Steven Rinella and Joe Rogan dive into systemic failures, from Target’s $400M protest-related losses to police distrust fueled by cases like the smoking woman’s death in custody. They debate U.S.-Russia prisoner swaps, excluding Paul Whelan, and COVID-era censorship risks, comparing it to fascist tendencies while questioning vaccine mandates and pharmaceutical transparency. Rinella’s whitetail hunting obsession—like Clay Newcomb’s multi-year pursuit of a single buck—highlights niche subcultures’ emotional stakes, contrasting with ethical trophy hunters like John Dudley. Montana’s outdoor culture and high suicide rates tied to poverty emerge as key themes, underscoring how geography shapes both wildlife and human struggles. The episode ends with Rogan’s frustration over media gatekeeping and public health dogma, leaving Rinella’s future moves uncertain despite his Montana roots. [Automatically generated summary]
I didn't know that that activity being inspired by particular rules as much as just like a breakdown of, you know, I don't know, like a breakdown of desire, like for a while, like a desire to engage with certain kinds of lawbreaking.
Well, there was that, and then there was also, I think, after the George, during the George Floyd protest, organized retail crime has driven $400 million in extra profit loss this year at Target.
That is great.
And organized.
You know, during the George Floyd protest, there was so much looting.
Who these people are that want to be mayors and want to be governors.
They're a bunch of loony people for the most part.
There's not a lot of competition.
There's not a lot of, like, super rational, really, like, well-educated, super successful in business people that wind up becoming governors and mayors, which is probably what you would need to be.
You need to be someone who's, like, really good at organizing business.
And there was a guy that was running in New York, and apparently he got really close.
He was ahead in the race for a while, but then he wound up losing to some woman who's the new mayor of Los Angeles.
I just heard a guy saying that that's the politicians that are going to win now.
He was a strategist, a Republican strategist, and he was saying that his prediction was it was going to be like the technocrats.
I don't know where he's getting this from, but it made me feel optimistic that people are getting more interested in his view of the midterms is that voters are getting interested in pragmatic problem-solving again.
We're walking down there, and we're going down the sidewalk, and I become aware of all this honking and yelling and shit at an intersection.
And as I'm walking up to a car, and there's a woman honking and yelling, and she's pointing into the car.
And I go and realize this guy, I thought he had a heart attack, just keeled over the steering wheel in the intersection.
So he had his back window down, like halfway down for whatever reason.
And I'm in there, and I got him by the shoulder, and I'm trying to...
Shake him awake.
And I think he's had a heart attack or died.
I don't know what he's got going on.
I'm yelling at my wife, call 911. I'm trying to get his door open, but his doors are locked.
And I'm trying to reach up to hit the unlock button because the thing's only half open.
And me yelling and saying, you alright?
You alright?
He perks up.
And like, takes stock of the situation and just goes off through the green light.
So now I feel like I'm like, not complicit, but I feel like it's like become my responsibility that he's gonna, I don't know, he's gonna die, kill somebody.
I call 911. My wife had already called 911. She got sick of waiting on hold and gave me the phone.
She went in to try to find, she had left my daughter's swimsuit somewhere.
She went to try to find my daughter's swimsuit.
I waited, waited, waited.
She came out.
I was still on hold and I was like, ah, he's gone now.
I'm in the middle of this book called The Kill Chain.
It's all about how China has a technological superiority over America because our systems don't communicate with each other and we don't have machine learning with all our military systems and how far behind they are in terms of what's available and what they have available in terms of like Artificial.
They're comparing right now, like, computers now that can beat people in the game Go, which I don't really understand, but apparently it's very sophisticated.
And also Starcraft 2, which is a very complicated game, and now computers are just wiping out the best players in the world and not making any mistakes.
And how that kind of computer learning is being applied in China, but it's not being applied in America.
And that all of our systems are kind of antiquated in that we update hardware first and then software.
So we don't have...
You know how your phone is constantly upgrading?
They're comparing that.
When they learn new things and they find exploits and they patch them up, you get an update on your phone.
They don't have that.
So it's like they're really fucked in terms of also the military branch's ability to communicate with other military branches.
It's a book about this kid in the 1700s that came out with the Hudson Bay Company up into the vicinity of Calgary and then was assigned out to the Blackfeet.
And the Blackfeet took him south.
And he just wrote his chronicles, spending a bunch of time with the Blackfeet.
The elections are fascinating to me because I don't particularly have an opinion about election fraud, but I do have an opinion on fraud, and it always exists.
There's always been people that are full of shit that are manipulating things and saying that they're not.
We're finding this out now with Twitter now that Elon Musk purchased Twitter and he's finding that, you know, they literally had FBI people embedded in Twitter that were holding back information from him.
Like there was a guy that he fired that was an FBI guy that worked for the FBI at one point in time and now was one of the head guys at Twitter.
And was withholding information from him while he was trying to release information about allegedly – I should say allegedly so I don't get in trouble here with this – but what he was saying essentially is this person was a bottleneck.
To releasing this data.
They were trying to find out, like, why did President Trump get banned?
You know, what was going on in terms of shadow banning conservative people and how much coordination was going on inside the company to try to suppress certain ideologies and magnify other ones.
I'm curious how much of that stuff's in there, how hard it is to find, and how much people were just being more discreet with text messages and phone calls.
Well, it's too bad that FTX collapsed, because he was going to use his money to battle AI. He wanted to, you know, like his whole deal, the, what's it called, effective altruism?
Part of his crusade, when he got to dishing out the, you know, he was going to get around to dishing out the billions of dollars to charity, and he was going to battle pandemics and AI. Interesting.
You can take X number of characters and then basically say something and then have professional journalists turn it into 800 to 1,000 word news pieces.
There's some part of it where it was like a, like I said, I shouldn't, because there's literally millions of people that know this history better than me, so I'm going to back out on saying what I'm going to say because I'm probably fucked up about it.
Like if there's comedians in here and we're talking shit, we say crazy shit just for fun.
Like there's this podcast I do called Protect Our Parks.
And it's a joke name because Ari, one of the guys that I do it with, Ari Shafir, there was a park in New York City that they were going to level.
And now it's like fucking condos.
They're going to put a prison there and a bunch of shit.
And he's like, it's a fucking great park.
This is bullshit.
You know, like, so do what you can to try to.
And so we were ragging on him.
Like, and he's saying, Ari, we got to protect.
Protect this park, Ari.
Obviously, they did level it, so the name of the podcast became Protect Our Parks, just for fun.
But that is the most ridiculous podcast ever.
Just four of us, we're always high and drunk, and we're talking crazy shit and just talking over each other, and it's just really rowdy and nuts, but there's no responsibility.
It's not responsible at all.
It's a completely irresponsible podcast.
But it's not on purpose.
Like, it's not like we're doing it to try to stir people up.
We're just doing it to talk shit and have fun.
That's the benefit of being a comedian, though.
Like, you always have that.
Like, if you say something outrageous, it's like, it's not really what you mean.
So there's a TikToker whose shtick is that he'll catch people in luxury cars, I gather, noteworthy cars, and his thing is like, hey, what do you do for a living?
He approaches an Apple executive.
The detail that matters to me the most is that the guy's with his wife.
He's not at a work function and he's with his wife, which totally changes how he answers.
He's with his wife and he decides to quote a movie that's becoming increasingly obscure as the years go by, which is the movie Arthur.
Apple exec was fired after being caught on video joking about fondling big-breasted women, said he stayed up all night trying to get the TikTok down before it went viral.
I mean, because like I said, it pointed out like his wife, you know, I don't know why it changes so much for me that his wife was there, but it changes a lot for me.
You might remember that you recently had Bill Maher on your show, and I listened to that with great interest, and he was talking about, you know, he's historically regarded as a very noteworthy liberal, but he was expressing that the left gives him so much good material.
And his kind of crusade against present culture and certain things around free speech and all that.
And that conversation, this one we're having right now, got me to thinking that you almost can fall into the same trap.
And I don't even know how it's different.
The outrage...
Recreational outrage.
At what point is the recreational outrage about this stuff become its own form of recreational outrage?
Like, you know, you hear it, you hear crazy stuff from any spectrum, right?
I have definitely, not in a negative way, I don't think, I have definitely taken note of shit that I grew up saying in the atmosphere I grew up, like very normal things to say.
I have definitely taken note that It's hurtful to some people.
And that sort of self-censorship and the idea of being a more empathetic person is a good thing, right?
But...
As long as it's reasonable.
But the thing is, the problem with that kind of stuff is it continues to go in the same direction where more and more things become forbidden and toxic to the point where, you know, the Elon Musk joking around about my pronouns are prosecute Fauci.
Jimmy Kimmel made a tweet back to him.
He said, your pronouns are ass and hole.
Which is pretty funny.
Did he really?
Yes.
And so then I read that and there was people saying, please don't joke about pronouns.
It's transphobic to joke about pronouns.
So they were chiding him for participating in a joke about pronouns.
He's had a real problem with Elon from the beginning of this thing.
But it's like he's in this leftist thought bubble.
He's in the most leftist thought bubble available, which is Hollywood.
And I think also...
Famously, there's some videos of him in blackface and those came out and he had to apologize for them and I think he took that hit and really doubled down in the other direction.
I mean, that's just speculation.
But he, you know, now is a guy that It goes after people like Elon Musk.
Which is, you know, Elon is thought of as being, because he's willing to put people on with uncomfortable opinions and he's like releasing people that were banned from Twitter.
Because of things that they had said.
He's like, as long as you haven't done anything illegal, I'll let you back on.
So he's doing a lot of that.
So a lot of people are upset by that because then they think, you know, well, you're platforming bigots and hateful people and...
It's a fucking...
It's a weird conversation because...
I'm a free speech believer.
I think the way to counter someone's inappropriate, even someone like Kanye West that says ridiculous shit, anti-Semitic things, the way to counter that is to counter that with more thoughtful opinions on what he's saying and point out that what he's saying is inaccurate in many ways, hurtful in many ways.
It's a good conversation to listen to if you want to understand how he works, because he works in rants, these long rants.
And sometimes when you're ranting...
Especially when you're a guy like that, you really don't exactly know what the fuck you're saying, why you're saying it, and you're sort of justifying it while you're saying it, and you're working stuff out in real time.
And sometimes you go down roads that are just not fruitful.
It's like trying to figure out how to fix policing.
It's like clearly the way to fix policing is not give them unlimited power and let them do whatever they want to do.
That's not the way to do it.
So is the way to do it to diminish their power greatly and diminish public perception of the police and public opinion of the police to where it is now or where it was during the George Floyd riots, at least.
The way is through training and education and maybe even elevating the position of being a police officer to make it more difficult to achieve and make it pay better and make them much more highly trained and, you know, treated almost like the way you would treat, like, special ops groups in the military, you know, where it's an honor to be a part of that group and it's a very difficult Power to attain.
Because to be a police officer in some places in the country, it's pretty fucking easy.
They don't have a lot of cops.
And you see some cops, and they're just grossly overweight.
Some of the saddest things to me are these breakdowns that they do on video.
They'll do martial arts breakdowns of how bad cops are at physical altercations.
I think that as I've looked at what's happened to public perception of police officers over the last few years, it reminds me of a similar thing I feel about the polarity in America.
Where you have your experience, you have your lived experience, okay?
And then you have the experience that you understand to be true from the news.
So, from the news, you understand that we're in this period of tremendous divisiveness, and America's splitting apart at the seams.
No one wants to engage anymore in a civil function.
We're perched on the edge of violence, okay?
You get that.
But then you analyze what is going on in your life as you go about your life, like having a job, raising kids, engaging with the public school professionals where your kids go, traveling around the country, riding with Uber drivers, dealing with whoever, okay?
And you'd be like, if someone wasn't telling you it was happening, you wouldn't know that it's happening.
And also, you're dealing with the problems that are occurring to millions and millions of people, in fact, billions all over the world, and the only thing that you read about is things that are bad.
I always try to enforce that with people when they have opinions of police officers.
I'm like, you know, because there's so many videos of cops doing shady shit.
I'm like, yes.
There's bad people at every profession.
Every fucking profession that exists is just because some people just have poor character.
They're just not good at what they do.
But there's millions of interactions with cops and people every day.
And nothing goes wrong.
And they're fine and peaceful.
But you don't take that into account.
So when you have an understanding of what's happening in the world in terms of people and their interactions with police officers, it's very biased by the information that you've been subjected to.
And that information is almost entirely negative.
Because you're only dealing with the stuff that you see that's horrible, unless you've had personal experiences.
And then your personal experiences vary greatly depending upon the color of your skin, your economic situation, what part of the world you're living in.
I have friends that are black and they talk about getting pulled over and they said they are terrified.
They feel like they could get shot at any moment, where I have never experienced that.
I'm always very respectful to the cops.
I don't think they think, well, obviously a lot of them know who I am, so that's not a problem too.
But it's very different for, and to try to get like a balanced, nuanced perspective.
policing and crime in this country, it's very difficult to be objective, especially if you've had a horrible negative personal experience or a personal experience of someone that you're close to.
It's weird.
This is also an information issue because you're juggling so much information.
You have so much data to process and to try to put it all together and have a nuanced, objective analysis of what it really is.
Another time, so another time, my wife thinks I tell this story way too much for the relevance of it, but I got a drunken disorderly conduct.
I got in a skirmish.
I got beat up by the cops a little bit, but I had it coming.
My buddy Fitz likes to point out that 45 minutes before this happened, I had said in about 45 minutes I'm going to be out of control.
I'm supposed to be leaving for graduate school, scared shitless.
You know, my dad realizes that, I don't know, it's like through like his church, through the church he went to, he somehow finds someone that knows someone, right?
I walk out of there getting a refund on my bail.
Like my bail was $250, I got a $225 refund and he asked me if I could afford the $25, walked out the door.
And I could have been not had that, a father with that level of ambition who didn't go to that church and might have been like, I didn't go to graduate school.
That claim is reminding me of the story, but I didn't remember that that was the details, that it was just about whether or not she had the authority to smoke or not.
Yeah, I mean, how do you not have the authority to smoke in your car?
I mean, if a cop pulls you over, it's one thing if he's arresting you, and you've done something horrible, you've got coke and guns in your car, and you're a fucking psychopath, but you're just speeding, and he's on some power trip, and he tells you you have to put your cigarette out.
You don't want to, so he drags you out of your fucking car and puts you in a cage, and then somehow or another she winds up dead, and they said she committed suicide, but it's very suspicious.
The whole thing is just like, and it's...
It's a story of abuse.
It's like you can watch the video of it.
You can watch the video from his squad car of him being abusive.
And that kind of video, those kind of videos, and there's many of them, That's what really accentuates this distrust that so many people, particularly people of color, you know, people, ethnicities, minors, minorities, rather, have this issue with police.
Oh, after that whole thing happened and I was like so stupid and really did something really stupid, my tonality in dealing with getting pulled over for traffic violations is to be my tonality in dealing with getting pulled over for traffic violations is to be like, "Man, I'm I am so sorry for wasting your time.
Because, you know, you build your view of the world based on what you experience, what you take in, you know, in terms of media and writing, and then your physical experiences, which are more profound.
And imagine if your physical experiences include a lot of suicide.
That's one of the big stories in this country, is chemical abuse.
Like, how many people are hooked on pills?
How many people are fucked up and addicted to substances?
I mean, it's just a tremendous problem.
That if you don't experience it personally, one-on-one, you really have no idea.
You really don't know.
And then, you know, you encounter someone who's dealing with that, and then you realize the scope of it.
I mean, it's a massive problem in this country.
Chemical abuse, meth, pills, opiates, you name it.
Amphetamines.
I mean, it's just, it's a huge, huge fucking problem.
And with that comes all kinds of violence, all kinds of abuse.
If you're a cop, that's all you see.
Yeah, and if you're a guy like you or me, just goes to the office, says hi to your friends, people you work with, goes home to your kids, your wife, unless you zig when you should have zagged and you run into one of those people, you really don't know.
No, you go down to the Thanksgiving potluck at your kid's school and you're like, man, this community's full of people who are just really dedicated to their children.
And then they get her back with an arms dealer, trade an arms dealer, and you wonder about whether that's an asymmetrical, somehow an asymmetrical trade.
But I don't know.
I don't even know what's going on.
And then it's kind of like, oh, I'm glad she's back.
And then you talk about the outrage machine.
Then you read a narrative that would be like, We traded an international arms dealer.
So in this thing, they're just completely mocking.
Like, well, he has one thing going against him.
He is a man.
And also, you know, he is white.
Like, here.
Meanwhile in Russia, top state propagandists reveal the narrative they'll be pushing to harm Biden and enrage Americans.
About the exchange of Brittany Griner for Victor Bout by falsely claiming that it wasn't Rush's decision to oppose Whelan's release as opposed to Griner.
So it's hard to say.
This person who's saying this is saying that it was Rush's decision to oppose Whelan's release, who they think was spying.
I don't know if he was or wasn't.
He may have been.
May have been arrested for espionage.
But see if you can find the video, because it's going to be in Russian.
And well known for the sake of PR. American voters are choosing the obvious.
I think for us, it's one more piece of good news.
The first good news is that a bout has returned.
The second good news is that a nation That spits on its heroes to the extent that it considers it significantly more important to free a rightly charged, well-known athlete.
She didn't suffer because she served her motherland, but because she couldn't live for 10 hours without her hashish.
Instead of freeing that person in prison for two years, For serving his motherland.
This says a lot about the state of this society.
So this is just like, basically, Fox News in Russia.
You know, it's obviously a very propaganda-driven show.
But that's the thing about Russia.
You can't have a show that shits all over the government in Russia.
You could never have, like, when MSNBC was mocking, openly mocking Trump, and, you know, CNN was constantly talking about Trump, and it was jacking up their ratings.
This is what people don't understand when they try to impose censorship.
It goes all the way through.
You will eventually get to a point where it's only state-sanctioned information that's allowed to be distributed if you allow censorship.
Because they've already shown that the government is deeply embedded in social media.
And this is one of the things that's most disturbing about these revelations about...
Whether it's the FBI or whatever intelligence agencies were behind censoring certain people off of Twitter and removing certain people off of Twitter and removing certain narratives and certain stories like the Hunter Biden laptop story.
If you support that because it fits with your ideology, ultimately you support government control over a narrative.
And it's going to go the other way if a Republican gets in office.
Then you're going to deal with a similar problem.
Imagine if instead of Hunter Biden's laptop, it was Donald Trump Jr.'s laptop.
And Donald Trump Jr.'s laptop, he's getting foot jobs by prostitutes and smoking street crack in Vietnam.
Do you think they would have censored that off of Twitter?
Do you think they would have censored that off of Twitter and said, we can't verify the information.
We don't know whether or not it's true.
It has all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.
It's not a fucking chance in hell.
That's the problem.
The truth dies with censorship.
You don't get a chance to sort out what's real and what's not.
The government gets to decide for you.
And if you ultimately believe in censorship, And you ultimately believe in censoring the people that have opinions that disagree with your own.
That's where this goes.
This goes to fascism.
This goes to a terrible place that no one wants that's unrecoverable.
You can't recover from that.
If you get to that point where the government controls the narrative completely and they get to dictate what gets distributed on social media, we're all fucked.
All of us.
The people that agree with the narrative, the people that disagree with the narrative, truth dies.
It'll be interesting what gets released, if there's any additional information about the collusion to go after people who...
Didn't get on with COVID orthodoxy, where the administration is actually flagging individuals who'd be shut down, and then they're pointing out where else to find them, or they've moved to this other platform.
Well, what's fucked about COVID misinformation is a lot of the stuff that they were calling misinformation that would get you removed from social media now is just openly discussed as fact.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what's scary.
Yeah.
That's why that kind of censorship is dangerous, because you don't get to find out what's right and what's wrong if you don't let everybody talk, including experts with problematic opinions.
No, I think it'll be, in time, it'll prove to be a great case study, because it happened so fast It affected all aspects of communication, all aspects of society, from local government to federal government, right?
I mean, it was just like, it was so quick and so everywhere, and then kind of ended relatively quickly.
So, rather than some gradual shift over time, you'll be able to step back, and it won't be long, like in five or six years.
You'd be able to step back and really go like, okay, here's what happened.
And you'd be able to look at how ideas, brand new ideas, emerged, were squashed, punished, people were punished for having ideas, ideas came back out.
It'll be a really interesting little segment.
To look at when it comes like the flow of information, how the flow of information is controlled, how narratives are reinforced, how people that pushed other ones were, you know, decried or delegitimized and then like very quickly later celebrated or pointed out.
I mean, I think, if you think 25 years ago, there was no internet, or no internet the way it is now, at least.
25 years from now, what are we going to be dealing with?
It's probably going to be something that's so profoundly different than anything we ever expected.
It's almost like we were talking about making a movie, a non-fiction movie about the future.
It's impossible.
25 years from now, it's probably going to be neural implants.
Which I was reading a story today that Elon might be in trouble.
The Neuralink company, because of animal abuse.
Because they run these studies on monkeys, and then they kill the monkeys.
Which they do all the time.
Whenever they do these studies with animals...
They wind up killing the animals to find out what kind of an effect these things had on the animals by doing autopsies on them.
And people are finding out that they did that to monkeys and that they opened monkeys' heads up and put these fucking Neuralink things in there.
And this is outraging people.
Which is a very interesting moral dilemma.
If you can fix all these diseases, if you can cure paralysis, if you can greatly expand the ability of the human mind through technology, but you have to kill a bunch of monkeys to do it, are we okay with that?
I don't think that'll become a widespread thing because you can't look at any of our major medical breakthroughs that didn't have some level of animal research.
I think on stuff that might strike people as relatively, you know, what might strike people as relatively frivolous, you know, testing comfort levels of shampoos and shit, right?
You can see people being like, that doesn't seem to me something that really warrants the use of animal experimentation.
But I don't think that the preponderance or like mainstream Americans are going to turn against Medical research that involves animal experimentation, once they understand how much of what they enjoy has been informed, influenced, discovered because of that.
I think you make some noise about it, but I have a hard time seeing that becoming an actual problem.
Yeah, I think it's going to be, it's a point of outrage for some people, particularly animal rights people, but that is the nature of a lot of those experiments.
What do you think about that kind of shit, like neural implants?
You just talk about it like you're watching interactions.
And so I try to invite that level of looking at, I try to invite that level of looking at the outdoors and the way of looking at wilderness 'cause I think it makes you, it helps you be more connected to it. - Gives you a reference.
So the wild goat was breeding with this female wild goat and right next to him, like 20 feet away, was another wild goat breeding with another female goat.
And this guy dismounts, runs over, and knocks that goat over.
Just charges in the middle of sex and just blasts this other goat and knocks him down.
And, you know, for many people, you get a little taste of it from documentaries, maybe a little internet clip here or there, or, you know, you see animals at the zoo.
You have very little exposure to what it's like to be around them in real life.
I fished when I was younger, but I didn't spend a lot of time in the wild, near wild animals.
And I remember when you and I went on that first trip to Montana, the moment where...
Shot that buck was the first animal I've ever killed and That moment where like I locked eyes on it and we're in the wild and you see this thing and it was a totally Unusual experience.
I remember thinking like this is almost like Bizarrely almost like psychedelic Because the world this world is so different Than any other aspect of the world the world where you're you're sneaking up on an animal You're trying to be undetected it spots you you look at them, you know, what's up?
They kind of know something's wrong and You're locked into this completely different vibration of existence.
And I remember thinking, but this is very bizarre.
This is a very bizarre state.
It's a state of mind.
And I feel like it's also a very bizarre state of mind that's recognizable.
It's like a little door that you didn't even know you had in your room, in your house.
Like, what's in this door?
And you open the door like, oh, this is the hunter door.
You didn't even know you had that door.
And then all of a sudden you're in there.
I equate it with people.
I tell people all the time.
I go, you know that feeling that you get when you go fishing?
Most people know that feeling.
When you catch a fish and everything just gets excited.
That is a feeling that's like deeply embedded in the human reward system.
There's something that tells you this is a great thing because now you are going to catch a fish and that fish is going to feed your family.
You're going to exist.
You're going to live.
You're going to thrive.
Whereas if you didn't catch a fish, you didn't get anything.
It's an almost illogical lighting up of your system.
But it's just strange how nature works, how it coincides with the seasons so that the, you know, the calves will be born in the spring and it's so weird.
If you put on a spectrum like microbial – forget microbial life.
If you put it on a spectrum – Colony insects.
So the ants in the colony, I'd be like, that has to be pretty low individuality.
I'm guessing lower individuality.
Up to animals that live in social hierarchies, like really fine-tuned social hierarchies, you have to be like, that's high levels of individuality.
No one's going to look and say that chimps don't have high levels of individuality.
Because you've got these animals that have these known personal histories.
They've conducted quests.
You know?
So that, like, reading the book, part of me making the joke that I wanted to make a version where I do all the footnote commentary is it's like there's a lot of shit in there that a hunter can't ignore in the book about the role of hunting and extinctions, right?
Lots to unpack, man.
And even the role of hunter-based, he even talks a lot about hunter-based conservation.
Where you'd be like, you know, so you kind of want there to be a lot of elk so you can kill them?
Oh, so more in the southern plains, the southern great plains of the United States, flowing across Kansas.
Oh, wow.
Where you have instances of people mentioning things that you sort of like, look at you like, man, if they weren't talking about jaguar, what the hell are they talking about?
And a lot of times someone will say, there'll be a reference to a large cat, and you can't rule out, well, maybe in a historic record, they're probably talking about mountain lions.
But what do you do in a case where you have a historic record and someone is in some oddball place, Southern Colorado, and they're talking about, they have lions and leopards.
And lions and leopards.
So it's like, I guess we're talking, I mean, they have to be referring to jaguars.
So as people get into talking about jaguar recovery, of which I'm a proponent with an asterisk.
When people get talking about jaguar recovery, you have to define what that looks like.
And there are some who would say Jaguar recovery in North America as a collaborative effort between us, Mexico, Belize, whoever else has rolled into this Jaguar recovery plan.
Jaguar recovery in North America would mean recovering them across core habitat.
Okay, that's a term you hear all the time, like core habitat.
So then you've got to argue over what is the line, what's core habitat for jaguars.
And some people will argue, and many of them have motivation.
Some of them are honest.
Some of them have other kind of political motivation to say that core habitat is not Arizona.
That was always fringe.
Stray males, one or two here and there, long periods of absence.
It wasn't core habitat.
Other people would argue that Arizona was absolutely core habitat.
And if we're going to restore jaguars in core habitat, we're going to be restoring jaguars in some portion of the lower 48.
Meaning, eventually, and recovery would look a couple ways.
One is like protections, and you would watch how jaguars are able to flow back and forth across the border.
A big question around jaguar recovery is the border wall.
How much would a border wall impact large mammal movements?
So that's an aspect.
If we don't allow recovery in that way, or we make recovery in that way difficult, do we truck jaguars up and turn them loose in Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas?
Now, a little bit, so this takes place in Michigan in 1998. Now, the biggest white-tailed deer, the biggest typical white-tailed deer in the world is this deer called the Hansen buck, or Milo Hansen killed the biggest white-tailed, typical white-tailed deer in the world, okay?
I think the Hansen buck was, the Milo Hansen buck was killed in the 80s, if I'm not mistaken.
When you look at these pictures, notice, when you look at the Milo Hanson buck, you want to notice a couple things about it.
When you look at all these giant bucks, you'll want to notice how the burrs are positioned on top of his head, like how much space is between those burrs.
And you'll want to notice, like, on these giant, giant bucks, the presence of little extra points and little points here and there and shit.
So anyways, this guy, Milo Hanson, kills this, in Canada, he kills this world record typical whitetail.
We just had in our podcast the guy, the huff buck, where a guy in Indiana just killed the biggest typical whitetail in the U.S., But he didn't beat the Hanson Buck.
I'll talk about the Huff Buck too as I tell you about this controversy around the Huff Buck that is not there anymore but controversy that emerged.
So he's this guy, Mitch Rampala is this Michigan bowhunter.
And weirdly, my old man knew Mitch Rampala.
Because my dad used to measure bucks.
And he would measure bucks for this place called Commemorative Bucks of Michigan.
And Mitch Ron Powell was involved in Commemorative Bucks of Michigan.
But one day, he, I think it was mid-November, Mitch Ron Powell in Traverse City, Michigan, kills a buck that's going to beat, that clearly smokes the Hanson buck in size.
Anytime something like that happens, there's like a lot of questions about, is it legit?
Is it real?
So, one thing that becomes readily apparent is just the buck looks weird.
So everybody already knows he's a very private person.
He comes forward with the buck, and it's more like everybody else is saying that this buck is going to beat the Hanson buck.
And all these theories start to emerge.
That he had fabricated the rack.
That he had access to a deer farm.
So he was able to make this perfect rack.
And people are looking at the photo of the buck and its ear droops funny.
There's blood in weird places.
The antlers seem to be not colored quite correctly.
And there's this idea that he killed the buck.
For real.
Cut open its hide on its head.
Took a fabricated buck rack on a skull plate and attached it.
However, a tribal game warden sees it at his house, doesn't see anything fishy about it, and some guys come to officially measure the buck, just like in the picture you saw.
They officially measure the buck, but they never examine the skull plate.
All those people say, these eyewitnesses, like, I didn't see anything wrong with that buck.
But he won't put the buck, he won't enter the buck into the record books.
Sighting Like, a disagreement with the record books over some stuff.
And he's like, and a lot of people kill deer and don't enter them in the record books.
People are also looking, they're like, a big buck like that's never come out, there's no big bucks in Traverse City.
Like, how's this guy kill this big buck where there's no big bucks?
And people are like, yeah, but these giant bucks are freaks.
Like, you don't kill multiple 200-inch whitetails in one spot.
But you'd be like, well, you kill a bunch of 170s and 180s and 190s.
The reason I want to make a documentary about this, it's legitimately unsolved.
Milo Hanson, the guy that has the Hanson Buck, he makes a lot of money renting his buck out to buck shows.
This is no joke, dude.
You'll have trade shows.
Not trade shows, but public sporting goods shows.
Gun shows, state sporting goods shows, whatever.
The people that organize it will pay to have the Hanson Buck on display.
But suddenly, the Hanson Buck isn't a hot ticket commodity anymore.
Because everyone knows that the Ron Paula buck beat the Hanson buck.
So now he's seeing his rentals go down because, like, you're not the biggest buck.
We can't get the biggest buck because he doesn't want to show anybody, but you're not the biggest buck.
They go to Ron Paula.
And they have a non-monetary settlement in Mitch Rampala under threat of lawsuit.
Mitch Rampala agrees in a non-monetary settlement that he will stop saying his buck is bigger than the Hanson buck.
Why would you do that?
Then people are like, just get the buck x-rayed.
Just get it x-rayed.
Two individuals in Michigan come forward and say, I'll give you $10,000 to let me x-ray that buck.
He wouldn't take the money.
Then he says, and a lot of his friends think that this is his legitimate response and this makes total sense.
Then he says, fuck it.
I'm not showing anyone the fucking buck.
I'm done talking about it.
Not why I hunt.
I don't want to talk about it.
Some years go by, and it's put to rest sort of by someone saying it burned up in a house fire anyway.
A lot of his friends are like, dude, that's totally a Mitch move.
That's what Mitch would do.
People also try to make a big deal out of a criminal record he had to demonstrate dishonesty.
But here's the other thing.
He then establishes a website, and in the following years, weirdly, posts, like the picture he just pulled up, posts a bunch more bucks that have the same look.
That super wide, crazy look.
The website's now gone.
But he then, over the course of years, keeps shooting these crazy looking bucks, which no one else in Traverse City is killing.
But he says, but that's not why I hunt.
And people are like, if that's not why you hunt, why do you still have the website with all these crazy bucks that look like homemade bucks?
Or I think one of our guys that I work with real close, Spencer, I think Spencer, maybe Spencer came in and made a guess at 80 because he reports on that kind of stuff.
So that's not the generational wealth thing, but like the biggest.
The biggest is a thing that, like, your kids, if that record stands, like, your kids will enjoy the benefits of that deer.
Because for people that don't grow up around it and don't understand it, I follow a lot of people on YouTube that have bucks and they're all named.
They have target bucks.
And so what these people do is they'll set up food plots.
They have these large chunks of land.
land, they've invested shit tons of money into creating habitat that would attract these deer.
And this is not fenced in.
This is just wild farmland.
And in this farmland, like in Kansas and Iowa in particular and some of these other states, These folks will set up food plots where they'll grow alfalfa and apple trees and all these different things that they feel, and specifically just to attract bucks.
And then they set up cameras.
So they have these camera traps everywhere.
And nowadays they have camera traps that are attached to cell phones.
So these camera traps, they'll send you a photo on your...
Giant, huge trophy bucks that any normal person would be very excited.
He wants them to grow bigger.
And then there's competition with neighborhood farms because this buck will travel to other places wherever the gals are, wherever the food is.
So they're trying to attract them to get them into this area.
And these guys will hunt for day in, day out, 30, 40 days in a row, however long the season is, just stay up in that tree stand, just freezing their dick off all day long.
I was reading this one account.
This guy was talking about how it was the most frustrating season ever because he went like 40 days in the stand and never even drew his bow back.
Never even saw a deer that he could shoot, but he was talking about like this is what he loves about whitetail hunting, is that if on the 39th day A whopper could walk right through a 200 inch buck and he would shoot it, but that this is an obsession with that part of the world that is Largely unknown like I remember one time when I was on the road I was I think I was in Nashville or it might have been Atlanta and I went and did this local radio station They were talking about NASCAR and they were talking about this guy and that guy
and did you hear about that?
And I'm like this is a world that I've never even heard of like you guys are excited about a guy races a car in a circle for real and But they knew everybody.
Whitetail have always been, like, they are the most hunted, in terms of man hours, not the most harvested thing, but in terms of man hours, they are the most hunted animal in America.
You can hunt whitetails in most states.
There's only a few exceptions where you can't hunt whitetails.
They have a relatively small home range, so you can kind of have one stay close and nearby.
They do really well with humans, meaning development, agriculture.
These things don't bother them.
In fact, it seems to be helpful.
They like edge habitats, so they like agriculture and woods and housing developments, golf courses.
None of this shit really seems to phase him like it does a lot of other highly sensitive So you can just live and be in deer country, and most people live in deer country.
And for most people, it's the biggest thing around.
And you can Have, like, this very long-term immersive experience with them.
You know, Clay Newcomb, he recently did a Bear Grease podcast about a buck he was obsessed with for many years.
And then he got killed by some guy on a neighboring property who just got, like, shit lucky.
And Clay is like mourning about this and eventually brings this guy the shed antlers.
He had over multiple years found the matching sets of shed antlers from this deer and the pictures and eventually gets over his mourning and does a podcast episode about it.
Actually, the guy is on the podcast.
He goes to the guy and be like, I need to talk to you about your deer.
And the guy didn't know what was going to happen.
He didn't know if he was going to get in a fight or what when Clay came and did that.
But he said, there's a thing or two I need to tell you about that buck he killed.
And lays out that he has five years into this deer.
I can't remember when the guy killed at seven years old or something like that, but Clay had early on.
I might get some of the details wrong, but Clay had early on flagged it as this unusual, like this buck with this unusual antler configuration, and he watched it get bigger, and then had a bad year and got smaller, and Clay thought, well, if they live long, they'll fade.
Whatever, at six years, he'll throw the biggest rack he's ever going to throw, and then he'll have a couple bad years before he dies.
This buck throws a shitty rack.
But then comes out of it and throws a bigger rack.
And just when you're questioning whether Clay's actually looking at the proper buck, the buck's got leg injuries, which makes it like a one-in-a-million leg injury array, front and rear.
So you can always tell the buck.
He's got, like, growths on his legs that you can just know that that's absolutely the buck.
And he's obsessed about the buck.
And then some guy rents a house.
And decides to go out hunting behind the house and shoots the buck.
We had a turkey researcher and they were studying how turkeys evade predation, human predation.
And they had a turkey that they actually started giving its coordinates to hunters.
Being like, here's where the turkey is right now.
Here's where he's roosted.
Try to get him.
Right?
And they'd be able to watch the hunter on a tracking device and they could watch the turkey on a tracking device.
They'd just watch all these turkeys just juke people.
And they'd even put good turkey hunters on them and good turkey hunters couldn't kill them.
One day a guy gets in a fight with his wife Storms out of the house, drives down the road, gets to the game management area sign, pulls over to the side of the road, walks off in the woods, sits against the tree to cool off, and kills that turkey.
Do you have a conflicted view of what I would call almost like, it's almost like free-range deer farming.
Because if you're providing them with all this food, and then you're keeping an eye on them with trail cams that send you digital images through cell phone signals, and you're tracking their location, and you make it so that you lure them in there.
I mean, obviously, it requires a lot of resources.
No, I don't mean conflicted, but I shouldn't say conflicted like you shouldn't do it.
What I mean is, like, is it different?
What are the pros and cons?
Because it's definitely different than if you go into the mountains and you stumble upon a giant mule deer and you track him and you hunt him and you kill him.
That is a deer that you might have seen the day before or something like that.
But this is not an animal that you have a relationship with.
And you certainly didn't lure him into that area with a food plot and apples and shit.
If you measure human knowledge, and let's say we're going to measure it in bits, and we're going to measure human output in calories or whatever, the bits of information required to successfully do that on a piece of land,
and the calories required to successfully do that on a piece of land are enormous and far outweigh The bits of information and calories expelled to get a deer in many other kinds of circumstances.
Different skill sets.
I don't feel any personal desire to have a place where I grow big whitetails.
Because to me, they're not as mysterious to me as they are to some people.
However...
The most productive chunks of privately owned ground that I know about from a biological standpoint are chunks of ground that people are managing as recreational properties for wildlife and hunting.
You can't if you're going to sit and say that you support there being wildlife habitat and you support private land conservation, you can't then sit and say that the person who's maximizing wildlife output on their property is somehow like, you know, you can't then sit and say that the person who's maximizing wildlife You know, a cheater.
Because, holy shit, they do phenomenal wildlife work, and it's trickle night.
And you could, again, we talked about this earlier, you could look and be like, oh, you're just doing that so you can kill that deer.
Well, okay, sure.
But the number of songbirds, the number of pollinators, the number of even predators, other things that thrive on some of these properties that are managed to be like quiet deer producing machines.
It's like, this is a hurdle you wind up talking about.
This is a hurdle you encounter when you're talking about mule deer, because people will always be able to say, well, there's mule deer laying in my yard.
If I try to show her, look at the size of this mule deer I got, she'd be like, oh, it looks like all the other mule deer.
Who cares?
But she prefers to eat mule deer meat.
Everything about them I like better.
I like the places they live in.
They're wilder.
They're less sort of touched.
You can go to certain areas and you might be the first person.
You can look at mule deer now and then and be like, you know, considering that he's only three, four, five, six years old, I might be the only person who's ever laid eyes on that thing.
Yeah, they're like, you know, I would look there, I would look there, I would look there, I would not bother looking there, which was hugely beneficial to my experience.
Well, I wound up getting one that they didn't know about.
I got one that they hadn't found out about, but it helped me be very, like, it helped me rule out.
If I had just done it off maps, I probably would have spent time in some places that they were like, I wouldn't look there.
I would be looking here.
For this reason.
And so I started looking there.
I found the bucks that they knew about and then pretty quickly found a buck they hadn't even known about.
I kind of dog on the people that keep track of the bighorn scores, because the biggest bighorn ever was just found dead in a place called Wild Horse Island.
It's like, it's not even, it's an island in Flathead Lake in Montana.
You can't hunt it.
Okay?
The history of the island was, it was going to be like this utopia of Where this guy was going to have like a lead economist, a lead sociologist and shit, we're going to live on this island and solve all the world's problems.
Somehow over time became that there's like this little population of bighorns out there that you can't hunt, but they're wild.
I'm making little quotes.
They're wild.
And one of them died and it's the new world record bighorn.
And I'm like, kinda.
They're not like historically even from the, you know what I mean?
So anyways, when you get into record shit, like the biggest shit surprisingly is always shit found dead or got hit by a car.
Like hunters don't get the biggest stuff.
There might be some case to, there might be some case I'm not thinking of where, but like the biggest whitetail isn't the biggest whitetail hunted.
And for whatever reason, no one I know that likes the hunt takes this, no one I personally hang out with takes any of this seriously, but they view that a typical should be really symmetrical.
But it has to be super atypical to be counted as a non-typical.
So if you have a buck, let's say you have a buck that has five points on one side and six points on the other side, and you measure up all the inches of antler, they'll actually deduct the difference off the score because it's not symmetrical.
So the thing will grow antler that they don't actually count.
But if it's so freakishly different, if it hits a threshold of asymmetry, Then its asymmetry counts in its favor.
So it can actually happen that you could feasibly kill a buck and break and take a pair of pliers or a hammer and knock a point off its horns and it actually becomes a higher scoring deer.
He saved up all his money when he was working at Matthews and he got a piece of land and he started developing it for archery hunting and documented the whole thing and obsessed with it.
I mean, you can't talk to him during that time of the year.
People dog on naming them, but you go spend a day hunting where you're watching a couple bucks, and you're going to start referring to them in some way that you can be like, there's that one buck over there, and then that other buck over there.
Eventually you're like, you know, the three by five.
And I don't have to worry about, if someone thinks that it breeds some level of disrespect, if I disrespect mule deer, I don't know what respecting them looks like.
I'm not doing a terrible disservice to how he put it, but it was basically that it knocked it down in his mind that you could get so good at it without having what he regarded as the fundamentals.
And so, again, John will be out there day in, day out.
A month plus at a time.
I don't know how long the Iowa season is.
But he gets these big...
And he's self-filming everything.
He films everything.
He has the whole setup up there with video cameras on arms.
And he does them all himself.
Which complicates things, right?
Because he has to get the buck in focus.
And then once he gets the buck in focus...
Yeah, that's okay.
Make that large so he can see it.
So this is the thing with John is that he's like really obsessed with education as well.
He explains what he does and how he sets everything up and when he goes in.
Give a little volume on this.
unidentified
I'm just bumping more deer trying to get in for the morning hunts than what it's worth because the evening feed is the majority of the movement.
So I'm coming in here 11, 12 o'clock in the morning when everything's not out in the open.
And I'm getting on a food source.
These are blinds that we built this year through an exercise, a brand new field.
But what's unbelievable about these next couple hunts for me is these are critical hunts because a family member of mine waited five years, drew a tag, came in.
I hunted with him during the rut.
We rattled in an awesome buck and he made What we thought was an awesome shot.
Quartering away, it looked a little bit high.
And just like what every bow hunter is eventually going to have to live through, we thought we lost this buck.
We could not find blood.
We looked and looked and grid searched.
He went back home.
He's been sick about it and then here we are only a few days before gun season and I just got a picture of this buck with the injury clearly visible.
I am going to focus on this deer.
It's a deer that I don't think is going to make through the winter with this injury.
So this is going to be critical going in e-powered as quiet as I can with my backpack.
This year I found a buddy of mine that hit a buck that he couldn't find and was worried sick about it, and I found that buck playing grab ass with some does.
When he had it cut out, they say it was the first Western-style surgery in the American West, I think, is when Jim Bridger had the broadhead cut out of his shoulder.
He said the bear was so close to him that it was one of those things where if he didn't shoot it, it was going to find him and it was within this range of like 15 feet where he was worried that it could possibly rush him.
And so he was at full draw and he found the shot and he had confidence in his equipment and he's an amazing archer.
So he just center punched it right through the head.
I'd hit a different one, and that one run off squealing, and that boar came in so hot, hearing all that squealing going on, and almost got to me, and then stopped right there.
And yeah, I would never advise someone doing that, but at that distance, it just doesn't.
Under the right circumstance, it's just unbelievably deadly.
And there's plenty of shots that under the right circumstances are deadly, but I used to think it was just categorically a no-no.
But I've had my mind changed by a lot of conversations with a lot of people, and I've seen it twice now, where it's just done properly is just deadlier than a heart shot.
You don't get a lot of practice in actually pulling the trigger, actually releasing the arrow.
Because especially if you're elk hunting once a year, you have like one moment a year.
So you have all this anxiety built up into this one moment.
And there's two different types of...
There's controlled shooting and then there's what's called an open loop system.
There's a closed loop system and an open loop system.
And you want to operate in a closed loop system where you have complete control of the shot from the beginning to the end.
It's never...
It's never just like...
It goes off.
And the way you do that is to have a mantra in your mind.
And to repeat that mantra so you're in the present moment through the entire SHOT process.
Joel Turner has a website called Shot IQ and Joel Turner was a SWAT instructor and so he's very aware of high pressure situations where people tend to panic.
Or people tend to flinch, and this is the best way to avoid doing that, to avoid getting yourself into an open-loop system.
Now, an open-loop system would be like swinging a baseball bat.
Like, once you're swinging that bat, that bat is swinging, right?
You're just going, ah!
Let it go.
A closed-loop system, in the closed-loop system, you could stop at any moment.
You could let down at any moment.
You're in complete control of the situation.
You're not overcome with anxiety.
Obviously, you're very anxious, right?
It's a big moment.
But in order to stay, to keep that in the conscious mind, he recommends and he teaches how you use a mantra.
He has a whole process in the draw cycle, and then he has a whole process during the shot cycle.
And if it doesn't happen a lot, like if you're a guy like Remy Warren that shoots a lot of things with your bow, you don't think about it like that because you do it so...
Or Cam Haynes, a great example.
He hits the trigger.
Whereas Joel Turner recommends a surprise release.
And during a surprise release, you're pulling through the shot and the shot breaks.
And you are aware of the process the entire time, but there will be no flinching because you literally don't know when it's going off, you know, which is ideal.
And so his whole system, he has a very comprehensive system on his website that's designed to inform your mind and to train your mind to be able to stay controlled during these very high-pressure situations.
And, like, getting through that, I've gotten through it not by...
I've gotten through that sense not by overcoming it through any sort of game I've done with myself.
I've gotten through that sense of just, like, long-term exposure.
Hunting with my kid now is funny because one of the biggest things I'm trying to explain all the time, and my daughter would be, well, yesterday she turned old enough to hunt, but would be just trying to suppress the excitement.
I remember when I was on that hunt with you, the first hunt, I was in the middle of range.
I had the...
I was like lying down on the ground and I had the deer in the sight and I was thinking of squeezing the trigger but I was realizing that I was letting my heart race too much and then it was there was a little too much movement and I remember I had to go hold on And I stopped myself, and I just calmed myself down for a second or two and settled down.
But I recognized that I was in this sort of panic state.
I was like, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't do that.
Don't let that overwhelm you.
And thank goodness I did.
I probably would have fucking shot a mile over its head.
But, I mean, I'm talking about, like, a competition.
So competition is even more crazy because you're ready for it.
And then you're thinking it's going to come in an hour.
Like, when am I up?
I'm up in two hours.
And then you're just laying around the dressing room and you have to stay loose so you're hitting pads a little bit and you're warming up and you're stretching and you're getting ready.
And then all of a sudden, are you ready?
Are you ready?
Fight!
You're like, ahhh!
But the guys who do it a lot, they get to this point where they can perform at an elite level even in the most high pressure situation.
But that's accentuated by experience.
The more experience you have, like a guy who has 50 fights has an enormous advantage over a guy who has two or three fights.
Because you've just been there so many times before and you can stay calm.
You know that you can perform under those bright lights.
For UFC fighters, it's a really big moment to make that debut.
And a lot of them have had a bunch of professional fights before.
We'll get guys that have had like 15, 20 fights outside of the organization.
Then they get to the UFC and then they can't believe it.
They're in the fucking octagon and they clamp that door shut.
And then they look around and then, you know, they see Herb Dean, are you ready?
Are you ready?
Like, oh my god, is this really fucking happening?
That, I mean, whenever there's a thing that you're preparing for for so long and then it's one moment.
But with a fight, at least you can kind of move around and get loosened up.
You know, you can move around, you can avoid, you have skills.
When you're drawing back on an animal, if you've never done that before, that moment is just like...
It's just one moment.
It's just one thing.
You release one arrow.
And it's so overwhelmingly anxiety-ridden for people.
You watch someone say something, you know it's not rehearsed, and they respond in a way that you're so jealous of that they would have ever thought to have said that.
The thing about stand-up is when you get in the groove, you're performing.
For me, I'm performing multiple times every week.
That's the only way you get in a groove.
I was on a plane yesterday with Ron White.
And we were talking about that.
And he was talking about how long it took him to get back into his groove from COVID. You know, because COVID he took like eight months off and then he started getting back into the groove when the show started opening up again.
And he goes, you know, and Ron is such a fucking character.
He goes, for a while I was doing a Ron White impression on stage.
I was like, what do I sound like?
What do I do?
He goes, I was surprised at how long it took me to get back into the fucking groove.
He had to just do a bunch of shows and then get loose.
We were talking about how some comics, something happens And they forget whatever it was that used to make them good.
And then they can't do it anymore.
They lose that fucking voodoo.
They lose that connection that they have to what they do.
And again, a lot of it is performance and it's anxiety.
And there's a lot of things that are at play.
But I've done a lot of shit, man.
And I think that hunting is probably one of the most anxiety-ridden things I've ever done.
Like, where you just have to wrestle with your nervous system.
Where you have to, like, shut the fuck up and stay calm.
You have to have that, like, dominant conscious mind that goes, no, no, no.
Like, little weird thoughts are coming to your head.
Like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
No room for you.
Stay in the groove.
Stay in the groove.
But if you don't have experience doing that, I can imagine, for some people, they're having a fucking heart attack.
Like all that, just all the emotions, man, like the dread and the, you know, the worried about dicking it up and the, it'll never, I'll never, it's like so much more, it's just like I'm just so much more calm now.
But you know what I wanted, the thing I wanted to ask you about when you brought up performing, I've always wanted to ask you this.
Do you get where, do you ever start feeling like way overexposed?
I don't mean like too much media, but do you ever feel, like when you come off doing shows, Do you want to go crawl into a hole?
Or do you want to go out with people you don't know?
That's what I was trying to do with this Spotify thing, man.
I was like, because Jamie was panicking because at the beginning of the Spotify thing, our numbers dropped way lower because now we're exclusive to this one platform.
We used to be on iTunes and YouTube, and then all of a sudden we're just on Spotify.
And he's like, oh, there's so many less people listening.
I'm like, good.
Good.
Let's keep it that way.
I want to be 10% less famous.
Yeah, unfortunately that didn't happen.
The opposite happened.
But it's, yeah, there's a lot going on with something like that.
We have that many people scrutinizing your words and all the shit you do.
But that's also what I do, you know?
So it's like you get more accustomed to it, and then your level of what you're comfortable with changes.
Well, there's so many things going on, especially you're doing a live podcast.
You have all these people on the stage with you.
You're navigating this conversation.
You're sort of orchestrating it.
And then if someone's trying to talk while you're talking, you're like, but I got this thing I got to get out of my head.
And then...
It's like you've got to know when to talk and when not to talk, and also you have a thought that comes across.
And what people don't realize is one of the difficult things about podcasting is when you have a thought in your head and you're trying to get it out and someone else is talking, it's very difficult to maintain that thought.
Which is one of the reasons why people talk over each other.
They just jump in.
They're like, I gotta get this out, and I can't help myself.
And you get better at maintaining those thoughts without interjecting and interrupting someone else's thought.
Because if you do interrupt that person, that person will be a less...
Less enjoyable guest.
They won't be as good because they won't be at their best.
What's funny is you do something kind of irrational where...
There's a very small fraction of the people that will experience it.
This is why I don't record them and release them anymore because there's such a small percentage of the actual listeners that are sitting there in that moment right then, but you are so beholden to them and catering to them because you have to look them in the eye.
It's also kind of cool for them if you don't release it.
If you don't release it, it's like this is a moment that's just a shared moment with everybody in that room, and it's very unique, and you leave there going, that was a lot of fun.
We were doing segments for a while, but they would never do as well on YouTube as our other stuff did.
But I could picture making a separate thing for it, especially when we get into a space where we can just do a better job of it, where it looks better.
It's very hard.
In our studio now, it's very hard to get a good product that anybody can be proud of.
Maybe what I'm going to say, I don't know if it's in the show or just in the novel, but in the novel The Handmaid's Tale, it's this dystopian future where there's like a religious revolution of sorts.
Men hold all the powers.
It's like an insane patriarchy.
And it follows this woman through this and she loses track of her husband.
He's gone.
But in the book, I keep telling people this story when we're talking about COVID because in the book, she's sort of like talking to her dead or gone husband.
And she's asking, there's one thing I need to know, though, is like, was there some part of you that kind of liked it?
You know, she's wondering of her husband about when she lost all of her rights and he like controlled the household.
Did that somehow speak to you in some way?
Was there a little bit of you that liked that power that you had?
And looking back on the pandemic, there are certain players...
He's like, actually, I got COVID. And I said, all right, tell me where you're at.
I'll have a nurse come to you.
And I got him an IV vitamin drip and all that shit.
Oh, that's good.
But the point is, like...
He wasn't worried.
And he's 70. I'm like, you're gonna be alright.
It's over.
This shit is not what it was in March of 2020 when everybody was shitting their pants and they're shutting the government and shutting the country down.
This is a different thing now.
So if you're still wearing a fucking mask in your car today, That's you.
Well, not only that, but now we're finding that if people got vaccine injured...
So if you have a mandate in your business and then people got vaccine injured, you can't sue the vaccine manufacturers, but now they're starting to sue the businesses.
So the businesses that forced them to do the vaccine.
The problem is, it's one thing if you're telling people to do something that you have a long history of long-term data.
You know exactly what the repercussions are.
But when you're telling people to do something where you don't have long-term data and You have studies from the pharmaceutical that's based on biased data that's interpreted by their scientists, and then they throw out any studies that show negative effects or lack of positive effects.
They can run 10 studies, and two of them get the required results, what they're looking for, and then the other eight don't.
They throw those out.
It's complicated because you're dealing with a business that's really just about making a lot of money.
And also a business that's had a bunch of criminal complaints, a bunch of lost lawsuits for fraud.
They've had criminal judgments against them for billions of dollars.
And we're expecting these people to be honest with us.
And you're trusting them.
And especially if you know people that have been injured by other pharmaceutical medications.
Like, I know people personally that took stuff that wound up getting pulled from the market years later, and they got fucked up by it, like, badly.
And it's just...
You can't.
You can't just mandate people take something that doesn't have a history of long-term use.
If it seemed like there was some ray of hope that something was going to fix the problem and let you go back to all the normal shit, I would get a little frustrated early on with people who wouldn't get with the program.
Not because...
Just because I wanted, I was like, come on!
Just like, let's do whatever we gotta do to be able to go and do our work, whatever.
Like, just get this taken care of.
And after a while you're like, this isn't, it's not gonna be like that.
Before I became like this person that resisted everything, I was lined up for it.
I went to the UFC to get it, because the UFC had allocated a bunch for all their employees.
But it was on a Saturday, the day the fights were, and they said, I thought I could get it at the UFC because they have a doctor that works there.
I'm like, can you give it to me, like, right before the fights?
And Dana was like, yeah, they'll give you the vaccine right before the fights.
I was like, perfect.
So I go there, and then I called Dana, like, as we got there.
I said, hey, I'm here.
Where can I go get the vaccine?
And he goes, let me get you in touch with the doctor.
So he puts the doctor on.
I talked to the doctor.
He's like, we actually have to administer it.
At the hospital.
So can you go to the hospital on Monday?
I was like, no, I have to go home.
I go, but I'll be back in two weeks.
In that time, they pulled the vaccine because people were getting blood clots.
And I was like, holy shit.
And then two people I know had strokes in that time.
And I was like...
What the fuck?
And then I just started, like, thinking about all the things that I know about pharmaceutical companies and all their deception, whether it's OxyContin isn't addictive or whether it's Vioxx isn't going to cause you to have a stroke or all these different things that I knew.
I'm like, hold the fuck on.
And then Trump got over it.
And I was like, that fat fuck can kick it.
All of a sudden, I'm not scared.
And then Chris Christie got it.
I'm like, hold the fuck on, people.
Like, are we sure this is what everybody is saying?
It's like this doom and gloom is in the air, and everybody's so goddamn terrified.
And by then, I knew quite a few people that had COVID in it.
Like one of the strangest upheavals of just the way discourse was handled, the way content was censored, the way you're allowed to talk about things, and even the way things that, you know, were described as misinformation and disinformation that turned out to be absolute fact.
And then you know that they knew it was absolute fact when they were labeling it disinformation.
And how in cahoots the pharmaceutical companies were with the government and social media.
It's like, wow!
It's eye-opening.
It's very eye-opening and pretty fucking wild.
It's an educational experience on the human condition and just about how people deal with adversity.
Because, you know, if the people that were in charge of the administration while the suppression was going down, which, you know, initially was Trump...
But, you know, there's also a lot of shit they didn't tell people to do that they knew because there's no benefit to them financially.
Like, take vitamin D. One of the early things they found out is that people that were in the ICU with COVID, a very large percent of them were deficient in vitamin C, which is crucial to the function D. D. Oh, you said C, sorry.
Did I say C? Sorry.
D, vitamin D. Because vitamin D is crucial to your immune system, and it's very difficult to get.
If you're not out in the sun every day, you're not getting vitamin D unless you supplement.
You're not really getting it that much from food.
You really only get it from supplements or better from the sun.
The sun's the best way to get it.
It's really a hormone that your body produces because of the sunlight.
And it's crucial to immune function.
They knew that early on.
And they were never telling, there's no fucking news stories telling, please, supplement with vitamin D. No one's telling you that.
It was a lot of very frustrating stuff for me, too, because I have these long-form conversations with Nutritionists and epidemiologists and people who really understand about the immune system and weren't beholden to pharmaceutical companies, especially independent people that have podcasts and scientists and people that weren't on board with the mainstream narrative.
There's a lot of things you could be doing to protect yourself and we should be telling these people to do this.
And there's no discussion of this.
It's just like this one very binary solution.
Take this medicine.
Must get it.
Get it, get boosted, keep going.
Even after I got COVID, which I got over pretty quickly.
There was people telling me to get vaccinated now.
And I was like, why would I do that after I got over the disease when natural immunity from recovering from the virus is seven times better protection than the vaccine?
I just was like, I'm going to hold on here because I just know the history of pharmaceutical companies and how all these things, everybody's like, oh, just take it, just take it.
Everything's fine.
It's not addictive.
It's not going to kill you.
And then years later...
The truth comes out.
It's like it's a long-standing story.
It's a narrative that plays out over and over and over again.
His initials are, if he's listening, his initials are SM. And I would fight with him early on.
But like, why not just go, because we, you know.
We're tied in on some stuff and I'm fighting with him being like just go get the stupid things you don't need to worry about it like what's going on like if we're gonna go to whatever just and he just would not and it was so funny and I remember even thinking like this guy is so rational about everything in his life and he's so like calculated and doesn't screw up I'm like why can he not?