#470: Steven Rinella on Hunting (And Why You Should Care), Reconnecting with Nature, Favorite Trips, and More

Steven Rinella (@StevenRinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/) is the host of the Netflix Originals series MeatEater https://www.netflix.com/title/80126646 and The MeatEater Podcast https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater. He's also the author of seven books dealing with wildlife, conservation, hunting, fishing, and wild foods, including the forthcoming The MeatEater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival https://www.amazon.com/MeatEater-Guide-Wilderness-Skills-Survival/dp/0593129695/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, coming out on December 1st, 2020. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:30Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:06Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. And now Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They just launched a new company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now, and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch. And I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill stain and scratch resistant, the sofa color, the color of the legs,

• 2:49Tim Ferriss?

  the sofa size, the shape to make sure it's perfect for you in your home. Also, Allform arrives in just three to seven days, and you can assemble it all yourself in a few minutes, no tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kind of like Lego pieces. They've got armchairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight-seat sectional. So there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kind of build on top of it if you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually, in a way, what I did, because I can turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So I mentioned I have all of these different things in this room. I used the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color, and I dig it.

• 3:31Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:14Tim Ferriss?

  Com slash Tim Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners at allform.com slash Tim. Make sure to use the code TIM at checkout. That's allform.com slash Tim and use code TIM at checkout. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain,

• 4:57Tim Ferriss?

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• 5:30Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Now would be a significant appropriate time.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:48Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job always to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, whatever, that you can test and apply in your own lives. My guest today. I'm very excited to have on finally Steven Rinella, R-I-N-E-L-L-A. You can find him on Instagram, @meateater, also @StevenRinella, Steven with a V. He is the host of the Netflix original series Meat Eater and the Meat Eater Podcast. He's also the author of seven books dealing with wildlife conservation, hunting, fishing, and wild foods, including a forthcoming book, The Meat Eater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival, coming out December 1st, 2020.

• 6:31Tim Ferriss?

  You can find all things Meat Eater on themeateater.com and you can also find Steven on Facebook, @StevenRinella, Meat Eater. Steve, so nice to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. That was a good delivery there, man.

• 6:46Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks. That was A-grade hosting. Well, you know, we, we met, I was trying to do the math on it and I'm guessing, I want you to correct me if I'm wrong, but I want to say maybe mid to late 2011. And I was trying to do a trip down memory lane. It's almost 10 years since we first met, which is just bonkers. And I promised that if I screwed up the intro, I would not make you suffer through 20 retakes and that I would fix any flubs later. But it seems like lifetimes ago that we first met in the context of The Four Hour Chef. And I thought perhaps a trip down memory lane, at least as I've been doing prep for this, there's been quite a

• 7:30Tim Ferriss?

  bit of that, could be fun for setting the stage because there's certainly going to be some listeners of this podcast who have hunted and there are going to be many, many who have not. And I wanted to read just a tiny little piece from the first chapter. I had someone on my team pull Everywhere You Appeared in The Four Hour Chef. It was like a quarter of the book. So I only dug into a few pieces, but there's a chapter called "The Anti-Hunter's First Hunt," the anti-hunter referring to me because I grew up on Long Island, having very bad associations with the hunters who did a very poor job in my neighborhood and around my house where I grew up. But you're the counterpoint. So I wanted to set the stage. I'm going to skip things a little bit, but the heading is 6:00

• 8:15Tim Ferriss?

  AM, South Carolina, and then I'll skip down Steven Rinella's tutelage and all things hunting was encyclopedic. My 6:00 AM brain struggled to absorb a motley assortment of miscellanea. Point, deer are classified as crepuscular. In simple terms, they move mostly at dawn and at dusk. Point, Kiefer Sutherland was once swindled in a cattle rustling Ponzi scheme. I'd forgotten that one. Point, if Steve could only eat one meat for the rest of his life. Let me know if this has changed. A monthly 50-pound allotment of any wild or domesticated animal, it would absolutely be elk, specifically cow elk or young bull elk. Point, the original version of The Joy of Cooking had instructions for how to fatten a trapped opossum with milk and cereals for 10 days before slaughtering and cooking it. Point, the neck of a male deer in mating mode, in other words, a ruddy buck, in quotation marks, can double in size, making it look like a linebacker.

• 9:00Tim Ferriss?

  Point, skinning a rabbit is easier than taking off your socks. Grab the scruff and peel, pulling down towards the head. Eating rabbit requires caution, though, as you can die from tularemia, an infectious disease named after Tulare County in California. Steve is as down to earth, this won't go too terribly long, so bear with me. Steve is as down-to-earth as you would hope any good hunter to be, but he didn't fit my stereotype. For instance, he applies physics terms to skinning, and most relevant to my food quest, as he put it, quote, "They're far better chefs out there than me, they're far better hunters out there, too, but there aren't many who can combine the two like I do." He is a master of turning the wild into, quote, "ingredients people recognize." Now, I'm gonna need some French help. In 2004, he prepared a three-day, 45-course, so I'll let that sink in for people, a three-day, 45-course banquet from Escoffier's landmark 1903 classic.

• 9:45Tim Ferriss?

  Is it Le Guide Culinaire? How do you, I have no idea how to say that proper.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  I'll tell you what I do. I say, "The Culinary Guide."

• 9:52Tim Ferriss?

  The Culinary Guide, nice. All right. And then the last, the last paragraph I'll read here is, "By prepare, I mean that he foraged, killed, and otherwise procured every ingredient from the outdoors, then recreated the feast himself, which took more than a week. This experiment was chronicled in his first book." Now, here's another French word. The scavenger's guide to haute cuisine, H-A-U-T-E.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  I've been well-trained in this one, and still, every time you do it, you get corrected. Oat.

• 10:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oat, okay.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  No, like it's like

• 10:19Tim Ferriss?

  Scavengers Guide to Oat.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Oat.

• 10:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oat, oat. I see. Without the H. All right. Scavengers Guide to Oat Cuisine.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  There you go. That was great, man. That was better than I do.

• 10:27Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. You know, you know, I've been, I've been working on my French on the side. He started trapping for income in rural Michigan when he was 10, now 38. That's of course changed. He writes for a living and his work is as likely to be seen in the New York Times as in Field and Stream. So I wanted to set the stage because I think a lot of people in their minds, as soon as I mention hunting or anything else will have an image pop up. And I don't think that image matches you all that well. The, at least the kind of stereotypical image that will pop up for non-hunters.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  When I was younger, I think it would have matched me perfectly well, man.

• 11:03Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. Say more.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  So I grew up in Michigan, but across the lake, you know, not terribly far away, sat state of Wisconsin. And my good friend, Pat Durkin in Wisconsin, had once said something along the lines of, you know, where he lived, that if you weren't a deer hunter, you at least slept with one.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  There wasn't a ton of, you know, there wasn't a ton of self-reflection at the time. And also raised up by a generation that hadn't been invited into and cultivated any kind of real conservation ethic. And there was a bit of a get what's yours while you can get it mentality that I grew up on. But I don't want to derail you. I just, you know, I just get a little bit, maybe we'll touch on this later.

• 11:47Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there's no rail.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  I often get accused.

• 11:49Tim Ferriss?

  You can't derail me.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  I often get accused of being somehow different than hunters or different than normal hunters or different than what you'd expect as a hunter. And man, like, I feel like I'm a lot like the people that I spend a lot of time with. I'm a lot like a lot of the people that I spend a lot of time with.

• 12:07Tim Ferriss?

  Let's dig into it. So for instance, in an interview that I read and prepped for this, you self-described as a hunter conservationist, right? Hyphenated. And I want to talk about that. And I guess by introing you the way that I did, what I wanted to point out, and I'll just personalize this, is that, you know, growing up, my exposure to hunters was very limited. It was limited to Seeing wounded deer with like arrows, it's like stuck in them on my property. My parents' property because people were A trespassing, B just not doing a very good job of hunting. Understanding that you're not going to have perfect shots all the time, but they're like beer cans everywhere. And it just wasn't a positive association.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 12:50Tim Ferriss?

  Now, in contrast, though, at least if we look at, I guess at the time, 38 year old Steve, who I went to South Carolina with for my first hunt, the experience and the explanation and the care and the attention to detail was something that I never would have associated with hunting growing up. I suppose all I'm trying to do is contrast those two things, which were largely an imaginary figure in my head, based on a few bits of exposure as a kid and then my experience with you, which were very, very, very different. And that's not to say that most hunters are what I experienced as a kid and not what you are. But let's dig into it. Like, why do you call yourself, if you still do, or identify as a hunter or conservationist?

• 13:35Speaker 03

  I absolutely do. Even sitting where I'm at today. So, you know, you're reading from when you're 38, I'm 46. Even sitting for where I am today, when I look back at what our relationship, when I say our, my families, the people I was around, what our relationship was with nature and the outdoors was very much based on a deep, deep love and appreciation for resources, for wild places, for nature. It was almost like, we would have never have put these words to it, but it was a sacred thing.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  And it was almost like a sort of worship for animals, in a worship of wild places. But...

• 14:28Speaker 03

  The perspective on it, I didn't know the history of how things came to be the way they were. We had a lot of national forest around us. We were sort of on the southern terminus of the Manistee National Forest. I think now it's the Huron Manistee National Forest. It was combined with another national forest. We were sitting at the southern terminus of that national forest. I couldn't have told you the first thing about how that place came to be. What sacrifices were made in our history to have the abundant wildlife that we had? I couldn't have told you how bad things had gotten in this country in the late 1800s and early 1900s with regards to wildlife. If there was a sign on that national forest

• 15:13Speaker 03

  that said closed to vehicular traffic, if it wasn't physically blocked, that would, that sign wouldn't really mean much to us. If it looked like somebody else drove there, we would drive there as well. I, at times, when faced with like an abundant surplus of things, sold things for money, that sold wild game for money, knowing you weren't really supposed to do that with some species that we would sell, but it was a thing that people around you did. You didn't really know that it was wrong. At the same time, we would see behaviors that we recognized as abhorrent, things that would probably blow away any negatives that you might have seen growing up. I've probably seen worse behaviors from

• 15:57Speaker 03

  hunters and anglers than you have. So I always lived with a, even if from my perspective right now, we had some poor behaviors, some ill thought behaviors, I always recognized a spectrum of bad behavior. And there were things that would happen around us that my father would be incensed about and would like dissociate with people who had extraordinarily bad behavior. And if you look at that sense of there being a spectrum of ethics or a spectrum of a conservation ethos throughout life with education and with like various epiphanies that come with just learning how to think and having exposure to

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Books and ideas, scientists, biologists, ecologists, philosophers, whatever. It's become more fine tuned and I now have a very acute sense of what it takes to have wildlife in wild places. I have a good understanding of that now. I understand our history now. And that has led me to like an extraordinary amount of reflection over the years about what role a hunter or an angler should play when it comes to environmental stewardship and hunting. So I associate as a conservationist because I try to really put my money in actions where my

• 17:17Speaker 03

  mouth is on conservation, meaning clean air, clean water, lots of animals, lots of wildlife habitat. Those are things I stand for. And I see that that is a thing that's increasing among my kind. But it's a little tough for me to think of myself as somehow extraordinary because I see many, many people go down the same path that I did. A long exposure to this seems to lead in this direction for most people.

• 17:44Tim Ferriss?

  For people who not only have no exposure to hunting themselves, but who have no real familiarity with how hunting works in the US from an economic perspective, the ecosystem, not necessarily the natural ecosystem, but sort of the fiscal ecosystem. I was reading an article and you seem to comment on the decline in hunting and fishing license sales as worrisome. Could you expand on that or speak to that? I'd love to give people an idea.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Oh, like how, how funding works?

• 18:18Tim Ferriss?

  How funding works.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would love to. This is something that there's a catch 22 almost within this. But yeah, I'd love to talk about that. So I know you have a global audience. I'm going to run down how it works in the United States. I can claim subject matter expertise in the US and I have a passing familiarity with other places, but I'm going to focus on the US. The US has 50 states, right? So all 50 states have a state fishing game agency and your state fishing game agencies are responsible for the stewardship. Of wildlife in your state. There are exceptions to this because migratory birds and some migratory fishes and things where an animal isn't going to live its entire life sort of in one in the confines of a particular

• 19:03Speaker 03

  state, then you'll have federal oversight over what happens in a state. Like there's sort of a some federal guidelines about how a state might handle its wildlife resources. There's other exceptions too, when you get an endangered species act and things like that, but generally you could say that the people in a state own the wildlife in that state. So if you're sitting in New York and you see a deer, you as a New Yorker own that deer. That deer is managed for you by your state agency. So it doesn't matter what that deer is sitting in a cemetery. If it jumps a fence into a county park, if it jumps a fence onto a farm, if it jumps

• 19:46Speaker 03

  a fence into a national forest, that deer is the state's, meaning it's yours. These agencies manage wildlife in terms of access to it. Oftentimes states manage like boat launches and trailheads on state lands and things, but they also do disease work on wildlife. So they do researching diseases, wildlife management, enforcement of wildlife laws. So if someone's poaching, it's a state issue. That all comes from your state fish and game agency. Some state fish and game agencies get no hard funding. When you pay your taxes in your state, in a lot of states, none of your general tax money goes to your state fish and game agency. The bulk of state fish and game agencies finances come from the sale of licenses, tags

• 20:31Speaker 03

  and stamps, hunting licenses, fishing licenses, permits, tags, all this stuff that goes with hunting and fishing. And another major funding source.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  For state fishing game agencies is excise taxes on firearms, ammunition, very use-specific sporting goods items, marine gas, fishing tackle, fishing line. These excise taxes, which can be like on guns and ammo, these excise taxes come in at around, you know, 11 or 12%. So when you go down and buy, even if some person that lives in New York City goes down and buy and they have a concealed carry permit, say, and they go down and buy some ammo for a concealed carry permit, about 11 or 12% of the cost they pay on that ammo goes to fund wildlife. And that's how we pay for this whole system. There are complexities to it, but

• 21:21Speaker 03

  that's how we pay for it. A fear about declining hunting and angling numbers. You know, angling numbers, this is since COVID, they're seeing a pretty strong uptick in fishing numbers with people. Like, I think people weren't able to go do what they would normally do. They're like, ah, fuck it, I'll go fishing, you know? And we're seeing a fair bit of that. Whether or not they'll be fishing in two years is not known. A fear about declining hunter numbers. And I'll tell you an interesting point. There, I think that there are about as many hunters right now as there were in the years following World War II. And they were low after World War II? Well, that was the peak in terms of per capita. That was the peak? All those dudes, this actually plays into my, I gotta remember where I was at. This actually plays into my own sort of genesis, right? Is my dad, my dad had me, he was old. My dad

• 22:06Speaker 03

  had had me when he was 50. He fought in World War II. And when he came home from World War II, he, like just about every other guy that went off and fought in World War II, got into hunting and fishing. It was sort of the, that era, the late 40s, early 1950s, that was the birth of the modern American sportsman. People had money, they were buying cars, they were traveling around. There was this, we were fetishizing the great outdoors. And my dad was part of that generation. But I'm saying hunting participation was so high then. I don't know, like, I guess you could look up real quick what the US population was in 1947, say, but, or 1950. But, you know, I think

• 22:49Speaker 03

  we've quadrupled our population, but we had about as many hunters then as we have now. So participation rates decline, in many cases, numbers of people who hunt decline. And a long-term fear, besides whatever that might mean for like a disassociation with nature and a disassociation with wildlife, it has funding implications. Because states, even if you hate hunters and anglers, you can't get around the fact that hunters and anglers fund your state's wildlife apparatus. If people aren't doing those activities anymore, those funding structures fall apart.

• 23:23Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the components of the wildlife apparatus? Like what are, for somebody, let's just say someone's, hey, I don't care about hunting. So why should I care about this?

• 23:31Speaker 03

  What are some of the pieces?

• 23:33Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  I'll give you a great, for instance. Anyone who hunts ducks, anyone in this country who hunts ducks, any kind of waterfowl, migratory waterfowl, ducks, geese, cranes, whatever. Besides buying your state license, state hunting license, you usually need like a base hunting license, you need a state waterfowl permit. You need to go buy a federal duck stamp. And for years, the federal duck stamp had been 15 bucks. It just raised up, it raised up into the twenties. All of that money, from all of those millions of individuals buying those federal duck stamps, all of that money goes into fund waterfowl habitat. Meaning it goes into wetlands work.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Anytime you, if you have a bear in your yard, or let's say you realize that you have a bear in your yard getting in your garbage, when you call a number, that's going to be someone from your wildlife agency is going to show up. That wildlife agency individual will show up. And when they show up, their salary, equipment, everything, like their agency is funded by expenditures from hunters and anglers. So a fear is that if hunter numbers go down, our ability to fund habitat work, like habitat improvement, habitat expansion, habitat acquisition, wildlife work, disease work, reintroducing

• 24:58Speaker 03

  species that were extirpated from the landscape, that a lot of that work will lose its funding And will go away. Could you define extirpate for people who are not familiar with that word? Yeah, it's a great word. I also want to get into the catch 22 of this all, but Yes. Yeah. Extirpate is, people are familiar with extinction, right? Extirpation is regional extinction, meaning grizzly bears are abundant. Grizzly bears are recovered in portions of Wyoming. Okay? Wolves are recovered in portions of Wyoming. Wolves have been extirpated from the bulk of their range in the US. Grizzly bears were extirpated from California. They're not extinct,

• 25:42Speaker 03

  but they're regionally extinct. So you could say that they were extirpated, like, brought to regional extinction in California. There's an ongoing bit of effort, much of it funded by hunters, for instance, around reintroducing species that were extirpated through habitat destruction and overharvest. For instance, at a time, New Mexico had literally run out of elk. They had none. Now they have thriving populations of elk and elk hunting seasons, you know, across the bulk of the state. But still, with as many elk as we have, as much as we associate elk hunting and seeing elk, elk are still missing from some 90% of their historic range. Everywhere was elk habitat and they're, they're, they've been extirpated. They're gone from those places.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Some of the work that's done by state agencies and other like wildlife groups, many of them hunter-based wildlife groups, is doing as much as we can to put those animals back where they belong. If you think, just like, if you look at it in terms of the turkey, at the time of European contact, we had wild turkeys in probably 39 states. There's some debate about where they were and it wasn't static, right? Like wildlife is dynamic, you know, it expands its range, its range shrinks. We probably had turkeys in 39 states. By the late 1800s, early 1900s, we only had wild turkeys in 19 states. They vanished from 10. Only a couple of states maintained any sort of turkey season. Most states, it was illegal to touch a turkey.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  We now have turkey hunting seasons in 49 states.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  So they did recovery and then some on turkeys. And that was driven by hunters and you could like, and someone could sit and say like, yeah, you guys did that because you like to hunt turkeys. And I would say, yeah, there's a lot of truth to that. There's a lot of truth to that. There was an incentive to do it, but it was done, you know? And this is the sort of work that would go down that you would lose if you lost that funding mechanism. Now the catch 22 is that, and this, this is legitimate. The catch 22 is that if hunter numbers go down, it's great for any individual hunter who has less competition. You could live in a world where you're the only guy that went out and hunted.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  You'd have a pretty sweet situation as long as you had public approval and didn't lose in the legislative process. And hunting got banned everywhere, which would probably happen pretty quickly if you were the only guy up to it. Cause there wouldn't be a lot of people there like guarding the gate. Right? So that's the catch 22. Like, that's the hard part of this. Some people find it deeply offensive. Well intentioned, well reasoned people find it deeply offensive that you would want to expand hunter numbers. Like, what are you talking about? Why would you do that? It'd be like when I was in, I think when I was in eighth or ninth grade, I had a civics teacher. No, he was in high school. I had a civics teacher who was supposed to help all of us kids get registered to vote. And he was like, why would I want you people to register to vote?

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Why would I want to dilute my vote?

• 28:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 29:28Tim Ferriss?

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• 30:07Tim Ferriss?

  If we look at the different extirpated species in portions of the United States, that whole spectrum, are hunters 99% or 100% focused on reintroducing basically target prey species? Or are they also involved in reintroducing species? I'm not saying necessarily, but you mentioned the grizzly or other carnivores who would compete with them for the game that they hope to capture themselves?

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's where it gets pretty tricky, man. I would like to tell you, I would love to tell you that my, uh, my hunting compatriots were as supportive of efforts to recover non-game species as they were game species. But that's not true.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  When you look at the habitat work, you'll find that we have these terms we use like capstone, keystone species. Okay. And when you look at organizations that do habitat work, they would tell you, and they're right in telling you this, that there is a massive trickle down effect. For instance, let's look at the work, work by two groups like Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, we'll do three Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Wild Turkey Federation. Okay. Now, you listen to those names. We'll throw a fish in one into and say trout unlimited, right? You look at those names. These are like species specific conservation groups and their

• 31:44Speaker 03

  constituencies are hunters and anglers. I'm sure there's probably some person that belongs to National Wild Turkey. I'm like a lifetime member of National Wild Turkey Federation. I'm sure there's people belonging to National Wild Turkey Federation that don't hunt turkeys, but in the words of Pat Durk, and I bet they sleep with someone that does, right? What their work winds up focusing on is it's not so much that you're managing the animals, though that happened at a time. At a time, like wildlife work in this country really was focused pretty heavily on moving animals around. Okay. Putting them back in places. That's become complicated for a variety of things, including disease transmission and

• 32:26Speaker 03

  other issues, just like red tape issues, bureaucratic issues, disease transmission issues that make, you can't just willy nilly truck animals around the country dumping them out where you wish they were anymore. It's tough. These organizations now mostly focus on habitat work. Oftentimes, their primary thing is simply buying and protecting habitat. When you get into something like Keystone Species, let's say your duck's unlimited, and you take money and you buy wetlands. Okay. You're looking for pristine imperiled wetland habitats and buy them, often through like a willing seller, willing buyer transaction, which is one of the things, also one of the things Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation does

• 33:08Speaker 03

  and Turkey Federation. These places all often do the same playbook. They get grants, they raise money from donors, they do fundraisers, and a big part of their work is they identify Keystone habitats for like, you know, and you hear like Keystone Species. So it's a thing that they want. It's a thing they like. And by securing habitat for that animal, you're securing habitat for everything that, that, that lives there. Restoring natural ecosystems. In the West, for instance.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  One of the more imperiled eco types in the West is like large riparian areas. Elk winter in these large riparian areas, meaning they go down along the main rivers. Okay. They go down into big river valleys to get out of the elevation, get out of the snow and get into good grasslands and eat. If you want to help elk, it used to be the best way to help elk was tranquilizing them, lifting them up with a helicopter and moving them over a couple of mountain ranges and letting them back go again. Now we recognize like the way to help elk is to look at like, where is the bottleneck in their wellbeing? And the bottleneck in their wellbeing is often riparian habitat areas. So we're going to go and preserve, protect as much riparian habitat as we can. Who else uses riparian habitat and who else likes a lot of elk?

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Well, wolves like it in the winter. Wolves need a lot of elk. So by helping elk through improving their habitat and protecting their habitat, you're helping everything on the landscape from songbirds to insects, pollinators, raptors. You're helping everything. People definitely recognize this when they participate in these activities, but the motivation is that people like elk, they like to hunt elk and they want a shitload of elk. And you can critique their motivation all you want, but then you can't really, you have to then look at like, what is the sum thing? The sum part of it is that a group like Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation or National Wild Turkey Federation, right?

• 35:07Speaker 03

  They have, every year they add to the net amount of pristine wildlife habitat that exists in this country. And you cannot say the same thing about PETA. You can't say it. When it really comes down to really saving animals, that's saving habitat. The animals, you give them the right place, the animals for the most part, take care of themselves and that's what's being done by hunters and anglers.

• 35:35Tim Ferriss?

  And I suppose that would, and you know so much more about this, but that would be in some respect, conditional upon letting the full spectrum of species flourish that are supported by this preservation or conservation of habitat for say, the elk during winter periods, right?

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I forgot that part. Yeah, there's a lot, there's a tremendous amount of animosity. There's a tremendous amount of animosity toward wolves among in the hunting community. It's definitely not across the board. I know a lot of hunters that really like to see wolves and welcome wolves on the landscape. But yeah, I should clarify that when it comes to, I'm speaking very generally here. Okay, I'm speaking very generally. I would say in general, let me put it this way, let's take a state that doesn't even have wolves. I would say that if someone proposed reintroducing wolves in Missouri, they would get an enormous amount of pushback from deer hunters.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  When someone decided to do reintroduction work in portions of Missouri on turkeys, I do not think they would have gotten any pushback from hunters. So yeah, what people, like all predators, I look at it a little bit like this, you know, when a coyote runs into a red fox, he likes to kill it. When a wolf runs into a coyote, he likes to kill it. Predators tend to want to reduce their competition. And I think that you could say that about hunters in general, though there are many, many, many exceptions. I know some very avid hunters, lifelong, very avid hunters, who really welcome wolves

• 37:18Speaker 03

  as wolves expand their range every year, welcome wolves back on the landscape. And even within those people that welcome back on the landscape, you'll find differences. There's a push right now, there's a, there's like a referendum vote in Colorado coming right up to sort of like mandate the reintroduction of wolves in Colorado. A lot of people are uneasy with that. The reason they're uneasy with that is wolves are coming in naturally drifting down from Wyoming. It's as nuanced as it is. You'll have people say, why would we reintroduce them when they're showing up at their own pace through natural migration? And that's like a pretty nuanced perspective, right? I welcome them walking in.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  I don't welcome them flying in. So it's hard to draw these sort of like real hard and fast rules about people's attitudes about it. And there's a real contradiction, like a funny part of this I like to point out to people. Alaska still has wolves and grizzlies, you know, I don't know across 99 or 95% of their historic range in Alaska. Alaska doesn't have large, they don't have large land mammals on the endangered species act, right? They've maintained all their stuff. Wolves everywhere you go, there's a likelihood of running into wolves. You're gonna run into grizzlies. Yet American hunters all dream of going up to hunt in Alaska. And you always want to point out like, are you sure?

• 38:39Speaker 03

  You hate wolves. That place is full of wolves. There must not be any game in Alaska. How could there be game in Alaska? They have wolves. And you would think with some people that wolves coming back into certain areas would mean the sure death of all ungulates that live there. And I think that's an exaggeration, but wolves don't eat granola bars either, you know, they eat seven pounds of meat a day. Seven pounds of meat a day. They're alive 365 days a year. They kill a lot of shit. And to say like how hunters think about it is really tough, man, because it's the full array of thoughts. But I'll say this, we don't like those wolves as much as we like those elk. And that's, that I can promise you is true.

• 39:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the wolf conversation, remember somebody put it to me as, you know, wolf, well, wolves in general are the Middle East of conservation. He said, if you want really, really strong emotions and a lot of polarity, then that is the right place to focus. There's a really good piece in the New Yorker, there's a profile on, I think it's Karen Vardeman, called the persuasive power of the wolf lady, which is about a go between, between these, these two polar extremes. And you actually had, I had someone named Mike Phillips, I don't know if you know that name, who's in Montana, but was involved with the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 40:07Tim Ferriss?

  And you had a scientist also on your podcast.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Diane Boyd.

• 40:12Tim Ferriss?

  That was outstanding. That was a, that was a really, really, really dense and also entertaining episode. So for people who want to, to dig into that, and I think Dave Meach, is that another, am I getting that right? M E C H. I'm not, I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. He's also somebody, if people want to learn more about this, he's another person who, who focuses quite heavily on the, the wolf component.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Colorado is faced with a very similar situation that is what Montana was faced with when they did a reintroduction in, you know, essentially in Wyoming, you know, in Yaleson National Park. Is that there were animals coming in naturally. There were animals coming in naturally from Canada. We would have landed eventually where in the future from today, we would have landed where we are now without doing the reintroduction. And, and some people would say the same thing about Colorado. They're headed that direction. There are wolves showing up. It used to be like a rumor. It was debated. It's just an absolute fact now. Like there are wolves in Colorado.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Coming in on their own. And some people prefer that because the social tensions become lower. There's a thing that can happen with animals. You might call it the spotted owlification of certain species where when conservation becomes so partisan and so political, oftentimes an animosity toward the animal develops because the animal becomes emblematic of what some people might view as federal overreach. Right. And like something being shoved down their throats. And so politically and culturally, it seems that it's a little safer to let things happen gradually and naturally than it is to force your hand by politicizing biology.

• 41:59Tim Ferriss?

  It seems super, super tricky, right? Because you have. So many subtleties here. And like you said, whether it's face masks or spotted owl or wolves, once things become politically associated, whether by just circumstance and momentum, or by some kind of engineering on one side or both sides for voting purposes, it complicates matters a lot. And then I would also-

• 42:26Speaker 03

  That's, it's really interesting that you, that you, I love that, the mention of face masks. Where, yeah, you're right. We're not talking about face masks.

• 42:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  We're not talking about- It's like, it's, we're not actually talking about the thing on your face. We're talking about like this whole set of ideas associated with the thing, right? Yeah, that's a good point.

• 42:44Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly, exactly. And humans are motivated, right? So you really have to take into consideration the motivations of whoever is speaking, whether they are hunters, non-hunters, or anyone with incentives in the world, right? And because there are people who would say, and we don't have to spend a ton of time on this, but that wolves were so forcefully removed. I don't want to apply the word artificial, but they were certainly with overwhelming sort of show of force and poison.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  With, they were removed with intent.

• 43:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, with intent, right?

• 43:19Speaker 03

  With like specific, specific stated intent. Elk were removed, not with a, they were removed, not with specific intent. No one set out to be like, I would like to remove elk from the landscape. It just happened.

• 43:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  But yeah, wolves are like, no, it was a plan. There was a bounty. There was poison. There was a plan. And the plan worked too well.

• 43:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah. So if anybody wants to wade into the Middle East of conservation, that's a good place to do it.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Oh, friendships end over wolves, man.

• 43:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it is a tense conversation for a lot of folks. You mentioned Alaska. I want to talk about Alaska, and I want to give a slice of life. Mini profile of Steve Rinella. So this, this is going to be another flashback moment. And for those interested, we, this is captured on footage, but I'm not sure all of it is captured. So you and I traveled up to Alaska at one point and ended up, fair to say, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. I mean, one of the most remote points in North America, got grounded for weather for a while. And it was just an incredible adventure. And we had at one point, actually at more than one point,

• 44:29Tim Ferriss?

  but at least at one point on camera, we had a grizzly, a barren ground grizzly, which you could explain, run into our camp. And the reason I bring up that is, A, that was something I'd never experienced before. And I and other members of the film crew were like, Steve, what do we do? Steve, what do we do? And this bear was running around this body of water straight towards camp. And I don't know how far away it was. Let's call it half mile. You can correct me, but let's just say a half mile, which is not very far. And meanwhile, you had just gotten out of your tent. This is the part that I don't know if it's on camera or not. You'd just gotten out of your tent. And I don't know if you remember this, a bunch of mosquito repellent had spilled in your tent.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Hundred percent deep had spilled and eaten a hole through the floor of my tent and warped my phone case and ruined my phone.

• 45:21Tim Ferriss?

  So, so you get up and you're like, God damn it.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Ate a hole, ate a hole through my tent. And that's the stuff we wear on our skin.

• 45:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So you are, so you're just like stamping around furious, cursing while this bear is, is running around this body of water. And everyone's like, Steve, Steve, what do you want to do here, Steve? Hey, Steve? And you're like, God damn it, motherfucker. So angry. And eventually they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you like grab a shotgun and shoot in the air and wave your hands and. Spooked this bear, which is a pretty large grizzly bear. You could speak to it, at least from my perspective, certainly a lot bigger than my dog, ran like a quarter mile away, kind of sat down and looked at us and just kind of waited. But could you, could you maybe add some color to that story? Because it certainly burned and etched the experience

• 46:15Tim Ferriss?

  indelibly into my mind. But what are, what are some of the details that I'm missing here?

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right about the D, the bottle 100% D. And man, it ruined, it ruined a lot of my stuff because it had given, I had given it a lot of time to fester, spilled in the corner of my tent and leaked out of like, it was a mess. In terms of the bear, yeah. So I'll point this out. We've been talking about grizzly bears. We've touched on grizzly bears in the lower 48. Anytime we use the word grizzly bear, if you asked a taxonomist, like a geneticist, they would tell you that grizzly bears in the lower 48, brown, what we call brown bears, Kodiak bears, barren ground grizzlies up on the Arctic slope where we were up in the Brooks Range, it's, it's all the same species, right? So they have

• 46:59Speaker 03

  big differences, physiological differences. They look different. They act different in these different places, but it's just different, you know, kind of like manifestations of the same animal. And then one of the things that these barren ground grizzlies up there are, you know, bears in the interior, a thing they're known for is they have these enormous home ranges. A brown bear, let's say a Kodiak brown bear, everybody's heard of that, like biggest bears in the world, biggest, you know, brown bears in the world. They might have a very, very small home range. They eat a lot of salmon. They live in a resource rich environment. They got their spot and they, they stay there and defend it against other boars. But up in these areas, you have, it's, I hate to say this, I don't want people to take it the wrong way. Up in the, like the Arctic slope and in the Brooks Range,

• 47:44Speaker 03

  it's a, it's a resource poor area. It looks amazing. It's gorgeous. When you're out in front of a migrating herd of caribou, it looks like the land is like crawling with animals. But the thing is, you could sit there at times of the year, you could sit there for months and nothing will come by. And so a big animal like that just covers ground. And they need to be extraordinarily opportunistic. They're going to be eating primarily, probably the bulk of that animal's diet is going to be vegetation, berries, roots. But they're just on the move all the time because they're always out looking for like that big windfall. A big hit, like a big protein hit.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  And so they cover ground and they have an amazing nose on them. I one time was caribou hunting in a different area east of where you and I were. And we had gone three miles up a tributary to a river and killed a caribou. And gutted it and hauled the meat back down to the main stem. That night, we were sitting on the main branch of the river at the mouth of that tributary and watched a grizzly coming down, digging up roots in the gravel bar. And it got to the mouth of that tributary and you could see something strike its nose to where like a scent. And it stood up on its back legs, waved its nose in the air for a long time, spun around, did it again. And eventually ran up that tributary.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  And I didn't go check, but I am certain based on the wind patterns that he smelled that gut pile from three miles away. And that's what they're out doing, man. They're covering ground. And so on that trip we were on, we had, I don't know, at the time, one or two caribou on the ground. And there's no trees there, you know, it's a barren land, you know, a treeless environment. And the trees that are there are shrubby and doesn't do any good, meaning you can't hang it up in a tree to keep it safe. So if you have a cache of meat that you're trying to protect, the best thing is to put it where you can keep an eye on it. Like close to camp, if you move it away a mile, it's just going to get, you know, consumed and you won't even, you won't be able to protect it. You won't even know that it happened. If you put it right in your camp, you're inviting stuff to come right in your camp.

• 49:52Speaker 03

  So you just kind of put it off where you can keep an eye on it. 75 yards away, 100 yards away, depending on what's going on. And this bear comes along to claim that caribou. He's probably done that a ton of times. He comes in and probably has in his life, countless times fought off other bears to claim a dead caribou. Fought off wolves to claim their caribou. In that place too, it's very likely that that animal had. Never had a direct experience with a human before. Sees aircraft, right? Whatever. Maybe smelled people somewhere, but probably never had direct experience. It just is knowing that it's cruising along and probably had miles away long before we knew it was there, had smelled that animal and was coming to get it.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  And then it gets there and you present to it in a way that's kind of like authoritatively saying, this is already mine. This thing is claimed. You have no right to be here. Like that's what you're trying to express to that animal. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. I got a lot of friends, you know, people lose stuff to those things all the time. But in that case, that little show of force, like I'm not afraid of you. This is my shit. It is not your shit. Worked and he ran off and then surprisingly didn't come back in the dark and try again.

• 51:09Tim Ferriss?

  I remember going to bed that night and it was just like, you know, we're in these skin thin, single person tents and I was saying to, I'm half blanking on his name. Was it Nick? It was Nick.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, was Nick with us? Nick Brigden?

• 51:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Nick. Yeah. Nick was with us and I was like, well, hope you don't die tonight. And he was like, you too, man.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Cause they can have a real attitude about claiming stuff, man. You know, claiming to kill and people get every year, it's kind of amazing to think, you know, every year in the lower 48, you know, multiple people get killed most every year from grizzly bears. This is going to sound callous, but you know, that that could happen is like, I hold that risk is kind of cool. I like it. Like I don't mind there being something big and scary like that out there. In fact, I derive a lot of emotional satisfaction from it. And this is beyond any sense that, that I don't like it when humans play God and decide to remove animals from the landscape, but just, I just, I like that.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  I feel more alive, better, more engaged, happier in places that have that full suite of large predators, omnivores, you know, out on the landscape. So I relish.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Those interactions. And I also am aware that, you know, at some point in time, I'm part of a very high risk group around bears. And I don't think that something will happen to me, but I'm part of a high risk group. And it's like, I'll feel lucky if I get out of life without having someone I'm very close to get mauled by a bear or killed in a small airplane crash. You know, it's just like things I recognize is like, those are real, actual, those are actual real threats. People fixate on the wrong things when they imagine danger. But if you're spending a lot of time hunting in these areas, that's not a fantasy that you could get mixed up with a bear.

• 53:03Tim Ferriss?

  It strikes me that if we're talking about, for instance, the bear attacks, which are so visually memorable for anyone who's seen the Revenant, for instance, they're gonna, they're gonna have a movie they can play in their mind of what a bear attack looks like, where a small plane crash may just be off menu. They just don't have a reference for it.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  But that's great. And we definitely don't have one for hypothermia.

• 53:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we don't have one.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  No one goes in the woods being like, dude, I hope I don't die of hypothermia. But I'm like, you know what? That's like, I'd be watching out for that.

• 53:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's not, it's cinematically compelling, but it's sure will kill you just as well. And are you more afraid? Because you, you take a lot of small aircraft, I would imagine. I mean, certainly we did. We took these, you know, bush planes, these are tiny, tiny aircraft, and you are not landing on perfectly manicured asphalt at all times, right? And do you worry more about the aircraft or in this case, bears predators?

• 54:05Speaker 03

  The thing about the aircraft is like, there's a sort of statistical bit of it, right? Like you can look, you go to a place like Alaska, where it's like, it's a primary mode of transportation. Like in most places, like having a private, single-engine plane is a hobbyist, right? Or like a flying enthusiast, you know, oftentimes flying for the sake of flying. You know, a place like Alaska and much of Canada, you know, it's like, that's like how you get around, right?

• 54:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  It's, it's like how you do it. I remember it was, I think it was Ted Stevens in Alaska. I think it was him, that had talked about an occupational hazard of politics in that state was small aircraft, and then died in one. But you can look at like hours, you know, like crashes per hour or whatever. So someone like me, no, I don't have any real reason to worry about it. I have a brother who's a, who's an ecologist in Alaska, and he spends a lot of time.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  And single-engine aircraft, a lot of time in, you know, fixed wing and helicopters. And yeah, man, you get to a point where all those people that do that, they all know people, right? They all know people that that's happened to. I'm to the point now where like, you know, I've been in planes that I later knew crashed.

• 55:22Tim Ferriss?

  That's spooky.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. But it's like, for me, it's just so minor. Like, you know, you know, some number of trips a year, but the people I know, like especially people in the, in the fish and wildlife, who do fish and wildlife work up there, I do worry, man. I do worry. Like, my brother spends a lot of time in those things and I worry about that. But for me, if you're at least open to thinking statistically, personally, I have no reason to be concerned.

• 55:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, for people who want to get a glimpse of Alaska, you could certainly read some amazing books like Coming Into the Country by John McPhee. But if you want a visual sampler, I just pulled this up. I don't know if this is accurate because it's on IMDb. It could be. It says, "Season three, episode one of Meat Eater."

• 56:05Speaker 03

  That sounds right.

• 56:05Tim Ferriss?

  Is, is our episode where we travel to the remotest corner of Alaska to catch the annual migration of the famed Western Arctic caribou herd. Can people find, where can people find, if they can, these, these older episodes?

• 56:19Speaker 03

  You can find all the older episodes if you go to themeater.com and you'll go there and you'll find, you'll find your avenue to all the older episodes.

• 56:30Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, great. Yeah, it looks like the episode is called True North, Alaska North Slope Caribou. Season three, episode one. We'll, we'll put that in the show notes also, guys.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, those are also, they're, they're also available and are broadcast by Sportsman Channel, you know, like Outdoor Channel and Sportsman Channel. But then you can also find them by going to themeater.com. They're not available on Netflix. We're going to be doing some things soon around distribution with some of our older material, but that's where you can find them right now.

• 57:00Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. Let's move from television to.

• 57:04Tim Ferriss?

  Books, and in this case, books that are not yours. We can certainly spend more time on books that are yours. But I read that you recommend, and I don't know how old this interview was, a few books very commonly. Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell, Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, and Boone by Daniel Morgan. Do you still, or would you still recommend those? What's special about these books?

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Son of the Morning Star is about the events leading up to and including the battle at Little Big Horn, where Custer's Last Stand. It's a great story. I mean, it's just like a story that just makes its own gravy. It's just incredible, the brutality, and just weirdness of that campaign, the culmination of Custer's involvement in that campaign. One of the things I love most about it, besides just like phenomenal reporting, is the openness with which the author approaches how different people remember

• 58:09Speaker 03

  things. And reading it, you get a sense of how there are, at any given time, and this is just so applicable today, there are 100 truths. I don't mean 100, like 100. There are as many truths as there are people about what went on during something. And his exploration of people's accounts of what happened that day and the days surrounding it, when Custer died, and who did what, and who was where, and who thought what, and what was going on. It's just, the question marks that loom over that stuff are unbelievable. It's a great telling. It's a great piece about just like human memory, but also a phenomenal

• 58:54Speaker 03

  history of the American West, and a phenomenal history of the Indian wars. To say like, what led up to the Battle of Little Big Horn, you can approach that in 100 ways, man. You can take a 500-year approach, right? You could take a decade approach. You could take a week-long approach. And he kind of manages to sort of like cover off on all Those ways to lead up to how in the world did a couple hundred US soldiers get wiped out, killed off by Plains Indians armed with antiquated firearms and bows and arrows in, to quote one of the Sioux participants in the battle named Gahl, in the amount of time that it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  It's just so bizarre. It's just candy. Like it's, it's history candy. And he's such a great, he's just great. I view it like a Western literature masterpiece. Arctic Dreams is a work of natural history. Arctic Dreams is a book about the Arctic. One of the most profound parts about it for me is that the author, Barry Lopez, is very uneasy with hunting. I would venture to say that Barry Lopez would probably not like me too much, but- What would he, what would he dislike about you? He's just very uneasy with hunting. Got it. He's on, you know, if you read, he's uneasy with hunting. He spends a lot of time with indigenous

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  hunters in the Arctic. So he spends a lot of time with Eskimo Inuit hunters. And he is at peace. He's relatively at peace with that, though he recognizes the violence, but he's at peace with that indigenous approach to hunting. You would look at that and I find that's often quite true. People who would be like, they don't want violence toward animals, right? But they're very accepting if it's done by an indigenous person, as though the animal somehow feels that pain differently. You can't really ignore that. If you're a walrus getting shot in the head on the ice floe, I don't know that you care who's pulling the trigger.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Right. I really don't think that that is of issue to them. But people are, tend to be much more comfortable with that. And he gets into it and Arctic Dreams also just is someone trying to comprehend an incomprehensible landscape. Tim, I don't know if you remember being out there on the, in the Arctic there. Do you remember the tusks?

• 1:01:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, well, I was going to, you know, I was gonna bring those up because you mentioned the lack of trees. I was going to make T-shirts for everybody. Do you remember that? I love tussocks.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Tim Ferriss?

  Because those fucking ankle breakers, man, you gotta, I mean, they're, you can describe them, they're like one-third inflated volleyballs covered with fucking dog hair. I mean,

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  They're like the most dangerous things you can think of, and it's just like many, many hundreds of square miles of these things.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you can't decide if you're gonna try walking between the tussocks or on the tussocks. And the tussocks are, you know, they might be like 12 inches, 18 inches tall, and they flop around. I always liken it to if you filled a gym full of six inches of water and then took basketballs and somehow like tethered them to the floor.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  So that all the basketballs are touching.

• 1:02:15Tim Ferriss?

  And then tried to walk across that.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  And then you'd be like, you gotta go across there for a few miles. And then you might figure out some way to walk on those basketballs, I don't know. Or you might find some way to get your feet wedged down between those basketballs. But either way, like I invite you to do this little journey. But in Arctic Dreams, one of the best parts of Arctic Dreams is talking about a botanist who spends their day face down on a tussock, counting, doing a survey on that tussock of the vegetation on that tussock and the thousands of blades of, you know, sedges and forbs and, right? And just trying to comprehend like, what's going on in this tussock? All these plant species, right? Incredibly dense.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  And then having this feeling of like doing that and then looking up in any direction you can look, as far as the eye can see, is just more and more and more of those tussocks, right? It's just like an incomprehensible landscape. And that book does a wonderful job of spelling that out. And it does a wonderful job of like challenging some things, of challenging some things and challenging some assumptions.

• 1:03:26Tim Ferriss?

  And that book won the National Book Award.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  I was just looking it up.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  It's phenomenal.

• 1:03:31Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's, that's no joke. Just as, just as a side note, I still want to hear about Boone, but the, I think perhaps the most nervous that I was at any point in that trip. In the Brooks range was, well, if I'm being honest, it was probably the grizzly bear acutely, but nothing happened. But when I had a lot of time to meditate on the dozens of ways that I could like fracture a leg or dislocate a hip and really be fucked because you know how hard it is to get to this place. And it's not like you just call someone on a cell phone and you know, an Uber helicopter shows up in five minutes. Like you could be stuck there for a very long time.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Oh, well, yeah, weather depending. You'd be there days.

• 1:04:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So when we were packing out the meat from the caribou hunt. And so imagine you're in this, this gym that you visualized earlier, right? With, with the six inches of water with all the basketballs touching and tethered to the floor. And you have to walk across that and then take a backpack with, I don't know, you tell me, I'm not, I don't recall what percentage of the body weight of a caribou would end up being harvestable meat. But I don't know what 60 to 100 pounds on each person's back, maybe something like that.

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. You know, you'd have a total of then, you know, over a couple, you know, a couple hundred pounds potentially. Well, that might be a bit much, but yeah, you'd be with, with the bones in there. You're moving, you're moving a couple hundred pounds for sure. Plus.

• 1:04:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  So that impacts ranging like at 50 pounds, a backpack is substantial. It decreases your mobility. At 90 and 100 pounds, a backpack is, you're like, wow, this is sort of a, you need to step carefully. Like you're like, you could hurt yourself carrying this weight. Like it's not good for you to carry this weight.

• 1:05:22Tim Ferriss?

  And I remember, you know, you commenting that if there were a sport that just involved carrying heavy weights for long distances, that you could be.

• 1:05:31Speaker 03

  That'd be the one sport I'd be good at.

• 1:05:33Tim Ferriss?

  And in my case, it's like, when's the last time that I walked on half inflated volleyballs for a mile with 100 pounds or 80 pounds on my back? And the answer is never. And I was like, wow, like, okay, my like glute medius and all these stabilizers in the hip have no training for this whatsoever. So thank God there are people like Dan Doty and other monsters behind the cameras are like, yeah, let me just grab that for you. I'm like, okay, hurts my masculine pride a bit, but I'm less interested in fracturing both my legs. So I'll take the help. Thanks very much.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  Trained Tussock walkers.

• 1:06:09Tim Ferriss?

  So Boone by Daniel Morgan.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've had a lifelong fascination with Boone and uh, any little kid that grows up loving to hunt and trap and fish and stuff like you're aware of Boone, right? You're aware of this pioneer Boone. And at various times in history, he was remembered as, you know, an Indian fighter, right? Even though he never, he didn't really have a big appetite for that. And if you look at what he did, he actually went out of his way, typically went out of his way to avoid violence. But an Indian fighter, a pioneer, an explorer, hunter, trapper. And you know, and at various times in my life, I've been in love with different aspects of what he did. But in, in he often in old books, you know, he was kind of presented as this

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  swashbuckling, you know, Davy Crockett figure, right? Whistling through the woods, just being a hero. But there's a lot of complexity there around this person and sort of this idea that he was heavily involved in destroying what it was that he loved. He made his money in a variety of ways and he was a horrible, had made a lot of business mistakes, a lot of land mistakes and different investments and stuff. But like for the most of his life, he was a commercial hunter and he was a trespasser. So he was hunting places, one that had Native Americans that claimed it and lived on it. And they fought amongst themselves over ownership of these hunting grounds. But there was that, which meant, you know, next to nothing to him.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  And then there was the fact that he was trespassing on land that he wasn't supposed to come on from his own government. Um, in the time of the colonies, the, we, we were always striking these deals where we would assure the tribes like, oh, no, no, this is about it. We're not going to go any more west. Uh, we promise our settlers won't go over that line and the rest of that's yours. We'll take this and, and Boone didn't care about that stuff at all either. He just went where he wanted to go. Um, and we now like do this, we describe this as a sort of celebration of freedom. But it'd be, uh, if you took that attitude today, you would be called an interloper and a poacher and you'd wind up in jail. But he was pursuing his trade. He hunted deer for leather.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  Not so much meat. They hunted deer for leather, leather workwear. It was sold and tanned and they made like the equivalent of making car hearts today. He did that for a lot of the year and then he hunted bears for the oil and meat markets. He would go out, kill bears, smoke the meat, render the fat, sell the smoked meat, bear bacon and sell the bear oil. And that's how this guy made his living. The book does a great telling of all this stuff, but a thing that I love about Boone and I've come to respect about Boone is he exemplifies this part of my history as a hunter. When I say my history, I don't mean the things that happened in my life, but as a continuation of a sort of discipline, as a continuation of hunting in America, he's this really pinnacle

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  moment where you have this person that loved wilderness, loved the outdoors, risked his neck day to day to go to the wildest places and celebrate them. And he liked those places. He wanted to be there. Boone would sometimes go on a hunt that would last two years.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  Gone from his wife and family for two years hunting and lost all the hides he built up twice by having them confiscated by Native Americans who resented his trespassing. He liked it. He could have found 100 other ways to make a living. That was what he was. He was a woodsman, but he was one of these guys in our own history who was instrumental in wiping wildlife off the face of America. And it's this part of this conundrum we're in where we look and I'm like that, I celebrate that guy, right? His skill set, you can't begin to comprehend his skill set. All the shit they did, they did without flashlights. It's like you can't begin to comprehend the

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  skill set and admire. And like, if I could go back in time, my number one pick would be to go through the Cumberland Gap with Daniel Boone, the first time he went through the Cumberland Gap and cross down into the hunting grounds in Kentucky to do that walk with him. But my God, the damage, like the damage.

• 1:10:24Tim Ferriss?

  No, was the damage his influence or was it just the manner? Which that he hunted and what he represented being done on a wider scale. What was the damage?

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Both influence by opening up those places. It would have happened anyways. Someone else would have done it by opening up settlement, opening up, clearing the road for the displacement of indigenous people, clearing the road for people who would destroy the habitat, but also just the mechanical, physical removal of all that wildlife. He one time processed, I think it's right around, I think this is correct. I think one time he processed 109 black bears in a year.

• 1:11:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's a lot of bears.

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  Oh, listen, they wiped them. We talked about extrapation earlier. They were wiping out stuff without even knowing they'd wiped it out. There used to be bison in Nashville. There's a guy that saw a thousand bison at a mineral lick near Nashville one time. People came into New Orleans and saw bison. They were on the beach. It seems as though people ran into near Washington DC. These guys shot stuff. They shot stuff so fast and so thoroughly that the shit was gone and they didn't know it was gone.

• 1:11:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's incredible.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  We now sit around, people, we sit around now like the last bear of, you know, he killed the last bear in Indiana or whatever, you know? It's like, it's like a thing, he's kind of celebrated. I mean, they were just rapacious, but they had no compre- I don't think they had any comprehension of what they were doing. There's a story I like to tell a lot about with bison. There's a story I like to tell a lot about the hide hunters that.

• 1:11:51Tim Ferriss?

  Can I pause you for one second?

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  Oh, please.

• 1:11:53Tim Ferriss?

  Just to establish your bona fides. So I'm looking at one of your many books and this one is American Buffalo in Search of a Lost Icon, 1,213 reviews, average five stars. So you, you, you've done a lot of reading and research related to this. Please continue.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I knew that world real well back when I was working on that book, but there's a great story about like what the damage that hunters do without knowing they've done it is, you know, so I'm going to just throw some wild round numbers out. Like at the end of the civil war, it's estimated there were maybe about 15 million buffalo, bison. On the Great Plains, right? And we were hunting them for their tongues, meat, but mostly we were hunting them for their hides. There was a, there was a strong market for leather and hides and we had a lot of market hunters chasing after them. So the Civil War ends, people say there's maybe about 15 million. We really turn our attention west. We start cutting railroads. We open up avenues of trade, meaning you can, you could kill buffalo and stick the hides on rail cars and send them to market. We had, uh, we were feeding an

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  industrial revolution. And so Pete, there's a lot of money to be made shooting hides. And they kind of killed off the ones in the South from the Texas plains, Kansas, right? And then they started working on the Northern herds. And some people say that, that by the time the Northern Pacific Railroad made it into, had crossed the Western Dakotas, made it into Eastern Montana. There was maybe a couple million left in the last wild herd and they shot that herd out in the winter of 81, 82, 1881, 1882, gone, right? Couple of years later, this guy Hornaday, William T. Hornaday goes out there to collect specimens for the Smithsonian. Like the assumption is they'll just be gone. They'll be exterminated, extinct. And he wants to collect some hides and bones and stuff so that man in the future

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  will be able to behold what these things looked like before they were driven to extinction. Uh, and he comments, when he gets out to Miles City, he comments how the people that live around Miles City, the ranchers, the merchants, were people that had been involved in that last big slaughter. And then they were just hanging around, waiting for the next herd to come through. Everybody knew there must be a bunch more up north or somewhere. And they waited and a year goes by and none came. And they waited and two years goes by and none came. And eventually they kind of got like, huh? And set up various businesses and ranching operations and gradually occurred to them that like, oh shit, we got them all. Accidentally, right? It's like, so when you look at these people, like getting back to

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  this Boone thing, which is the question. When you look at these people that were engaged in this stuff, like I don't think they, they knew. They knew that something was amiss and they knew that like things were changing. Cause that's why Boone had to constantly move Pennsylvania to North Carolina. He constantly marched west. By the time he died, it's rumored that he had made it all the way up into the Rockies following. The Missouri River up on a hunting trip. He always had to move west because they killed everything and it forced him to need to move. He was aware of this, but I don't know that they really were like villains. I don't know that they really were acting with malicious intent, but my God, were they destructive and also just cool. It's like, it's a good book. It's, it's the best piece of work about Boone.

• 1:15:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, these are all amazing stories. Your story is pretty incredible and want to rewind to your first sold piece of writing. So you mentioned this in passing. We didn't get really into it, but your plan A was to be a professional fur trapper up until something like 22, right?

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  I had to give up.

• 1:15:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I had to give up for a whole, whole host of reasons. And you decide that plan B was to become an outdoor writer. So your, your first story sold in 2000 to outside. Is that right?

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. That was the first like piece I like sold for money.

• 1:15:49Tim Ferriss?

  What was that piece about?

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  That.

• 1:15:52Tim Ferriss?

  You remember?

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  Oh, I do. I, I'm still mad about the title. Um, you don't get to pick your own title. They called my article getting jiggy.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Which I'm still mad about it. 20 years later. I love dearly. I love dearly and I'm still friends with the person who oversaw that process. I've never told her about my, my anger, but it was about, so for a while, for a semester, when I was young, like I was young in Michigan and everyone that if you hunted and fished, you know, where you needed to go live was what we called the UP. That was like the cool spot. And so some of my closest friends, my brothers, they like went up to the UP to go to college. UP Upper Peninsula. Upper Peninsula, Michigan. Yeah. So, and it was just like, kind of like the, the promised land, you know, or that's how we viewed it anyway. And I went up there to live for a semester at Lake Superior State University. My brother Danny, he stayed up there and graduated from

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  there. So I was in and out of there all the time. And there was this hydroelectric diversion canal in Lake Superior where they peel water off the St. Mary's River and run it through a channel and run it through a hydroelectric dam, right? So just to turn turbines to make electricity. And, uh, this canal had a lot of aquatic insects that lived in it. And so fish would gather at the outwash of this dam. So where they release the water out after passing through the turbines, they release this water back into the St. Mary's River. And it would carry with it a lot of food. And you'd go up and like, we would actually tie our boats up to the dam. And you're just fishing for whitefish, Lake Superior, Great Lakes whitefish. You're fishing for whitefish in the outwash of the dam. And we would sometimes,

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  my brothers had figured this out, you could leave the bar. It was competitive to get the right tunnel, the right turbines that seemed to hold a lot of fish for whatever reason. I never understood. Certain turbines held a lot of fish. No matter how early you got up, you know, some dude had beat you, some old timer beat you to the spot. So my brothers hit on this idea just to leave the bar at one or two in the morning, whatever, and go out with a sleeping bag.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  Okay. And sleep. Was a technical term. You mean the bar. Oh, no. Be like, well, screw getting up at five. Let's just sleep there. So I would go out with my brother Danny and, and, uh, they'd run, we'd run a boat up in, and we'd go in the tunnel. Like you're, like you're in the bowels of the dam because it's warm in there from the turbine. And there's these like little hooks in there and you could drive your boat into the tunnel and tie off and just like sleep in a sleeping bag. And then at five in the morning, when some old, you know, some old timer fishing fanatic shows up, lo and behold, you know, you're laying there hungover in a sleeping bag, ready to fish. And I, I wrote a, a piece about this. Oh, you know what? I was wrong earlier. That wasn't the one they called getting jiggy. I was mistaken about that. That was

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  called dawn patrol. Again, jiggy was, was another article I wrote about something very similar in Seattle. I'm sorry. I was, I screwed that up. Dawn patrol. And I sold, I was still in graduate school and sold, I remember for 4,000 bucks and I couldn't imagine that amount of money. That's. It was like an unfathomable amount of money.

• 1:18:59Speaker 03

  We partied for days after that.

• 1:19:02Tim Ferriss?

  Were you always a, an able writer? Or did you do something between, I guess, 22 or whenever you began thinking about outdoor writers an option? What enabled you to get to that point? Because I am not a features writer or a magazine writer. So it's hard for me to, I don't, it's hard for me to speculate in that world, but I wouldn't imagine that most folks start off with a $4,000 payment for a magazine piece. They're probably doing bit small stuff here, there.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  Well, I did all that small work after that. You know, it took a long time. I got encouragement, you know, it's so hard to like pick out like what exact moment turned it, but, but absolutely this, this goes out to all the school teachers out there. When I was in 10th grade, I had a English teacher named Bob Heaton. Mr. Heaton took interest in me as a writer. You know, I later went to, I did a, you know, master of fine arts, right? I did all, I studied with phenomenal writers. I've had many mentors. I've had people pull strings for me. I've had great advantages, right? Expert technical training, all this stuff. It's really hard to talk about how you got somewhere where you are, but I feel as though

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  if Mr. Heaton, if this 10th grade English teacher hadn't spotted something there and made me aware of it, that I probably wouldn't have done what I did. I think that's pretty fair to say. He, this is kind of interesting around this, I don't know if you're, how much you pay attention to, to, you know, like the education system today, but there's this thing where like, we're more and more into like grooming kids for this fear that we're more and more into grooming kids for standardized testing. And like, I guess at that time, Mr. Heaton didn't really give it, he didn't give a shit about, he didn't give a shit about whether you're like, you're like doing the assignments. I mean, if you were a slacker or weren't trying, he wanted you to do the assignments, you know? But this guy gave a lot of room.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  If he saw something you liked, he just gave you a lot of room to like focus in and explore. It sounds like a lot for 10th grade English. You go there for an hour. A day and half the time you're not paying attention. But in that time, in a couple of classes I took with him after, in that time, he like, he, he took the time to develop things in kids and, and maybe took the time to develop things in kids who otherwise didn't have a lot of prospects. And, and that's what led me onto the path and it's, it's been like wild because you know, you go on and I want to be a writer and, and kind of backed into doing television and backed into doing a podcast and now helping to run a, an outdoor media company. But yeah, man, maybe it boils down to that.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  And the trapping thing is I started, I've set my first trap with my brothers in 1984. And there had been these insanely high fur prices in 1978 through at 1982. And people were making a bunch of money trapping muskrats and stuff. I came in at the tail end of that and fur prices just went down, down, down. But in the beginning of that, I thought that I would, that's what I would do for a living.

• 1:22:04Tim Ferriss?

  Now you've, you've expanded quite a lot, as you mentioned, beyond the writing. Before we leave the world of writing, if you were teaching a class, and for all I know, maybe you have, but if, if you were teaching a class, not an English class, but a writing class specifically, could be to 10th graders, could be to freshmen in college, doesn't really matter, but I would say, could be MFA, but by that point, people have already kind of decided and honed some of their skills. So probably, let's just call it 10th grade through to end of college, you could pick the age. What would you do? What would your approach look like? Are there any core books or practices or anything that you would, you would use in your class?

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not gonna do the 10th grade one, but I'll do the college one, grad school one. I, I just don't have the expertise to, it's hard for me to understand 10th graders, even though I, you know, once upon a time was one, I, I understand college, like I, I'm more aware of where, I was just more cognizant by then. If I was gonna like just writers in general, like writing in general, if I was going to give advice to someone, this is gonna, I don't know if anyone else gives this advice this way. I would read everything you can get your hands on. I would pay a lot of attention to the things that you read that really speak to you, that make you feel jealous, that you wish you would have wrote it.

• 1:23:16Tim Ferriss?

  I see, got jealous of the writing itself.

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  You're like, my God, if I could do that, right? Pay attention to the things that make you feel like. Like you want to die. It's so good and you're so jealous. Find that handful of writers that that make you feel that way. Try to understand what they're doing and then don't try to mimic one of them, but create a way in which you're trying to mimic, or you're trying to capture the thing that you envy about three or four different writers. Because they're too smart to be emulated. You can't copy them. They're geniuses. In trying to copy them, you will, if you're lucky and you're good, you will come up with something new because you will never succeed in copying them. That would be my advice to writers.

• 1:24:01Tim Ferriss?

  Dig it.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  That's what I did.

• 1:24:02Tim Ferriss?

  Outside of the books that we already talked about, is there a particular writer who inspires that? Jesus, if I could just do that.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  Oh, for me?

• 1:24:11Tim Ferriss?

  Sense in you? Yeah.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. Joan Didion. This is, I'm dating myself because these are the books that were cool when I was in graduate school. Joan Didion, Ian Frazier, John McPhee and David Foster Wallace.

• 1:24:24Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  Those are the people, those are the people that were like, if I could do that, I would be happy. Like those are the magicians. Black magic shit, man.

• 1:24:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, black magic. Yeah, there's.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  I don't know how they do what they do.

• 1:24:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, they're definitely those experiences. I've been having those experiences in fiction quite a bit, even though I'm not a fiction writer. But it's funny when I talk to, I don't, I don't know if, I don't know if you've written fiction. I have not.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  No, never.

• 1:24:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I've, I've spoken to some very competent fiction writers who've been like, oh, nonfiction's too hard. And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me?

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:25:01Tim Ferriss?

  Like not, good nonfiction is hard. Don't get me wrong. Like to do anything really well takes dedication and some degree of talent, I suppose. But when I read really good fiction, I'm like, yeah, no, I can't do that.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's that, that's art. There's like, that's art. It leans in the direction of art and I think nonfiction leans in the direction of craft.

• 1:25:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. We were talking about season three, episode one, you have season nine of Meteor that just launched and you've have all these different projects. But if we're looking at Meteor, the television show, you've more than a hundred episodes now. Are there any particular episodes that really?

• 1:25:42Tim Ferriss?

  Stick out for you. Any particular trips that are favorites? Could be the film or experience and maybe that's a lazy question, but I'll throw it out there anyway.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  No, they're, they're, they're different. What, what we do isn't, isn't overly produced. And so there's a huge amount of, a lot of it, you just can't produce because you can't be like, the animal shows up now, you know? They're not overly produced, which means that there's like an actual trip happening. There's an actual journey happening with a question mark around it since it's not scripted. It's like, so there can be the actual journey, you know, the trip, the, the physical trip you go on. And then there's this like, this product that comes out of it, this, this piece of work, this, this craft that comes out of it, which is the show. You could have a trip that isn't like hugely impactful, but the thing you make from it, the piece of entertainment that you make from it is like memorable. You love it. You know, you're like, man, like, I want to have that.

• 1:26:34Speaker 03

  If in the future tombstones have like something playing on tombstones instead of just inscriptions, I would like, I'd like my tombstone to play that episode over and over again. Right? But it doesn't mean that the trip was great. I, I think the, the, the things I've done, the trips I've been on that were like phenomenal trips. And in my view, great episodes were the handful of times, a, a couple of times when we've been able to go, travel on rivers and hunting fish with Amerindians in South America, particularly in Guyana, in Bolivia, hunting with people who are ancestral hunters and gatherers, who are on a landscape,

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  hunting and fishing on a landscape that from their view is that they've been hunting and fishing in perpetuity, probably for thousands of years, father, grandfather on down the line. And the level of intimacy they have with the land and water where they have been raised and where they hunt and fish 200, 250 days a year. To see that is a very eye opening. It's an eye opening experience because it really invites you to imagine what was lost here where we live. In terms of this continuity, that there's still places there where indigenous peoples,

• 1:28:00Speaker 03

  even though there's technologies emerging and stuff happening all the time and, and people can have email addresses, where there's like a continuity of like the same people, the same culture, doing the same practices in the same place for hundreds or thousands of years. A level of awareness and like fine tuned thinking comes out of that, which is like stunning to witness. And then just the cool shit, like just the how they cook and, and, and hunting practices, fishing practices. That's been things that have really impacted my worldview, episodes that doing them impacted my worldview. And then also the delivery of the product, the thing that people go watch when they're sitting on their living room couch at night

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  is in my mind, like good work. Like we did good work and we did those shows.

• 1:28:49Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned the awareness. Are there any particular sensitivities or types of awareness, any examples that you could give where you just thought to yourself, oh, wow, that's something I haven't seen before. That's something I haven't felt before. Do any snapshots come to mind?

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:06Tim Ferriss?

  Spending time with these people?

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  Tracking, okay, like detecting sign on the ground, footprints, broken blades of grass, bent things, just like animals passing through and knowing that they pass through. An awareness of bird sound in a place where it just feels like a cacophony. Have you ever watched that movie about the making of Herzog's Fitzgerald movie?

• 1:29:30Tim Ferriss?

  But you know, that is so strange that you're bringing this up. The burden of dreams.

• 1:29:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35Tim Ferriss?

  I just started watching it last night.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:29:37Tim Ferriss?

  That's bizarre. That's super bizarre. And that's not, I mean, this is not a movie that you hear.

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:29:42Tim Ferriss?

  It's not widely spread.

• 1:29:44Speaker 03

  No one knows about this movie.

• 1:29:45Tim Ferriss?

  So yes, but I literally just started watching it less than 12 hours ago.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  You get to a point where he is very sick of the jungle and he's explaining that birds don't sing. They scream in agony.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  It's this incredible cacophony sometimes of just noise and that they could like sit there and dissect that, you know, it's this bug, it's this, it's this, it's this, it's that bird, it's that bird, it's that bird. That was impressive. Hunting, being able to hunt with bows and arrows made entirely from native materials, except for a piece of wire cut from a fence that was then hammered into the shape of a projectile point. Finding a plant called arrow plant, which you get your arrows, shooting a black curassow to get his feathers for fletching, taking a yucca type plant and pulverizing it, braiding it into a string,

• 1:30:42Speaker 03

  waxing that string with rubber from a rubber plant, lashing the fletching onto the shaft, making a glue from native materials with which to put the things together, cutting a tree, making a bow string, and then wading out into a river and seeing a fish that I can't see and shooting it with an arrow. It's good stuff.

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  It's good stuff, man. And you're also watching it, you're watching things change. A thing I come back to again and again about that is that there's an individual I love quite a bit down there who, he was explaining to me one time about the white lip peccaries, that they haven't been seeing a lot of white lip peccaries. And there's a fear in his village that the shaman from a neighboring village has grown jealous of his village. So this neighboring shaman is mad at my friend's village because they're so prosperous.

• 1:31:35Tim Ferriss?

  And a peccary is like a pig, a pig like animal?

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  Yep. It's a, it's a, yeah, it would, at a passing glance, a javelina is a collared peccary. People in the southwest, like in Arizona, western Texas are familiar with javelinas. Um, yeah, that's a collared peccary. Then there's a slightly bigger, more gregarious version called a white lip peccary. And he said that he was concerned that this shaman in neighboring village had grown jealous of his village and had locked up all of their peccaries in a mountain. And they had

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  Their own shaman trying to develop the necessary skillset to release their herd, their peccaries from that mountain. And I'll point out that you can email this individual if you have a problem with what he's saying. So they are at a real crossroads. And it's been a long crossroads, but to intersect, to intersect them at this place, at this moment was fascinating.

• 1:32:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What a time to capture the experience on film.

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:37Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll, I'll get the specific episode information from you afterwards and we can put those in the show notes as well.

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  No, it'd be great.

• 1:32:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, last question for, for this conversation, actually maybe second to last. For people who want to reconnect, attempt to reconnect with nature, whether by themselves or with their families. I've also spent quite a bit of time in South America and other jungle based communities. And you, you do see this, what they sort of take for granted. It's almost, you mentioned David Foster Wallace. It's like the old fish that swims by the two young fish and says, how's the water boys? And they kind of nod and they go by and they go, what's water? Right? So to them, them referring to the communities in places like you mentioned, the idea of being separated from nature is just inconceivable.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, they wouldn't, they wouldn't describe that problem.

• 1:33:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's just the problem itself would be hard to explain. So for people who are listening to this and want to reconnect, feel engagement, kinship with nature, what would you suggest?

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  It's interesting you ask, cause we're working on a book right now about kids, kids in nature, kids and nature, but you could also say kids in nature. And I've been thinking about this a fair bit because there's a, there's a risk of making, we're talking about these extreme forms of nature, right? The jungles of South America, Arctic Alaska, we're talking about all these extremes and you can create this problem where people think that engagement with nature needs to be a radical version. I think that, as I've pondered this a lot lately, I think that there's some things that I find. By myself trying to do with my kids that aren't for kids only. And I think you need to start trying to develop the mindset of what it is to be like native.

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  And I'm not trying to take away, I don't mean native in terms of that you'd be Native American, say, or Native Alaskan, or Amerindian. I don't mean that. I mean native like the of trying to belong to the place. We associate ourselves belonging to a fan base, belonging to a social media community, belonging to a municipality, belonging to a political persuasion. But if you want to start thinking about yourself as belonging to nature, start a list of all of the, first define what your yard is. It could be the grounds on an apartment building where you live, could be your yard, whatever it is. Start a list of every bird, get a good bird book, get the Sibley, get Sibley's Guide to Birds of North America, if you live in North America.

• 1:35:11Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell Sibley?

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  Sibley. I believe he's, yeah, he's an illustrator and ornithologist. S I B L E Y. I believe, alright. Get that book and start a list of every bird that you see from your property, from your place where you live, from your balcony or whatever it is, a list of everything you see and be and allow yourself to count things that you see way off. So if you're in an apartment in New York and you can see out over the Hudson and you catch a seagull, count that. And allow yourself to count every bird that you hear. And then do a couple of other things. Acknowledge the solstices and the equinoxes.

• 1:35:53Speaker 03

  On those days, acknowledge what is happening, that today, the day is as long as the night. Or today is the longest day, the sun will shine for the longest time tonight. Or this will be the shortest day, the sun will shine the shortest amount today. And tomorrow, the sun will start marching back in another direction. Ask yourself, when you turn on your faucet and water comes out, where did that water come from? Did it fall as snow, rain? Where was it collected? Is it from an aquifer? What feeds the aquifer? And then ask yourself, when it goes down the drain, what is its path to where it hits the ocean?

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  And make a mental map of if you were to take a piss in your yard, make a mental map, it would flow into this ditch and that ditch flows into that stream and that stream flows into that river and that river flows into that estuary and that estuary drains into that part of the ocean and make a mental map and look at that map. These are some of the things you can do sitting in your, at your desk. And I think that as you do these things and think about them, you'll start to realize that you're a participant in something and you'll start to realize that there are things that are extremely reliable. The solstices, like the solstice, equinox, there's things that are so unbelievably reliable. And there's things that are so chaotic, like you're passing the coming and going of birds.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  As you do those things, you'll find yourself feeling a part of something that's way cooler outside of being a part of your community and family. It's way cooler than being part of a fan base or part of a social media network. Do that and then go down to South America. But start, start at home, man. Like you're never going to understand if you can't like just understand like where you're sitting and how it fits. Like get some awareness, you're like, you're in nature, man. You're in nature. It's just we're, we're trained to not notice it.

• 1:37:52Tim Ferriss?

  That makes me think of the thousands of tussocks that I walked over, never actually getting down on my stomach and looking at one.

• 1:38:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Plant your face in one of those things. Yeah. Like, but like Barry, like Barry Lopez describes.

• 1:38:05Tim Ferriss?

  Those are great recommendations. Uh, I think I will actually look at the water investigation later this afternoon.

• 1:38:15Speaker 03

  It's fascinating.

• 1:38:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  I haven't gone so far as to make my kids memorize it, but I try to talk about it a lot.

• 1:38:22Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Steve, we're gonna hopefully do a round two of this. That's the plan.

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  I would love to.

• 1:38:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And is there anything else that you would like to mention, any closing comments, any asks or requests of the audience? Of course, people can find a lot of what you do at the meat eater dot com. And we'll include all the social at meat eater at Steven Rinella on Instagram at Steven Rinella meat eater on Facebook. Is there anything else you'd like to say before?

• 1:38:48Speaker 03

  No, I could be so, yeah, if you, if you allow it and I could be so audacious as to, yeah, just ask people to go to the meat eater dot com. You'll find not only stuff from me and about books I've done, but from, you know, all of my great colleagues and our podcast network and daily stream of written material and other things. So yeah, please go there and check it out.

• 1:39:12Tim Ferriss?

  And for everyone listening, as mentioned, I'll also include links in the show notes, which you can find at tim dot blog forward slash podcast to the website, meaning Steven's website, the podcast, specific episodes of the TV show, books, and many other things that have been mentioned in this conversation. So people can find those as well in one place. And Steve, what a pleasure to catch up. It's been a little while.

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thanks for taking the time, man. It was fun to talk to you as usual. You do a great job.

• 1:39:45Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks, man. And we'll, we'll figure out scheduling for a round two very soon. And to everybody tuning in, until next time, thanks so much for listening.

• 1:39:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've Somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance, and it's very short.

• 1:40:40Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. And now Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They just launched a new company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores.

• 1:41:25Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm sitting in my living room right now and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch. And I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant. The sofa color, color of the legs, the sofa size, the shape to make sure it's perfect for you in your home. Also, Allform arrives in just three to seven days and you can assemble it all yourself in a few minutes, no tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kind of like Lego pieces. They've got arm chairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight-seat sectional, so there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kind of build on top of it if you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually in a way what I did because I can

• 1:42:08Tim Ferriss?

  turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So I mentioned I have all of these different things in this room. I use the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color, and I dig it. And I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day. So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in-store sounds risky, you don't need to worry. Allform sofas. Sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping and you get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it. That's more than three months and if you don't love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund. Your sofa frame also has a forever warranty. That's literally forever. So, check it out. Take a look. They've got

• 1:42:52Tim Ferriss?

  all sorts of cool stuff to choose from. I was skeptical and it actually worked. It worked much better than I could have imagined and I'm very, very happy. So, to find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com/tim. That's A-L-L-F-O-R-M.com/tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com/tim. Make sure to use the code TIM at checkout. That's allform.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Thousands of listeners and a lot of the contractors I use and my readers use FreshBooks. If you've been thinking about turning your part-time side business into a full-time small business, or big business for that matter, you may

• 1:43:35Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:44:18Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:45:02Tim Ferriss?

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