Michigan’s Mitchell’s satyr butterfly by controlling varmints. He slams "gun-free zones" as failed policies, citing Finland’s shootings despite restrictions, and blasts liberal inaction on mental health and crime, contrasting it with post-WWII Detroit’s self-sufficient ethos. Nugent’s Ted Nugent Camp for Kids (since 1989) teaches 16,000+ youth archery and stewardship, while he mocks animal rights activists as "lunatic fringe," exposing their hypocrisy in bans like Michigan’s morning dove hunting. His unfiltered logic—from debunking draft myths to calling Michael Moore a "lying punk"—reveals a lifelong crusade against anti-science, anti-freedom narratives, proving truth often thrives in controversy. [Automatically generated summary]
And let's make this available universally to all of our podcast friends out there.
In life, the clusterfuck to omniscience is what we aspire to.
Maximum level of awareness on all fronts.
I don't care if you're a welder, a podcaster, a guitar player, or a butcher.
Maximum efficiency.
Being the best that you can be, clear mind, clear conscience, true north compass.
In the world of archery, because it does consume you, and here I am 70 years clean and sober because I'm currently and forever consumed with the mystical flight of the arrow, which is the origins of Zen, the Japanese religion of not shooting an arrow,
not being an arrow, But being the path of your life, and if you use the gifts from God to the ultimate application of efficiency and effectiveness, you can put that fucking arrow right Right where you want it to.
And the baggage that all humans have to deal with, and it's most painfully manifested in the pursuit of archery, is too many minds.
You can't think about it.
If you've got to think about playing wang dang sweet pun tang, you ain't going to play it.
It better just be you and unleash, and with an arrow, because you want to let that arrow go, because you're You're shooting an arrow!
It's archery!
I need to put that arrow down there in that bullseye or in that pump station or in that crease of the buffalo.
And so you want it to go because that's what you're here for is to let the arrow go.
So you've got to tell yourself you can't let the arrow go.
You have to shoot so many arrows throughout your life that no too many minds, subconscious physics of spirituality, ingrained deep within your origins and aboriginal ancestry.
There it is.
If ever there was an aim small, miss small, perfection...
It's archery.
And let me, I don't mean to monologue here, but this is so much of my life.
No matter what you do, and I've done this since the 60s when the hippies were trying to get me stoned, and I'm going, no, that's not what you want to do.
What you want to do is get a bow and arrow.
What you want to do is escape what you're trying to escape, the pressures.
The pressures, fuck those pressures.
You be the source of pressure, not the receiver of pressure.
And my dad raised me.
My dad was a drill sergeant.
God bless that son of a bitch.
He was awesome.
I hated him.
Discipline, discipline, discipline, discipline, especially at the archery range.
And so I learned archery, and when I'm playing guitar and I'm playing all this outrageous Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard stuff, and everybody's getting high and drunk, and they're really great musicians, and the more high and the more drunk they got, they became less great musicians until the point where they weren't even musicians anymore.
And so I would escape that.
And I was 11, 12, and there was no hippies.
It was beatniks.
And I'd get back to my little house in Redford on the Rouge River in Detroit, and I'd get that little bow and arrow, and I'd go down to Skunk Hollow, and there's a river rat.
And even as a stupid, mushy-brained, idiot child, I was able to...
A little longbow, no recurves yet, you know.
I could shoot a rat in the eye because I had no baggage yet.
I really was just getting, you know, baptized by the Chuck Berry bow diddly electronic guitar orgy.
And in that late 40s, early 50s, it was a firestorm of defiance and rebellion musically manifested.
But Roy Weatherby was going beyond the 30-30, which everybody used for deer hunting, and it was a good 100-yard, and if a real marksman, real zen marksman could shoot a 30-30, 200-plus yards, whether open sights or scope.
And marksmanship and sniper discipline was a powerful force in a hunting family, and in all families, every family I knew, we all shot every weekend, Pistols, shotguns, rifles,.22s, hunting woodchucks in Freiburg, Pennsylvania, with the Targetmaster Remington single-shot bolt.22, .22 shorts, 25 cents a box at the dry goods store.
It's awesome!
And my dad taught me to shoot them in the eye.
Aim small, miss small.
Breathe, sight acquisition, you have a responsibility to kill that animal outright.
If you're going to utilize that precious gift of flesh and fur, body fluids and bone, You better kill him clean because you're a reasoning predator.
You have a moral, intellectual, and spiritual obligation to kill your dinner humanely and cleanly.
Duh.
And so that marksmanship routine was developing with ballistic, Ted Nugent ballistically maximized firepower.
So, Roy Weatherby was extending long-range marksmanship and developing the famous Weatherby Magnums with more powder, more efficient burning powder, better primers, better-designed ballistic bullets that would cut air better and go flatter longer, better trajectory and velocity.
And so it was fun to shoot that deer or a bullseye at 100 yards.
That takes a lot of trigger control and discipline.
But now Roy Weatherby was creating Weatherby Magnums.
The 300 Weatherby Magnums shot a 180-grain bullet at 32, 3400 feet a second, which was unheard of.
And so you could aim small, miss small.
And if you really got that really intricate, meticulous, triggered smoothness, you could shoot 1,000 yards once you learned the trajectory of your However, 1911, the last of the Yanni Indians, Ishii, was discovered in Oroville.
And instead of shooting this Yanni, this last Indian, they called the local sheriff and they took Ishii into custody and they called some scientists and palanteologists from California University by the name of Saxton Pope.
And Saxton Pope came and studied Ishii as an Aboriginal.
And they discovered Ishii and they were fascinated by his stealthy awareness of the wilderness and his archery control with his funny little style of shooting the bow with his thumb and getting close and doing ice cold river bathing before the hunt to cleanse himself to be worthy of the beast.
So Fred Bear witnessed the film that Pope and Young eventually made of them becoming consumed with the mystical flight of the arrow.
Now, this was in the 20s and 30s, and they put a newsreel out and went all over the country and showed this newsreel of hunting with the bow and arrow by Saxon Pope and Art Young.
Shooting grizzly bears in Yosemite and going to Africa, filling lines full of arrows.
They weren't really as good as these sheep, so they'd fling a lot of arrows.
And these animals were pretty relaxed, almost tame, because they'd never been hunted like that before.
And so Fred Bear come from Pennsylvania around that time to work at the FOMO company building cabinets for the new radio they just invented and the wood dashboards for the Ford Motor Company.
And he was also making bows.
Handmade U-wood and Osage orange bows in his little archery shop with Nels Grumley.
I can't believe I remember Nels Grumley, one of the greatest boyers of all time.
So my dad Got the archery bug because Fred defied the trend of easier hunting, easier long range.
You didn't have to be very stealthy to shoot a deer at 500 yards.
They don't even know you're there.
All you have to do is be a disciplined marksman, which is a discipline and a great accomplishment unto itself.
And it was a new challenge for long-range ballistic capability.
Well, Pope and Young and a handful, Fred Baer and Nels Grumley, went and saw this newsreel of these guys, these doctors, these professors, hunting all over the world with these handmade bows.
And Fred was already into it.
And he goes, I'll be damned.
I didn't realize you could do that.
And so now people, after seeing the Pope and Young newsreel, started asking Fred to make bows, and it spread.
So he started the Bear Archery Company.
Late 20s, early 30s.
And he moved to Grayling up in the northern part of Michigan where the wilderness was and they had cut down all the trees so there was this new growth of ideal wildlife habitat.
Because not many animals can live in an old-growth forest, an owl or two, but you need low-level animals.
Escape sanctuary and browse that the animals can access.
And so Fred was now promoting archery in Michigan, won all the National Field Archery Championships along with Ann Marston.
It's awesome.
And so my dad was a follower because he'd come back from World War II, and he needed that escape.
He needed that cleansing to get away from that horror, which is why they never talked about it.
And so we'd go up north every year, October 1st, the Nugent family and the Ford station wagon, and I had my little bow and arrow with the suction cups, and I'd shoot stuffed animals off the couch.
But my dad would walk the woods with his real bow, and we'd stop at this little brick shack that said, Bear Archery, and I had no idea.
And so I was already into bows and arrows, shooting all the time.
I was obsessed.
I was on down the river every day.
No baseball, no football, no hockey.
Bows and arrows, bows and arrows, critters.
I think I had the Songbird World Slam by the time I was eight.
And so now I'm meeting this tall, lanky gentleman named Fred Bear.
He didn't register with me until I started seeing him on the cover of True Magazine and Sporting Magazines and Life Magazine with a grizzly bear and an elephant and a tiger and a lion in the newsreels.
And I'm going, I'm shooting river rats, which is so thrilling, I can't even describe it.
And here's this long, lanky, tall, lanky guy that was building bows in this rustic shop in northern Michigan on my way to my favorite thing in life, October 1st opening day of archery season, as a 6-, 7-, 8-year-old boy.
And we'd have chocolate milk and cherry pie with this Fred Bear guy.
Now it's registering.
This is the Chuck Berry of bow hunting.
This is it.
This is the guy.
So I became enamored with him, and he was kind to me, and he'd show me stuff, but I got to hang out with him as I grew.
By the time I was 16, we moved to Chicago because my dad got transferred, but I got to visit with Fred Bear at least every other October.
Never hunted with him, and now I started Amboy Dukes.
I'd already had a great band, won the Battle of the Bands in Michigan with the Lures.
We opened up for the Supremes and the Bo Brummel's at Cobble Hall.
Wow!
And so now I'm in Chicago, shooting my bow and arrow all the time, started at Amboy Dukes, playing like a madman, graduated in 67, went back to Michigan two years later, and immediately went up to Grayling, where now there's this huge cathedral, bear archery, and Fred Bear is like the dude!
He's like the sporting dude, because he taught the long-range marksman that there's an intimacy.
There's a better learning process and a more important lesson to not kill the animal, but to understand your relationship with the animal and to try to use those God-given gifts I mentioned a moment ago to penetrate the otherwise impenetrable defense system of game, because they are sneaky, elusive, crafty.
God made them to get away from guitar players with sharp sticks.
And so, this caught on because people go, you know, I kill my deer every year with my 30-30, now with the 30-06 and Roy Weatherby, long range.
I wonder if I'm a badass enough to get close to a deer with a bow and arrow.
So it caught on like wildfire.
And they made the first, Fred got the first legal season in Michigan at the Allegan State Park on November 1st, 1947, where George Nichols, my buddy, got the first legal buck in Michigan with a bow and arrow on that morning.
And so I knew these are the guys I hang with.
These are the founders.
I was at the Concord Bridge of Archery.
And so Fred embraced me, and he was real suspicious of the long-haired, hippie-looking, rockin' maniac, Motor City Madman.
But all of his friends went, no, no, he's not into drugs.
In fact, he's anti-drug, and he's always promoting archery.
I'd shoot flaming arrows at skulls and a big illegal, I think it was a felony, a big turkey vulture.
I had stuff, but it looked great backlit, you know, and I'd shoot that fucker off the amps at night and people didn't know whether to shit or go blind.
There's this wild man screaming the bird lance, making all this outrageous racket.
I come out with a bow and arrow and a flaming arrow and blow up a turkey vulture.
What more do you want?
And so Fred looked past the insanity of the fear factor of rock and roll, and he finally admitted to me, he said, every sporting goods show I go to, Ted, All the young people, anybody under 30, all they want to know is if I know Ted Nugent.
Because that was the first time they ever saw a bow and arrow.
And they do my interviews about the spirit, the cleansing of escaping the insanity of whatever your job description might be.
I learned to walk toe first, and I learned to go around anything instead of stepping over and to stay in the shadows.
So I knew the maneuvers.
But coming out of a tour and playing 350 nights a year, and then you get a couple days off during November, and you get the bow and arrow, it's hard to go from that to...
It has little buttons on its forehead, which is a legal deer with a doe tag, and I had that here.
And I said, it's a buck.
Feel.
You have to feel on the head to make sure it is a buck, because it's such a little guy.
And it's a legal deer, and it's a delicious deer.
The deer of the year is a fawn.
That's why we have this hunting season in the fall, because now they're independent.
They're not They've been weaned.
They're independent animals.
In fact, the button bucks, their asses get kicked by their mother to throw them out of the herd to get the hell out of the way for more breeding, which is what I do.
And so I have that button buck mounted.
Well, who's going to tell me that's not a trophy?
The experiences, the memories, the clothes, the bullets, the day, the sunrise, the crows, the sandhill cranes, the birds.
The movement.
The anticipation.
And I got back straps.
I had fun.
Ultimate discipline challenge sport.
Ultimate meat.
Ultimate protein.
The purest, most organic before it was even hip.
And if you could, I dare you to tell me that button buck is not a trophy.
Along with Rocco, my son out here, his first wood duck that he got with much effort.
And we have that wood duck mounted.
There's a love affair with our instinctual stewardship duties to the wildlife to harvest the surplus to make room for next spring's productivity because there's going to be more animals, but there's not going to be more habitat.
Hence, sustain-yield, successful wildlife management model that is so perfect, it defies criticism, unless you're a lying sack of shit.
But he decided he does not want to take part in the harvest.
I respect it completely.
Good for you.
If you really want to kill the most things...
Be a vegan.
Because the farmers who protect your beans kill everything.
I kill one animal per arrow.
In order to grow tofu, you have to kill every ground squirrel, every vole, every shrew, every snake, every turtle, every frog, every bird, every rabbit.
Anything that gets in that bean field, I'm either going to plow and dismember, which is why the crows and the seagulls follow the combines every year, And then if anything does survive my first slaughter, I'm going to come in with Mansanto and poison the shit out of everything so you can have a tofu salad and not be responsible for any death.
The system is often less than perfect, but until someone comes up with a better system, I salute and genuflect at the altar of farmers and ranchers and people who kill animals to sustain my fellow man.
Well, I just think there's a lot of films and a lot of documentaries that portray veganism as being this perfect way of living that doesn't have any death or any habitat loss associated with it.
And then they look at the extreme of meat eating, which is the worst aspects of it.
Factory farming, some of these disgusting pig farms and chicken farms.
And the upgrade goes on because more alarms have been sounded.
Not by PAID and not by the Humane Society of the United States.
They're just scam artists.
By people who are coming to realize that we do not only have a responsibility to kill critters to feed mankind...
But it can be done in an environmentally beneficial way.
I mean, if you watch my great late friend Anthony Bourdain on his shows and Andrew Zimmern on the Travel Channel, you watch their shows and the emphasis on environmentally friendly productivity, more and more organic farming.
More and more conscientious waste dispersal, whether it's, you know, pig guts and they re-utilize those, or in Las Vegas they get all this wasted food and they feed the pigs so it's good food going in, the pork tastes better.
So there is upgrade taking place.
And here's the ultimate inescapable fact of upgrade environmentalism.
When I was growing up, Joe, Lake Erie would catch fire because of the pollution.
It wasn't environmentalists or greenies that sounded the alarm.
It was the duck hunters that said, you're polluting this area so bad there's no ducks.
There's no wild salary.
There's no walleyes.
There's no fish.
There's no muskrats for the trappers.
Hunters, fishermen, and trappers have sounded the alarm more often than not about environmental irresponsibility.
And now Lake Erie that would spontaneously combust when I was growing up is now the number one walleye and smallmouth bass fishery in the world!
And we're still producing, we've still got the Industrial Revolution going on there, but conscientious, higher, responsible level of awareness is spreading like wildfire across the country.
And I believe that there's no mutual exclusivity whatsoever to productivity and environmental responsibility.
I believe that they both benefit each other.
And I've got so many unlimited examples where that worked, from farms.
I mean...
People who live downwind of a pig farm are going to be the biggest squawkers, rightly so.
And so I see a lot of upgrade going on.
More organic, more conscientious, less waste.
It's not as regular operating procedures as it should be, but I see upgrade.
And I think that the thought process behind all these people that are upset about factory farming, people even that go vegan, the thought process behind it is in the right place.
I just think there's a lot of misguided energy there because they don't really understand where the food is coming from.
They don't understand large-scale agriculture.
And a lot of large-scale agriculture is to grow food to feed animals.
How in 2018 do you not acknowledge there's a few dead turkeys on Thanksgiving?
You've got to be brain dead.
I think they're so consumed with hate that they fight.
Ignorance is acceptable.
I'm ignorant.
When I go to the Indy 500, I couldn't tune a Cogsworth.
I'm ignorant about Cogsworth.
Ignorance is acceptable because you can remedy it with knowledge and research.
Stupidity is when you guard your ignorance.
If you think that we're murdering innocent animals...
To feed our families with the purest protein available to mankind, balancing the herds with more deer, more elk, more bison, more turkeys, more waterfowl, more cougars, more bears than ever in recorded history except for the bison, but we're way back.
We have as many bison as we can sustain in North America.
A lot of the Native American tribes are desperate to get more harvested in an efficient and responsible manner.
So wildlife is thriving because hunters implemented regulations for sustained yield.
How many ducks can we kill?
How many will they reproduce?
Where is their habitat that determines their reproduction?
We must safeguard that.
Delta waterfowl, ducks unlimited.
But see, this information is universally available, but the fake news, academia, Hollywood, and half of our government is stone-cold obsessed with political correctness and denial.
And our Spirit of the Wild show has been number one on Outdoor Channel.
Is this 29 years now?
Wow, I'm getting old.
Because we say it like it is.
We don't play around.
Fun sport meet trophy, sacred beast, prayer for the wild things, resource stewardship, conservation wise use, walk the wild ground before you comment on the wild ground.
I'm going to get your contacts, and I'm going to send you stuff.
It will expand your horizons.
Like you didn't know was available.
The history of modern bowhunting at the hands of Fred Bear and Saxton Pope and Art Young and the families that wanted to get closer to game, not necessarily kill because 90% of the time you don't kill squat with a bow and arrow, but when you do, it's because you dedicate yourself to a higher reasoning level predator awareness And you put your gifts from God to the maximum efficiency.
And again, that's welding and carpentry.
But ultimately, you're going to kill something.
You better kill it clean.
And being human and failing overall to be perfect, you can be perfect.
And put that arrow, when you learn to read the wild...
Signals, the attitude, and the bird indicators when the deer's coming.
You use the light, the wind, the camo, stealthy movements, silence, and learn to time that shot.
My average deer dies in five seconds.
The top of the heart's taken off.
Both lungs are penetrated.
That deer falls asleep on his feet, and there's never been a beefsteak ever had it so good.
When Anthony Bourdain came to my place, he was still a little squeamish with killing stuff, even though he ate dead stuff on every show and got his paycheck from eating dead stuff.
And we talked about it, and I shared my knowledge with him.
I don't have an opinion.
It's an animal.
It's dead.
You either revere it or you don't.
You either utilize it with respect or you pretend you didn't have anything to do with it.
It's dead.
You're eating it.
You should have been closer to the system.
And the hunters, fishermen, and trappers of this country still carry on the definitive physics of spirituality that the Native and Aboriginal peoples called the Great Spirit, hence the Spirit of the Wild, the prayer for the wild things.
You were, yeah, but I mean, you got lucky in that your father was interested in bow hunting and that it gave him an escape, which, by the way, it gives a lot of veterans today.
A lot of veterans and good friends of mine are finding great relief in bow hunting as a discipline after combat life.
Fred Bear coined the phrase, and I use it all the time, it cleanses the soul.
When you leave the pavement, when I leave the pavement, and I make that transition from modern concrete jungle hand-to-hand combat City guy, because that's where my rock and roll career is the ultimate.
And you take that deep breath, you literally go back to the year one.
I know there's a highway nearby, and I know I can hear trucks off in the distance and the train whistle, which is kind of titillated unto itself.
But when I get in my swamp in Michigan or my woods in Texas, to quote Jimi Hendrix, ain't no life nowhere.
I am...
The aborigine.
It's me, my resources, and the beast.
And it's a religious experience.
It's the spirit.
Natives call it the great spirit.
They've considered the buffalo their brother.
And it is so consuming that I don't care what kind of stress.
You could be going through the ugliest divorce in the world, and I have.
You could be fighting against people who don't think that America should be first, and you don't need secure borders, and you don't need to earn your own way.
You're able-bodied, but you want somebody else's income.
You're just crazy shit.
And all of a sudden, I get out there, and I'm telling you, Joe, it's perfect.
I'm literally intoxicated.
I'm drunk.
I'm stoned trying to pick up all the signals.
And I do.
I do a pretty good job.
I've learned over the years because I need that so much to play my music like I play it that it cleanses my soul.
And I've been contacted since the 60s with vets who have gone through just absolute Torture in their military careers.
And when I get them at a campfire, and we go out and sit before the sun comes up, I can't tell you how many times they've cried, because it's good again.
It was a great morning.
I didn't have any stress.
Forgot all about that bullshit when I thought I heard the deer.
And when I saw the deer, it was Perfect.
So you've expressed that, and I thank you for that, because you're new to this sport.
And for you to be an advocate and to articulate, you learned because you were already a mature man when you entered it.
I was a dirtball, mushy-brained kid.
But thank God I learned about that spirit.
I learned about the discipline.
I learned about stewardship callings and responsibility, of course, pounded by my dad.
God bless him.
And my brothers, my sister, we all are happy, healthy, successful, hard-working, funny, cocky, loving, giving people because of that discipline that revolved around My family hunting seasons.
And this is, his life is, and he'll tell everybody, all that stuff that he does, all the working out, that's so he can be at his best in the mountains as a bowhunter.
Yeah, but it's a celebration that I have been humbled and blessed beyond description for To share campfires with more hunters than anybody you've ever met.
Because I've been donating hunts for years.
I started my Sunrise Safaris.
I guide hundreds of hunters every year.
I don't take them all out to their stand, but we all get together at my Michigan place, have 24 in a weekend, 20 in a weekend.
And it's a campfire get down with Uncle Ted playing guitar.
With lots of newcomers because they see this rock and roll guy that they love the music and we share the appreciation for my American rhythm and blues rock and roll jihad.
And so they want to try hunting and they come to buy a hunt with me.
Or they make a donation for a military or children's charity and they've never hunted and I tell them what to buy and they show up and it's Natty Bumpo, man.
At a time where there was no indication that you might have to.
The animal rights thing hadn't really started meaningfully yet.
Political correctness wasn't even coined.
There was no fake news.
There was the beginning of the attack on hunting from ignorant, citified people that somehow believed that their food didn't die or they're not responsible for any death.
And so they would play the holier-than-thou dishonesty move by attacking those of us that actually took part in the process of feeding our families.
And Fred was such a gentleman and he was so clever and he so efficiently promoted the challenge and the intimacy of man and wild connection that he will live in infamy.
Everybody in the hunting world knows that he was a force to reckon with, and he's always there.
And as the song says, in the wind, he's still alive.
I think people understand that there's more to it than they thought and if they're willing to just look a little bit further.
Look a little bit further they realize like well especially western hunting these guys are running hills and they're backpacking with heavy weights on their back discipline for hours and hours every day just to build up their endurance so they can hike out with meat.
These Western hunters, man, that are going out and bowhunting elk and then packing them out by themselves over the course of five days.
And that goes back to what you said earlier, that when you dine on that, and you put that effort forth, and you spent all those days skunked and wet and cold and nasty, enjoying it for what it was, But there's also a pain in the ass.
You can't wait to get back to someplace with a wood burner.
But when you've packed it out yourself, when you take that sacred flesh off that grill, before you even finish the first knife slice, all those memories, and it just tastes better.
And it really does taste better.
But with that effort, it is a spiritual moment that this, like the natives say, you don't kill the animal, you accept the gift if you put your heart and soul into your reasoning predatorship.
And that's always been my mantra.
And my kids are all raised on venison.
We just don't buy meat.
It's all we eat is the stuff we kill.
Pheasants and quail and doves and woodcock and grouse and rabbits and squirrels and ducks and geese and gullenules and snipe and beavers and deer and elk and antelope and bear and cougar.
It's the greatest food in the world.
I'm 70 years old and I'm forced to reckon with because of my disciplined diet of the ultimate rocket fuel available on planet Earth.
I've heard comments with his attacking me for the whack-em and stack-em because it would be much better if I just butchered them and slaughtered them because semantics is so important.
But the people who come and join the sport because of my exuberance don't.
I would say that, God bless Steve Rinella, and God bless Cameron and all those guys, I revere them.
They're masters of their craft.
I have caused more young people to become hunters than all other forces in the world.
Case closed.
Because I'm having so much fucking fun.
They go, hey!
This guy's out of control!
Bows and arrows?
Let's get a bow and arrow and go kill something!
They absolutely come to it because of the fun.
Then they hear about the discipline, and they hear about the quality diet, and they hear about the spiritual trophy, whether antlers or not, that has guided my passionate life and manifests itself in these killer songs and killer guitar licks and outrageous fire-breathing concerts.
And they go, fuck, I can do that.
And so they get a bow and arrow, they get a shock, and they start hunting.
Go to my Facebook, I don't know if it's millions, but thousands and thousands of young people that would be inclined to be anti-hunting are now gung-ho hunters because Uncle Ted is having so much fun because I whacked them and stacked them.
Or worse, or worse, Joe, my critics, and I won't mention any names, but you know...
When they're on their hunting TV shows and they're so ultra-cautious not to ruffle any feathers, they kind of come off like Mr. Rogers with a Lawrence Welk soundtrack, and young people think you're a fucking asshole if that's all you've got.
And if hunting is that boring, I think I'll just smoke some dope and go, you know, cruising tonight.
Which I know you like to smoke your dope and go nuts.
The focus to create, and I've been so blessed beyond words to have the greatest musicians at my side for Ever.
For literally 60 years.
Right now I got Greg Smith on the bass guitar.
Just a god of thunder.
Greg Smith, the best.
Like a funk brother in heat.
And Jason Hartless, 23-year-old drummer from Detroit, is just an absolute...
Animal.
And every band from my Royal Highboys in the 50s to the Lourdes in the 60s and the Amboy Dukes and even the damn Yankees with Tommy and Jack and Michael, are you kidding me?
I've had literally the A-list of musicians at my side from Tommy Aldridge and Tommy Clefettos and Mick Brown on drums and Cliff Davies, are you kidding me?
Denny Carmasi, I mean the best drummers, the best bass players.
unidentified
I've just been the luckiest guitar player in the But it's a weird connection, right?
But there I was, geographically, in Michigan, a firestorm of musical influence.
All the best musicians in the world, they'll tell you, come out of Detroit from Motown, Bob Seger, now Kid Rock, Eminem, and just killer, killer bands.
MC5, I got a great Wayne Kramer story.
He has a wonderful book coming out called The Hard Stuff.
He's got a good book about his tragic mistakes and near-death heroin prison dirtbag maneuvers.
But he's a great man, a musical authority.
And...
In the music of Detroit, and of course, 50s, Little Richard, how do you not get moved by Little Richard and Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry?
How are you not touched by that?
And then you see him on TV in the Ed Sullivan Show, and I don't care who you are, Stephen Tyler or Billy Joel or whoever, Elvis Presley and now the Stones and the Beatles.
Are you kidding me on...
And it's Ed Sullivan, and I had a guitar.
Plus, I'm in Michigan, and every kid was born, you got a Red Ryder Daisy BB gun, you had a Wham-O slingshot, and you had a little bow and arrow of sun kind.
I live right next to the Rouge River, so I was always down there, you know, chasing critters and building forts and crossing the river.
And the music and the bow hunting, music and the bow hunting, I met Fred Bear, I got these great musicians, the music and the bow hunting, music and the bow...
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
What a life!
What a dream!
What a firestorm of cravings and fulfillment of those cravings every day.
And here it is.
Last night was my 6,680th concert, and that goes all the way back to Sakop.
I took out all the books and started adding them up.
But from my musical review with the Royal School of Music in 1958, and then with Joe Podorsik from the Capitol School of Music at the Detroit Fairgrounds, And then we started playing sock hops and pool parties and malt shops and everywhere, you know, basement parties.
I counted those.
Those are gigs.
And then when the Amboy Dukes started in 65, we'd do 300 concerts, plus 300 a year for many, many years.
And even with the damn Yankees in the early 90s, we did over 200 concerts a year.
So I added them all up, and last year was 6,679 in Okinawa for the U.S. Marine Corps.
I think we can both agree the greatest philosopher of all times was Dirty Harry, when he said a good man knows his limitations.
Back with the Amboy Dukes, we'd do over 300 concerts a year, and I was still craving my hunting, so I'd carve out a weekend in October and a weekend in November with my dad, and we'd get out there and hunt, but that wasn't enough.
And get that bow so it settles back here for hand-eye coordination, and you don't have to struggle.
People should start with a 25, 30-pound bow to get that archery thing going, preferably an old recurve or longbow if you can, and find out where you're pointing.
Yeah, and a lot of people think that the remedy to that is legalizing drugs and taxing them.
Yeah, yeah, I would like to.
I mean, the same thing with prohibition.
The same thing that would happen in America.
We really boosted organized crime and Al Capone, and they got a stronghold because of the money they were making from illegal drugs, which is alcohol at the time.
I think that right now that the spoiled brat epidemic in this country, if you don't get everything you want and you start shooting people or you cut people off and road rage, if everything doesn't go just right, everybody is so touchy and so pussified that when I was growing up, sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt me.
The liberalization of policy and the horrible lie of the welfare dream that people who need a helping hand Are always given a helping hand by neighbors and family and friends.
Yeah, well, the Catholic Church has $8 trillion just in jewelry.
They could probably provide some sandwiches and blankets.
So there's plenty of help available.
But when you get into a system and you play on the people's emotions that we need a safety net.
These poor people are destitute.
They need help.
Okay, let's create a welfare where we can help these destitute people.
Meanwhile, it's infested with scammers and bloodsuckers and liars who are able-bodied and they just don't want to stop at the help wanted sign.
They want some of your income because you're stupid enough to get up early and work really hard and they don't want to.
That's pandemic.
So meanwhile, the people who are truly needy They slip through the cracks.
We don't even get to know who they are.
And the liberal policy of eliminating the heartbreak and the disrespect of cuckoo's nest, we can't call them mental health centers.
We might hurt some feelings.
So now what are they doing?
They're putting spikes in boards and attacking people walking their dog in L.A. He said there's no place for them to go.
When I was growing up, there was a place in Detroit called Eloise.
It was a nuthouse.
And that's a cuckoo's nest.
That's where if you were mentally ill and you needed help, that there was a place for you to go to get you off the streets so you don't attack people with spikes and two-by-fours.
But even those institutions, the corruption and the abuse of power that runs rampant, the nurse Cratchit, I mean, that wasn't just a fantasy script.
That happens.
The irresponsibility and pharmaceutical-ing everybody.
You know, they got a mental problem, and then they increased the mental problem with Big Pharma.
I mean, I've had personal experiences with that, with dear friends of mine that were having mental problems, and they end up in an institution, and then their mental problems are exasperated by chemical warfare upon them.
You know, when I was growing up, how old are you, Joe?
When I was growing up, there was this mantra, this colloquialism, better living through chemistry.
And in many ways, it is.
I mean, we saved tens of millions of lives in Africa with DDT by killing the Zizi fly, and we saved tens of millions of people.
And then some environmentalists came in, and the DDT is a dangerous chemical, so they stopped it.
And we lost tens of millions of people.
It's better to kill a bunch of tsetse flies to save human lives than to ban the DDT that allows tsetse flies to flourish and kills people.
So now it's gone full circle, and that's where the toxins have accumulated and the horrific waste that I had texted Anthony just before he died congratulating him on his hosting that show.
Brilliant documentary.
If you haven't seen it yet, it's called Waste!
What We Do to Our Foods in This Country.
And the self-inflicted scourge of toxification of our precious environment.
So there's not a lot of easy answers, but here it is, 28th of June, 2018, and here you and I are at least discussing this stuff to millions of people, I suspect, and I see upgrade taking place.
I see upgrade in awareness, not fast enough to make me happy, but enough to indicate an upgraded prognosis for people's Awareness, accountability, responsibility.
Taking care of your health with a conscientious diet, good athletic workout discipline, physical prowess, do you really think that an outside source, peyote, mushrooms, dope,
whatever you want to call it, do you really think that with that outside influence, You can do something you can't do unto your God-given gift individual self?
I'm convinced, Joe, that you will be the absolute best you can be.
You will accomplish what I think is the self-inflicted curse of modern man that 90%, 98% of humanity might be tapping into 5% of their capabilities.
Because they get on a treadmill, they get in a paradigm, self-restricted paradigm, ever so decreasing view of the world and experiences and the destroyed road over-traveled versus not only the road less traveled, but the non-road untraveled.
That's my favorite.
I'm convinced that you, Joe Rogan, will find your Superior, definitive best, without any outside influence.
I believe you have the power.
I think I have the power.
When I get on stage tonight, and you gotta come witness this.
We put our fists together and chant James Brown and Wilson Pickett and Funk Brothers, and it's like the last wolves on an island, ganashing of teeth over the last bone and shard of flesh.
It's an out-of-body, soaring-above-life-itself experience that we have in us.
But my 70 years, I'd say at least 55 of those years, from the beatniks to the hippies to the friends, and you've got to meet this Wayne Kramer guy, MC5 guitarist, new book, The Hard Stuff.
He and I were born the same time, same influence as Detroit, the swamps, the outdoors, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Motown, James Brown.
And he's like wallowing in a cesspool of dog shit.
And I'm not knocking Wayne.
I'm saying that he was courageous to write this book.
It's a brilliant book.
You've got to have him on.
You're going to read it.
You're going to be consumed by his conversational writing of the MC5's ascension to the most authoritative powerhouse music I've ever witnessed in my life.
To a bunch of dirt bags on the downward spiral because of drugs and alcohol.
But I think it's because these people that consume it, they don't have those other qualities.
They don't have discipline and focus.
They don't have respect for their body.
See, the thing with, especially in the jiu-jitsu community, it's super common.
Marijuana is really, really, really common.
Yeah, I mean, there's a show called High Rollers where these guys, they put together a jiu-jitsu tournament and everybody had to get high before they rolled.
And you're talking like elite, world-class Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts competing high on marijuana.
Well, you're doing an art that's designed to break bodies, and the two of you are going to do it together, and the whole idea is that you're going to get someone into a position where they have to tap, or they're going to get their arms snapped, or they're going to get choked unconscious.
It's an intense, extremely difficult pursuit, and a lot of people do it under the influence of marijuana.
And those people, when they smoke marijuana, they freak out.
They get paranoid.
Because what's happening is, the marijuana increases your sensitivity, makes you aware of all these variables, and a lot of people consider that paranoia.
You start freaking out about all these variables.
You start thinking about your mortality.
And instead of embracing this time as a magical moment, instead of being in this moment, you just start getting overwhelmed, and you feel your own heartbeat, and you start freaking out.
But once you make it widespread, I mean, I've studied the results of legalization for recreational use in Colorado and how the highway fatalities and accidents have increased.
Especially in a society that's been spoiled for so long.
And you get a trophy if you don't even show up.
And you can't hurt people's feelings and get bullied and you cry instead of fighting back.
I mean, there's so many manifestations of a cultural deprivation that runs amok in our society that my fear is, and I've studied all these mass shootings.
My best morning with my M4, it's an M16 carbine, and I got a POF upper.
It's piston-driven, so instead of 600-plus rounds a minute, it's over 700 rounds a minute.
But the 600's too low.
Well, it's way too low.
It's not enough.
The original Thompsons were 900 rounds a minute, and nobody, including Sergeant Rock, could control that, so they backed it down to 600, but that's 45, and it's got a whole lot of lift.
My 223 M4, my best morning, and this is how Uncle Ted parties, Apache helicopter, M4, Bags of ammo, 469 hogs one day.
Me and Chris Kobach, we were hunting, and we weren't allowed to pay the helicopter pilot by law.
It couldn't be a for-profit outfit unless the government paid them, which was so un-Texas-like.
So Chris Kobach, who was the Secretary of State in Kansas and was running for governor and should be governor of Kansas, He's a constitutional master, and he took the current pig hunting law from helicopters that was government controlled, no citizens, no commercial value whatsoever.
He rewrote it.
We gave it to then Attorney General Greg Abbott and Governor Perry at the time, and we said, this is insane.
This can't be Texas where you get to hunt the pigs on our land, but we can't.
So literally within a week or two, they passed the law where it became a commercial outfit where we the people can hunt the pigs out of helicopters, and it's become a huge success.
It's really knocked the shit out of this dangerous pig population in those areas where landowners allow it and give authorization.
Put in a good olive oil and all the seasons you like, but also a can of Werner's ginger ale, because it's got real ginger and just enough sugar in it to affect it, and soak that overnight in a glass dish covered up in a cool, like a refrigerator.
And then put that sonbitch on some hot orange coals.
I don't care.
Apple, cherry, mesquite, hickory, whatever you got.
Fen, F-E-N. It's a very unique wetland habitat that's a cross between a marsh and a swamp and a bog.
And it's the habitat that produces the Mitchell's satyr butterfly environment, which is the Christmas tree fern.
And on my Michigan fen, I have the healthiest productivity of the endangered species Christmas tree fern and Mitchell's satyr butterfly.
According to the biologists and the botanists that visit there every year from universities, because I kill lots of critters that would otherwise denude those touchy wild vegetations.
And that's why I hunt every day up there.
I hunt coons and possums and skunks and beavers and mink and muskrats.
And pheasants up the ass.
I'm the only ground in southern Michigan that has pheasants because I wage war on varmints.
You cannot hurt varmint populations.
In fact, they are drastically underharvested.
But on mine, I kill so many egg-rating varmints that I have...
The best biodiversity of all, including the endangered Mitchell Satter butterfly and Christmas tree fern, because I'm a steward who actually walks the wild ground, unlike a bureaucrat who looks at the computer screen in his DNR office and makes an assumption.
Of what the model might indicate instead of what the actual wild ground will show you if you get the fuck off your chair and go walk that sacred ground.
It's like people who live in a drought voting on what's going on in your floodplain.
You know, it's like the people in Detroit voting on wolves in the Upper Peninsula.
If you don't live with the wolves, you don't get say-so.
You need to respect the people who live with the wolves.
And wolves don't buy licenses, wolves don't buy permits, wolves don't pay fees, wolves don't have bag limits, wolves don't have seasons, they just like to kill stuff.
And if you have too many wolves, nobody's spending money on deer license or bear license or small game hunting in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan has been abandoned by a bunch of politically correct, ignorant city jerks who think they have to save the endangered wolf.
I want wolves in Michigan, but not to the detriment of wildlife that actually pays for the game department to manage it for a sustained yield productivity.
How can you go to work every day violating your oath to wildlife science?
How can you force the mountain lion and the black bear in California into the liability column as a game warden, as a person dedicated to conservation?
How can you violate your wise use oath to And turn the mountain lion and the black bear into a liability because some dirtbag in San Francisco think it's unfair to use hounds or bait for bear.
And then you have to go in and shoot black bears with tax dollars and bury them in a hole in the ground.
Instead of a family recreational resource that you buy licenses and fees and permits and guides and outfitters, hotels, food, lodging, groceries, supplies, butchers, ice, taxidermists, none of that happens because some...
Liar has forced the wildlife mismanagers of California to ban mountain lion hunting while you continue to kill them as damage control instead of manage them as quality control.
Shame on the California wildlife officers.
Shame on you for not blowing the whistle.
It's like Comey at the FBI. How dare you walk into that building that says J. Edgar Hoover over the top and not feel a sense of guilt?
Because J. Edgar Hoover was one of the biggest criminal punks that ever walked this earth.
And now Comey is following him in his footsteps.
I challenge my FBI buddies.
How did you go all these years without blowing the whistles on the corruption, the power abuse, and the criminality by your so-called leaders?
I do know, because he's a liar, and he's a perjurer, and he's a felon.
I'm really angry, because I work with the FBI. I've had to rely on these guys to cover my back on raids, and they're great warriors, and they look the other way because they're saving their pensions instead of blowing the whistles on their corrupt criminal leaders.
And give out permits after the mountain lion has destroyed millions of dollars worth of livestock and pets, and scared the shit out of people and killed people.
Then they kill them.
You're supposed to kill them before they do the damage.
It's supposed to be quality control, not damage control.
They know the system, they've abandoned it, and they've gone the political correct denial route and said that the mountain lions are not game animals.
Yeah, then we go to Big Bear, then we go to Reno, and we go to Iowa, and Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and we're all over the country.
And I fly in a little plane over the country, and it's God's country.
It's wildlife habitat.
Eternally all across this country.
And California is one of the most beautiful wilderness states in the world.
And because mountain lions have been irresponsibly mismanaged, now you have a destruction of the wildlife in the deer category, in the small game, another game.
Because the mountain lions are in the liability column.
If you reduce the mountain lion numbers, then hunters will pay for the deer licenses, which pay for the game departments and the scientists to manage the wildlife so we have balance.
California is imbalanced.
It's out of balance because of the lie of the animal rights that have...
How the wildlife officers of this country accept that bullshit is just a crime.
They should stand up and go, you're wrong.
This is a renewable wildlife resource and we're going to have a season on it because now we're killing them as damage control.
They're still dying.
But then we're taking millions of dollars to compensate the llama and the alpaca and the cattle and the sheep and the goat and the horse.
We're millions of dollars compensating and then we're going to kill the lion and bury it.
No, you don't get to eat it.
No, you don't get to spend any money and provide game department finances.
No, you don't get to go to hotels and travel and food and lodging and supplies and sporting goods and taxidermists.
You don't get to increase the economy of the entire area because of one mountain lion hunt.
We're going to take your tax dollars and compensate all the dead livestock, and then we're going to hire a guy to kill the mountain lion, Joe, dig a hole, which, by the way, you're going to take your tax dollars to hire a guy with a front loader, dig a hole, and bury this magnificent animal.
People that don't have any interaction whatsoever with wildlife think of animals like they think of their dog.
I don't want anything to die.
And then you hear about a mountain lion, like, oh, why would you kill a mountain lion?
You're being cruel.
Like, you would only kill a mountain lion if you're one of those dickless assholes that wants to go to Africa and shoot a lion in the head and mount it on your wall.
Well, how about the fact that he put together that so-called documentary that Hollywood actually gave him an award and he copy and pasted Out of sequence, the attack on the great Charlton Heston, claiming he was somehow responsible for the little child killing herself with her paroled felon father's gun.
And they put it out of sequence and attributed Charlton Heston defending such irresponsible gun ownership.
And so they think I'm a dirtbag and a goofball because I not only wrote Wang Dang Sweet Poontang, I meant it.
But when they take me on, they don't realize I never went to college because I was too busy learning shit.
And if you take me on on any subject that I am even slightly aware of, I will fuck you up.
Because I've studied this stuff.
I've lived this stuff.
I've been with guns since I could walk.
I have had universal, unlimited access to firepower my whole life, both in a recreational and A disciplined, a law enforcement, military training, and just family plinking competition.
So in every considerable, imaginable gun use, I've been 68 years of it.
So they sicked Pierce Morgan on me to teach me a lesson about how irresponsible gun owners are and that if we could just ban guns, that all the violence would end.
And of course, if you haven't seen it, you've got to Google it.
It existed in Paris, where all those people were shot with Kalashnikovs.
Kalashnikovs were banned.
They have their dream.
Pierce Morgan's dream exists.
It's called a gun-free zone.
Virginia Tech, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Parkland, Every instance where the most innocent lives have been slaughtered, Have been in Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama's dream.
Their dream is a gun-free zone.
Where free people are forced, forced into unarmed helplessness where the most innocent lives are lost.
And that dream has produced more carnage and destroyed lives than anything in the world compared to the NRA convention where you have the highest innocence of gun ownership or opening day of deer season in Michigan where you have 100% gun ownership and access where nobody gets hurt.
So if you know that your dream is a gun-free zone and that's where the most innocent lives are lost, what kind of demonic dirtbag would actually want more?
And the real answer to drownings in America would be to ban water.
You work on banning water, I'll work on banning guns, and we'll touch base every few weeks and see how we're doing.
You cannot ban, you cannot eliminate guns, Finland.
You cannot eliminate guns, Alberta, Canada, where the guy came into the university and shot everybody up.
It's impossible.
So what you do, instead of thinking you could ban water, learn to swim and watch your children by the pool.
Call me weird, but the way to handle violence is to carry a gun, practice with it, and when someone brings lethal force against you, shoot the motherfucker!
Do you know, Joe, and everybody better write this down, because I'm the only guy that will tell you this.
I've studied the cadence, the bullet manufacturers, the rate of fire, the movement of the perp, and the movement of the victims.
In every instance, including in Connecticut, including Aurora, including San Bernardino right here, There were American citizens who would have had a gun on their person if they were allowed to.
And they could have been a meaningful force to at least reduce, if not terminate, the violent, murderous threat.
But by law, we have been so dumbed down and so forced against our natural survival instinct to have a tool on our belt That in every instance where the most innocent lives were slaughtered, those people that would have intervened with a firearm, not many of them, but there was a janitor, there was a couple of guys in the office, they had concealed weapons permits, but they weren't allowed to have them in that building.
In Virginia Tech, there were guys that had concealed weapons permits, but they weren't allowed to have them there.
In Aurora, Colorado, are you kidding me?
All kinds of people would have had guns.
They could have returned fire, but they were forced into unarmed helplessness.
Here's the gun debate.
In its irrefutable conclusion, if you are forced into unarmed helplessness, you are unarmed and helpless.
What a horrible, irresponsible, suicidal condition that in.
I'm just a guitar player, Joe.
I've never been unarmed since I graduated from high school.
I've always had a hanky and a A pocket full of guitar picks and a pocket knife and a belt knife and a belt tool and a pistol and some extra bullets.
The thing that we would all like to have is no school shootings, no mass shootings, no Aurora, no Columbine.
So how do you stop that?
Do you think you stop that with more guns?
Or do you think you stop that with mental health education, figuring out how to get people off of pills, figuring out how to keep people from living despondent lives where they want to just tear it all down and shoot everybody and hurt a bunch of people?
Here we are, 2018. So we can't Go back in history and find the goofball from Virginia Tech and what motivated him.
We can't go back there because we have failed as a society to take care of people or respond with any sense of responsibility or effectiveness to the glaring danger signs most It's
He said in numerous visits with his psychiatrist that he had threatened.
His goal in life was to kill as many people as possible, and he's now got his new AR-15 to do it with.
And the psychiatrist didn't say anything.
I've studied this stuff.
We need to not only see something, say something, we're missing the part.
The final part?
Do something when this kind of aberrant, threatening, violent, red alarm behavior is going off.
Intervene.
Sit down with this kid at the first instance.
When your kid comes home all glassy-eyed and goofy and incommunicable and showing weird signs like the Sandy Hook guy did all his life and the Aurora guy did all his life and the Parkland guy zombie, you know, staring like a...
Wouldn't blink in a sandstorm.
Somebody's got...
I know I would.
I mean, in my life, whether it's musicians or family members, I go, are you all right?
During the season, rifles, shotguns were brought and put in your lockers.
There was unlimited, ubiquitous access to firepower throughout my youth.
No school shootings.
Something else has happened, and it has a lot to do with Big Farm and the irresponsible knee-jerk bandage on a gaping wound of a child showing, you know, uppity, childlike behavior, and all of a sudden they Prozac them and they're riddling them.
Listen to what he did on the Ted Nugent album and the Cat Scratch Fever album and the Free For All album and the Weekend War.
I mean, this guy was a god of musicality.
He became depressed and was prescribed.
And the incidence of people being prescribed mood controllers and emotion controllers and depression controllers, the incidence and the consistency with which they attempt to go cold turkey and kill themselves.
Your brain becomes changed.
It becomes altered.
Your logic meter is off-duty with this pharmaceuticals in your system.
Cliff came home, decided to get off the Prozac, walked out into the yard screaming, throwing his clothes out the window, and shot himself in the head.
And then there's the argument that there's a lot of people that take these pharmaceuticals and they have no violent outbursts, which I agree with too, but the people that do have violent outbursts are almost universally on something.
42 calls to the Sheriff's Department threatening to shoot the school and three to the FBI. Do you think the Parkland shooter should have been visited a little earlier than after 42 and three calls of threatening to shoot up the school?
Do you think the authorities should have the right to go visit this kid, meet with his parents, and get the guns out of there?
Don't you think when you say, I am going to shoot up the school, in my world, that would be good enough to disqualify that person from owning a gun?
It's not like he was, you know, peeing on the Alamo and just being a dirtbag.
He was threatening to kill as many people as possible.
That, to me, is enough information to disarm the guy and probably institutionalize him or even take him in for review to a psychiatric ward at that point.
The last thing, I've said it a hundred times, I'm going to say it again on the Joe Rogan podcast, write it down.
I do not want everyone to carry a gun.
I do not want everyone to own a gun.
I don't want everyone to hunt.
I don't want everyone to have an 850 horsepower Ford Bronco.
I don't want everyone to go on the Joe Rogan podcast.
There is a time and place for individuality and individual choices, and many people will always be uncomfortable, you know, taking a hook out of a fish's lip.
So don't go fishing!
And if you don't feel comfortable around guns, by all means, just don't have one!
But those of us that have a hint of warrior instinct and rugged Boy Scout being prepared desire Don't disarm us.
We're your best friend.
And they're everywhere.
Those teachers in all these school shootings, there were teachers that would have had a gun, but they were forbidden to.
And there are instances, and this is something that people that are anti-gun don't like to talk about, but there are instances where trained shooters have stopped mass shootings and have stopped someone killing people.
Next time she was robbed, she shot the son of a bitch.
She knew what to do.
She knew what was the trigger.
No training.
She won.
Shot the guy that was threatening her life.
Now they put her in jail.
Initially, it's like, you know, Bernie Goetz defending his life, but eventually the charges were dropped because it was clear and present she was defending herself from an engineered recidivistic Write that down.
Engineered recidivistic.
The system, knowingly and intentionally, lets out knifers and stabbers and rapists and murderers and child molesters.
They keep letting them out.
Those are the people, 96% of the time, that commit the violent crimes.
He only served six years of his life sentence for killing those people.
I mean, it happens all the time!
And that guy's on the street and he kills somebody.
He goes, I can't believe it.
He had an arrest record going back to his youth and it was 100 pages long.
I can't believe you let him out.
Well, we let him out.
We knew he killed people.
In fact, he stabbed two people, but he missed the artery, so we're going to let him out and see if he can study anatomy enough and get a good stab next time.
Our court systems are a joke.
Our prison system is a joke.
I mean, if somebody stabs somebody, do you want him on the street with you?
If he stabs somebody, you are killing that person.
You're just shitty at it.
If you shoot at somebody and you miss, that's murder.
You're just bad at it.
If you're willing to throw a bullet at a human being, I want him in a cage forever, or better yet, dead right there and then.
If he's capable of taking an innocent life, I want him out of the gene pool.
I don't believe in, how did I put it in that one interview?
I don't believe in repeat crime, repeat criminals.
I believe in dead criminals.
If someone threatens innocent life, get them out of here.
I really believe that.
And you know who the best person to make that decision is?
I mean, I hear what Ted's saying, that you should be able to defend yourself.
And I agree.
Like, if you were in a grocery store somewhere and some guy came in shooting and you had a gun, I would want you to be able to defend yourself.
I want you to be alive.
I agree with you.
I get that.
But is that the only way?
I mean, or is it just what we have to do right now?
I mean, I don't know what anybody on the other side wants, other than taking away everyone's guns.
But if you take away everyone's guns, how are you possibly going to do an audit of 300 million guns in this country?
How are you going to find all the illegal ones?
How are you going to find all the stored ones?
And then there's that old cliche, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
I mean, it's almost like the same thing we're talking about in terms of legalizing and illegal drugs.
When drugs are legal, they can be taxed and you can make sense of the situation.
You can have treatment centers.
The stigma of, you know, the appeal of them, of doing something you're not supposed to do is no longer there.
And then you're not funding these illegal organizations.
Organizations like, you know, the cartels in Mexico or...
Back when it was organized crime in America for alcohol, when the prohibition was going on.
I don't think that you're going to be able to take away all these guns.
But I don't know what the argument...
I would like to talk to somebody who has an argument that you could do it.
Because I know they did it in Australia, but Australia is so small.
And by the way, you can get guns in Australia.
People use guns there for hunting all the time.
So guns are available and occasionally they do have gun violence.
But they had like one mass shooting in the 1990s in Australia and they just banned all the guns.
But Australians are...
they're a different culture too.
Like this fucking culture is gun happy from all of our movies and television shows and the solution is always like bang bang bang like shooting people is a part of the solution.
This conversation about guns, I don't see an answer.
I really don't.
I don't see an answer.
Ultimately, I'm all for responsible gun ownership.
I have guns.
I've hunted with guns.
I believe in gun ownership.
But how do you stop gun violence?
And I don't know what the answer is.
And I think this is ultimately what everybody is trying to find.
We were talking about, when you were gone, the Australians, where they banned guns because of one mass shooting, and they've never had a mass shooting since.
Delineation from a post-World War II celebration of the freedoms that motivated our armed forces to defeat the worst evil on the planet, the Japanese slaughterers and the Nazi devils.
That it was our constitution and our individual rights that motivated these guys to fight harder.
And you know, as a martial artist, you have to see beyond the contest.
And it's almost like you don't make your hit where you want to hit.
You want your hit to go past where you want to hit.
We were a united nation in 1946, 1947, and certainly right, 48 when I was born.
And Detroit was the work ethic, productivity epicenter of planet Earth, universally known.
We were the war machine that built the tanks and the bombers and the planes and pride of ownership.
And you got up early and you busted your ass to be the best that you can be and you kept your yard good and you kept your house clean and you earned your own way and it was an embarrassment not to earn your own way.
And you save for a rainy day, and you live within your means, and you discipline yourself.
My upbringing wasn't poverty.
I was never in need.
But you couldn't drink a whole Coke.
You couldn't buy something because you wanted it.
You needed some socks.
You probably got them for Christmas.
And if I wanted an arrow, I had to go to pick up garbage and try to sell golf balls back and get deposits on bottles and cans and cut lawns.
Got to work for it.
Yeah.
There was the rugged individualism, the self-sufficiency, the neighborliness, the giving and caring and You know, it did take a village.
It started with family, but you cared about your neighbors and you watched over each other.
And then I saw, with all due respect, when the beatniks and the dope and then the hippies and the disconnect and a carelessness erupted and a meanness.
I started seeing...
More meanness and anger and disconnect.
And then, after whether it was the New Deal or the Great Society, which kind of incentivized not being the best that you can be, and you can actually stay home and get a check, and the unions would negotiate not on quality automobiles, but money that May or may not be there, but we'll get you some more money and you can make Chryslers that won't even start.
You can't even drive them!
They're such a pile of shit.
And I saw this Detroit go from this glowing...
Epicenter of goodwill and decency and work ethic to liberal Democrats scamming people and bribing people for votes by getting you something you didn't earn.
And then all of a sudden, the city burnt down and there were couches in the street and refrigerators on the lawns and it just turned into a lump of shit.
And it breaks my heart.
I go downtown Detroit now and building the beautiful architecture still boarded up from the 67 riots.
I took my kids down for the 42nd anniversary of the Amboy Dukes, and I wanted to show them this beautiful city I was raised in and what happened to it.
And almost for dramatic effect, almost like Cecil B. DeMille was directing a scene for me to emphasize how deteriorated Detroit got.
Here's this guy on the sidewalk with his pants down taking a dump.
In the middle of the afternoon!
And I go, well, I didn't actually hire that guy.
That's really what's happened here.
So, if you allow your society to crumble before your eyes without intervening and going, hey, you can't do that!
Hey, you can't do that!
And I've done it with my musicians all my life.
I go, goddammit, we were really rocking last week and now you're all stoned and can't even wake you up!
But don't you think that when you're talking about 1946, the United States, we were all...
Against the Nazis and the Japanese, we were united in the fact that our lives were threatened, the world's future was threatened, and people felt like they had a purpose.
Do you remember, I was in New York right after September 11th, and something happened, a friend of mine fainted, and we had to call the fire department, you know, EMT showed up, and the respect of And the happiness that people had when they saw the first responders.
And I was like, this is fascinating because I lived in New York before.
When people were united, working together to make sure there was enough scrap metal and enough rubber, and they were carpooling so that they have enough raw materials to create...
Yeah, and I walk down the streets here, I go to Starbucks and get a coffee.
Hey, Uncle Ted!
They pay for it for me.
And love, Spirit of the Wild!
Thanks for standing up for our freedoms!
God bless you!
I can't find a dirt bag.
I'm sure I could.
But here's a salute on a Joe Rogan podcast to all those people out there That do intelligently and responsibly prioritize.
And they bust their ass because they're out there.
There's monster armies of working hard, playing hard shit kickers who sacrifice and take risks and try to start a new business and fall down in the arena and stand up and brush themselves off and get back at it.
Those are the people that I want to talk to right now because they're the best of the best.
Don't back off Friction.
Don't back off discomforting encounters, whether it's your kid, because I've got buddies.
And you take them in your arms and they didn't do anything wrong.
And they're burying their fucking kid.
Did you confront him?
Are you telling me you didn't see this, man?
Here's my alert to people listening to the Uncle Ted and Uncle Joe boogie.
Look harder.
Be more assertive.
If something doesn't look perfect, look into it.
And if there's needy people, instead of giving them money, because they're going to probably buy drugs or alcohol, and they're probably going to die.
If you make a donation to most homeless people, you're helping kill them.
They're not going to buy good shit with it.
And badger your elected employees.
We need to have mental health facilities.
What are you wasting money on?
You don't need to find out the sex life of a turtle.
You need to take those billions of grant money that you're blowing right now for some jack-off, and we need to address the mental health homeless, truly needy, not the greedy, not the scammers who are able-bodied and they just like to stay home, the people who have mental issues and physical issues, and that Donald Trump has finally got a point in time where you can fire a veteran administration and that Donald Trump has finally got a point in time where you can fire a veteran administration scam
doesn't show up for work, and absconds on revenues that could have got a couple wheelchairs for a legless Marine.
Now we can fire the bastards.
So there is upgrade happening.
But those that do know and do care...
Know more, care more, and demand answers, whether it's your family member.
How come you didn't show up at the family event?
What are you doing?
Are you high?
Are you using?
What are you doing?
I think if we start family, neighbors, and don't be afraid to tell your neighbor, you know, I saw your son the other day who's passed out at the curb.
I don't think we intervene like we did back when I was growing up.
Nobody would have tolerated that shit when I was growing up.
They would have sounded the alarm, and I don't think there's enough of that.
Neighborliness.
Not being afraid to hurt feelings.
Well, it's none of your business.
Well, you know, it is my business because you're my neighbor and the guy just shitting my lawn.
I mean, I don't think we're aggressive enough.
I come from a world of aggression.
Not being a prick about it, but asking questions.
At some point, you might have to shrug your shoulders and go, well, he doesn't want any help.
Some people don't like to hear this shit, but the style in which you talk, like even when you're debating Piers Morgan, you're very powerful with the way you describe things, and you get people that want to argue back with you.
But he came in swinging a crowbar to this horrible status quo that can best be described as, well, he's not presidential.
You're goddamn right he's not presidential because all these presidential guys got us into this mess because they were so cautious and they didn't want to ruffle any feathers.
We want to have a big tent, including all the bad guys and people that don't believe in secure borders.
What's that?
And people that don't believe in earning your own way.
What's that?
People that don't know the difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration.
What's that?
So the shit kickers finally saw somebody busting the status quo.
You're damn right he's not presidential, because presidential got us into this train wreck, and we're done with it.
So the Republicans better be paying attention, because if you're status quo-y, we're not voting for you.
If you come in swinging, you don't have to be rude, you don't have to be screaming, you don't have to be condemning, but you have to be honest and forthright and sound like somebody, you'd have a beer with it, a barbecue.
And if you sound like a shit kicker and one of us working hard playing on Americans, and you address our concerns, we'll vote for you.
If you don't, we're going to stay in our tree stand in November, which is what happened traditionally.
That's why Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, with 800,000 hunters, won it for Trump, because we are a hunter's We're good to go.
Every one of my promoters have death threats because they dare to hire me.
Every one of my bandmates and my crewmates, some guys that are building this wonderful Bell amplifier, they just showed a picture on their website with me testing their new amplifier, and people attacked them and threatened to kill them because they're working with the coward animal murderer.
The entire Mexican, Guatemalan, all those governments are as criminal as Al Capone in Chicago in 1932. They're so infested by the cartels.
Law enforcement is the cartel.
The military is the cartel.
Yeah, it is.
So the bottom line is we have the right to secure borders.
This is not my opinion.
We in America have the right and the responsibility to secure our borders.
If you think otherwise, you're dangerous.
I want people who need a better quality of life.
I'd welcome them.
I've got buddies that came like that.
My sound man, Frank, went through the seven-year process from Germany, and now he's a legal citizen in America.
Why should someone be able to swim across the Rio Grande and circumvent all that process so we know whether you're going to be an asset or a liability?
It's not rocket science.
Liability or asset?
We want assets.
And that's why our immigration system is horrific, even the legal one.
So I know it's a problem, but we're putting all these resources and man hours into securing the porous border instead of processing those who legitimately would like a better quality of life in America.
But first, we have to differentiate between the protesters who think that we need to turn over...
California, Arizona, and Texas back to Mexico so it can turn into a shithole.
Of course they left Mexico.
They know it's horrible.
That's why they're here.
Why would you come here to get away from a shithole and then turn the place you came to into the shithole?
We have a Constitution.
We have a Bill of Rights.
You need to earn your own way.
You need to work very hard.
If you're in the asset column, I will.
Love you.
If you're in the liability column, I love you if you're having hard times.
But if you have squatted intentionally as an able-bodied individual in that liability column, you are a detriment to America, and you should get the fuck out of here.
That's when you look at it in perspective, the people that are able-bodied Americans that don't do jack shit, and some poor bastard is trying to do anything they can to get here from Mexico to the point where they're literally dying of dehydration, making their way through the desert.
And they would bust their ass if given that opportunity, and it's not fair.
They're so disprioritized that all this effort's going towards, you know, securing the Rio Grande when people are illegally swimming across and jeopardizing their very life and limb when just down a couple miles there's a legal entrance and it might be a pain in the ass.
But you're here with me today, June 28th, 2018. Have you not put up with major pains in the ass as a martial artist, as a comedian?
That's a tough life.
You got your world carved out because you put up with a pain in the ass and you improvise, adapt it, and overcome.
But nowadays we learn from those black soul artists that were the consummate definitive authority of emotional music.
From the James Brown, the Funk Brothers, and Chuck, and Bo, and Little Richard, and Bebe, and Freddie, and Albert, and all these monster black heroes of everybody's.
And there's not a musician in the world that won't admit that.
But now, because of that influence all these years, the white boys can keep right up there with them.
In fact, in many instances, compared to a lot of the rap and the hip-hop, There's a whole lot of white guys out there.
I think of Joe Bonamassa and Anton Figg and certainly Jason Hartless and Greg Smith and all the guys in Aerosmith and ZZ Top.
I mean, you close your eyes and there's not a Caucasian to be found in these bands nowadays, soul-wise.
It's an unfair thing to do that people like to do because it automatically puts you on the defensive.
You're automatically on your heels and you have to defend this charge against racism by proving you're not a racist, which makes people suspicious that you might be racist.
Like Diane Sawyer, God love her, but she had the opportunity of a lifetime when she was interviewing Bruce, and he was saying, you know, for all practical purposes, I'm a woman.
And she said, she should have said, yeah, except for the dick.
I've witnessed you articulate it and you're doing a great job.
And I thank you for that.
And I salute you.
And you've made great progress and inroads in that arena of ignorance and presumptuousness.
But I'm very blessed because I'm a loud mouth and I'm alive.
I mean, I'm engaged.
I exercise my duties as we the people to talk about policies and get in the face of my elected employees and hold them to constitutional accountability.
I'm like, I missed the Concord Bridge, so I'm here doing this now.
And I, in my everyday walk at the sushi restaurant, at the gas station, at the feed mill, at the charity event, people are always coming up and they've Those that would hesitate, I guess, never showed up because I never felt any hesitation.
They're always genuinely intrigued, and they express confusion and uncomfortableness, discomfort with the concept of killing game.
But within minutes, when I talk about sustained yield, habitat carrying capacity, just simple, readily understood Earthly logistics.
They go, well, I never thought of it like that before.
Well, they're going to have babies next year, and there's not going to be any new ground.
We're going to have to grow next year's wildlife on the existing habitat, and in most cases, reduced habitat.
But thank God the cougars can live in your backyard, and the bears can live in the cul-de-sac in Pennsylvania, and coyotes will live in your bathroom here.
If you don't lock the doors.
So wildlife has adapted miraculously.
I mean, geese and ducks and turkeys and deer and elk and bear, they're literally everywhere.
Check out Estes Park in Colorado.
I mean, they're landscaping Destructo Derby.
So we don't need to worry about encroaching on habitat because they will adapt and they have wonderful.
And again, more deer.
More elk, more cougar, more bear, more turkey, more geese than ever in recorded history.
And we're slaughtering them by the gazillions every year because they grow gazillions every year.
And once I express it to people like that, and then I inject the inescapable truism, you talk organic.
Well, this conversation is what I'm talking about.
People don't know how to get started.
They hear about that and there's all this talk about organic and, you know, close to nature and being connected to your food, but they don't know how to...
It's pretty easy to start a garden if you have a yard, but to start hunting, there's a great barrier to entry.
Not to be my Facebook, but I am the glow worm of the hunting lifestyle.
People have always come to me for that.
Because I've always promoted it, and I've never backed down, and almost every interviewer brings it up since the 1960s because it was the tip of the culture war controversial spear.
It really was.
Hunting and guns, those are the tip of the culture war from the beginning because people were moving from urban, self-sufficient hunting, fishing, trapping, earthly lifestyles to the city where they were catered to.
And they didn't hear the chicken squawking, so they didn't feel responsible for its death.
Easily identified colloquialisms of modern terminology that is timeless, and it registers with them quickly.
Now, getting over the hump to have access to hunting ground, I also have been effective in educating people on that, because everybody's got an Uncle Joe.
Everybody's got access to some state or federal open ground, and even though the hunting isn't very quality on those public areas oftentimes, If you are willing to pursue what should have inspired you to ask about hunting, and that means to go beyond the beaten path, which is part of the spiritual experience, leaving the modern kush and getting Into a wild area.
I find that a lot of my new baptized hunting, young, old, and otherwise, that they like going deep.
And they will find that deer that's not on the fringes of public ground that have already been, you know, so pressured that they've moved into the interior nucleus of more sanctuary habitat.
And these guys, they almost cry.
They're so happy, even if they didn't get something.
Because I got in there and it took me two hours to get in there.
It was still dark and I was concerned about my safety.
I'd never been that deep in the woods before up in the Manistee National Forest in Michigan or in any wild ground, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, California.
And they said, you're right, Ted.
It's changed my life.
Just watching that deer come down, I forgot to draw my bow.
So it's an immediate aliveness that is rarely available in a modern setting except for great family times, birth, death, sex.
Well, another thing that's a big blind spot is they don't understand where conservation money comes from.
When you talk to them about the Pickman-Robertson Act, you talk to them about how many billions of dollars every year is generated from sales of ammunition, hunting gear, bows and arrows, and all that stuff.
Well, the 30s, the Dingle, Robert and Pitsman, that was almost a Teddy Roosevelt thing.
But the real battle cry was in my lifetime.
There was no anti-hunting first 10 years of my life.
It was the concrete jungle acidification removal from the system by which we are sustained that was a convenient disconnect, and you could deny it because you didn't hear the animals die.
You didn't see the blood.
It was nice and cleaned up in the little cellophane package.
Yeah, and that denial metastasized into a cult of Make believe in fantasy.
But to their credit, there is only a lunatic fringe.
I don't believe that the animal rights, even though they've succeeded in California, they run into a dead-end brick wall everywhere else.
Even though in Michigan the dirtbags succeeded in banning the hunting of the number one game animal on planet Earth, the morning dove, where we grow more doves in Michigan than all the quail, pheasant, woodcock, and grouse combined.
Thank God you've been baptized, because this has a great impact, because your average listener does not come to hear hunting truth.
Your average listener comes to hear smartass dialogue and issue review and intellectual analysis of life's experiences.
All good.
All perfect.
But that you have inflected and injected the truth about conservation-wise use wildlife management is a hallelujah moment, which is why I'm sitting across from you today.
And a lot of it I got, honestly, from people like you that were enthusiastic about it that got me curious.
When I saw how enthusiastic you were about hunting and about the eating of wild meat and how much energy it gives you, I got very curious many years before I ever started hunting.
Good.
I saw a lot of those PETA videos where you see these horrific conditions in factory farms and I didn't want to be a part of that.
I was trying to figure out how to not be a part of that.
And so when I first decided to start hunting, before that I was making two decisions.
I was either I'm going to do this and I'm going to hate it and I'm never going to do it again.
And I'm going to be a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter.
And the moment I shot that deer and then we ate it, I was like, oh, I'm doing this forever.
And people that think you're just going to stop that, listen, you're going to get a lot of people that aren't healthy.
This is not the way to go.
And if some people want to go vegan and they can pull it off with careful studying of their diet and making sure they're supplementing with all the right things, good luck.
Well, you know, you ask how we can initiate this conversation.
After my great hero Fred Bear died in 1987, it was the next year I started the Ted Nugent Camp for Kids, which was a movement forward of what he told me to continue promoting conservation and hunting the way I was.
So I started a charity, 501C3 Charity, the Ted Nugent Camp for Kids, where we run in Colorado, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa.
Every year we've graduated over 16,000 boys and girls between the ages of 7 and 17 from From great volunteers, men and women from every imaginable walk of life that I have to vet because it's got my name on it, but great heroes of law enforcement, military, and just great families.
And we teach them the discipline of archery, the discipline of wildlife management, including if you don't fish a pond, the fish will...
They'll overpopulate and they'll die off.
That you have to harvest a surplus to make room for the next productivity.
And trapping, the importance of trapping, that that's how you keep disease under control.
And that's how you keep value to fur bearers.
And that's how you make really great, great warm clothes.
And atlatls and fly fishing and the meticulous detail and discipline of tying flies and animals.
Being clean and sober and being the best that you can be and self-sufficiency and rugged individualism.
So this has been going on since 1989. And still, you haven't read a word about it in New York Times.
You haven't read a word about it anywhere because they're too quick to condemn me because I'm so good at promoting hunting and gun ownership that they avoid me like the plague.
But the real tragedy is that outdoor life, field and stream, sports and field...
Guns and ammo, all these sporting publications, not a word.
30 years of a wonderful charity created by a household name celebrity about the most important things in life.
They just don't care.
It's so...
I'm mentioning it here on the Joe Rogan Podcast because my volunteers have been doing God's work for all these years.
And plus, people have been very generous.
The She-Car Safaris donate money every year, and people just dig deep and make donations to keep the camp alive.
So if people want to find out about that, then go to my website.
But it's a charity for children about being aware of resource stewardship and hands-on, boots-on-the-ground environmentalism.
If you're going to cut a tree, you might want to plant 50. Simple.
Well, the Texas property is fenced because I have exotics, so by law.
And why do I have it fenced?
Why do I have exotics?
Because if it wasn't fenced with exotics, those exotics would have probably been extinct by now.
But landowners in Texas, we took the lead from South Africa.
And a lot of people don't know this, Joe.
In fact, I articulated in an upcoming Spirit of the Wild show.
High fence hunting saved wildlife in Africa.
Because the development of agriculture in Africa was in total conflict with the migration of wildlife.
We're talking all those incredible species from Elan and Kudu and Gemsbach and Inyala and Wildebeest and the warthogs and elephants.
They would migrate every year and all of a sudden the migration came to your citrus grove and destroyed everything.
It killed all the wildlife because you want to sell your citrus.
Yeah.
Some of the ranchers who value the wildlife more than citrus, and there's nothing wrong with citrus, they literally said, well, goddammit, every time my herds migrate, only a portion of them come back because all these agri-concerns are destroying, killing the wildlife to protect their agriculture.
So I'm going to fence my 20,000 acres, and I'm going to manage it.
20,000 acres is huge.
Even my spirit wild ranch is 300 acres.
It still has a finite productivity.
Every habitat is finite.
And so they started selling those hunts for the surplus every year of these magnificent wildlife species instead of agriculture.
So those animals are thriving in absolute natural habitat, as is my home ground, Spirit Wild Ranch in Texas.
You must harvest the surplus, fence or no fence.
And mark my words...
People who condemn and criticize high fence hunting is not fair chase are speaking out of their ass.
Ted Nugent hunts more days in an average year than most people will in their lifetime.
I hunt hundreds of days every morning, every afternoon.
Are my pressured animals on Spirit Wild Ranch, on my open 1,100-acre swamp in Michigan.
If I want to shoot a deer, I can 90% plus tell you, with all my different choices of tree stands and my strategies of wind and In habitat and positioning, bait or no bait, just travel corridors.
I've been living there.
I've owned it since 1978. In fact, the one place I've owned since 1970. I have like 20 times the shot opportunity on my open ground than I do on my fenced ground.
My high-fenced hunting and all the high-fenced hunting I've ever had is as absolutely pure, fair chase...
As any wilderness I've ever been to, from the Sudan to Alaska to Saskatchewan to Ontario to Montana to Wyoming to Northern California, it is hunting.
The role the fence plays is zero!
In my killing an animal, it only plays a role in keeping pressure outside so I don't have to shoot that two- or three- or four-year-old buck.
I can wait until he's five, but I still have to kill those fidgety does, and it's absolutely pure hunting.
The way people disagree is that the idea that these animals can never leave.
They're stuck.
They're stuck there, so you know that they're going to be there, which is the difference between that and, like, say, you go into a backcountry hunt, you know, you park your truck in the trailhead and hike in 12 miles.
Or in a pond that's not stocked, but managed on my property, so that I fish it adequately enough so that the bass get to be 6, 7, and 8 pounds, but I don't let them get stunted.
Same thing.
Those fish ain't going anywhere.
And quite honestly, in those suburban areas and urban areas and even farming across America, those deer are there.
They are there.
And I have no better chance of shooting deer on Spirit Wild Ranch in the high fence than I do hunting the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, where those deer can go everywhere, except that there is a highway right there.
We stopped shooting young ones, and all the neighbors agreed, just like they did in Buffalo County, Wisconsin, which is all just decisions by contiguous landowners to not shoot young bucks because somebody shot a 200-inch, and they went, wow, where'd you get that?
And I went, on my farm.
So they knew they were there.
That's why I was so popular, because deer hunting was not popular, and guys were shooting six- and seven-year-old mammoths.
And so the hunters that started deer hunting went, well, I'm not shooting that two-year-old booger buck, because Joe down the road got a...
Got a massive stag.
I'm going to wait for one of them.
And by waiting for them, they do get older and they do have that mysticism of stagness.
A lot of people go trophy hunting takes out the best genes.
Yeah, right.
No, it does not.
We keep setting records for deer and moose and elk and caribou and bear and mountain lion and antelope every year.
We set world records constantly because our hunting system of being disciplined and waiting for that mature animal, our hunting system has produced the healthiest, most monstrosity specimens in the history of record-keeping ever.
Every year!
So we're not hurting anything by being disciplined and patient, which I've learned over the years, and my son is very adamant about, and so many hunters are.
There's a mysticism to that mature stag.
The breeders of our ancestors were the best hunters, and they did the breeding because they were more resourceful and more Intelligently connected to the system by which we fed the tribe.
So those killer stag hunters were always the leader of tribes.
And also, this pursuit of bow hunting, which is more difficult and more rewarding because it's more difficult, is many levels more difficult when you're chasing after a 200-inch buck.
In South Texas, where age management was created, because they supplement and they got center pivot agriculture down in the deserts of South Texas, and that genetic is a very fortified genetic anyhow.
200-pound deer are not that rare.
A lot of people think all deer in Texas are little, but they're not.
And if you let them grow, which Texas pretty much pioneered, those bucks in South Texas are Are the easiest deer on the planet to kill.
There's a couple of dynamics.
There's just some strange genetic lineage there that they're a calmer animal.
Plus they're on wide open, vast, private ground, which means they don't get the public hordes of pressure.
And once that buck is a button buck the first year, nobody shoots at them.
So he encounters, he smells that person, he sees that person, he hears that person, no problem.
Second year, he had a little booger buck.
He ran into people.
Nobody messed with him.
Third year, he's got a nice little rack.
He still ran into people.
No problem.
There's some corn here.
This is where the wheat field is.
Yeah, I smell that guy, but, you know, three years, he's never bothered me.
I'll just keep eating.
Fourth year, same thing.
So they reduce their fear factor of the encounter with humans because nobody shot at them.
Because they're not going to shoot at them until they're sick.
You know that sheep were more popular in America than cattle.
There were way more sheep than cattle until scrapies came in, which is that CWD version for sheep, mad cow in bovines and Crutchfeld Jacob in humans.
And, of course, Crutchfeld Jacob was a result the scientists determined by the scientists Crutchfeld and Jacob that the Indonesian people that got this This spongiform condition from a mutated prion because they ate the brains of their conquered enemies, which is never a good idea!
So I'm aware of all this stuff, but believe me when I tell you, live on the Joe Rogan podcast, the CWD hysteria is a scam.
More deer are killed in Michigan every year by feral dogs than all the deer ever worldwide by CWD. I think the concern, though, with CWD is that it's spreading.
They were looking for it before, but they think that it's come from animals that get out of these high-fence farm operations where they all feed from the same trough and they spread this from there.
Dr. James Crow just testified with me in front of the Michigan Natural Resource Commission and Department of Natural Resources, and all the exhaustive studies have concluded that CWD cannot be cross- A species.
There is no evidence whatsoever that CWD has ever compromised a cervid herd.
There's been no reduced seasons even in the epicenter, the endemic area of Colorado and Wyoming, where it started, where it's the most prevalent.
No seasons have been reduced.
No reduced in tags.
No reduced in harvest.
It's inconsequential.
It occurs so rarely.
They've studied the deer for 18 years in Wisconsin, and deer that had CWD 18 years collared and monitored still haven't fawns.
They say it's always fatal.
It is not always fatal.
Go to drdeer.com.
I'm worried about bureaucrats that have scared away hunters in Wisconsin and caused butchers to quit processing deer because of the manufactured hysteria.
CWD is not a concern.
Buicks kill more deer than CWD. The bureaucrats go in and slaughter deer by the thousands.
So if CWD has killed 58 deer in Michigan, which it has, they found, I don't think any of them were fatal.
I think they had to kill them.
Though they did find one in Jackson County, they claim.
I don't believe them.
I just don't believe bureaucrats.
Remember, these are the bureaucrats, Joe, in Michigan that claimed that there were, quote, 5,000 to 7,000 Russian boar running wild in Michigan.
Can we analyze that claim for a moment?
Maybe you can tell me, Joe, what the fuck is a Russian boar?
I'll tell you what a Russian boar is.
It's a male pig in Russia.
There's no such genus as a Russian boar.
It's all...
Wife's tail bullshit!
And that was the official statement by a game agency in Michigan.
Lying sons of bitches.
And then they claimed, and here's another one, so isn't it our moral and spiritual obligation to wisely use the animals we harvest, isn't it?
If there's enough sandhill cranes for farmers to shoot, open the season, sell licenses, create a management plan, and show some decency and respect, and let us eat the ribeye in the sky, you stupid bastards.
It doesn't make any sense that the morning dove, you know, the picture of the dove on millions of boxes of ammo in Michigan, there's a picture of a dove and it says game load.
But the Michigan DNR will say, oh, no, no, no, that's a songbird.
And I think it's a good opportunity for people to get a chance to see you in a long-form conversation rather than these sound bites they could just choose to hate.
And then the Wikipedia claims I got a 4F. 4F! What is a 4F? A 4F means you're physically incapable.
I've never been physically incapable of anything.
So they make this shit up.
And so I did an interview with High Times, which by the way, let's make it clear.
I've done this so many times, but people ignore my actual statements.
So I had been doing interviews all because the Embrydukes were on fire and I was just an outrage on stage with the loincloth and the bow and arrow and the feedback and these killer songs and the band was so good.
Greatest musicians in the world.
So I did interviews all the time talking about the music I loved and they never got anything right.
These stone, dirtbag hippie writers got the guys in the band's names wrong.
They got the facility wrong.
They mentioned songs we didn't perform.
They got nothing right.
And every time I'd read the interview, I'd go, God, we were talking about my music.
You didn't even get the song titles right.
So I started having fun with these interviewers, much to the entertainment of my bandmates, who would break out in hysterics when I'd make up stories because I'm not going to even try to be accurate anymore.
It was an ongoing maneuver of mine.
We'd have these hippie writers come in to take notes, and I'd say, yeah, I play this Fender Stratocaster.
As I hold up my Gibson Birdland, which I was known for, and they'd write down, he played a Gibson Stratocaster.
There's no such thing as a Gibson Stratocaster.
So I was having fun with dirtbag anti-journalists.
So now I'm invited to High Times Magazine, and I was hardcore anti-drug.
I've never been with an underage girl since I was underage.
I'm not a racist.
And what else do they say?
Oh, and they claim that I made Courtney Love blow me when she was 12. I think she claimed that, right?
Yeah, I never met Courtney Love.
You can tell I don't have a rash.
You've just got to be kidding me.
They just make this shit up because they know I'm so good at I'm bringing my basic conservative agenda forward that they have to go full Saul Alinsky and lie and lie and lie.
And if you go to Wikipedia to find out about Ted Nugent, they will repeat these lies.
They're lies.
And every one of those things, if I had done it, I'd go...