Adam Greentree recounts his grueling 28-day Colorado elk hunt, where exhaustion and injuries nearly derailed him, contrasting America’s ethical hunting practices with Australia’s wasteful culling of invasive species. He details deadly saltwater crocodile encounters in the Northern Territory, debunking myths about their behavior, while linking ancient Aboriginal rock art to possible mass extinction theories. The pair then dissect societal collapse risks—from global conflicts to LA’s homeless crisis—highlighting Greentree’s farm-based preparedness and Rogan’s push for stem cell therapy over bureaucratic medical hurdles. Ultimately, they argue that resilience through passion and incremental effort, not passive conformity, is the antidote to modern dissatisfaction. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, so I couldn't capture it all, but I... Tried to at least mention everything that I was going through but there was like one stage I just felt like I was in the war and I actually slipped between two fallen down trees and I nearly broke my legs like straight across the front of my shins.
And it's like I didn't capture it and I'm sort of hurt and so you don't get to see the whole story but I reckon I at least give the people 80% of the story you know.
Colorado's just reintroduced wolves, which is just...
It's such a shell game because when there's like stipulations to reintroduce wolves, like Ranella's talked about this before, like they reintroduce wolves and then the idea is when the wolves get to be a certain population, then they will allow hunting.
But then the wildlife protection groups come in and they sue.
To make sure that you don't open up wolf hunting.
So then they only can issue depredation permits to ranchers.
You know, people don't like the idea of hunting wolves, and I get that.
But you shouldn't also like the idea of rampant wolf populations that are invading into people's communities and eating their dogs and threatening children.
The reason why Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood and all that shit, there was a story, because they used to eat kids.
You know, and it's true, but there could be lots of elk in that area at another time of the year, but hunting season starts, hunters go in and sort of pushes them out.
So it's a little bit hard to say, but yeah, you don't feel right.
You know, you want to shoot something that's in a good, healthy population.
how do you know what units to pick you you don't you're just guessing yeah yeah so are you going online and doing any research yeah it's a lot of full or lots of research yeah hunting full super handy and stuff like that talk to the guys pretty frequent before coming up to a trip and then sort of just leaning on the hunting community a little bit you know and you've got guys and this is what happened this trip because i'm starting from fresh again it's been four years the spots that i used to hunt elk in aren't like that anymore or they're limited entry now
so and I didn't draw...
So I am starting from scratch, from the draw board.
So I sort of leaned on the hunting community a little bit, and I had a few guys reach out.
Well, I had actually a bunch of people reach out, which was really nice, and try this spot.
I hunted here last year.
You're welcome to join me in this camp.
So I had a lot of that, which was really nice.
But even those guys don't know.
You think you've got an animal figured out.
Fuck, think again.
I think that's why I love bow hunting so much.
I've constantly got a passion for it because you never actually fully work it out.
As soon as you start thinking you've got something worked out, you're fucked.
They'll change it up on you.
And that happens to me every year in just about every species.
So you can go in there with as much knowledge as you like, and obviously that helps.
But at the end of the day, that's why it's so good, so appealing.
I've sort of fucked myself because I want to go to a place where there's just elk running around everywhere and stuff like that, but because I've done these hard hunts now, it's like I can't go backwards.
And I'm not lining myself up for a disastrous hunt, but...
I want it to be that tough.
I don't want to go in on the first day and kill one.
Yeah, I've got no interest in climbing Mount Everest, and I've said this many times before, but if there's a fucking animal at the top of it, I'll do it.
I'll do it, you know, and I'll push myself to that limit.
And if I had 28 days to do what you do, I don't know if I'd do that.
But I guess what you're doing is, I mean, you hunt so much in Australia, and Australia is so game-rich, because there's so many invasive species in Australia, there's deer everywhere, there's stags everywhere, you have so many pigs, it's a great place to get your meat.
Yeah, and as a hunter, I get to see these animals up close, you know, and you realize that they are a beautiful animal and have a lot of respect for them.
And then, so you see, when you see that happening, it is pretty upsetting.
Customs is really strict in Australia and because there's no diseases in our red meat, I think they're really, really strict that they don't want that.
that's been eating a rotten animal or i've heard people catch uh they've eaten bear that have been eating nothing but fish and they're nasty yeah okay yeah that makes sense yeah it does make sense yeah because like everyone's always said like like the tar in new zealand oh it's a smelly goat you know or the pronghorn in here in america right because they do have that smell to them but once it's prepared prepared correctly yeah oh it's delicious I think the thing about the pronghorn, too, is that you hunt them in the summer and it's very hot.
And if you had a cooler in your truck at the trailhead, and you're back there for 30 days, there's no ice back there anyway, or someone's going to steal it.
We were climbing up one morning and she started feeling sick.
And we get all, like, we're way out there and we get way back and we're climbing up this mountain and a gunshot goes, like, straight off in front of us because Colorado's got muzzleloader at the same time.
And that was about the point that she's like, look, book me a flight.
I'm going to go home.
It was one of the kids' birthdays.
So then she went home and we're already doing pretty radical stuff, like, back there.
Sort of, but you know, the traditional thing is weird too.
Like, I get it.
I get all of it.
But I think if you're going to shoot a traditional bow, you have to be a guy who's been practicing for a long time, and you have to put a lot of hours every day doing that.
Because it's essentially like you have to judge just based on how far you know an arrow drops.
And so my effective range with a trad bow is like 30 yards.
Ideally, I'm at 10 or 15. So even having the stalk in that close with traditional gear and then having the compound and being at like 40, 50 and being just like, oh, this thing's done, you know?
Mechanical, and it just expands and opens them up.
But...
Because we're shooting buffalo, so I do that buffalo hunt once or twice a year, and then some of our bigger deer, like the red deer, are pretty solid as well.
With a two-blade broadhead, you can still split bone and punch all the way through the animal.
If you shoot something in Australia using that sort of setup, like a 70- or 80-pound bow...
A good, like, micro-diameter shaft, so there's no restriction on the shaft actually passing through the animal after the broadhead.
And a decent, solid broadhead.
If you're not picking your arrow up in the dirt somewhere out the other side, you're like, shit, where did I go wrong?
You know, and it's like, so there's hardly any what we'd call, like, flag in an animal where the arrow's hanging out of it.
When I really got fixed on a fixed blade was called this big red stag in.
Like, he'd come down through the mist.
Like, couldn't even see him.
Just could hear him up there raking a tree, like, in the rut.
And then started calling and hearing coming down the mountain.
And he sort of come slightly angling on, but pretty much facing me.
And I was like, shit, I'll wait for him to turn.
And he was pretty much going to come straight over the top of me.
So I thought, oh, I can slip it in there.
And as I shot, he turned.
So I hit him right on that bone, that front leg bone.
And it split the ball joint of the leg bone, like straight in half, angled down, went in through a rib, through his heart, out through another rib and into the bottom joint on the far side leg.
And like it just dropped you on the spot because it pinned his legs together.
Obviously died pretty much instantly through the heart.
And like took all the meat out, deboned it, thought I'd keep all those bones and boiled them out.
And so it split four lots of bones to go through that stag.
Otherwise, I was just wounding it.
And it was from that point there that I'm like, I'll never shoot anything else.
And I don't have to change, like from shooting, you know, um, goats or deer, a small deer to shooting a massive Buffalo.
I don't change my setup, you know?
So the arrow's always at around 550 grains.
The broadhead's the same.
I can resharpen them.
So you talk about these long trips and trying to save weight.
I don't carry spare broadheads or anything because those broadheads, like they'll pass They'll hit a rock on the other side.
You pick it up, you file it off, then you get it razor sharp so it's shaving hairs again and away you go.
That's why I like the setup.
But every now and then I'll have limited blood trail.
I'm like, shit, I should be shooting a big expandable broadhead, but I don't want to change.
And I've had two since, and they've both done the same thing.
They get jammed up.
And like you'd see the amount of hunting I'm doing, I'm going through water, I'm going through dirt and grit, I'm going through crap, and it's just like properly locked up where it's holding on to 80 pounds without letting go.
So I mucked around up at my farm like I can shoot out to however distance you like.
I'm up at the farm and then I was trying to get it to go off and I still couldn't get it to go off.
So that's why I changed because that wise guy's got very limited...
So I bought three, because now I keep one in the backpack, so I've just cryovacked it so no crap can get in the backpack, and it's just in the backpack sitting there waiting as a spare.
I've been thinking a lot about that, you know, because I've talked to Joel Turner and he brings you through, you know, that whole shot IQ process.
I think you can shoot a release and make it go off, but you make it go off while you're in control of all your faculties and you're not panicking and you have a shot process.
I mean, if I have a hinge and I pull it back for people that don't know what a hinge is, A hinge is a release that you don't have a trigger.
You're just rotating the release and eventually it goes off.
Well, sort of, because it gets to a click.
And the click is saying, hey, we're real close.
It goes click.
It gives you an audible click.
And what that is is to let you know that this release is about to go off.
And all you do is pull and it goes off.
How is that any different than keeping your shit together and putting a finger on it?
I've hunted with a hinge, but this year I hunted with a thumb button and I just had it set pretty hot and I executed a perfect shot.
I have a process in my head and you know I'd also had the luxury of having one elk hunt that was just a couple weeks before that and Where I shot a nice elk and also I shot a pig a few weeks before that.
I just had this massive snowstorm like two days before.
I'm like, this is going to kick the elk off.
This is going to be sick.
And I'm way back there.
There's no human footprints or anything like that.
No frigging elk footprints either at that point.
And by the time you get back to camp, cook dinner, you're in bed pretty early, like two hours after dark sort of thing.
And I'll say the word again, you're rooted.
So you put your head down, you're fucking fast asleep two seconds flat.
And I get up in the morning and it's like dark still and I climb out of my tent and there's like this light-coloured blob like just across from me and I'm like, fuck, what is that?
And then I start walking closer to it and a dude set up a tent like right near me, like 50, 100 yards from me.
So he hiked in in the pitch black of night, dude, and set up his tent there.
So I went back in the tent and I'm like, shit, I've got company.
It's competition back then.
There's no elk around, so the last thing I need is another hunter pushing in on me.
I'd be better next year, if that makes sense, because I've already done so much land and walking this year that it's sort of, oh, there's no sign there, there's no sign there, there's no sign.
Even older sign, you know, like I've constantly taken note of like the trees that have been nibbled at by the elk in the winter, so they winter there.
Or where there's a shed antler, you know, you've sort of taken all that sort of thing in and, oh, there was heaps of hunters there, so stay away from that.
Oh, there was bugger all hunters there.
So as long as I get to follow it up next year, I think I'm better off.
And then I end up walking so far that I walked out to a highway at the end of the unit and called a friend and it's like, hey, is there anyone that can pick me up?
Jim Shockey was on the podcast a while back and he was telling a story about how they had actually hired him to go to Africa to hunt crocodiles because there were so many crocodiles that were taking people in this village.
They would set up stakes in the water so that the crocodiles couldn't go through the stakes to get to them.
But they figured a way around the stakes.
And this woman, while he was there, was washing clothes and she got jacked.
Right there on the bank you can see a big saltwater crocodile.
You can see his snout and his eyes closest to the bank and then you can see like the ridge at the front of his tail standing under the water.
I actually watched him come from the center of that billabong there right to the edge when he noticed the line that I was taking to the edge of the water.
Watch this thing sink away.
Yeah, you can see he's properly hunting me here.
You'll see his eyes and snout just disappear under that dirty water.
And he could have sunk down and turned around and sunk in that water.
I would never know that it was there.
But instead he's like, fuck, food, sweet.
Let's have a crack, you know?
Yeah.
So, but that seems more common at the moment.
And I don't know why, if the population's getting too high, but you used to get around and see like a saltwater crocodile every now and then.
And, but nearly like hard to find, you know, certain river systems not, but like tucked away water like that.
Whereas now it's just like every fucking waterhole's got a crock in it.
So we just bought a property up in the Northern Territory of Australia and it's got a beautiful big lagoon on it.
And Kimmy's like, oh fuck, that's going to be sweet for swimming.
I'm like, that's the wrong state of Australia, you know, because all the top of Western Australia and all of Northern Territory and the top of Queensland, that's where the crocs are.
So, and this property that we've purchased is inland as well, but they get pushed in there.
Like, the Norma Territory will have a big wet season, water will rise, like over the top of the land and everything like that, water will rise, and those big soldies can move into a little water hole.
Where they've never been before.
So you might have a property and being like, nah, this water's sweet.
And then the next year, there's a big salty in there.
Yeah, I think I told you about the story where, like, I shoot a big boar pig.
And like the arrow zips through it and it just dropped over onto the riverbank.
And I walked over there with another arrow just to see if I had to follow it up.
And so I walked up and like I'm like a metre above it.
Anyway, it was just on the side of the water, like not in the water, just on the side of the water.
And it was just like in the final stages of its life.
And I looked down and put my second arrow away like it doesn't need another arrow.
It's sweet.
And I looked down and I put the second arrow away and just heard the water erupt.
And this big saltwater crocodile come out, grabbed it.
I could still see it in slow-mo.
Grabbed this pig, like threw it over in the water and then started swimming away with it and actually took, and it was a big boar pig, actually took it underwater for like 30, 40 yards and then come back up with it.
And then another big salty was trying to get it off that saltwater crocodile.
Now, if that pig was already dead, I would have just jumped straight down the back, the bank, and I would have been right in the line of fire.
Me and Kimmy did 120 kilometers across inland Northern Territory.
And...
It was funny, because when you're in society, like back at home, you've got all the different things going on, whether it's bills, kids, just a thousand things going on, work and stuff like that.
And Kimmy really enjoyed that trip, because all you had to worry about every day was water, food, where you're going to camp...
But with water comes fucking crocodiles because you have to go down and collect the water.
Like we're walking 120 kilometres.
You can't carry enough water for 120 kilometres.
You literally fill it and it's stinking hot.
So you're filling your water bottle up multiple times a day.
And I'm like, you stay back here and I'll race down, watch the bank where I fill the water up at.
And because you're looking over this water hole, like even with binoculars, glass in it, you can't see a crock anywhere.
Like during the daylight, like you can't see a crock anywhere.
And I go down and I'm fast, like I don't muck around down there.
You go down, you scoop up the water and it's dirty water, you can't drink it.
Then you take it back up the bank, away from the crocks and you filter it up there from one water bottle to another.
So anyway, I race down there.
I scoop up the water.
I'm halfway back up the bank, like way away from the water though.
And Kim's like, look behind you.
And I turn around behind me and big saltwater crocodile eyes come up straight behind me.
Like that's how quick they are.
I went down, scooped, water got away from there.
Right where I filled up the water, croc eyes come straight up.
Yeah, because they'll only come so far at the bank.
So this last mission that I did with a couple of friends...
We had no choice but to camp within like 20 yards of the bank, but it's a high bank and the saltwater crocodiles were trying to come up that high bank every night.
So we end up running fishing line, you know, like three or four inches off the ground and like tying tin cans and like whatever we could that would make noise across there just so you'd hear them coming up overnight.
So a freshie might bite you, but he'll let you go.
Whereas a salty will bite you and hold onto you and fucking eat you.
And then so I'm going around with this torch and I'm seeing all these freshies.
Freshwater crocodiles everywhere and then I hear something moving up like there's sort of rapids below me and I hear something moving through the water and I'm like oh no that's not a fucking freshie and I turn around start walking down there and shine the torch and yeah it's a big salty and he's like coming straight up the water towards me and uh yeah so fucking they do live they do coexist with each other so if you see a freshie don't think you're safe and jump in for a swim there could be a bloody salty in there too So is that just a lack of people traveling in their area and so they've developed
There's a place called Car Hills Crossing up in the Northern Territory, heading out towards a part of Arnhem Land.
It might be actually the border of Arnhem Land.
And there's so many saltwater crocodiles on that crossing.
And people come unstuck there all the time because it's tidal, right?
So they'll try and drive across there with a car and their car will get washed off and they've got to swim back to the bank with all these crocodiles in the water, so...
It's pretty sketchy.
But I still feel like Australia is safer than hunting bloody Wyoming or somewhere or Montana because of the grizzlies.
And they're actually on land and can come to your tent anytime they like.
So there has to be a bit of a fight back, but there needs to be some sort of middle ground where it's like, oh shit, this is actually going to be better for the...
The problem is that these people that are the wildlife activists, they do not like hunting in any way, shape, or form, and they don't want to give up any ground.
I'm going to send you this, Jamie, because this is pretty crazy.
I got the same feelings towards a pig as a beautiful deer and they're good feelings you know and it's like you as a hunter you understand this as well that it's not like you know nah shoot it i want to kill it you know it's not about that at all no they're all cool they are it's cool that they exist we're very fortunate that we get to be around them in the wild because it's such a unique moment when you're around an animal that you know especially the places that you go Probably never seen a person before.
Yeah, I come across that a fair bit.
And I just actually had an accountant with a dingo, a wild dog in Australia that had never seen people before.
And he actually arced up at me, like was like barking flat out at me.
And I didn't know what I was, and then I pretended to be prey, so I turned and started running away to see what he'd do, and he'd come flying down the bank and was coming at me, and then he hit my scent, and then it was a completely different story.
As soon as he smelt human, he knew it was danger, and he spun around and bolted.
And he actually, there was a little waterhole there that he'd just walked out of, like there was wet prints coming out of the waterhole in the half-eaten wallaby.
And they were on a killing rampage there, these dingoes.
End up finding three wallabies, one dead that hadn't even been eaten, had just been killed.
That one that I was just talking about, that had half-eaten, they'd half-eaten another one in the creek, and they'd also killed a wild cattle calf.
And we're eating that as well.
All in this one area, they were just cutting sick.
Like me and Kim were both walking down the bank in the Distriar River and he both were in plain view and just stood his ground on the top of the bank on the other side just going off at us.
It had this cool back end with faint stripes on it and a tail.
And then my buddy Isaac Butterfield, you met him when I was here last month.
The big, tall comedian dude.
Yeah.
We were talking about doing...
Like basically a search mission forum throughout Australia doing a series on it, which I think would be really cool because they haven't been extinct for that long.
And there's a lot of remote country in Australia that there's still definitely a possibility that they're out there somewhere.
And then I did another series of Isaac Butterfield looking for the Black Panther in Australia because they come over as like mascots on the US ships and then when I think when they were told to like put them down as in like don't bring them back they didn't want to put them down like these these soldiers had these animals near them every day that they kicked them off on the mainland of Australia.
And then, so we did this black panther one and I set up a couple of trail cameras and obviously we never got any photos of a black panther.
And then, you know, Isaac's like, do you think they're real then?
I'm like, well, there's koalas here.
There's deer species here in the mountains.
There's wild dogs in the mountains.
There's possums in the mountains.
There's all these things that definitely exist right there and there's no photos of them.
Well, especially when you get to places like some of these intense, dense jungle rainforests.
How much of that's been explored?
I remember watching a documentary about a man.
Who spent his entire career looking for the giant sloth in the Amazon because it used to exist and there's been a bunch of indigenous people that have told stories about encountering these giant sloths.
So this guy was absolutely convinced that these sloths were there and he was kind of banking his career on it and it wasn't working out.
And you could see the desperation in him.
He was just realizing, like, what have I done with my life?
There's 700 dialects of the Aboriginal language, so there's a lot of different...
Mobs of Aboriginal people, you know?
So it's like, but why did they paint that there and they painted the same painting there and maybe they never even got along with each other or communicated from both to the same drawing, you know?
And then I watched that Graham Hancock documentary, which was frigging brilliant to watch.
And I started actually thinking, because they're starting to really date back some extreme Aboriginal civilisations now in Australia.
I don't know if Graham's ever been to Australia to see and witness it and study it, but I'd love for him to come out at some point.
There's every chance that those animals existed, but we just haven't found them yet.
And I was talking to Jamie when I first got here about that boneyard in Alaska.
Well, the area that he's at, though, because of the thick carbon layer, what he thinks when he's listened to Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock discuss the Younger Dryas impact theory, he thinks he's in an area that got hit.
One of the things we were talking about last time you were here was that when you explained that there's 700 different languages that these Aborigines have and that a mob, that's what they call like a tribe, a mob of Aborigines, could be just 10 kilometers away from another mob.
And the story is that there was people that lived on the mainland on the coast.
This is the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
And then there was people that lived on the islands.
So the Dampier Archipelago is 40 odd islands, I think, just off the coast.
And there was another community of people that lived on the islands.
I think they called them like the boat people or the canoe people or something like that because they traveled from island to island in canoes.
And they looked and talked and acted so much different than the people on the mainland that when these canoe people used to come towards the mainland, the people on the mainland would clear out of there, like would leave.
That's how freaky these other people were to them.
No idea, but the fact that there were over 70,000 rock arts on the mainland, that says that there was a lot of people on the mainland, and they would clear out of there when these canoe people would come.
I've seen the images of, like, the tar getting taken up to, I think it might have been the top of Mount Cook, in, like, a trolley system on wires, you know?
Like, they went all out to get them to where they wanted them, you know?
So, New Zealand's doing the same thing as Australia where they just, you know, they're helicopter culling them and, you know, trying to eradicate them.
It's been bloody five years since I did a podcast.
I think that was year four, four years ago.
Yeah, I was on a hunt.
I climbed in over a couple of days up the mountain, like started from the bottom, climbed up the top.
I was chasing chamois.
You know chamois?
Yeah, I was chasing chamois, which is like regarded as one of the hardest animals to harvest with a bow.
And they're not necessarily a hard animal to stalk.
They're just hard to get to.
But really cool hunt.
Good, really good eating.
You know, great experience.
And I think I end up killing a chamois on day four.
And...
The weather was rolling in really bad and I actually climbed into a pretty horrible spot.
But I was confident in doing it because I was always going to get a helicopter out.
Get an animal on the ground, process it, pack up camp, call in a helicopter and get the helicopter back off the mountain because going down can be pretty risky.
It always feels safer going up than actually coming down with a bunch of weight on your backpack.
And I looked at the weather, had a GPS on me which could tell me the weather and I looked at the weather and it was coming in really bad for like the next four or five days was forecast.
So I called the helicopter in a little bit early, but they're like, hey, there's a gap in the weather.
We can come and pick you up right now.
And I'm like, yeah, look, let's get it done.
I was pretty keen to get off the mountain.
I was only like camped on this tiny little spot, like a tiny little flat spot that just sort of fit the tent and like me coming out the front of it.
And the back of it was just like sheer cliff for like 200 yards straight down.
Yeah, it was pretty, pretty sketchy spot, but the weather was still good.
I felt comfortable there.
I can hear the helicopter coming in, and as the helicopter's coming in, these fucking horrible clouds just start rolling in, like at my height.
And I hear the helicopter coming in, but it sounds like it's frigging below me.
And I've just got my sleeping, not my sleeping bag out, my mattress, because it's bright orange, to flag them down in the clouds.
So I've walked onto the far side of the tent and I can just every now and then see these lights flashing and they're like a hundred yards below me flying in the clouds.
And I hear this chopper like coming in.
I'm like, it's going to, I thought it was going to smash straight into the mountain.
And you see them coming in, coming in.
Like, I mean, it's like sheer rock straight below me.
And the helicopters below me.
And then they seen that they were about to fly into the rock wall.
And then they pulled back.
And then I just heard them leave.
And I'm like, fuck, I'm here now for the next four or five days.
What sucked was...
In the panic of them saying, yeah, we're coming to pick you up now, I packed up and got super wet, like packing up in the snow.
It was starting to drizzle out of them clouds.
So I was already wet.
My sleeping bag was wet.
Everything was wet from packing up.
I'm like, shit, I probably should start hiking out.
And then so I looked at my GPS and...
It looked at the time like it was a pretty gradual climb all the way down into this creek.
So there's a glacier up above me and it's been melting for however many years and it's carved out like a bit of a creek.
And so it looks safe.
And then I started climbing down.
And the first, I don't know, two hours wasn't too bad.
Like it was pretty gradual, like a bit of rock hopping and slippery stuff.
And I had one little leap to do.
It was like...
Two and a half metres or a metre down onto a rock to go out to this next rock.
And it was like there was a big glacier pool below me.
And it sounds weird, but you're calculating everything as you're going.
So it's like, this is the best place to jump down because if I did fall, at least I'm landing in water.
And that's just a two-second process in your head.
And that's happening all day.
There's never a point that you can switch off in that country.
You're constantly on the ball, otherwise that's when you're going to come unstuck.
Anyway, what I didn't realise was the rock that I was jumping down onto had actually quite a bit of a slope to it and it had like clear ice, a layer of clear ice on it.
You've got to remember, I've got this chamois in my backpack and frigging wet everything because I packed up in the wet.
So the pack weighs a lot and it weighs a lot anyway because you're going back for like 14 days.
Man, I hit this rock and my feet come out from under me that fast.
It was just like full chest weight on the rock.
Bang.
Started sliding off the rock backwards.
So I'm on my stomach, sliding backwards, legs going first.
And I slide off the back of that rock and I've got a heavy backpack on.
So it just pulled me.
I just started plumbing and down to this ice cold water.
And like...
Back neck first, straight into the water.
And I just remember hitting the water.
It pulled me all the way under.
It was a good enough fall, probably six, seven metres down into it from where the rock slid off.
And it pulled me under.
I just remember my breath getting sucked out of me.
I mean, it's crystal clear like that blue water straight off a glacier.
And it ripped me down and then sort of I struggled to come back up and get to the surface and by the time I got to the surface, because it was flowing pretty hard, it was pushing me into one of the drainage chutes from it.
And then so I hit this drainage chute sort of scramble and trying to grab on and then it pulled me down legs first as well, like down into the chute in the next lot of water.
By the time I got to that point, there was no going back up.
There was no chance I could go back up because it's dropped me into a spot where I wasn't on the sides of the bank anymore.
I was stuck in this glacier melt.
Then I end up getting out of there and I got to the next point and there was a big tree falling down in the water.
There's no trees on the side.
It's just whatever's been washed down over the years, like a big stump.
I end up wrapping my hand around that, my arm around that.
Get to my legs and then weighed twice as much again because now everything's full of water and soaked.
And then I got up on the rock then and it's just like one rock in all this water.
And then it's a fucking long story, so I'll probably skip a few bits.
But I end up, like, fighting with it for the rest of the day, and then I end up falling over another two times.
One time I actually had to volunteer to jump.
I had nowhere to go.
I was just, like, stuck in this little canyon in the water, and I literally had to come up with the guts to be, like, jump into the next water chute, which is just, like, a slide cut out of the rocks from the water running down there for fucking millions of years.
And it's just like, like then it was like, no, there's no going any further.
Like, to go further is definitely deaf.
You need to work something out here, you know.
And it got to the point, it takes a lot of courage to even be like, I need someone to save me.
Like, at least for me, because I've always, you know, like, it's the way that you're brought up, the way that I was brought up, because, you know, I never had the father figure in my life, I didn't have any of that, so it was always everything I do, I do for myself.
That's why I never usually ask people for help.
This is the biggest ask for help there fucking is.
And it's pressing the SOS button on the emergency device.
And I sat there for 20 minutes and still pumped with adrenaline over that time.
I'm getting adrenaline talking about it now.
And then realizing there's fucking definitely no way off here.
It's time to hit the button.
This is where you don't get to see your family again.
Or you don't get to do any of this again or live life.
You need to hit the button and just fucking, like still hitting the button hurt.
And you've got to hold it in for like 10 or 20 seconds.
It was fucking the longest 10 seconds of my life.
At this point, I've taken the backpack off.
I took a jacket off because it was just so fucking heavy and wet.
And it's sitting there.
And I'm holding the button in for like 10 seconds.
And then it's like SOS. And it's like, oh, shit.
But there's no reply to it or anything like that at that point.
It sort of just says the signal's successful, as in sent.
And that's about it.
And it's getting late and I'm like, I need to set up some sort of camp.
I need to go for my pack, see what I can use, like what's going to work out here.
And I pull my pack out and then like I've only got a spot that's like the size of one body laying down to even stand on in this area.
And it's barely flat.
The only thing that's kept it flat is the trees falling off from up at the alpine tops at some point in its life, falling down there.
And then all the shale and rock that's fallen off these big washouts with the water has leaned up against that big stump.
So it's laid out a flat bit.
And I could fit about three quarters of a little one person tent on there.
And so I set the tent up there.
I set the mattress that I was telling you that I was trying to flag there in the helicopter.
If I'd set that just on there, that just sat on there.
And then I pulled the sleeping bag out and it was fucking soaked.
Like the sleeping bag was drenched and I'm like, it's still going to be something.
And went for the rest of me pack.
I pulled the chamois skin out and sort of laid that there, hoping it'd give me some warmth as well.
And I've, like, stripped down then all the, like, bigger layers to try and get that off me.
And I've climbed in this wet, cold sleeping bag, which is the worst feeling fucking ever in that situation.
Like, you do.
You're starting to think, like, this is the end.
This might be death.
And I climbed in there.
I was trying to get warm.
And then I kept looking at that signal, but it's usually through my phone.
My phone had already died, so it's just through the little device.
And remember the old phones, how you had to go through the fucking alphabet on them to type a message?
I'm trying to type a message to my buddy that was keeping tabs on me as all this was happening.
And the message just went out as in, I need help.
And he, like, I've been around this dude for forever.
He's one of my best friends.
So he knows what I'm like.
He knows if I'm like, I fucking need help.
It's not good, you know.
And that message, I didn't know if it went out or not.
I had to turn it off because I had like four or five percent in it.
Anyway, I'm laying in there, and then obviously the adrenaline's calming off, and I think I dozed off for a little while.
It might have been 40 minutes or so.
It's like a power nap.
And I woke up, and my body was just quivering flat out.
Like, from fucking deep in, it was just quivering flat out.
And that feels like death.
That actually scared me.
I couldn't stop.
I was just fucking quivering flat out.
My core was trying to warm back up.
It took me a little while to think about that because I ended up shutting myself down.
I stopped myself shaking.
Then I was like, you fucking idiot.
That's exactly what your body's supposed to do.
It's trying to warm up.
Then I loosened up again and started shaking.
And then I went to move this arm and this leg and they wouldn't move.
Like I couldn't move them and then I was like, oh shit, like as in the adrenaline.
It was from that first fall, I think, or it was from the jump that I did.
I don't know if I'd bruised it.
I don't know if it was about...
Nearly hypothermic.
I don't know what really happened there.
I just couldn't move that leg and I couldn't move this arm.
So then that scared me a bit too.
And I started thinking about Kim and the kids and like shook me up.
And I got teary as well, which was weird because then I fucking warmed up.
Like when all that happened, I was starting to warm up.
Anyway, I tried to sleep.
You can't sleep here in a wet sleeping bag.
Everything's fucking frozen around you.
There's fucking rocks rolling from the top of the fucking mountain down into the river, the creek that's now turned into a river.
There's rocks rolling down there.
You're listening to that all night.
There's smaller debris and rocks hitting the tent.
And you can't move because I'm on a pad this big.
Anyway, I don't even know how, but the morning came at some point.
I got up, turned the GPS back on.
No, there was no message, no nothing.
So I hit the SOS one last time and I held it in.
Nothing, nothing.
I think I sat around for the first couple of hours of morning, like just holding my chest and stuff like that, trying to get warm again.
And I got to the point and it's like, no one's coming for you.
It's fucking on you.
And that was the best thing that happened to me because it was almost like I hit the button and it was almost like a give up as in like, oh, someone's coming for me.
It's fine.
And then it wasn't until I realized and said to myself, no one's fucking coming.
Just fucking get up and do something.
And I was like, I'm fucking going to start a fire.
Even if it takes me half a day, at least this is turning.
Let's try and start a fire.
Let's do something, you know, like fucking stay in it.
And then, so I started pulling all the different rubbish out of my bag that I carried from the trip.
Started piling that up.
There's no branches or anything around, so then I'm back at that tree where my tent was, and I'm trying to carve into that tree to try and get into the middle of it, try and find some dry, because it's been raining for a day and a half now.
Maybe even longer down low because I descended so far down.
And then I'm trying to get in there and I'm like, I'll burn the tent.
I'll burn.
What else can I burn?
You know, I started thinking about all the things that I can burn.
I'm like, yeah, if you're here for another night, you can't burn any of that.
And I was like, I came from the top and he's like, hold, because they seen this fucking rock face that was straight below me.
And I was thinking they wouldn't even take my backpack, to tell you the truth.
And I'm like, just leave the backpack here?
And he's like, yeah, but I'll bring it up on the next run.
And then he lift me up, I got into this big bird.
Rope went back down, fucking come back up with the backpack and everything.
And I'm like, how did you...
Like, how did you know that I was here?
And my buddy actually rallied the locals and they come out as a training exercise because they didn't actually even get the fucking SOS that I was down there.
You know, it's funny because, like, I've done that real sketchy stuff in New Zealand four or five times now, and I've shot tar, and I've shot shemmy, and I've done them in beautiful ways, like the bow, walking from the bottom to the top, and days in and getting them, and it's like...
And I want to do it again, but like how your fucking time comes up at some point, you know?
And it's like, and I don't think I'm any more sensible than ever, but...
Well, maybe I'm a bit more sensible, that would make sense, because I don't have to do that again.
I will do New Zealand again, but I won't do that sketchy country.
And it's like, I'll do that because there's probably no one back there.
Like, that's what puts you there to start with.
You're fully off the grid.
You don't see any other hunters, because that's all public land in New Zealand.
But you're back far enough and doing the dumb enough stuff that people don't do it.
That night in the tent where I told you I was in a shitty spot and I wanted to get the helicopter back in, that was a super cold night.
And I have spare batteries in my sleeping bag to keep them warm with me.
They still all died.
I got up in the morning, the phone was dead.
My main camera battery was dead.
Then a battery bank was dead as well.
But that's generally what I do.
I've always got a spare battery and you just sort of lean on your phone for GPS. These new phones, at least in Australia now, they've been trialing it.
Yeah, and then he got the punches, so I got the best spot.
And then, yeah, me son come out, but if it wasn't for that, like no vehicles came, we're broken down on a road in Australia, and no vehicles drove past us in a day and a half.
I prepare, you know, and it's like, it mightn't sound like I was prepared that time in New Zealand and, you know, and on a couple other things, it's like, you're not prepared, you're not prepared.
And it's like, well, I am prepared.
Otherwise, I would have fucking died ages ago, you know, and it's like, you've always sort of got that back up.
And I think you've just got to be good in those situations.
I've been in those situations with other people and they panic and they make more decisions that are bad, you know?
Because one of the next projects I want to do is buy land in America, build an off-grid cabin, have a nice big truck here and RV and live that American dream.
And so I was like, I might freight my 79 series over here.
It's fully decked out how I want it.
It's like a freaking weapon.
And I looked it up and got the price back and I was like, yeah, no, I'll just buy an American truck when I get there.
And I was like, I'll put a smart charger and everything in there.
We'll just get an electric vehicle for just doing the town stuff or the kids are growing up so they're getting their driver's license and, you know, a nice safe car like that.
But by the time I looked into it, I'm like, it's just not practical for me.
And the rest of the family too, because they're always going and doing things far away places as well.
Whereas all my cars have long-range fuel tanks on them, so you're good for 1,000 kilometers, and it's a long time between fuel stations in some of that remote country as well.
When the shit was going down in LA. I was starting to think the shit was gonna go down in LA before.
I was thinking about earthquakes and things like that.
If you get trapped and you have to drive off-road, I wanted something that was lifted, something that had a real off-road vehicle suspension, real power.
It's such a precarious scenario because so many people have had things provided for them for so long, they have no skills, no understanding, no knowledge, no ability.
They would have to learn from scratch while starving.
And that's terrifying.
Yeah, it is terrifying.
And that's just assuming you're not getting attacked.
That's assuming, you know, you haven't been invaded.
It's assuming that you haven't been hit with a nuclear bomb and everything's gone.
It's assuming the power grid's up.
It's assuming, you know, there's gas to pump.
You know, there's so many variables that are completely out of your hands.
Because of what's going on in the world right now, I've never felt more like things could fall apart at any moment.
Now, again, it's always late at night when I'm by myself.
I just think...
Because as a father and a husband and a provider, you think you have to figure out a way to take care of everybody.
How do you take care of everybody?
And then there's the Walking Dead scenario, right?
I mean, one of the things we found out about Los Angeles is the people that are working on the homeless situation are being paid exorbitant amounts of money.
There's people that work on the homeless situation in Los Angeles that are making $240,000 plus a year.
The incentive is to keep the problem going so that they keep getting these cushy jobs.
That's what they have.
And there's no performance benefit.
They're not paid based on the amount of homeless people that are moved into shelters and reintegrated into society.
No, they're just paid because there's a homeless problem and there's a budget.
We need to raise the budget for the homeless problem.
We need to fix the unhoused situation.
Sure you do.
But what you really need to do is keep getting paid.
And that's what a lot of them are doing.
And there's no hope in sight.
And it seems to me that it's reached a tipping point that once things get so sideways that people are just camping out in the streets.
When you go to Los Angeles, like, there's parts of Los Angeles, you're like, what the fuck is going on?
Like, this is not sustainable.
I have a friend who had a house in Venice, and in front of his house, 30 feet from his house, there's people camping.
30 feet.
Like, right outside his house.
You've got crackheads.
People are openly doing drugs, fentanyl, and they're tapping into the power lines and shit, and they're putting generators in these tents.
Like, they have no plans on leaving.
And there's no one to force them out.
No one to try to say, hey, you can't do this.
You can't litter on the street, but you can pile all your bullshit on the street.
All your garbage, human shit.
And then you have places like Skid Row.
Mike Glover, who runs, I forget the name of his organization, but it's a preparedness organization where he teaches people how to prepare for the worst and what you have to do if something happens.
He said Skid Row is the worst place he's ever seen at all the places he's been to, all the third world places he's been around the world in terms of like Just the sheer amount of homeless people, the open-air drug use, no hope, no law enforcement, no nothing.
And I'm sure there's some very legitimate people that can't help being on the streets at the moment, whether it's from job loss through COVID, whether it's from mental illness.
It's like they have this fucking ideology in their head, like they're in a cult.
And they think their way is the only way to do it.
And as long as they're safe in their home, they don't take into consideration what the overall effect on society.
All these laws and lack of enforcement of laws.
I mean, there's so many cities that all these businesses, like San Francisco, businesses are just pulling out left and right because they're just constantly getting robbed.
They're constantly getting looted.
You go to a drugstore in San Francisco, everything's locked up.
Everything.
It's all behind locks and cabinets and People just go in there and steal whatever they can.
It's really bad right now in New York because they made it a sanctuary city.
So then you have all these – and so the way the New York State works, Coleman Hughes, who was on the podcast before, explained it, that it's actually – A New York state law where you have to provide housing to homeless people.
But that was supposed to be for people that lived there.
So these people have come here from South America, Mexico, and they've made it a sanctuary city.
And so now you have entire hotels that are no longer hotels.
They were told that it was going to stop transmission.
I mean, there's that famous Rachel Maddow clip where she was like, if you get vaccinated, the virus stops with you.
It was bullshit.
It was never even tested to do that.
It was tested to provide these antibodies.
Does it give you antibodies?
They never tested it to stop transmission, and they had to admit that over time.
But this has just been the story of pharmaceutical drugs in America.
The massive amount of profit that they can make by forcing people to do that just...
That amount of money just went really far to enforcing this because so many people were on the take.
Whether they were on the take voluntarily, whether they were on the take psychologically because this was set up as the one way to get out of this and everybody believed them.
You're on a plane ride for like six hours to WA, Western Australia, and everyone's got their mask on, and then when the food gets served, everyone's got their mask down.
Actually, me and Kimmy were in New Zealand, in the backcountry, when it really properly broke out.
Like, we'd heard about it on the news.
Don't really follow it.
Don't really follow the news.
But, you know, you were hearing about it in China and things like that.
And we're in New Zealand.
Me, Kimmy, and a good friend, Tyler, in the backcountry.
And there's one rise that you come up and you just get a little bit of phone reception there.
And we'd touch base with the kids each afternoon, each night there.
And we come up to this rise and...
I start getting messages flat out.
It's my son, Noah, and he's like, you just need to come home.
You need to get home now.
They're shutting down the world, basically.
And so I get that message, and I'm like, shit!
And I turn around, Kim and Tyler behind me, and the sun's gone down, so the ground's dark, but the sky's slightly lit up still.
And I just see these 14 bright as fuck lights in a row, like, leaving, like, the atmosphere, like, cruising across, like, the horizon.
And the first thing that jumps into my head after getting that message and COVID's going mad is, like, all the fucking rich and famous, like, Joe Rogan's on one of them ships.
And I seriously thought that.
I was like, there's ships leaving the Earth.
It's gone to shit.
And I was like, and I said to Kim, I'm like, holy fuck, what's that?
Because COVID... You know, although people did lose their lives and the economy got destroyed and it was a catastrophe and a pandemic, it's fairly minor compared to something that could happen if we got hit by a meteor.
Now there's talk of, at least in Australia, and I haven't read too much on it because it's been hard to find since, that there's a vaccination that cattle are going to get.
And for anything to go to the stockyards, like the sale yards for cattle, they have to have this vaccination.
And like right now, I'm trying to buy acreage because I want to run unvaccinated cattle, like pure blood cattle, you could call it, and sell direct to consumer because I believe there's going to be a big market in that.
And you don't take your cattle to the market to be sold.
They get sold through you direct because if that's something that comes out, I'm not going to want that meat either.
The thing is, if there's something that they can profit off of, and if they can profit off of forcing cattle to get vaccinated, then these pharmaceutical drug companies can force these cattle ranchers to make sure they vaccinate their cattle.
It's fucking mad.
It's really crazy.
And it just shows what happens when absolute power corrupts absolutely.
When money gets involved and, you know, there's just so much money was made.
And now they're scrambling to figure out how to try to make that kind of money again.
They have antidepressants that make you suicidal, so they provide you with another drug that you take with the antidepressant that is supposed to stop the suicidal thoughts, but those side effects for that also include suicidal thoughts.
It's just wild shit.
It's wild shit.
And no one is saying that one of the main ways to stop depression is exercise.
And exercise is actually 1.25 times more effective than SSRIs.
But they're not prescribing exercise.
They're not telling people, hey, I want you to hike an hour a day.
I want you to jump rope.
I want you to do sit-ups.
I want you to elevate your heart rate for 20 minutes four times a week, and let's see if that helps you.
Yeah, it's not anyone's design, but it's like, fuck, if you want to do that, you need a vehicle to travel, I need fuel, I need time off work, so I have to work, I have to make money.
And we've just got to adapt and fucking get on with it.
But it's like, what are you going to do?
Or what do you aim towards?
Originally, when I went in the business, it's because I was like, I want to hunt.
But when I go away hunting for a couple of weeks, there's no money coming in.
How am I able to go hunting and still be financial?
And it's like, well, I'll start a business.
I'll have other people working for me.
I'll set that up and put the years in to do that to get to a point where I'm like, I can hunt.
Money does keep coming in.
So it's like people need to find what's their vision and aim towards it.
Whether you're successful or unsuccessful, at least you're aiming towards something.
Yeah.
But it is hard, and I feel for these people that are stuck in a cubicle or in a situation they don't want to be in, you know, and it's just like, where's the light at the end of it for them?
And it was about if you spend this much time a day doing something that in so many years you're a professional at it.
I can't remember exactly how it went but all it is is just saying what you said.
You've got this big goal and you've got the picture and it's written down and it's like every day or each week or each month You keep tapping a bit of that away, knowing that at some point you're going to be there where you want to be.
Once you've done it, it's easy to think back on because you've already done it.
I'm even talking about multiple things because you've already been at that point.
You've already gone through that shit and you know what's on the other side of it.
I sum up hunting like that a little bit.
I've done enough of those horrible backcountry elk hunts That you know at some point, even if you're not successful, you still succeed in yourself.
You still grow.
And that's the end goal and result for me.
But because I've done it before, I already know it's coming.
So it's easier to keep going through that shit.
Kim's never been through that.
She hasn't killed a bull.
She hasn't had an opportunity to shoot a bull.
So she's not enjoying those weeks in the mountains.
But I know it's on the back end of it.
And I'll say it every time.
I've always been successful.
I'm waiting to not be successful because that'll be even better for me.
Like in here, what I'm chasing and mental health, not being successful will even be better.
I just think humans are inherently tribal hunter-gatherers.
And I think there's certain human reward systems that are deeply ingrained in our DNA. And you can either accept those and find some way to satisfy those needs, or you can live a life of misery.