#237 Steven Rinella - Founder of MeatEater

Steven Rinella is an American outdoorsman, writer, and television host, best known for promoting ethical hunting, wildlife conservation, and field-to-table cooking. He is the founder of MeatEater, Inc., a company that produces hunting, fishing, and outdoor lifestyle content across multiple platforms, including television, podcasts, and digital media. As the host of "MeatEater", a long-running TV series on Netflix and many other platforms, Rinella takes viewers into the field, blending hunting adventures with education on wildlife, ecology, and sustainable food sourcing. A hallmark of the show is its authenticity—highlighting not just the successes but also the challenges of hunting, including the reality that not every hunt ends in a filled tag. Each episode also emphasizes cooking and consuming wild game, reinforcing the deep connection between hunting and food. In addition to the TV series, Rinella hosts "The MeatEater Podcast", America's most listened-to outdoors podcast, which ranks among the top ten sports podcasts overall. Featuring expert guests, in-depth discussions on conservation, and plenty of entertaining outdoors stories, the podcast has become a go-to resource for hunters, anglers, and outdoor enthusiasts. An accomplished author, Rinella has written ten books (and three audiobooks) on hunting, wild game cooking, and outdoor survival, including American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon; The MeatEater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival; The MeatEater Fish and Game Cookbook; and Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature. His writing has appeared in many publications, including Wall Street Journal, Outside, The New York Times, Men's Journal, and Glamour. Rinella also appeared in the Ken Burns documentary, The American Buffalo. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: ⁠https://americanfinancing.net/srs⁠ NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 866-781-8900, for details about credit costs and terms. ⁠https://tryarmra.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://aura.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://betterhelp.com/srs⁠ This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. ⁠https://bubsnaturals.com⁠ – USE CODE SHAWN ⁠https://shawnlikesgold.com⁠ ⁠https://mypatriotsupply.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://patriotmobile.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://ROKA.com⁠ – USE CODE SRS ⁠https://shopify.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://trueclassic.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://USCCA.com/srs⁠ Steven Rinella Links: Website - https://www.themeateater.com X - https://x.com/stevenrinella IG - https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella MeatEater Podcast - https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater Books - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/84146/steven-rinella Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards, all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com/protectionterms.

• 1:04Shawn Ryan?

  Steve Rinella, welcome to the show, man.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Thank you, it's a privilege. Come on, like, I always watch your, uh, I consume tons of your, the shorts you pull from your episodes.

• 1:15Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  I like them, yeah.

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  I like all the, all the warriors, man. Like, hearing them tell stories is a kick, yeah.

• 1:22Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's an honor to do it, you know? I just, I just think it's really important to document the last war. I mean, I was in part of both of them, so I think it's just important to document that stuff, actually, how it happened, instead of listening to some fucking news head on the media tell us about what happened, who'd never been there. Or maybe they did a photo shoot there at some point in time, but... Yeah, I've been tracking you for quite a while, so it's pretty surreal to have you sitting in here. Thank you for coming.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Appreciate it.

• 1:52Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, all right, everybody starts off with an introduction, so here we go.

• 1:59Shawn Ryan?

  Steve Vernella, an American outdoorsman, writer, and TV host known for ethical hunting, wildlife conservation, and field-to-table cooking. Founder of MeatEater, Inc., producing top-tier content on hunting, fishing, and outdoor lifestyles across TV, podcasts, and digital media. Host of the MeatEater TV series on Netflix. You run the MeatEater Podcast, America's number-one outdoors podcast, and a top-10 sports podcast. Author of 10 books plus three audiobooks on hunting, survival, and nature, including hits like "The American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon" and "The MeatEater Fishing Game Cookbook," and "You're

• 2:43Shawn Ryan?

  a Husband and a Father." And so, being out there a little bit, talking to your team, we were asking for funny stories, and they had mentioned something about, something about a hunt, I believe it was in South America, for monkeys. What is that? Well, I gotta hear this.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had a number of real-life-changing experiences hunting down in South America with indigenous South Americans. Some people use the term "Amerindians." I spent time with some guys that are from the Makushi tribe, or Makushi and Wapashon tribes in Bolivia, and then the Chimene. Sorry, Makushi and Wapashon, and Guyana, and the Chimene in Bolivia. And we were on a river trip, traveling up a river with some Chimene guys. And they had, they had a shotgun, which is kind of a common armament down there. And it would

• 3:44Speaker 03

  be that, like, I was with these guys, another trip I was with, just to give you a sense of the ammunition and stuff they use down there is, I was with these guys in Guyana one time, that they weren't supposed to have a gun, right? They weren't allowed to have firearms, but they had a firearm. And they had a 16-gauge shotgun, and they had 12-gauge ammo. And they would, I'm not kidding, dude, they would sit there, so, at night, they liked to hunt at night. And they would take that, they had a 16-gauge casing, it's got the same primer. So they would take that 12-gauge shell, someone had given these 12-gauge shells, and they would cut it open, and they had a leaf, they cut it open, poured the shot out in a leaf.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Got the wad out, poured the powder out in a leaf.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Pushed that primer pin out.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Put the primer into the 12 gauge. Uh, put the powder in. And then they used, like, they had this kind of waxy paper they'd use for a wadding. Put their shot in, then they had a candle. Instead of crimping it, they'd cut the crimp off and they'd melt a candle in there. And drip candle wax in there to seal the thing. No way. So they could go take their 16 gauge shotgun out hunting. I remember one night, these, these guys. I would go out with them sometimes. One night I was, I just, for whatever reason, I wasn't like invited to go. I remember they made two of these shells and they're gone for quite a while in the dark and a while. I never found out what happened, but a while there they come back, make one more shell and then go back out again.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  So that was, but these, these are these, to get back to the question about the monkey, these guys in, in, uh, Bolivia, they really like, they like monkeys and different, I, I, the handful of different groups I hung out with, there's different opinions about eating monkey.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  It's either taboo or not, but these guys like red howler monkeys.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  So I go out with them in the jungle and they had, they had found a, they knew about a tree that was fruiting. They'd been scouting around and found a fig tree or not a fig tree, maybe some kind of date. I, I, I don't remember the fruit. I'm sorry, but. We got under a tree and we're just waiting under a tree and pretty soon you can see a howler monkey up in the tree. And he shoots up there with a shotgun and down comes not only a howler monkey, but a howler monkey's baby.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  And man, they, uh, this guy comes back, there's some stuff we like, we, we filmed this off. There's some stuff we didn't film. Or didn't use the footage of, but they come back and they. You know, they kind of cook that monkey's head and eat it like a apple, walking around with it, kind of chewing the. Are you serious? Took all the intestines out in the river. So they took all those monkey guts down and inverted all the intestines to clean them, to eat. And, um, yeah, they just, and, and they cook everything to the nth degree. So they smoke it, cook it, boil it. Yeah. And sitting there eating that monkey meat. And it was like, I can eat anything, man. I'll eat anything. But, uh, eating monkey meat

• 6:58Speaker 03

  was, yeah, eating monkey meat was a, was a tougher meal. So they run around with a monkey head and eat it like an apple? Did you try that? I didn't try the mo-, I ate a lot of monkey meat, but I didn't try the monkey head. I wasn't, I wasn't offered the monkey head. You weren't, you weren't invited. No, but I remember just seeing it. He had the little, the little monkey. And, um, yeah, just palming it, you know? That's crazy. Yeah. What about the skull? No, just not like, kind of like get like a picture that you're, picture that you're getting the, the skin off and the jowl meat and stuff, just kind of cleaning it up, you know, cleaning it up. Yeah. That's fucking crazy. Yeah, it was, it was a wild experience. And what, what I, the, the joke about that, that

• 7:40Speaker 03

  I always tell people is, we run into a, they have like, our only marsupial here is an opossum. They run into a pot, we're out at night, we run into a possum and they just killed this monkey. So we see a possum, which is not a steamed food item here. Once upon a time it was, like, people would even harvest them. The commercial guys used to harvest them just for the fat, just for the oil. Oh, shit. Didn't know that. We run into a possum. I'm like, dude, if there's some Americans eat a possum, that possum's dead meat with these boys finding it, you know? It was so funny. There's this possum hanging on a tree and they can see it in the light. And, um, I'm like, man, I feel bad for that possum. And they're like, nah, just keep walking.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Sounds like monkeys, cool possums, no one's gonna eat that.

• 8:25Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, what's the craziest thing you've eaten?

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Uh, I think that, like, eating monkey meat and then, and then, um, years ago, I did a story, I, I, I went to, I was mentioning to you, um, even though I promised not to do this, I'm like, earlier I was telling you, but, um, earlier I, I mentioned having an opportunity, we were talking about Vietnam Vats, I mentioned having an opportunity to go to Vietnam years ago. I did this, I did a magazine story when I was doing magazine articles, I did a magazine feature on, um,

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Fit Cho, which is like meat dog in Vietnam, and it's, and it's, uh, in the, in the north of Vietnam, around the lunar new year, so Tet.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Like Tet is like an auspicious time to eat dog meat in the north. And so I did a story about, uh, I did a story about that, like, eating dog meat, the mythology of eating dog meat, the, the business of, the business of dog meat in Vietnam, um, how it's, how it's raised, how it's sourced, how it's served. And, uh, went and ate for about a week and was never able to enjoy a bite of it, man. It would give you like, it would give, uh, a hot, they would call it a hot food, like it was, it was, it's a charged food. They would call it hot,

• 9:47Speaker 03

  meaning i- i- it's like a potent food. But I would get hot, like hot flushes of guilt, dude. Like I'd get like a sweaty guiltiness.

• 9:55Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Eating that dog and you, there's a common thing they would serve where you'd go into these, these places that would open. It was funny because I was right on that lake where they, where they fished McCain.

• 10:07Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, you're sitting like, that lake where McCain went down in, and, and a guy in Vietnam mentioned, he was a guest of us once talking about McCain. But it was that, where he was, there's a street there that during the Tet holiday is all these sort of like, you'd almost put it like, it's almost like food trucks or like pop-up stores. It's just all Fit Cho places that are open just for the Tet holiday. And you can go in and get. They'd serve like you go to that get dog five ways or dog three ways and it'd be like a prefix menu. Interesting. Of just different preps. And when I wrote that, I published that story in Outside Magazine long, long ago now. And I remember it was the most they were, they were saying that in terms of

• 10:51Speaker 03

  generating like vitriolic hate mail. It was their number two. I'll bet. And the number one thing was at the time, they said the number one thing was something they had written that was critical of the boy scouts.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  So I was, I was, I fell behind. Damn. And vitriolic hate mail. But you know, um, that, that was, that was a rugged, that was a rugged bunch of meals and, um, and eating the monkey was, it was fine. I, I would do, I would eat the monkey, you know, I would, I would do that again because it's such a pleasure to hang out with guys. You got a picture that

• 11:27Speaker 03

  you, you're with people. You're with people that, um,

• 11:34Speaker 03

  that, that, that, their, their, their great grandfather, their grandfather, their father, them. They hunt and fish 250 days a year, maybe. They spend some time doing these little, uh, little farm fields they cultivate up and down the river, but they hunt and fish. I would ask a lot of guys like how many days and they'd have to think about, they'd say like, you know, two out of three days or whatever. They hunt and fish. Um, within a 50 mile radius, 75 mile radius for many, many, many generations. I don't care how good you think you are in the woods.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  You can't compete. Yeah. You can't. Um,

• 12:15Speaker 03

  you'll never catch them. Do you know what I'm saying? You can't catch them. They're so good at like a specific set of things in a specific environment. Yeah. I mean, they, they live in it and it's, it's not pleasure or hobby, right? It's survival. It's just, you can't compete. The stuff they see, you'll never see it. The stuff they hear, you won't hear it. Yeah. Damn. I bet you've seen a lot of that all over the world. Yeah. Um, that, yeah, that, so that meaning like if, if I can go and spend a evening or a day or whatever, go out at night with flashlights with, with guys that know that the, that know their business like that, like I'll do it anytime. I don't care what I gotta eat. I bet you've learned a ton over the years, huh? Yeah. Yeah. I've learned a lot of it's not, a lot of stuff you pick up.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  It's it's not it's not like you're learning tricks that you're going to integrate into your own program, but you're just you're learning. Uh huh. You know, um, you're you're you're it's more like it's more like building a uh building kind of like a database of information or an understanding rather than like picking up some little thing. Though I did like I I have gone and I I have gone and seen it's funny gone and seen people solve

• 13:30Speaker 03

  seen how um indigenous hunter gathers or hunter gathers like see them a fine like solve a problem that I have recognized in our own world. Interesting. Um, we used to for for a short period of time, I would sell snap and turtle meat. And uh in Michigan and we would always get snap and turtles, you know, and and I remember my dad would how I was taught to do it and how I would do it later when I sold a little bit of snap turtle meat is like you cut snap turtle's head off. And then they they have such like an ancient nervous system, you know, that they'll for hours, I mean, for hours, like if you cut a turtle's head off and he's going to retract into his shell.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  And for hours, you know, you know, the expression like chicken with a head cut off, right? Like I'm always trying to explain that to my kids. He's like, he's he's daddy don't know it. But for hours, a turtle is tensed up. No kidding. Oh, yeah. So like I remember my old man, he'd like cut his head off, go hang it by the tail and then you'd pull and eventually it would go limp. And and down in South America, I saw these guys, they they got this big uh they had set a net and they got this big um giant river turtle in it. And they uh took a they they whittled a big long stick. Have you ever heard of the fish processing technique called Ikejime? No. So.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  It's you you'll you'll catch a fish and brain it and then they cut it by its tail and crack its tail. So you're got you get an entry point into its spinal column and they'll run a wire into it to just deaden the nervous system. Well, these guys cut this big, long skewer. And when they cut that turtle's head off, they ran that skewer into the right into the backbone and shove that skewer down in that thing and that turtle just

• 15:28Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  I mean melted and then it cooked it right in its shell.

• 15:33Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  And with something like that, I'm like, that's something I could wish I would have known about a long time.

• 15:39Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  That's something I wish I would have known about a long time ago. So there is stuff like that, but a lot of it's like, it's not transferable. It's just cool to see it. It's cool to witness it.

• 15:46Shawn Ryan?

  Just cool to understand how they do it and.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, like as a writer, it's cool to know it.

• 15:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  You know, because I'll write about that stuff.

• 15:52Shawn Ryan?

  How do you deal? I mean, I could imagine that with the dog thing, you got a ton of ton of hate mail. I mean, I could see that happening. I

• 15:59Speaker 03

  You know, I remember seeing some, but surprisingly not.

• 16:03Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:05Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's good.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  I've had a little bit of that from I always shocked at how little of how little of that I've got. I've had I've had to have the FBI look into a guy one time. Um, but they like scared the hell out of them, you know, and never heard from them again.

• 16:21Shawn Ryan?

  Good deal.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  They went to his trash. He was eating pepperoni pizza. I'm like, he's not even a vegetarian, dude. They're like, no, he ordered a pepperoni pizza.

• 16:29Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:31Shawn Ryan?

  What a hypocrite. I'm surprised you don't get more pushback. I've taught I've had a couple of guy. Actually, I had Bob Parsons on, do you know? He was the CEO of Go Daddy and he had a

• 16:39Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 16:40Shawn Ryan?

  Thing and um, he had an incident, he got a but I mean, I don't think people realize, you know, they did how uh, whatever, how good we have and how sheltered we are here in America. I mean, you go to the fucking grocery store and get everything you need, but

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:54Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you're talking about on the jungles of Vietnam and Bolivia and it's like, dude, this isn't like pleasure or hobby for these people.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 17:01Shawn Ryan?

  This is this is this is their occupation.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:05Shawn Ryan?

  And how they feed the villages.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Legitimate subsistence.

• 17:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Legitimate subsistence.

• 17:10Shawn Ryan?

  I think.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  On the on the issue of like hearing from just to wrap that up, like on the issue of getting being a hunter out in the public eye and getting harassed by animal rights extremists is like, there's nothing.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  There's nothing they can take from me.

• 17:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Do you know what I mean? It's like what they do is what what a better target is someone that you can harm some aspect of their occupation. Let's say you're an actor, you know, you're an actor and you're like a closeted hunter and actor and there are some. Cause they're like, well, I'll be rejected in Hollywood if people know that I do this, but

• 17:48Speaker 03

  there's, you know, there's like, there's no repercussion for me. It's like, no shit, you know?

• 17:53Speaker 03

  It's like, I'm not gonna be like, damn it, I've been outed.

• 17:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, hey, before we get into the interview here, I got a couple of things to crank out. So.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Please.

• 18:03Shawn Ryan?

  First one being, we got a Patreon account. We've turned it into quite the community. They've been here for a long time, a lot of them. And um, so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. So this is from Justin Larson.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Justin, okay.

• 18:23Shawn Ryan?

  Steven, given your expertise as a hunter, conservationalist, and advocate for ethical outdoor practices. Do you believe that with the right advocate, we could implement mandatory hunter safety courses in schools to promote responsible gun handling? And teach sustainable food harvesting from the land?

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Mandatory?

• 18:48Speaker 03

  I don't know, cause like driver's ed isn't even mandatory.

• 18:51Shawn Ryan?

  That's a good point.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I, I like it. Um, it's nice to have it be available. When I was a kid, we took it at school. You, you, you would take it in the, you could go to the school and take it, but it was a weekend long thing.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  How, how long can people go on about this? Cause I'll try to be quick about the issue. If there's, if there's been a trend in hunting regulation structure, a surprising trend is that, but then that states have tended to over the years lower.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Barrier to entry. Okay. When I was growing up in Michigan, you couldn't hunt at all until you took hunter safety. You couldn't hunt with a firearm till you were 14. Like, we did not pay attention to that rule. Like, my dad was, uh, not interested in that rule. Uh, you could be, you had to be 12 to hunt with a bow. You couldn't hunt with a bow until you took Hunter's Ed. Now, they leave it up to a family to decide when a kid can hunt, and they make it that you can hunt for a number of years with a mentor who's within arm's reach before you need to go and

• 20:03Speaker 03

  take your Hunter's Ed. I generally support, not generally, I support that, that, that deregulation. Yeah. There to make it easier for people to participate out in the woods with their little kids. I live in the state of Montana. Um, I think Montana's got it just about right. A 10-year-old can hunt with their parent or a person designated to, to mentor them. They can start at 10. They can hunt two years and then they're obligated to take Hunter's Safety. Gotcha. So, you can, so when my kids turn 10, I hunt with them, I'm their mentor, they're right here

• 20:45Speaker 03

  with me. Like, they don't do, unless I say do it, they don't do it. They're right there. But we can do two years. They can get hooked or not, and then go down the path of doing the Hunter's Safety. And it's, it's like, it's, it's a great program. It was too strict. It was too strict and too big brother, I felt, when I was a kid. So, I like these, I like these moves to leave it up to a family to figure out when it's appropriate for their kid to get rolling. Yeah, that sounds good. That sounds, I mean, is that, is that when you started your kids? Is that 10? Yeah, well, I would bring them out with me and they could hunt pine squirrels and whatever else, but they, their first, so, my 10, I got a boy turning 10 now. In a couple of weekends,

• 21:28Speaker 03

  we have our, in, in our state, we have our youth waterfowl season. So that'll be, well, no, because he was able to hunt turkeys in the spring. This will be his first duck hunt coming up.

• 21:38Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, right on.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  So we have a two day youth waterfall season. It'll be his first duck hunt. We have a, we have a youth deer season. It'll be his first deer hunt. And that's what I do with my other two kids, too. And they all love it. Yeah. And it's nice to be able to get them going and not have to jump through all these legal hurdles to take them out and set them right next to you.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards, all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com/protectionterms.

• 22:54Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I'll bet your kids are dying to get out there with you.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, yeah, they, I've been lucky in that way, man. I've been lucky in that way. I remember having kids and someone saying, like, what if your kids don't like to hunt as much as you do? And I'm like, not many people do.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  But I've, I've been lucky because they dig it, you know? They, they, it's, it's fun. I don't know that they always will, but they'll always carry it with them. You know, they'll always carry like, I like them to be a little bit, you know, it's good that they're a little bit gritty. You know what I mean? Yeah, I like them to have that. Even if my daughter, whatever, if she grows up and doesn't go near it, she'll carry some things from those experiences with her, you know?

• 23:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's cool. I think kids definitely need more grit.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 23:37Shawn Ryan?

  It's, I think it's, at least from my perspective, it's very apparent.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I love it. Yeah, I like it. The thing I always tell people, like, if I, if I, like, a measure of sort of a way, this kind of like very arbitrary, individual way of kind of measuring, like, where your kids are at, like, if I hold, if I got something in my hand, you know, and I hold it out. Like, my kid would be like, they're not, they don't, they don't go like, what is it? Do you know, or if I'm like, no, try to eat that, eat that, take a bite of that, eat that. They'll be like, okay. Damn. And I just like, I like deliberately try to like, get that feeling on like, if I hold, if I got a snake, I'm like, no, he's cool. He won't get you. They're gonna take it. Wow. You know, or whatever, if they see something, like they see a mouse run along, like their instinct is to grab it.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Nice. Is hunting on to the decline? Man, depends on how you, depends on how and when you measure it. So it's remained remarkably in, in, in not percentage, but this is this kind of weird deal. Not in percentage, but in actual numbers, it's remained remarkably consistent. Oh, really? Well, since the end of World War Two, like World War Two kind of gave us the modern day outdoorsman. Um, and my dad was a product of that, like my dad came home from the war. There, there was even a editor at Outdoor Magazine at the time and made some comment that like, how can you train an entire generation of men to shoot in camp? And not expect them to hunt.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  And my dad grew up, he was raised by Italian immigrants. He was raised by his grandparents, South Side of Chicago. Um, came home from the war and got into it, man, like started bow hunting in the fifties. Started, uh, you know, deer hunting, he just got into it. He, he wanted to be outside. He said, everybody was stir crazy, no one to be held tight. He told me stories of like being lined up hunting rabbits and someone had shoot and everybody had hit the ground. Wow. It was like that fresh, you know, but he was just, that's just what he wanted to do. And that kind of gave us, and there was other things that were happening culturally as you had, people had automobiles. So people that could, that would live in urban suburban areas had a way to get somewhere. Freezers were becoming a thing.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  So you got away, like if you killed a deer, like picture, and normally like if you killed a deer, you know, you had to either be really good, knew how to dry it into jerky and want to eat that. But with the freezer came this idea that you could go and hunt geese, dogs, deer, whatever, and, and bring it home and freeze it. And then have, and then be able to periodically throughout the year, eat fresh food. And so it birthed the American outdoorsman. And since those post-war years, the number of hunters has remained remarkably static. But obviously, it's declined hugely in terms of, I mean, our population, you know, doubled, tripled, quadrupled, or whatever the hell since then, I'm not sure, had has to have tripled.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  So the percentages have dropped. You look in California, so California, New Jersey, it's less than 1%.

• 26:40Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Less than 1% of the population.

• 26:44Shawn Ryan?

  New Jersey doesn't surprise me.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  California, 1% of the population buys a hunting license. Fishing participation is different, but just speaking about hunting, other states are pretty robust. There was a huge spike during COVID, you know, behaviors change. So hunters are kind of hard to count. Right? Like, like if I go and if I go and buy a license in, if I buy a license in my home state of Montana, and we have a little fish shack in Alaska, if I buy a license in Alaska, I just got counted twice. I'm on the, I'm on the list.

• 27:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  In two places. The one thing that's really easy to count is if you want to hunt migratory waterfowl, you have to buy a federal duck stamp. People could go buy that duck stamp for no reason, or just collectors, whatever, but by and large, you can look at like how many federal duck stamps were sold.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  How many guys hunted ducks because they have to buy this federal stamp? And, you know, they'll sell a million of those stamps. Meanwhile, you know, 13, 14 million people will hunt deer. Deer is the most hunted thing. Mourning doves are the most harvested.

• 27:52Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Animal.

• 27:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I was having a, I'm not a big hunter, but when I took my first deer last, last season, it was a little guy. I was excited, but he was like, don't ever post that.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  It was too little?

• 28:06Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, is there a size?

• 28:07Speaker 03

  Male or female?

• 28:08Shawn Ryan?

  It was a male.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  How do the anglers?

• 28:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Dude, come on.

• 28:11Shawn Ryan?

  They were little. He was like, don't post it.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  That's.

• 28:14Shawn Ryan?

  I was like, why not? It's my first one.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  I wanted to cherish your friend, but he's giving you bad advice, dude.

• 28:19Shawn Ryan?

  But, um.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  You like, if you were happy.

• 28:22Shawn Ryan?

  I was ecstatic. You know, I was like.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Come on.

• 28:25Shawn Ryan?

  I thought it was awesome. But anyways, we were having a conversation and he was like, yeah, he's like hunting is, uh, hunting's on the decline ever since, and you know, this could be hearsay, I don't know. But he was like, ever since, you know, smartphones came out, he's like, it's getting harder and harder and harder to get kids out into the wild. And he's like, and now we're seeing this overabundance of deer and all this other game. And I was like, oh, shit. Makes, makes sense. I was just curious what your thoughts were.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, you know, like suburban deer and stuff. I mean, it, it's a very complex issue. It's not just a lack of people willing to hunt them. Like anyone out there, if you got a bunch of deer, you, you have 10 acres, 20 acres, a hundred acres, and you got a bunch of deer bugging you, and you put a sign up, says hunters, please inquire, the day's not going to be through and you're going to have someone banging on your door. They're like, you don't meet, you don't meet hunters who will tell you like, I can't even scratch the surface of all the properties I got to hunt. They're dying to hunt. People are dying to hunt. The, the suburban deer problem is, is, is self-made. It's not because there's no interest.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  It's because people are, people are intolerant of it. They don't want like hillbillies and rednecks running around their place.

• 29:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  That's what, that's what that's about.

• 29:44Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  And for some people in some, and for some people in some suburban areas, they would rather, they would rather entertain ideas such as like providing, uh, contraception to deer, hiring, um, hiring taxpayer-funded sharpshooters to shoot deer. They would rather do all that than let some hillbilly on their place.

• 30:07Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  That is the suburban.

• 30:09Shawn Ryan?

  contraceptives?

• 30:10Speaker 03

  That is the deer problem.

• 30:11Shawn Ryan?

  What is, what, what?

• 30:13Speaker 03

  They can treat them with contraceptives.

• 30:16Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Yes, tried it. Yeah, they they somehow like they do with the wild horses. You familiar with the whole wild horse? Problem?

• 30:22Shawn Ryan?

  No, I didn't know there was a problem.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  There's like, you know, the wild horse in burrow. In in the arid west, there's these feral populations of wild horses and for a while they were you could come out of you could commodify them. And so they passed this thing called the Wild Horse and Borough Protection Act, which is a huge mistake. And now we have like now we lose all kinds of wildlife habitat. We lose desert bighorn habitat, mule deer habitat to competition with feral horses, just like horses running around. They're not a native animal. And so there's even legislation up right now to like up the amount of contraception. Darting mares with contraceptives.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  To try to slow the population is something they're always toying with with deer. It's more palatable than some dude killing it and eating it.

• 31:11Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  It's just it's it's lunacy. So like the the suburban deer problem, I'm like, it's a problem because we've decided to let it be a problem. It would very quickly not be a problem.

• 31:21Shawn Ryan?

  Have you heard about this? Shit, I can't remember his name. This guy in Hawaii. I guess there's all these deer that are just like.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Axis.

• 31:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, they're just like taking over everything.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:34Shawn Ryan?

  And I think he shoots them on nods and it's her take as many as you can get. Have you done anything like that?

• 31:40Speaker 03

  I've hunted Axis deer in Hawaii long ago, but I haven't done any of the sort of like eradication stuff that they got going on.

• 31:46Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  You know?

• 31:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we're thinking about bringing him on, but I just I just haven't gotten around to it yet. But anyways. Yeah. So a couple more things. Everybody gets a gift.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:58Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 32:02Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance League gummy bears legal in all 50 states.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Oh, legal in all 50 states. That's my first question.

• 32:07Shawn Ryan?

  There's no, no funny business in there.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 32:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's not a vice.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 32:13Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Well, I would have found a home for him.

• 32:16Shawn Ryan?

  Made up in Michigan. And then I got you got you something else.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  That's great. Appreciate that.

• 32:22Shawn Ryan?

  That is, are you familiar with USCCA?

• 32:25Speaker 03

  No, I'm not.

• 32:26Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Should I be?

• 32:27Shawn Ryan?

  Are you a concealed weapons guy?

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Well, I have open, I live in an open carry state, but the other day I was doing an FFL transfer on a pistol and she suggested to me that I should get concealed, even though I don't need it because I don't need to do FFL transfer.

• 32:41Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:42Shawn Ryan?

  That's cool.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, my old man had a, in Michigan, my old man had his concealed, but yeah, we're open carry.

• 32:49Shawn Ryan?

  So basically what USCCA does is they are, it's kind of like a, um, so if you have to act in self-defense, you know, it's going to be an entire disaster of a legal process.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:01Shawn Ryan?

  And so what they do is, uh, they provide you the attorneys and

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 33:06Shawn Ryan?

  All of that stuff. So it's, it's an insurance policy for concealed carriers in case, you know, in case something goes, goes bad or you have to defend yourself or your family. And so they'll jump in, they'll provide you with the attorneys if you want them, they'll provide you with all the advice and they cover all of the, all the legal fees up to a certain amount of camera board it is, but.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I'll eat some, I'll eat some gummies and I'll read up.

• 33:29Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 33:30Shawn Ryan?

  So that's a lifelong membership to that.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 33:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Oh, sweet dude. Thank you. Appreciate it, man.

• 33:35Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, all right. So I love doing life stories. Where'd you grow up?

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Where I grew up, I grew up in Western Michigan, Meskeen County, Michigan, pretty close, about eight miles from Lake Michigan. Yeah.

• 33:49Shawn Ryan?

  How into hunting were you?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Sorry?

• 33:51Shawn Ryan?

  Did you grow up hunting?

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. My dad was a big hunter. We were brought up in it. Um, we did a lot of normal stuff. Everybody does, you know, um, but I grew up on a lake and, uh, had a lot of fishing and hunting opportunities around. My dad had been, like I said earlier, he was a big hunter. He was, he was into archery hunting very early. You know, there was a sort of like, Obviously, people used to archery hunt before the advent, you know, before the introduction of the firearm. And then archery hunting took a long vacation. And then started, you know, people started toying with bows again in the twenties and thirties and, um, and, and my dad was bow hunting even before some states were even having archery seasons. So I was brought up around archery hunting. We hunted ducks, we hunted squirrels.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Uh, we'd hunt mostly within prob- definitely most of our, the vast majority of our hunting was in ten mile, ten mile radius. Um, we had a lake and so I grew up fishing in the lake, grew up trapping muskrats, got real into fur trap when I was a kid. Um, but yeah, I was just totally immersed. It was never like a thing that you, I, I, it was never a thing you decided to do. It was just around. It was, I, I, to kind of give you a sense of like what that, what the community was like or how it was perceived is I remember, I would wake up, I remember waking up in the morning and hoping to look out my window in the dark, hoping to see those raining and blowing so that we didn't have to go hunting. And I remember feeling real guilty for feeling that way.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  I feel like, I hope it's real windy, so I don't gotta get up. I'm like, man, I shouldn't feel that way. That's terrible. Yeah, it was, it was just, it was just baked in, man. It was baked in. Everybody around there hunted. I got a friend who's an outdoor writer, Pat Dirk, and he was talking about Wisconsin, right across the lake from us, you know, very similar. And he said, if you're not a, in this community, he said, you're not a deer hunter, you sleep with one. And, um, it was just, it was just a thing. People just did it, you know? People did it. Everybody did it. Not the women.

• 35:51Shawn Ryan?

  Would you like doing more, fishing or hunting?

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Hunting.

• 35:55Shawn Ryan?

  Would you like more firearms or archery?

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Firearms.

• 35:59Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:01Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you like firearms?

• 36:02Speaker 03

  I like them. I hunt bow when it's bow season.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  The real serious archers, like the way you measure a real serious archer is a real serious archer is bow hunting during gun season. Right? I bow hunt as a way to extend my hunting opportunities. Gotcha. A real archer, like a real bow hunter, even when they could use a firearm, they're like, nope. Like, when I see that, I'm like, that's a bow hunter, dude. Right on, man. You know, and I'm like, I'm like, I use it to extend my seasons. Right on. Yeah. I bow hunt when I can, but the minute I can grab my gun, I grab my gun. Is it that much more challenging? It's just different, man. It's, it's too hard to say.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Okay, I would say this, if you're bow hunting during firearm season, hell, yeah, way more challenging, but there's some great archery opportunities where, and no one is able, is able to be out with a gun. So then, um, I can't say it's more challenging because it's like giving you an opportunity and, and a behavior set and wildlife that you're not going to see during firearm season. Like deer know, let, let's just take something like whitetail deer, like which are, they're all over here, they're all over everywhere. Um, people hunt whitetail deer in forty some states. Um, they know, like when general firearm season opens, they know the day before firearm season opens, like unusual activity, whatever, and they go into lockdown mode. Um, oftentimes, right?

• 37:30Speaker 03

  In high pressure areas, so their habits just change. So if you're hunting them a week before that with a bow, I can't tell you that it's more challenging because you're hunting deer that are acting more like deer. Right? They're out and about. But if you were just, if you were a purist, you're a purist and you're like, even when gun opens, I'm out with my bow and I got plenty of friends that do it. Yeah. Way more challenging. I mean, the difference between, I see a deer at, you know, I, I catch a deer crossing something at 200 yards and it's just like, he's mine. For him, it's gotta be thirty-five, forty. It's gotta be that close?

• 38:08Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, depends. I got, I got one very serious bow hunter buddy. I was having this conversation the other day, like lifelong bow hunter, the kind of guy that's gonna hunt with a bow even during gun season. And instead of his range going out, out, out, like the, the better the gear gets, everything, uh, he was telling me just the other night, a guy named, uh, whitetail hunter named Mark Canyon was telling me, he's like, from now on, I don't know how it's true, he'll stay. He says, from now on, I don't shoot more than thirty yards. Why? Too much margin for error. They got too much time to react. You know, they got too much time to react. They're, they're already doing something. Makes sense. And the time it, from that, the minute that, like, that bow makes a noise,

• 38:50Speaker 03

  he's already responding. Gotcha. And you'll see people, there's a term people use called jumping this, like jumping the string or ducking the arrow. Where if you look in slow motion, there's an arrow coming toward a deer and it looks like he, it, it looks like he ducked it. Cause he, he like scrunches and the arrow pssst over his back. What he's actually doing is he's loading up to spring. So he hears it. They're so fast. You can't even comprehend how fast they are. They're so fast. He's already down, loading up to pshhh, take off. And so that's why it gets really tricky at certain, especially with fast animals. Like elk aren't nearly as fast. But a whitetail deer, you know, who's most famous, I've never killed one with a bow, but the most famous string jumping

• 39:37Speaker 03

  thing is the Axis deer. No kidding? That's, that's, that's what very like credentialed friends of mine have said, that Axis deer, you know, they'll point out, maybe this is a thing that had in its native range, coexisted with tigers. Right? They're like, you, you think about releasing that string and that deer is already loading up, you know? Damn. That's their reputation is their, their way ahead. You can't comprehend time, but think about like, you picture that there's a fly sitting here. You know, and you're like, and he's already gone. You, you, you think you're going fast and the fly's head, you're going like this.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  How he perceives time?

• 40:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  He's like, yeah, I should probably get out of the way of that thing.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  At some point, I should probably move.

• 40:25Shawn Ryan?

  If you, uh, I got it. I'm sorry. I just got a bunch of random questions.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Oh, no, please.

• 40:29Shawn Ryan?

  But have you ever done, we're going into fishing.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 40:33Shawn Ryan?

  Have you ever done anything in Brazil or maybe Peru on the Amazon? Have you ever done an Amazon fishing?

• 40:39Speaker 03

  I fished in the, the extreme headwaters of the Amazon and Bolivia and stuff that will eventually flows into the Amazon. Yeah. But it would be like tribute, headwater tributary stuff. Yeah. But never the Amazon proper.

• 40:52Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  And I fished over a drainage divide into rivers that would like on ridge lines that would, one side would go to the Amazon, but the other side flows into the Caribbean. I've fished that stuff, but never, I've never been like on an Amazon river trip, though I would like to.

• 41:06Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I've been dying to do that.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  For peacock bass and stuff.

• 41:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, for whatever. Arapaima.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 41:12Shawn Ryan?

  Have you got one of those?

• 41:13Speaker 03

  I've seen, I've, I've laid eyes on Arapaima. And when I was talking about those guys in Guyana that like, they used to bow hunt Arapaima for the commercial markets and I've caught Aruwana, which is like a small, much, much smaller version of arrow, much, much smaller version of Arapaima. And I've observed Arapaima, but I've never even taken a cast at Arapaima.

• 41:37Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's cool. I'd love to do that.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, I've, I've never done it, but it's, it'd be sweet. You know, you see those pictures of them. I think what is the largest freshwater scaled fish?

• 41:46Shawn Ryan?

  That's the wormer.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  That seems like you're adding a lot of like things. Cause it can't be the largest fish, which is the whale shark. So you gotta be like the largest freshwater scaled fish.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Cause in the Mekong Delta, there's a catfish that's bigger than an Arapaima.

• 42:02Shawn Ryan?

  No shit. Have you gotten any of those?

• 42:05Speaker 03

  No, I've caught some big ass weird catfish, but not that kind of catfish. No.

• 42:09Shawn Ryan?

  Run on, man. Yeah, that's something I would love to do. I would love to get into hunting too. The, the, uh, it's just, you know, business gets in the way of just about everything.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. You got little kids though now?

• 42:20Shawn Ryan?

  Well, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, warming my son up to fishing.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:25Shawn Ryan?

  We've been, we've been at it for almost a year now. He's come a long ways.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:29Shawn Ryan?

  Now he's casting. He can do pretty much everything, but put the worm on the hook and take the fish up.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm glad you let him fish worms.

• 42:35Shawn Ryan?

  Poking their eyes and shit. It's hilarious.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. I had such a good time the other day. I was with my little daughter and we went out and. Shouldn't call her little anymore. She's 12, but I took her out. We caught grasshoppers. Um, I have this little grasshopper container that once belonged to my dad and we caught grasshoppers and put them in there and then went down to the creek and this is the area we're not allowed to kill cutthroats, but we pinch the barb and hook grasshoppers and just send them down the river.

• 43:04Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  Watch those fish come out and grab them. It was fun, man. Like I said, they'll, she'll carry that stuff with her, you know?

• 43:09Shawn Ryan?

  That's cool, man. That's cool.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:12Shawn Ryan?

  Well, actually one more. Where is your favorite place to hunt?

• 43:17Speaker 03

  I mean, I like hunting all over the place. I, I really have a lot of, um, I've had a lot of fun opportunities to, to hunt up in Alaska. I have a brother that's, that has been there for a long time. Um, and so when he moved up, I started hanging out up there as well. I really enjoy, uh, being out in Alaska. Between different kind of things I'll do, I spend maybe a month every year up doing different stuff there. We have a little, uh, we have a little fish shack in Alaska that I bought 20 years ago. With some, with my two, two of my siblings and a buddy of ours. Um, we just bought it on a whim at 20 grand apiece.

• 43:55Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Smartest thing I ever did.

• 43:57Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Um, and we fish up there and, and, uh, do some hunting up there. So yeah, I, I, I like that. Not to, I mean, I, I love where I live. I live in Montana. We have a great time there, but I really appreciate, um, I, all my, some of my best experiences are up, are up in the far north. Yeah. Up in Alaska.

• 44:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's beautiful up there. Do you, do you like the adventure of getting into new ecosystems, new environments to hunt in? Yeah, I'll bet.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  I just, I spent a month in, um, after toying with the ID and toying with it and toying with it for decades. I spent a month in Africa this year.

• 44:35Shawn Ryan?

  How was it?

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Just life-changing, life-changing. Went to Tanzania. I met these dudes, this, this guy, um, I got a professional hunter named Morgan Potter. He works for this place, Robin Hert Safaris, and I met, um, Roger Hert. A kid of the founder, you know, he got tore up by Kate Buffalo. So he'd come to the US for for some medical care. And this other professional hunter married a woman. Morgan Potter married a woman, they live, so even though he spends half his year in Tanzania, he spends half his year by me. And so we just got to hanging out and I had him come on my podcast, just talk about their life and the kind of hunting they do.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  And once I knew, once I had some people I really trusted to go. Um, I went and it changed, I mean, like life changing experience. I kept telling people I was there so long I had to cut my fingernails twice.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  It was, it was, it was dude, it was just.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  I mean utterly life changing. Yeah, just the stuff I saw, other ways to live, you know. Um, I was blown away, man, I'll be talking about that the rest of my life.

• 45:50Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, I mean, when you go on these remote trips like this, are you embedded with indigenous people? You get to see how they live.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:58Shawn Ryan?

  What they.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, got to hang out with the trackers, you know, and the way these guys. The way these guys work is we were out. Just to give you some, I mean, you know, obviously, I mean, you know, you've been all over the world. I mean, it's a huge continent, right? Like it's. The different ways that that not only different ways people live, the different climates and all that. There's very different ways in which wildlife is managed in Africa. Um, Tanzania has a very progressive view on wildlife management. Um, we were on it, we were on a area. That's we were on a hunting area that's the size of Yellowstone National Park. It's a two million acre dam game concession.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  There are human activities occurring, it's not a peopleless environment, like there's guys that have permits to commercially fish there. There's guys that do commercial honey harvest in there, but it's like. The, the government has said that this two million acres doesn't get developed and they, they make money off it. They're able to make money off it by allowing hunting to occur on the place. Um, and so we're out in this like two million acre thing, we're, we're the only people around, we would, we would some days do a hundred miles. You know, 100 miles of pickups. I'm just, I'm just trails these guys hack out through the woods, you know, and you see just crazy stuff. But yeah, there's guys out on the landscape, you know, you'd run into, the honey season was just finishing up. So there's guys out

• 47:21Speaker 03

  doing honey. But we were with trackers in this part of Tanzania, in, in, in, in eastern Tanzania, I had, was spent some time in Masai land, which is the Masai tribe, where we were was, was like Bantu peoples. But we were with trackers that, and the trackers they use are by and large, poachers that they caught. So they'll catch poachers. And if they're young and ambitious and good, they'll be like, listen, you know, you should come see us. So the two trackers that I was hanging out with were both people that were brought up as poachers. They were

• 48:02Speaker 03

  in the bushmeat trade, snaring and hunting with homemade guns and poise and arrows. Wow. In order to sell bushmeat. And these dudes are now trackers. And, um, yeah, it's, it's unbelievable. I said to our guy one time, the professional hunter, in some ways, in some ways acts as a liaison between you and the trackers, you know, like they, the trackers hold a lot of, carry a lot of weight. Like their opinion matters immensely. Mm hmm. Right? And you're there, you don't know shit. And the professional hunter is kind of like, he's the, he's meant to be like, he understands you, like the white dude, and what you're hoping to accomplish. And he understands the trackers and what they

• 48:47Speaker 03

  know. And he's aligning, he's aligning everyone's interests. And he's also in charge, you know, I mean, like, he's there to keep you from getting killed. But at one point, we're going along, and I would now and then make, I would now and then be like, you have to, like, when they're looking at the ground, I'm like, come on, like, what are they, what are they seeing? And when I would do it, they would be like, okay, if you really need to know, one went, one walked, one Cape buffalo walked right there, one walked right there, one walked right there, one walked right there. If you look at that piece of grass, you see how it stepped on it, look how it looks now. That shit has about an eighth of an inch of dryness on it. It wasn't, it wasn't laying there yesterday. It wasn't laying there that night. It was laying there this morning, and they're probably bedded down over that way. Wow. And she's like, okay.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  But at one point I said to this guy, I've told people this bunch of times, I said to the tracker, or to the, to Morgan, the professional hunter, I said, man, I don't see what they're seeing. You know, we're going through a burned area and we're trailing something. I'm like, I don't, I don't see it. I was incredulous. And he turned to me and he said, he said, um, that's the point. You can't see what they see. And he's gotten to the point where he's totally fine with that.

• 49:56Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  He just, he's like, he's fine with it. If they say it's there, he's like, okay.

• 50:00Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  If they say it's there, it's there. When they say it's not there anymore, it's not there anymore.

• 50:06Shawn Ryan?

  I think that stuff's fascinating, man. Just a, just a, I mean,

• 50:12Shawn Ryan?

  yeah, I've been all over the world hunting different stuff, but, uh, but through my career, but just seeing like, it sounds weird, but man, like I love being in thoroughbred countries and seeing, you know, how people live and survive and what they like to do and all that stuff and, and, and it's just fascinating to me. See, see how they live in Haiti or Yemen or Afghanistan, Iraq, all of South America. I mean, it's just, it's just fascinating to me. And it, it also gives you an appreciation for how fucking easy it is here in the U S.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  You have the added thing in your life, though, you've seen a lot of places where it's like, there's poverty, but it's overlaid with conflict.

• 50:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  I've seen poverty, but I haven't seen it overlaid with conflict.

• 51:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  And so that's a, that's a, what you're seeing is a very different version of poverty than, than peaceful poverty. Peaceful poverty is one thing, but wartime poverty is different.

• 51:17Shawn Ryan?

  I've seen peaceful poverty too. I, South America was all on my own accord.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:23Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, you know, you know, what's interesting is how, at least from my perspective, not, not necessarily in, where conflict is, but to see how happy. People are, especially in South America, living in a grass hut.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:40Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? Or a mudwalled hut. And it's, it's like, dude, they're just happy people. You know, you go around America, so everybody's bitching about.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:50Shawn Ryan?

  Who knows what? Politic, usually politics, but you know what I mean? It's, it's, it's, it's, we have so much here, and yet, we are so pissed at each other and so tribalized. And it's, it's, it's, and then you go down there and it's, they're just, they're not even making ends made.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:10Shawn Ryan?

  They have such a positive attitude. I think that's cool.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  I was telling someone about this the other day on, on my show, and I'll, I'll give it to you to, to think about for a minute, too. Is, uh, I took this class in college called political rhetoric. Um, and we read, you know, Dr. King, um, this, the Camille Paglia. One of the things we read was the Unabomber's manifesto. You ever read the Unabomber's manifesto?

• 52:38Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen, snacks, a stapler?

• 53:21Speaker 01

  The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards, all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com/protectionterms.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100 degree weather, or too much sun. Gator Light, with a specialized blend of five electrolytes, was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator Light: Hydrates Faster Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Okay, there's, there's, there's a, without in any way seeming like I'm endorsing, I'm not, I'm saying there's a point he raises in his manifesto. If you can get you through it, it's very difficult to get through. But there's this point he raised, which has always stuck in my head since I was in college, is he talks about, there's these different, there's this way he sets out difficulty of task. Okay? And when he's laying out difficulty of task, he stages them like one through five. I can't remember if it's escalating or de-escalating, but the easiest difficulty of task, or the most difficult task, is something where if you try your absolutely hardest,

• 54:52Speaker 03

  you have only a slim chance of success. Okay, let's say that's like, that's like level one. On up to, you don't even need to try at all, and you'll succeed. Okay?

• 55:07Speaker 03

  He said that humans do best at two and three.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  Like, at two and three, it's that if you try really hard, you have a reasonable chance of surviving, if you try hard. But he says, that's what was his gripe with technology. He said, "Technology has landed us at five. You don't need to try at all, and you're fine." And he says, "That's where all of our neuroses come from."

• 55:34Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Because the thing where, the thing that he argues, Kozinski argued, and again, without getting into like sending mails off, or sending bombs off in the mail and shit, it's just an interesting point, is he argues that the thing we were, that we're supposed to be trying to do really hard is like to take care of ourselves and take care of our family. But now that it's all a given, we have all this mental room.

• 55:58Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  We have all this mental room. To be spoiled and whiny and bitchy. Cause we we wake up and there's. We wake up and it's just. It's all pointless. It's all taken care of. I'm fine.

• 56:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  You know, if you don't know where your next meal is gonna come from, you probably know it's coming. Right?

• 56:15Shawn Ryan?

  It's an interesting point.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  That was that was his gripe, you know?

• 56:19Shawn Ryan?

  Kind of hard to argue that.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  And again, I always hesitate to bring up where it came from, but I I need to be intellectually honest to say where the point came from and and and going to other places and seeing other things. Demonstrates that. My two boys share a room. Which brings up all amount of bitching. You know, and the other day I'm saying to my, I'm saying to my fifteen year old, we're having the same damn conversation around dinner table, like them sharing the room. I'm like, dude, you just came from a place. They they had been out there with me for a week. And then my wife took my kids bumming around. But I'm like, you just came for a place, dude. People were sleeping and you saw it. You were there. People sleep in grass huts they made for themselves. He's like, good point.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Now that I'm done hearing about the room thing, but at least he's all of the recognize like, yeah, you're right.

• 57:05Shawn Ryan?

  That's cool. That's cool.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 57:08Shawn Ryan?

  You know, back to the Africa thing, I mean. They take that, I mean. I've had a lot of people in the talk that do big game hunting and they don't want to talk about it because they don't want the, they don't want the blowback.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:19Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and and. But friends of mine, guests that have been on here, a lot, lots of people. But, you know, from my understanding, I've never been on a hunt in Africa, but they take that shit. Very, they take conservation very seriously, from what I understand. I mean, they have, they have. Contractors, uh, careers that that hunt poachers, correct?

• 57:41Speaker 03

  Yep, yep. And and I can only, I'm anything but. Anything but a subject matter expert. I can speak to like. I can speak to where I was in Tanzania, but in Tanzania, it's a remarkably different regulatory structure than what we have. One of the things that makes. The United States of America is so progressive and so great on wildlife. Like, a way that we've achieved success with wildlife is wildlife is publicly owned. Okay. The US citizens, the citizens of a state, they own the wildlife. And then agencies represent your interests in owning the wildlife. It's democratically owned.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  In Tanzania, that's not the case. Like, the government owns the wildlife. So, there's poverty there.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  What they, how they can, how they can protect habitat is by declaring these areas, hunt areas. And they put a fee to the animals. And they hold a bid process. There's a bid process where a hunting organization needs to go to the government and these contracts were new. I can't remember, I think it's maybe their contract's good for 10 years. You come in and you're like, we will pay you Tanzania blank dollars to have access to this parcel land to hunt it. So there's revenue for them. Then they come and they have their biologist come out and do a survey of what's there. And there's like, you guys are allowed to kill whatever. I'm just gonna throw out random numbers that aren't true.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  But let's say, you know, you're allowed five Cape buffalo, you're allowed

• 59:21Speaker 03

  30 topi, whatever the hell it is. They'll come out with a list. And they'll say that you are obligated to buy 40% of that wildlife from us, the operator. Okay, so then when, when you get an animal,

• 59:37Speaker 03

  your, what they call a trophy fee, your fee just goes to Tanzania. That trophy fee does. And so they're able to draw revenue from undeveloped lands. The biggest risk they have is slash and burn agriculture. Which people, people, small farmers come in, they cook the forest, they burn it, they grow a crop. They don't have money for inputs, they don't have money for fertilizer and other things. And so when you cook the soil after a couple of rotations, what do you do? You burn the next chunk. It devours the wildlands, slash and burn ag does. But you're able to come in and stay with these areas and all of a sudden now the government's able to make money off of preserving habitat.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  There, there's a, next to the place we hunted, there's this big national park. Guess how many, like, I'm not gonna make you guess, because you never guessed the right number. There's a huge national park of equal size, almost equal size, next to this concession. Last year, that national park had 14 visitors. One for. What? It had 14 visitors. To a national park almost the size of Yellowstone National Park, 14 people went and paid a visit to that national park. Meanwhile, the hunting concessions meant money. Damn. For the government. That's interesting. So it's like, you can, and, and that's where, like, a dude, as a dude growing up in America,

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  withholding certain American ideals about wildlife management, wildlife being democratically owned, right? Trying to, trying to foresee and prevent ways in which people might commodify wildlife so it wasn't available to like, blue collar people, so opportunity, like, you grew up with this whole ethos about how to protect the, the democratization of American landscapes and American wildlife, and you're like, that's the way to do it. Um, part of travel is you go and you say, like, you realize there's other ways to skin, there's always the skin the cat, right? And they have got this other system, and you could look at it and criticize it,

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  aspects of it, it's very hard, you know, it like, it's very difficult for a citizen of Tanzania to go out and do lawful hunting. There's, there's not like an avenue for it, like, I, that's too bad, I regret it. But, it's a different place, different challenges, um, enforcement issues, poverty issues, whatever, they have found a way to preserve habitat and to preserve wildlife by assigning value to it. And right now, that is what holds the line, like, that is what holds the line to.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  Burning it.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  You know, burning it and depleting it. Um, and so it's just, it's, it's hard to condemn it. You know, I mean, and I used to sit back, I used to sit like in my pompous, you know, somewhat pompous American seat and used to be like, oh, you know, pay to play. Right. You gotta pay to play in Africa. That's not Ameri-, you know, that's not the American style. It's like, it's not the American style, but it's a way to achieve conservation in that place. Yeah. You know, and, um, and, and you also can look and be like, we've also, you know, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, um,

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  that because of deregulation, I mean, we almost ruined, we almost ruined American wildlife. Yeah, let's, let's move into the, the history of hunting. Yeah. In America. In the U S. Yeah. Um,

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  first off, it's, you know, people who hunted in the U S, I mean, there's, people debate the number, but somewhere between, there are people definitely here hunting 13, 14,000 years ago. People were maybe here hunting as much as 20,000 years ago. People that came from Siberia, passed into Alaska very quickly, you know, at some point by 13,000 years ago, it like exploded across the landscape and those were hunting cultures.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  Only later, right, like many thousands of years later, Europeans started to come. And that's kind of where I'm, I'm very interested in, in, in native hunting practices. But kind of when we get, when we look at the decimation of American wildlife, that story begins with the colonials, right, coming in. Uh, just to get a little extra detail there, there is a, there is an argument that is a, there's a very powerful argument.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  It's not settled science, but there's a very powerful argument that when humans arrived here, they wiped out, they wiped out many species of wildlife. I'm talking the first, the first Americans, Siberian immigrants, they wiped out many species of wildlife. People debate it, but to me, it's, it's like, to me, it's verging on settled science that humans had a huge, were a huge contributing factor into extinction of mammoths, mastodons, short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, a host of things, like nine genera of animals, kind of blinked out around the time humans arrived. But then they had this huge period

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  of, the historian Dan Flores calls it like Native America. They had this 10,000-year period, 10,000 years of hunting in America had, the ensuing 10,000 years of hunting in America had one extinction, a flightless bird on the Pacific coast. People hit harmony. Like, like people hit where we weren't driving shit to extinction for 10,000 years on this continent. And then boom, Europeans show up and that story shifts, right? To get into kind of like, just give you a little bit about like the first hunter, if people that are like loosely familiar with American history will recognize the name Daniel Boone, like

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  no doubt. I mean, we're kind of in Boone country right now, you know? Let's take a look at Boone for a minute. So Boone, Boone's people came from England. At the time, in England, you weren't gonna hunt, right? The king owned the deer. There was no sort of public hunting. Wildlife was jealously guarded by the elites. Hunting wasn't a thing. Boone's family comes here and all of a sudden, like, there's this rich wildlife resource out there and they pick up hunting. Like, these are people that, these are not hunters coming to America. These are very much like non-hunter. The European colonists that come over are like not, they're not showing up as hunters. They're getting here and they're learning

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  from natives, how to utilize these resources. And, and Boone is this interesting figure because he sits right at the beginning of colonial history, or he sits right at the beginning of the, you know, the American experiment. Like, he, in the years prior to the, to the American Revolution, Boone is, becomes a deer skin hunter.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  During the colonial period, Boone is also an interloper. He's a poacher in two ways. Boone is going, he's living in these settlements. First, he lives in Pennsylvania, then he's down in the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina. He's forbidden for two reasons from hunting where he hunts. The British, the colonial British, don't want American colonists who they view as like, the frontier people they view as like the worst of the worst. Hillbilly rednecks are these American colonists out on the frontier.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  Right? They question their allegiance and they don't want them crossing the Appalachian Mountains and hunting in native land. Because it causes so much trouble with the Native Americans. Like the British were somewhat friendly, were somewhat better than the Americans became at like dealing with native relations. So the British would say, you're not allowed to go over there. And then it also violated native law where the natives claim these areas. Okay, the Cherokee, the Shawnee, like they claim these areas as their hunting grounds. But these colonists like Boone realize they can make a lot of money going into the Indian territories and hunting deer skins, which they're forbidden, the British forbidden them from doing it.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  The Indians forbidden them from doing it, but that's their biz. So like Boone going through the Cumberland Gap, you know, the first time he went through the Cumberland Gap, he's looking for deer skins. And these guys have no, they have no cash economy. You raise crops, you use, a family raises crops, the family uses 90% of those crops. The only access you have to cash is you might sell a small amount of corn or whatever. But all of a sudden, they have access to a cash economy because they can kill whitetails. And we see then this thing that's, this deer hunting era, late 17, like late 1760s into the 1770s, we see this phenomenon that we're going to see again and again and again where these guys

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  like with a commodity whitetail deer, we see that they're able to like wipe places clean.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  They're able to go into an area and literally kill everything. And what do you, when that happens? Go further down the trail and literally kill everything. And from that point, we start seeing this like this, this dewilding of America from, from commodity hunting, from commercial hunting. And man, I got nothing but respect for Boone. Like I've done projects on Boone, studied Boone. Um, phenomenal, phenomenal woodsman, but that becomes the American tale. Is, uh,

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  deregulation, commodification. And all of a sudden you just realize that this inexhaustible resource we have, we just eat it. We just consume it from one end of the country to the other. Damn. You know? And, uh, you know, you've heard of Jim Bridger, like the mountain man era. I mean, they pretty much, they pretty much wiped beaver out in the Rocky Mountains. The buffalo, I just finished a project on the buffalo hide hunters. The buffalo hide hunters from the end of the civil war to 1883, they killed the last 15 million buffalo. Geez. Sold them all. Two 50 apiece, $2.50 apiece. And it's like, so when people, it's funny, cause you know, I tend to be in, in, in many aspects, I tend to be like right leaning.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  And then you hear like deregulation. And I was like, yeah, you know? In some areas, sure, but in some areas we've caused a lot of trouble. Like deregulation has caused a lot of trouble with American wildlife. Yeah. Yeah. When did we start to see a turn? Late 1800s, early 1900s, the, you know, the name that comes up often is Theodore Roosevelt was, was instrumental in this. By that point you start seeing, by that point, the, the first thing you start seeing is bans on selling wild meat in cities. Like New York, have you ever heard of the Boone and Crockett Club? No. Okay. Like Theodore Roosevelt was the first president of Boone and Crockett Club. When, when you, when people talk about, you ever hear of someone's kill a buck and they say it was a 180 inch whitetail?

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  What they're usually talking about is a scoring system developed by the, the Boone and Crockett scoring system. It's a way to measure a deer's skull or measure a deer's antler growth. Uh, Boone and Crockett Club, all these other organizations start out and they start trying to regulate harvest. And they'll come in and say, um, like in New York city, there'd be a ban on selling certain wild meats. And then they come up with a, um, they come up with a thing called the Lacey Act, which gave it some teeth where if you broke, anytime you break a state's law and cross a state line, it becomes a federal problem. Because you could have states, when they're trying to save wildlife, a state might come in and say, no more market hunting, you can't kill ducks. You know, you, you can't kill ducks with punt guns anymore and sell it, but they don't

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  enforce it. So then with the Lacey Act, it became like, if you're down and, and you're in Chesapeake Bay and you're commercially killing ducks with a punt gun, but then you take them to New York and sell them, you now have a federal violation. Gotcha. And so that is when they were really able to start curbing the market hunters. There's a great irony with calling the Boone and Crockett Club, the Boone and Crockett Club, because it takes its name from Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. The Boone and Crockett Club and people that came out of that organization, that influenced that organization was instrumental in wiping out the wildlife markets. But Daniel Boone and later Davy Crockett, they were market hunters.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  So there's a kind of irony in the name, like we associate Boone and Crockett, like Crockett was a commercial bear hunter. Um, you know, and became a congressman, but he was a commercial black bear hunter. And he also had military contracts. When there was a military campaign during the Indian Wars, Crockett would hire on to shoot meat to feed the soldiers. Interesting. That was one of Crockett's, that was one of Crockett's early occupations is like feeding a marching army. Wow. You know. Did not know that. Kill enough shit for everybody to eat, that was his job. Right on, man, right on. Yeah, he was badass too. Now, he wasn't a badass like Boone, but Crockett was a badass, you know, not like Boone, but, you know. What made Boone more badass? There's one time Boone.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  Boone went over, there's, there's one point where Boone goes into Kentucky and goes there with some guys, handful of guys, um, they run into a bunch of trouble with Indians. They get all their shit stolen. One of them gets killed. Okay. Eventually Boone's, one of Boone's hunting partners, like his brother and stuff, like they leave and go home. Boone stays by himself. Some accounts suggest that he's, he's there so long, he needs to make his own gunpowder with using wood ash, bat guano. Um, and sulfur deposits, right? Stays there two years.

• 1:13:52Shawn Ryan?

  Two years?

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Stays in the woods, two years, much of it by himself. Um, builds up a big loot, like builds up a big pile of hides, twice gets them stolen from him. Or seized, I should be a better word for it, seized by the natives. Um, and just hangs out two years. He was like, he,

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  he loved being in the woods, man. You know, Boone was a badass. And, and, and, um,

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  it, it came at a great cost. Like there, there was always these conflicts on the colonial frontier. Boone's, um, Boone was next to one of his kids. When he was killed in, in Indian fighting. Another one of Boone's sons was killed in Indian fighting. Uh, brothers, his was killed, brother-in-law was killed. Many, many, I mean, you know, many, many people in his family all like, gave their lives, I should, that's the right word. Made enormous sacrifices to live that lifestyle, very dangerous lifestyle at that time. Cause there was active warfare.

• 1:14:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  In the colonial areas and, uh, yeah, and, and Boone, I mean, he just was hooked. He couldn't picture living another way.

• 1:15:05Shawn Ryan?

  You know, talking about Theodore Roosevelt, I mean, he's the one that put all the national parks in place, correct?

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, a, a number of things. They weren't called national forests then, but he was designated in these like forest preserves. It was instrumental in the national park program too. So like the public estate in, in many ways comes from, uh, Roosevelt. There's a famous story with Roosevelt where he had authority to declare these, he had authority to declare. These wilderness preserves, whatever nomenclature they use at the time, he had authority to do it. He was losing that authority while he was in office. There was legislation, like he was going too crazy, they felt, declaring all these, what would become our national forest system. And there's legislation arising that's going to strip him of the authority to unilaterally create national forests.

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  Support for this legislation is so strong that he knows he can't veto it because his veto will get overridden. So he creates this another huge pile of national forests. They call it the midnight forests. Because his ability to make forest preserves was going to expire at midnight. So in a flurry, he like sits up with his team and they just start making national forests. And then turns around the next day and has to sign legislation saying he won't do it anymore. And those are known as the midnight forests that he created. Who was right? I mean, he was hugely controversial at the time. That's the thing people forget about, like, like all politicians would want to be favorably compared to Roosevelt now.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  Like any, any politician is going to take, if someone says he's like a Theodore Roosevelt when it comes to conservation, they're going to be like, "Thank you." That dude was controversial at the time. And who was right? They carved him into Rushmore, right? As the preservation guy.

• 1:16:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  So, um, he was right, you know, and it was not popular at the time. That's the thing people lose sight of is like what he did at the time was, um, some people supported, but a lot of people hated him for it. And then now we recognize that it was a stroke. It was genius. It was genius.

• 1:17:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, what do you, you know, we just had that public, uh, public land sale, you know, almost go through and the big beautiful bill and I was way late to the game on that. I didn't, I saw a tweet uh, from Jaco saying, pay attention to this guy, this guy Braxton McCoy. Do you guys know each other?

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  No, I know of him now for sure, but I have never personally met him yet.

• 1:17:37Shawn Ryan?

  But great guy, amazing story too. But, um, but anyways, I saw a tweet that, uh, he had thrown out through Jaco and I was like, hey, I'll be in touch. Brought him on, he kinda told me what was going on and we, and uh, we released a preview, got pulled that night. But um, I was curious, I mean, I know you were a big player in that and, and uh, you and Cameron Haynes and a couple of other people I follow were, you know, screaming at the top of your lungs like, this, this isn't a good idea.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Shawn Ryan?

  And um, and so I, I, you know, I just wound up jumping in last minute, cause it was like, this, this doesn't seem right.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:18:16Shawn Ryan?

  Are they selling this land?

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  Glad you did, yeah, I'm glad, I'm glad you didn't, everybody else that did, yeah.

• 1:18:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and uh, well, all of uh, the collaborations together got it pulled. And um, so, but I was just curious, you know, we were talking a little bit about this at breakfast. But I mean, what was your take on all of that?

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  Man, it's a, it's a thing that comes up in different, it's, it's a thing that comes up in different forms throughout the history of the country, is this question of legitimacy, the intelligence, or whatever, uh, of having large tracts of federally managed public land, it's, that, that's open to everybody. Um, maybe it's on a 10-year cycle, but my, my friend and colleague, Ryan Callahan, is, is a lifelong crusader for public lands and, and, you know, he, he and I were talking recently, and you saw about it, it's just like, it's a, it's

• 1:19:11Speaker 03

  a 10-year cycle, where uh, in, in some western states, the majority of the land is owned by the federal government, okay? Some people look at that and they're like, what an enormous gift, that, that half of the state, or more than half of the state, whatever, is open to any American who wants to go out on that land to ride ATVs in certain areas, ride bikes, camp up their kids, hunt, fish, live an outdoor lifestyle, you don't need to have money to own your own ranch, it's just there, right? It's there for us, and not only that, it's not developed and it's not industrialized. It's like, it's, it's literally, it's money

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  in the bank, and it's habitat in the bank, right? It's just there, it's an American treasure. Other people look at it and they, they look at it and they see a huge loss in revenue. Because you're not able to, you're not able to industrialize or develop that landscape. So someone, you know, you're a political figure in a state. What you want to do is you want to generate economic activity. And then you see that, um, there's these landscapes that aren't easily used. Now, to be fair, on these federally managed public lands, uh, US Forest Service land, Bureau of Land Management land, um, they do mine it. They do do alternative energy on it.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  They do oil extraction on it. The, you know, uh, what's the big, uh, festival in California? The, um, Burning Man? Burning Man. Burning Man is on BLM land. So BLM land is like. Is it really? Yes, it's on public land. I didn't know that. The Burning Man festival is on BLM land. A BLM, the BLM makes money. The BLM makes money by permitting the Burning Man to occur on their BLM property. All kinds of shit is happening on this land. Cattle grazing, right? It's, it's, it's a land, it's a multi-use landscape. But what doesn't happen is it doesn't get permanently developed. So in states, you know, Utah is a hotbed of anti-public land sentiment in, in the political, in the political delegation there.

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  A lot of it comes from Nevada where they want more land, you know, they want more land to develop. And this, this public land system, this federal land system stands in their way of having more areas to develop and more areas to produce revenue from, produce opportunities for friends and, you know, developers. And, and therein lies the, like, therein lies the rub. Um, there's some states where, like, I haven't lived in Montana and, uh, in, in Montana, there is a, like, like, it's political suicide. It's political suicide, remains political suicide in Montana to advocate for large-scale sales of, of public land. You can't do it. You can't do it there. In Utah, you can't. In Utah, you can.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  And so oftentimes, federal land sales where they're like, where they want to peel off large acreages, there's kind of like.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  In, in, I think it was 2017, there was talk of, uh, you know, three million acres. There was talk of three million acres this time of like, we're going to sell three million acres of public land. That's usually coming from a, you, the, the Utah delegation. Well, that's where it came from this time. Yeah, they spearhead it and that is, that is a hotbed. Like this, I'm not telling you like a controversial thing. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not putting like a spin on it. Um, the intellectual architects of large scale public land sales, the intellectual architects of, of that concept come from Utah. Okay. This is not spinny. It's just, that's just the, the reality. It was, it was last time around when we went through this and, and read something very similar, three million acres.

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  I think it was 2017, Jason Chaffetz, House of Representatives in Utah, had, had legislation out there which they were calling it, um, they were calling like excess public lands. They were going to sell three million acres. And when you get into three million acres, you're talking big tracts of public land. Yeah. There's a way to, there's a way to move public land. Like we have systems in place by which we can move public land. Like if you have a, whatever, there could be a military base that gets decommissioned. There's a way in which that can be sold. Um, and what these efforts usually are, are ways to ditch. It's usually like a way, how can we ditch the process and do this right now, large scale? And that's usually what happens. And, um, the last time in this time, we're identical in the response is of your, your

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  normal groups that, that the, that they, the, the effort to push came from a faction of the American right, like came from a faction of the Republican Party. Like we should move to sell public land, large tracts of public land. Um, of course they know that the, the, the, the tree hugger community, the bleeding hearts, of course they know that they'll revolt, but they, it doesn't matter to them. They don't have their support anyways. But both times what has happened is that people that they view as being their people, people that probably normally support President Trump's agenda, people that normally are like very like are right of center, they're like, no, not that idea. I don't like it. And then both times with, with Chaffetz and then this most recent thing was coming from,

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  was being pushed from Senator Mike Lee. Um, both times it seems they were quite surprised that their constituent base.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Hated the idea. They hated it all right. It was, it was, it shocked people, but I'm like, I was always really like, it should be that shocking because this is what happened last time. And the response was the same. It was like, oh, wow. All these, all these, um, we're just shocked at all these, these, these, um, Republican voters hate the idea of selling off public lands. And they'll focus in the focus because like, oh, it's only three million acres. But what people see lying there is you're kind of like, I'm afraid it's not about that. I'm afraid that at this level, we're having a discussion about the legitimacy

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  of federally managed public lands. You know, and so people, they're not, they, they tend to not be interested in the details. It's like American sportsmen, at the end of the day, American sportsmen want public lands. Yeah. And they're probably, and they're definitely intellectually capable of recognizing that it comes at some cost. But look at like what conserve, like if you look at like what conservative values and conservative means, it's like, it's not going anywhere. It's in, it's, it's our federal land, right? If we were to wind up in some national, like we're in an existential crisis as a country, and we needed to utilize some of these lands for extraction or whatever, like

• 1:25:59Speaker 03

  we were in an existential crisis, like a world war two scale crisis for resources, I think you'd have a very different reception. If you were talking about the need to industrialize some of our beloved landscapes in order to address an existential crisis. But outside of an existential crisis, it's there. It gets more valuable all the time. It does more for the environment, more for people. It's just a wonderful asset. When you sell it, you sell it one time, and you sell it at market value, and that's it. So, um, this is just a calculus that gets run and I, and I promise you in 10 years there'll be another version of it.

• 1:26:35Shawn Ryan?

  You think so?

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:26:36Shawn Ryan?

  Think they'll learn their lesson?

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  No, I think there'll be another version of it and maybe someday, public sentiment, I, I don't see public sentiment on it switching because it is a thing that galvanizes a huge group of people. I got buddies that like, they don't hunt fish, they like to ski and they don't like the smell of it. They don't like public land divestitures. It's just, it, it galvanizes people.

• 1:26:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I didn't hear anybody who wasn't in politics that was for that.

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:02Shawn Ryan?

  Not anybody.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  I, I have friends that are definitely, I have good friends and some like big hunters that are definitely that, that they look and they're like, you guys are too absolutist.

• 1:27:12Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, where does it end? We did three million acres right now. Cause that was the big thing, right? It's just three million acres. We're only gonna do it out, right outside of the cities. And it's like, great. Okay. So that's three million acres. It's gonna become industrialized, gonna come, become housing, low, low income housing.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  And the, in the bill, the, the language in the bill didn't match the rhetoric. Because when people went in and mapped out, when people men in and mapped out what lands meet, meet the criteria, you could buy islands, you could buy extremely remote islands in Tongass National Forest, where, where like, would follow the criteria of what could happen. Also, in the thing it has to go to the highest bidder. I, in the end, even Lee acknowledged this. In the end, he said, that the way the legislation was written, the government of China.

• 1:28:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  Could have been like, oh, we'll happily take three million acres of America. Whatever bid you get, a dollar more. I, I. It was, it was, in the end, they couldn't prevent this.

• 1:28:13Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like that was an excuse on, oh, we overlooked this.

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:17Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, you fucking overlooked that?

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  It was.

• 1:28:20Shawn Ryan?

  You just happened to overlook that China's buying up all our farmland and.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. It, it allowed, it was a path, it was a pathway out.

• 1:28:28Shawn Ryan?

  Outside of military bases. Oh yeah. You just, you just happened to, you found that out last minute and that's.

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  It was a pathway out. It was a safe, it was a face saving mechanism, but it was a pathway out.

• 1:28:38Shawn Ryan?

  Not because your ass is about to get voted out of office because you pissed off every outdoorsman, hunter, fisherman, skier, rancher in the fucking country.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:28:46Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.

• 1:28:48Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:28:49Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 1:28:50Speaker 03

  It won't, it won't, it won't go away. It won't go away. And, and.

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  I know you, I know that you like, you also looking at your work, like you love to look at things from a variety of angles, you know, and um, I, it would be, uh, it wouldn't be honest to me to not say like, of course, I look like, I understand the perspective. I understand the frustration of, of, of, of someone in a political position being like, look at all the economic activity that under my tenure.

• 1:29:24Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  You know, all the economic activity that could be occurring under my tenure and that I could go in front of voters and, and be like, you know, that I had blank achievements and job creations in certain sectors, if I could just develop that stuff, like, I get it, I get it, I get it, I just, I just don't agree.

• 1:29:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  No, I don't agree.

• 1:29:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, me neither, me neither. But, well, Steve, let's take a quick break. Actually, I'm gonna have you show me how to shoot a damn bow.

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  Oh, you got a lefty?

• 1:29:52Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:29:53Speaker 03

  I'll show you anyway.

• 1:29:54Shawn Ryan?

  All right, cool, let's take a break.

• 1:29:59Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  All right, Steve, we're back from the break. Thanks for the, uh, the lesson out there. Oh, yeah. That was bad. I'm going to get one. Yeah, they're fun. I'm gonna get one. I'm gonna get good at this shit. Yeah, it's fun. Next time you come, I'm gonna outshoot you. Okay. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't be surprised, man. I wouldn't be surprised. I'm not as disciplined as I should be about shooting. I start shooting. I've been shooting pretty good now, but I shoot in prep. I don't shoot recreationally as much. Oh, like a train up? Yeah, I'll shoot like, you know, like hunting season's coming, I'll start shooting. My boy, he shoots league in the winter, you know? Oh, really? Yeah. That's cool. When hunting season's over, this is bad, I hate to admit it, but when hunting season's over, oftentimes I might not touch my bow for a few months. Right on.

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  You know, I'm like, I like, to me, it's.

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  I shoot, I shoot a bow in order to hunt, you know? It's fun, but I just, whatever. You like to hunt? Yeah, I like to shoot. Like, I like to shoot, I like to shoot guns just for the kick of it, but, um, just, I like shooting guns for fun, but I don't shoot my bow as much as I ought to. You said you shoot a 300 wind mag? A lot. The most time when you're hunting? Yeah, you know, what that comes from is it comes from having.

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  Comes from this just kind of like desire to have one thing that you take care of and know well and, and keep tuned up and rigged up. Yeah. And then I can use it for all manner of hunting. So I like to hunt coues deer.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  You know, it's a, it's a small desert whitetail. I mean, those things are 110 pounds, right? And I'll take the same load as I would kill a bull moose with. No kidding? Yeah, hunting with it, yeah. Just shoot it back from the shoulder. Watch out for the shoulder blade. Gotcha. Just punch clean hole in it. So you do that for consistency? That's what it, that's what it stems from. As much as I wind up messing around with all kinds of stuff, I just like, I'm just comfortable with it. Like, you know, I kind of like, basically also you get, I just kind of basically understand the trajectory. You follow me? And it's just like, it's a little bit ingrained. No, I get it. I get it. It's just, it's, it's convenient. We have, like, my kids shoot 6'5" Creedmoors, since I got them started on something smaller. Um, and.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  Those are great to shoot, you know, but, but yeah, if I, and it's a little, that, that 300 wind mag thing is a little bit, little bit perhaps antiquated as, as bullets have gotten so good. You know, like the uniformity of bullets have gotten so good that, uh, you can get away with shooting much lighter rounds now. Um, these, you know, you, you know, all this stuff, but like there used to be a lot of talk about a flat shooting rifle, but with laser rangefinders.

• 1:33:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  It's not as relevant. Like you, you wanted a point of, you wanted a gun that 300 yards point of impact. Right. That like anywhere from, from zero to 300 yards, you're going to be within some number of inches of right.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  With a flat shooting gun, but with laser rangefinders, it's like, just call your shot. It doesn't matter anymore, you know? So it's a little bit, little bit of it's antiquated, but yeah, that's what I'm currently, that's what I currently hunt with.

• 1:34:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I was, I was curious. I mean, like I said, I'm not a big hunter, but I'm, I want to get into it as soon as I clear up some time. But, uh, you know, I've been invited to elk hunts, moose hunts, bear hunts, gator hunts. Told you I took my first deer. Last year, but I've, I'm always like, wondering and because, you know, because of my background of, it's people think I know all this shit. I don't, you know?

• 1:34:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43Shawn Ryan?

  And so I'm always wondering like, how the hell do you know what caliber to use on a big, on a big animal?

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:34:49Shawn Ryan?

  Versus, you know, something smaller.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:52Shawn Ryan?

  Like I've heard the most dangerous thing to hunt is water buffalo. Is that true?

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  Cape buffalo.

• 1:34:57Shawn Ryan?

  Cape buffalo?

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know what I was talking about Tanzania? Tanzania has a restrict, a caliber restriction.

• 1:35:03Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  Which you don't see in many states. You, for in Tanzania to hunt cape buffalo, it has to be a minimum of a 375 H and H.

• 1:35:12Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  You know, so that's what I shot was a 375 H and H.

• 1:35:15Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 1:35:16Speaker 03

  Or sorry, minimum of 375. So they set minimums, but there's so many, I mean, there's so many really good 30 caliber, like really good 308 variations.

• 1:35:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:31Speaker 03

  You know, but for like,

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  moose is the biggest thing, you're the, the biggest bodied thing you're going to hunt in North America is moose. And if you're shooting a hundred and 80 grain, a good hundred and 80 grain bullet.

• 1:35:46Speaker 03

  You, you, you're fine.

• 1:35:47Shawn Ryan?

  It's gonna work.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're fine. That's, that's what I use. Yeah. And I just like, I just like the versatility of it. But listen, man, there's guys that'll go.

• 1:35:56Speaker 03

  There's guys that'll go way deep on small little differences and things like if you get into archery, you'll find you'll wind you'll wind up in all these conversations about like prepare yourself for the conversation about mechanicals, single bevel, double bevel, right? All these things.

• 1:36:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  And it all matters kind of, but in the end, if you put it where it's supposed to go.

• 1:36:21Shawn Ryan?

  Doesn't matter.

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  It does. You know, you make a hole through two, you make a hole through both lungs on something, that thing's got problems.

• 1:36:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:30Speaker 03

  It doesn't matter what made the hole.

• 1:36:32Shawn Ryan?

  Have you ever had an encounter where you shot something and it didn't, it didn't drop, but came after you?

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, plenty of counters where it didn't come after me, but I, I ran, I one time shot a moose and a pretty, yeah, somewhat questionable shot. That was with, that was with a 300 variation called a 300 short mag with a 200 grain bullet. And I shot a moose coming on. They got a huge brisket.

• 1:37:01Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  Um, I shot him coming on, straight on. We called him in, so he's coming in, he knows we're there. And I shot him right like this, uh, and didn't get in where I needed to get in.

• 1:37:16Speaker 03

  And it buoyed off. Went, um, we kind of, we chased it little ways. I shot at it again and didn't know, but missed when I shot at it running off. Cause once you hit it once, it's like, you know, once you hit it once, just put lead in it. You're not gonna, at that point, the, you know, you already started a mess. So you might as well do what you can.

• 1:37:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35Speaker 03

  So you might take a shot you wouldn't normally take because it's the second shot and you already wounded it. Anyways, I get up there and through some, through some incompetence, I had cleared my chamber. Like I shot, I had, I had three in the, I had three rounds in the chamber and sat down without a round chamber. So I put one in the chamber. No, I got one in the chamber and two.

• 1:38:00Speaker 03

  One in the chamber, two in the magazine. I shoot the moose. I then rack around. Um. Shoot at him again. And then instinctively just rack around. But then I run up to the moose. And I racked around. So now I've spit out my last shell. I ejected, I ejected a shell, a live round. And I'm sitting there on an empty. I'm sitting around an empty chamber. And, and I'm not kidding you, the timing is so we got, this is all filmed, like we, we've used this for a million times, but. I get up to him and, and I realize he's kind of like getting up. And I click.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  And add, and man, he gets up and just comes at me, you know, and um, and uh. He, like, he comes, I'm trying to get away, I got chest waders on, I'm trying to get away and he bowls and he get, he runs over me.

• 1:39:00Shawn Ryan?

  He ran over you?

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. So then my buddy shoots him and kills it.

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  He's chasing me, my buddy kills it. And I reach around and he's got my back, you know? And I reach around and my hand, and my hand comes up and it's got blood all over it. And I think he's punctured me with his antler. But then I realized, because I'd hit him in the brisket, that when he ran over me, it hit the blood from his brisket.

• 1:39:23Speaker 03

  Had got up my back. So I go like this, you know, and I'm like, oh, I'm dying.

• 1:39:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  But it wasn't, I wasn't hurt at all. I wasn't hurt at all.

• 1:39:33Shawn Ryan?

  Any close, any close calls with bears or anything?

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, a few little, you know, here's the thing is, is like, everything seems like a close call. And unless you could interview the bear. You don't know if it was a close call or not. But had one, had, had a number of little.

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  You know, little mixups and things that could have been stupid. There's, there's one time we were bow hunting elk. And it was kind of a weird day. And I remember sleeping on a, we were sleeping on a ridge, just passing the hot part of the day. When nothing's going on, sleeping on this ridge and something woke me up from a nap.

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  And there's a bull, a bull elk come over the ridge and like I wake up and my bow's laying there and I and just me trying to grab the bow spooks the elk. So I'm like, God, what are the chances that would ever happen, you know? I fall asleep again. I hear something again and I wake up and here's a black bear standing and they do it in the same spot. Okay. I go to grab my bow. He spooks, runs down the hill. I just forget, forget about he's gone. He spooked. Later that afternoon, it starts getting toward evening, prime time and we go down, we go down, happened to go the direction the bear went, but just coincidentally went the direction the bear went. Get down to the bottom of this ridge where this, where this, get down the bottom of this hill where

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  the hill goes down into a riparian area. And here nails on bark. Something climbing a tree. Okay. We, I watched this bear go this way. So I'm like, holy shit, it's the bear. Like I said, I think he's still in the area and it, in a black bear, you'll spook a black bear. He might go on a tree. So I run up there thinking I'll tree him. And if I tree him, I can just get him with my bow. Cause black bears will climb trees. But I run up there and like it's thick and I come busting in there trying to like be like a demon coming in there to encourage the bear to not come down, but go up the tree. Cause I can hear it climbing and it's a, and it's a, there's a sow grizzly

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  standing against this tree. And what I had heard the claws of was her, was her woofing her cubs up the tree. So when I come busting in, I mean, I'm busting, I bust in like, I mean, easy me to that painting you in the helicopter, you know, like, oh, and I started trying to back out of there in a hurry, you know? And, and she, that cub comes down the hill and I remember she like legitimately, she legitimately, I could be hallucinating this, but like, I know I saw it. She's, she swatted her cub to get moving. She's like, like this, and they kept spilling out of the tree and that could have been like, that could have been just dumb.

• 1:42:18Speaker 03

  Pissed off a mama bear. How the hell did you get out of there? She, she went. Left you alone? She just got, I got lucky. She went woofing up the hill.

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  And then a couple of things like that, then um, and then one time I was involved in a one time I was involved with a bunch of other guys in like a legit bear mix up. Uh, on a fog neck island in Alaska and we got, we had elk hanging in a tree and we were eating lunch under the tree. This is totally long story about being an idiot, but we're eating lunch under a tree. With elk hanging in it that we'd left there for a couple of days. The quartered out meat and this bear came in and, and um, and uh, my buddy Yanni. He had sat down, he had spray on his belt and he had his pistol sitting on his backpack.

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  And when that bear came in, you know what he did? So he's got the pistol laying right here. And spray right here. You know what he did is he smokes it across the nose of the trekking pole.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  I mean, like right, like I'm there, it's here and he blop across the nose and this other guy, my buddy Dirt. Fell on it. Fell on it and rode it down the hill.

• 1:43:33Speaker 03

  Fell on the bear. I thought the bear was carried him down. Holy shit. When he, he was trying to get out of the way and landed backward on its hump and rode it down the hill. Oh my. Into an alder thicket and we thought that it carried him. We all read it that it carried him down the hill. So all of a sudden everybody's like lunging down the hill and he comes squirting back out of the alders. Running back. Oh my God, dude. He had, he, he rode it. This is dude named Dirt, uh, Dirt Myth. Damn. He rode the bear. Holy shit. So we obviously. What did he say? What he got back? I don't remember what exactly he said, but it scared the shit out of us, man. You know what's crazy about that deal?

• 1:44:15Speaker 03

  Um. So that's a draw permit on a fog neck island. You have to draw an elk tag. And they're not, those elk, so, so you, if you're looking at a map, if you casually looked at a map, you wouldn't think, you wouldn't notice that Kodiak and a fog neck are separate islands. There's a narrow strait that separates Kodiak and a fog neck. Years ago, they brought up elk from Washington's Olympic Peninsula and turned them loose out there on a fog neck. So it's a draw permit. We had that mix up.

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  The next year, some dudes, and you probably be able to track these guys down, and one of my friends interviewed them. These Navy SEALs, a Navy SEAL drew that permit.

• 1:44:58Speaker 03

  They got attacked by a bear right there. But they killed the son of a bitch.

• 1:45:04Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:45:04Speaker 03

  They killed it with a pistol.

• 1:45:06Shawn Ryan?

  Have you ever seen that video? I think it was that Russian, I think it was a Russian dude. He has a side by side shotgun. And this grizzly keeps attacking him from all these different angles.

• 1:45:15Speaker 03

  My kid was showing me that.

• 1:45:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  And I was trying to question how true it was, and he was trying to fish out, but I, I, I don't remember. You should just tell it, because I don't remember the details of it.

• 1:45:24Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I don't know any details. I just, somebody showed me the YouTube video, and I was like, holy shit, what would you do?

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  I do recollect my kid, my kid showing me something about this. I remember I was able to determine that it was a Russian somehow.

• 1:45:37Shawn Ryan?

  I think it said in the description, I can't remember, maybe it was Reddit, I can't remember what it was. But yeah, I would like, charge him. And you could just, I don't know if the dude had a GoPro strapped to his head or whatever, but he's just running around this side by side, and then he'd come at him from another angle.

• 1:45:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, this is ringing a bell. And I remember, I, I try to teach with my kids, I try to teach skepticism. And I remember like trying to, so my kid will come to me and be like, hey, is this legit? You know, we'll watch stuff and try to figure out what we're looking at. But I, I don't remember the details on it. But um. I got included on the bear thing. I love those bears. Like, I like, I like, I like. I love grizzly bears. I like them. You know, they're scary, but I like them. You know, yeah, I'm not, I'm not an anti-bear guy.

• 1:46:22Shawn Ryan?

  You get any other close encounters?

• 1:46:25Shawn Ryan?

  I love hearing that stuff.

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  Um, just little. Yeah, little like false charge, me and my buddy Cal, I mentioned him earlier from the public lands issue, he and I got false charged by a bear one time. Um, which was scary. And I remember I had like a. I made like a line, an imaginary line at which I would shoot. We were hunting grizzly bears. It was a sow with cubs and I had an imaginary line at which I would fire, you know, and she turned off at that imaginary line. Um, but again, man, with, with those, with those bears, it always seems like, everything seems close because you can just picture it, you know?

• 1:47:09Speaker 03

  Um, but that's, that's kind of my, that's kind of my main little run ins. I've had them too where they're coming and you're just trying to scare them off. You know, and, and I remember uh, one was coming and we were trying to shoot rocks out in front of it just to get it not come into our camp. And I remember it would run over to look at.

• 1:47:30Speaker 03

  It would, it would run ahead to look at what it was. It's like, what the hell was that?

• 1:47:35Speaker 03

  And I was like, that's not working.

• 1:47:36Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. How do you determine where you're gonna hunt? I mean, you know, like around here and every, I've been hunting before. I just never got anything and it was always on public land around the Midwest and bear season in the Midwest is like bigger than Christmas.

• 1:47:52Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:47:52Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and I'd, I'd go out and I'd be like, I'm out of here, man. There's like 50 people over here.

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  Yep, yep.

• 1:47:58Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not doing this. So I'm just curious. I mean, how do you determine where you're gonna hunt?

• 1:48:03Speaker 03

  You know,

• 1:48:04Shawn Ryan?

  Cause you hunt public land.

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  A lot. I mean, I hunt both, you know, I hunt a lot of pri- I hunt private land. I hunt public land. Um, I hunt everything I everything I can get to. Uh, I, I kind of have a odd, not an odd setup, but like at this, at, at this point, I've hunted for a long time and I have so many friends that are really dedicated, disciplined hunters that for me to do, for me to do like research on spots is just very different. There, there's not many places you could point to, there's not many places in the country you could point to where I couldn't within a, within two phone calls.

• 1:48:47Speaker 03

  Talk to a buddy that a buddy or a buddy's buddy that like knows the area real well. Gotcha. You follow me? So it just winds up being it it it winds up being different and. I hunt it. We kind of in hunting. But you know, you we you a way to split hunting opportunities would be that you have over the counter. We call over the counter hunting opportunities, or you have draw hunting opportunities. Over the counter means you go to the gas station or the sporting goods store and buy a license. Right? So most whitetail deer hunting in the east, most states, you just buy a license. Um, but then there's a lot of draw hunts where more there's greater demand than there is supply. And so to allocate it democratically, they do these lotteries.

• 1:49:33Speaker 03

  Um, and they're they're generally for a resident, they're very inexpensive. For if you're applying in other states, it can be more expensive, but they're like they're going to release. Twenty tags for said unit, a hundred guys apply for that unit. Um, so no one, there's no individual that routinely hunts the spot. Gotcha. So it's kind of new for everyone every time. Okay. If I do that, I'm applying for a unit like, for instance, I mentioned going to a fog neck. Um, I had applied a bunch of years, eventually drew a fog neck, but because of my my social circle and professional connections. I wind up uh with a buddy of mine who's like, oh, yeah. Me and my friends have hunted it twice. We landed at this lake.

• 1:50:17Speaker 03

  You want to hike, you know, we found them over here. If you can't find them there, go look here. And it's just it it's just it's a perk that I that I can't act like isn't a big factor. So a lot of the time that someone might normally spend needing to work from the ground up, which is what I would do when I was younger. Um, a lot of times now I'm able to ask a lot of questions. Gotcha. Uh, another thing is is um. There's other spots, particularly like public land spots that I like to go to. It winds up being that. I there there's spots I tend to go to spots I know really well. And where and I understand seasonally what they're like, I understand the impacts of pressure on those spots.

• 1:51:00Speaker 03

  And those are the spots I go to often and and there wasn't a reason that one of the reasons I like them in return is I kind of understand the rhythms. Of the area.

• 1:51:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:09Speaker 03

  Do you know what I mean? Like late November, it's gonna look like this. They'll have been there like things that were there are probably over here now. Because of pressure, weather. When I say pressure, I don't mean barometric pressure, but hunting pressure, weather, whatever. And so you just kind of get trained up, but at a time I had a very, you know, at a time when I first moved out west.

• 1:51:36Speaker 03

  We just went out and figured shit out. We were very comfortable with failure.

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  And and had a lot of time, not a lot of money. And just went and went and that's the guys like that. The young guys now that I look up to are the guys that are in that phase of their life where they're just figuring it out. And they got they're not they're not bitter yet. I look at my kid and his buddies, my kid and his buddies, man, they're just in the exploratory phase. Do you know what I mean? They're like, we're gonna jump at that bridge and go try to get ducks. I'm like, man, that's cool as shit, man. That's great, you know, and they don't if they come back with nothing, they don't care. They're just in the exploring phase and and they'll someday be like me and they'll and that phase will wind down a little bit for them. You know, and they'll kind of have their habits. They'll have their habits and their their their honey holes.

• 1:52:26Shawn Ryan?

  Just gaining gaining experience.

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  You know, and it's it's a blast when it happens and I look back on it quite fondly. But at this point now, I just kind of have, you know, it's just life's different for me.

• 1:52:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about hunting and health. Being in the outdoors, the difference between game meat and, you know, the shit we get at the grocery store.

• 1:52:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:48Shawn Ryan?

  Wherever you want to start.

• 1:52:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  Outdoor fitness.

• 1:52:57Speaker 03

  One thing I have, the other day I had to run, a couple of days ago I had to run in the airport. Um, I'd left my bag and the dude's like, run and get your bag. Um, so I had to run back to the other gate to get my bag and uh, I don't run. So even just running around in the airport for a while and I'm like, I got a shin splint dude from running. Then I run, but I can, like if I have a physical specialty, like uh, to brag for a minute, um, I am very good at just walking for a long time. Like I'm, I'm an expert, uh, I'm an expert just walker, like one foot in front of the other and, and that's like hiking.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  Like I like to hike, I can hike, um, I can out hike people that would beat me up, I could out hike people that would outrun me. Whatever, but like I've, I'm hiking across rugged ground and hiking in hills and something, something I enjoy a great deal. And, and I've, that ability comes from just traveling in the mountains. Um, and so that's kind of a little bit of a, for me, like a little bit of measure. Like the way people might measure fitness, you might talk about whatever you can bench or you can deadlift this or do this or that. Um, uh, for me it's like, i- if I was going to ask someone a fitness question that would, that would,

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  if I was going to ask someone a fitness question that would mean a lot to me, it would be like, how long can you walk on how little water? That's like something I'm interested in. Uh, the, the, the food stuff, we eat, like when we're home, we only eat wild meat. No kidding. In our house. So, family of five, like when we're eating in our house, we only eat wild meat. Now and then I'll come home and my kids will be like, don't tell mom, I'm telling you, but we had a chicken. You know, my bought a chicken. She doesn't want you to know, but yeah, we're real strict about it. Like we eat wild meat in our house. Why is that? Well, cause, cause it's, it's just cooler. It's, it's a better, it's just better. It's a, it's,

• 1:55:04Speaker 03

  that's what I like to eat. That's why I want to see my kids eat. I can't sit and tell you with a straight face. I can't tell you chemically.

• 1:55:14Speaker 03

  Like how it's different. Do you know what I'm saying? But it's like, it, it just, it feels very good to eat it. But I can't, so I, I can't separate out the emotional, spiritual, psychological aspects of what it's like to eat your own food. And how good that makes you feel. Compared to like the biochem. The, the biochemistry aspects of, of eating wild meat. Yeah. Okay. There's a ton to talk about, you hear people talk about something being organic. Well, i- if you're, I hate to tell people this. If you're hunting deer. In Wisconsin, okay, I have a lot of friends that hunt deer in Wisconsin. You're probably not eating organic meat.

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

  Because those deer are in, they're eating GMOs. Those deer are eating GMO corn. They're eating GMO soybeans perhaps. That, that if it was certified organic, you wouldn't be able to feed it. But you can't control what that thing's eating. Yeah. If he, he could be raiding like, you know, he could be raiding Old Lady Thompson's garden where she just put a bunch of, where she put a bunch of, sprayed a bunch of glyphosate. You don't know what it ate. It's a wild animal. So people will be like, oh, you know, it's organic. I'm like, yeah, there's a lot of places you can, like, you know, you kill a caribou on the North Slope of, you know, Alaska, some bitches. Purely organic. But a lot, a lot of game meat's not organic. Migratory waterfowl.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  That's a tough claim to make. That it's organic. But it just feels good because everything we eat, when we're sitting around eating, everything we eat is like a story. It's a celebration and we always acknowledge. This is Rosemary's deer. Right? And, and if, and if I don't bring it up, the kids will bring it up. That's pretty cool. Whose deer is this? This is Rosemary's deer. The other night, we got back from our fish shack. We had a bunch of Pacific cod. So the other night, I had two, one of my daughter was away with her friend. So I had my two boys, my boy's buddy, my wife, and we ate, we were eating cod that we caught. We were eating carrots that we grew. We were eating green beans that we grew. We were eating zucchinis that we grew.

• 1:57:26Speaker 03

  And um, and like that's that's pride. You follow me? Oh, yeah. It's like we're, we're like proud of that and it makes a cool story. Um, you know, one of the more interesting aspects of, of health is the, the, is the, the confluence of where your, your mental life and your physical life collide, you know? It's just, it's exciting to us and, and I take an immense amount of pride in it. Yeah, that's. Even if someone came and told me, even if someone came and told me that, that it wasn't good for you, it wouldn't change my perspective. I, I got a buddy, a very avid outdoorsman named Parker Hall, and he likes to fish flathead catfish.

• 1:58:07Speaker 03

  Flathead catfish eat fish that eat fish. So they, they do a thing called bioaccumulation, meaning if there's heavy metals in the environment, like mercury, whatever, they bioaccumulate because when a little, when a little fish gets mercury in its, its system, it's stored in its fat. And then imagine that you magnify it, where here's a fish that eats fish that was eating fish. So all of that, when he eats a fish, he takes that load of mercury. Okay. Or whatever heavy metal we might be talking about, or anything industrial solvents or all these things carry stuff. But when he eats a fish, he gets that fish's stuff and it goes into his fat. And then at the end, when he's five years old, six years

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  old, whatever, he's got a lifetime of consuming stuff that was consuming stuff. And so they get a heavy metal load. And the states, they don't do this for domestic meat, but the states will often come out with, they'll often come out with advisories. Sometimes they're very detailed. Don't eat more than one meal every month of yellow perch over 12 inches in length from Lake Washington. It might be that specific. I was saying to him one day, you're eating all these flatheads. And he also likes flathead belly. It's like, it's kind of a, sort of a flathead delicacy is the belly on a flathead, which they say is where the heavy metals accumulate. This is a very, turned into a very long story. I was joking with Parker

• 1:59:31Speaker 03

  Hall. And I was like, what do you think about like the heavy metal warnings on these big flatheads? And he says, man, if I can catch and eat so many flatheads that it kills me, I win. That was where he was at. Right on, man. So, so even if, yeah, like even if I heard, and I've gotten sick from, you know, I've gotten sick from game meat. Um, it doesn't change my view on it. You know, I just like it. There's no, no one can tell me it's like, it's just good. I feel best eating like, I feel best eating vegetables. And, and deer meat. And I like more and more, I, I like to eat food. We eat like,

• 2:00:18Speaker 03

  when I cook for my family, which is whenever I'm home, um, we eat food that you look at and you know what it is. It looks like something that came out of the dirt. Or it looks like something that you chopped out of an animal. Like that in my mind is, is, I can't tell you the scientifically, but that's how we liked it. That's how I like it. The way to live. Yeah. That's how I like to live. Yeah. So let's move into Meat Eater. Hmm. How did that start? It's, um, that's a long story. Uh, again, I came up as a writer. I studied, um, magazine writing. Became a magazine writer out of magazine writing, started doing books. Um, out of this came various opportunities in television.

• 2:00:59Speaker 03

  The first show I did years ago, I did a show, a very short-lived, I did an eight-episode show for Travel Channel. A long time ago. I was paired with a production company called Zero Point Zero Production. To do this show. Um,

• 2:01:15Speaker 03

  the show tanked. But out of it, the guys I was working with and, and Zero Point Zero most famously worked with, uh, Anthony Bourdain. They produced Bourdain's different shows over the years. So I was working with that same crew of guys that worked on that show. And, um, they had all, in doing our stuff, they'd kind of fallen in love with hunting. And so we decided, well, let's just do our own thing that we own. We'll do our own show. It'd be like very simple, stripped-down show about going out, you know, on hunting and fishing adventures. Um, and so I had a little teeny kid at the time. My boy who's 15 was a baby and I would read him mostly books about animals. And I always liked, you'd be reading about a T-Rex or a polar bear or whatever.

• 2:01:59Speaker 03

  And it'd be like this meat eater, this ferocious meat eater, right? Just like a thing. And I was like, I just called it that. It wasn't meant as like a advice. It wasn't meant as dietary advice. I was like referring to like these species that that's what they eat.

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  So we started doing the show and um, and we owned it. We only licensed, we only licensed it out. So we, we maintain the IP of it, right? And then later did, uh, launched a podcast.

• 2:02:30Speaker 03

  And called it that. It was the Meat Eater Podcast. We had a show called Meat Eater. Um, did some, did some guidebooks. Under that title. And eventually kind of built up this, you know, built up a brand. You built up a brand eater. It's crazy. And then what, what's kind of cool about it is because we were doing a TV show. Uh, we would get sponsors. And so one, some of our very earliest people that gave us any kind of vote of confidence and backing, like there, there was an apparel company, First Light, and I knew the guys that started First Light and they just started it kind of out of their homes in Ketchum, Idaho. Um, these like big hunters, ski bums, and they were making merino base layers for hunters. And

• 2:03:16Speaker 03

  so we kind of grew up together. And then later, later on, our company Meat Eater was able to, was able to acquire some gear companies. So we have an apparel company, First Light. We have a, an American-made accessory company called FHF Gear. We have a game call company, Dave Smith, uh, or sorry, we have a game call company called Phelps Game Calls and a decoy company, Dave Smith Decoys. And those founders are still, those founders are still very much involved with their businesses. So we've become, you know, we've become like media and product.

• 2:03:54Speaker 03

  But I, but the vast bulk of my time exists around the, the, the, the media end of it being podcasts. We still do print books. Um, and, and I work in all those kinds of projects, everything from, I've done cookbooks and I'm, I'm currently working on an American history series. Um, what's that about? Market hunting. So did Meat Eaters American History, Volume One, and that was that story of Daniel Boone and the deer skin trade. Awesome. And that covered seventeen sixty-three, which is the end of the French and Indian War, to seventeen seventy-five, so right up to the American Revolution. And then did Meat Eaters American History, Volume Two, The Mountain Men,

• 2:04:38Speaker 03

  which covers the beaver skin trade, which eighteen oh six, so two years after the Louisiana Purchase, The Return of Lewis and Clark, which launched the era in eighteen forty, when that era and that market collapsed because of silk. The advent of silk replacing beaver wool as the way that hats were made. So the, the, the silkworm kind of killed that market. We just recorded Meat Eaters American History, Volume Three, which is called The Hide Hunters. It picks up with all the displacement at the end of the Civil War,

• 2:05:17Speaker 03

  and displaced veterans, Confederates, and Yankees going west and picking up the buffalo skin trade. And it ends in eighteen eighty-three, when they killed the last herd in northern Montana. And from there, probably, from there, we'll probably jump up to the Great Depression and do the Alaska fur trade during the Great Depression. Or, sorry, it'll pick up at the end, it'll pick up at the, with the, it'll pick up during the roaring twenties, and it'll, it's closing year. If we do the Alaska fur trade, its closing year will be the Great Depression. Very cool. Remember like the flappers, you know, like the roaring twenties, every run around with

• 2:06:02Speaker 03

  all that fur? A lot of that fur was coming out of Alaska. No kidding. It, it, it was like money, all these things, all these different eras we're talking about are, um...

• 2:06:14Speaker 03

  The potential for life changing amount of money for people and they're all markets that emerge and then die and emerge and die. Um, and usually there's usually a variety of factors that leads to their death with the buffalo one, it died because they were gone. And the crazy part about those guys is some knew what they were doing and some were legitimately, they didn't know what they had done. On the Texas plains, the hide hunters were convinced that a bunch of them had run into Mexico. And there was more in Mexico, more buffalo in Mexico. In northern Montana, they'd all gone into Canada and they held out hope. And they waited around one year,

• 2:06:58Speaker 03

  two year, and eventually it was like, you know what I think might have happened, dude is I think we maybe killed them all. It's over, you know? So, so that, that history stuff is, is something I love working on. Yeah. The American history series.

• 2:07:14Shawn Ryan?

  We built one hell of an empire, man.

• 2:07:17Speaker 03

  I don't know what I'd call it. Yeah. Um,

• 2:07:22Speaker 03

  yeah, we, we make cool, yeah, we, we get to make cool products. It's fun. Yeah.

• 2:07:27Shawn Ryan?

  How do you balance all the business and family and all that stuff?

• 2:07:34Speaker 03

  One of my,

• 2:07:37Speaker 03

  I'll tell you, like, if I have a,

• 2:07:43Speaker 03

  answering that question, that picture, remember the old cartoons where does the dude with the devil and the angel? You know what I mean?

• 2:07:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

• 2:07:51Speaker 03

  Like, if I carry with me a, a thing like that, it's about what I've done and haven't done for my kids. The devil is saying, um, there has been years in, in my, all my kids' lives, there's been years, the devil's like, dude, there's been years when you missed half of their days.

• 2:08:17Speaker 03

  Right? You worked half their days or traveled half the days they were alive. And the angel is says, uh, but dude, when you were home, you were home. Like you were all in, you know, and that, that's a debate that, that's a debate that goes on. Um, I,

• 2:08:35Speaker 03

  Goes without saying, like, you know, I adore my children.

• 2:08:41Speaker 03

  We have.

• 2:08:44Speaker 03

  I have a very strong relationship with my kid. I've missed my kids. I've missed a lot of their lives. Um, but I've also spent some like extremely

• 2:08:54Speaker 03

  impactful times with them where I'll be able to just be immersed with them. We just spent two weeks at our fish shack. Where they're like in my sight. Yeah. For two weeks. When I'm home, I pointed this out a bunch, just to other people that have young kids and stuff like.

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  And when I'm home.

• 2:09:13Speaker 03

  I like, what I like them, when I'm home, they see me serve, like they see me serve the family. Do you know what I mean? Like I, I clean. I cook. When I'm home, I make dinner. I lay dinner on the table. Right? I call them to the dinner table. We, when I'm, they eat family dinner, whether I'm home or not, they do with their mom, or we all eat it as a family. But like, I want them to, to know that like when I'm there, I'm there. And, and, and that's one of the, that, that is the sort of like, that's the compromise. Is that hard for you to switch it off? You know, a long time ago, my wife came up with this rule where she said, um.

• 2:09:53Speaker 03

  She's like, i- i- if it's, I remember sitting when we first had a kid, it's, it's so funny to think about this now, cause he's like, like little enough where they're like in the, hanging out in the bathtub. And I remember needing to go out of town to work. I remember sitting there like weeping. I was so sad when I had a little baby, when I had to go out of town. And, um, my wife said, you gotta button, you gotta button it up, dude. You gotta tighten up. Th- th- it, this isn't what it is. Like, you can't display, like, you can't like, display this. This like lament. You know, and then later she had said, if it's. It's not going to be a big deal when you go. And it's not going to be a big deal when you come home. Meaning when you come home, you merge.

• 2:10:39Speaker 03

  You merge into traffic, right? Like it's not like balloons and shit like, welcome home, dad. It's like you come in and you're, you're, you're, you're in it, you know? And so, no, I, I, I, I find it easy to come back. A, a challenge I've had, and dude, all this pales in comparison. I was with the guy the other day, I was with the guy the other day that came from your, that came from your professional world of military and his wife told me, I was with him and his wife, he told me that the first three years of marriage, they were together 200 days. So this is nothing like that. It's nothing like that. But I do find some parallels with, with people that have dealt with that level of being gone. Um, but no, I don't, my wife would tell

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

  you that I don't turn it off. Well, I would argue that I've gotten better at it. Do you take your kids out with you now? Yeah, any chance I can get, man. Any chance I can get. To business, on business? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I meant to take them out in the woods and out in the field. Yeah, both, both. My older one, I'm just now exposing him, my, my 15 year old, I'm just now exposing him to, um, I'm now exposing him more and more to what I do. He's very interested in it. We never let him have any kind of social media. Once he turned 15 and he was taller than me, um, seemed weird to tell him when he's taller than me. He's got like his learner's permit. He takes a gun out of the gun cabinet and goes shooting skeet with his friends. And it's hard to be like, you're not

• 2:12:04Speaker 03

  allowed to have social media. You can take the shotgun, but no Facebook, you know? So he has social media now and he likes to kind of post about his outdoor adventures, you know? And, and, and I encourage that, um, and, and keep a tight rap on it. But yeah, he's real curious in what I do. Um, he's, uh, I'm not a photographer. He's very interested in photography. He's very interested in, in communication. So I'll be curious to see where that leads. Right on, man. Um, but yeah, the other ones, man, I, I. For me, the funnest thing now is to take them out hunting. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. I don't even care if I get like, to me, it doesn't matter to get stuff.

• 2:12:42Shawn Ryan?

  Just time.

• 2:12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just like to be, my buddies are the same way. Buddies with kids, after a while, they're like, you being the one that gets something, no one cares about that anymore. It's good to see the kids have success, you know?

• 2:12:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, man, that's like I was telling you at breakfast, I just, we've been, uh, I'm official with my son, he's a toddler. For almost a year, this fall, it'll be a year. It's been so fucking cool to watch him like learn, figure out how to cast. He learned it like a couple of days.

• 2:13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:11Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, now it's just. It's like trying to dodge bullets when he casts. But, uh.

• 2:13:17Speaker 03

  And all the untangling and stuff, you know?

• 2:13:19Shawn Ryan?

  Hook in the nose.

• 2:13:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:21Shawn Ryan?

  But yeah, it's, it's, it's just, I love watching him. Real abassing and or it is so cool, man.

• 2:13:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:29Shawn Ryan?

  I love being outdoors with my kid.

• 2:13:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's good. It's good to spend time. It's, it's, it's good for them. It's good for you.

• 2:13:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. But, um. Well, man, I just, I really appreciate you coming in. I thought this was an awesome conversation.

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  Oh, well, thanks, man. Like I said, I've always, uh, admired your work and enjoyed watching the clips. My, my boy likes watching the clips. We have a good time.

• 2:13:51Shawn Ryan?

  He does?

• 2:13:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:52Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, we'll give him some stuff to take home.

• 2:13:54Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 2:13:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, man.

• 2:13:55Speaker 03

  No, he likes, yeah, he like, again, like me, he likes hearing from, he likes hearing from all the warriors, man.

• 2:14:00Shawn Ryan?

  Cool.

• 2:14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:01Shawn Ryan?

  Well, there's a lot more coming on, so.

• 2:14:03Speaker 03

  Good, yeah.

• 2:14:04Shawn Ryan?

  But Steve, honored to meet you, man.

• 2:14:06Speaker 03

  Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Cheers, son.

• 2:14:12Shawn Ryan?

  Is there anything we didn't cover? You want to cover?

• 2:14:14Speaker 03

  Great, thank you. Thank you.

• 2:14:16Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 2:14:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that was awesome. I really like that bow stuff, dude.

• 2:14:22Speaker 03

  It's fun.

• 2:14:22Shawn Ryan?

  That's, I could see how that could get addicting.

• 2:14:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of guys that find it like quite therapeutic to shoot, you know?

• 2:14:32Shawn Ryan?

  What is your, what's the favorite animal to hunt?

• 2:14:35Speaker 03

  For me?

• 2:14:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Or maybe like the one you're most proud of?

• 2:14:38Speaker 03

  Mule, oh, yeah. Well, I like hunting doll sheep, but I don't get as many opportunities to do it. But like for day in, day out hunting, I like mule deer 100%. I just love everything about them. Love everything about them. But I grew up on whitetails. So it's funny, I got friends out there, grew up out west and they're like, dude, that must be so cool. Tree stand hunting whitetails. But then we grew up tree stand hunting whitetails. Like that must be so cool to hunt the mountains for me, old dear.

• 2:15:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:04Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, it's like, it has a lot to do with that, but I like that. And I've really gotten into, um, I've been, I've done it for a long time, but I like to hunt moose. I like to call moose. Like on the 11th, I'll take off to go with my brother Danny, who lives up in Alaska to go call moose, you know? Which is a total mindfuck.

• 2:15:23Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 2:15:23Speaker 03

  It's a slow game. It's a slow game. Like a moose might take days to come to a call. Like he hears it. Oh, and he might be like, yeah, eventually. I'll eventually get over there.

• 2:15:33Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man.

• 2:15:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's kind of funny, you know, you see them and they're like aware of you, but the time for them is different, you know, elk might, he just comes ripping in. But moose is like, yeah, I'll get over there in three days.

• 2:15:44Shawn Ryan?

  Is there, is there, uh, I actually meant to ask you in the interview, but is there anything that you think the hunting industry is getting wrong? Like in the public's eye, anything that pisses you off about the industry or?

• 2:16:04Speaker 03

  I think that, yeah, there's a handful of things, but it's not anybody, but I think that a lot of the commentary around, um, a lot of the commentary around relationships with predators isn't accurate. And I think that people are, what our ask needs to be on, in the west on wolves and grizzlies. Well, not just that, and not the west, upper Midwest. What the aspect needs to be on wolves and grizzlies is it needs to be that like they're going to be on the landscape. The ask, the days of the, of it being that they're going to be gone.

• 2:16:40Speaker 03

  That's not gonna happen. The ask needs to be that they be managed as game animals.

• 2:16:45Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 2:16:46Speaker 03

  It's like lamenting the existence of large predators. Or just like, you know, this whole like smoke a pack a day, you know, or shoot shovel, shut up shit about wolves. I don't think that that's productive.

• 2:17:00Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 2:17:00Speaker 03

  The ask is like, the ask is like, get them off the ESA.

• 2:17:05Shawn Ryan?

  What's that?

• 2:17:06Speaker 03

  Endangered species act.

• 2:17:07Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:08Speaker 03

  They shouldn't be, they don't qualify for endangered species act protection, just like categorically. When I started doing reintroductions on wolves and when I started doing protections on grizzlies, all the people, all the stakeholders came together and said, here's what recovery looks like. Recovery will be this, this many breeding pairs, right? This level of distribution. We hit recovery on wolves and grizzly bears 20 years ago. In some cases, even longer ago, in some areas. And but and there's still is this faction of sportsmen that thinks we're gonna go back to having those animals not out there preying on deer? And it's fucking dumb.

• 2:17:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:46Speaker 03

  Like the ask is de-list and manage as a game animal. Um, that, that's the thing that people gotta, and, and in, in order to push their viewpoint, they kind of over, they like exaggerate human risk on things that there's not human risk. There's not like a reasonable human risk, like wolves, like don't, like wolves just don't fuck with people.

• 2:18:13Speaker 03

  You know, mountain lions every now and then, but predators need to be there.

• 2:18:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:19Speaker 03

  They need to be managed as game animals.

• 2:18:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:22Speaker 03

  We need to have hunting, you know, like it's ridiculous right now that there's no wolf hunting in the upper Great Lakes. It's ridiculous. Um, they need to, you know, they de-listed, then they listed again. That, that needs to be a hunted population of wolves. But, um, they're not going away.

• 2:18:40Shawn Ryan?

  What about, um, like invasive species and stuff like hogs down south? And I mean,

• 2:18:47Speaker 03

  um, I used to have a habit of asking guys that owned land that had hogs on it, the bitch about the hogs. And I'd be like, if you could wave a magic wand, I've asked so many farmers, ranchers, like if you could wave a magic wand and they would really be all gone, would you wave it? And they're always like, I mean, I don't want them all gone. Again and again, you know, I don't want them all gone. I mean, that's ridiculous. Uh, yeah, but you know,

• 2:19:17Speaker 03

  the, a thing that hunters don't, if you're gonna look at from a conservation habitat perspective, um, non-native plants are probably, I, I, I think that you'd probably get buy-in on that statement. You'd probably get buy-in on that statement from most people that non-native plants are a greater risk to hunting in America than non-native wildlife. It's a little bit, there are cases where one could argue that because in the Mississippi system, the Asiatic carp species have to be having an impact on game fish. But there's no way they're not having an impact on game fish. So that's a huge thing in that area. Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes is a big problem, but non-native,

• 2:20:01Speaker 03

  um, habitat that is becoming that it doesn't support wildlife, because it's got plants that wildlife can't utilize, like, that's a problem. Whole fucking hillside, I mean, whole mountainsides,

• 2:20:15Speaker 03

  taken over by plants called like, uh, spotted knappweed, leafy spurge. Whole mountainsides used to support animals or hillsides used to support animals, now don't. No shit. I did not realize that. Canadian thistle, that's another one. Like ecosystems that had game that don't have game because they can't digest noxious weeds. Interesting. That's, I'd never thought about that. Noxious weeds are, noxious weeds are huge, will be a huge problem in the future. I mean, they're already a huge problem. Like, if you, i- i- i- anywhere, if you went anywhere and, and talked to someone from, like, most states, if you went and talked with someone, it's like, we got plant problems more than we got animal problems. You familiar with like the pollinator crisis? No.

• 2:21:03Speaker 03

  Losing, losing all of our pollinators. Oh, like bees? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I have heard of that. From habit, habitat and also habitat and then the fucking pesticides. Damn. Herbicides and pesticides, and I'm not hacking it, dude, like, people gotta eat, you know? Um, if you wanted to live in a world with no herbicides and no pesticides, you should probably plan on losing about half the world's population to starvation. Right? It's like a real fucking conundrum. Um, it could be that anyone that's poor dies because we don't use herbicides and pesticides anymore, or we continue to like wipe out

• 2:21:42Speaker 03

  insect species and wipe out plant species that, that are some of the foundation of, you know, all of our environmental shit, you know? Yeah. Man, that's an interesting aspect I never thought of. Yeah, it's, it's one of those, it's one of those hidden things and it's like, and a lot of people, um,

• 2:22:02Speaker 03

  a lot of people aren't hip to it, you know? But I have the, like, I have the luxury of, of, of, I have the luxury of just like occupying a, a, a world and occupying a conversation that, you know, some guy that works his fucking ass off and,

• 2:22:18Speaker 03

  you know, gets to hunt a few weekends a year and he's happy if he can hunt four weekends a year. It's just like, he just doesn't have time for hearing about all that shit, you know? Yeah. Cause he's got, whatever, he's trying to fucking raise his family. And so there's people that just, there's a lot of sportsmen that don't know and it's not necessarily like ignorance. It's just like, it's just complicated. And so they might be like, what's wrong with hunting? You know, why are you not seeing deer? And it's like, oh, fucking coyotes. It's like, yeah, it's more complicated, dude. That's easy, but it's, it's more complicated. You know?

• 2:22:51Speaker 03

  Interesting. Yeah, the predator thing is, is a, is a, and, and you wind up fighting both extremes. Like I wind up arguing, um, I'm always arguing with people that think that like, I'm always arguing with people that think that wolves fucking walk around eating granola or flowers. You know, be like, no, dude, wolves have a major impact. Coyotes have a major impact. And then I turn around, I'm arguing with some guy that thinks it's the only thing that matters is that if we just kill more coyotes, the world will be overrun with wild game. You're like, "You guys are both fucked up."

• 2:23:28Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:23:29Speaker 03

  You guys are both wrong.

• 2:23:32Shawn Ryan?

  We wanna grab some lunch?

• 2:23:33Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:23:34Shawn Ryan?

  Cool.