Ep. 688: MeatEater Radio Live! Our Biggest Catches, Endangered Orcas, and Fishing for Treasure

Hosts Spencer Neuharth https://www.instagram.com/spencerneuharth/?hl=en, Janis Putelis https://www.instagram.com/janis_putelis/?hl=en, and Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/?hl=en talk with Stephanie Raymond of Orca Network https://www.orcanetwork.org about the state of the Southern Resident pods, fish for a minute with Dan Johnson of Trout Unlimited, recount their top 3 biggest fish caught, and cast a magnet into the middle of NYC with James Kane of Let's Get Magnetic. Watch the live stream on the MeatEater Podcast Network YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Connect with The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 1:58Speaker 03

  Smell off now, lady. Welcome to Meat Eater Trivia. Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Welcome to Meat Eater Radio Live. It's 11 a.m. Mountain Time. That's 1 p.m. for our friends in Lincolnon, Georgia on Thursday, April 10th, and we're live from Meat Eater HQ in Bozeman. I'm your host, Spencer Neuharth, joined today by Yanis Butellas and Brody Henderson. On today's show, we'll interview Stephanie Raymond from the Orca Network about one of the world's most endangered whales. After that, we'll do one-minute fishing with our friends at Trout Unlimited, followed by the top three biggest fish we've ever landed, and finally, we'll talk to James Kane about the day he caught $100,000 while magnet fishing. Lincolnon, Georgia is a place I visited last year while attending the Masters. It's Masters Week right now. I had one of the most unique dining experiences of my life there. It was

• 3:06Speaker 04

  so southern that I couldn't believe that it was real. It was called Papa's Old South. You went into a little trailer house and you ate from their buffet of all sorts of southern fried foods. It was so satisfying. If you live in Georgia, if you're ever attending the Masters, make the drive to Lincolnon to visit Papa's Old South. But I got one Masters story to tell you because the Masters teed off today. Hold on, before you tell us that, tell me what you ate there. Yeah, everything. They had- Well, give us your top three. Every protein was fried. So, like fried chicken, that was delicious. Their cornbread, that was great. And then- Catfish? Oh, of course they had catfish. Yeah, they had mountain- Did you eat it?

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. They would shame you if you didn't take enough on your plate. It was that kind of place. And maybe that sort of experience is more common than I'm aware of, and I'm just ignorant to like how southern folks treat you and how just dang nice they are and how excited they are about their food. But go to Papa's Old South. I loved it. I can't believe it exists in 2025. And then the other best thing was the dessert. It was a cherry pie. Oh, interesting. We were in there with all the, the good church going folks, uh, while we were headed to the Masters. How much was this, uh, buffet? I don't know, probably like 20 bucks or something. The price didn't feel very southern that, that made sense to me. I was like, oh, that's,

• 4:32Speaker 04

  that's relatable. The rest of it was very different though. One Masters story to tell you. You, you know, our friend, Brian Harmon, who's been on trivia, he's been on the regular meat eater podcast. Yeah. We were there on a practice day, which is when things are like less serious than the actual tournament. So you can, there's like a little more leeway for the patrons. They call them patrons. You're not a fan when you're there because you're not fanatical. You're just like very respectful and you're a patron. Hmm. They have all kinds of vocabulary things they have to say. It's very, very different. It's not the rough, it's a second cut. Hmm. Can't say rough. It's very different. Can't say fans. I'm, I'm glad it exists in that one place. If the entire golf world was like that, I'd be like, this is so pretentious. It's disgusting.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  But having it exist in that one sort of place, once a year, I, I enjoy that. Anyway, Brian Harmon, he was on the first practice day. Um, I was, I was with a few buddies and I was like, do you think he'd like look over if I made a little turkey call? There are no turkeys that live on Augusta. Um, but he was probably 75 yards away and there are hundreds of people around at this point. You're hearing birds all day long. Uh, so I'm like, you know, let's, let's watch this. And so I'm, I'd,

• 5:43Speaker 04

  did that and sure enough, his head turned on a swivel over to my direction. No one else though, in this crowd of hundreds of people acknowledged it. That was just very satisfying. That's why I'll always cheer for Brian Harmon. So there is a lot of birds. They don't pipe in the bird noises? You know what? You don't see a lot of birds. You hear a lot of birds and a conspiracy theorist would tell you that, yeah, there are speakers around that you can't see. I, I would bet there are speakers piping in some of those. Other tournaments have been busted for doing exactly that, but that place, yeah, that place is so manicured. Um, like you, you stand under a tree and you look up and you see that, all of the branches off of the main trunk are like tied with some wire to each other because every, every little blade of grass, every leaf,

• 6:26Speaker 04

  um, is so impeccably placed and, and thoughtful, um, that, that nothing escapes them as far as what this place should look like, smell like, sound like. So if they were piping in bird noises, that would not surprise me, Brody. The epitome of cleaning up the woods. It's, it's wild. That's what it is.

• 6:44Speaker 05

  The natural environment?

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Well, no, I'm saying it's it's not, but you know, my uh my elders, you know, my my, the generation of my dad's uh parents, and so they were like my great uncles and whatever. They were big into that. Like when they had little

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Cleaning up the woods.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Cat, when they had little cabins, cottages, whatnot, like that was the thing they did. I mean, they were just working people. They loved to work. So they would go up to their cabin. Instead of just like laying around drinking beer, getting sun. They would work and they would do things like clean up, clean out all the, you know, seaweed, not seaweed, but whatever, you know, plant was growing in the pond.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Or go into the woods and literally rake the woods clean, right? And it was just like, in their mind, they're beautifying, right? And they let me, a lot of people do that. Now, I mean, let me look at lawns. I mean, that's

• 7:34Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  People loved to manicure.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  Oh, man.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Humans love that look. Nature really doesn't.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  I uh, I worked on a golf course, ground crew all through high school and college. And this time of year in the north, they're like way past this down where the masters is going on. But like, when when it was first time to go to work in the spring, that's all we did was pick up sticks off the ground, like hours and hours of picking up sticks.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  What what other work did you do for the golf course? Were you like spreading fertilizer, cutting grass?

• 8:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, ground screw everything.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  And did you ever swing a golf club in those days?

• 8:08Speaker 05

  Once in a while we'd dick around, but like I I'm just like, you know.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  What about your peers working there? Were they not like deeply

• 8:15Speaker 05

  No.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  In love with golf?

• 8:16Speaker 05

  No, that not, like I was like, we had a little like crew of friends that worked on the course and

• 8:22Speaker 03

  It was a job.

• 8:23Speaker 05

  It was a job. But it was a cool job because you start at five or six in the morning, be done, but like latest we'd work was two, you'd have the rest of the day to do what you want.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Was that place covered in deer and turkeys?

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Yes, that course. What? We used to hunt on that golf course because we were like buddies with the the dude, the brothers that owned that course. So we'd now and then hunt on that golf course.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  That that'd be a dream permission to get is on a golf course somewhere.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Not Augusta, though. No turkeys there. Uh, but for Brian Harmon, he thought for two seconds that there was. So cheer for him this week.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  Do you think you'd actually like hunting a golf course?

• 8:55Speaker 04

  Would I?

• 8:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Absolutely. If you out, if you're out there and you got permission or you own a golf course, you're a manager at a golf course and that place is covered up in deer, you let me know. I'll come hunt that thing for you. Why wouldn't you like it? That's no different than hunting a cornfield.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  No, it is a lot different.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  I don't think so.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  I'm kinda leaning with, if you're to compare it to a cornfield, it ain't that much different.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. Them deer being deer when they're out on a golf course.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  I, I, I also like the idea of hunting them in a unique spot. I've never gotten to do an urban hunt. I've lived in places that have had urban hunts and I've like haven't drawn the tag. Uh, that, that would be a, a unique experience that I would also embrace if you were, you know, forty yards off someone's back patio. Boy, that'd be fun. I don't wanna, I don't wanna spend the rest of my life hunting golf courses.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess for an experience, I would do it. It just would seem that for me aesthetically, it wouldn't be as pleasing as hunting in the woods.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Uh, we're, we're not disagreeing there. If you got a golf course that, uh, you can let me hunt.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Some golf courses have a lot of woods. That one that I worked on did.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  Yanni, is your lion season over with?

• 10:07Speaker 03

  No, I've got, uh, like, there's like four days left in the season. Season ends on the fourteenth, which is next Monday.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  But does it feel like it's over with when there's four days left? Or is it like still good hunting conditions?

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Uh, it's, it's tougher hunting conditions. I don't mind them. I think it's, it's good for the dog. Um, I'm gonna definitely go out at least one more day this weekend and, and, you know, there's probably a lot of people that have given up by now. A lot of folks, you know, once a-

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Because of snow? Why?

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, or just, you know, it's like anything. It's like turkey season. If it's a six week long turkey season, you know, there's-

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Eight, ninety percent of the people are out there in the first week and then the numbers just atrophy, you know, from there on out. I imagine the same thing hap- I mean, I know it happens with elk season. Imagine, I mean, our season is, I don't know, five months long, so, uh, yeah, but it's, you know, obviously the animals are still out there and you can still catch them and, uh, you don't necessarily need to have fresh snow. Fresh snow makes it easier to find the original track, but, um, yeah, we had a tough hunt the other day. Uh, where Mingus just ran a lot of trash, which I don't really like that term, but that basically means when he's running so- anything besides what he's supposed to be running.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  And, um-

• 11:22Speaker 04

  Give me an example, a fox?

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, fox, coyote, deer.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  And he was in with another pack of dogs and I'm not blaming that other pack, but-

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Is similar to humans. You get into a group and the mentality changes about what individuals can do and what the group can do. And, uh, yeah, he gets caught up in that and, uh, does what they call a lot of booger barking. Which I was thinking about where that comes from and I was thinking maybe they, it's like a term for being like, oh yeah, they're just, they're literally instead of smelling the scent on the ground of a lion, he's literally smelling his own boogers and barking at them. I don't know where that came from.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  When I hear that, I think of like a, a turkey hunt getting boogered, just like things went wrong.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Sure. So, uh, I would definitely like to go out and finish on a little bit better note. Cause right now, when I came upstairs this morning, I saw Mingus crawling out of his bed, looking at me and I was like, you're a piece of shit, dog.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. Okay. Well, he's got four days to redeem himself and then after that, Yanni, uh, you give us a full recap of lion season here on Media Radio.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Okay. I'll come back and tell you, I, I had a successful hunt a couple of weeks ago, but I imagine we burned up our time for me to tell you about that one.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  I have a fear that we have.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  That's all right.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  All right. Let's get to our first caller. Joining us on the line now is Stephanie Raymond, the program manager from the Orca Network. Stephanie is here to educate us about one of the world's most endangered animals, the southern resident orcas. Stephanie, welcome to the show.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  First thing, Stephanie, tell us about what makes southern resident orcas different from the other 50,000 killer whales that live in our oceans.

• 13:05Speaker 06

  Well, so yeah, orcas are one of the most widely distributed mammals on the planet. So on the face of it, it might seem like there are plenty of them out there. But the different populations of orcas around the world have very different characteristics and we used to call these different eco types. But now we're starting to regard them as separate species and just last fall, uh, the southern resident orcas were designated as their own specific species.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting.

• 13:31Speaker 06

  Relative to, you know, the, the wider population, also the bigs orcas. So there's two different orcas in, uh, the Salish Sea that share that ecosystem. But they do not interact in any way and both of them have been designated their own specific species now.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Who's, who, Spencer and I were arguing about this earlier and, uh, like I'm a lumper and obviously he's a splitter, like, um.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  Like, how, like, who's deciding they're different species and how is that decided? And, like, you know, a lot of people would look at them

• 14:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  As one species?

• 14:09Speaker 06

  There is some formal body, and I don't know their precise title, who gets to decide this stuff.

• 14:16Speaker 06

  But the reason it was, the decision was made is that, you know, for about 20 years now, there has been research about the genetic differences between these groups and the, um, the behavioral differences, the vocalization differences. So these different populations of orcas around the world have really different characteristics. Um, each group has unique vocals and culture. They have behavior that's learned from their mothers. Each has a specialized diet depending on what's available to them in that, that environment. And, um, they're very like humans in this, except that where human groups of different cultures and languages and dietary preferences tend to intermingle, the orcas don't do that.

• 15:01Speaker 06

  So the southern residents are a unique genetically distinct population of about 74 animals who range from Vancouver Island in British Columbia to Monterey Bay, California. They are coastal animals. They don't tend to go far offshore. They are made up of three large extended family groups that we call JPOD, KPOD, and LPOD. And within this population, the young whales never leave their mothers. They are always there. So it's a big group around, um, you know, some, some common female ancestor who may not, no longer be living, but, uh, these groups are, have all formed in that way. They are primarily salmon eaters. Over 80% of their diet is Chinook or king salmon in particular.

• 15:44Speaker 06

  They also will eat koho and they've been known to eat lingcod and halibut on occasion. They have good taste in, in fish. Um, so they are fish eaters and that is one of the things that distinguishes them from the other orca population that shares their territory because that other population feeds exclusively on marine mammals.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  Okay, so 74 of them left in the wild. What's caused that decline?

• 16:08Speaker 06

  Boy, um, a lot of things. So these whales primarily, their primary threat right now is lack of food. Um, as salmon fisheries have declined throughout the Pacific Northwest, you know, that's been a big challenge for them. It takes a lot of food to sustain a, an 18-month gestation and have a healthy calf and then feed that healthy calf. So being able to reproduce without enough food to supply that has been a challenge. Uh, they also, these animals have a high toxic body burden. They're carrying a lot of chemicals in their bodies, persistent chemicals like PCBs and PBDEs, flame retardant chemicals, because they're eating high on the food chain and the salmon that they're eating in pretty

• 16:53Speaker 06

  much every case are passing through estuaries that where there is this historic contamination in the sediment that gets into these young salmon and then stays with them. Uh, the reason that the salmon are a preferred food is that they have a high fat content and that fat is where these persistent chemicals store. So the animals themselves are accumulating that, that toxin in their fat, the orcas themselves. And then if they don't have enough food to eat, they start to metabolize that fat, the blubber that they're, you know, would normally be there to keep them warm. Uh, they start to metabolize that and that releases those chemicals into their different organ systems. And we see both reproductive

• 17:36Speaker 06

  effects, neurological effects and immunological effects as a result of that toxicity. So that's another challenge. And then we have evidence that shows us that, uh, first of all, big freighter traffic in particular, when we have the big, uh, container ships coming in and out of these ports on the West Coast, the sound of the bubbles that are generated by their propellers, as that, as those bubbles collapse, it's called cavitation. And the cavitation sound is happening exactly at the same frequency that these whales use to communicate and to echolocate to find their food. Finally, if a vessel is within 400 yards of a female southern resident, we see that she stops foraging. So vessel disturbance is another issue that, uh, these whales are faced with.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  What are, Stephanie, they're down to 74. What was their historic high? Like, how?

• 18:28Speaker 05

  How far have they dropped? And then like, what, what amount of time?

• 18:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we don't know exactly how many were present prior to the era when they were being captured from marine parks, because nobody had done a census. And there was just sort of this assumption that there were whales coming in from the ocean into Puget Sound and, you know, they were just, they would just keep doing that. It wasn't until the 1970s that the initial census was taken. And at that point, the population was pretty close to where it is now. The estimates are that maybe between 150 and 200 would be like the normal carrying capacity for the population. And we did see some recovery following the end of the capture era. The population rebounded to close to 100 animals. But then in the late 1980s, we saw salmon fisheries crash.

• 19:18Speaker 06

  And along with that came the corresponding decline in the southern resident population. And there has been a lot of effort made to restore salmon habitat and, you know, legislate different regulations around how vessels should behave around these, these animals. But we're not seeing yet the recovery that we really would like to see.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Talk about that capture era, Stephanie, and how differently these whales were treated in the 1950s and 1960s.

• 19:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, these animals used to be feared very much. People just assumed that if you found the water near one, that was it. You know, it was kind of the, the great white shark of, of its time, that they were just aggressive vicious animals, killer whales, right? You call them killer whales and, and people make assumptions. Also, fishers didn't want the competition for salmon. My own grandfather was a commercial fisher. And, you know, when I was a little kid in the seventies and was, you know, starting to get really turned on about these whales, he would tell me about how he had a permit to shoot them if they got too close to his nets. So, you know, they were not animals that were really.

• 20:24Speaker 06

  Well-loved in the way that they are now. There was a whale that was nicknamed Moby Doll. He was one of the first captive orcas. He was shot multiple times because somebody wanted a model for a sculpture to put at the Vancouver Aquarium when it was first opened. And the whale survived the shooting and survived for a while in captivity. And this was when we started to realize that they weren't aggressive toward humans, despite how the humans had been treating them. And then we had Namu, who famously was caught in a fisherman's net and sold to Ted Griffith in Seattle and was on display in the Seattle waterfront for a while.

• 21:09Speaker 06

  Again, Ted really bonded with that whale and was able to ride on his back. And people, at that time, he would go in the water with the whale and people would be like, "Oh, my gosh, it's an accident and what's going to happen?" And then it turned out that was all part of the act, that Namu was not a vicious creature. So in captivity, the intelligence of these animals became apparent, and there were very few incidences of aggression against humans. We know since then there have been some notable exceptions, but that also aligned with the observation that there's never been a documented incidence of aggression against a human from killer whales in the wild. So people began to see them as friendly, which, that's a human value that may or may not

• 21:54Speaker 06

  be true. But the population census and the way the whales behaved around researchers in the wild began to point to something really special about these animals and how they seem to have a natural curiosity about us, but also an uncanny ability to know our intentions. You mentioned in the questions you sent me, the Seymour Narrows in British Columbia, they were going to place a gun there. To target practice, do target practice on these whales when they pass through. And they chose that location because that was a spot the whales were known to frequent. Well, after they set the gun up, the whales never went there.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 22:29Speaker 06

  As though somehow they knew, and we can't explain that. But you know, there are many, many stories of situations like that where somehow the whales seem to understand what the humans were up to in a way that we don't understand what they're up to. So it's they're they're very, that by themselves is such a compelling thing. I think a lot of researchers and a lot of the general public are really drawn to this population in particular because we know, we know them intimately, we know them as individuals. Uh, they all have nicknames that the, the public may know them by and, and we know their stories. So, um, it really has been a 180 degree shift in attitudes and, you know, just a little bit more than 50 years.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, uh, I've, I've seen a lot of headlines in the last six months about the southern resident orcas. So I want to talk to you about some of that news. First thing, tell us about the salmon hats and why, uh, people cared about that last fall.

• 23:23Speaker 06

  So this was a really interesting, um, human phenomenon as much as an orca phenomenon. In the 1980s, late 1980s, there was one summer when, uh, it seemed to be the thing to do for the southern resident orcas to carry salmon around on their heads. And, um, you know, if our, if the image we have of, of orcas is a whale in a tank, that's a very sterile environment. They don't have a lot of things to interact with. But in the wild, these whales are very tactile, very interactive creatures. They like to manipulate things in their environment. They're curious about them. They're, you know, they want to play or, or do other things. And they do have these social trends that happen, whether it's a behavioral trend or in this case, maybe a fashion trend.

• 24:09Speaker 06

  So we've also seen years where, you know, everybody's got a piece of kelp draped over their dorsal fin or some eel grass or something like that.

• 24:18Speaker 06

  And what happened last fall, we had a just incredible salmon run here in the Salish Sea, just record breaking across the board. And one of our volunteers snapped a picture that had a salmon sitting on the head of an orca. Well, somebody grabbed that from one of our reports that we put out, and it went viral. And everybody's like, oh, they're reviving the trend. But the reality is that that was part of a series of pictures in which, you know, the picture before and the picture after did not show a salmon on the orca's head. And so, we don't know exactly how that fish wound up on that

• 24:59Speaker 06

  whale's head for just a second, but it did not appear to be actually carrying it. There was one other researcher who witnessed a salmon on the head of an orca for a second as well, but didn't get a picture of it. And that was it. And the reality is that when these whales come down into Puget Sound, which is what they do in the fall, because that's when the salmon are running into the sound. There are hundreds of people on the shorelines with cameras documenting their presence, getting their pictures. And if there had been a widespread revival of that salmon hat trend, we definitely would have seen a lot more evidence of that than we actually did. It was just really interesting how compelling it was to humans. Again, you know, here's this interesting behavior. Look what they're doing. They're doing something like us. They have a fashion trend. And it

• 25:44Speaker 06

  just really, we were getting media requests from as far away as Germany and New Zealand, where people asking about this particular situation.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Okay, and Stephanie is skeptical that the salmon hats are back in fashionable.

• 25:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, we haven't, haven't seen it since.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  Now, last year, the largest dam removal project in US history took place when four dams were destroyed on the Klamath River. Talk about what that means for these southern resident orcas.

• 26:10Speaker 06

  So what that means is that there's now more habitat for the Chinook salmon to spawn. And we know that the further the Chinook have to travel upriver, the bigger those fish have to be. It also really, you know, has a big influence on the spring Chinook run. These were salmon that would enter the rivers in the spring, but they didn't spawn until fall because it took them that long to get all the way up to the upper watersheds. So when we open up this upper watershed habitat, we are really improving the salmon supply for the southern residents to eat. And that's true all up and down the coast, of course, because as I said before, they go down as far as Monterey Bay.

• 26:51Speaker 06

  All of the salmon-bearing streams on the Pacific Northwest coast potentially can supply them with additional salmon to eat. What we've seen as the fisheries have declined is that there are not only fewer fish, but they tend to be smaller because they have less range to spawn in. And that means that the whales are working harder. They're spending more energy to find smaller fish, so they have to spend even more energy to get enough food to eat. So bigger fish are great. More spawning habitat for those fish is great. And, you know, both the Klamath and the Elwah Dam removal projects are potentially going to boost that supply of salmon, and hopefully that's going to make a big difference for these animals.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, let's end this interview on some more good news. It's news that's only a few days old. Tell us about the newest member of the southern resident, J-Pod.

• 27:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is really exciting. We just had a baby J63, so it won't be given a nickname for at least another six months or so. There's not a lot to say at this point. She appears to be the first calf of a whale known as J40 Subtles. And Subtles has a long history of being kind of an auntie or babysitter to other new calves, but has never been seen with a calf of her own. So, so far, baby looks great, and we're cautiously optimistic, but of course, we'll need to have a few more sightings to confirm that Subtles really is mom and that things are continuing to go well. And the other piece of good news is that baby J62, who was born in December, is also appears to be thriving. That little one seems to be doing really, really well in recent observations.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  And last thing, if people want to help southern resident orcas and support their conservation efforts, what can they do?

• 28:36Speaker 06

  So it really goes back to, you know, a lot of the stuff that we're told is good for the environment is going to be helpful for these whales ultimately because we're all connected in that way. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, being aware of your watershed and what you're contributing to it is really important. Avoiding toxic products for lawn, garden, or farm care, maintaining your vehicle so you're not leaking oil, and making sure your tires are properly inflated. It turns out the dust that erodes off of tires is actually really toxic for some types of salmon. So that's another piece that we're, you know, as we're uncovering the different ways that we can restore salmon habitat, that's one of the things that's being looked at. Conserving electricity is huge because, again, you know,

• 29:18Speaker 06

  we're here in the Northwest, we're so used to abundant, inexpensive hydropower, but we know now what a devastating effect that has on the salmon population. And wherever you live, you know, because our power grid spreads all over the place, that's helpful. Advocating against proposed dams or removing existing dams that we don't necessarily need anymore, advocating for good conservation policies for salmon and for orcas, all of those things are things that people can do to support this population.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Okay, everyone listening is going to do their part. Thanks for joining us, Stephanie, and congrats on the exciting J63 news.

• 29:56Speaker 06

  Thank you, and thanks so much for having me.

• 30:00Speaker 04

  You boys feel differently about orcas now? You all excited?

• 30:05Speaker 05

  Hmm, I mean, they're super cool animals, you know, I'm glad to hear they're potentially going to be doing better. I was surprised to hear, I was expecting to hear that there had been some precipitous decline in their population, but the fact that their numbers have remained steady for 50 years makes me think that, you know, maybe things aren't as bad as, the picture isn't as bad as people might be painting.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  I don't think we fully got the scope of it talking to Stephanie, but one piece of news I'd seen is that like 60 or 70% of the calves die in the first year, and I think that's the thing they're really fighting right now, is how can we make sure that when a calf is born, which is already a lot to ask for, that the thing survives to adulthood? So I think that's, that's what...

• 30:53Speaker 05

  I mean, they have the unfortunate fate of living in basically an urban marine environment, which, you know, makes things tough.

• 31:05Steven Rinella?

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• 32:42Steven Rinella?

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• 33:26Steven Rinella?

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• 34:05Speaker 04

  All right, moving on. Our next segment is one minute fishing.

• 34:10Speaker 08

  Do I feel lucky? Well, do you, punk? Go ahead. Make my cast.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  One minute fishing is where we go live to someone who's fishing and they have one minute to catch a fish. And if they're successful, we'll make a $500 donation to a conservation group. And for the whole month of April, our friends at Trout Unlimited are joining us for one minute fishing. This week, our angler is Dan Johnson, the Desert Terminal Lakes Basin Project Coordinator at TU. Today, he's on Hot Creek in California and fishing for a donation to Trout Unlimited. Dan, welcome to the show.

• 34:47Speaker 09

  Hey, thank you all so much for having us and for highlighting TU this month and highlighting this, this beautiful stream behind me.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  It is a beautiful place, also a windy place. Now, first thing, we asked Trout Unlimited to highlight some important watersheds across the country for this segment. Tell us about Hot Creek and its greatest threats.

• 35:09Speaker 09

  is a very, very unique stream. It starts as Mammoth Creek up in the eastern Sierras there. Flows down, it's really small, very narrow as it hits the valley. But about a couple hundred yards upstream of where I am, it, it has a number of geothermal inputs. The, this hot water that comes out, it's actually perfectly in that 60 to 67 degree range that is optimum for trout growth and, you know, longevity and reproduction. But we've been involved in Hot Creek for a number of years because just over the hill,

• 35:50Speaker 09

  I can see it from here, there is a project to start exploratory gold mining, right on just a ways over the banks there. In 2021, the company Core Mining, they were awarded permits to drill. After a huge amount of community backlash and litigation from other NGOs in the area, those permits were revoked for the time being. But, you know, gold is near all time highs and we are actually working on a protective designation for Hot Creek, outstanding national resource water, which we feel would, you know, neutralize that mining threat once and for all.

• 36:35Speaker 09

  And I mean, at Trout Unlimited, we're realists, right? I drove a truck here today and it's built out of things that were pulled out of the ground at one point. You know, we need mining, we need to work these landscapes, but also we need places like Hot Creek. You know, it's a part of our American tradition. I actually roped my father-in-law in, he's my cameraman today and I come out here with my daughter and yeah, Trout Unlimited, we're just working to protect the places we love to fish.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  We're grateful that TU is involved with the spotlight.

• 37:07Speaker 05

  Spencer, can I ask one question?

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, what do you got, bro?

• 37:09Speaker 05

  Hey Dan, what, what kind of land are you, is Hat, is Hot Creek a, like a public, primarily a public river? Are you standing on, like what land entity manages the land you're standing on right now?

• 37:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, so Hot Creek, um, you know, it's actually interesting. We're in the very valley stage of or portion of Hot Creek and it ends up going in some pretty dramatic canyons. Um, it's a mixture of US Forest Service, mostly to the, uh, across the stream from me, BLM down below. There's also some private property and, um, some, some tribal trust land as well. So a fair number of, uh, yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  The gold, the gold mining would occur on, is the proposal to, for the gold mining to occur on public land?

• 38:00Speaker 09

  Uh, that's correct. On Forest Service land.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  Gotcha. Gotcha. All right, Dan, let's talk about the fishing. What are you targeting today? How are you doing it? And what fly are you throwing?

• 38:09Speaker 09

  Yeah. So we are, Hot Creek has, and of course I just got stuck on my, it's Hot Creek has, uh, wild populations of brown trout is kind of the main quarry. There's also some rainbows. Um, at this time of the year, none of the really big stuff, um, is hatching. So I am throwing a size 18 blue wing olive, if you can see that, and then a size 20 zebra midge down below. So the, the real small stuff, um, but we did have a hatch going off a bit earlier. We've been watching fish rise here. I've been, you know, whispering words, reassurance to my tiny flies the last 10 minutes and, uh, feeling good about it.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Okay. Have you made a cast yet today, Dan?

• 38:56Speaker 09

  I fished a little bit downstream, but we've been trying to do our best to leave this hole intact and not, you know, not mess with them at all. I don't think they, I don't think they know that we're here. Um, so this is the one we've been reserving.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  Great. Well, your one minute of fishing starts when you make that first cast. Let's do it.

• 39:15Speaker 05

  Better get in there before someone high holds you.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  Alright, Dan is walking to the edge of the creek. Yanni, describe what you're seeing there.

• 39:27Speaker 05

  Oh, just a beautiful creek. I'd have to just stand there and enjoy the view for a while before I even wet a line.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  That's right. Alright, he's making his first cast.

• 39:36Speaker 05

  Snow capped mountains, dropping into some like desert-y, up high country sage.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  Uh huh. Looks like a place you'd find some, uh, some mulies or blacktails and some, some antelope.

• 39:50Speaker 05

  I like that he's kind of being a purist here, because if I was going for the one minute deal, I'd probably have a San Juan worm and an egg on there.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Oh, did, did we have a hook set there, Dan?

• 40:00Speaker 05

  He thinks he has.

• 40:00Speaker 09

  We did, we missed him though.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  You're 30 seconds in.

• 40:05Speaker 09

  He got, he, uh, bit the tiny little zebra mid.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  Oh, alright.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  Feeling optimistic.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Burning a lot of time on that falls cast, Dan. Get it back in the water.

• 40:16Speaker 09

  I know.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  20 seconds to go.

• 40:18Speaker 09

  These tiny flies, I gotta, I gotta dry them out.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  20 seconds to go.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  10 seconds left, Dan.

• 40:29Speaker 05

  Eat it!

• 40:30Speaker 09

  Uh...

• 40:33Speaker 04

  Not gonna happen today. Dan, tell us what happened on that, uh, that one fish that made an offering at your fly.

• 40:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I could see him. It's actually really clear water here, so I saw him move for the zebra mid. And, uh, I mean, I hope y'all don't mind if I keep fishing while we talk. I know it doesn't count, but, um, yeah, he went for, he went for the zebra mid and I, he just didn't commit to the, uh, the bite and... Yeah, we'll see. Uh, we're gonna hang out here the rest of the day too. So maybe I'll, maybe I'll text y'all a picture or two.

• 41:05Speaker 04

  Okay. Good workday for you, Dan.

• 41:07Speaker 05

  That's the line, uh, that's the line my clients used to always use, like, oh, he missed it. Like, they never miss the fish. The fish missed the fly.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 41:17Speaker 09

  And, and if I may, real quick, if you're looking to get involved with TU's work on public lands, just go to tu.org and we have a little bar at the top that says, "Take Action." We're, uh, we're likely working in your neck of the woods right now.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  Okay, good message, Dan. Thank you for joining us. Good luck with fishing the rest of the day and thanks to Trout Unlimited for doing what they do.

• 41:37Speaker 05

  Thanks, Dan.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  All right, we're halfway through the show. Let's take a break for some listener feedback. Phil, what do you got?

• 41:43Speaker 10

  We've got a question from our producer, Corey Colkins. He asks, who's the better golfer, Spencer, Yannis, or Brody? Ain't me.

• 41:51Speaker 04

  I imagine it's me just because I play the most, but I am not a good golfer at all. Uh, if, if Yanni wanted to go golfing five times this year, he might be better than me after those five times. I'm, I'm, I just enjoy the camaraderie of it.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Maybe. We don't, we don't need to spend any more time on this.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, Corey asked that question because he's the best golfer in the office, or, or top two. Uh, so, so good for you.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Who rivals him? Man, I used to like Corey and then I found out he's a golfer.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  Well, he's, you'll like him even more when I tell you this, though. He's a phenomenal golfer who doesn't golf. He'll go like once a year and, and that's good enough for him, but if I had Corey's, if I had Corey's skills, I'd be out there even more. Uh, but it'd be Corey and Colin is the best golfers. What else you got, Phil?

• 42:34Speaker 10

  Question for Yannis from, uh, Dermond. What are you feeding a top level hunting hound like Mingus?

• 42:39Speaker 04

  Piece, piece of crap, uh, hunting hound. You described him as earlier.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  I just feed him dog food, buddy.

• 42:45Speaker 05

  Didn't you used to, remember your old dog, Mud? Didn't you used to feed her meat?

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. I mean, we, we feed Mingus some meat too, some scraps, you know? I'll save my trimmings and feed it to him. But yeah, for the most part, we just, I vary it up. I don't, I feed him the same stuff all the time. We're actually going to switch over to, to whatever Costco's selling. Uh, that's what I'm buying, uh, next for Mingus.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Do you know who makes it for Costco? I imagine that's.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  I don't, but I had a couple of people tell me that they thought it was good and it was cheap. So that works for us.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm not buying into the whole thing that my dog needs to eat the same diet that I eat.

• 43:21Speaker 10

  Uh, Rashad asks, and this is for Yannis as well. I'm assuming you know the answer to this. When's the next Meat Eater roast coming out? I loved the first one.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Oh, well, um, glad you liked the first one, Rashad. Uh, the next one is coming out early May. I don't think there is an actual drop date yet, uh, but, uh, look for it in early May. It's a good one. We got, uh, Corinne Schneider, Meat Eater Podcast Producer, and Maggie Hudlow, uh, Director of Website Content, uh, squaring off with each other.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  I heard they put on an exceptional show.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Oh buddy, they, they made some delicious food.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Coming out in early May.

• 43:57Speaker 10

  Uh, from Peter, question for Brody and Yanni. What cartridge are you going to use for your kids when they go from hunting deer and antelope to elk?

• 44:05Speaker 05

  Man, I, I started my older son on a 243 and he hunted with that for three, no, four seasons. Three. Was last year four? Last year was four. This year he's going to a 6.5 Creedmoor and I would be completely comfortable having him shooting elk with that cartridge and he killed an elk with a 30 hot six last fall, so.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, we've been shooting the 6.5 Creedmoor and I imagine we'll stay shooting the 6.5 Creedmoor and just not shoot it too far.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  Hmm. Let's do one more, Phil.

• 44:43Speaker 10

  Oh, man. Okay. Uh, da, da, da, da, da. From Eric, how do you guys balance family vacations and hunting trips if you have limited time off?

• 44:54Speaker 05

  You take, you take family vacations that are hunting trips.

• 44:59Speaker 04

  You two.

• 44:59Speaker 05

  Or fishing trips.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  You two boys are pretty good at that.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure. Yeah. I'd say there's very few hunting trips that, that if they're not work, that are, uh, you know, that are hunting trips or hunting trips without my family. So the only one I can think of off the top of my head is, uh, like I'm going to go to Wisconsin hunting with my dad for a few days for turkeys. But otherwise, if it's not a work trip, I'm hunting with my family and otherwise I'm hunting with a camera.

• 45:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I definitely do some, some solo hunting. Um, but like, you know, most of our family vacations involve hunting or, or a lot of fishing too, so.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  You're kind of asking the wrong guys because we get to hunt for work sometimes. So we don't actually have to balance family vacations and hunting trips because, uh, yeah, we, we get to hunt for work sometimes, but, uh, yeah, I hope that helps, Eric.

• 45:56Speaker 10

  Sorry to make you jealous.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Probably doesn't. All right. Moving on. Our next segment is top threes.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  Trouble over here.

• 46:22Speaker 04

  Such a beautiful voice. So beautiful. Phil, does the computer have to help you hit that high note? Or is that all?

• 46:30Speaker 05

  Oh, no, that was, that was natural.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Wonderful.

• 46:32Speaker 05

  All natural, baby.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  Wow. Now, this week, we are ranking the three biggest fish we've ever caught. And to be clear, it's not literally the biggest. It's the biggest relative to other fish of that species. So, you know, for today's show, it would be more relevant if you caught a two and a half pound bluegill than if you caught a 30 pound tarpon. So, these are the three biggest fish we've caught relative to other fish of that species. Brody, you go first. What's the third biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 47:03Speaker 05

  We need the picture because I can't remember. Oh, yeah. What order I put them in.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  Oh, big old trout. That, um, that's a big old whopper. That's the third biggest fish. Spencer wants me to say that's the third biggest fish I've ever caught.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 47:21Speaker 05

  Then I can talk about it.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  That's right. Yeah, talk about it. Tell us about it.

• 47:24Speaker 05

  Well, it's a big ass rainbow trout.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Look how young you were. How old were you?

• 47:29Speaker 05

  Man, that was probably like

• 47:33Speaker 05

  20 ish. Nah, well, maybe, maybe like 17 years ago, let's say.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Okay, so how old?

• 47:41Speaker 05

  I don't know. So he was still 40. Late, mid 30s, let's say.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  I didn't know you were ever in your mid 30s.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, man, I wasn't born 53 years old. Now, is that a pellet head or is that, or is that not a pellet head? Well, I mean, not on the river. I don't think it was on the river that it was caught on.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  How big was that fish for people who aren't watching this?

• 48:03Speaker 05

  Again, Spencer and I were talking about this earlier. I don't, generally don't carry a tape measure around with me, um, or a scale. But that fish was over 30, like I'm guessing 32 ish. And it was caught this time of year in the spring. So it's a female full of eggs, so I'm guessing 12.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  She's got a big old belly on her.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  12 poundish.

• 48:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  What were you doing when you caught that fish?

• 48:29Speaker 05

  What do you mean? What was I doing?

• 48:30Speaker 04

  Like what fly were you throwing?

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Oh, I caught it on an egg. Big ol' egg pattern.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  Okay. Was that a good day for you fishing?

• 48:37Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Can you tell us the river or is that?

• 48:40Speaker 05

  Sure, that was the roaring port.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Oh, you kinda tailed off at the end there. It felt like you were regretting telling us.

• 48:46Speaker 05

  That's not a secret, man. There's probably twenty boats on the roaring port today. Oh, yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  You ever gonna top that trout or is that a once in a lifetime fish?

• 48:55Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't, I don't have a crystal ball. For trout, that may be it, cuz I just don't do that kinda fishing as nearly as much as I used to, but who knows? Anything could happen.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  All right, Yanni, you're next.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  Well, the third biggest fish I ever caught was...

• 49:11Speaker 04

  Say it.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Is...

• 49:15Speaker 03

  You want me to say this fish?

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, just, yes. Whatever fish is on the screen that you're talking about.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  See, I labeled them wrong. I was gonna finish with this one.

• 49:23Speaker 10

  No, see, I think you, you, you labeled it number three, probably meaning that you want it to be shown third, but unfortunately that's not.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  I can't believe how hard this segment is. All right, so the, the third.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  We told you you had problems before we started. This is a, uh, sailfish that I, uh, caught recently down in Guatemala with my, uh...

• 49:39Speaker 05

  Did you pull your tape measure out for that one?

• 49:41Speaker 03

  No, no, no. I pulled one out of the water, sailfish, and I showed you guys a picture of that on an earlier episode and, uh, uh, a couple of folks reminded me that you shouldn't take those fish out of the water. It really increases mortality, so, uh, yeah, uh, it was, uh, I, I've only caught a few sailfish. They were all roughly the same size, uh, to me and, um...

• 50:04Speaker 05

  You caught that one on a fly pole, though, didn't you?

• 50:06Speaker 03

  Well, I, I don't know if it was exactly that one that I caught on, on the fly rod, but, uh, yeah, it was, it was a great trip. Um, we had three anglers. We, we all caught quite a few of those sailfish and, uh, beautiful place, beautiful water. Rough seas, though. Rough seas.

• 50:23Speaker 05

  Did you, yeah, you, you, were you, uh, getting a little sick?

• 50:25Speaker 03

  No, I was wearing the patch, so I, I was good. But, uh, those guys, you can see there, the guy on the left is, uh, Zan and my brother-in-law. They decided on day three that they were all good with the patch and they didn't wear one. On day three and it caught them.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  How'd they take that picture?

• 50:43Speaker 05

  GoPro on a stick.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  Good looking photo, good looking fish.

• 50:46Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, they know what they're doing. Uh, we were fishing with the, uh, Selfish Lodge of Guatemala. I don't know. DM me on Instagram if you want to know more about them. Great outfit.

• 50:57Speaker 04

  Alright, the third biggest fish I ever caught is this perch. Now that, uh, that I got a tape measure under it, like Brody was saying, I, I did have a tape measure with me. I was 14 and a quarter inches. It was two pounds exactly. I was south, it was in South Dakota. It was 2012. Uh, I was fishing by myself that day. I was pulling plugs for walleye. Did not expect to find that fish in that place. There's not a lot of perch in that lake where I caught that.

• 51:23Speaker 05

  Oh, that gets me excited Spencer. That's my favorite fish.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  And he hit a, a number five Rapala shad rap. And when perch get to that size, everything just looks wrong. Like they, they develop shoulders that they don't normally have.

• 51:37Speaker 05

  They get that hump on their back.

• 51:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, their, their fins look too small. You, you start to, they like, they look so lethargic that you're like, how is that thing staying well fed enough to grow to that size? But then you're reminded when you're pulling plugs for walleye and it, it smashes a shad rap, uh, that you'd expect, you know, only larger fish to be keeping up with. And then I got another picture.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  Did you eat him?

• 51:59Speaker 04

  No, I threw that one back. Two years later, I caught another 14 incher. That one also weighed two pounds. Threw that fish back as well. It was, it was, uh, almost the same place, same time of year, same lake, doing the same thing. Uh, pulling plugs for walleyes, hooked into a big old perch. Uh, you can see pictures of these fish on our Meat Eater YouTube channel.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  Don't let those things go Spencer.

• 52:19Speaker 04

  That's okay. Uh, you know what? I, I've like, since I've gotten older, uh, if I were to catch that fish today, it's probably more likely I would keep it. Uh, but then I felt like I was, I was really doing the Lord's work, letting the 14 inch perch go. But now I realize that like that thing probably had a year of life left on it. Uh, there, there was no harm in me keeping that big old perch in the middle of the summer.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  Good fish sandwich right there.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Alright Brody, you're up next.

• 52:44Speaker 05

  Okay. I don't remember. Oh, the second biggest fish I've ever caught. Now that, this is a ling cod.

• 52:54Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm supposed to wait for that?

• 52:55Speaker 04

  No.

• 52:56Speaker 05

  See, this is a mess. This whole segment is a mess.

• 52:58Speaker 04

  Do whatever you like.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  That's a nice link cod there.

• 53:03Speaker 05

  Well, link, link cod get can get quite a bit bigger than this. The reason I put this one in here is because at the time I caught that up around Steve's shack, that was as big of a link cod as you could keep legally. So that's why it's there. Um, that. And how big is it? The slot that year was thirty to forty-five inches. So it was, it was like forty-three, forty-four. It's hard to get an exact measurement in the bottom of one of those skiffs. Um, you can hang them and measure them, but it was, it was just under the slot. So that's, that's a good one. And now like that slot has gotten progressively smaller every year. So you wouldn't be able to keep that thing anymore.

• 53:48Speaker 05

  So how much bigger are the bigger ones that you've caught than this one? There's actually a second slot in that part of Alaska and it's fifty-five and over. And nobody's ever seen one of those. Um, there, there gotta be down there somewhere, but they can get, they can get five feet long, fifty pounds, but that's a pretty good one. Beautiful fish there. Yanni, you're next.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Well, Spencer, the second biggest fish I've ever caught is that big old red fish.

• 54:15Speaker 05

  It is a big red fish.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Uh, also known as a, uh, bull drum. Uh, that was caught off the coast of North Carolina with, uh, my wife's cousin, Captain Rob Orr. Also had my brother-in-law and his son with him. It was a great eve. We went out for like the night bite. So I didn't start fishing until it pretty much got dark. And, uh, we were fishing a shoal with just some cut bait, pretty simple. And, uh, we basically made three casts and we each got to catch a red fish roughly that size. And, uh, it was quite the tussle.

• 54:48Speaker 05

  The head on that thing.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. The head and shoulders. And you know, that's what I love these days. Being a freshwater angler for so many years and then doing more saltwater in, in the latter part of my life. Um, these fish just, they fight you, you know, they actually pull back, which is what I enjoy so much where, you know, the trout, you know, it's more of a finesse game to get them to the net. But like that joker, you just don't know if you're going to actually win the, win the battle there. But that one we did release.

• 55:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. Are you even allowed to keep them that big in North Carolina?

• 55:23Speaker 03

  You know, uh, that fish is probably, that fish is definitely out of the slot. So no.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Beautiful fish.

• 55:30Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  Again, like the proportions when fish get this big for their species, the head.

• 55:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:36Speaker 04

  It's just unbelievable.

• 55:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can imagine that thing doesn't run away from much. It's things, most of, most things are running away from it and that giant mouth.

• 55:45Speaker 04

  All right, the second biggest fish I ever caught is this northern pike that Phil is showing us a photo of. Now that was in 2014. I was a senior in college. At that point, that was the biggest pike I had ever caught. I was, I was by myself pulling plugs for walleye. I was just under 40 inches. And then three years later, in 2017, I caught a bigger one that then became my biggest one.

• 56:08Speaker 05

  Spencer, I thought that's just the three biggest fish, not the six biggest fish.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  Well, so I'm just giving you some context. This, this pike then was 42 inches. He weighed just over 20 pounds. He ate a number seven Rapala bleeding olive minnow wrap, which is a plug they don't even make anymore. They have, they have minnow body crank baits, but they don't make that specific one anymore. And, and I was again pulling plugs by myself. This was 2017. I was in the same lake doing the same thing when I, when I caught that other pike. Let both of those fish go. That, that was.

• 56:44Speaker 05

  It's got a big old gouge in its back from another pike or something.

• 56:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it was, um, that was fun. That, you know, we were just talking about actually getting to fight a fish, getting to fight a 20 pound pike. That doesn't even compare to it, like, uh, you know, the walleye that I was actually targeting that day. So that was my second biggest fish ever, 42 inch pike, just over 20 pounds. All right, we're at our biggest fish, Brody.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  The biggest one ever. Now, when do I wait for this noise to come in, Phil?

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Here's, here's what you do. What is, what kind of fish is that? Tell me.

• 57:20Speaker 05

  Well, that's the biggest fish I've ever caught.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 57:23Speaker 05

  And it's a Coconie salmon.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  So here's what you do. You say, the biggest fish I ever caught is this Coconie salmon. And then Phil plays the buoy.

• 57:31Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  Yep. Okay.

• 57:32Speaker 05

  Great, great job.

• 57:33Speaker 04

  Now, tell us about it.

• 57:34Speaker 05

  Um, that's a Coconie salmon, which is a landlocked version of a sockeye salmon, or they call them red salmon in Alaska. Um, in most places where there's Coconie fisheries, freshwater Coconie lake fisheries, in the, mostly in the Western United States, those things are like 12 inches long. Um, people love fishing for them because they're, they're good to eat. Um, that, that thing's like a monster for a Coconie.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 58:03Speaker 05

  And it's like maybe pushing five pounds or so. I didn't measure it, but you know, it's like.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  Did you keep it?

• 58:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I kept it. Um, I think it was somewhere 22 to 24 inches. I don't know exactly. Uh, but it, that's like, for, for the species, that's an extremely large Coconie.

• 58:24Speaker 04

  What were you doing when you caught that?

• 58:25Speaker 05

  Perch fishing, buddy.

• 58:26Speaker 04

  Oh, was that the only Coconie you caught that day?

• 58:28Speaker 05

  Only one we caught that day.

• 58:29Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 58:30Speaker 05

  Just happened to get.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  I never caught a Coconie. You ever caught a Coconie?

• 58:33Speaker 04

  No, never. Although I don't know how many times I've even been in a lake that had Coconie. It's, it's been pretty rare in my fishing days. That's, uh, that's a special fish.

• 58:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was like, it was, it was good eating too. It was very good eating.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  All right, Yanni, you're up.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  All right, the, uh, biggest fish I've ever caught, which was, this is supposed to be my third biggest fish, but it doesn't matter. Um, and I actually didn't even personally catch this fish.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  There she is, my girl, Lindsay.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do you remember Lindsay's last name?

• 59:05Speaker 04

  Meyer.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Meyer, yeah. Lindsay and what was your husband's name?

• 59:08Speaker 05

  Yanni's tried to steal one of my clients from me for a little while.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  Oh, successfully did or not?

• 59:13Speaker 03

  I don't know. They fished with me for a while. I don't remember. I, I left town, so Brody got him back, I guess.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Oh, all right.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  But Lindsay and Jim, uh, they were the classic example of, uh.

• 59:24Speaker 10

  I still don't think we've said the, the kind of fish.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a rainbow trout. Uh, very similar to Brody's, uh, third biggest fish.

• 59:32Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  And, uh, classic example, these two, uh, she always was in the back and was like, oh, I'm really not that into fishing. I'm just here for the views and the, and the good time. And Jim would be fairly serious about it, but.

• 59:48Speaker 05

  Really? She wasn't serious? Man, she got real serious with me after a while.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  You must've been a better guide.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  I put her on a bunch of fish like this. She got, she got serious, but she would listen to what the guy was saying. Jim would, or not that Jim wouldn't, but she did a much better job of, of listening. And, uh, so she would always outfish, uh, Jim from the back of the boat. But, uh, was interesting about this particular deal is this on the Colorado River. And it was early season. Water was still on the high side and, uh, we'd had a particularly big runoff year. And fish like that weren't normal, uh, ever on this section of, of the Colorado River. And all of a sudden, I think it was, I think I was with another boat actually, and I want to say we floated through this

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  pretty slow deep hole and both boats hook up with these giant fish, you know, and it, as a guide, you're like, oh my gosh. You know, what, what is that thing coming up underneath the boat? It's a leviathan. So you kind of do anything and everything you can to land a, a fish like that. Get a lot, get lots of pictures. And those fish hung out in that hole and in that area for quite some time. And whoever I was with, I remember being like, dude, we cannot tell anybody else. Cause everybody's going to want to float through this section just to hit this one hole.

• 1:01:08Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  Best we could figure is that there was a tributary near there. Best we could figure that there was probably a stocked pond upstream on that tributary. And it probably got blown out and then these fish just swam down the tributary and got dumped into the river.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  So this was a short-lived experience catching these pigs.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  So how big was that?

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  In my, in my experience, I, I don't know. Again, I didn't have a tape on me. I can't remember. I don't think it was quite 30 inches, but you know, it's probably close, but yeah, just in, I mean, that fish is like more than double the size of the average trout we would catch.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  That section of river.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  When, when you hooked into it, was there any question as to what it could be? Like, did you know this is a big ol' rainbow?

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, I guess you could hook into a big mountain whitefish. That would, but it wouldn't be that big, but eventually you get a look at it, you know, but when the rod's is bent over double and it's sitting down deep, yeah, you don't know what it is.

• 1:02:05Speaker 05

  And usually if you're float fishing, especially with a client that hasn't fought a lot of big trout like that, you've got to follow them around in the boat for a while.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the cool thing. Like, as the guide and rowing a boat, you're almost doing as much fighting as the angler is because you're flipping the boat around, positioning it, and then obviously fighting the current and, and, you know, trying to stay in that slow water. Because nothing worse when you got a tank like that on and then you gotta like row through a riffle or a small rapid. Uh, you know, shit can go wrong real quick.

• 1:02:37Speaker 05

  I can tell you that, that Yanis did a very good job of, of releasing that fish in good shape because our buddy Alvin DeDeau had a client catch it like a week later.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  How do you know it's the same one?

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  In his picture.

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  I mean, it had to be.

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  But there was a couple of fish, I think, that were in that hole.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  Beautiful trout. All right. Biggest fish I've ever caught is this paddlefish. Uh, now, this is sort of cheating because I was working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That's a picture of my boss that I took of him. Uh, this was right after I graduated college. I worked at this, this fish hatchery and we raised a lot of things, but primarily pallid sturgeon and paddlefish.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Hold on, that dude is not you.

• 1:03:20Speaker 04

  That's not me.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  That, he has a remarkable resemblance to you.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  He's not me. That was, uh, that was my old boss Craig. Uh, so this was, this was 2015. We, we would provide all of the paddlefish that were stocked in South Dakota's reservoirs. And so to do that, we'd have to go out and net adult paddlefish, bring them back to our hatchery, take their eggs, take their milt, uh, raise the young. And then at the end of the summer, early fall, we would release these 12-inch paddlefish.

• 1:03:46Speaker 05

  What kind of nets were you using to get those things?

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  Uh, just big old drift nets, um, just like 100 foot long drift nets that had holes in them where if, uh, uh, it was big enough for a paddlefish to swim in and get stuck.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  Like gill?

• 1:03:58Speaker 05

  Net stock or not because that would kill them, wouldn't it?

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  Well, you're grabbing them ASAP. Yeah. Um, so this day it was just me and Craig on the boat. He was running the boat. I was running the nets. That paddle fish was just short of seven feet long and it weighed 129 pounds, which would have broken the state record at the time. And she gave us hundreds of thousands of eggs. We released her about a month later. Uh, none of these people in this picture are me either, but this shows us taking her eggs uh, after we gave her a hormone shot, uh, and that took three adult men, uh, just to handle this one fish. And then, uh, another person to capture the eggs.

• 1:04:37Speaker 05

  Um, how old is that fish?

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  So that fish, it, it came from Lake Francis Case, which is a reservoir. And, um, any adults that we were catching in that time, that big were born before the dams were put in. That dam was put in in 1952. Uh, so that fish was 65 plus years old when we caught it. I'll, I'll never, uh, see another fish of that size. And my boss and I were absolutely thrilled. Uh, I, I remember feeling like such a badass that day. When we got back to the boat dock that the two of us, uh, had did that. And I, I remember backing the boat down, the, the boat dock and turn on the radio and Tom Petty's Won't Back Down is playing and I cranked that up. We were so thrilled. We went into Chamberlain that night, drank our faces off. Man, we were excited.

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  Uh, that, that was a once in a lifetime fish. Um, and I caught it using, um, nets. I didn't catch it on a rod and reel, but, uh, I'll never forget that old girl.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  There we go. Those are the three biggest fish we've ever caught. We're going to figure out that segment someday. Six months into the show, we're, we're still, uh, working out some kinks.

• 1:05:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's give it nine.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  Okay.

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• 1:08:35Speaker 04

  Moving on, this is our last segment of the day. Joining us on the line last is James Kane and Barbie Augustini. They are magnet fishermen from New York City who had a life-changing catch last year. James, welcome to the show.

• 1:08:51Speaker 11

  What's going on guys? Thank you so much for having me. Barbie is actually away at the moment with a little stomach issue, but she'll be back in a bit.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 1:08:58Speaker 11

  I've got my bro here. How you doing?

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  What's up, bro? Alright, first thing, for those not familiar, explain what magnet fishing is.

• 1:09:06Speaker 11

  So magnet fishing is where you take a giant magnet this size, you know what I mean? You put it on a string and you throw it in the water. And you're waiting for the bite, like you guys will call it the click.

• 1:09:20Speaker 04

  The click, okay.

• 1:09:21Speaker 11

  Any object, yeah, you can feel it on it, yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 04

  I like that.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  Now, hold on, I got more questions about this part, because you're gonna move on.

• 1:09:29Speaker 04

  Well, go ahead.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Are you dragging it? Are you moving it? Are you changing cast locations? Like, if there's a piece of metal that's five feet away from that magnet, will it pull it over to it? Or do you need to land it right on top of it?

• 1:09:44Speaker 11

  The fairest connection point to these giant magnets you'd think would be that big. But actually, it's more like, especially when you're underwater, I think the pull distance is maybe five to six inches at max. So you do have to change location. You have to throw like you're still high school softball, so you gotta throw it as far as you can. That's the secret. No one's gonna tell you.

• 1:10:03Speaker 04

  Let one rip, let's see your throw. We're getting to that at the end. Not yet, James, hold on. At the end of the call, he's gonna show us how it's done. We're gonna learn more about magnet fishing first, though. What got you into magnet fishing?

• 1:10:16Speaker 11

  Uh, so, believe it or not, my family and I were very bored during COVID and we started watching videos. I always wanted to do treasure hunting as a little kid, but never had the background education, never had the financials to go on a boat and the gear and this and that. And then I saw someone putting a magnet on the water on a string. On YouTube, there are other channels down south that actually do it quite often. And I said, you know what? Let us try this. My kids were like, you're not gonna do it. You don't do nothing. So I actually took the challenge and we went to our local pond and, uh, yeah, it all goes from there.

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  How much does the gear cost to get going in magnet fishing?

• 1:10:54Speaker 11

  So the rope is 20 bucks for like 100 feet, 20, 30 bucks. The, the magnets, the level we're at now is a lot more powerful. So we have magnets that range from 200 to 300 dollars. But when you first want to start, you can go on Amazon and spend 30, 40 bucks just to see what it's like. So you don't have to, you know, drop three hundies on a freaking giant powerful magnet. You can still get stuff with the low powered magnets, but when you become obsessed, you want, you want the good stuff. Yeah, the bigger, full one.

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. And what kind of areas do you typically target when you're magnet fishing?

• 1:11:30Speaker 11

  So when we first started, we were just going to any bodies of water. Um, now I tend to look for, uh, so we're obviously, we're in the middle of New York City. So anybody of water that there's a lot of foot traffic and houses and roads nearby. That's when people toss and stuff right out the, right out the cars. And that's the best spot to go. Crowded, sometimes dangerous neighborhoods is the best spot, dude.

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  Love that. Now normally when we're talking about fishing, we want to go where people are not, but, uh, not, not magnet fishermen.

• 1:11:56Speaker 11

  Right.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  Do you use any sort of mapping apps like Onyx to maybe scout areas?

• 1:12:03Speaker 11

  Google Maps, Google Maps. And then I, sometimes you could find Google historical maps. I like to do research of locations that we're in. And there's sometimes historical items you can find by using the older maps as well.

• 1:12:13Speaker 04

  That's good. Now what are some of the most common, what are the most common things that you hook while magnet fishing?

• 1:12:20Speaker 11

  Bottle caps, rebar. Rebar. And nails. Tons of rebar. I don't know. I guess when they're constructing or whatever they're doing, the guys are, the people are done. They just lost their water in there.

• 1:12:31Speaker 04

  Uh huh. And do you ever get skunked or you, you're always catching something?

• 1:12:35Speaker 11

  We have gotten skunked a couple, uh, skunked a couple of times. Yeah, definitely. Um, in high salty areas like on, uh, we have our bay areas, which, uh, mix into the East River over here in New York City. Uh, something about the tides, which, you know, I don't, I don't fish. Maybe you guys can even explain that a little more, but, uh, when the tides are moving fast, the stuff is taken out into the ocean. So you don't get nothing on the island in Brooklyn off the piers. You're not going to get nothing unless it's really heavy. The salt eating it up and the tide's taking it out.

• 1:13:05Speaker 04

  Now besides the safe that we'll get to in a little bit, what are some of the most unusual catches that you've had?

• 1:13:12Speaker 11

  What I can say on here, I don't know. I usually, believe it or not, I tell people when they're, when they're watching. I used to say, oh, you'll never imagine what you can get, but now I tell them you, what you can't imagine is gonna be.

• 1:13:24Speaker 04

  Okay, so guns, how many guns have you caught?

• 1:13:28Speaker 11

  Uh, in the two years, we're almost on two years, we've found about thirty-five.

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  My goodness.

• 1:13:33Speaker 11

  Yeah, crazy, thirty-five guns.

• 1:13:35Speaker 05

  What are you doing with those when you find, what are you doing with those when you find them? Are you contacting law enforcement or throwing them back in or what?

• 1:13:41Speaker 11

  You have to. Yeah, um, I used to think to call nine-one-one, nine-one-one right away. Now we actually, uh, I try to call precincts.

• 1:13:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Speaker 11

  And then the precincts, precincts will tell you, no, you gotta call nine-one-one. And I was like, it's not too much of an emergency. I have, we have all the guns. We have the, the, sometimes we find grenades.

• 1:13:58Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 1:13:59Speaker 11

  Um, so we do have to call, I'm a New Yorker, my brother's a New Yorker. It's impossible, it's nearly impossible to get, uh, any kind of firearm license. Yeah, you don't wanna get called one. Not in New York City.

• 1:14:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  Have, have you ever, have you ever learned about, uh, the history of one of those guns? Like what crime it was used in or who owned it or anything like that?

• 1:14:19Speaker 11

  In the beginning, I was, uh, believe it or not, I was, I was actually scared, you know, I was nervous. Like I wasn't brought up around firearms. I'm not, don't have a military background. Uh, so I was nervous at first, like, oh, a real gun, ooh, what am I gonna do?

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  Uh-huh.

• 1:14:30Speaker 11

  Uh, and then I find out in the future that there is, like you said, there are stories with them. And we have found some that are so fresh that were used only a week ago. And then you research and you find out, wow, this person passed away, this young person passed away. Uh, and sometimes detectives will actually call us with, uh, possible subpoenas to go to court. Um, yeah, it can get a little, it can get a little weird. Get a little weird. I, I, I choose sort of not to follow them.

• 1:14:56Speaker 04

  Uh-huh.

• 1:14:56Speaker 11

  But there are other magnificians that want to know, um, the history and, and actually who's going to jail and who's.

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Speaker 11

  What crime can get solved from it, but I'm sure we helped out a lot of people, a lot.

• 1:15:06Speaker 04

  So other weird things that you've caught, anything really historic, anything really old?

• 1:15:12Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, we got um, we got a World War II grenade confirmed by the bomb, the bomb squad in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Uh, that's, yeah, we have two grape shot cannonballs in Central Park in New York City before the park was made. It was a, there was a garrison there for the War of 1812, you know, it didn't happen over, uh, too much over there, but they would practice over there.

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:35Speaker 11

  So we got those and um, some really, really old horseshoes on the valley stream.

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  Bro, all that and stuff.

• 1:15:41Speaker 11

  We must have like a three, three hundred year old horseshoe, oh, lots of coins. Lot of coins, you know, uh, other countries' coins are all magnetic, so.

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:15:50Speaker 11

  In America, the only magnetic coin is the forty-three penny. Still haven't got one yet, it's a gold.

• 1:15:55Speaker 04

  Okay, let's, let's talk about.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  What about, hold on, what, what happens when you latch on to something that is too big to, to yank out? Like, you know it's there, cause you, you got the click, but it ain't budging, what do you do?

• 1:16:09Speaker 11

  Uh, what I like to call it is you gotta jerk it off, you just gotta, you gotta take it right off the back, you gotta pull really hard.

• 1:16:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can't get go of it, yeah.

• 1:16:17Speaker 11

  Yeah, cause when it's, cause these things you grab really hard.

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  One safe out of the water, yeah, that didn't work out too well, that was a big safe, that's a little thing.

• 1:16:24Speaker 11

  A lot of safes in New York City as well.

• 1:16:26Speaker 04

  Hmm, alright, let's talk about what happened last year on May thirty first. Tell us where you were at and what you caught.

• 1:16:34Speaker 11

  So we were actually, uh, in a park called Flushing, Flushing Queens or Corona Park. Um, and we were throwing over there, this is like my second time over there, and we do have, we have found safes, just like this one you're watching. Clicked on to it, and I was like, oh, it's just gonna be another safe, and I stick, stick my fingers in the hole, and I feel something mushy, which really sounds weird, but it was stacks of bills. And in my mind, I'm, I'm scared right away at this point, like, when I feel the money, I'm nervous, cause there's no way we're gonna keep it, you know what I mean?

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:05Speaker 11

  And I was like, babe, I just wanna get something, we're gonna go for pizza, we're gonna grab something, you know, something good, but the money is so bad. The money is so mush and slush. Yeah.

• 1:17:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can.

• 1:17:15Speaker 11

  And I'm, I'm just going crazy right now in my mind.

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  You can see this video of James catching this safe and going through it on our YouTube channel right now. So after you reel in the safe, the police had to get involved, what was that process like?

• 1:17:28Speaker 11

  Believe it or not, to this day, we get ranked on like why we actually contacted the NYPD and supposedly in New York City that anything over a hundred dollars is supposed to call in. And uh, we're trying to, you know, get our channel out there. I'm trying to do whatever I can. Maybe someone lost it and if they can get their money back, I would go, dude, here's your money. Let me get like a hundred bucks. But um, the police were in shock as well. They didn't believe any of it. They didn't believe it. Then a whole squad comes down, if you watch towards the end of our video, and they actually gave us the money and FBI got involved in the same thing as well and did their investigation for a few hours and we walked off with all the money in a Ziploc bag.

• 1:18:08Speaker 04

  Amazing. So determined. Go ahead, Yanni.

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say, I'm surprised it was only a couple hours and then you literally walked away that day with that muddy muddy.

• 1:18:18Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. I was in shock. I was in shock as well. We had to go to Washington DC.

• 1:18:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we got to keep the money. And for those who weren't watching on YouTube, those stacks of bills were covered in a black sludge from being underwater so long. So how do you go about turning those filthy bills into usable currency?

• 1:18:39Speaker 11

  So the process is done in Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington DC. We did some research. They found out what happened. They, we went right on the bus to Times Square, took a megabus right to DC, um, and went to the engraving and printing, handed them the money. They explained to us the process. We didn't get to see too much of the lab and how they do that. But it's all gonna be put back together piece by piece. Even the money we didn't bring, because there was more in the safe that was just tiny obliterated pieces. They said we should have brought it because they can put it all, they can put it all back together. It's gonna take about two and a half years. We have zero sense at all. There's only one group of people that do it. Yeah, there's only like seven people that do it for the entire America, put all the money.

• 1:19:24Speaker 11

  It's ridiculous. Takes a long time.

• 1:19:25Speaker 04

  And how much, how much money was it?

• 1:19:28Speaker 11

  They estimated between fifty to eighty thousand only.

• 1:19:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:19:32Speaker 11

  Only.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  Only.

• 1:19:33Speaker 11

  Only.

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  Now, during this process with the police and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, have you learned anything about the origins of the safe? Like how old it is? Or is that still a mystery?

• 1:19:43Speaker 11

  Um, I can only go on by honestly by the bills that were in there. We had some as far back as 2007 and 2009. They had the magnetic stripping, so I think the oldest bill is like 2009, honestly.

• 1:19:56Speaker 04

  Oh, I expected older.

• 1:19:58Speaker 11

  Not that old. It looked like it's been after. The barnacles weren't that crazy.

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  Okay, so you're you're still like two years away from getting this cash back, though.

• 1:20:07Speaker 11

  Give or take. They said it could take up to two and a half years, so it could be any day now.

• 1:20:10Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:20:10Speaker 11

  You know?

• 1:20:11Speaker 04

  Well, James.

• 1:20:11Speaker 11

  Barbie now.

• 1:20:13Speaker 04

  James is standing at the pond where he caught the safe and he's got his mag.

• 1:20:17Speaker 11

  He's got Barbie on here now.

• 1:20:18Speaker 04

  Oh, what's up Barbie?

• 1:20:20Speaker 11

  Hello.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  Uh, so James is standing at the pond. He's got his magnet. Can you show us how it's done? See if there is any treasure left in that bit of water.

• 1:20:30Speaker 11

  I mean, they got the. We're gonna take, uh, I'm gonna take a big toss with the, uh, ten, nine pound magnet here.

• 1:20:35Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:20:35Speaker 11

  I like to throw like I'm still in high school playing, playing baseball.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:20:39Speaker 11

  Softball. Yep. Basically, you just, some people can swing however they want. I like to swing like we're playing baseball.

• 1:20:45Speaker 04

  Okay. Have, have you gotten better at this, James, over the years?

• 1:20:48Speaker 11

  Oh, dude, challenge me. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, oh. No one throws as far as I can. And I'm actually known for that. I actually won a belt. Title. I actually won a leather championship belt for the longest toss in, uh, so far.

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

  Okay, what a treat. We're gonna see the world champion magnet throw. We're giving it a toss here.

• 1:21:05Speaker 11

  I should have bought the belt.

• 1:21:06Speaker 04

  Do your thing, James.

• 1:21:07Speaker 11

  I'm not gonna throw that far because I don't have that much rope. Toss it, bro. Come on, you have to bet in. Yeah.

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:12Speaker 11

  My rope's not, uh.

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  Yanni could throw farther than that.

• 1:21:16Speaker 11

  Oh, I can. I don't have my, my rope.

• 1:21:18Speaker 04

  Okay, okay. So what do you, what do you think you might grab in there? Maybe some nails like you talked about?

• 1:21:24Speaker 11

  Dude, we're in the near, we're in the middle of New York City, so it's probably gonna be. Get a weapon. Could be, it could be a firearm. It could be, uh, a toenail clipper. You don't know.

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  Now, if you were really a good guess, James, you'd have planted a handgun in the water for us or something.

• 1:21:37Speaker 11

  Yeah. Right? We, we, we don't do any of that.

• 1:21:40Speaker 04

  Okay, so you've got the magnet back to shore.

• 1:21:43Speaker 11

  I actually use something.

• 1:21:44Speaker 04

  Okay. See what we got.

• 1:21:47Speaker 11

  Don't know what it is.

• 1:21:48Speaker 04

  Oh! Is that a car park?

• 1:21:51Speaker 11

  It is, looks like it's one of the New York City Fire Lightposts. They had a door for the light pole.

• 1:21:57Speaker 04

  Okay, so.

• 1:22:00Speaker 11

  Got some icebreakers.

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  Well, there might be something in there.

• 1:22:04Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:05Speaker 11

  Yeah. Let's see what's in the icebreakers.

• 1:22:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then, uh, yeah, that, that went so fast, James. Can you give it another toss for us? Let's see what else we can catch. Okay.

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, we can clear out the rest of our schedule.

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah. What do you guys got going on today?

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  Five hour meeting.

• 1:22:21Speaker 11

  Two bottle caps.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  Okay. What, what do you do with when it's just straight garbage that you catch?

• 1:22:27Speaker 11

  Uh, we collect all the garbage in a bucket and then we dispose of it all the reception.

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah. All right, James, you can give a second toss.

• 1:22:35Speaker 04

  Really, really, uh, put your body into this one. I want to see how far you can throw that thing. Okay, he's, he's giving himself more line. Uh, he's confident that this thing's gonna touch the other shoreline.

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  You guys got any other questions for James?

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  No, but you should go. Yeah, I want to return back to the giant safes that you left. I'm like, I don't know how you could ever.

• 1:22:58Speaker 11

  Yeah, that was a big one.

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  The guy told you that he's like hooked on a giant safe and then you just moved on. Like, what happens with the giant safe?

• 1:23:05Speaker 11

  It was stuck there. We couldn't move it. It's still there.

• 1:23:07Speaker 04

  Still there.

• 1:23:09Speaker 11

  Alright, I'll take a bigger throw.

• 1:23:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, bigger throw.

• 1:23:13Speaker 11

  Go ahead.

• 1:23:15Speaker 11

  Two.

• 1:23:18Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's better.

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  All right, yeah, that's a good throw. We're, we're gonna get something really nice this time.

• 1:23:23Speaker 11

  It's, it's 10 pounds, you know what I mean? That's 10 pound ton.

• 1:23:25Speaker 04

  Okay. Yanni is stuck on the safe.

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

  I'm stuck on the big safe. So you know where it is. You can't get it out, but there's a safe underwater. You're not gonna.

• 1:23:35Speaker 11

  Uh oh. They chopped into the safe, so it was empty. We could see there was empty in there. We just wanted to try and get it up to the land. We couldn't get into it.

• 1:23:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it had to be at least like six inches thick.

• 1:23:44Speaker 11

  Huge, dude. That was a big mistake. I was gonna say it had a little spin handle on it. It wasn't a safe. The one we left was a vault. Vault, yeah.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. Now it looked like you got snagged on something there, James. Was that something magnetic or were you just dragging it over a log?

• 1:23:57Speaker 11

  It could be logs, it could be uh.

• 1:24:00Speaker 05

  Rocks.

• 1:24:00Speaker 11

  Uh, sometimes there's stones that people throw in the water.

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:24:03Speaker 11

  You know, it could be spikes that are too deep that we that sometimes you just can't get that.

• 1:24:07Speaker 04

  Okay. The James is bringing the magnet to shore again. Let's see what we got this toss. You can go see the world champion magnet tosser on our YouTube channel. Watch James do his handiwork.

• 1:24:20Speaker 11

  We got a paperclip. Oh, look at that treasure. Paperclip.

• 1:24:24Speaker 05

  Oh, nice.

• 1:24:25Speaker 04

  An actual paperclip.

• 1:24:27Speaker 11

  Magnet fishing, sometimes you're gonna get a paperclip, sometimes you're gonna get a hundred thousand dollars, you don't know.

• 1:24:31Speaker 04

  That's right. Alright, James, if people wanna see more of your magnet fishing, how do they go watch it?

• 1:24:38Speaker 11

  You can literally just go on uh, online and type in, let's get magnetic. We're on all social media platforms. But mainly YouTube if you wanna communicate and say what's up.

• 1:24:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  All socials, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, uh, Facebook page and group.

• 1:24:53Speaker 11

  One of the, one of the interesting thing is we get a lot of lures and I always wanted to know if these things have value or not. I have, we have like a box of like. Yeah, I'm crazy. We find them all over.

• 1:25:01Speaker 04

  You, you text me some photo, James, we'll get to the bottom of that. Well, thank you for joining us. Thanks for teaching us about magnet fishing. Thanks for cleaning up our waterways and good luck getting that cash refurbished.

• 1:25:12Speaker 11

  Guys, thank you so much for having us on. Hope everyone has fun. Everybody.

• 1:25:15Speaker 05

  Thank you. That was fun. That was great, Spencer.

• 1:25:19Speaker 04

  That was fun.

• 1:25:20Speaker 05

  Save the best for last.

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:25:22Speaker 05

  You know, the, the one bummer about it is just shows you what kinda dirtbags people are.

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. Guys. No. The people they're cleaning up after. I mean, the, tho- that's what you want, representing the great city of New York, right there.

• 1:25:37Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:25:38Speaker 05

  I mean, he's like, yeah, if someone else can say that it's their hundred K, just give me a hundred bucks. I just wanna go out for pizza. That guy's great.

• 1:25:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll uh, we'll check in with the James again.

• 1:25:48Speaker 10

  So yeah, there, I wanna just plug their, their page. They've got an Instagram page too here. Um. Uh, it's just let's get magnetic. It's all, no, no apostrophe, all one word. Um, he's on YouTube and Instagram, so.

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, doing uh, doing something fun and they're cleaning up our water while they're at it.

• 1:26:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Speaker 04

  Brody, you said your son had a magnet, but he gave up on that endeavor.

• 1:26:09Speaker 05

  Pretty quick.

• 1:26:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. He needs to live in a place like New York City to really appreciate magnet fishing.

• 1:26:13Speaker 05

  Maybe it's a good thing that he never really found anything cool and he went right back to regular fishing after, after like an hour doing the magnet fishing.

• 1:26:22Speaker 04

  Alright, that brings us to the end of the show. Phil, let's get some final listener feedback.

• 1:26:26Speaker 10

  Yes, sure thing. Let's see here. I'll just grab this one because it's the first one I saw. It's Phil Hunter Fish. The answer is kind of sort of.

• 1:26:35Speaker 04

  What's the biggest fish you ever caught, Phil?

• 1:26:38Speaker 10

  I couldn't even tell you. Um, yeah, I mean, people, a lot of people know this. I was not a hunter before I started working here. And I still probably wouldn't consider myself a hunter, but I've gone out several times. The only person who really invites me out is Cal. So thanks to Cal and no thanks to anybody in this room.

• 1:26:54Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 1:26:55Speaker 10

  But, uh, yeah, yeah, I mostly, I've just, you know, I've done upland ducks, uh, turkey, just pretty much just birds so far. That's kind of all I'm really interested in. I'm not really chomping at the bit to get out in the woods, but I wouldn't say no.

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:27:07Speaker 10

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:27:08Speaker 04

  Would you take some meat if we had meat for you?

• 1:27:10Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah. Totally.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  We can do that.

• 1:27:12Speaker 10

  Hmm. Uh, let's see. Uh, you can plead the fifth on this one, but maybe it'll just kind of show your, your true colors here. Our good buddy Leland asks, if you had to join just one conservation organization, which one would it be?

• 1:27:26Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:27:28Speaker 05

  That's a toughie.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  I think we've talked about this before, but if I was just joining one and my membership always ran out, I'd join a different one the next year then. So I'd spread my memberships around. Um, but for the rest of my life, I don't know what the answer would be. What do you boys think?

• 1:27:44Speaker 05

  I mean, yeah, it's a tough question. Maybe TR, well, I mean, TRCP doesn't, you don't really have a membership there.

• 1:27:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you can still support.

• 1:27:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can still don't like, so like, I like them because they're like in DC, like hopefully like affecting policy.

• 1:28:04Speaker 05

  Um, that, you know, that's, that's a good choice there.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think any of the groups that are non-species specific that really work across entire country, um, and for all, you know, outdoors people. So maybe TRCP or the Sportsman's Alliance or Howell, you know, that are really involved across the board.

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. The ones that I benefit the most from probably National Deer Association and Pheasants Forever, because in my home state of South Dakota, they do a lot of great habitat work. And that same habitat work, uh, is, is good for deer as well. Um, but I'd probably go with something that's, uh, oriented towards access like BHA. Because, uh, if I didn't have places to go hunt fish, wouldn't matter if they were deer or pheasants out there.

• 1:28:45Speaker 05

  But man, look, if you got like a, a critter you like the most, turkeys or mule deer or whatever, like. It's not like, you're not making a bad choice by supporting those groups either.

• 1:28:56Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:28:57Speaker 04

  What else you got, Phil?

• 1:28:59Speaker 10

  Caleb asks, as a beginner to turkey hunting, what would be the crew's go-to call? We're a Phillips family here, but if you guys have any sort of, uh, specific Phillips calls that are beginner friendly.

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  No, for me, it's, answer is easy. It's always just a, a basic slate call.

• 1:29:13Speaker 05

  Pot call, yeah.

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, basic slate pot call. Very easy to use. Can make all kinds of sounds, loud, quiet. That's it.

• 1:29:22Speaker 10

  Great. Colin asks, what's your favorite fish dish? Whether to prepare it or eat it?

• 1:29:28Speaker 04

  Mmm, beer battered fish. Can't beat it. It's, it's my favorite.

• 1:29:31Speaker 05

  You're a beer batter guy.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can't do the beer batter, man.

• 1:29:34Speaker 04

  Why not?

• 1:29:35Speaker 05

  I just, I like, I like, I've, when I eat it in restaurants, I'm like, this is way too much shit around the fish. And then when I've tried it at home, I haven't been able to like, do it to the point where I'm like, this is better than breaded, fried breaded fish.

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 05

  I'd like to see you, or I'd like to try your versions and see how you pull it off. Cause yeah, I know other people that are big beer batter folks, but uh, yeah, I'm kinda with Brody. I'm like, eh, it's good for the first couple of pieces. And then I'm like, yeah, it's a lot of, lot of stuff.

• 1:30:05Speaker 04

  We'll have a fish fry sometime.

• 1:30:07Speaker 05

  That'd be, that'd be great. Yeah, I, this is a tough one to pick one fish dish because there's like, very different kinds of fish, right? Like there's fish like perch and walleye that are awesome fried, but then there's like salmon, which is like awesome grilled. So, that's what I go with. Fried fish, grilled fish, depending on what kinda fish it is.

• 1:30:32Speaker 04

  Yanis?

• 1:30:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not the dish so much. I'd say that more of just the species itself. And, uh, one of the fish I was gonna possibly use for my, uh, the, our top three fish segment was a yelloweye rockfish I caught years ago at, at Steve's Fish Shack and, uh,

• 1:30:49Speaker 05

  You know, that thing is like a uh, it's like a grouper and a scallop had a baby. You know, that's what their flesh is like. Like you literally just don't need to add anything to it. You know, besides a little bit of salt and uh, and again, just cooked very plain and simple, you know?

• 1:31:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. If I, if I wasn't picking beer battered fish, I do like a very midwestern chowder. That would be very creamy, have some corn in it. Um, you can put about any fish in there besides maybe a salmon.

• 1:31:17Speaker 05

  I do like a good fish chowder.

• 1:31:18Speaker 05

  No, we do it. We do a salmon chowder. It's great. It's popular in Northwest.

• 1:31:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Put any fish in there. Phil, what else you got? Let's do a few more.

• 1:31:25Speaker 10

  Okay. Uh, this is the, by far the question we've been getting the most, um, but there's a lot of misinformation about it out there. But, uh, we should probably just say a few words about it. What does the crew think about the dire wolf de-extinction?

• 1:31:38Speaker 05

  Um, they're not dire wolves, number one.

• 1:31:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. The branding is all wrong.

• 1:31:42Speaker 05

  Um.

• 1:31:43Speaker 10

  Cover of Times, Time Magazine story.

• 1:31:45Speaker 05

  Look up our buddy Jim Helfelfingers post on it. He's got a good Instagram post on it. Um, I, I, I think it's like a giant marketing campaign. I, I don't think it's conservation as they're proposing it is. And then like, I'll leave it at that.

• 1:32:02Speaker 10

  Yeah. And you can, if you want more information, straight from the horse's mouth, uh, episode 564 of the Meteor Podcast. We had, um, Matt James of Colossal Biosciences on the show. Yannis and Brody were in the room for that time. Um, so yeah, you can check that out for, for more info.

• 1:32:18Speaker 04

  And if we, if we had the ability to actually bring things back from, uh, extinction, let's focus on the things that we caused to go extinct. Uh, not some critter that died during the ice age. How about the dodo or passenger pigeon? Uh, is it the white rhino that we're, got like one left of in the world? Um, let's, let's de-extinct those, but, um, yeah, the.

• 1:32:39Speaker 05

  Or keep shit from going extinct. How about that?

• 1:32:41Speaker 04

  That's right. We can, we got a lot of efforts, uh, that we could focus on in that area.

• 1:32:46Speaker 10

  Uh, yeah, we'll do one more, kind of running out of them here, but, but Chris asked, does the crew have an aversion to hunt the Pacific Northwest? Temperate rainforests obviously prove a serious challenge, a fine game, but could definitely make for some awesome content. Cheers from the Olympic Peninsula. Um, I have noticed that the, it's a bit light on, uh, Pacific Northwest content here. Is there, is there a reason for that specifically?

• 1:33:08Speaker 05

  I mean, southeast Alaska is

• 1:33:11Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 1:33:12Speaker 05

  Climate wise is very similar. So I don't think, I think that's probably like Steve owns a place up there. So that's why they're going there. I don't think there's an aversion to it. Is there, Yanis?

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  No, I've been looking at, you know, maybe going hunting black tailed deer in that neck of the woods, but for a lot of the other species, they're, or those states just generally aren't very, uh, friendly to non-residents. It's not easy to get tags in Oregon and Washington. Um, so I know there's some out there. I'd love to go hunt a Roosevelt at some point.

• 1:33:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean Phelps and those guys, they hunt.

• 1:33:44Speaker 10

  Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's Phelps' home turf over there. He's, he's in the, in the forest deep.

• 1:33:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Is it Oregon? I don't think they do preference points. Am I thinking of a different state?

• 1:33:54Speaker 05

  No, Oregon does. I think that's one reason why it's real tough to get.

• 1:33:57Speaker 10

  And it's very different climate wise, but Cal's done several things in eastern Oregon that you can see on, on YouTube.

• 1:34:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. And Washington's a tough state for non-residents too.

• 1:34:06Speaker 04

  All right. Is that it, Phil?

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  Well, I like Matt's question about once in a lifetime tags.

• 1:34:11Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:12Speaker 04

  Okay. Last question.

• 1:34:13Speaker 10

  Am I blind here, Yanis?

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  Right above the one you had highlighted.

• 1:34:20Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 1:34:21Speaker 10

  Oh, Matt asks, what are the room's thoughts on, uh, quote, once in a lifetime tag drawings? Uh, the PA game commission is pushing to change the bull elk tag to a once in a lifetime format.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  I, I mean, my thought is, is a lot of those, a lot of the tags that aren't once in a lifetime tags, like.

• 1:34:40Speaker 05

  That aren't done that way, like sheep or mountain goat, or in a lot of cases moose in the lower 48. They're once in a lifetime tags anyway, really, right? So I don't have a problem with, like, if I draw a bighorn sheep tag and kill a bighorn sheep in Montana, say, I'd be fine if it was once in a lifetime.

• 1:35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it should be that way. I prefer it that way because, uh, yeah, it is such a limited resource. And if I was to get so lucky to draw two,

• 1:35:11Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  and there's hundreds of the other people that are, you know, waiting and waiting and want that experience, like, yeah, I don't think I should get a second opportunity. I think someone else should get there first.

• 1:35:20Speaker 05

  And for, for, I mean, we're talking specifically lower 48 here, right? Like, if you did, if you drew a mountain goat tag in wherever, Colorado, and it was once in a lifetime, and you really wanted to go hunt one again, you could, you know, go hunt them in Alaska or somewhere like that.

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:35:38Speaker 05

  You know?

• 1:35:39Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:35:40Speaker 04

  I agree with what you boys said. All right. That brings us to the end of the show. See everyone back here next week. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening.

• 1:35:57Steven Rinella?

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• 1:36:42Steven Rinella?

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• 1:36:48Speaker 12

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• 1:37:48Steven Rinella?

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