Steven Rinella shares childhood hallucinations from eating tobacco and debates parenting risks—balancing wilderness exposure (grizzlies, mountain lions) with YouTube’s algorithmic dangers like QAnon. He contrasts rural Montana upbringing with urban concerns, praising Meat Eater’s raw storytelling while critiquing demonetization policies that stifle hunting content. Military guilt drives his push for son to enlist, but Rogan counters with the podcast’s enduring appeal and Rinella’s niche media success, where authenticity thrives despite censorship battles. [Automatically generated summary]
Because they're all workers, so they don't smoke because it keeps their hands free.
Um...
But I was explaining to them my version, and I feel like it traces to when I was in fifth grade, we had to make agricultural maps of the United States of America, and you had to glue the product, so you get to South Dakota and you glue a little corn kernel.
And for whatever reason, for Virginia, we had tobacco, and someone had brought in, I can't even remember what it was, it must have been loose leaf or plug, and Me and my buddy, I don't even know if this dude remembers, me and my buddy Stanley Johnson ate.
We took it out the playground and ate something.
Dude, I was, I was, I hallucinated twice as a child.
I don't know how into history they are, but when you just get into the history of people and the history of people in the United States, those books are fascinating books in that regard.
Mark Twain is widely regarded as the first stand-up comedian.
So, well, recently there's been some controversy introduced into this, but Mark Twain had worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, so he had a very informed perspective for all of his characters.
A riverboat required 12 feet of water.
You know the big paddle wheel riverboats?
Required 12 feet of water for safe passage.
So, there would be a guy up on the front of the boat who'd have a rope with a weight on the end and every fathom, a fathom is a nautical term for six feet, he'd have a knot tied in the rope every fathom.
And he'd throw the weight out, the weight hits the bottom, and you see how deep the water is.
So, he describes like you're going through the fog or in the dark and there's some guy up front going, Mark Twain...
Some other guy, we recently, someone sent in to us, because we were discussing this on our podcast, and a guy sent us in this book.
I can't remember who the hell wrote the book, but he was saying the real thing is, Mark Twain, when he was out, I think when he was out visiting one of the silver mines in Nevada, maybe, he took to go into a bar, and the bar would log how many drinks you had on a chalkboard.
Okay?
So it's like your tab.
In this book, this guy was saying what happened was Twain, whose birth name was Samuel Clemens, Twain would come in and order two drinks by saying...
I guess he was still alive, so I guess he responded to it according to this article.
What did he say?
It's the nom de plume of Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news for the New Orleans McCain, and he died in 1963, and he no longer needed that signature.
The states that, like Washington, used to have a hound season, and they lost it to the animal rights activists, but they still maintain their regular hunting season.
Yeah, the states that don't do anything about them, like California, then you get a case like a couple weeks ago, a five-year-old kid got bitten by a mountain lion in Calabasas.
His mom had to punch the thing in the face.
And, you know, the kids in the hospital, the thing bit his fucking head.
Two summers ago, you and I might have talked about this, two summers ago, Oregon, Washington had its first mountain lion fatality in state history in the same summer.
Oregon had its first mountain lion fatality in like 98 years in the same summer.
And every time he gets to a good piece of bedding cover, like a grown-up clear-cut or a canyon, he gets to a good piece of bedding cover, he stops and turns his predator collar on.
You can do a mouth-blown predator call, which mimics the sound, typically, of a dying animal.
So, if you just went into a sporting goods store and walked up to a shelf and bought a mouth-blown predator call, it would probably mimic the sound of a dying rabbit.
You can get, like, jackrabbit, cottontail rabbit, and it's just a horrific sound.
Then they have electronic callers that have these massive libraries.
So I have an electronic caller.
I have a Lucky Duck electronic caller.
And it's got a library of dozens and dozens of sounds.
So it's like you can have it play woodpeckers in distress.
I mean, anything.
Oh, yeah.
It's like house cat noises, which is attractive to urban coyotes.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, a vast library of sounds.
So he would go and turn a predator call around.
And a lot of times, like fawn distress calls, it's just like loud, excitable noises that are attractive to predators.
Yeah.
And eventually he wrote in that he said he sat down.
Turned his collar on.
And, you know, I actually say he turned his collar on.
I don't know if he was using an electronic, like a battery-powered collar, or a mouth-blown collar, but either way, he said, you know, within a minute, there's the lion.
And the Lions were kind of coming from behind off to his right side, and he's not certain whether they were going to pass by his right shoulder on the way to the real turkey, or if they were going to him.
What else is funny that just happened this spring, he has this on video.
He shoots a turkey.
Well, he has the Lions on video, too.
He's got them on his Instagram, but he shoots a turkey, and And all of a sudden, I mean, no soon does that turkey get hit that a coyote has it and is running away.
One of my buddies, Seth, I think they called in three coyotes turkey hunting in one day this spring.
I've had black bears, bobcats...
Sorry, a black bear, a bobcat, many coyotes come in to turkey calls, but I have never had the lion thing, but I got a few friends that have done lions, and I feel that that is the greatest.
That term, renewable resources, like, that's a good term.
Like, you use that term as a hunter and as a conservationist, but...
Most people...
The problem is like the people that vote, right?
Like a good example is British Columbia, right?
Because British Columbia bans grizzly hunting because they think grizzly hunting is trophy hunting.
Meanwhile, they're like overrun with grizzlies.
They have a lot of grizzlies and they would manage them by controlling their population and would...
You know, it would keep people from getting attacked, it would keep livestock from getting attacked, and the encounters were frequent.
Like, my friend Mike lives up there, and he's like, there is no shortage of grizzly bears.
Like, they're all over the place up here.
He goes, and now what they've done is they've stopped people from managing them because the people in the cities, who never have any encounters with them whatsoever, think that it's unsightly to hunt them.
But they allow black bear hunting.
Because black bear seems to be something that people actually do eat.
But then you can't gut them.
Because if you gut them, they're worried that people are shooting them just for their gallbladders.
If you're going to go around and determine what we should be allowed to hunt based on what might kill you if we don't hunt it, I would be worried about the future of duck hunting.
I'm more inclined to be like, in my desire to sort of bracket things...
I would say if you have sustainable, harvestable populations of wildlife, and you have a public interest in exploiting that wildlife, and it can be exploited without long-term detriment to the species, that should be allowed.
I was very sad to see what happened in BC, and I think it's emotionally charged.
I think you're seeing the same thing.
You see routinely the same thing around wolves.
Just this morning, someone shared an article.
Montana just rewrote some of their wolf hunting rules and expanded some areas.
And they used to have, outside of Yellowstone National Park, they had hunting districts that had these very strict quotas.
They liberalized wolf hunting in Montana because we have a lot of wolves.
And there's a pack in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley, there's a pack of 24 wolves.
And three of those wolves this year have been killed outside the park.
So now you can expect renewed calls for the park's jurisdiction to extend further away from the edges of the park in order to protect that because people will routinely call them Yellowstone's wolves rather than Montana's wolves.
I was watching a video yesterday of a woman who rear-ended this guy in a Lamborghini and then got out and started screaming and yelling at him that he hit her car and the guy was laughing.
Did you see that video?
They show the video from the gas station.
The guy's like, what the fuck are you talking?
And then she gets mad at him for being white.
But she's white.
Isn't she white?
Kind of white?
I don't know.
She looked white.
But I mean, it's like a literal crazy person.
Like maybe just trying to make up an excuse for why she was in a car accident.
But she clearly takes a turn, slams into this guy's car.
Yeah, and in conversation with the man that shot his leg, the man said to him, when you lifted your foot up on that stump, it looked like a gobbler going into full strut.
When I hear something like that, though, to be honest with you, one of my first—I have twin feelings— One of condemnation of the individual and one of like some level of, you know, like a level of sympathy.
So when I first heard that, a wildlife biologist in Arizona named James Heffelfinger sent me some information about that.
When I first heard it, I was like, yeah man, but maybe it's something that was always there, but you weren't looking for it, or there's a false marker.
And he wrote back with a bunch of information on it, and they had all these serums That they've banked from over the years.
If I was in charge of examining this, a thing that I would be curious to look at would be captive cervids, which are in very close proximity to people.
unidentified
Which is also how they spread CWD. Yeah, CWD can be spread that way.
They just had another deer farm that had shipped 100 and some CWD positive deer around the country.
you could see that that would be a case where you had captive deer in very close proximity to humans, and then those deer are rubbing noses through the fence with wild deer.
I don't know, man, you walk out to your, you know, you're in the suburbs somewhere where you got deer hanging out in your yard, like deer hang out in my yard.
Yeah.
And you walk out to your car in the morning and sneeze and some fricking deer walks by, I don't know.
Because then, you know, if you come up to me, then you're not supposed to go to school, and, like, I'm going to go out there, and they're, like, upset, and they're making artwork for me and bringing me food.
And after a few days, they're just like, the fuck's that guy?
It is interesting about the zoo animals, because the zoo animals may be close proximity, but all of it outside, and then also no real physical contact with zoo animals.
You'd go over your friend's house so you could get chicken pox.
If you had chicken pox, everybody would go and get chicken pox.
Let's get it over with.
Now we're scared of something that doesn't even harm kids.
Zookeepers first noticed last week that the animals were displaying symptoms including decreased energy and appetite and coughing and sneezing.
The animals are now being treated with anti-inflammatories, anti-nausea medication, antibiotics, the latter of which is intended to address a likely secondary bacterial pneumonia.
You know, I wonder how much, like, if you could get a gauge of the overall anxiety of the world, how much it decreased yesterday when Facebook was down.
Yeah, it blows my mind that for a long time, it would be that you were supposed to regard those individuals responsible for social media platforms, we were supposed to regard them as these heroes.
If you watch the Social Dilemma, the documentary, The Social Dilemma.
That guy, Tristan Harris, has been on the podcast and sort of explained a lot of it to us.
He's going to come back on again and we're going to talk to him some more about it because it's...
It's very disturbing because what they've done with these algorithms and they knew what was happening while they were doing it is they've accentuated arguments.
They've accentuated all the division between people and that it's kind of like an unstoppable domino effect.
It seems like at this point in time there's a clear division in our country that didn't exist in 2007. If you go back to the invention of the first iPhone and when social media started coming about, if you go from there to now, the change is palpable.
It's very, very real.
And then when you add in the anxiety of a pandemic and real adversity, which is what people have encountered over the last 18 months, now it's through the roof.
I hear that, but I know YouTube's not a social media platform, but I had a rare moment of just nothing going on this morning because I woke up in a hotel and I wasn't at work or messing with my kids.
And so I was just dicking around on YouTube.
And I was kind of pleasantly surprised to be like that YouTube understands that I like to watch Norm MacDonald videos and I like to watch stuff about catching bobcats.
People think that they do it because they want to make you mad.
It's not.
They do whatever you're interested in.
Like my friend Ari, he did this experiment where he went on YouTube and only looked at puppy videos.
And all it would show him was videos of puppies.
Like every time he went on YouTube, it's puppies.
But when you get into the comments...
That's when you find out that YouTube is a social media platform.
Not just that, but creeps have used comments.
They've gone to certain websites, and this is how they've caught people for sex trafficking.
And there was a bunch of these weird fucking kid videos.
I don't know if you're aware of these.
They don't understand what was going on.
They don't know how these things were made or why they were made, but there was a bunch of kid-friendly looking videos.
So it'd be like Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse, but then they would get drunk.
And, like, fall down and bust their head open.
It was really weird.
But these videos would show up in, like, if a kid was looking at cartoons, and if you're one of those parents that just, like, gives your kid an iPad, just go ahead.
Your kid would watch normal cartoon videos, and then all of a sudden, in the feed, because of the algorithm, these, uh, it was, like, Spider-Man was a bunch of them.
Yeah, they were using these comments like they would meet up on certain videos and they would communicate inside the comments of those videos with code.
And that's how they got away with communicating publicly about certain things.
And I don't know if they were child porn or what they were involved with, but I remember there was a lot of people that got in trouble for that.
And then YouTube's trying to figure out, like, what are these videos?
They seemed kind of normal, and then the cartoon characters would get drunk, and they would always wind up getting busted in the head with a bottle and blood everywhere, and you're like, what the fuck?
That's my only thing I knew growing up was like Wayne's World on the SNL was a public access show, but then we actually had public access, and that's where wild shit was happening after 10 o'clock.
And then the feeling of hypocrisy that you get of things that meant that when you were young, things that meant a lot to you and felt very authentic to you, like freedom, freedom to consume what media you wanted.
Freedom to talk to who you wanted to talk to.
Freedom to go where you wanted to go.
That later you're in a position where you're denying...
Denying someone something that you really wanted in an honest way when you were young.
Like, he lets his kids walk home from New York City.
And, you know, he was talking about one time his kid got a little lost and they were really, really scared.
You know, it was like they were trying to find him and it's like a terrifying feeling.
But that ultimately the development that the child receives from Being able to navigate the world on their own is very valuable, but there's a risk.
And so you have to weigh this risk versus reward.
And the opposite of that is people who helicopter parent, and we know how that turns out, right?
That's not good when you overly coddle your kid and your kid is not exposed to any sort of adversity.
Or any sort of danger or any sort of adventure or any sort of independence that it could be stifling.
And then it takes a long time for the child to develop outside of that parental environment once they become free.
There's different kinds of kids, right?
There's kids that grow up in bad neighborhoods with very little parental guidance and they're 18. And then there's kids who grow up completely coddled and completely protected and insulated and they're 18. And then they run into each other.
You know, yeah, it's just like, we all find our ways to be, you know, we all find our ways to, like, try to find some way to be comfortable and try to find some way to not be overdoing something or underdoing something.
And then dependent upon the kind of parenting that you received.
It's not that it is a deal breaker, like you have to have sports in your life or you'll never be good at things.
I think you have to have difficult things that you're attempting to do.
You know, I think that's really beneficial for kids and for adults.
I mean, I think that's a key part of my life is lessons learned through adversity and trying new things is a very important part of that because it forces you to really be a beginner.
One of the things I found in martial arts, like when you would get guys who are world champion kickboxers and they start entering into MMA, they're really good at one aspect of fighting, which is kickboxing.
And then they would have to learn wrestling and jiu-jitsu.
They didn't like it because the wrestling and jiu-jitsu, the problem was they were getting fucked up a lot.
So their development as a mixed martial artist was always limited.
They always get to a certain level and they could never pass that because they never really developed the skills required to excel in the overall thing.
When you see foster kids that don't have love, they don't have a family, they don't have real parents, or maybe even worse, they know their parents are out there, but their parents don't give a fuck about them and someone else is raising them.
Because sometimes when you get a shitty hand of cards, you develop adversity and determination that a person who's been coddled doesn't have and that allows you to excel wildly beyond anything that you're capable of.
Which is a hard thing for me as a parent because all of my favorite friends are fucked up.
Like they all had fucked up childhoods and it made for the most interesting people.
But, you know, they're horrific.
Like my friend Joey Diaz, one of my favorite people that's ever lived, found his mom dead on the floor of the kitchen when he was 13 high on acid.
It's like with all things in life, there's a balance that can be achieved.
But sometimes through imbalance, you develop spectacular abilities.
You know, like some of the greatest fighters, like Mike Tyson is a great example, right?
Literally didn't experience any love in his life until he was like 13 years old and he was adopted by this guy, Cus D'Amato, who just happened to be one of the great boxing trainers in history.
And through this guy's mentoring and also through hypnosis, the guy hypnotized him to be this assassin inside the ring, he got his love through destroying people.
And obviously that worked out really well.
I mean, you don't have a Mike Tyson.
You don't make a Mike Tyson if birthdays are all on time and everyone's buying you a nice Christmas gift and you never run into bullies at school.
You don't get a Mike Tyson.
Everybody worshipped Mike Tyson.
When we were kids and Mike Tyson fought, Jesus, that was a big deal.
I guess I was in my early 20s when Mike Tyson was in his prime, holy shit, was that a big deal.
When you watch a Tyson fight, I mean, everybody knew when Tyson was fighting.
It was like you were going to see a public execution.
You don't create a person like that unless things go badly.
Yeah, and I think that to go into it planning on, if you went into it thinking you were going to manipulate that system to produce a spectacular child, it would be, like, ripe for backfiring.
Well, for what you do and, you know, for the company Meat Eater and for First Light, like, there's no better place for you to live.
I mean, Montana's just an amazing place to live and run a company like your company, you know, that makes Netflix shows and videos and writes books and, you know, it's like, it couldn't be better.
I did some ads for Subaru and got this car for free.
The way it worked, for some reason, it was these branded history things, okay?
So I got to pick 13 things around the country that I thought were interesting.
And one was like, I did this thing about this guy that there's this mountain range and a town and a path and a national forest all named after this dude.
And all that's really known about him is he got killed by a grizzly bear.
So there's the town of Lolo, there's Lolo Creek, there's Lolo Pass, there's Lolo National Forest, and all they know is there's like a dude that lived on a tributary to that creek, and he got killed by a grizzly.
That's like really all I know about the guy.
Anyways, they did a thing about where they think he might have been buried.
I did all these other things.
It was like this thing, it appeared on, it was like these ads that were on History Channel.
And I would go and check out whatever, something that was interesting, but there'd be like these driving shots, right?
Where you like drive there in a Subaru.
So the way that stuff works is you have to buy the car just for insurance purposes.
Like you buy the car from them and like invoice them for the car purchase.
So- This dude, he got into that vintage denim stuff, but he also would find old, old clothes and sell them to collectors, sell them to people making films, looking for period clothing.
And I drove around with him in Nevada and wrote a profile on him.
I think it was called the Brotherhood of the Very Expensive Pants.
It's like we went to this guy and this guy had just junk everywhere and it was like he had a lot of junk and also be like there's the old cabin where grandpa lived.
There's the old rundown house where my mom and dad lived and here's my house and everything was exactly they just would move across the property and build a new structure and leave the old ones in place so he's dying to get in here and look around.
And this guy had a t-shirt.
This guy had an outdoor spigot that was dripping.
For whatever reason, he tied a t-shirt around it to deflect the drip or whatever to prevent erosion underneath there.
He went through all the channels and talked to the ranch manager, got a hold of the ranch, or the rancher's like, have a look, let me know what you find.
Goes in there and pulls out.
This had to be a very old, I can't remember what kind.
It was like some other kind of jean.
It wasn't old Levi.
Pulled out a set of pants that had been plugging that chimney up.
So, I don't know, there's like three feet of pipe above these pans.
And it looked like tie-dye because that part that was up, just being exposed to the rain and whatever limited amount of sunshine ever shined straight down that chimney.
He'd like bleach those pants white.
But he pulled those pants out and there they were.
And they find stuff like, people used to make log homes and chink, you know, chinking between the logs.
To get inspiration for, you know, like whatever, like Dickies, Carhartt, whatever, like different designers would go and look around his stuff to get inspiration for it.
I think all those old jeans were made out of hemp.
I think before the 1930s, before hemp became a problem when they made marijuana illegal, then you have like a stamp to grow hemp, and then it become phased out with the cotton gin.
You know, well, the decorticator actually was what brought it back.
I think that was in the 1930s.
But all before that, canvas itself Came from cannabis.
Like canvas was actually made with hemp.
Like even like the Mona Lisa was painted on hemp.
It's a far more durable fabric.
And if we had hemp jeans, they'd be so much more durable.
I had a friend of mine, my friend Todd McCormick, used to grow marijuana.
He was one of the first guys ever to be arrested for it when they had medical marijuana, but they were still charging people federally because it was medical in California.
But when you would go to jail, you would realize once you went to court that you couldn't bring up medical marijuana because you were in a federal trial.
And the federal trials, they wouldn't even recognize it.
You were just a drug dealer to them.
And he was like, oh my god, this is a crazy racket.
I'm getting railroaded here.
Because you couldn't even say, no, I was growing it for medical purposes in the state where it's legal medically.
So he had a stalk of this stuff.
And you would pick it up, and it would be hard like oak, but light like balsa wood.
It was the wildest shit.
You'd realize there's nothing like that fiber on earth.
And when you take that fiber and break it down, the paper, they would make hemp paper, and it's crazy.
Where our office is, like, my wife drives a car, and all of a sudden where our office is, there's all these bumper stickers that say, like, Ronella drives a Subaru on people's cars, but not my car.
And so it's like someone, like, observing, you know, someone in this area, like, observing what my wife drives and, like, printing a bumper sticker.
It was some dude that worked at, it was some event, like, it was, like, these dudes that worked at Sitka, and then I eventually found out which one of them did it, and he, like, tried to get a job with us, and that was, like, his, like, vengeance thing, which is, like, bizarre, man.
And when people get rejected, I mean, imagine being a woman, you know, experiencing, like, some guy tries to hit on you, and you reject him, and then this guy's stalking you.
He's like, his whole family's been loggers for a million years.
He's the first one to not be a logger in western Washington, you know.
And he started out, he's like trained as an engineer, but started out making game calls.
And he's just an incredible guy.
But I hunted with him this year and I've never seen, you know, I've been, like I used to think Yanni was like, I used to think Yanni was like God when it came to elk calling.
And Yanni hunts with Phelps and Yanni's like, dude, I'm like, I felt like an idiot, like a child.
I haven't felt that because I feel that primarily it's been able to sort of like Let me speak to it in the way of what I'm involved with.
I'm involved in everything and I have awareness of what goes on, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I have a team of people that I work with on producing things that are my primary day-to-day responsibility, being that we just launched just a week ago, I think.
We launched five new episodes on Netflix, right?
Season nine?
Season ten, part A. Just went live on Netflix.
So I'm heavily involved in making that.
We do a lot of books.
I'm heavily involved in our book projects.
I'm heavily involved in certain stuff.
By having a team of people around that I work really closely with, you're able to greatly amplify what you put out.
I'm able to do more.
And that means a lot to me because I had spent my life Up until we started a company, I'd spent my life, a lot of it just as one writer.
And it takes a couple years to write a book.
And so my output was constrained by just what was one person capable of doing.
When I wrote my Buffalo book, I researched it for two years and then spent nine months writing the book.
And I wasn't doing much else then.
Now I'm able to We're good to go.
In terms of getting into working with brands that we love, so far it's been people that...
The companies we work with are people that...
First Light, for instance, was one of the first sponsors we ever had for our show.
Vortex Optics and First Light were the first two people that ever got behind our show.
I knew Phelps for a long time.
I've been wearing an FHF vinyl harness.
I remember my late friend Eric Kern turned me on to FHF stuff a bazillion years ago when Paul was just stitching away in his basement or whatever.
So to have it be that those relationships matured and we kind of came together under one company, it all seems very natural to me.
It all seems like just things growing and getting better.
So I have never felt too spread thin.
And then, like I said, we have a lot of people that kind of know what they're doing.
When dealing with people in my age bracket, I can't step into a role—I can't step into a position of being able to not have it be very close and very personal.
Yeah, it's like they're so wrapped up in this thing that they're doing.
If you're a person and you're running a company, you're essentially performing all day long, right?
Because you can only be a certain amount of yourself.
Most people like to tell jokes that are maybe inappropriate or use language that's maybe inappropriate or say things that everybody's thinking but you really shouldn't say.
They like to do that occasionally.
Well, if you're a CEO of some major company, that would come with enormous financial consequences.
As some of them have found on this very show.
Yes.
Well, that was nothing.
He just smoked a little weed.
He made the money back the next day.
The company went down like 6% and went up 9% the next day.
But everybody wants to talk about the 6% and went down the first day.
Everybody's like, look, it's a fucking giant company.
It's going to go great.
But, like, I was reading about someone from Bezos' Blue Origin company, right, just got fired for something.
It's like the way you're allowed to behave if you're a bigwig in some sort of a large corporation is very narrow.
There's a very narrow, acceptable way that you're allowed to behave and you're scrutinized like extremely closely.
So if you want to be that guy that makes all this money and gets all this stock and has all this responsibility, you also have to behave in a way that's kind of unnatural.
It's not just that you're not allowed to do anything inappropriate, but you have to have a very measured and unemotional tone.
You have to be very conscious of how people are going to perceive or even distort what you're saying.
Look at it and take it out of context.
I mean, it's got to be an incredibly pressure-filled thing to do when you're doing that every day, eight plus.
I mean, no CEO really works eight hours a day, right?
You're working nine, ten, twelve, whatever the fuck it is.
They gotta do that every day.
I mean, that's...
How many of them die of heart attacks?
How many of them die of cancer?
How many of them, like, the pressure gets to be too much and they can't take it?
Well, leadership through example is always an interesting thing because it's like there's certain people that you admire and the way they live their life, like Jocko Willink is a great example, right?
He shows leadership through example, the way he lives his life.
Very disciplined, very fair, very smart, very open-minded and objective.
Doesn't have any weaknesses in his social game, but also just a real prime example of discipline.
Well, having been on your show a few times, I've always admired the amount of work that's involved, like, for the cameraman and the folks that are running the show behind the scenes, sound, all that stuff, because those guys are there 24 hours a day.
Like, if you're on a trip, and that trip is a seven-day trip in the backcountry, Yeah.
And your responsibilities, obviously, work-wise are from the time you start hunting to the time you're done hunting.
And that is like from dark until dusk.
You get up when it's dark and you don't end hunting until it's...
Unless you're successful.
Until it's dusk.
You're filming the entire time.
So these folks are working long hours.
And then there's no hotel to go to.
The hotel is a fucking thin foam thing that's over rocks.
And then you lay your sleeping bag over that.
And you're sleeping.
And oftentimes you're freezing your dick off.
Like when we were in Montana the first time...
First time I ever went with you, I was like, wow, this is a job.
Imagine this job where your job is all day.
There's no like, I'm punching in, I'm punching out.
There's none of that.
The job is constant.
It's all day.
It's a very unusual job.
Because if you looked at the hours that those guys work, it's hard to quantify.
Because you're kind of working when you're fucking sleeping on a rock.
Say if you're filming a television show, an adventure show, and you're filming an adventure show, and you're looking at mushroom specimens in the woods, You know, you're going to have a shooting schedule.
Like at 8 a.m., we're going to have breakfast at 9.30.
You know, Paul's going to go out and examine all these different mushrooms and show everybody.
And then we're going to have dinner at 6 p.m., you know, and then, you know, we're going to wrap it up for the day.
And then we're going to start up.
There's none of that with you guys.
You guys are out there.
Plus, you might be seven, eight miles from camp.
And then you gotta huff all the way back with fucking headlights on in the middle of the night, and then you're looking at your watch like, Jesus Christ, we gotta be awake in seven hours, you know, and you haven't even eaten yet, and then you eat, and then you crash, and then it's like, alright, everybody up, it's five, like, fuck!
And for that professionalism and all that, it's doing that, you know, months for months, being together all the time in whatever, like in tents or in a rental house and in cars and just like, ugh!
Right?
You...
You can't stay buttoned up quite like maybe how you're supposed to.
Right, like if you were a CEO. Yeah, it's a different kind of experience.
And it's also an experience that I think is really lost in translation in all of hunting media.
I think you do the very best at...
First of all, your show is fantastic because of your narration and because you have a very clear love of the wilderness and of animals and of the experience of hunting.
It's hard to encapsulate a seven-day, really rigorous experience into an hour-long show.
And it's lost.
To people that don't experience, like to me who's done it with you, I can watch one of your shows and I can go, man, I wish I was there the whole time.
Where I would really get a sense of how hard it was to find the bulls, and then you hear them in the distance, and then you've got to walk three miles through this valley and try to get to this other ridge, and then you glass them up, and then they're already gone because they caught your wind.
There's so much the seesaw ride of the experience of trying to navigate your way through the woods and hunt, and then the wild thrill of it being successful or the failure.
All those things are...
The worst thing that's ever happened to hunting, I think, is hunting shows.
And that, not yours, but a lot of them, there's shitty music and bad writing, and it's all about the kill.
And to people that...
I don't have any experience doing that.
They're watching and it's sort of encapsulated into this very brief moment of people laughing and hooting and hollering because they shot a deer.
It's like if all of romance was boiled down to an orgasm.
It's like, Jesus, there's so much more to human experiences and relationships.
There's so much more to hunting.
It's like everything else.
There's so much more to...
If you see a fight...
And you know that this guy punches that guy and that guy falls down.
If that's all you see, if you're just like a highlight of a knockout, you're missing And the struggle and the people that are in the camp with them, they're the only ones that really know.
If someone is in a camp with Roy Jones Jr. in his prime, they see all the training leading up to the fight and then the fight.
Those are the people that get the real experience.
And I feel like no one gets the real experience of hunting.
Until you do it.
And it's one of the reasons why it's so misrepresented and misunderstood in the general public.
In the people that don't hunt, in our culture, hunting has gotten this very bizarre bad rap And even amongst people who eat meat.
And I think a lot of it is because of that.
I think your organization and what you've done with Meat Eater, with your writing, particularly with your show, is the best thing that's ever happened to hunting in the modern era because it explains it and displays it.
In a well-thought-out, intelligent way that's filled with emotion and it's filled with introspective thought and articulate discussion and in a way that people get a chance to see, oh, maybe I had the wrong impression of what this is.
We made many of our episodes that were 22 minutes long.
And we still, on Sportsman Channel, Outdoor Channel, 22 minutes.
When you watch a half-hour show, you're watching 22 minutes of stuff.
And traditionally, we would produce it in a four-act structure.
So you have an enormous amount of constraint on how you put this thing together.
Premiering episodes on Netflix, you're not held to that.
You're not held to the act structure.
You can kind of make them their own natural length.
We had a lot of training early on in making that happen.
And that's where the skill of the editors is how do you take hours – How do you take maybe, I don't know, 100 hours of stuff and compress it down in 22 minutes in some way that was true to the experience?
There's stuff you don't show, there's stuff you do show, but yeah, it's tight.
It's 22 minutes.
It's hard to capture it.
I think the key in doing it is that I'd made the show with A lot of people who are very key, and you know Moe, right?
You know Moe, you know Nick Brigden.
People early on that were very involved in making the show that I was making.
These people, these weren't hunters.
They were people who were very interested in story.
They were very interested in sort of like the rhythm of the story, how a story got captured, how a story got laid out.
And so they weren't coming from a lifetime of watching hunting media.
They were coming from a lifetime of how do you do this thing, which is take people on an emotional, like create an emotional journey for someone doing something.
And they applied that skill set.
With me, who had a level of subject matter expertise and had my own understanding of narrative that I developed as a writer, but come in and apply that universal storytelling principles to this thing that other people might have felt was beneath them.
But they had the generosity of spirit in those early days.
They had the generosity of a spirit to take this thing and see some kind of beauty in it.
And help develop it into a thing where they were like applying their expertise to it.
I've seen enormous changes, and it's hard to untangle the impacts of digital media.
Right?
Because during that time, we were undergoing all this stuff with distribution channels changed so much.
And you had sort of the gatekeepers melted away.
You have people producing a lot of stuff.
Like our company, we do a lot of direct-to-YouTube series.
So you're able to put material out.
So people that wanted to make good material might before, they hadn't fallen into...
They didn't line up with what people felt should be broadcast.
And now they're able to put out what they want to make.
So it's hard to untangle what might have happened in outdoor media from what is just happening in media.
With the ability of creative individuals to come out, make a thing, and then have the thing be seen by other people without it needing to be something that someone decided on.
And you're seeing that in all aspects of everything.
So have I seen big changes in hunting media?
Absolutely, because even in our own ability to put out material, I've seen enormous changes.
We do tons more, and we're able to do stuff without having someone say that it's okay to do it.
Is there an issue now with YouTube where I know they have new guidelines for hunting where you're not allowed to show The kill you're not allowed to show like the impact of a bullet or of an arrow and I don't think you're allowed to show any kind of suffering And you may not be able to show butchering.
And we found that out in a weird way when we stopped doing, when we were moving from YouTube to Spotify.
All of a sudden, All of our shows that used to be demonetized were no longer demonetized.
Maybe 25% of our shows would be demonetized on YouTube.
25% of them would not be eligible for any sort of income.
That all changed as soon as we went over to Spotify.
Then 100% of the shows got monetized.
Upon closer inspection, the YouTube ad-friendly content guidelines was found that in July of 2021, the policy was updated to make it clear that footage of animals in distress induced by human intervention may not run ads.
Naturally, the hunting and killing of animals fall within the new guideline, meaning that hunting content as we know it can no longer be used to make money on YouTube.
The exact policy reads as follows.
You can turn on ads for this content.
Hunting content where there is no depiction of graphic animal injuries or prolonged suffering.
Hunting videos where the moment of kill or injury is indiscernible and no focal footage of how this dead animal is processed.
For trophy or food purposes, which is crazy.
Well, it says, while they don't go into much detail, it seems clear that any impact shots or footage of an animal after it's been shot is no longer acceptable to make ad revenue.
Whereas the creators don't get money, but there was an ad on it.
Hasn't that been a complaint that people have levied before?
I don't necessarily think that's happened to us, but I do believe that has been a complaint, that people have said, hey, my video's demonetized, but it still has an ad on it.
And in fairness to YouTube, I mean, I always say this and it's an important point.
YouTube is managing at scale in an impossible volume.
The amount of people that are uploading videos to YouTube on a daily basis and to even hire people that are supposed to watch all that shit as it's being made is impossible.
Well, that was the crazy thing about YouTube, right?
Was that YouTube, in a remarkable, fair move, decided to share revenue with the people that are creating content, encouraging people to create content.
Because I feel like if they didn't do that, people would still have created content.
Like, they really didn't have to do that.
And I remember when they first started doing it, when we first started making money, we were like, you can make money?
Yeah, we had a podcast episode the other day with an early YouTuber, a dude named Jared Outlaw, an early YouTuber, and he talked a lot about that being a major transition point.
As an early YouTuber, it was when monetization became possible that it just really transformed the YouTube community.
He identified as a YouTuber.
But with media, a thing that I remain very interested in is this diversification of distribution.
But I had people on the podcast in April of 2020 saying that and I was labeled a dangerous conspiracy theorist by like these different left-wing media platforms that had decided that there was only one narrative despite the fact that I had evolutionary biologists that were explaining in detail why when you study these viruses it appears they've been manipulated.
And the fact that it broke out in the very exact town, in the exact neighborhood where this fucking level 4 lab is.
But that was part of the problem with having a president like Trump, who is so fucking polarizing.
That anything that he agreed with, people immediately disagreed with it.
I mean, he could have agreed with some of the most amazing inventions in the history of the world, you'd be a racist if you agreed with them, because of the fact that Trump was a proponent of them, that he was promoting them.
Because the guy's entire career, he had this one persona.
This, fuck you, pay me, I'm the man, you're fired.
He was always like, Rosie's gross.
He always had Rosie O'Donnell's disgusting person.
He would insult people openly.
And that was part of his thing.
And he did it while he was president, which was wild.
It was wild to see.
Yeah.
A president, a sitting president, talking about a woman he had sex with and calling her a horse face.
I remember seeing that on Twitter going, this is crazy.
He's not changing at all.
But that's what got him to the dance.
But that's what got people excited about him.
Oh, he's real.
He's PC. But it also really fucking...
Polarized the people that were in opposition to him.
And so because of that, everybody kind of lost their mind.
And it became where you couldn't even discuss things with actual experts that were experts in the field that you were discussing.
People that had no education in it whatsoever were deciding that these subjects were off limits and now would be demonetized.
And I saw that coming.
I was like, that's a real problem for me because I'm not going to change how I do this show.
I can't.
There's no reason.
I wouldn't do it.
I wouldn't enjoy it.
I'd hate myself.
If there was subjects that were taboo that I found profoundly interesting and I didn't discuss them because I thought I would be demonetized, I would be fucked.
I would be like, why am I doing this then?
Why don't I quit?
Because I want it to be just like if you and I were having a conversation, if we were sitting across a fucking dinner table or we're hanging out at your house and we just start talking about stuff and it's interesting, I want to just talk about it.
I just want the cameras to be on it so other people can be in on the conversation.
But I'm not going to change how I do this.
I'm never going to change how I do this.
So we were in this situation where I was like, okay, well, should we start putting stuff on?
We put stuff on Vimeo for quite a while.
I'm like, should I start expanding and looking for other online video platforms?
Would that water us down?
Would that help us?
And then I started thinking about all these other social media platforms.
Maybe I should join them and start posting them.
But a lot of them are like you get labeled a right-wing kook if you're on these.
Yeah.
All these QAnon folks on there.
It's one of those things where we're in such a strange time when it comes to media because everybody is sort of making the rules up as they go along and the amount of censorship that these companies are allowed to employ With no real regulations in terms of like, you know, the First Amendment or- Yeah, they're privately held companies.
I know they are, but they're so big that they're not really- it's not simple anymore.
Like, Twitter is responsible for an enormous portion of the world's discourse.
I want other people to be able to talk freely the way I'm able to talk freely.
I wouldn't want to restrict their ability to do a podcast just because I'm doing a podcast.
Yeah, that's a good point.
If I have an opinion on things, I always think that the answer, and I've been wrong before, and if I'm wrong, I always try to correct myself if I find out that I'm wrong.
I'm not one that tries to bury an incorrect statement.
I will try to expose it and try to explain how I was incorrect.
I don't think anybody would trust you if you don't do that, especially when you're doing something like this where, you know, we don't talk before this.
This is one subject that we did talk about before this.
The deer having COVID. I was like, let's not hold that.
Let's talk about it on the podcast because I knew it was interesting.
Deer having COVID. But we don't have like a set agenda.
So when you don't have a set agenda, there's oftentimes you're going to come across things, and thank God Jamie's the best one-handed Googler in the business.
I don't know what the fuck we're gonna talk about while we're talking.
That's part of the fun of the show is that it is just a conversation.
As soon as I micromanage that and change, it's like it's gonna lose whatever appeal it has to me.
Because the appeal it has to me is like to be able to have conversations.
I want everybody to be able to do that.
The problem with People that have rigid ideologies that also have the power to decide what people can and can't do is that you get situations like the lab leak hypothesis where they're wrong and they're banning people and they're censoring people and it goes on for months and months and months and it destroys people's faith in free expression.
It destroys the ability to have conversations about the subject that are important because you have to say, well, why do you believe that this leak hypothesis is probable?
When then you have an evolutionary biologist or a virologist or an epidemiologist, and they start explaining things or debating it in a way that it seems like it's not possible.
And you can't have those conversations if someone has an ideological opposition to an idea based on a person who's a proponent of that idea, like Donald Trump, saying it's the Chinese virus, and then all of a sudden everybody says, well, if you discuss it, having leaked from a lab that you're a racist.
And then, you know...
You've got to be able to figure out what's right and what's wrong.
The only way is through discussion.
The only way.
It's the only way.
You can't have a person who decides, you can no longer talk about this subject because this subject has detrimental effects on X, Y, or Z. Well, it says who?
Because some people would say it doesn't.
And some people would say, well, X, Y, and Z are problematic because you can't have that discussion.
So they're these sacred topics that you can never really get an understanding of.
And then they're like a religion.
Like, what are they now?
You're not allowed to take the Lord's name in vain.
You're not allowed to talk about the Wuhan Clinic.
Like, what are we doing?
Like, are we talking?
Or are we under this weird censorship of...
These people that really don't have any expertise in the subject at hand.
You can have expertise in every subject.
So as soon as you have people that are ideologically opposed to certain discussions, you've got a real problem with free speech.
And I think that an argument could be made with all these social media platforms that they're so fucking big now that they can influence so much of the world's discussions that That we have to figure out where we stand in terms of free expression.
Because if you say to a person, you can't talk on Twitter because you don't believe that a man can be a woman.
That's a good example, right?
Because that's one of the things that gets you banned from Twitter.
If you don't believe a man can be a woman, you know, like a trans woman.
Or if you use some...
This is the one that you get banned from...
If you decide to become Steveina Ranella, and I keep calling you Steve.
I can call you a stupid piece of shit, and that's fine.
But if I call you by your old name, I'm dead-naming you.
Well, now we're in a weird ideological thing, right?
Because we've decided this is a protected class of people, and that you can't even have this offensive discussion about this protected class of people.
So you've set up almost like this religious barricade to free expression about this one very, in your ideas, sensitive subject.
That's nonsense.
That's a crazy way to dictate how people can and can't talk.
And you develop this, you know, you're going to have these people that are going to say things behind closed doors and be terrified that other people are listening.
And that shouldn't be that way on the internet.
Especially when you're dealing with, you know, I mean, fuck most of the people on Twitter, they're not even using their name.
A lot of discourse in today's society because people are being dishonest in doing that.
They're being dishonest and if you can't reply to that, if somehow you're banned from Twitter or you're banned from YouTube or you're banned from Facebook or something like this comes up and you have no recourse, there's no way you can defend yourself.
Like, that to me is a real issue.
Because I've seen so many people mischaracterized, misquoted, taken out of contest, or even lied about.
Like, I've had fucking CNN say I'm taking horse dewormer.
I've seen that.
When I've got ivermectin prescribed by a doctor that's meant for humans and a medication that actually won the Nobel Prize for its use in humans.
And CNN. Lies about it.
And they do it on purpose and they know what they're doing.
So it's like, if you can't defend yourself or there's nowhere you can say the truth, like, what are we doing?
Like, what are we doing?
Do we have just sanctioned bodies that are allowed to manipulate reality for their own financial benefit or to promote whatever narrative that they think is either beneficial or sanctioned?
Like, is that free speech?
That's not free speech.
So if you can't defend yourself on Twitter, if you can't defend yourself on Facebook or YouTube, if you don't have a podcast, those are your options.
And if they remove you from one of those options or all those options, like that was one of the crazy things that the White House press secretary said, is that if you get removed from any social media platform for misinformation, you should be removed from all of them.
Well, what about if you're right?
That's what she said, which is so crazy.
That's not your position.
Your position is to be saying what the president will do or won't do, what is the policy, answer the reporter's questions.
Your job is not to dictate what social media companies do or don't do in terms of misinformation.
To even think that this is your place to manipulate or suggest It's fucking chaos.
It's crazy.
It's crazy that we're in a position where a person would say something like that.
We should ban more people for misinformation.
Well define misinformation because you give a lot of it yourself.
Like the fucking White House press secretary is responsible for the occasional misinformation.
Because that seems like, you know, if we're going to hold everybody to the same standard, we should be really clear about this.
Like, what does that mean when you say misinformation?
If someone fact checks you and they find you to be in error and you do not correct it publicly, what are we supposed to do about that?
Should you be banned from being a White House press secretary?
Should you be banned from being able to speak on social media because you've been proven to be incorrect, possibly willfully?
I think we need free expression.
We need free expression to sort it all out.
And it's very convenient for people to just want to silence people who say things that they don't like or say things they think are inappropriate.
It's not healthy.
The only way we figure out what's right is you let everybody talk and it's messy and it's complicated and a lot of times people say things you don't like.
But that's how you sort out What's how you feel about things takes a long time takes a long time to gather up a true opinion on a subject and one of the only real ways is to get a view of it from all sides and in history we Typically after a period of 50 years or so look back and condemn Any occasion where we have suppressed dissenting views.
Blacklisting people from the Red Scare, issues that came around, civil liberties for certain minority groups during World War II. There just winds up being a theme, and later we'll look and be like, ah, you know.
We got a little carried away there.
People after the terror, it hasn't been 50 years by any stretch, it's been 20 years, people after the terror attacks at 9-11 who question certain orthodoxy about what we should do militarily, right?
We're put in a certain place, and now it's like we're dusting off and re-looking at these early whistleblowers.
It'll be interesting to see how the history of this stuff gets written, particularly around questions about when you dare question COVID orthodoxy.
I've had it.
I got the vaccine.
I was kind of misled because I thought the government was going to try to take my brain over.
But I wanted to get in the ring with him and fight it out, but nothing happened, you know?
I've seen people, there's hours and hours on YouTube, or at least there were, of people putting magnets on their injection site, and they think that somehow or another there's a chip in there.
Yeah, I guess my primary point around that is that I have...
Through this, I have been on many sides of issues and have largely tried to just roll through it and not have people tell me what to do.
And looking at travel restrictions, I'm like, oh, I want to avoid travel restrictions, even though I already had COVID. I'm like, I'm going to go get the vaccine because I don't want to have any kind of travel restrictions.
I got sleepy when I had COVID. I got achy when I had the vaccine.
But, you know, I've held all these different opinions, like deep frustration.
I went from being in it right away.
I was like, oh, it's just a thing we have to live with.
Everyone will wind up getting it.
Then I got like really hopeful that maybe it'll somehow go away and everybody get vaccinated.
It'll go away.
Then the vaccine came out and people I know that got vaccinated got COVID.
Then I was back to thinking that everybody's just going to wind up getting it.
So I have sat on so many sides.
Like I've sat on every possible side of this thing.
And at this point now, you get to a point where you throw my hands up in the air, and as I've thrown my hands up in the air about not understanding it, losing faith that anybody really understands it right now, it's been now difficult for me to see people getting punished for challenging the orthodoxy when everything has changed so much.
It's like, how could any person...
Sit right now and act like you have the authoritative view on what's going to happen.
And this is coming from someone who's played along with the program every step of the way.
And when I come out the other side of it, I have a deep skepticism.
And not that I feel that there's some grandmaster plan.
I just have a deep skepticism of anyone coming in and being so positive about something they're gonna punish someone for having some different view.
I think at this point it's like pretty fair for people to sit and hash out what they think is going on.
In terms of where you're getting at with just like the social media climate and how it has been used in that way to sort of like punish dissenting voices or exclude dissenting voices, I think that I have a perhaps an unusual perspective on it because for my entire career I've dealt with a set of ideas that are inherently controversial.
I'm a firearm owner.
I support Second Amendment rights.
All my material involves guns.
We kill animals and eat them, right?
But these things all existed.
Like this set of ideas and set of interests that I had existed pre-social media.
So as social media came to be a thing, I've always lived within the context of how do I take things that the people that hold distribution channels are probably going to have a semi-adversarial view of?
And how do I find a way to keep dealing with the ideas I want to deal with and distribute the ideas and distribute the imagery and distribute the content that I want to make in a way that conforms to their views so that I can keep doing it?
So I feel like I've always, like a little bit of been like a...
You know, like a spy kind of like living in this other world in some way.
Like I'm used to feeling like someone's going to come and take my shit away from me.
I remember having this conversation with you because it was like one star.
You guys had like one star.
Because back during the star days, people were attacking your show because it was the first show that Netflix had that showed actual hunting.
I wanted to talk to you about that.
How did that come about?
What was the conversation?
Because that's a brave move for them to decide to take something that's traditionally been on the Sportsman's Channel or the Outdoor Network and then to put it on Netflix.
We worked with a company that handled distribution, and this is years ago now.
We worked with a company that handled international distribution, and the company that handled international distribution had some connections to Netflix, and Netflix purchased what was called a second window.
There's a thing like the degree to which you stand by producers and the degree to which you stand by your ideas.
It just hasn't been a thing.
But I assumed.
I used to wake up every day thinking that...
Oh, there's no way we're going to be able to stay on Instagram.
There's no way we're going to be able to be on YouTube.
There's no way we're going to be able to be on Twitter.
And then at the same time that I'm worrying about that, our material gets outward validation from a large streaming service.
We publish with Random House.
So we have certain people who are very, very intimate with our material.
Being okay with it and distributing it and allowing us to monetize it and at the same time feeling like someone at any minute is just going to drop it out because we use firearms.
The funniest thing is through all this, it's like you'd imagine we get attacked from the right more than the left.
I mean, we get attacked from the left and the right, but we get attacked from the right more.
Over what?
You know, I think it's kind of like, I think that a lot of what we do makes people uneasy, that there's sort of a new, like there's this kind of like new emerging thing that has maybe disrupted some traditional, that has disrupted some traditional Monopoly.
They held on certain audiences.
It would be that somehow, even though virtually everything we make has firearms in it, every show we put out has firearms in it, is that you don't love firearms enough, which is just like, it's always confusing to me.
We get attacked from the left.
We get attacked from the left some.
It'll always feel very nuanced when you're attacked from the left, but we get a lot of heat.
And it's such a crowded, confused world, and when you kind of, like, survey the enemies, when you sort of find that, you know, you find that...
It'd be like if during World War II we had decided to go and bomb England because they weren't totally on board with our plan rather than staying focused on the freaking Germans.
And so I think that a lot of that heat is coming from people who they're looking and like, you're a lot like us, but maybe you're a little bit different.
And that's one of the more interesting things about social media, right?
It's like a lot of the things that if people have said sort of behind closed doors, now they're said in sort of an open forum, you know?
And it just shows you how petty...
Also a lack of emotional development that some intelligent people have.
They could be accomplished and intelligent and successful and they still act like fucking babies.
Why do you care?
Like, if there's a show and you don't think they glorify guns enough and you're angry at them, like, don't you have enough shit in your own life to focus on?
It's usually because, you know, you're probably at least a little jealous.
Unless you've done something egregious, like you've actually campaigned against Second Amendment rights, which, of course, I know you would never do, but if you did...
Then they'd be like, well, this is crazy.
This fucking show, they use guns, and then they campaign against guns.
You get in trouble for having, and talk about getting in trouble from the right and the left, you get in trouble for having conversations with certain people.
You know, we had a Native American historian and activist named Taylor Keene in our podcast, so he said some things that people view as controversial around Like, you know, around things like picking up an arrowhead.
As much as people on the right right now are against cancel culture, you know?
And I'm glad they are.
They seem like oftentimes representations of that perspective seem to be guilty.
They seem to be guilty of their own crime by being very eager to restrict certain voices that don't conform to them.
And I... I do try to invite a variety of voices and represent opinions that I think are interesting, and not every opinion that comes out in my material is necessarily my opinion.
But I try to do it, and it just makes people mad because people want you to be their thing.
Yeah, I experienced that with Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee.
He was experiencing some weird cancel culture shit from the right online.
And I was like, what the fuck is going on?
I called him.
I go, come on the podcast.
I go, we got to talk about this because this is so ridiculous.
Like, these are the people that have been rallying against this for the four years that Trump was in office and rallying against this for the year that Biden's been in office or less than a year.
It's like the thing that blows my mind though is when I go about my daily existence, if I didn't know it wasn't all going on from the news and social media and stuff, when I go about my daily existence and just the interactions I have with people, fuck, I would never know what was happening.
Because that environment is- I just think that like, oh, you know, hey.
Because the environment of social media is a terrible environment for human communication.
The environment when you're going about your daily business is normal.
You're talking to people.
And most of the time, like sometimes people have like a weird opinion of someone and then they talk to them like, oh, he's a good guy.
Yeah.
This happened to me a couple of days ago.
Someone told me that there's this business thing that I'm doing, and this guy is a real problem.
He's very full of himself.
You're not going to enjoy it.
I'm like, wow, shit.
Okay, well, I'm just going to put my best foot forward and see what happens.
I meet the guy, and he's wonderful.
He's friendly.
He's nice.
And then I'm like, oh, maybe that other person was a fucking pain in the ass.
And they met this guy, or maybe that guy...
I had a cold that day.
I mean, I don't know.
When he met that other person, maybe...
Who the fuck knows what it is?
Like, people are different on different days for different reasons.
But I had it in my head, but then I met him, and he was great.
I had a great time.
So...
Something about human interaction when you're together with the way we're supposed to look each other in the eye have a conversation Be close to each other like physically in the room with each other That's how humans are meant to communicate when we're communicating anonymously through text messages or arguing about things on Facebook and these fucking long verbose Passages like it's not normal.
It's not a normal way where you get to just Fucking expand upon something for paragraph after paragraph where no one says well that's fucking wrong and that's not true That's not what I said and this is not what I meant and you're changing this and taking this out of context people people get more Angry with each other when you don't get to respond when someone says something and you're like you're like well,
that's not me fuck you and then they it's designed in a way That is not compatible with human emotions, with normal human interactions, with social cues, and reading each other's...
Like, Louis C.K. had a bit about this once, about kids and kids doing things online, that kids like to be mean online, because it's like fun and they don't feel anything.
Like, if some kid is in front of you and they say something mean, and then the other kid feels bad and starts crying, they go, oh, well that doesn't feel good.
But they say it online, they're like, oh, fuck him.
Hey, you fat fuck.
And they say it, and then they don't feel anything, because there's no one there.
But the impact on the other person is real.
It's a terrible way to communicate.
And this is the way that a lot of ideas get discussed.
A lot of people are communicating that way.
And as detailed by these documentaries like The Social Dilemma and, you know, these different books that have been written about this problem and that woman who just testified, which is kind of crazy, right?
The day the woman's testifying about the problems with Facebook is the day Facebook goes down.
And there's a lot of conspiracies about that, right?
But this is an issue.
It's an issue that they're aware of inside the company and that they chose profit over rectifying this issue.
They're like, well, this is what we do, though.
They're like, we're making a lot of money doing this.
And I think that in the wild, when people are just running into each other, we're still just people.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but isn't the inception of that app, like what they were fixing to make, was they were fixing to make a way you vote people up and down?
There were other apps around the same time like that where you would find someone hot and you'd click, yeah, they're hot, and they'd get, like, ranked higher.
Well, the thing about Facebook is I think when they do their prognosis on the future, it skews so old that Like, it's young people are dropping off of the use of Facebook pretty radically.
See if that's true.
Pretty sure that's true.
I read something about it today, but I was only, like, gave it a cursory examination.
But I think what they're saying is that Facebook is kind of doomed.
And so they're in this sort of desperate, even though they're making billions and billions of dollars.
You know, Instagram is kind of like the middle ground.
Twitter is where people go to throw shit at each other.
You know?
Here it is.
Facebook misled investors about shrinking user base.
Complaint to SEC, Facebook mishandling of duplicate accounts was extensive fraud.
So what is it saying about user base?
Facebook is leading investors about shrinking teen and young adult user bases and about the actual number of Facebook users.
Former employee Francis Haugen alleged a whistleblower complaint.
Facebook stock valuation is based almost entirely on predictions of future advertising revenue.
Thank you.
And advertisers, including the amount of content produced on its platform, failed to disclose internal data showing a contraction of the user base in important demographics, including American teenagers and young adults.
The company is also hidden to the extent of which content production per user Has been in long-term decline, the complaint said, but obviously these are allegations from a whistleblower.
And apparently she's donated a lot of money to AOC and some heavy-duty left-wing.
And she was like...
Upset that if you are a young woman, this is a very good complaint, a valid complaint, that if you're a young woman, if you have issues with anorexia, Facebook will send you anorexia content your way, which may exacerbate someone's predilection towards anorexia.
It's fucking terrifying.
They're the people that get it the worst, apparently, is young girls.
Young girls get...
Social media, they get the impact of social media worse than anybody.
According to Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, he talked about that, that higher suicide rates, self-harm, all that stuff, the bullying, online bullying, young girls are the victims of that more than that.
Yeah, I read a statistic that of teenage girls, I can't remember, like a pretty staggering majority of teenage girls go to sleep at night with some level of anxiety about social media.
That influenced my decision to leave and go to Spotify, for sure.
I didn't trust anybody.
I didn't even trust Apple.
Because I knew that there were certain episodes, like when Alex Jones came on my podcast once, The ratings went down.
There was no update in the ratings for like a week.
When I tell you it was my biggest podcast at that point in time, I think eventually Elon Musk became bigger and a few other ones became bigger, but at that time when Alex came on for episode 9-11, it was not just the biggest, but it was the biggest by far.
Not only was it not reflected, there was no ratings.
The ratings stopped.
And then when it came back, That episode was ranked like, you know, number five or six or something like that, where other episodes where I knew what the downloads were, were number two or one.
I'm like, how is that?
They're doing some shenanigans.
They didn't want that episode.
I think somebody, I don't know if it's true.
I might be wrong.
But I think somewhere, someone didn't want that episode to be number one.
Because the numbers were crazy.
It was like 16, 18 million downloads.
It was nuts.
It was because it was a wild, chaotic, you know, alcohol and marijuana-fueled conspiracy ride with a maniac.
Yeah, well, at a certain level of influence, you know that people do, at a certain level of influence, there are people that are able to pay detailed attention to very specific things.
I'm sure, like, I wouldn't be shocked to hear that your show drew some special level of attention, the same way that there were people at Twitter assigned to Trump's tweets.
Unless I was the victim of some sort of censorship and I was a martyr.
And then I put it on my website and I had everybody download it from there and make some sort of a contribution and that's the only way we can keep it alive.
Then you could get people to realize like, Fuck the man, man.
When I stop enjoying it, you know, I mean, I don't want to mention any names, but there's certain people that do shows where people feel like they're phoning it in.
If anybody ever really feels like I'm phoning it in, I'll stop.
If I feel like I'm phoning it in, I'll definitely stop.
Or I'll stop phoning it in.
But I don't think I'm ever going to stop...
Wanting to have conversations with people.
If I can have you and you and I just talk, I always want to talk to you.
You're an interesting dude.
If we get a camera on us and other people can get in on it and they enjoy it, like there's someone out there on a treadmill right now enjoying the shit out of this.
I like that.
I like it.
You're providing something that people actually enjoy.
As long as it's enjoyable to me, I think it'll still be enjoyable to other people because enthusiasm, like genuine enthusiasm is contagious, you know?
And I find that if I watch someone that's cooking on TV or someone that's making things or someone that's talking about something they're passionate about, even have zero interest in it, if it's a genuine enthusiasm.
Which is why when I do this show, I don't do it based on famous people.
I don't try to get people that I know will get big ratings.
Show and interesting kind of subjects and and before you'd ever taken me hunting I'd always had this fascination with hunting I'd always watched like Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild and watch a bunch of these hunting shows because I would be like but that's probably the best way to eat like to get the meat yourself that way you really understand where it's coming from versus this weird sort of separation between you and the act of the animal dying where you don't really understand what you're doing just eating meat you know and One of the two times I thought my career was over was
And I felt for a minute that my book hadn't done good enough to get to make another one, but then someone took a bet on me again, and I was able to make a successful book.
But, yeah, doing that Wild Within on Travel Channel, dude, we were...
They ordered eight episodes.
They ran them all.
But we were...
I mean, we just rapped.
The eighth episode.
Okay?
I mean, I was in the...
We were, like, getting in a car to go to the airport from the location where we were filming in West Texas.
And I got a call that...
It was effectively canceled, even though they ran some through.
And I was just, didn't realize, like emerging into a thing where, like you said, like the Wild West or you're in the open ocean or whatever the hell, like I was just emerging into a place where like the time lined up that you didn't need to be, you could still do things.
Because he came in, he came from an unexpected background, didn't last long, bought some shows, none of them took off.
We didn't know what, we had no idea what that show was about.
It was kind of a mess.
It was fun, but it was kind of a mess.
And then when that was over and we started making Meat Eater, I was like, I had learned enough from that wild NBS to understand very well what I wanted to make.
And it was going to be extremely stripped down.
And it was going to be like, and I was going to have a very high, like, a Very high level of influence over everything that happened.
And this thing happened to me where years ago I was invited by someone to go down to give a talk at Fort Bragg.
It was the third special forces group in Fort Bragg.
And I went down to give a talk.
And it was interesting because I call them kids or not kids.
They're all guys about a decade younger than I was.
30, early 30s.
And Sitting there in front of these guys talking to them, and these are people that had come out of high school.
They came out of high school post 9-11 and went into the military, did all their training, became Green Berets, and had spent their entire adult life either training for or in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Do you feel like you're worried that you might want him to do something that maybe he wouldn't do otherwise because you didn't do it and you feel guilty?
Yeah, do that, but mainly right now go get Meat Eaters Campfire Stories close calls.
And then also we're doing a fundraiser right now.
At TheMeatEater.com where we're doing a fundraiser for our land access initiative where we raise money to improve and enhance places where you're hunting fish.
And we've got a big auction going on right now.
We've got a signed guitar from Luke Combs.
We've got all the kinds of Like a raccoon hide, antelope skull and stuff, all used on the episodes.
All up for auction.
You can buy Giannis Patelis' first pheasant tail, knives, all kinds of stuff.
And we're going to use all that for our land access initiative.