Ben O’Brien, co-creator of Rye Brain, recounts his moose hunt with Joe Rogan—ten months prior in British Columbia—where they drank spiced rum and ate moose heart, contrasting it with urbanization’s erosion of hunting culture (17.5M hunters in 1982 vs. today). They debate ethical dilemmas like poaching (e.g., David Barry Jr.’s Bambi sentence) and predator-prey balance, critiquing media’s anthropomorphic portrayals while defending regulated culls for invasive species. O’Brien’s shift from tradition to conservation mirrors Rogan’s stance on preserving public lands, like Bears Ears, amid polarized rhetoric. Hunting’s emotional weight—target panic, accountability, and "grip and grin" backlash—reveals deeper tensions between conservation ethics and public perception, where even well-intentioned practices face scrutiny. [Automatically generated summary]
Remember that we went and we shot your bull, right?
But then we took the heart and the liver and we started drinking heavily and you were up there just cooking liver and onions, cooking up a giant moose heart.
So we had like the fuel of organs of an animal you just killed.
What is that, do you think, and here's, coming from a person that's been on a bunch of life-changing experiences, and I know you have, and I want to talk to you about some of them.
So, when you play that, we were talking about the other day how this guy got in trouble because they have all these things in the game that you can do to people.
And this guy, like, tied this hooker up and threw her off a cliff and shit.
Yeah, so if you go and you see some great comedy from the 1990s, like you watch a Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock special from the 90s, that holds up 100%.
If you watch porn, and you watch some porn from the 1980s, and then you flip through like you porn, not that I would ever do that, but if you did do that and looked at all the different categories, you'd be like, what the fuck happened?
Well, but we're progressing with our storylines for, like, humanity in a weird way in media, but we're also, like, suppressing a lot of our—we're trying to suppress through social justice a lot of the same things, right?
Jennifer Lopez, obviously, besides being beautiful and having a body like some sort of a test tube person, some lab-created super freak, obviously, she knows how to throw that thing.
Listen, I think the way that I came up with it is because in the hunting world, there is this, speaking of conservative, there's this like, there's a conservative traditionalist, right?
And there's the more progressive folks that you have met and been around.
You've been around both, but been around both that are more environmentalists, more public lands, more access, right?
So there's kind of like two, of course, there's always two sides in politics, but there's, in this case, two distinct sides, right?
Yeah.
And the line kind of gets drawn around, one, a little bit around guns, but also a little bit around the environment.
So part of the biggest issue in politics for a hunter or angler right now is like, I really like guns.
I like the Second Amendment.
I dig what's going on there.
I'd like to support that.
But what I also like is healthy ecosystems and environment.
And I like habitat for wild game to live and public lands and access.
Well, it just so happens that a lot of the A-plus rated politicians for the NRA are like F-minus or D-plus rated in protecting wildlife and wild lands.
And a lot of that's around extraction and different things like that.
It hardly leaves room for those beliefs in normal conversations with people, unless you absolutely know that the person's going to be objective and, as your shirt says, pro-nuance.
The idea that you shouldn't be able to defend your family is where it gets crazy.
It doesn't get crazy that you want to be able to defend your family.
Why do these movies all have...
Robberies and break-ins and bad guys.
Why?
These are real things.
These are real things.
So the idea that you should just be a sitting duck because there's so many crazy fucks out there that want to shoot up schools and go on mass shootings that somehow or another you're being conflated with them.
That you're being confused with them or categorized with them.
Like, I want to be able to defend my family and own firearms and have that freedom.
That's a big part of this country.
But I also don't want people to die in mass shootings.
I don't want that.
Of course.
On the other side of the coin, when it comes to environmental issues around hunting public lands and things of that nature, I want coal miners to have jobs.
I want...
People that work in the extraction industries to have an opportunity to work and live and do what they need to do.
But I also want to protect our ecosystems at all costs because you can't replace that shit.
And there's got to be other jobs out there if the government put its resources instead to propping up old ways of doing business that pollute the environment versus new ways of doing business with subsidies and with government programs.
Yeah, someone was trying to make that argument with fracking with me.
I was talking to him about that.
Is it Josh Fox's documentary?
Yeah.
He was on the podcast, Fracking Nation.
It was a very good documentary.
When I had him on the podcast, it was interesting because he seemed like he had been attacked a lot for it and even misunderstood some of the questions I was asking.
Maybe they were coming from me.
And I was saying, no, this is just like, what is it called?
You're watching some aspects of it, like when they're lighting their water on fire, and then someone tried to say, oh, there's some places where you've always been able to light your water on fire.
I would think to be confident about that, and I'm not confident about it, but to be confident about what that guy said to me when he was saying that it's always been like that, you would have to have done massive research.
You would have to have spent time there.
You would have to have been working either directly or indirectly with the scientists that are collecting the data.
To me, access could be, I like wilderness, where the only way you can access it is on foot, via trailhead.
Someone else might say, access to me is elderly folks or disabled folks be able to get into a car and drive through a road on public land or get into an ATV and drive.
And so...
Politics, being what they are, politicians take this term of access.
It happened around national monuments.
They take one side said the president is stealing your land and the other side says the president is giving back your land.
Somebody there, either both sides are full of shit or one of them is.
I remember when this came up, Patagonia, which is a giant company in the outdoors, had a big ad on the internet that said the president just stole your land.
And then I heard Ronello talk about it and he said, I'm going to paraphrase, but he basically said, if you say that the president stole your land, you're not being careful with your words.
Culturally or socially, emotionally culturally significant pieces of land.
All the way to things like the Grand Canyon, right?
And so, spin it up to the end of, there's a lot that I just skipped over, but I'm going to spin it up to the end of the Obama administration.
President Obama used his executive power to protect large swaths, millions of acres around Bears Ears National Monument, to protect not only the significant places for Native Americans and for Native tribesmen around Bears Ears, but many millions of acres around that.
And so, then it becomes, the problem I have and why that t-shirt exists, it becomes a political football throwback and forth.
It's not, at this point in time, what's best for Bears Ears, what's best for that national monument, what's best for it to be federally owned, what's best for the people, the jobs, the place.
It becomes what's best for each side and their rhetoric.
And so President Trump asked former Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke to review, I think it was like ten monuments, to see if they should be reduced based on the predictions that Obama had put into place.
So he reviews these ten monuments, he cuts out eight of them, and hones in on two places, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante.
They then say we're going to reduce the size of these monuments.
Some would say they did that as a straw man, as eight straw men, to knock them over and look at those other two.
They said we will reduce the area that is designated as a national monument.
And here again, it comes to both sides.
They would say because...
President Obama wielded his powers corruptly to protect, to be as an environmentalist, to protect lands that didn't need protected under the Antiquities Act.
Because the Antiquities Act does say it should be the smallest acreage possible to protect.
So now you get into stuff that I'm not an expert in around legal jargon and going back to things that were written in the 1930s.
But...
We get to a point where one side's saying, here is the Republicans trying to shrink down these monuments so that they can then go, companies that are, can then go and lease these places for mining, but they can't currently do under protections as a national monument.
The other side is saying, we're trying to protect culturally significant lands and these millions of acres need protected.
There's checks and balances, but there's executive orders that can come down.
There's real power.
Listen, I'm not the expert on this.
I'm sure I fumbled through some of the details on that, but to me, the bottom line is something like that Why I like to live in the center is because something like that becomes, it becomes a thing that, it becomes a PR hit.
It becomes a thing that people are throwing back, they're throwing bear's ears back and forth because at the end of Obama's administration he made the designation and they repealed it or reversed it a year later.
In these situations, there always seems to be spin on both sides, and being a part of these debates on a daily basis, and bringing in this information on a daily basis, it's tiresome.
You get tired.
You get tired of being pandered to by people.
You get tired of having to hear that this value system is right or this value system is right and there's no room to be anywhere close to the center around this stuff.
Public lands are the only place where I look at it and say, no, you've got to leave that to the government.
You've got to leave it to the federal government.
Don't leave it to the states.
It's the only place.
I mean, when I think about all the different things, like with...
Like, legalization of marijuana.
Now they're going to legalize psilocybin, apparently, in Oregon.
They're talking about doing that.
I'm like, yeah, leave it to the states.
They should be able to vote that in.
They should be able to vote in.
Like, all the crazy laws you have in weird states, and some states have state taxes, some states don't.
It's all good.
That's all good.
But when it comes to, like, federal land, the problem is if these states get into debt, and this is what people need to understand, they can sell it off.
So if Utah is in debt, I'm just not picking on Utah, but if they just, for some reason, they wind up in debt, which states do all the time, and then they sell off a giant chunk of land to some oil company, now you can't camp there anymore.
There's a guy named Senator Mike Lee out of the great state of Utah, which you rightly put that a lot of these things revolve around Utah for some reason.
Let me, I'll take the first point, you take the second point.
Okay, go ahead.
So, Senator Mike Lee comes out and says, right, this is like the perfect way to spin this type of thing.
He calls back to, and Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah has also done this, he calls back to the Sagebrush Rebellion and things like that, saying that wilderness is akin to the European aristocracy.
Because only a certain few can go there.
Because you have to have two working legs that can get you up into wilderness.
Part of the basis of a speech he gave, and he's given it several times, is that public land and wilderness specifically is akin to the European aristocracy because only certain folks can go there.
If you would open up access, cut roads through it, then it would be for everyone.
So then it gets back to the semantics and the spin and the things that politicians push forward to try to convince you.
What he's right in is that if you put roads through, anybody could go through anytime they wanted.
On a car, if they had no legs, if they can barely walk, if they are in a wheelchair normally but they can drive a car, yeah, they can go in deep into the woods and they can enjoy all of the wilderness that has stopped.
I live an hour from there and I've taken my family there and it just feels like I used to feel like, oh man, this is an illicit place.
As somebody who's gone into the wilderness and tackled these big challenges and hiked around in crazy places, this Yellowstone is like, nah, it makes me feel uncomfortable.
Then somebody said to me, I feel like it was this guy named Cody Rich who has a podcast called The Rich Outdoors.
He said to me, It's like it's an ambassador for real wilderness.
It's like a way to present to people that this thing exists without them having to actually strap on a pack, get some trekking poles, and hike miles up into the wilderness.
It's an idea that we all pay into a thing, we all own, and anybody can go there.
It's super easy to get on that train.
It is real easy to get on that train and lose your critical thought around what is the idea of wilderness.
I mean, because when I think of my hunting now, like we first went hunting like five or six years ago, you would ask me this question, I would have given you a whole different answer.
So what I probably would have said like when we first went hunting in BC together for moose, what I probably would have said would have been around, it would have been less value based and more like I do it because my dad did it.
I do it because it connects me to my dad, like my dad, my family, my people.
I do it because humanity did it.
We filmed a video, remember, sitting on a thing.
We talked a lot about our humanity, right?
Like the drawing back through the history of time when the hunter was exalted in a tribe of people.
So your skills that you acquired as a hunter made you important to the culture, the society, the everyday life.
I would have probably called back to that.
Not that I would say that's wrong now, but what I've come to find out over some other years of hunting in a lot of places is that I think my hunting is more about healthy ecosystems now than it is about anything else.
I think all of my efforts should be around clean water, clean air, places that we can go and explore.
And what that brings to our world, that brings more wildlife, that brings places for my son to go and experience these things.
And so I've changed over this very short time and the way that I do it.
Well, the more you experience the wilderness and then go back to the city and then go back to the wilderness, the more you realize how special it is out there.
And the more you realize when...
Like today, I went flying in a helicopter over L.A. with my good friend Bill Burr.
And as he was taking me up, I was looking at all this development.
We were talking about all these apartment complexes that are being developed.
And he's like, yeah.
He goes, you really see it when you're up here in the air.
Because you see where there was nothing.
And then a couple weeks later, it'll be flattened out.
Well, I think there's some perspective, and I think honey has a lot going for it around the fact that as urbanization happens, you know, as jobs, even for me, like as jobs become more prevalent in urban places and people have to travel from wherever they're growing up to these urban places and live so removed from wilderness, so removed from sustainability, I think...
For a long time, because hunting peaked in 1982. There was like 17.5 million hunters around that year.
and i will always say that like the three things that i think happened were urbanization so people are getting removed from they're getting moved away from having hunting in their lives on a daily basis not that they're anti-hunting in any way they're just getting removed from from that thing getting your meat on your own they're removed from that and a lot of times you're removed removed from gardening and other types of sustainable use things.
The other thing is Disney.
Walt Disney is a nice man, but Bambi was not a good thing for our collective psyche around hunting.
The reality of baboons, and I've studied the work of Robert Sapolsky, who's a guy who's been on the podcast before, and it's really pretty amazing stuff.
What they found out about baboons that he studied, actually, because he actually studied a baboon tribe that the alpha males died off.
They were all eating out of a poisoned garbage patch.
There was a garbage patch that had sick food in it, just bad food, and the alpha males who got to eat first always chased everybody out.
They wound up dying off, and for more than one generation, I think it was several generations, They became really peaceful and calm, and they weren't the vicious, violent baboons that are the norm.
If you Google it, Sapolsky studies baboons, and Radiolab also had a podcast about it, which is where I first heard about it, and then I read what Sapolsky wrote about it.
But it is unbelievably fascinating.
It shows how you can have this insane, violent animal culture, and then the cunts get removed.
And when the cunts get removed, everybody chills the fuck out.
But baboons, for the most part, I mean, maybe he shot the nicest baboons ever, but for the most part, they're a bunch of baby-eating cunts, and they'll steal your fucking kid.
That little two-year-old that you love so dearly, that little motherfucker would be on a porch somewhere, and if there's baboons around, they'll snatch him and eat his head.
The structure is like there's a professional hunter, which is essentially your guide, and then there's trackers, which are usually native folks that help track in the game, spotting the animals, things like that.
But our PH... He was like, if you see a baboon, shoot it.
He's like, we have lots of irrigation here to maintain this ranch, and they rip it up, and they're basically terrorists around coming around our camp, messing with our fires, messing with our food.
He was like, if you see one, shoot one.
And that was the instruction that I got.
And I never did, but, you know, given that instruction from somebody like that, like, hey, this is a good thing for our landscape.
Go and do it.
Now, that's very far removed from stacking them up.
Like we, we were talking about around the old meat eater incorporated offices the other day around how do you, how do we as hunters who are around these animals all the time and shit, how do we, and something happens, somebody gets mad about this guy killing all these, these baboons.
And that this is how the bubonic plague got spread.
It got spread actually, in fact, through the ticks that were carried by the rats.
Is that what it is?
Fleas?
Fleas.
Thank you, Jamie, with Google search.
The difference is that squirrels are not overpopulated and that raptors are killing them off left and right.
It's a primary source of food for a lot of these flying raptors.
Eagles and hawks and stuff like that.
Sure a lot of other things eat them too, but there's enough balance out there, but rats Rats lock into us.
I mean they lived without us for a long time But once they found us they're like oh look at this shit these dumb motherfuckers have holes in their ground You can live under their houses.
He just they put garbage out every day.
Yeah, you just go jack their garbage You got plenty of food.
Like his dad's, there was a, what was it, like there was a flood, I'll probably mess this up, there was some sort of weather event that pushed all these kangaroos onto his dad's ranch, and his dad was going out every day and just whacking ad nauseum.
Is our, like, the endangered species has come into play here in a weird way, because is our caring for animals dictated by the number of the animal that there is?
And a lot of folks wrote in and they said, I'd be interested to hear what you think about this.
If an animal is wounded, and say you're up in a tree stand or you're hunting spot and stalk, or in the case of Randy, hunting over a waterhole, if you're doing that and you're a hunter, you hold a tag, you can choose which animal you'd like to kill.
You have a buck or a doe, a male or female tag, you can choose which one.
You want to kill.
If an animal comes by you that has been wounded, clearly been wounded, clearly struggling, you know, in the case of Randy Newberg, he was sitting on a waterhole, and I believe he was in Arizona, with a trophy tag, which means there was a lot of big mule deer walking around, a lot of big antelope walking around in that situation, pronghorn.
Well, let's explain to people that are listening that don't know what we're talking about.
When he says a trophy tag, what he means is there's some units that are designated as trophy areas.
It doesn't mean you don't eat the animal.
What it does mean is that it's very difficult to get into this area.
You have to have a certain amount of points, which means you're putting in to the pool of money that is for conservation, for habitat protection.
You're putting in every year to try to get a tag.
get a tag in a lot of these places once a lifetime for some places yeah in some places i've drawn every 10 years drawn tags that are once every 15 years i mean it's a very complicated point system but yeah so what but let's explain why they do that they do that to preserve the population of big mature animals so that this you can't just let anybody go in like there's some places that are called over the counter yeah what an over-the-counter unit is
is they know that there's a large healthy population of animals and they either the wildlife biologists and the state representative they choose to just let anybody go in and when they think the animals are diminishing too much then they'll put a cap on it, but for now, it's an over-the-counter unit.
And then they have places that are very difficult to draw units.
And those difficult-to-draw units is one of the places where Randy Newberg was because he was looking for a big, old, mature animal that had spread its genetics.
Once in a lifetime hunt where you're never going to hunt there again and you're looking for the most unique animal that you can find, the most mature animal that you can find.
Yeah, but along the way, like in this case, ethically, he runs into a limping antelope, a pronghorn.
It comes into a water hole and it's limping to the point where he thinks, oh...
And this happens to a lot of hunters.
He thinks, oh, I have this tag.
I've waited a long time to get it.
It's a very unique tag, of course, is the way you explained it.
And...
I can eat this antelope just the same as I would any other one, but to exercise some mercy around this antelope that's clearly suffering, clearly injured, who knows how it got injured, limping up to a waterhole, he's having this ethical pondering in his head, like, should I dispatch this thing and it's suffering, fill my tag this way.
Because with a tag in that nature, if you have a tag, you can then choose to do anything you want with it in legal bounds.
It's a virtue we all would like to be able, and I said this, and Randy kind of, we talked through it, but I said that this is a unique situation to a hunter.
If you're a hiker and you come across an animal wounded in this way or injured in this way, there's very little you can do.
But this is unique to the hunter's responsibility to look at this animal and make this decision.
Another argument is you really should do nothing because those are the animals that are designated to be taken out by the predators and you want to keep the predator population healthy.
He kills a lamb every year and feeds everyone a sada.
Wonderful human being.
He grew up in Czechoslovakia.
And part of his describing his growing up is like, there's a term, and I'll butcher the pronunciation of it, but miklovik is the term that he used to describe a hunter.
It's like hunter or the one who thinks.
And the way he described the cultural significance of a hunter when he was growing up in the late 80s in Czechoslovakia was that the hunter was the judge and jury.
So there was like a reverence around hunting, a reverence around a hunter because that hunter got the privilege in his culture to be the judge and jury for what animal gets taken out of the herd.
Making that very serious decision to say this animal is wounded, this animal is too old, this animal is young enough.
You've talked about it a lot on this podcast with some other smart hunters.
I think what hunting needs to become now that it isn't is...
This exalted status in our society where we're giving somebody with a hunting tag or a hunting license, you're giving somebody the opportunity to make a decision about something's life.
Well, you say exalted status, the problem is you don't have to earn that status, right?
It's like you can just go out and do it.
And one of the things that I've found out about hunting that is, I don't know if it's necessarily surprising, but it's very difficult to express is Without personal experience is that the consequences are so different than what you would think.
It's very difficult to do.
It's very physically exhausting.
The consequences of your actions are so grave and the rewards are so much different than any other way of acquiring food.
There's something that we, and I don't think this is a learned thing.
I think there's a connection to difficult to acquire mammals that goes deep in our DNA. And I think this is the reason why we, I think one of the reasons why we enjoy fishing is Is because those reward systems were put in place by people that survived by eating fish.
By all those generations of people that did catch fish, and that was how they ate that day.
That excitement lives inside of you.
And you spark that up when you get a big steelhead on the line.
So even though it's recreation to you, it's a thrilling recreation.
But then the consequences aren't as grave.
There's something about a wounded deer or a wounded elk that is so horrific and a merciful killing that it's such a relief that There's something powerful about it.
Like I told you, I shot that elk that it's out there that it walked four yards.
And I'm not exaggerating.
Four yards and fell over.
It was dead like that.
And the guys who were there, they said it was quicker than any rifle shot they had ever seen an elk die.
So when you would get a roast, even if you went to a butcher and you got a roast and you brought it home and you were making roast beef and you're cooking it, or your uncle shot a deer.
unidentified
When was the last time milk was delivered to your door?
And accelerated when railroads could take meat from the Great American West back to the cities in the East Coast.
And so those things accelerated, that technology and those things accelerated market hunting and the depredation of things like the whitetail deer and the buffalo as we all, famously the buffalo.
I'm just trying to flavor this in the context of most people that hear these conversations don't really know what we're talking about.
You're obviously well versed in this but for a lot of folks they don't understand that what happened was after the Civil War in particular There's a lot of soldiers that weren't fighting anymore in the war, and they got jobs as hunters, and they would just go out with no rules and shoot as many animals as they wanted.
The term we call that is market hunting, and market hunting means that they're out hunting for marketing the meat or marketing the hides or marketing parts of the animal to themselves.
There's more white-tailed here today than when Christopher Columbus landed on this continent.
Yeah.
At the time, at the turn of the century, at the height of the market hunting crisis in this country, there were enough whitetail deer that they probably would have been on the endangered species list or been close.
So the model of conservation that we then enacted, I don't want to say, I don't want to overexert this for people who have never heard of it, but if you look up, Jamie, the North American model of wildlife conservation, There was a ton of key figures in taking what America had at that point, which was basically the Wild West, where animals are dying at mass.
And with railroads and refrigeration, like we said, they're then feeding and clothing at that time the masses in the urban settings, you know, in New York and different places.
But as these centuries turned over and as you get into the teens and the 20s, guys like Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinochet, John Muir, there was a bunch of figures who essentially kicked off what is America's conservation movement.
The movement to conserve not only the wildlife populations but wild lands and wild waters and significant places in this country that we needed to protect.
Because around the turn of the century, we did not have that feeling of value as a society.
There wasn't like, we have to go value that thing we've never seen because you could never see it.
There's a law to say how many animals you can kill.
Just like that fellow in Missouri that's got to watch Bambi, if you kill more than you're supposed to kill, you're a poacher now, you've broken the law.
And the law is dictated in most really good states, like Montana, by wildlife biologists, conservationists, and people that understand the population, what's a healthy population for the area, and how to maintain a correct balance.
What we talked about was the actual science behind this one particular issue, but you grow to appreciate, when you hear someone like him talk, you grow to appreciate the complex nature of wildlife biology and maintaining the populations of animals, keeping them healthy, and making sure that these habitats are preserved.
Oh, it's impossible to really understand the scope of these, like you take Take Wyoming or Montana.
We tend to cordon off things we really care about.
Like, oh, grizzly bears and the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.
We really care about that.
That's the thing to talk about.
But really what we should be talking about is in really what most wildlife managers are looking at is this biodiversity and health of all wildlife populations.
And for whatever reason, we get it in our head that if, and I think this comes from this whole idea of trophy hunting, that if you kill something like that, you're only killing that thing because you have a little dick and it doesn't work and you want to be a big man, so you kill this thing that's better than you and you ruin this beautiful animal.
And in some ways I agree with that in comparison to other ways of hunting, right?
But at the same time, I can tell you this.
There's no more ethical, if the idea is to kill the animal, kill the right animal, especially in bear hunting, you're trying to kill a specific boar, a male bear, that is older, past breeding, anybody who's bear hunted will tell you one of the hardest things to judge while it's living is a bear.
Whether it's a male or a female, how big it is, how old it is, they are hard to judge.
So spotting and stalking, what we call spotting and stalking, which is like walking around, trying to find a bear, looking at it far away and getting close enough to kill it, whether it's with a rifle or a bow.
There's a lot of problems with what seems to be a fair way to achieve the pursuit of that animal.
There's a ton of problems around that because they're hard to judge.
You can come up on a sow, a female bear that has cubs in a bush, not see the cubs, not know that it's a sow, you're far away with a rifle, you crack, you kill it, two cubs run out of the bush.
That is not what you were trying to do.
You made a mistake there.
In the scenario where you are at a bait site, this animal comes in, it's walking around very close to where you are.
You get to judge it.
You get to look between its legs, see if it has a dick or not, and then determine it's the animal you want to dispatch and dispatch it ethically because it's closer to you.
A lot of times it hopefully doesn't know you're there rather than doing it from further away or having to stalk close to it.
So I say all this to say, like, this is complex.
What you think might be fair chase, what you think you might want to apply your own, you know, levels of fairness to, doesn't always equal the reality of pursuing that animal if the end game is to dispatch it fairly and kill it fairly.
You listen to my podcast, I got a guy named Cole Kramer who I've hunted on Kodiak Island with.
He's seen male bears chase down sows, run them into a cave, rip, I mean he's watched them rip cubs and rip them in half and eat them and spit them out.
You know, and once you've seen that, you're, you know, no matter how many bear cartoons we show, no matter how many times a bear has suspenders on and is talking to us, it doesn't change, no matter how many times we name a bear, it doesn't change the bareness of the animal.
I'm sure somebody way more educated than me can tell you exactly what's happening there, but we know, you and I both know, that they're killing those two, they're killing as many cubs as they can to get the sow to come back and heat.
Again, that guy Dushan, he was explaining in Czechoslovakia, to go hunting, you had to go take a class and learn flora and fauna and learn how many pheasant eggs were in a nest.
You're like a person who really thought hard about what you were eating and wanted to explore...
What is happening here?
And is there alternative ways?
So I think what non-hunters want from hunters is for us to say, listen, we get it's complex, we get it's a serious thing, and we're doing our best to unpack the moral and ethical entanglements in what we do.
And it's not easy.
I mean, we flush pheasants when we can shoot them on the ground, And that's the way we do it.
We call that fair chase.
But we don't like when an animal comes close enough to us and eats the corn and we can shoot it.
Yeah, and it always goes back to the reasons we do what we do.
But again, I would hope that everybody listening to this, lots of people do that don't hunt, that they would ask themselves, what do I expect from hunters?
What is the thing that I expect you to do to earn?
Because I very much feel as a hunter, I need to earn the respect of the non-hunter.
I have a duty to my hunting community to actively earn the respect of every non-hunter I run into.
And you have to be honest, and I think you have to address the complexity.
You have to realize that this is very complex.
But guess what, fuckface?
If you wear leather shoes, you've got leather clothes, you've got a leather interior in your car, you're eating cheeseburgers, you should probably shut the fuck up.
We breathe in, we breathe out, we consume the world around us.
That's the way it works.
As you always say, life eats life.
But the reality of the situation for me is I've tried to, not stray away from, but try to add on to the pragmatic arguments for hunting.
To try to examine the emotional issues we have around caring for the single animal over caring for the entire species of that animal, or in any case, subspecies of that animal.
That, to me, is something I've tried to add on.
Let's first start with pragmatic arguments.
You eat meat.
You're fucking killing things.
Why aren't you thinking as hard as I'm thinking about this?
I really would love to build a bridge with people to say, I care.
Let's say you're an anti-hunter.
And you love animals.
You're a vegan.
You've had a lot of conversation around vegans.
I'm a vegan.
I really care about animals.
They're sentient beings.
They all deserve life.
Put that person in front of me.
And then I'll stand right beside them and be like, I fucking agree with you.
I agree that all animals are sentient beings.
I agree that they all deserve life.
And then I go to preserve that life for that animal.
That's what I go to do.
We start, me and that anti-hunter, I'm a hunter, start at the same point.
And over time, whether it's mass media or just the way hunting has been marketed and the poor PR agent that we've had, we've kind of walked away from each other.
We both care about animals and we've kind of walked away from each other.
And over time, we've been unwilling to turn around and face each other and be like, remember when we started out thinking we all value these animals?
We value their lives.
We all care about them.
Hunting is just a version, our version, and it's worked.
Given that model of conservation we were talking about, it's worked.
For the white-tailed deer and the mallard duck, it's worked.
There's more than ever.
Um, I'm just doing it a different way than you've chosen to do it.
I'm doing it in a more proactive way than you've chosen, you know, to think about it.
And so, I would, if a vegan came up to me, I'd be like, listen man, we have more similarities, in my opinion, than we do differences.
We've just chosen the difference, the one big fat thing that's different.
Okay, actual consciously killing or buying something that's actually consciously killed is different than if you buy – look, if you buy soy, if you eat tofu, there is a fact.
And that fact is there has to be a lot of animal displacement in order to make that amount of field available to grow soy in.
Yeah.
Or to grow soybeans in.
It's just a fact and then when you talk to anybody that's ever seen what happens when a crop gets hit by a combine and then the vultures start flying overhead There's a reason because there's a bunch of little fucking squirrels and rabbits and all sorts of shit that just got ground up and anything else that gets stuck Yeah.
In that field as those gigantic machines come whirring by.
And that's how, when you're talking about large-scale agriculture, that's how things are harvested.
Of course.
They're not plucked one by one.
Now, if you're one of those people that has an organic garden and you pluck one by one, you take your rotten apple cores and your fucking orange peels and you throw it all in a compost pile with some dead leaves and you use that as fertilizer, You're going to run out of nitrogen because you need fish, bitch.
It's really weird, but the cycle is that dead animals actually fuel the plants that you consume.
So if you're a person that is, you know, even if you're eating wild plants, right, you want to eat some wild plants, I guarantee you some dead fucking squirrels and rats and pigeons and anything else went to fertilize that shit.
And I would tell those folks, I respect the shit out of that.
And I'm trying to do...
I'm trying to take...
My own, this into my own hands, and actively go and do the thing that I know to be enriching to my life, to make me a better person, to make me a more skilled person, to give me more perspective on the world.
But at the end of the day, the byproducts of all that activity is a healthier ecosystem and more wildlife, because that's proven via the model we've said, and I feed my family with that.
And I'm just trying to do what you're doing in a more tangible way.
You're hands-off, I'm hands-on.
Is the way that I would say that.
And I respect the hands-off.
I respect, like, I'm cognizant of what's happening here and I'm trying to make it better.
This is true because eggs are full of cholesterol and saturated fat.
And because every year over 100,000 people in the U.S. contract salmonella from eggs, they cannot legally be advertised as healthy or safe or nutritious.
Not only is it true, it's from 2010. Maybe it's different in 2018. 142,000 people in the United States are infected each year with salmonella enteritis from chicken eggs and about 30 die.
By the way, if you eat chicken raw, you get salmonella too, stupid.
You're not supposed to eat it raw.
You're supposed to cook it.
Okay.
One egg has only 75 calories with 7 grams of high-quality protein, 5 grams of fat, and 1.6 grams of saturated fat, along with iron, vitamins, minerals, and carotenoids.
The egg is a powerhouse of disease-fighting nutrients like lutein and zeaxithin.
I ran into him three years ago at a concert and went backstage, and we were chatting, and he had huge ice packs on each one of his knees, and he had just had surgery on one.
I don't know what the surgery was for, but he was clearly in pain, and he just looked run down.
But then we went out in the crowd, he came on stage, and he looked like a 25-year-old rock guy.
I mean, when the time comes and the lights are on...
That guy goes after it.
And people are like, so you support the racist things you said?
No, unfortunate.
Whatever the fuck he said that you didn't like, that either he shouldn't have said, or maybe you didn't understand what he meant, or maybe it's out of context.
Anything that hurts anybody's feeling, unfortunate, and I don't support it.
But guess what?
We all have unfortunate things about us.
That's just a fact of being a fucking human being.
And one of the parts...
One of the things that we're doing when we're screaming out and calling out someone and we want someone deplatformed and dismissed and never to be heard from again, part of us are worried that that's going to happen to us.
We're worried that we would ever exhibit that sort of reprehensible behavior or language, and we want to put a stop to it in ourselves, in other people.
We want to eliminate it from our society and culture.
We want to do it harshly and ruthlessly, and we're terrified that it's going to be done to us.
Should I be on this podcast right now and have said something in the last couple hours that was terrible and like I would hope the folks that know me would know that like this is a mistake and as long as I own up to the mistake and say hey it was in the moment I apologize.
You had a little bit A little bit of right brain.
My brain was going.
Yeah.
I apologize for that thing.
And it's not...
That doesn't define me because that's a very scary and slippery slope to get down.
It's like one moment in your life can't define you.
They fucked up and they should never be heard from again.
And also, I think, and this is my own bias, I think it's a product of a shitty way of distributing information that has existed all of our lives until recently.
And I feel like the long-form conversation...
It's the only way to get to know somebody.
And when I sat down with Ted, after the three hours of talking, I'm like, I like this guy.
Well, like you always say, I love when I get off of a good podcast, when there's an episode of The Hunting Collective and I sit down with somebody and they're like, oh my god, this person is what they just brought to my life in two hours.
Yeah, who better than you to say that and be like, this has informed the way that I think, the way that it's impacted our society and our culture, this show?
And there's no way to get out of a long-form conversation.
You can't say, like, hey, I've got to go now.
I'm out of my depth.
All the things I said about myself, how great I was before this, now you're opening up this chasm where I don't know the things I said I knew.
But I could, for a 30-second or one-minute TV spot, I could train, I could read the lines, and I could come off like I look like I know what I'm talking about.
Is that I would do a show about ethics around, like, hunting and the outdoors and things.
But it would just be called Drunk Ethics, where I would just be drinking with people and having intelligent conversations that would increasingly get...
Like I'd much rather the stress of an airport with a kid and a wife is not, I'd much rather just drive it and take the time because you get this like connection.
If you can get the phones out of the way for the passengers, you just get this connection that you wouldn't get otherwise.
So, like, you have been married for quite some time, and we were talking about prior, when we were shooting our bows out there, like, there's things you've done to make it work.
Like, you like your wife, and she likes you, and it works.
And it's been working for a long time.
And, like, the percentages say that's, what'd you say, 50-50 is...
And what that does to children, too, because I told my dad, I wrote my dad this letter recently.
This is getting real deep.
Hour number three of the podcast.
We're getting real deep.
We're pro-nuance.
I sent it to my dad, but he won't listen to this book.
I wrote this letter that was like, listen man, because I had seen recently his developing relationship with my son.
It put this thought in my head that my relationship with my dad, his caring for me, the fact that he stayed with my mom and they developed this place for me to grow and nurture me and allow me to become a person in that environment.
It was a north star for me when I left that environment.
I never wondered What my path was going to be.
I always could look up and be like that bond that I developed with my family, their love for me is like the thing that I'm always, you know, I'm looking back to but also looking forward to because that's what defines me.
And regardless of what I do, I can always fall back on that, that my dad loves me, my mom loves me, I love them, and I grew up like with this strength of soul because I knew, I don't have, I have friends that came from the same place that I did, same town I did in Maryland, and That OD'd on heroin.
They lived in the same little suburbia community that I did.
They had parents that were the same age.
They went to the same high school.
They lived in the same environment.
They went down one way.
I went down another.
And I truly do feel that me going down that way is the way that my parents built this structure around me that was always about that bond and that love and the things that they provided.
Me being able to later on in life see how fortunate I was to have that drove me to not fail and to not let whatever other failures creep into my life around.
Maybe I'll take drugs.
I have a lot of friends.
A place I grew up in, Maryland, there's a lot of people that succumb to drugs and alcohol and things like that.
Yeah, and listen, I'm not trying to generalize in any way about any one situation.
My situation was that I could always, I felt like, and I told my dad at some point in my life where I said, I went to him and I was like maybe 20 or 19 and I said, I'm going to get all A's now.
I'm done fucking around.
Because I was a C-plus student.
I was the dumbest kid in the smart class through high school.
And there was a time in my life where I realized that I had to pay back what my parents and my grandparents and my family had done for me.
Because I knew that they'd given me something that not everybody had.
And I was like, I know that I have to pay this back.
And I've got to stop messing around now and go and do something.
And unless you introduce that child to hard work and the rewards of hard work in their life You're probably gonna set them up for some kind of failure.
I was Extremely fortunate that I found martial arts.
Yeah, I was at my biggest struggle in my teenage years And I found something that was insanely difficult, but the highs the rewards were Like nothing I'd ever experienced in my life So I realized like, okay, to get really good at something, you have to be able to put in the kind of energy that most people are not willing to do.
And that's what separates you from them.
To find a discipline, put a massive amount of energy and focus into that discipline, and then be obsessed with it.
Then the rewards come.
If you analyze it correctly and pursue it with everything that you have, you're going to figure out how to get better as long as you don't get really fucked up along the way.
And there was a real possibility of that.
So what I realized early on, and very lucky, was that all these people that I saw around me that were engaging in all this really risky behavior, really crazy violence and drugs, what they were doing was looking for thrills.
That's what they were doing.
But they were looking for thrills in an easily accessible way.
It didn't require discipline.
It didn't require years and years of training and focus and commitment.
It didn't require that.
What I was doing was something, and I was just lucky that I found this thing.
I'm tired of this dude giving me the fucking tough guy look, and I've got to go the other way because I'm scared.
I just didn't want to be that.
I didn't want to be that.
So that...
Carried on with me for my whole life.
Yeah, but I've seen so many people that didn't find a discipline and they just bounce around like a cork at sea forever.
Yeah, man It's one of the reasons why I push it so much I was like whatever the fuck it is that you can do that you like to do that's competitive like one of the things about competition is not just that you prove I'm the fucking man know what it is is hard and It's fucking...
Competition is one of the hardest things.
Because if someone's trying to do it and you're trying to do it, it's like, how much do you want it?
And I felt that what I'd been given was significant enough to my life that I owed it.
I owed it something.
I owed it to drive toward whatever happiness I could find. - Right. - And it was that, the stability of my family life And it wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good.
And rather than sink into that, I was like, I'm going to just push through that and use that as fuel.
Yeah, I mean, if you listen to this podcast and you never hunted, like, I would encourage you to go and find these people on the internet, on social medias and things, and understand that each one of them represents, in my opinion, a layer of hunting, right?
John Dudley represents, to me, I mean, he's a wonderful human being, but, like, at his core on social media, he represents the expert archer.
And one of the things when I got into it that was interesting that Steve said to me, he said, you're going to really like this because it has so many layers to it.
It's like there's a lot of room to learn and grow.
I mean, you get lucky a couple years in a row, but eventually you're going to run into some sort of a situation where the wind catches you or something goes wrong.
We've talked about this many times with target panic.
That's what that is.
That's the realization of the anticipation of the moment and the consequences, the understanding of the potential negative consequences, and they're overwhelming, and they haunt you.
So you can equate the consequences in your mind to be successful because at some level you have to, right?
It has to be an important motion for you to really care to do it right.
But there's real...
And that's why I say, like, one of the reasons why I continue to do what I do is because this thing is complex, and I see other people's confusion around it, and I appreciate their confusion, and I understand that it's hard to get.
And I desperately want to find ways to, like, to make it easier.
To someone who doesn't know what it is, one thing that's going on is you just accomplished something that's insanely hard to do and you're relieved that the animal died.
And that relief manifests itself in exuberance.
You high-five, you hug, you go, fuck yeah!
You're happy that it happened, that it died quickly.
Grip and grin just means you're with the animal, you're gripping its antlers or gripping a part of the animal and you're smiling and you're happy that you did that.
What I think...
What I say about Gripping Grins is that it's been weaponized, right?
Everybody that's listening to this has likely seen...
One example, but that's what ends up happening around these images.
Now, when I posted this thing the other day, half people would say, like, don't stop doing what you're doing if you feel it's right and you feel...
Respectful as a hunter and you're telling the entire story and part of that story is to sit behind the animal and smile and signify how great you feel about it, then go for it.
Exactly.
That's what you should be doing.
Don't let someone else change your behavior.
The other side of things is like every hunter has a chance to impact somebody that doesn't go hunting.
Every hunter, there's 11 million hunters, they have a chance to impact the millions and millions of folks who aren't exposed to hunting at any point in their lives.
And so, I can really see both things, but for me, it's an issue of, if I want hunting to continue in the way that it does, and I want my social media privileges to make hunting better, I would probably choose not to put that out there unless it was in the context I felt very comfortable with.
You're not getting the full context of where the food came from or how the animal was raised and how it was killed and turned into a burger.
You're just getting the burger real quick.
And this is like what you're getting with the photo.
You're just getting a photo.
You're not getting the full context of the experience that led up to you shooting this deer that might be like this 200-inch mule deer that's the deer of a lifetime.
You have this giant smile on your face because you can't believe you outwitted this old monarch of the forest and put an arrow in his ribcage.
But if I was to say, like, I always, I said in the very beginning of the whole me not liking grip and grins conversation, I said, if someone had said, Ben, can you give that up for the betterment of hunting?
Like, could you just give that one thing up that's traditionally, it's been done for decades, where a guy kills a thing and sits in front of it.
Would you be willing to give that up if, for some way, shape, or form, even if you didn't agree with it, it made for a better hunter-to-non-hunter relationship?
I'd be like, fuck yeah, man.
I'm down for that.
And so I think that's what the conversation is now, is trying to determine, is that the best thing ever?
I think for anybody who's listened to this three-hour conversation and sort of gets an understanding of where we're coming from, they'll appreciate that there's a lot of thought involved here.
For anybody that sees that photograph of you smiling with a dead bear, they're not going to appreciate that.
It's going to be real quick, and they're going to have this...
How many people are willing to sit here and listen to this whole conversation to get an understanding, rather, of how your mind works and how you think about things?
Not nearly as many...
We'll look at a photo and go, that guy's a cunt.
And that's the Ricky Gervais tactic, right?
As much as I do enjoy Ricky's comedy, and when he looks at these things, first of all, that fucking giraffe one, that giraffe one was super complicated.
And Glenn Greenwald and all these other people, they sicced a lot of people on that lady.
That giraffe had to be killed.
That giraffe apparently had killed at least two or three young bulls.
And it was a non-viable male.
And they made it out like it was this rare giraffe.
With Cecil, they enacted real change, but unfortunately, a lot of it has been negative.
What people don't understand is how much it costs the people that live there.
And about these hunting concessions get closed down, and then these animals go wild, and then what happens is poachers just take over, and a lot of the animals get decimated the same way they did in the United States before market hunting was outlawed.
A concession, and this happened, I want to say it happened in like the late 70s and early 80s in Africa, where there was, you know, especially antelope and African antelope and all these other species that were there.
They were not at the brink of extinction, but they were suffering.
A concession is essentially a bunch of landowners get together and be like, let's put a fence around our stuff to keep poachers out and keep the animals in.
In Africa, especially South Africa, when concessions became prevalent, wildlife populations skyrocketed.
You know, tripled, doubled, times ten.
Hundreds of thousands of antelope that weren't there before.
I mean, the number is so different in the amount of money they contribute.
This is where people have to understand.
Because they'll throw some numbers at you.
Like, you know, 5,000 people go to safaris.
Only 2,000 people hunt.
Yeah, sure.
But the 2,000 people that hunt...
They hunt and they spend way more fucking money.
It costs a lot of money to shoot a lion.
It costs like $50,000.
As much as you find lion hunting distasteful, you have to understand that if you remove it, it's like when you take a dictator out and then you have like a power vacuum.
Well, and it's just like, there are just some on-the-ground things that happen too around, look, if you want to do wildlife viewing, you gotta cut roads.
If you want to do wildlife viewing, people are going to pay less.
So it means you have to have more people encroaching on these places where these wild animals are.
What's going on right now in Africa with the exact area that Cecil the lion happened in is that they had to call 200 lions.
They had to shoot 200 lions, which means they had to pay someone to go and shoot these lions because their population had gotten so high they were decimating the ungulate population.
So all the antelope and all the different animals that the lions were hunting, they were destroying them.
And the way they kill them is they have to hire people, and they have to use public funds, these tax dollars, and they hire a guy with dogs to go catch these fucking cats and kill them.