Remi Warren recounts his lightning strike survival in Nevada, where a childhood bolt left him with lifelong twitches, and later his near-fatal climbing mishap in New Zealand after retrieving a chamois. His hunting injuries—tearing tendons on a mallard duck and a hiking fall—led to a complex wrist surgery with broken drill bits, now limiting his grip but fueling his Live Wild podcast’s rise amid pandemic-driven fears of food shortages. They debate invasive species like Texas’s axis deer or Florida’s pythons, critiquing California’s exotic skin ban as impractical, and explore trophy hunting’s ethical nuances, contrasting European mounts with stuffed displays. Ultimately, Warren’s stories reveal how primal risks and rewards reshape survival instincts, even as modern life complicates the balance. [Automatically generated summary]
I was, I shot a pretty good bull elk in New Mexico.
And I'm like skinning it out and I couldn't use my hand very well.
So I like taped the knife in my hand and do the whole thing.
And the guys that are with me are looking at me like...
That's not right, man.
You should probably get that checked out.
And I was thinking about it.
I was like, yeah, I probably should.
So I went to the doctor and I was just thinking they're going to say, ah, it's nothing.
And they're like, this is a major injury.
How long has it been like this?
I was like, I don't know, three months or so.
And they're like, oh yeah, how did you do it?
I was like, I don't know.
They said it was consistent with a fall from maybe 10 feet straight onto your wrist.
And I couldn't think of it.
I was like, I would remember that.
They're like, you would remember it.
And I started thinking back.
And Like, the following January, I was duck hunting, and these mallards are coming in, and, like, pretty high up.
So I shoot one, and it's probably, like, I don't know, 30 feet up, flying 30 miles an hour.
And it's coming right at me, and I think, oh, I'll reach up and try to catch it out of the air so it doesn't hit me in the face, and bent my hand back.
And I think that that's what tore it, and then just never, I just taped the fingers up, and never, like, healed right.
And then a combination of that, when I was in, and then I was in BC this last year, like, Hiking across a mountain, had the trekking pole, and my wrist just gave out and slammed into the hill, and that was kind of, I think, the last strut.
Yeah, there used to be, like, when you first started shooting a bow, there was a rubber band that would go from the peep and stick on your riser to pull it straight every time.
It's kind of annoying, but it would keep it straight.
John coached him as well Dudley coached him as well.
Yeah, he's I mean that guy's incredible like watching him do that with his feet like wow oh Yeah, oh yeah, he's got a release on his shoulder So it's I think it's something he does where he like twists his head a little bit to release Or maybe it's just it might just be attention based.
Yeah, you know That's cool.
Yeah, I don't know how he's doing it, but it's pretty amazing.
Yeah, so it looks like he's like almost kind of got a back tension style release where he's pulling back and then it hits his shin kind of and goes off.
I hurt my wrist boxing when I was, like, 22. And then when I was around 30, it was always nagging.
And I got pro-low therapy.
You know what pro-low therapy is?
No.
I guess whatever I've got is some sort of a tendon issue and they injected, it's like a glucose solution that they inject directly into your tendons and it inflames the tendons and actually makes them thicker and stronger.
It's really painful while they're doing it because there are just multiple injections digging into that tendon and injecting it with this fluid.
I might be butchering the actual mechanism behind doing it.
Yeah, it was one of the ones I've kind of always used that as just kind of this philosophy that I live by.
The things that I like to do, I like that wild feeling of being out there and doing something in the wild that seems maybe things that other people aren't doing.
Yeah, it's fun for me, too, because it's a way for me to introduce people to what I really love.
So they try it, because I think through that food experience, people that don't hunt can understand hunting in many ways, and that's a big thing for me.
Even my wife, I think, she didn't start hunting Until we were together.
I always think of fishing as the gateway drug to hunting.
You kind of learn the basics of what it means to get your own food.
You learn the basics of the entire experience.
And that was something that I was worried about when my wife started hunting is making sure she had the right shot, making sure everything was steady, making sure that it was going to go right.
That's the one thing that people are saying that as meat shortages and food shortages happen, I don't know why everyone's predicting all these goddamn food shortages.
It's kind of freaking me out.
Because I hear it about in the news constantly.
Food shortages are coming.
Food shortages are coming.
How?
There's so much food.
What are we doing?
What are we going to do differently in six months than we're doing now that you're assuming there's going to be food shortages?
I think that whole reason is why people have turned to hunting and being a little more self-sufficient.
Because right now, if there was a food shortage, I'd be fine for quite a while.
I mean, I wouldn't have a variety of diet, and I'm not saying it would be the most comfortable thing, but it's pretty much not a lot would change for me.
It was the first time I've been there because I'd normally go to New Zealand during their fall, you know, southern hemisphere fall, where it's chasing red deer.
A lot of them, like there's a lot of, well when they went to New Zealand, like they would start out with 20 and then 7 would make it or whatever it was.
Yeah, you can see the predator situation and the difference between the amount of deer that you find in California versus the amount of deer that you find in Texas.
Whereas in California, you're going to fucking jail.
Like, you have to have a depredation permit.
Like, even if you do that, the animal rights activists will find out about you.
There was a woman that had an alpaca farm in Malibu.
And she was getting this problem where this one cat was visiting her alpaca farm and just joy-killing.
So he'd hop the fence and kill, like, you know, six or seven alpacas, just fuck them up, and not even eat them.
And so they issued a depredation permit, but then the press got a hold of it, because it was kind of a wild story that this mountain lion was targeting this woman's farm.
And then the animal activist started sending her death threats, and she was freaking out, and so she decided not to even exercise the permit, because she was going to hire someone and have it taken care of.
It's like the thing about mountain lions in California is they kill the exact same amount of mountain lions as they did when mountain lion hunting was legal.
It's just now the state has to pay for it versus money coming in from hunters buying tags and paying all the other things that you would do that go along with mountain lion hunting, whether it's dogs or You know guides or hotels, food, all that revenue is gone and instead it's just a negative because now they have to hire government hunters who have to go after these mountain lions that wind up killing a lot of dogs.
But it just makes people feel okay that hunters aren't killing mountain lions, but instead like these government hitmen are and you don't know about it.
It's so dumb.
But there's still a massive mountain lion population and it's fucking hard to find deer in California.
It's what happens when you don't manage properly or if you manage with emotions...
And, you know, the general perception of the public that's not informed, instead of using wildlife biology and science and, you know, what they do in most sane places where they regulate the animal population based on what they understand from the surveys.
I mean, it's one of those things when you've got this crazy ecosystem where it's tightly managed and people are like, well, just let nature take its course.
And like, we've already, we've completely screwed up nature.
The fact that you're living there, existing there, you think about like all these, the plant species that are in North America right now should never be here.
Like we can never get back to that equilibrium.
We've fucked it up way too much.
It's too far gone.
It's like it's this crazy idea of like, it'd be nice, but it can't happen.
You know, because if that were to happen, you'd have to have like a mass eradication of so many animals.
I mean, just to like be like, oh, let's get everything back to normal.
Well, you'd have to kill off all the wild horses and nobody wants to do that, right?
But you couldn't, you know, because those wild horses will make a lot of native species go extinct.
Because all the different things that get ground up in the process of making that soil available for farming and grinding up the cultivation of all those plants, whether it's using combines or whether it's what they're doing to churn up the soil.
They actually do like the CRP program where they'll pay farmers essentially what that almost, I don't know the exact amount that they pay them, but to just leave it as like habitat because they notice that so much land's being demolished just for agriculture.
I was watching that on an episode of Yellowstone where they were talking about CRP. Conservation Reserve Program?
You know about that thing they're doing in the American Prairie Reserve?
Do you know that thing they're doing in the middle of the country?
They're trying to essentially replicate something similar to what it looked like before modern settlers, or the European settlers rather, American Prairie Reserve.
So they're trying to buy up enormous swaths of land far bigger than Yellowstone, fill it with buffalo and pronghorn and mule deer and all these different animals.
And I think they're doing block management on this too.
So they're going to have areas where people can hunt.
But these will be areas where there'll be no development, no cities, no nothing.
I mean, I don't know how true this is either, though, because they were saying the axis deer at one point ate so much vegetation that it changed the weather, but I don't know how that could be, but I've read that before.
I think that makes sense, because if you think about yearlings or any kind of little tiny shrubs that are coming up, like trees that are on their way up, they just start eating them before they ever get a chance to become trees.
That's the weirdest thing about the Big Island to me.
Because the Big Island is so fascinating because you go from Kona and then you go all the way around and you make the loop and you run into like five different ecosystems.
You can go skiing in places in the Big Island.
And the same day you could be on the beach surfing.
Because you get up on the top of the mountain, and your whole perspective is normally looking up at the space, and you're looking down at the stars.
I'll never forget this.
One time I was hunting central Nevada, and that's got to be one of the darkest places in the lower 48. Actually, you guys pretty much went to that spot, but I was up on the big mountain behind there and packing out a deer and it was a really big meteor shower and you're looking and they're like below you.
There's that scene where the bomb goes off and, like, everything's kind of, like, slow-motion-y weird and the sound's weird and whatever.
When I saw that scene, I was like, that's my memory.
It was, like, that noise and, like, everything was weird, slow-motion-y.
I think because your heart's probably going really fast and you can't hear.
Everything's like this weird noise and I just remember it and when I saw that I was like, that's really fucking accurate.
So I'd be interested to see like other people that have been in like a shell shock situation or whatever.
I bet you that somebody had to have done something where I would say like coached them on that because that scene of like that really I thought it was super accurate of like what lightning was like.
Yeah, I've trained myself to consciously not do certain things.
It's been a very long process.
I don't even think about it anymore, but for a long time, when I was younger, probably until I was 17, you just have to think about it 100% of the time.
It was a weird thing because it's one of those things now.
I actually got it under control to the point where it's actually weird because I don't even think about it anymore.
I don't even like talking about it because it fucks with that part of your head that you're like...
I don't know, but to train yourself to do something in a different way that should be automatic, like your heart beating, I guess, you know, you're like, I don't do that, but yeah, like anything that's automatic to train yourself to do something in a different way is very difficult, in my opinion.
They say people that have been struck by lightning, I was young enough where it wouldn't have affected me in that way, but people's personalities change and just random stuff, weird stuff happens like that.
Dude, we were here once in July, and there was a lightning storm, and lightning hit...
300 yards from my house, and the sound, like if you've never been around where lightning hits really close, the sound and the instantaneous sound, because it was the crackle, you see the bolt, the sky lights up, and you hear the boom, and you realize, oh shit, that's right there.
But I feel like there's probably something about an animal attack or a close animal attack that triggers some sort of primal reaction in a person that's paralyzing.
We've got these little cabins, and I hear something going down behind one of the cabins, like something killing a deer.
So I went out, and it was a mountain lion that killed a whitetail, like, I don't even know, probably 15 yards behind one of the cabins.
And then I was guiding, so I got up early and left and went out telling, like, my wife, everything, be careful, you know, don't be walking around at dark, whatever.
But I put a trail, I should have been smart enough to just, like, move it, but I just didn't have the time to dick with it, so I put a trail camera up to see if it was coming back.
And a bear had come in, like a black bear, and claimed the carcass.
Which black bears do a lot.
Like mountain lions, when they kill something, they first get it, they kill it, and the first thing they do is they take out the most nutritious part.
They just pull the liver right out.
Because they're going to get chased off a lot of their kills.
They're just such efficient killers too.
It's nothing for a mountain lion to go kill something else.
Whereas a bear isn't really great at killing stuff.
So they're more scavenged, they're more foraged, they're more omnipotent.
Yeah, bears are, it's, they're beautiful, and they're cool, and I'm glad they're around, but they scare the shit out of me.
Yeah, I can see that.
Mostly brown bears.
Yeah, but, you know, Ranella was telling me a story once about this guy who was on his first hunt ever, and a 500 pound predatory black bear broke into his tent.
There's actually a lot of black bear attacks, but most of them are in almost what I'd consider like a residential experience where they've got food and it's like a lot of older people or women mostly.
And it's those times that you're caught off guard, like you walk out and it's in your trash can and maybe it's got cubs and then freaks out.
Or people walking their dogs and the dogs fuck with the bear and then they go to save the dog and the bear kills them.
Yeah, I guess that's, well, that's the thing, like, they can, it's 50-50, really, they're either going to run away or run towards you, and for them, it's probably just as easy to do both, I don't know.
I would say one of the scariest things, I was in New Zealand, I was actually guiding at the time, and I took this lady We were hunting chamois and those mountains are like just straight up and down.
And she was older and she was doing this thing where she was trying to hunt everything like free range in the South Pacific.
And I don't know at the time if any other woman had accomplished that.
And she was getting older now and it was just kind of like one of those things.
So I really wanted her to be able to get this animal.
So we were hunting and we got dropped off by a helicopter.
And then we were up there camping and stuff and it was really foggy.
And then the fog cleared and there's a chamois over on the cliffs.
And so I was waiting.
I'm like, okay, in that cliff stuff, it's like, okay, you might be able to shoot something, but you also need to be able to recover it.
And I was waiting, telling her, we've got to wait until we can get somewhere so we can recover it.
Okay.
So I'm looking and it moves over to the right and I think it's a perfect spot.
It'll fall down the cliffs and we'll be able to get to it and bring everything back.
So I told her to shoot and she shoots and it falls and like lands, like it's stuck halfway between this cliff.
It was like this piece of rock that I didn't realize.
So I thought, ah, fuck.
Well, I'll just climb up there and go get it.
And so I get down there and the mountain's really, I mean, pretty much nearly vertical.
I wouldn't say it was like technical climbing, but it's very...
You've got to have three, four points of contact kind of thing.
And so I start climbing up to it and I didn't really think anything of it.
I was just like, okay, I'm going to get this chamois and it'll be good.
And it was really cold and kind of mossy and my hands started to get cold and my feet started to get cold and I climb up to it.
And it's like what had happened was this rock had pulled off the mountain and then the chamois had fallen into here.
So I have to climb up above it and then kind of scale over.
And then to get down to it, I have to jump onto this little piece.
So I jump down to it, and I still haven't really thought anything of it.
I jump to it, and I grab the chamois, and I pitch it over the edge.
Because I'm like, you know, I'm going to go...
And I pitch it over the edge.
And watching it fall, like, you know, you throw something and you're like, okay, it's going to hit the ground.
And it's falling and falling and falling.
It took forever to hit the ground.
And I realized how high up I was and how far down it was and just, like, how probably out of my skill set I was.
And I just, like, literally started shaking.
It was like this instantaneous, like, watching it fall for so long.
All I could picture was me just...
And I started thinking to myself, I was like, I actually just then realized, I don't know if I can actually get out of here.
Because I can't down climb when I came up.
I'm not good enough to down.
Down climbing is really difficult for people that are like...
And I had boots on.
I mean, it wasn't like you've got climbing shoes and solid surface and all this stuff.
And I was like, man, I just put myself in a really shitty situation.
And it freaked me out.
And actually, so I thought...
So I kind of like sat there for a little bit and then regained my composure and decided, well, I got to climb up.
No, but when I'm like, I mean, I love mountain hunting, and I love that alpine experience, and I still do it, but when I get to those parts where it's like, okay, you just gotta, you know, you think about it, you're like, one fall, I could die.
And when you're hunting, when you're climbing, you're kind of like, okay, I've got this equipment, and I've got this, and I've got these kind of shoes and boots and ice axe, or whatever you've got.
You've got these things.
When you're hunting, you're kind of like, well, I've got to get up there, and I don't know how to get up there.
And you start getting up there, and you're like, well, I've just got to keep going.
And you've got a heavy pack on.
You've got big boots on, heavy boots.
You've got gloves.
Like, you just aren't really prepared for it in some ways.
Yeah, that one, it wasn't, I mean, I figured I could get out, but I think I've told on here before a story where I jumped in a river and actually saved a lady.
I didn't think I was going to get out of that one.
And there had been, like, a Facebook group, and they had the Blackhawk helicopters out looking, couldn't find her, search and rescue, they did the dog thing, everything.
And so I got there, it was, like, probably 5 p.m., still daylight when I got there.
And we get there and kind of talk to search and rescue, and I'm like, one of the guys kind of recognized me and knew who I was and what I did, and I had my whole pack, like, I was ready to glass.
Normally on search and rescue things, they want people out of the area, but they knew that I knew what I was doing, so they let us in to help.
I met with them, talked to them.
There was a Facebook group thing of what they'd seen, and there was this report of a vehicle with Mexico plates leaving the area.
And I don't know, like, how, you know, people start saying, like, okay, I saw her last wearing this.
So the last she'd been seen, she was just wearing, like, running stuff.
Didn't have any equipment with her.
She'd gone up.
And then the search and rescue dogs, like, they went up the canyon and then they came back.
And they did that multiple times.
So the theory was, like, she went up, came back, and then people, they actually had kind of thought since they put in a search effort that she was gone, like, taken.
So, you know, they kind of asked, like, they do, like, a little interview, like, you know, how far do you think she's going?
I was like, well, she trains for marathons.
Like, she could be 20 miles from this point.
We don't really know.
We don't know what happened either.
She could have fallen.
We just don't know what happened.
So they showed us where the dogs had gone and where they had inspected and everything.
And I thought, I was like, you know, the way that I think was like, well, whatever you guys have done...
Didn't work, right?
So I'm just going to kind of take the things that you've said and look at it through a lens of like, that didn't work, so we've got to just try something different.
So I loaded up my pack and I had all my optics, everything, and my thought was, I'm just going to go out there.
And part of it, too, was kind of like a wreck in some ways.
I'm not just going to sit around and do nothing.
So it's starting to get dark at this point.
And my thought was, like, I'm not coming back until I find something.
So I just load up my pack like I'm going on a backcountry hunt with all my shit and just go back there and see what I can do.
And I wanted to be...
It was good in nighttime, so I wanted to be, like, ready first thing in the morning, thinking before that light gets harsh and she's in the shade.
Like, if you're trying to survive in the desert when it's super cold at night, so you're probably moving around to stay warm.
And then in the morning, you'd probably still be moving around, but once it gets daytime, then you're probably...
In the heat.
And you're in the shade.
So there was the guy.
So they had Blackhawk and it had to go back because it timed out.
Like it needed fuel there at that point.
And they were searching in the middle of the day, which I thought, you know, it'd be better to search in the evening after the heat on the rocks cools off a little bit and you can use a FLIR system like thermals.
Because everything in the desert cools down so fast that you might be able to find her at night using a thermal system.
So I asked the guy if we could get a thermal FLIR system and so they were working on getting something.
And so I had one of the guys take me into the...
I just said, like, drive me as far.
They had, like, these little Ranger things in the whole, you know, like an off-road vehicle, like Polaris.
Yeah.
Or Can-Am or whatever.
So I was like, just drive me as far back as you can.
Drive me back.
And now it's starting to get dark, and I had a big flashlight.
And I just, like, looked at it before it got dark and just looking around.
I was like, oh, I'd probably go up here.
No trail.
I was like, man, we've hiked all over the world together.
No trails.
We never go on trails.
So I just thought, I'll start going here.
But at this point, it's dark, and I just started hiking in the dark up this canyon.
And it's probably maybe...
probably close to midnight at this point.
And I was thinking about...
You know, like, a lot of shit's going through my head, thinking, man, what's it gonna be like if I find her dead?
And, okay, like, am I prepared for this?
Or what if I, and the thing that really, like, messed me up was, what if I never find her?
These things kept going through my head.
And I'm literally in the dark, and there's no moon at all.
Just hiking in the dark.
I felt very, very, very helpless.
And I'm literally praying for a sign of some kind.
And I look down, and there's this weird scuff mark.
And I'm like, I just keyed in on it.
Randomly walking in the dark.
And there's deer tracks everywhere, and I just start following this one track.
And it just didn't look right.
But it's not like the kind of ground where you can see tracks.
You know, I inspected it.
I didn't see shoes.
And I get up to this like flat bench area.
And I just had this weird feeling.
And I'm like, yeah.
And then I saw a light on the top of the mountain.
So I thought, oh, man, maybe that's somebody had come in, hiked in with like thermals.
I'm like, hey, you know, I'm up here and they were around, they were looking around the rocks where the dogs had turned around thinking maybe she went up there, fell into something and got stuck in like places people, normal search and rescue wasn't going to look.
So they were looking in kind of those areas.
So I hike up to where the light was on the hill and it happened to just be like people that were in the area, like a couple that were just like, whatever, camping.
And, you know, I was like, hey, you know, I talked to him.
I was like, hey, here's a picture.
Have you seen this person?
No, we haven't seen anything.
I was like, cool, you know, like the area's kind of closed down right now, just so you know, because they're looking for like, cool, keep an eye out.
And so now I'm away from that spot.
I just like, I started to think about it.
And I was like, I called my brother and And they're like, yeah, you know, we don't see anything around here.
Like, maybe we'll start first thing in the morning.
And I was like, okay, you know, I'm going to stay up here and I'm going to go back to this spot.
I'm just going to camp out up here or whatever.
But I got to go check this spot first.
So I walk back to that, like, little bench thing.
And I sit down, I turn off my light, and I just yell out.
I'm like, hey, Danielle, this is Remy.
If you can hear me, I'm not leaving until I find you.
I'm just, like, sitting there.
And then I hear, Remy?
And I was like, oh shit.
And it was so faint.
I was thinking to myself, did I just like, did I actually hear that?
So I had my radio and I called my brother and friend and I said, hey, I just heard her.
I'm going to turn my radio off in case maybe that's like I'm only going to hear one more time.
I'm going to turn my radio off.
Get somebody up here.
And I just said that over the radio because I didn't want the radio going off for some random reason while the next time she said something or whatever.
So I flipped the radio off and I just started moving in that direction where I heard something and I yelled out again and didn't hear anything and then kept moving and yelled out again.
Before it got dark, I remember it was this big basin, almost like a...
Amplitheater kind of shape, right?
And on the top side was all these cliffs and everything.
So I thought, well, maybe I heard it across the canyon and she fell into one of those cliffs.
So I'm like moving in that direction, but I'm trying to move like, you know, when you're chasing an elk and it's like that, you've got to, you've got to run, but you can't run loud.
I called my buddy, and I was like, all right, I've got her.
We need paramedics here now.
And so my buddy, they were probably two or three miles from the base camp.
My buddy Joe just takes off, just sprinting down to the base camp.
And then my brother is hiking up to me to help her.
And so we didn't have service where we were, and I have a satellite messenger, but I left it in the truck.
So my buddy goes down and I think somehow somebody had called whoever, you know, paramedics and the whole deal.
And so my buddy Joe, this is the funny part, is my buddy Joe runs down to the search and rescue camp.
And he's like, Remy Founder, we need to go.
And one of the guys that was kind of in charge, like an older guy, not a guy that goes in the field or anything, he's like, you know, somebody thought they heard something, but it could have been a mountain lion, so we're just going to save our energy for the morning search.
And my buddy Joe's like...
He's like, fuck you, I'm commandeering your vehicle.
And he just takes the ranger, the razor thing, and just rips off toward town.
And then the type of person that has the capability to do what you do on a daily basis.
Most people are not going to be able to get to her.
They're not going to be able to have the understanding of how to navigate and how to get around, or they're not going to have the aerobic capacity that you have.
All those times of hunting and camping and hiking, you have crazy, sick cardio.
Yeah, it's like a lifetime of essentially spending my entire life looking for things that are hard to find, and then using it in a way that was more beneficial than anything else I'd ever done.
And I mean, on her end, too, it took a while of just essentially the PTSD of an experience like that, where it's like you're doing something you love and whatever, and you just...
That you have to this child and the mother and this experience and like you're so locked in in a way that you didn't think you were ever going to be with anything.
Like you didn't even know that that feeling was available to people.
Like I had always knew that people had kids and I love babies.
I love everybody.
It's great.
Having kids must be great.
Now you got a kid.
Congratulations.
But until you see a baby come out of a woman and it's your child and it's her child and you made this child together and now this child's alive and then every fire, every cell in your body fires up.
And it's like, okay, now we're in dad mode.
Now you're in protector mode.
Now you're in, you know, you gotta, like, I became way more ambitious.
I started working harder.
I was way more disciplined, like everything.
Way more attentive.
I was like, holy, this is real.
First time I went hunting, I remember just locking eyes on the mule deer and realizing it was about to go down and then getting him in my sights.
I wound up dropping I wound up hitting him in the spine and he dropped and then I finished him off we had to get up close to him and finish him off and When I finished him off it was like I was like this is like almost psychedelic in the way it changes the way you feel about things like When we were cutting that animal up and then we were eating the animal, I was like, this is one of the most primal things I've ever experienced.
And it's in many ways not like having a kid in that it's not the same kind of feeling, but also it's a feeling that you didn't know was available.
That it was so primal and it felt so natural.
It's like my body was like, yep, this is how you do it.
This is what you have to do if you want to get meat.
You have to kill the animal.
Once you kill the animal, you get this feeling of completion, of satisfaction, of this human reward system that kicks in.
Because for...
Fucking untold thousands of years when someone shot an animal and killed an animal it meant that was going to feed your family and that was a good thing and it wanted to reward you with that good feeling so that you could continue to survive and that your genes would carry on and the human race would survive.
The moment I shot that mule deer, I mean, it's on the show, we talked about it, while Ronella was like, you know, so what are your thoughts on hunting?
I'm like, I'm doing this forever.
I'm like, this is what I'm doing.
Like, I'm 100% sure this is how I'm going to get meat now.
Like the moment, when we were sitting over that campfire and we were eating the deer that we had just shot, you know, hours earlier, and we're cooking it and eating it and it was so delicious and it was so fresh.
I was thinking, of course this is what I'm going to do now.
This is what I'm going to do.
I'm not going to not do this.
This was fucking amazing.
It was really hard to do.
It was difficult.
It was nine degrees outside.
We're camping, freezing our dicks off, and fucking hiking forever.
The satisfaction of completing the task and getting the deer and eating the deer, I was like, oh, I found some new shit I really like.
Like, this is my new thing.
And since then, it's been a giant part of my life.
And Signal is very similar in that you could send, like, higher resolution videos and audio.
And you can actually use it for calls and...
Stuff like that.
I think you can use signal for video call as well, but it's encrypted, peer-to-peer, so it's not like it's going to a third-party server or anything like that.
What concerns me is that the government, these creeps that a lot of them aren't even elected, there's just people that are bureaucrats that have been embedded into the system forever, have...
Essentially have access to every fucking person on the planet's text messages and emails.
Anytime you send something, they have access to it.
Yeah, I mean, you could take any one of the texts that I send with my comedian buddies that we send to each other.
Any one of them is horrible if you don't understand what's going on.
These guys will say the most horrible shit to me through text messages just so we could laugh.
Because we've fucking heard it all, right?
I've been a comic for 30-plus years, so comedians that are also comics, to shock them, they'll send me the worst things, and the worst images, the worst videos, and ha-ha-ha, with a joke attached to it.
And people are like, you guys are terrible, but to who?
Well, it's also like we're playing a game with each other, right?
Because we're in the business together.
So it's like, to shock me, You know, you have to send me some ruthless shit, and so there's a lot that comes my way.
It's funny because I'm paying attention to this Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial, and I'm realizing the old text messages, if you get into divorce, man, they'll fucking come up in a trial.
And it's a system that doesn't allow you to ever become a full, normal, functioning member of society.
Because you're coddled, and you're treated in this very bizarre way, and you're isolated from everyone else except for all the people that are your handlers, or the people that are your sycophants, or the people that love you, and publicists, and agents, and People that make a living off of you.
So that is your existence.
And then you're married to a fucking crazy bitch who throws bottles at you and wants to kill you if you don't sign a prenup or if you want her to sign a prenup rather.
It's wild.
That relationship is wild.
And watching her sit there and try to act like she's not a psychopath while all this is going on while they're playing the audio recordings of her talking about hitting him and all the craziness.
She recorded all their conversations.
That alone, like if that's not the biggest fucking red flag, like she recorded dozens and dozens of conversations where he had no idea that he was being recorded.
I don't think any jury is going to listen to her and not think she's out of her fucking mind.
You would have to be the most hardcore, man-hating feminist, one of those women that's just been fucked over by man after man after man her whole life to the point where, fuck all men.
You'd have to be that woman to listen to that lady and not think she's out of her fucking mind.
Because Stanhope published a letter on what a con artist she is.
He published some sort of a...
What did Stanhope do?
Stano, he posted something, right?
He wrote an article, I think, while it was all going down, and she was accusing him of hitting her and all kinds of crazy stuff about what a con artist she is.
And he's like, just understand this.
This woman is a fucking con artist.
And she threatened to sue him, so he took it down.
But he had already gotten it out there, to the point where people had sort of started going...
Huh, what's going on here?
And then all Johnny Depp's former girlfriends were all like, no, he never even raised his voice.
He's a nice guy.
Maybe he yelled, but he's not an abuser.
This is nonsense.
This is crazy.
And she said that she used a specific type of makeup to cover up her bruises, but it turns out that makeup wasn't even invented then.
It launched years later.
So she's just a nut.
Those are the people you see crying on in films when they act really good.
But I've actually thought about it in the way of I don't know, anything that your parents do, and it's what we do all the time, so I don't know if that would be something that makes her into it, or if it's something that will detract her from it.
I'm so careful about that with my kids, because my kids did martial arts when they were young, and I always say, Hey, hey, you guys want to take a class or something like that?
If you want, let me know.
I'm like, no, I want to do this.
And my one daughter is really into gymnastics, so that's her focus.
But my youngest daughter, every now and then, she'll bring it up, because I let her hit me.
That's something that, I think they changed that, but YouTube for a while was going to, they were going to stop people from showing animals being butchered, and they were going to stop kill shots.
I don't know if they did it, but I remember it was a big conversation, and a lot of people that have hunting programs, and I know you do Solo Hunter, and you release those.
For people that monetize stuff, there's different rules as well, which I understand you're getting random advertisers on there and they might not write certain things.
So some people might have had problems like, oh, they're blocking this from whatever.
Well, it's more based on the monetization thing because you sign up for different rules when you do that.
Yeah, that's an issue that happened during the pandemic, where they really ramped up on the amount of episodes of things that got demonetized.
And a lot of people thought, oh, this is some sort of a plot to censor people.
It's more a plot to make money.
They just want to make sure they maximize the advertiser money, and the advertisers essentially are the ones that dictate what kind of program is allowed on the network.
One of the things that we found out during the pandemic was that pharmaceutical advertisers are 75% of all the ads on television.
Not unrelated to right now, when we were talking about the cloned tiger meat the other day, I was trying to look up hard where do people even need to eat that?
There's certain parts of hunting where people that don't do it don't understand.
It's like, okay, you've got this deer here, right?
I look at it, and it's just a deer, but you look at it.
The meat from that deer, I don't know if you shot that, but if you did, it's like the meat is long gone.
Everything is gone, but when you look at that, that animal lives on in your memory way longer than Anything else that you would ever get at the store or anything like that, you have a personal connection with that.
When you look at it, it's a weird thing to explain to somebody that doesn't hunt, but in a way, it's like I love animals so much, and maybe in some ways, that's almost honoring the memory of that animal to you.
It certainly is, and in many ways, it's nature's art.
I look at a skull, and I only have European mounts, for people that don't know what that means.
A European mount is just the skull and the antlers together.
When you see a stuffed mount, like of a deer head on a wall, you're looking at a doll.
It's like fake eyeballs, and underneath it is like a foam sort of...
Yeah, it's a sculpture.
And oftentimes it's not even the actual hide of the animal that you shot.
Like if the animal you shot is a fucked up hide, they'll give you a cape that you can put over, or you could buy one, that you could put over your mouth.
So the only thing that's really from your animal is the antlers.
I mean, when you mount a mountain lion, it's like this.
And you remember that you actually shot that mountain lion, and it's in your house now.
You can look.
It's a great visual representative.
But my mind won't let me do that.
My mind goes, that's foam.
That's rubber.
This is fake.
That's a fake nose.
It's fake our eyes.
This is fake.
I hate fakes.
I don't like this.
Get it out of there.
I've never wanted to have a shoulder mount.
I look at them and I'm like, ugh, that's a doll.
This is, to me, nature's art.
To see a skull with antlers, even if I had just found that in the forest, like a deadhead of an animal that had been killed by a mountain lion or something, when I look at that, it's art to me.
I'm fascinated by just...
There's so much beauty to this.
I mean, just looking in the nasal cavity, you see how complicated it is, and you realize this is an animal that has to survive on its nose, how important its nose is.
And you look at that enormous opening that it has for taking in scents.
And then you see the eyeballs and how they rotate on the side of the heads and they're like way off to the side so they can see things from both sides and behind them almost and in front of them.
And there's, I mean, there's things, even I feel like I know a lot about animals, or a lot of different animals, and then one day I'll be like looking at something, there's an animal called the slow loris, I guess it's a venomous mammal.
I hope that that's right, because I just read that, I was like, how did I not know that, unless it's some, unless I was reading some, you can't trust anything anymore, that's the part that sucks.
Well, one of the things that I really loved about when you do the solo hunts and solo hunters, when you went to Africa and slept outside and hunted solo with cameras, and I was like, that's a ballsy move.
Like toxoplasmosis is, I think it's called toxoplasmosis gondii.
It's a parasite that you get from, a lot of people get it from cats.
And it's a very strange parasite because it rewires.
It's one of the most bizarre parasites because it rewires the sexual reward system of rats and it makes rats attracted to cat urine and it makes them fearless.
So the way this parasite grows and spreads is inside a cat's gut.
And the way it gets inside a cat's gut is to get into a rat first.
So it gets into the rat first and tricks the rat into being horny for cat piss.
So it goes where the cats are.
And you see them literally chasing cats.
And cats are like, what the fuck?
And these are rats with toxo.
And then the cat will kill the rat and then the cat will get it into humans.
It's either from...
That's one of the reasons why they tell women when they're pregnant to never handle cat shit.
Never deal with cat poo.
Because cat feces can contain toxoplasmosis and they can get into your system.
It also affects people in a way that makes them more risk-taking.
And there's a guy named Robert Sapolsky.
He's...
I believe, is he an anthropologist?
I think a psychologist and maybe an anthropologist.
He does a lot of primate research.
Sapolsky's been on our show before, but one of the things that he did was when he was a resident, one of the doctors that he worked with in the ER, whenever they get motorcycle victims, he would say, check them for toxo.
And there's a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims that test positive for toxoplasmosis because they think it makes them take more risks.
The fact that it sends the rats to the cats, I mean, it's in some way, it's like it grows in the rat, and then it's like, okay, now a cat needs to kill you so I can live.
And he's done some amazing work with primates too, like amazing work with orangutans and baboons rather, and some different primates and just like studying the way they think and behave.
But his work on toxoplasmosis was what drew me to him because I remember reading about that.
I'm like, well, because I've had a lot of cats in my childhood and I'm scared to test to see if I have it.
I just typed it in with deer, so I'm getting a lot of the deer stuff.
But there were reports in Canada, Wisconsin, and then I just scrolled down and saw 200 free-rumming cats and 444 white-tailed deer were tested positive for the parasite.
That whole sheep hunting thing is a strange subset of hunters because it's a lot of rich people that go on these bizarre, dangerous adventures to hunt sheep.
I was like, that's interesting that somehow or another caught on with a lot of these wealthy trophy hunter type guys.
Yeah, I think the opportunity, it's an economic thing in a way where there's not a lot of, let's say there's not a lot of tags, right?
So the price of that one tag just keeps going up.
But the reason that price of that tag needs to be so expensive is that's what's Helping the sheep populations come back.
There's no other management for these very, I would say, a niche species, a species that's living somewhere that needs a lot of resources of things.
In the state of Nevada, actually, there's more sheep in the state of Nevada than any other state outside of Alaska, as far as the United States.
And it's because of, like, hunter conservation dollars and projects and building, helping, you know, restore habitat with drinkers and water things and all that kind of stuff.
And they auction off, they'll, like, auction off in pretty much every western state one sheep tag.
And some, like, the Montana one goes for three hundred and something thousand dollars.
I think it was like the Wild Sheep Show this last year.
They raised like $10 million I think at their banquets.
It's like who else is putting $10 million to conserve something like that?
And that's just one event.
I mean there's thousands of those events throughout the country.
So it's like there's a ton of money going into the research and the restoration, conservation, all kinds of that, easements.
They're actually like one of the biggest threats to wild sheep is domestic sheep crossing and giving them – Brucellosis.
It's called MOVI.
It's a form of pneumonia.
Oh.
And it will wipe out – it's the biggest threat to wild sheep populations.
So maybe you've got somebody that's been grazing sheep for 15 generations on whatever land.
So they're actually going in and buying out grazing permits and all that kind of stuff so it can be – so those wild sheep populations don't encounter those domesticated sheep and building fences to keep certain domesticated sheep from wild herds.
And it'll be a different experience eating that meat than if you just sat in front of a feeder.
For sure.
I don't even think of that stuff they do out here as hunting.
I think of it as harvesting food.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
And if you want to eat wild game, that's probably the best way to ensure that you're going to get wild game.
Set up in front of a feeder and this is just a way to harvest food.
And you're going to get it quick and you don't even have to be in shape.
But the difference between that and the experience that I talked to you about, about Montana that turned me into a hunter, That was a difficult, arduous experience.
It was days and days and days of hunting and hiking and glassing and freezing your dick off and climbing up to the top of a ridge and not high density of deer and just trying to find them.
And then when we did find it, the feeling of success after the difficulty is what makes it all worth it.
If it was easy, like we got on a boat, we pulled over to the shore, like, oh, there's one right there.
It's like a weird reward thing that flips on in your head.
Yeah.
Because as the hunter, I know that what I... If you cooked an elk steak right now, and I cooked an elk steak, and it's like you cooked an elk steak of an elk you shot, and an elk steak of the elk I shot, The one that you know you took in that entire experience is more rewarding.
You're going to choose that elk steak.
I mean, I live off wild game meat.
But it's not like when I go to a restaurant, I'm not ordering elk because it doesn't taste the same to me.
It doesn't taste the same as something that I took or was a part of.
There's like even something that maybe...
It's like a certain kind of seasoning through sweat in some ways.
The harder you work for it, the better it tastes because it's just that reward factor.
In some ways though, I'm so used to self-filming now that it's easier for me to self-film and have somebody with me filming.
Because I can control everything.
I've done it enough where I feel like I've gotten really good at it.
And for me, it's actually easier now to do the self-filming thing than to have somebody there filming with me.
Unless it was somebody that had the same hunting skills, which is not really feasible to find somebody that does that and films, or does a good job filming too.
For me, it's actually harder to have somebody following me around with a camera than for me to film myself.
Well, when I went hunting with Ronell, the times that I've gone, one of the things that really struck me is what a shit job that is for the camera guys.
Because they're A, not hunting, B, that's just a job, but they're there 24 hours a day.
Well, because when you first reached out to me, it was like, hey, I've been watching the Solo Hunter thing.
I was like, why are you watching?
You're like, man, I learned a lot.
That's the one thing I didn't even realize about Solo Hunter is, you know, people, the comment that I give is like, man, I learned so much.
I was like, I didn't even know I was teaching you anything.
I was just going out there doing my thing.
And people, like, really liked that aspect of like, okay, I'm like seeing how you're doing something that maybe I've never seen it done in this way ever before.
Well, I really love Solo Hunter, too, because when you're doing it, you're talking to yourself, and you're talking to the camera, and there's something pure about that, that it's just you alone out there.
I remember there was one where you were hunting, and you stopped to go fly fishing, or you stopped to catch trout, and then you cooked the trout.
That was your lunch that day, and I remember thinking, man, that's got to be a fucking cool experience.
He's by himself.
He's hunting, and he's like, let me just stop and catch a fish for the day.
And you catch that fish and cook it, then you're back on the hunt again.
One of the other ones that I really enjoyed of yours was when you decided to camp out in this ancient Native American site that you had found on the hill.
I actually ran into, on a previous trip, an archaeologist that was up there.
And they were thinking that it might have been one of the first, they're around this lake and they're saying like in that area, maybe one of the first like kind of, not like a semi-permanent place where they would keep going back to that place like during the summer.
And then, yeah, you'd see that they'd build blinds essentially.
And then probably, my assumption was they'd build those blinds and then herd sheep, wild sheep.