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#1674 - Clay Newcomb

#1674 - Clay Newcomb

The Joe Rogan Experience XX

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[0] Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

[1] The Joe Rogan Experience.

[2] Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[3] What's happening, brother?

[4] How are you?

[5] I'm doing very well.

[6] It's always interesting to meet someone in person when you've heard them on a podcast.

[7] I've heard you, I don't know, a hundred times on the meat eater podcast.

[8] So to see you in person.

[9] And then to start listening to your podcast, which is Bear Grease, which is a hilarious name for a podcast.

[10] And if people don't know, bear grease rendered bear fat is actually a very valuable thing.

[11] And it's great to cook with.

[12] And it's like I'll never forget when I found out about bear hunting, about bears being good to eat, was actually from Steve Ronella.

[13] Right.

[14] When he was explaining to me about blueberry bears.

[15] Yeah.

[16] And then I watched that video that he put out of him hunting this bear in Alaska that had been eating nothing but blueberries.

[17] Right.

[18] And so when he's breaking down the bear and taking the fat off, the fat is actually purple.

[19] Yeah.

[20] Because his bear has been eating so many blueberries that it's in its flesh.

[21] Yeah.

[22] And he said, it is the most delicious meat you'll ever eat.

[23] Yeah.

[24] Well, I mean, bear grease, bear fat is essentially whatever that bear's been eating.

[25] You know, and it's flavored, whether it be by acorns or berries or whatever.

[26] Or fish.

[27] I've got some bear grease for you, Joe.

[28] Oh, exciting.

[29] I have, I come bearing many gifts if you would like, if you would like to see what I've got here.

[30] Tell me what you got there.

[31] And, you know, talking about bear grease and trying to connect it to a podcast, I mean, at some point I'll have to explain the metaphor of bear grease.

[32] What's explaining now?

[33] Well, so bear grease at one time was this highly valued commodity.

[34] I mean, used as a unit of currency on the American frontier.

[35] And bear grease, bear oil would be the rendered fat of a bear that would turn into liquid like this right here.

[36] And so this is for you.

[37] Thank you.

[38] Have you ever had, I mean, I know you've bear hunted, but have you had bear grease before?

[39] No, I've only, I've eaten bear.

[40] I've never rendered bare fat or cooked anything in bare fat.

[41] I've only just taken the meat and cooked it.

[42] Yeah.

[43] Usually slow cooking.

[44] So what you would do with that is you would cook with it.

[45] You would fry with it.

[46] You can make pastries with it.

[47] You can use it to condition leather.

[48] It's supposed to be amazing for pastries, right?

[49] It is.

[50] Pie crust.

[51] Yep.

[52] And so there was a time when bear grease, bear lard was super valuable on the frontier before refrigeration because bear fat stayed, didn't go rancid as quickly as pork lard.

[53] So like on it, you would have pork and bear would be essentially the places where you would get it this lasted longer.

[54] That'll last on the shelf at your house.

[55] unrefrigerated for over a year.

[56] Why does it last so much longer?

[57] Just whatever the constituency of bear lard is, it just stays good for that long.

[58] So going back to this metaphor of the name of Bear Grease, in our podcast, we're exploring things, and even in the tagline of the podcast, we say that we're exploring things or things that are forgotten but relevant and we're searching for insight in unlikely places and so like this bear bear grease i brought you some stuff that you can do with bear grease this is uh this is some bare fat lie soap if you've if you ever used animal tallow soap no like just for like bathing washing your hands man that's incredible stuff yeah it really is 100 % all natural i mean it's It's an ancient process of using lie and animal tallow.

[59] What is lie exactly?

[60] Lye is, doggone, if you hadn't asked me, it's, I mean, it's a chemical.

[61] It's a caustic chemical that you can buy just about anywhere.

[62] But shoot.

[63] How did they use to?

[64] It's like H -2, something, something.

[65] They used to use ash.

[66] Oh.

[67] They used, they got the lie from ash.

[68] And it's a metal hydroxide traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes or a strong alkali, which is highly soluble in water -producing caustic basic solutions.

[69] Sodium hydroxide.

[70] That's what it is.

[71] So they would get it from like burning wood?

[72] Yeah.

[73] So they're the real primitive method for making soap from animal tallow.

[74] And you could use, you could make animal tallow soap out of beef towel.

[75] anything but bare fat lie soap is uh is is our specialty not but it uh it's supposed to be real good for your skin it's what you know because you sell this no no no no no no no it's not not for sale just uh but did you make this yeah yeah and so what are the what's the ingredients so just lie and four four ingredients bare fat sodium hydroxide lie water and water and And then just essential oils, we just...

[76] For the smell?

[77] Yeah.

[78] It smells real good.

[79] What are the essential oil?

[80] It smells like one of them stores in.

[81] We had a bunch of different kind of oils that we added in, like peppermint, whatever.

[82] I don't know.

[83] Sometimes I'm amazed at how, you know, kind of like hygiene conscious us bear hunters are, like making soap and stuff.

[84] Because the other thing I brought you, Joe, and I know you don't run a beard, but this is some bear grease beard oil that I made.

[85] And so that is a combination of three things.

[86] so it's it's cheating just a little bit but it's it's it's one part bear oil one part almond oil one part hajoba oil and then essential oils and I mean you can drip it out put it on your hands and uh oh that smells good yeah yeah interesting and then the last one here and then I'll start talking about my metaphor again if if you're if you want but this is a bare grease hand salve and so bear oil has all kind of folklore around it and i'm in the process of like an anecdotal research very serious project of exploring all these folk tales of bear grease and bear oil and so it's healing properties yeah yeah they say i mean back in the day bear oil would have been used to relieve arthritis pain um they say and you can find this all over the internet that bear oil cures baldness, which obviously is like a big piece of folklore.

[87] Right.

[88] But it's still just fun.

[89] But going back to the idea that bear grease has all these uses is that this thing that at one time was the currency.

[90] And if you polled the United States 3 and 30 million Americans and you said, what is Bear Greece?

[91] I mean like what percentage of people would even know what it was?

[92] Probably like 1 % of 1 % of 1%.

[93] Yeah.

[94] So it's been forgotten.

[95] And so there was a time when, so there's an archaic unit of measure of a barrel.

[96] They used to take the tanned neck hide of a deer, which would have been a part of the buckskin that wasn't usable, the neck hide.

[97] And they would have sewed it together and they would have used it to have stored bear oil.

[98] And they called it an eel.

[99] So they would make a container out of it, like a wine flask almost.

[100] An eel of barrel oil.

[101] Huh.

[102] And it's just a wonder.

[103] Spell it like eel?

[104] Well, it's, you know, it's been probably 10 years since I've actually seen it written.

[105] I think it's E -L -L -E, like an eel of barrel oil.

[106] Would have been a unit of measurement.

[107] So like you could have gone to the store and you're like, well, I got two ills, barrel oil.

[108] You know, I'd like some flour.

[109] I'd like some whatever.

[110] And, you know, it's just a wonder that we don't call the U .S. dollar, you know, an eel.

[111] You see what I'm saying?

[112] You know, because the buck is essentially connected to the value of a white -tailed deer skin that was tanned out and ready for tanning.

[113] And that became equivalent to a buck for $1.

[114] For $1.

[115] Wow.

[116] And so, again, this idea that there's some pretty amazing stuff that's forgotten.

[117] And then as hunters, we're very interested in using as much as we can from these animals that we're taking.

[118] Very interested in that.

[119] And so a bear offers a whole other market of commodity that really no other big game offers.

[120] And that, you know, of the big game that we hunt, like, let's say an elk, I mean, like, you're going to keep the meat, obviously.

[121] That's the number one thing.

[122] You're going to keep his horns.

[123] But very few people would even keep the hide of that animal.

[124] And certainly they're not rendering down elk tallow.

[125] White -tailed deer would have the same sequence of usually.

[126] usable commodities.

[127] Man, a black bear, we have incredible meat.

[128] We, I would venture to say that 90%, maybe 80 % of black bears that are killed in North America, their hides are tanned.

[129] They have, usually, especially in the fall, will have an incredible amount of fat, which can be rendered down into all these incredible, healthy, usable products.

[130] and and so I mean like we have we use my point is we use more off of a bear than we do almost any other big game animal that we hunt I'm getting off track here no you're not no my friend John and friends John and Jen they run a bear hunting yeah in Alberta yeah I know and they take the bear fat and they give it to the first nation elders and they use it for some sort of medicinal properties they have some way of utilizing it themselves And they found that pretty fascinating.

[131] They personally use bear fat for cooking and things like that.

[132] And they cook a lot of bear.

[133] And they're interested in a lot of bear recipes.

[134] But they say that they make trades with the elders.

[135] And they deliver them bear fat.

[136] They're really into bear fat.

[137] Yeah.

[138] But they don't kill bear themselves.

[139] Right, right.

[140] Which is interesting.

[141] The natives.

[142] Yeah, the natives.

[143] Well, you know, they call them First Nations up there, I guess.

[144] They have a different perspective on bears.

[145] Like, it's weird up there because they have, different laws for First Nation folks.

[146] So if you're on public land or what do they call it, Crown land in Canada.

[147] When you're up there, First Nation people can, they can hunt at night with spotlights.

[148] They can shoot a moose 365 days a year.

[149] They don't follow seasons.

[150] They can catch as many wall eyes as they want.

[151] They have a lot of weird rules.

[152] But they don't hunt bear.

[153] Right.

[154] But there's a lot of them.

[155] You're right.

[156] There are First Nation tribes that do have inside of their history quite a bit of use for Black Bear in different places.

[157] But I've seen that too.

[158] A lot of the Canadian First Nation peoples aren't that interested in bear hunting.

[159] But historically, I mean, bears and, you know, First Nation people, especially in the South and everywhere in Alaska.

[160] I was just doing a reading a book on the Co -Ucon people up in Alaska.

[161] which is an indigenous tribe in Alaska and I mean they have an incredible amount of bear hunting history and bear hunting methods and like they have what they call taboos I've got a list on my phone of like 14 of their rules for bear hunting which are like super interesting let me hear all like very specific yeah it might take me just a minute Joe that's okay we should probably tell people because it's it's all this stuff sounds odd because uh when you're talking about hunting in north america to most people that don't hunt they think of deer hunting that's that's common yeah but during the days where people were traveling across the country uh settling and the pioneers they mostly ate bear and they were using deer for the skins which is kind of crazy when you think about it today like that bear was like Steve Ronella has that great animated thing.

[162] Have you ever seen it online where someone's animated this piece about...

[163] The story about Boone.

[164] Yeah, Daniel Boone and all of his bear hunting and canning bears and smoking bears.

[165] And that bear meat was highly prized.

[166] Yeah.

[167] Yeah, it was...

[168] I mean, there's no reason why that really should have changed other than just kind of went out of popularity.

[169] Fucking Disney.

[170] Disney did it.

[171] That's what happened.

[172] People started looking at Amazon.

[173] animals in this really weird anthropomorphic way.

[174] Yeah, yeah.

[175] I mean, it's Yogi Bear, it's a teddy bear, it's your buddy.

[176] Yeah.

[177] You know, which is the weirdest thing to have an animal that will fucking kill you.

[178] And that's the one that you've decided that you won't kill back.

[179] Yeah.

[180] And you won't eat them.

[181] Yeah.

[182] Well, I mean, bear meat, that's probably the number one question that I get asked by people is, do you eat the bear?

[183] And, I mean, like, absolutely we eat.

[184] I mean, bear is, I mean, it's incredible meat when handled correctly, just like any other kind of meat.

[185] It's the way I describe it, I'd say it tastes like a deer fucked a pig.

[186] It's like red pork.

[187] Yeah, it's like this really interesting meat.

[188] Yeah.

[189] But it's very good.

[190] It's very good.

[191] Yeah, I mean, really is.

[192] You don't have to convince yourself.

[193] I mean, really is, you don't have to convince yourself.

[194] black bears on the North American continent are thriving.

[195] Thriving.

[196] Especially in New Jersey.

[197] Anywhere.

[198] Florida, Arkansas, Oklahoma, out west, Michigan, Wisconsin, like whatever's happening ecologically right now in North America.

[199] And I mean, you could make a list that would just be bizarre about urban sprawl and fragmentation of wilderness and all this stuff.

[200] whatever is happening, you know, increase in temperature across the place, like bears are thriving.

[201] And so why that makes sense that right now that people would begin to be re -interested in hunting bears is that we've got more people on this continent than we've ever had, obviously.

[202] We've got more overlap of bear country and humans.

[203] we've literally are up against the wall in terms of managing these animals of I mean they will be managed like bears will be taken out of populations one way or another because bears only have so much of like for instance let's take Arkansas Arkansas has 2 .2 million acres of national forest and that's essentially the core bear habitat in the state of Arkansas that's great bear habitat.

[204] A natural bear density in Ozarks or Wachitao Mountains would be, let's just say, one bear per square mile.

[205] And that would be a fairly high population of bears at a landscape level.

[206] Well, if you have two bears per square mile, that might not seem much to you or me, because we're not bears, but long term, that is not sustainable.

[207] And bears replicate, basically, a healthy population of bears is going to increase by over 10 % per year.

[208] So if you have 100 ,000, bears and you know the next year you're going to have 110 and then you can do the math and one time I did the math and it was like in I want to say within 12 years of population even including mortality natural mortality could could double in like 15 years if it was just released you know when you start doing the math 10 percent per year anyway point being you have to do the math with fawns and you know elk calves and all the different animals they're going to eat and what kind of impact that's going to have yeah yeah point being is that like it's a great time I mean it seems kind of counterintuitive with the social structure of the planet but I mean like man this country was founded on it really was bear hunting I mean the American frontier was fueled by bear meat and bear fat it sounds so crazy to say but it really is true.

[209] And it took me a while to understand that.

[210] It took me a while of reading historical accounts of these travelers and these people that were making their way, these pioneers, making the way across the country, and what they ate.

[211] Yeah.

[212] A lot of what they ate was bare.

[213] This blows people's mind, and it blew mine when I first learned it years ago.

[214] But, and we could do trivia, but I'm setting you up to know what the answer is, Black Bear.

[215] What is the most widely distributed?

[216] big game mammal in North America.

[217] This is a little bit of a trick because it's not quite as straightforward.

[218] Most widely distributed, white -tailed deer, elk, naturally pre -European civilization.

[219] What else to be Black Bear?

[220] Well, right?

[221] Black Bear's number two.

[222] Really?

[223] What's number one?

[224] Mountain line.

[225] Really?

[226] Mountain lines went from, they basically covered the entire North American continent, except in the real far North Arctic.

[227] but you know since that time habitat fragmentation and mountain line populations are now they're thriving in the places where they are in the west and they're moving back into the east which we did a podcast on but black bears will be number two the most widely distributed big game animals so they were everywhere i mean when when people got off the i mean when they in the eastern united states full of bear i mean the the eastern deciduous forest which would essentially be from Western Arkansas all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Maine, all the way to Florida, all the way down to East Texas.

[228] Like one third of the United States would be the eastern deciduous forest.

[229] And how did they, like, was bear hunting a thing in Europe when the early settlers came here?

[230] Right.

[231] I don't think there was a lot of, like I don't see a lot of connection between our bear hunting culture and European bear hunting culture.

[232] Do you think we or the pioneers learned it from native?

[233] Americans?

[234] Absolutely.

[235] Daniel Boone learned how to hunt bears from Cherokee Indians.

[236] Yeah.

[237] And they learned all the different properties, like the bear fat.

[238] Yes.

[239] Did they speak at all about trichinosis or about diseases that they would get from not cooking the bear meat enough?

[240] Man, it's really just a non -issue when you handle it right.

[241] I mean, trichinosis and trichinosis dies instantaneously.

[242] And because it's such a big platform, we can fact check this.

[243] Trichinosis dies instantaneously at like 144 degrees.

[244] Okay.

[245] Which is like medium.

[246] Yeah.

[247] It's not even well done.

[248] You know, the USDA is telling us to cook our meat to 160.

[249] Right.

[250] So, I mean, we are programmed to cook our meat to 160 to cook it done in most things.

[251] Trichinosis dies instantaneously at like 144 degrees.

[252] And fact check that before you eat a piece of bear meat.

[253] but it dies you know it's an incremental scale going down like it dies at 143 if it's at 143 for five seconds it dies at 142 if it's at 142 degrees for a minute so you could sue v bear at 135 and do it all day long and you'd be good with a medium rare piece of beef absolutely like a medium rare piece of beef really have you ever done that no i just i'm not quite on the suvi i mean i should be I've worked for Steve Ronella, but I'm not on the SiouxVee train yet.

[254] Suvi's awesome.

[255] I know it.

[256] I prefer smoking.

[257] I prefer like a pellet grill, like a Trager.

[258] That's my favorite way to cook.

[259] But Suvi, the thing about it is you could go to work and just leave it, sit out there in the counter, and it'll cook for eight hours for you.

[260] Yeah.

[261] And then you come back and everything.

[262] It's just sort of all the tendons and all the rough stuff is dissolved.

[263] Yeah.

[264] It's nice.

[265] Yeah.

[266] It's good.

[267] I know Ryan Callahan's big on it.

[268] the suvi yeah yeah it's good stuff so but i've never done it with bear all i've ever done with bear is cook it either slow cook it like a ham and you know and make sure it's thoroughly cooked put a meat thermometer in it or i've made ronella's bear candy recipe have you ever had that recipe no i haven't oh my god it's so good it's like a what's that there's like a general Sal's chicken you know it's kind of like a sweet sort of chicken you eat it over rice like an Asian dish you make that with bear so it has sugar in it so my kids went fucking crazy for it they loved it like bear candy was one of the favorite dishes that I've ever cooked for them because it's very sweet it's a lot of sugar in it it's really probably not very good for you but man is it delicious and you you know you cook it like an Asian dish with like some peppers and scallions and things on and you know it's got kind of a brown sauce to it and And you pour it over rice, and it's really, really good.

[269] Nice.

[270] And other than that, I've eaten bare sausage and, you know, standard things.

[271] Yeah.

[272] Bear backstrap.

[273] Well, that's good.

[274] So these are, read us off these rules again?

[275] Okay, so this is my, these are not quotes from this book.

[276] These are my interpretations that I wrote on the inside cover of the book.

[277] Okay.

[278] And you took a photo of it?

[279] This book was called Make Prayers to Ravens.

[280] That's the name of the book.

[281] make yeah make when was this book written in the 1970s it was basically an anthropologist that went and lived with the co -eukon people in Alaska for an extended period of time and he Nelson was his last name I can't remember his first Richard K. Nelson I think incredible yeah make prayers to the Raven Richard Nelson oh incredible look okay so when I got to the section on Black Bear they had a full chapter on Black Bear And they started, they called them taboos.

[282] But, okay, so, so when a bear is found, and these are like kind of spiritual rules that they use in bear hunting.

[283] But if you find a bear, you must speak very cryptically about your plans to go back or the spirit, because the spirit of the bear is aware and he'll hear you.

[284] So like if, like, if I went out hunting and I found a bear, bear sign, but I didn't kill the bear, and I killed the bear, and I came back to camp, came back to my house that night, and I wanted you to come with me. I would be like, Joe, tomorrow, I would like for you to come with me around the mountain just to see what we can see.

[285] And you would know exactly what that meant.

[286] You would be like, winkety wink.

[287] So the idea is that your thoughts project and that the bears are so aware.

[288] They assign bears a very high level of spiritual ranking and, and, you know, power and only only second to the wolverine they have like this hierarchy of animal powers and so basically you know you can't you can't you can't talk about your plans you got to be cryptic in the way those plans will get out there because the bear will hear you and he will route your he'll do something different so that's that's rule number one you should never point at a bear because he will feel you so if you're hunting you know your first instinct is to oh there's a bear point at it no pointing because he will he will see you you know i would be i'm one of those people that would love to call him bullshit oh i'd love to call bullshit on this but i don't know if i do i you know what i'm saying like there's a thing about animals when when you are staring at them i feel like they get like a little just some sort of a little frequency like a little beep beep those little message from the distance where they get uncomfortable well i i read these to yons petales and and he kind of functionalized every one of these he was like well of course you don't want to point he's like think about the movement that you're making when you're pointing you're drawing attention to yourself because he was trying to like say you know trying to find the functional value and and i'm not saying that i believe these joe i'm saying i believe them.

[289] I'm saying I believe.

[290] Bears are psychic.

[291] I'm going with that.

[292] So the third rule was that you talk to the bear as you shoot it.

[293] You tell him what to do.

[294] So you like sweet talk the bear.

[295] And this whole chapter has has examples.

[296] Like they did interviews with these people.

[297] They had examples of them doing this.

[298] But basically when a bear is in your sights and you need him to do something particularly, because if you're hunting, a bear might be behind a tree.

[299] He might be facing you.

[300] You don't have a good shot you're supposed to sweet talk him and they had it gave examples of it to be like dear friend i really would like for you to turn slightly to the right and wow there will do it i watched that episode of meat eater where you and ronella were hunting bear were you in montana montana and there was a bear that was how many hundreds of yards away 800 800 yards away and he winded you yeah well i mean winded us like that but yeah it was what i mean by winded for people don't know we're talking about the bear the wind came from behind you and reached the bear so you're sent reached the bear from eight football fields away which is fucking bananas that's so far yeah and that bear started running yeah and that's the only thing that you could attribute to his behavior oh there there was no question that the bear smelled us i mean that that's not in my mind or steve's mind really debatable but there is more to the story that it helped make sense Joe because we were basically at the foot foot of a mountain and to our right was basically a very steep straight up mountain so we're sitting here the wind is hitting us directly in the back of the neck and it's basically creating a wind channel that directed our scent right to that bear where if it had been open country I feel like by the time our scent got there it would have dissipated And there was six of us You just see me and Steve on the screen But behind us Camerman and all that jazz At least four other people May have been seven of us A lot of smelling motherfuckers It's true The other thing is The way it's been described to me Is that kind of makes sense Is skunks We can smell a skunk a mile away And it's weird Like a skunk smells weird Like, you know, you're driving on the road in your car, and you're like, I smell skunk.

[301] Like, somehow or another out there, that minuscule amount of sunk skunk scent can get into your car and hit your nose.

[302] Someone explained to me, now imagine that times a hundred, and that's how a bear can smell things.

[303] Right.

[304] And I'm like, what?

[305] You know, it boils down to when you look at the physical structure.

[306] I mean, you know, we have these olifactory receptors in our nose that help us smell, like just a little receptor.

[307] receptors, a bear would have, and I've forgotten the stats, thousands more times, surface area of those receptors.

[308] So, I mean, they just have more mechanisms for receiving olfactory information.

[309] More than a bloodhound, even.

[310] Oh, yeah.

[311] Yeah.

[312] A bear, as I understand it, has the most powerful nose in the world of any animal.

[313] That's what I understand.

[314] But this is the way I've heard it described to me that made a lot of sense.

[315] Like, if you were to walk into your house, house and there was a pot there was a dish of a lasagna cooking in the oven and you walked in and you're like I smell lasagna it's just what we would register lasagna a bear would walk in and he he would say I smell cooking cheese I smell warm tomato paste I smell a pastry or I smell you know the the noodles I smell sausage I smell like he could smell the layers.

[316] I mean, essentially, it's such, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a scent.

[317] That's one of our weakest things as humans is our scent.

[318] We don't, we don't use it in a defensive way at all, really.

[319] And so it's hard for us to understand, but man, the animal kingdom runs off their noses.

[320] It's, it's almost like a superpower to try to comprehend how a bear could smell you that far.

[321] It's hard.

[322] Yeah, our, our senses suck in comparison, right?

[323] Yeah.

[324] It's a wonder we ever survived so what were the other uh taboos okay yeah there's a few more that are pretty interesting uh always wear new boots when you're spring bear hunting so don't wear a pair of boots that you've worn before always skin a bear where it is killed never haul or drag a bear why why would you uh not wear old boots because of the scent man when you read this book you would get a sense for the the worldview of these people and the way that they think and if That would, your question would be answered if you read the rest of the book.

[325] I mean, they just, like, stuff happens and it becomes law, you know.

[326] And why don't you drag a bear?

[327] Who knows?

[328] A lot of these were just stated.

[329] Right.

[330] It was just like, this is what you do.

[331] I think it has to do with respect, though.

[332] This one was interesting.

[333] When you kill a bear, you slit his eyes before you skin him so that he does not see you and him become offended after his death.

[334] Wow.

[335] So you walk up to the bear, the first thing you do, you slit his eyes.

[336] Because they perceive these as like spiritual animals that have power.

[337] They don't, they very rarely keep the skins of bears.

[338] They don't want a bear skin in their house because they think it holds like authority or power.

[339] So the bear hide is not used as, which you'd think in the Arctic that this would be like an essential for their clothing and whatnot.

[340] But they're killing caribou and other things.

[341] I think I stumbled across the eye slitting on a video of Make the Prayers to the Raven.

[342] Oh, wow.

[343] I haven't even seen this.

[344] Well, they're not even slid in the eye.

[345] They're actually removing his eyes.

[346] Wow.

[347] And as I get down to these last two, I'll tell you kind of my conclusion of why this is intriguing to me and how I think it relates to me as someone who I don't.

[348] Well, I'll tell you how it connects.

[349] But the last thing, well, close to the last thing, bear death ceremonies are second only to human funerals.

[350] So when you kill a bear, like they have an absolute, like, ceremony.

[351] People all over the village would cook food.

[352] And this would be old, more ancient stuff.

[353] I don't know that I couldn't say how these people live today.

[354] but basically like extreme respect for that animal only second to a human funeral would be the death of a bear and they would have these like ceremonies and cook and get together and it was uh you know I I feel that way when I kill a bear I mean like I don't take it for granted man and I've killed a fair number of bears and like each one is like significant to me Do you feel differently when you kill a bear than when you say you kill a duck or something like that?

[355] No. I'm not one of those guys, if I could say those guys, and I don't, I'm not pointing any fingers.

[356] Right.

[357] A bear is an animal.

[358] I mean, I do not attribute him.

[359] I don't want to give him, I don't want to anthropomorphize him too much.

[360] But they are special animals.

[361] And they are, they are an incredible animal, especially when you understand where they fit inside of the ecosystem.

[362] They're an indicator species, like basically wherever you have bears, you can be guaranteed that a whole bunch of stuff underneath that bear is in order.

[363] In terms of the ecology of the land, there's probably salamanders there.

[364] There's, you know, the squirrels are probably in good shape.

[365] I mean, they're an indicator species.

[366] And so to me, they just, they represent something really special.

[367] So all animals that you kill have.

[368] a deep significance to you.

[369] Yeah.

[370] Bears are just another one of those animals.

[371] They are.

[372] But they are of particular interest to me. Right.

[373] And I feel like we have the right for no reason other than we just want to to make something special.

[374] You know?

[375] Yeah.

[376] I mean, just like I have chosen in my life that the Newcomb family, when we kill a bear, it's a big deal.

[377] For no good reason.

[378] Why do you do that?

[379] Clay, why not when you kill a squirrel?

[380] Well, we just like bears, man. we well they are special yeah yeah yeah yeah just by their abilities just by how difficult they are to come upon i mean there's a reason why they bait bears in a lot of parts of the country it's because it's hard to get on one yeah they're they're very aware and their senses are highly tuned yeah so it's it's a significant thing to kill a bear yeah it is and it's also So, as you were saying, if you are going to be a person who's involved in conservation, if you're really thinking about it correctly, they have to be managed in a certain way.

[381] And if you look at it, if you choose to look at it this way, like all animals, they're a valuable resource.

[382] Like deer are a valuable resource.

[383] You eat one or you shoot one.

[384] Your family can eat it for months.

[385] That's a lot of food.

[386] And the same with a bear.

[387] And if you shoot a bear, you're also stopping that bear from killing a whole lot of fawns, a whole lot of elk calves, a whole lot of livestock.

[388] There's a lot of things.

[389] I mean, that thing has to eat a lot.

[390] Yes, it does.

[391] And a good part of its diet is animals.

[392] Yeah.

[393] We just published an article that recounted a – the study was probably done 10 years ago in Alaska, and this was a brown bear study.

[394] and they they collared 17 brown bears in Alaska and they had a video it was a video collar that took five second videos every now 15 second videos every 10 minutes and the batteries on those at the time the technology they would last for like 60 days and then the collar would release and they would go gather the collar up they were able to they were they put them on 17.

[395] bears seven bears lost the collar so they had data from 10 bears and i want to say with seven bears this is going to sound bizarre because even as i read it like i wanted to just be like man this is crazy but i mean this came from the biologist in alaska they killed those seven bears killed over 200 moose and caribou calves in the time of 45 days i mean they were just stomping around with the intent to kill moose and caribou calves.

[396] And it was a groundbreaking study because as far as I know, it was the first time that it was video evidence.

[397] So, I mean, they're watching these bears on video.

[398] It was also really cool because they laid out in percentages of time of what that bear did, like, you know, like 80 % of the time.

[399] He was asleep.

[400] 6 % of the time he just stood there.

[401] He would stand up and just stand there.

[402] I want to say only 6 % of his day he actually fed. But in 45 days, less than 10 bears killed over 200 moose and caribou calves.

[403] Have you seen the photographs from Yellowstone of the recent, there was a wildlife photographer that captured a famous grizzly bear.

[404] I want to say, it had a number, like 399 or something like that.

[405] And they caught this bear in the act of killing an elk calf.

[406] and feeding it to the cubs it's pretty wild it's pretty wild because you see the l calf still has spots it's real young and the bear catches up to it and it's like a big dust up and the uh even the cubs are duking it out over who gets to eat it's pretty wild wow it's pretty wild because they you know they caught it with a really good wildlife photographer there's a whole series of photos see if you can find it it's it's very recent that's a lot though and that the impact on the species and but it's also for the health of species you need a certain amount of them so you were saying it's a great indicator species right yeah yeah and if you know if if a bear needs there it is oh wow what number bear is that there's the bear is a number yeah it's 399 famous grizzly 399 kills elk calf on camera but it's wild man look at that seven foot sow and look at her chasing down that poor little guy no chance incredible beasts man yeah and then the babies were behind her and uh they were like what's going on mom what's happening and they got the whole deal of it chasing it down and eventually getting it and then the pretty wild man yeah it is we just did a video on bear defense with uh through meat eater we put out a video on bear defense of whether you should use a pistol or bear spray what was the conclusion both i mean just to cut to the chase We interviewed a guy named Todd Orr.

[407] Have you heard of Todd Orr?

[408] He's the guy that got his head cut open in Montana.

[409] Yeah.

[410] He had the viral video of him, like, walking out.

[411] So we interviewed Todd, and then I went and was trained by a professional pistol shooter that, you know, talked to me about the sequence of drawing a pistol and shooting.

[412] And then we went to the Montana Fish and Wildlife, and I did a bear simulation, bear -charged simulation with a remote control.

[413] troll bear that will only go 23 miles per hour is there a video that oh it's on media or YouTube okay go I need to see that remote control bear yeah well Joe what was wild about it was I mean to be responsible in gris country and to be clear about with people like black bears I'm not gonna say black bears are not dangerous because black bears do kill people and do attack people it is much less likely that a black bear is going to attack you as a brown or grizzly bear, which in the United States, brown grizzly bears are only pretty much in one general area, which would be in northern Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and they're filtering out into Colorado and parts of Washington.

[414] And that's where grizzly bears are, the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

[415] And those bears are very dangerous.

[416] I mean, very dangerous.

[417] I think there's already been a couple people killed this summer up there.

[418] So the wild part, so you need to be responsible, and to be responsible means you need to have options, and you need to be trained in those options.

[419] Bear spray is highly effective, but there are times when you don't want to shoot a bear with bear spray, there are times when it is life -threatening and a bear is trying to kill you, and you need to take lethal action upon that bear.

[420] And so best case scenario...

[421] There it is?

[422] Oh, my God.

[423] Yeah.

[424] It's crazy how fast it comes on.

[425] Well, okay.

[426] And that's slow.

[427] I sprayed the bear.

[428] But what happened to Todd Orr was he sprayed that bear right in the face.

[429] But that bear was running 35 miles an hour when it was eight feet away from him.

[430] And he hit it, and the bear still hit him and bawled the heck out of him.

[431] And, you know, within five, six seconds, the bear took in the full potion, you know, and left, but Todd had already been banged up incredibly bad in a very short amount of time.

[432] So basically my conclusion, even though I did spray this bear, was that I still would have got mauled.

[433] And I knew it was coming.

[434] I knew it had.

[435] So basically, if you get surprised by a grizzly, you're in trouble, man. Yeah.

[436] And as far as caliber, is there a consensus?

[437] We discussed that in the video.

[438] And there's been a lot, I mean, for sure, a bigger caliber is going to be more effective at stopping a bear.

[439] But that is usually not the limiting factor in a bear attack scenario.

[440] Because that big, bigger caliber gun, you may only be able to get one shot off accurately.

[441] Where with a smaller caliber gun, like say a 9 millimeter, you might be able to get off four accurate shots.

[442] And so the idea, you know, what we say is that choose.

[443] the handgun that you shoot the best, worry less about caliber.

[444] Because for a while, guys, we're carrying 454 Casals, and I'm not saying that's a bad weapon.

[445] You just need to be able to shoot that thing.

[446] Right, the kick.

[447] I mean, yeah, they're tough.

[448] I shot a 44 mag on this, a 44 mag revolver.

[449] And, I mean, that's a great bear gun to carry.

[450] It has tremendous kick.

[451] To get six shots off quickly with that accurately.

[452] Yeah.

[453] For Clay Newcomb would be very different.

[454] Cole.

[455] But with a nine millimeter.

[456] Nine millimeter, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

[457] Right.

[458] So, and most likely, if you shoot a bear, you're not necessarily going to kill the bear right that moment.

[459] Like, you're just hoping to hit him, stun him enough that you turn him.

[460] And you're going for center mass. Center mass. You're not trying to headshot a bear.

[461] I mean, if you did with a nine millimeter, it's a good chance to have bounced off the skull, right?

[462] If it hit him in the right place, I would say, yes but you could you could punch one in the right place depending on the size of the bear what about a 45 is that a good middle ground okay my my firearms expert um uh jake on this video and i haven't seen the ballistics but and there's so many variables with with with ballistics and different things but he said a nine millimeter actually penetrates better in some situations than a 40 40 caliber why we think about that Because smaller load?

[463] Smaller diameter bullet.

[464] So, you know, there's this, there's this physics involved between a smaller diameter bullet that has less, that has less mass, but, you know, I mean, it's just physics.

[465] Moving faster because it weighs less.

[466] Yeah, so there's, there are some loopholes there because you think a bigger caliber is always going to be better.

[467] And I'm not a caliber expert.

[468] No, nor am I. But my conclusion was if you're going to be in legit brown bear, black, you know, grisly, country you need to be carrying both because in my mind there are scenarios where a non -lethal option is very safe and doable like friends like and and for people who wouldn't know as well grizzly bears in the lower 48 are very protected and if you shoot a grizzly bear you better have a very good convincing story or you're in big trouble was this jamie oh is this the guy in colorado yellowstone this is um this is they used a non -lethal shotgun round I believe on this bear, right?

[469] Is this the one where it charges the warden?

[470] Correct, yeah.

[471] Is that what he used, Clay?

[472] I don't know.

[473] I've only seen a clip of it, which is this right here.

[474] Oh, because his one leg is up?

[475] Yeah.

[476] I don't know.

[477] Maybe.

[478] He shoots it with a non -lethal round.

[479] I hadn't even seen that part.

[480] Yeah.

[481] Yeah, it charges him.

[482] This is real recent like two weeks ago.

[483] Yeah.

[484] Oh my gosh.

[485] You hit it there on the button.

[486] Yeah.

[487] Look, he's got a pistol on his side, bear spray oh you hear the little kid crying yeah they're right in the car right there kid should cry fucking 2 ,000 pound monster gigantic monster that's a big bear too roll that back again so we can see how big that fucker is I mean look at that imagine that thing running it does seem like something's wrong with his left paw look see yeah he's got it up off the ground and he gets still that's probably extremely fast yeah it's got to be a big seems like that's a big bear yeah he's got a hurt front foot so yeah well that's the legend of big foot right there bears walking on back feet you know I've shown that to people that are like big time big big foot believers I'm like listen man imagine you're in a densely just like a huge forest like Pacific Northwest like Mount Rainier or something like that incredibly dense forest you're only glimpsing things through trees and it's like a box of Q -tips.

[488] That's how dense the trees are.

[489] Now, imagine you've got a hurt black bear that's walking on his back feet.

[490] And he walks by and he's seven feet tall.

[491] You'd think it's a giant gorilla.

[492] Yeah.

[493] You would think for sure that's big for them.

[494] Yeah.

[495] And we've seen documented in recent times bears that are almost bipedal, you know.

[496] Yeah, there's a lot of them.

[497] There's one, they'd call them pedals.

[498] Pedals.

[499] He was missing like a front paw, and he would walk around on all, everywhere he went on his back feet yeah yeah for people who haven't seen it you should google uh black bears walk on two feet because it's crazy how often they do it it is it almost it looks fake unless you yeah when i first watched it when i first watched that i was like that in real i mean years ago and then quickly you see that it is that's one of the beautiful things about things like youtube is that there's so many videos now whereas before it maybe would be a legend you'd hear about it i saw a bear walking on two legs like what for how long oh across the whole field like I don't know.

[500] You wanted to believe people, be like, this guy sounds like he's full of shit.

[501] Look at these guys just hanging out, man. I mean, these two standing up there, but that is bananas.

[502] Click on the video.

[503] Click on any video.

[504] We're going to watch them do it because the way they do it is so strange.

[505] It literally seems fake.

[506] I mean, if you were walking around in the woods and you saw that, you would for sure think that was a Sasquatch.

[507] Especially if you were scared and it was dusk.

[508] you know and you hear weird noises yeah and they you know they make weird noises that's a impressive bear call pretty good right if i'm not kidding not bad right it made me turn my head that's how they sound too they get that weird oh dude you got a better bear wolf than me want to hear my my roar you're right impressive I'm impressed I'm impressed I'm Got a lot of free time.

[509] Not really, but I'm an idiot.

[510] So what are the other taboos?

[511] Is that the end of their taboos?

[512] There was one more.

[513] There was one more that a man should stay awake after killing a bear so that the spirit of the bear doesn't catch him sleeping.

[514] Whoa.

[515] How long are I stay awake for?

[516] Well, it's like this kind of, they just say like basically 24 hours.

[517] They attributed a lot of, like, we, do you think that the attribution was due to the fact that they had these complete superhuman abilities in terms of like their senses, their sense of smell.

[518] You know, again, the full context of the book, you see that they do this kind of stuff with a lot of animals.

[519] Like they have moose hunting taboos.

[520] They have, like, everything has a way that it's done.

[521] And that's really what I kind of appreciated about it, is that they pay attention and that they had just a scripted way that they did things which I value that ultimately turned to respect towards that animal you know but it is a fascinating book for sure co -econ people well it's always interesting when you see people that have lived with animals for generation after generation after generation so they're passing down like either legends or traditions that are hunting if not thousands of years old and you get a sense of how important these animals were to these people like one of the one of the stories I really enjoyed on your podcast was the story from the 1800s about the two German bear hunters oh yeah yeah that's a great one and it's I really love how your podcast is produced too it's a whoever's editing it and putting music in it they're doing a great job because it's it takes you to a different place with the music and the way everything is the sound is edited into it it's really clever and it's something I would tell people like if you're going to start off with one start off with that one it's a good one because it's representative of it gives you an understanding of what this is all about without you having to have an interest in hunting like that that transcends like you don't have to be a bear hunter or any kind of hunter in that regard listen to that podcast that's really interesting and it transports you to think about what it was like for those people that relied on these animals for their food and how incredibly risky it was yeah so that episode was called death of a bear hunter yeah i think it's episode four and we learned a lot on that episode a lot of this has just kind of been an experiment to see how these stories come together and it's been an incredible journey for me i mean like i've had the time of my life making these podcasts and when i first you know i read a section of this book that was published in 1854 written by frederick gerstocker some people the germans would will say that i'm pronouncing it wrong and i'm sure i am gersticker is what they say and i read like a 10 -minute section out of the book and i remember when i first told the guy that was working with me on it he was like he was kind of like okay like you know you're sure this going to keep people's attention and and I was like man I think it's going to be really good and man when I listen to it you know I record all this stuff and do all the interviews but you know the guys Phil Taylor at meat eater is the one that puts it together like I do basically you know 99 % of the content editing so you know I'm picking out what's in there but Phil turns it into what you heard And man, that episode was the first one where we stitched together like a pretty robust story because it was centered around this guy getting killed by a bear out in the Ozark Mountains, you know, 20 miles from where I live.

[522] But the story involved my family, the story involved an old man named Ori Province that I met that helped us locate potentially where the grave was.

[523] The story involved a quest into human nature of why do stories impact us?

[524] And the beauty of that particular podcast, too, and really what I'm trying to do with bear grease is answer some real essential, genuine questions inside of me. Because I remember where I was standing when I read that story in about 2008.

[525] I'm just reading this book.

[526] Somebody told me about the book, a college professor, and said, hey there's some old bear hunting Arkansas bear hunting stories in this book you ought to read it I was like uh okay bought the book five years later I start reading the book I'm going through the pages and in the book is called wild sports in the far west just to get that out there the first one third of the book he's just traveling through the United States which is fascinating but because I'm because the center of my world is Arkansas I was waiting place in 1840 so he arrived in in the United States in 1837 and left in 1843, Frederick Gerstocker did.

[527] And so the first third of the book, he's traveling through the eastern United States and goes up into Canada and finally gets to Arkansas.

[528] And I start reading this story.

[529] And I read the story of Erskine's death.

[530] And I mean, I was offended that no one had ever told me this story before.

[531] It was like something incredible happening in your backyard, which I want to hear about your black panther um but i don't think it was a black panther i got to see that i got to see it well okay the this incredible story and i don't know why i was it so impacted by it but i was and and i went home and i told my family and i would use that story and i would tell my little boys when i would take put them to bed i would tell them that story my daughter to this day wears a bear claw necklace around her neck like that story really shaped our family and for no really good reason like there's not some big moral of the story so part of the quest inside of the podcast was to understand why stories impact us so much like why why does this story matter to me and you know the conclusion that I came to wasn't that profound except that human nature we are drawn to stories Netflix is stories.

[532] The Joe Rogan podcast is stories.

[533] Humans are magnetized and drawn to and find significance, find identity.

[534] They understand culture.

[535] They understand value systems.

[536] Like our way to understand the world is through stories.

[537] Well, without giving away too much of that story, that story has so many dots connected.

[538] Like, first of all, there's a life or death struggle in that one man is seriously injured, the other man is killed.

[539] It's also a camaraderie between animals because they're hunting with their hounds and what initiates him to literally go hand to hand with a bowie knife with his bear was that the bear is killing his dogs.

[540] So he rushes on the bear and tries to stab it to death and gets mauled and killed.

[541] And his friend jumps in and stabs the bear as well and gets his arm ripped out of socket.

[542] It's wild shit because it's got so many things connected together and then you've got the dogs that are still remaining alive staying with him the dead bear is there his dead friend is there and he's trying to start a fire with one arm yeah yeah and then he uses up all of his powder shooting shots off into the sky to try to try to alert the rest of the hunting party as to where he is in the dark why wolves are howling around him yeah i mean it's an amazing story i'll never forget even the first time i read that story when he so he's got a fire going And Erskine's corpse is, you know, 10 feet from him.

[543] And he had to lay stones on his eyes so that his eyelids would stay shut.

[544] And he said, with much effort, I made his arms lay down flat.

[545] Wow.

[546] I mean, he called it, he made reference to it was the night in the tomb.

[547] Wow.

[548] Because within, I mean, you just described it, but within 10 feet of him was a dead bear, five dead dogs, a dead human.

[549] and him who was knocked unconscious shoulder knocked out of place and he stayed the whole night there the night in the tomb wow just imagine the courage it takes to rush up on a bear with a buoy knife you know that was very common during that time and i'm not taking anything away from this particular instance but just for reference and it makes perfect sense why it was common because the way to hunt a bear was with a pack of hounds and they were were carrying one -shot muskets.

[550] They didn't have repeating rifles.

[551] So what would happen is the dogs would bathe the bear.

[552] And some percentage of time inside of bear hunting with hounds, the bear does not run up a tree.

[553] Most of the time it runs up a tree.

[554] And you're able to take the bear out of a tree.

[555] Some percentage of time, the bear stays on the ground.

[556] The larger bears tend to stay on the ground?

[557] Yep, usually.

[558] Because they have a harder time climbing trees too.

[559] I mean, a really big bear is harder to make climb, but you might have a young bear that won't climb either.

[560] So the correlation is, yeah, bigger bears typically won't climb, but sometimes younger bears are bad about it too.

[561] So you run up on this scene of bears, you know, dogs ban a bear.

[562] You shoot one time, it, the bear's now been shot, but still might have life in him.

[563] And so the situation escalates dramatically you don't have time to reload so what you do you pull your bowie knife which is standard issue for a bear hunter during that time period and you go in and you finish him how big is the blade on a bowie knife 12 inches at least 12 inches yeah standard issue man like every every bear hunter would have had one Jesus yeah it's just a wild way to go out of it yeah there's a lot of American art that revolves around that idea we have a painting in our home believe it's William Fitzpatrick it's called the Life of a Hunter could you look that up for us life of a hunter in there multiple iterations of incredible art from the 1800s of men on the ground with bowie knives taking bears why was the bear thought of as oh there's the image okay there's one of it now that's not the one I have in my wall I don't like that one as much go keep looking that is that one go left this this image right here that actual image the real original painting is is in Bentonville Arkansas at the Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum the original of that and they don't there's no dogs in this painting but you know this scene is just so common during that time yeah now that okay that's an illustration that was in the book wild sports in the far west so this was just an illustration man i did an illustration i like to draw and i've got a pencil drawing that hangs in my office framed of of the scene that i drew years ago of that scene yeah yeah do you have it online is it online type in uh yeah type in uh yeah Yeah, type in Clay Newcomb, Erskins' death.

[564] I think you'll find it.

[565] How do you spell Erskine?

[566] E .R. Oh, basketball coach, his name.

[567] Oh, really?

[568] Really.

[569] Yeah, it's a, it's, it's, it's, it's, I used it, uh, well, it's on my Instagram, too.

[570] It's up on my Instagram.

[571] Yeah, it's for sure on my Instagram, if you can pull that up, I don't know.

[572] But, no, there's a lot of, there's a lot of incredible history inside of bear hunting.

[573] And what's so interesting is that just the trend of the age is that this would be something that seems to be...

[574] This is it?

[575] You drew that?

[576] No, nope, nope, nope.

[577] Okay, go one back, keep going.

[578] That one.

[579] Yes, sir.

[580] That one.

[581] Oh, wow, that's great.

[582] Yeah.

[583] So, you know, that's Erskine.

[584] There's a dog that's been...

[585] Yeah.

[586] Why do you think they preferred to eat bear over deer?

[587] Because deer had to be plentiful back then, right?

[588] Right.

[589] It was just super lean.

[590] It wasn't as, it was tougher.

[591] Bear meat would be much more like beef.

[592] Yeah, it was just better.

[593] More of it.

[594] So there were more of it because it's a larger animal?

[595] Larger animal.

[596] Yeah.

[597] Yeah.

[598] It just seems that with the danger involved, that they would probably prefer eating deer.

[599] I mean, we're showing and talking about these extreme scenarios.

[600] You know, Daniel Boone in early 1800s, maybe late 1700s, you know, was reported he and Rebecca and his son, one of his sons on the Big Sandy River in Kentucky killed 155 bears in one winter.

[601] What?

[602] And I don't even think they were using dogs.

[603] Like, they were just still hunting these bears.

[604] There was that many bears.

[605] Oh, yeah.

[606] So it wasn't, like, it's not necessary.

[607] It's not always, you know, that's actually the trouble with some of hunting's PR is that if me and you go hunting, we're going to come back and talk about the most exciting thing that happened, the most dangerous thing that happened.

[608] Right.

[609] And that brands the whole thing, which 98 % of the time that doesn't happen, or 99 % or 99 .99 % or 99 .9%.

[610] But that's what we talk about.

[611] We don't talk about all the times that the bear just ran up a tree and we killed the bear or we just saw a bear feeding and we're able to take it.

[612] It never knew we were there.

[613] It was a good clean kill.

[614] I mean, so I think we're seeing the extremes inside of stuff like this, which is not something we're necessarily focused on.

[615] That's a big issue with perceptions of people who don't hunt, right?

[616] Non -hunters perceptions are a lot of times based on grip and grins.

[617] A lot of times based on maybe you were flipping through the channel.

[618] and you get on the outdoor channel and some guy shoots a big buck and they're hooting and hollering and high -fiving each other and people find it distasteful.

[619] They see it and they don't understand why everyone's so excited and so happy because they don't see how difficult it is to get to that position, how much anxiety is involved in shot placement and squeezing the trigger and make sure you don't flinch and it's hard.

[620] Like any kind of hunting and taking an animal's life is very difficult.

[621] So when you see that success celebration, people think it's like a celebration of death, of killing.

[622] Right.

[623] But it's a celebration of success and of overcoming anxiety and nervousness and the fear of failure and this, the moment itself, which is so enormous.

[624] The moment when you're squeezing a trigger or drawn back a bow on an animal, it's a heavy moment.

[625] Yeah.

[626] And there's so much going on in the mind, so much so much anxiety that you have to battle well and i think too that it's it's a snippet of time that's taken completely out of context yeah and you don't see the lifestyle potentially that and there's all gradients and scale inside of hunters you know some some people it truly is a lifestyle they've dedicated their life to it others you know do it less time whatever but like when i see a grip and grin photo, I see a lifestyle.

[627] I see somebody that's probably dedicated a big part of their life that's not even connected directly to hunting that has informed their ability to be efficient hunters.

[628] That's kind of what the stories that I'm telling, and even in the future, some of the stuff I'm planning in the future, what I'm trying to tell the story of is people who live their lives close to the land and the other things that happen.

[629] So you'll always hear some flavor of hunting in most of my podcasts.

[630] Many of them are not about hunting at all, but you'll see a small window, but you'll see this life.

[631] For instance, there's a podcast that's coming out soon and I interview this old guy that really is a legendary hunter.

[632] I'm not going to tell you where he's from.

[633] I don't want to forecast what the podcast is about, but he the whole podcast is about his life.

[634] Very little of it's about hunting, but it puts it in context.

[635] And it goes, no, that's not just an old hillbilly out shooting stuff.

[636] This guy has dedicated his life to this.

[637] This is a very thoughtful process.

[638] This guy, not just his life, his dad's life and his dad's life before him, was dedicated.

[639] I mean, these guys made a decision.

[640] This is going to be a big part of our life, boys.

[641] We're going to be hunters.

[642] and it affected their careers, it affected their families, it affected how many kids they, I mean, you know, just like the implications of choosing a lifestyle is so big.

[643] And that's what I think is so profound about hunting.

[644] And that's what I'm interested in, is because I love to hunt.

[645] Like, I cannot erase that for me. Like, I do love to hunt.

[646] But I am very interested in where, like, how hunting has actually affected my life, how it impacts the character of my child.

[647] children, how it impacts the sanctity of my marriage.

[648] I mean, I'm kind of going out there, but I'm being serious.

[649] Like, I think that what we choose to dedicate our life to has the opportunity to make us better and impact our character.

[650] It's just a big story, man. It's a big story, and a grip and grin doesn't tell that story, but it's so hard because it's hard to tell me, Clay, don't post a picture of yourself with a dead deer and you're smiling.

[651] And it's like, bro, you want me to accommodate my entire life for you?

[652] I will do that.

[653] Like, I spend much of my life doing that, trying to interpret for people hunting.

[654] But we're kind of asking for some empathy, too, from the other side.

[655] And we've got to do a better job of telling our story.

[656] Yeah, I think there's that.

[657] And there's also that we're connected to what you would call, what the general population would call trophy hunters.

[658] It's like that and that's therein lies the rub with bears is that many people don't understand that bears are food and that it's not just food.

[659] It's actually a delicious food.

[660] And from a conservation standpoint, it's actually important to control the population.

[661] But when you see someone posing with an animal, unfortunately, it will go to like elephants or giraffes or some some unpleasant animal, a lion, where you see someone.

[662] someone posing with a line and then you think about some canned hunt in Africa where some obese man is standing there with a with a rifle over this majestic animal and it's very distasteful and it infuriates people and rightly so because like the image they're getting out of that is some cruel sociopath who's just trying to check off boxes.

[663] Have you ever seen Louis Theroux's piece that he did on hunting camps in Africa?

[664] I have not.

[665] It's really good.

[666] It's really good.

[667] It's really good.

[668] And he goes to South Africa and one of the best parts about it is he bothers the shit out of the people that run this camp.

[669] He's there forever.

[670] He's the, until they just start talking frankly in front of him.

[671] And he gets all these people who come over there and they're talking about how much money they're paying.

[672] I want to pay this much to get a hippo and then I'll pay that much to, and you know, and you see these folks and you see this sort of casual attitude they have about going over there.

[673] it's almost like going to Disneyland saying okay I'm at Disneyland I want to ride the Incredibles ride and then I want to go over here and I want to do this thing and yeah it's the same sort of way of describing it and missing is all of the stuff that I get out of your podcast yeah all the stuff of the long deep history of this and their traditions and then you know one of the best things about meat eater is not just that it's like Like Steve is an incredible narrator and the way he writes those pieces is amazing because it gives you this insight into his mind that is this deeply intelligent, very well -read man who also loves hunting.

[674] But also the cooking, he's always cooking wild game on the show.

[675] And you get it.

[676] You get it when you see them cooking over a campfire and eating this food.

[677] And it's like fantastic.

[678] They're on the mountain.

[679] Yeah.

[680] Camped out.

[681] It's very attractive.

[682] Yeah.

[683] It's so much better than a grip and grin.

[684] Yeah.

[685] You know, like, that is, if there's, if a gripping grand is the worst way to get people introduced into hunting, meat eater, the television shows the best way.

[686] Yeah, yeah.

[687] Have you ever heard the, is anybody ever walked you through, like, the philosophy of the term trophy hunting and how it kind of came into?

[688] No, no. So, here's the short version, Joe, is that I'll start out with a controversial statement and I'll qualify it.

[689] Okay.

[690] Trophy hunting is what saved North American wildlife.

[691] Trophy hunting.

[692] Imagine a market hunting culture where there was no ethic of, like it was literally the Wild West.

[693] Let's explain that to people how that all took place too, because most people don't understand.

[694] So market hunting, like essentially when Europeans arrived here, they arrived into a wildlife bonanza like the earth is not.

[695] seen sense of all the big game animals that we have now and and they began to hunt these animals for market for profit okay so you know the the hides of animals were valued the meat of animals were valued a bear bear fat was a commodity that could be traded as money and so there was much incentive like Daniel Boone a lot of these guys I mean they made a good living as market hunters and when I say good living I mean they weren't getting rich but Fur traders could get rich.

[696] And so market hunting was a career.

[697] I'm a market hunter.

[698] That happened from in 150 years, essentially, from 1750 to the turn of the century, 1900, basically was one of the greatest scale demolitions of wildlife that planet Earth has ever seen.

[699] And how long is going for?

[700] How many years?

[701] Well, you know, I mean, Boone was born.

[702] in 1734 and he died in 1820 and that was kind of a so so let's just say from the late 1700s till the late 1800s so roughly 150 years and during that time there was also no refrigeration so if you did shoot an animal it was really only good for a certain amount of time that's right and they had to sell it quickly yeah but it was common like if you ate bear me if you Missouri and, you know, 1820, you were probably eating some kind of wild game, you know, that was marketed.

[703] And so that was the mentality is if it's brown, it's down, kill anything.

[704] There was no ethic involved in it in terms of conservation.

[705] That wasn't on people's minds.

[706] Like it wasn't invented yet.

[707] And in the late 1800s, Teddy Roosevelt and a group of guys that would later form the Boone and Crockett club, they foresaw the end of North American big game.

[708] They said, we're going to, the big game of North America will be extinct in the next, you know, decade, like gone forever, such that they went out to collect specimens to put in a museum in New York so that future Americans would know what a buffalo looked like because it was going to be gone.

[709] So Americans would know what a mule deer look like and so they basically these great thinkers of which teddy roosevelt and a bunch of them there were other many other men but roosevelt was the big one they were like we got to change things or this thing's going to die and they created the the boon and crockett club which essentially gave credit gave cultural value through a numerical number a score of an animal like and and so for The people that don't hunt, today you might hear a hunter say, man, I killed 150 -inch buck.

[710] And that means nothing to you.

[711] That's just a number.

[712] But to us, that means a lot because, oh, wow, 150 -inch buck.

[713] Like, we know the way that they're measured, and we know that, man, that's a big buck.

[714] And you're measuring the antlers.

[715] Measuring the antlers of a bear.

[716] You measure a skull.

[717] Or the length of the body.

[718] Well, for Boone and Crockett, it's just the skull.

[719] Oh, okay.

[720] Just for measurement.

[721] The Boone and Crockett guys essentially came up with an ingenious plan that we are going to give cultural value to older age males so that people will be incentivized to take older age males and let the juveniles and females go.

[722] And basically, over the course of about 50 years, they changed the entire hunting culture of North America.

[723] They picked us up from a market hunting.

[724] It's brown.

[725] it's down there was no value not much value put on big animals like you can go back to some of the the the the native american cultures and see that they put some value on big horns but very little and i'm not an expert on that but essentially this idea that we're now obsessed with big antlers comes from the idea that we want to save north american wildlife and in a conservation perspective the best animal to take out of a herd is an older mature male because he has contributed to the gene pool and it is a it is not a loss to remove him.

[726] And so basically they had this incredible idea that worked.

[727] And so that's what hurts me a little bit.

[728] Like when you say trophy hunting, I'm like, no, I mean, I'm against, I mean, what you are describing, I am against.

[729] The semantics of it, though, actually, if you deep dive And that's where you cannot understand these things if you just glossed over the surface.

[730] And that's the problem with so many parts of our world.

[731] It's people look at a clip off YouTube and go, okay, I understand the whole thing.

[732] Man, you don't.

[733] That's a part of Louis Theroux's documentary as well.

[734] We explains that these animals, a lot of these animals in Africa, were on the verge of extinction.

[735] And now they're in abundance, but they live in these high fence hunting ranches.

[736] Right.

[737] And it's sort of a weird, bittersweet victory.

[738] because the numbers are huge.

[739] They're higher than they've ever been before because there's value associated with them because people are willing to pay to kill them.

[740] And I realize that's a tough pill for somebody to swallow, or some people to swallow.

[741] But like, so to me, like many, many, many animals have not been shot by me and my family because of the influence of us wanting to take a bigger male.

[742] And there's no shame in that.

[743] It's honorable.

[744] and it's not honorable because wow look at the animal you killed you must be a big you know big stud man because you it's not it we're playing a part we're players in this big game that we understand you could take any one of my kids and put them in this chair and they can tell you the exact same thing that i just told you i mean they understand what we're doing they understand that yeah when we pass up a young buck to shoot an old one we will celebrate the heck out of those horns but we also know that we are celebrated in the heck out of that we took an animal out that's the right one to take out the hardest one to take out and so to throw in trophy that word came from that time period you know so anyway to me that's fascinating trophy hunting is what saved North American wildlife and now we have this incredible ethic inside of everywhere like when you go elk hunting you want to kill a big one When I go bear hunting, I want to kill an older age male.

[745] And that's a good thing.

[746] It's a very good thing.

[747] It's hard to understand.

[748] It's not understood in a headline.

[749] Right.

[750] It's a complex issue.

[751] And it's an issue if you do go back to the whole market hunting thing and people get an understanding of what was happening in North America in the 19th century, they'll get a better appreciation of what was done.

[752] Because with market hunting, having animals in the verge of, of extinction and then reintroducing them in places like Kentucky where they now have seasons again or places like Pennsylvania like there's a lot of parts of this country where while some like elk were just they're gone still from most of their range right where an animal has cultural value it will be protected and preserved yeah where that animal has no cultural value no incentive for the common man to preserve that animal he will not be protected I think it's hard for people to swallow the fact that it takes a lot of money to protect these animals as well.

[753] And one of the best ways to get that money is through the taxes that are taken from hunting tags and ammunition and gear.

[754] And the Pittman -Robertson Act that has been set up to set aside, is it 10 %?

[755] It varies, yeah, 10 to 11%, something like that.

[756] So through that, they've generated literally billions of dollars in conservation.

[757] And as far as I know, I don't think there's anything even close in terms of the amount of resources that have been gathered for conservation.

[758] No. It's hunting has gathered up more money for conservation than anything else.

[759] Absolutely.

[760] I mean, when you see a big bear, when you see a hunter with a bear with a deer, I mean, really, what you should see through that lens is see protected habitat.

[761] I mean, because essentially to have healthy populations of animals, we've got to have habitat.

[762] And that is the biggest threat to North American wildlife right now.

[763] It's just fragmentation of wilderness, urban sprawl, decimation of habitat.

[764] I mean, you know, there's the stats are easily accessible of, you know, how much of the planet is becoming concrete every single second.

[765] And, man, when you lock in these hunting grounds, I think it's awesome.

[766] that we still, like, wars for the last 10 ,000 years have been fought over hunting grounds.

[767] And today, we still kind of do the same thing.

[768] I mean, not wars, but like we set aside areas that this is a place to hunt.

[769] And those areas, public land anyway, are accessible to other people other than hunters, but hunters are the ones that are primarily funding most of the public land.

[770] and it's ingenious.

[771] Ingenius to the point it's almost hard to believe.

[772] Yeah.

[773] It's got to be a giant shocker too when you run those numbers by non -hunters or people that are opposed to hunting and that people who are believers in wildlife conservation, but they don't really understand the amount of resources that are involved in maintaining that stuff, protecting wetlands, protecting, you know, making sure that public lands don't get bought up that's an issue too right yeah some states they're trying to sell off public lands and people have to act and it gets it gets heated yes it gets really crazy because yes it's a slippery slope we have a really unique situation here too right yeah i mean north america has has a hunting culture that's different than anywhere in the world and what's so cool about it too and joe you may know this kind of stuff but You know, the European model of hunting essentially boiled down to that people with money, wealthy people, elites, kings, aristocrats were the ones that hunted and controlled land and controlled wildlife.

[774] Gerstocker.

[775] The reason Gerstocker left Germany in 1837 was to come to this wild, wild place and hunt.

[776] And those guys got here and they were like, you mean we can just go hunt?

[777] I've got a friend that I tell the story sometimes I've got a friend that lives in whales and she watches our bear hunting stuff sometimes and she says every time and she likes it presumably she says every time she has seen me shoot a bear she gasped because she says he just shot the king's bear like that's the question like it's not it's just the impulse of her is like, oh my gosh, Clay's going to be in big trouble.

[778] So it's like a cultural thing.

[779] It's embedded.

[780] Yeah, wildlife is not for the people.

[781] Roosevelt, man, that's why this is so ingenious.

[782] Roosevelt came over here and said, tell you what, we're going to make wildlife accessible to all the people.

[783] We're going to make public land accessible to everyone.

[784] And everybody would have been like, wait a minute, you sure this is going to work very good?

[785] Like, if we want to have more wildlife, don't we need to protect wildlife?

[786] And they were like, no, we need to incentivize the average guy that he has a right and a place and an ability to go out on land and kill game for his family.

[787] And then you give incentive to everybody to protect, to value, to conserve, to contribute.

[788] And it's worked better than anything on the planet ever.

[789] Because what people don't know, perhaps, is that most, in European countries, most of the land where people are hunting is privately owned.

[790] And it used to be owned by the royals, which is why, you know, she's thinking, oh, my God, he shot the king's bear.

[791] Yeah.

[792] And that's what Robin Hood was all about.

[793] The original Robin Hood, the reason why Robin Hood was an archer, Robin Hood was a hunter.

[794] And he was hunting for animals on the royal land and giving the meat to the villagers who were starving to death.

[795] And he was taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

[796] Later on, it became money.

[797] You know, as the...

[798] Oh, I didn't know that.

[799] So originally it was meat.

[800] Yeah.

[801] Originally, Robin Hood was about hunting.

[802] Hollywood stole another bow hunting story from us.

[803] Well, it's like what they've done with hunting is really kind of crazy.

[804] what Hollywood has done with Bambi and with movies where there's always these drunken assholes that are out there killing animals and so like a horror movie when they get theirs it's always great like you ever see the movie Wolverine probably one of the movies one of the Wolverine movies I think it's Wolverine is Hugh Jackman stumbles on some bear hunters yeah superhert no I have not seen that well they're asshole bear hunters and he has to fuck these guys up because he's mad that they shot a bear like he defends the bear yeah it's but it's that thing where the bear hunters the hunters in films are rarely represented as like noble people with a deep appreciation for wildlife and and sustainability and the fact that this is going to feed and provide nourishment to their family and to friends and it's not it's never thought about that way it's thought about like bambi you killed bambi it's an easy story it's a very very it's a one step story to tell someone that does not know or has any context into the rural world yes that these hillbillies killing stuff are bad right it's a multi -step story to understand it right you know i mean so it's it's just like it's if you want to go from zero to an understanding you've got to walk through all the things we've just described and you can't put that on a billboard yeah you can put on a billboard this is bad don't kill Bambi it's just it's so it's so classic clickbait human nature to be like yeah that is bad and I mean in modern culture people are looking for everyone has this agenda of something bandwagon they want to get on and it hurts me man I mean like for real like Joe I stay up at night thinking about this stuff I mean and to me it's an issue of representation of my people I mean I take it really personally I really do I mean, just like, we are not the bad guys.

[805] We are the good guys.

[806] Why can't we tell that story?

[807] And part of the problem is the people who think of hunters as the bad guys are involved in factory farming, in the extent that they buy factory farmed meat.

[808] So they're involved in this weird imprisonment thing where everything is done in the shadows behind closed doors and through the protection of agag law.

[809] So these agricultural gag laws won't allow people that work in these factory farm situations to take photographs and videos because it would unfavorably hurt the business.

[810] So they've made it so that it's illegal to film atrocities where people would be disgusted.

[811] This is what it takes to get my bacon?

[812] Well, I don't want bacon anymore, man. So they're worried that that would hurt the business so they've made it illegal.

[813] So people have been locked up and gone to jail for taking video of things that most of us would think are crimes against.

[814] nature.

[815] Those people who buy that stuff will hate hunters which is really kind of crazy.

[816] We have the card stacked against us too for two things.

[817] Number one a smaller number of people are hunters.

[818] Number two finances like we don't have what we do as hunters is done in private and it is not a massive financial contribution to society.

[819] I'm not discounting the hundred dollars that we talked about but just like think about like the agricultural industry the meat industry massive amount of money coming into that i mean they control the levers on the marketing of that thing we're just these guys that are doing what humans were designed to do from the beginning of time and we are easily marketed against because i mean we don't have the i mean you know there's not some organization that manages all of hunting's PR It has a bankrupt.

[820] I mean, the point is, is that we, by the very nature of what we do, are a smaller group of people that are not a super financially empowered group of people.

[821] There's no incentive for some big meat company to make hunters look good.

[822] Also, it has the opposite effect that virtue signaling does.

[823] You have to defend yourself.

[824] So as opposed to like, there's a lot of people that love to talk about how they're vegan.

[825] And one of the things about saying that, you're vegan, you're letting people know that you're a very moral and ethical person who cares about life and you don't want anything to be harmed.

[826] So you do no harm and you just eat vegetables.

[827] And so by saying that, you get a free ride with a lot of people like, there's very few people that are going to question, okay, do you understand monocrop agriculture?

[828] Do you understand what's involved if you're going to plant corn, how many gophers you have to kill?

[829] Do you have any idea how much pesticide you have to use to kill off the bugs?

[830] Do you have any idea what a damaging effect, monocrop agriculture?

[831] When you see hundreds of acres of soybeans, you know fucking bad that is?

[832] It's so bad for the environment.

[833] There's no question whatsoever.

[834] You've displaced a shitload of wildlife.

[835] If you're using combines to gather up that stuff, you're going to grind up a lot of rodents and rabbits and maybe deer fauns.

[836] There's a lot.

[837] And all the wildlife habitat like pretty much anywhere in the eastern deciduous forest that is row crop agriculture was at one time a climax forest of some type yeah life eats life and as weird as that sounds there's not really a lot of moral high ground to eating vegetables as opposed to eating a large game animal Shane Mahoney as a very well known conservationist and author and speaker he's up in statistic one time, and I don't have the actual numbers, but essentially if the United States decided, if everyone in the United States decided that they were going to be vegan, we would have to turn the entire United States and Canada into, we'd have to clear the land and have it be row crop agriculture and able to fuel a 350 million person vegan operation.

[838] I mean, his point in the numbers there, you know, I don't have, it's been so long, but his point was, there's a massive imprint on this place, even from something as, you know, that sounds so non -massive about being vegan.

[839] Yeah, and what are you going to do with all the cows?

[840] What are you going to do with all the chickens?

[841] You're going to give them birth control?

[842] You're going to sterilize them?

[843] Like, how are you going to keep healthy populations alive?

[844] Do you have that worked out?

[845] Like, what are you going to decide some bulls can breed with cows and then some can't?

[846] Like, are you going to play God?

[847] Like, are you going to hunt them if there's too many of them?

[848] And if you do, what are you going to do?

[849] You're going to feed them to mountain lions?

[850] Like, how are you going to do with all the food?

[851] Yeah.

[852] You're in a weird situation.

[853] Have you ever read Dan Flores' book Bison Diplomacy?

[854] Bison Ecology, Bisoned Ecotan.

[855] American Serengetti?

[856] Yeah.

[857] He also wrote Coyote.

[858] Coyote America, which is amazing.

[859] He's written quite a few great things, but one of the things that he pointed to, it's really an interesting, a really interesting theory that when you go back to the original North American settlers, they did not talk about massive herds of Buffalo.

[860] And he thinks that Native Americans, with their hunting strategies that they had already had in play once they got a hold of the horse and once they were riding horses which really didn't happen until the European settlement it's crazy sort of convoluted thing because horses originated in North America but then they went extinct but they had already traveled to other parts of the world so like they had Asian horses and all the horses the Mongols used originated in North America but then they're in our fossil record yeah so Europeans reintroduced the horse Native American start In the 1500s or so But what he said is The reintroduction of horses Came with Europeans introducing diseases The diseases killed 90 % Of the Native American tribes Which is so fucking crazy When we think about genocide And surely genocide was committed On many North American tribes In the form of murder But the diseases Killed most So in killing 90 % of these Native American tribes, what it did was completely alleviate all the hunting pressure.

[861] So all these buffalo, the populations went crazy.

[862] So when you see these millions of buffalo on these fields, that was wholly unnatural.

[863] And his position was that was a direct indication that the hunters had died off.

[864] So, I mean, it's hard for us to imagine that 90%, a disease that wiped out 90 % of all the people here.

[865] But that's, that is what happened.

[866] And so when a lot of what, like, Lewis and Clark would have seen and the early exploration of the West was not natural for the last 10 ,000 years, that's what you're saying.

[867] Yeah, well, that's what you heard of Cavesa de Vaca?

[868] Yeah, I just read, uh, did you read it?

[869] What is it, a place so strange?

[870] Is that a land so strange?

[871] A land so strange.

[872] My friend Hank turned me on to it.

[873] Okay.

[874] Bizarer book.

[875] It's been a while since I've, read it, but I think that was the first documented European travel into the interior, the United States.

[876] Yeah.

[877] The guy landed in Florida, I want to say, and traveled up to the southern U .S. into parts of Texas.

[878] Yeah.

[879] And, uh...

[880] 400 guys, they got down to two.

[881] Bizarre.

[882] Wild.

[883] Bizarre.

[884] You know?

[885] I mean, I think maybe two or four.

[886] How many people survived at the end?

[887] Maybe it's four.

[888] But either way, from 400 guys.

[889] Yeah.

[890] Yeah.

[891] It's a bizarre history that we have.

[892] Yeah, super bizarre.

[893] When you think about how long people have been around, and, you know, one of the ways that I always describe it, and, you know, you have a similar way of talking about it in that bear hunting episode, is that, or was it the deer episode?

[894] I'll listen to a couple of them.

[895] But anyway, the point is that if the United States was founded in 1776 and people lived to be 100, that's three people ago.

[896] Yeah.

[897] That's not that long.

[898] That's so, if you go back three people, you're looking at a completely different place, which is nowhere on earth like that.

[899] Yeah.

[900] Other than, obviously, the introduction of, you know, machines and engines and, you know, the industrial age, which changed the whole world, just the sheer fact that this was populated by nomadic tribes who are subsistence hunting.

[901] And then all of a sudden, within three generations, it's completely unrecognized.

[902] the population of the animals is completely changed some of them have been extirpated out of their land forever and then there's just this new group of humans from another continent that overwhelm the place yeah it's nuts it's nuts now it is interesting our the human perspective of time like and what you're referring to is when I was talking to my buddy my old my hero James Lawrence he he's 72 or something something, and he was heavily influenced by his grandmother, who I want to say we calculated that she would have been born in the 1800s, and she would have had grandparents just like James that would have been primitive humans.

[903] And we feel like that was so long ago, but, you know, and I'm using James as an example from that one, but I mean, it's not all of us, but like, James.

[904] is like he much of the way that he views the world would would would be from the direct influence of these people it's just an interesting thought especially people who live close to the land who live in the same places that they always have is they're like an artifact and i'm fascinated fascinated by them yeah they carry with them the echoes of people who literally came on boats without a photograph to look at yeah they had no idea what they were getting into they someone could have drawn this is what this is what i saw in america you draw it down like okay let me take the baby we're going to get in a boat and take a couple months and get across the country or get across the ocean i mean how long did it take to get across the ocean back then uh it had to be a long fucking time at least a month maybe three and they just took these chances i mean what kind of wild -ass people were the kind of people that were willing to take their family and jump on a boat and hope to live.

[905] Because you knew not everybody on that boat was going to make it.

[906] Yeah.

[907] I mean, that was the reality of the age.

[908] It's just, it's incredible, it's incredible how far we've come in terms of air quotes progress.

[909] Because it is progress.

[910] But it's really what it is is like technological innovation and the invasiveness of this technology and how it's permeated all aspects of life in all aspects of civilization and how radical that change is over the way people lived for hundreds and hundreds of years with small evolutions, small deviations and practice and new inventions and, you know, different ways to do things.

[911] And I've heard you talk about this kind of stuff, and so it's a common thought process for people that have in this time, but like the way that we have lived, even just for the last 50 years, is a bizarre human experience.

[912] that has never, ever, ever, ever, ever been seen before.

[913] Information and technology, just, I mean, us sitting here, us knowing each other.

[914] I mean, like, in 1800s, we would have known each other because you would have lived in Austin and I would have lived in Northwest Arkansas, and that would have been a 18 -day wagon ride, I mean, or longer than that.

[915] I mean, this is a bizarre human experience that we're having right now, and that's why, like, if we talk about people, changing the rules and we have this bizarre understanding of time like we're just we just show up on this planet and then we feel like we we have answers and that's why I'm so concerned with people specifically with hunting hunting bears it's like we have this one little sliver of time and we decide that we want to change the rules that have governed us for the last 10 ,000 years mm -hmm and it's like wait a 50 years ago.

[916] How old are you?

[917] And it's not really fair.

[918] I mean, it's like, in the disconnection of humans from natural places and just a general understanding of the biology of a human and what we have to eat and how we have to live and the natural landscape, it's so disconnected.

[919] We're kind of in like a dangerous place for people that want to see wild places continue.

[920] And I was talking to Keith, Keith Urbane, the guy that's with me here.

[921] He said something last night that put a bunch of pieces together for me, just in probably a three -minute conversation.

[922] But he talked about, he had been reading a book about how the American identity for 200 years essentially was interfaced with wilderness.

[923] And clearly there's a lot of very negative things, genocide, conquest of the world.

[924] West, like, we're looking back on that now and trying to understand it and the impacts of it.

[925] But the American identity for so long was our engagement with wild places.

[926] And then all of a sudden, we're done.

[927] And how that, like, we're now, we seem to be in this time of trying to understand what is our identity.

[928] And for so long we had this identity that was deeply connected.

[929] I mean, you know, you look across the nations of the earth and, you know, the American identity is pretty tied into, or has been, has tied into wild places and hunting and frontiersmen.

[930] Some of our most famous people were, you know, Daniel Boone and some of these guys.

[931] And anyway, just we're in a weird place.

[932] And then what we're trying to say is, hey, just because we don't, there's a revitalization of American identity.

[933] that should be modernized to fit our world now.

[934] And not to say that everybody should be hunters because they shouldn't.

[935] And not to say that being a hunter is some magical thing that's going to make you a better person.

[936] That's not what I'm saying.

[937] But there should be a space for us.

[938] I agree, and I think it's a lack of understanding.

[939] And that lack of understanding is there's a lot of factors.

[940] There's what we talked about before with the media perceptions or depictions of hunters have been very distorted.

[941] It's very, very rare that you see a noble hunter who really truly respects the animal that they shot and killed and takes time with the preparation and really values each piece of that meat.

[942] You don't see that in films and in television shows.

[943] You see the negative, because they're just trying, they have 90 minutes to get a story out there, right?

[944] And the stories, you know, they're trying to have good guys and bad guys and the bad guys wear black and it's real simple.

[945] You know, it's easy to, and hunters are a great rude.

[946] person if you got a guy who's like really in tune with animals what do you do you have a drunk asshole hunter and you insert him into your story it's a tired trope right yeah yeah but there hasn't been a lot of defense of that on the side of of hunters hunters defending themselves or depicting themselves in a positive light because I think up until now there really haven't been the resources available the wildlife show or the outdoor shows, the hunting shows that are on television are really just preaching to converted.

[947] A lot of them have like kill shots over and over and over again and you know and people hooting and hollering and it's for the converted.

[948] And oftentimes, and there's some of them, we don't have to name names, there's some of them are hugely distasteful even to actual hunters.

[949] Like you bring up some people that are professional hunters on television amounts actual conservative.

[950] and actual hunters, they get angry.

[951] They'll get angry about that person.

[952] Like that motherfucker's setting us back so hard.

[953] Yeah.

[954] With all the hootin and harlarin and all the stupid way of talking about these animals.

[955] But with podcasts and with shows like meat eater, I think things are changing in a lot of people's perceptions.

[956] Yeah.

[957] Because they get us, I've had conversations.

[958] I've had multiple conversations with people where they said, I have never even thought about hunting until I listened to a hundred Hunter on your podcast, describe what it means to them.

[959] And then I started watching some videos, then I watched meat eater, or then I read a book, or then I go, okay, it's like one of those things where when you're looking at it from the outside, you have a view of it that is not really accurate.

[960] And the only way to really understand what it is, is I think we have to lay layers upon layers upon layers of these kind of conversations and discussions and stories and put them out there very carefully and be honest about the good and the bad the disturbing the part of the the weird feeling of loss like you shoot an animal there's a there's a feeling man when i when i shoot an animal like an elk and i walk on that up to that animal there's a real feeling of loss there's a feeling of of um very appreciative that that animal's going to feed me and my family and a lot of my I'm going to give people sausage.

[961] They're going to send me pictures of it.

[962] Like, look what I got.

[963] Look at Woody cooked tonight for dinner.

[964] It's exciting.

[965] It's all great.

[966] But there's a real feeling of loss.

[967] And you've got to be honest about that.

[968] All the aspects of it.

[969] Yeah.

[970] And then people need to be educated about where their meat is actually coming from.

[971] And there's really good regenerative farming options.

[972] You can buy, particularly, there's a lot of good places in Texas, or you can know your rancher.

[973] You can go and see the cows that that guy's raising.

[974] You see the bison they have that they're raising, and you can buy meat from these ethical people who humanely curate this meat, and you can have a relationship with them and buy all your food from them.

[975] And that's great.

[976] It's a great option.

[977] But if you're a person who eats meat and you don't know where your meat comes from and you are casting aspersions at hunters, you're doing it wrong.

[978] And it might not even be your fault.

[979] I'm not even blaming you for your perceptions because your perceptions, again, A lot of them are shaped by popular culture.

[980] And popular culture over the last, you know, whatever it is, 100 years, has not done a good job of accurately portraying what's the best aspects of it.

[981] It only concentrates on the worst.

[982] Yeah.

[983] You know, Steve Ronella, man, he, you know, I've just got to know Steve like the last year, really.

[984] And, I mean, before that, I would just have been a consumer of his content.

[985] And, I mean, he really changed the game.

[986] He did.

[987] I mean, like, he changed the game with a thoughtful, intelligent way.

[988] And, I mean, I don't know any way to say it.

[989] I'm not trying to blow smoke up anywhere.

[990] No, you're just telling the truth.

[991] It's just the truth.

[992] Articulate, well -read, thoughtful approach, and with a deep respect for those animals.

[993] Yeah.

[994] And there's other people doing it too, but.

[995] But he's got a great way of disappointing.

[996] describing things and that motherfucker loves to talk so it's like you know uh when he had done my podcast the first time he didn't even know what a podcast was yeah and then he got me to go hunting with him that was back in 2012 so I was nine years ago was the first time I ever hunted so it's so really you had it with Steve nine years ago for it was that long ago yeah I mean I still I watched one of those episodes a while like 2012 yeah there's a an episode of me and brian cow and hunting mule deer in the Missouri breaks.

[997] Did he get you started in honey?

[998] Yes.

[999] Okay.

[1000] On that show.

[1001] How did you know Ronella to begin with?

[1002] I watched the show The Wild Within.

[1003] Okay.

[1004] He had a show before meat eater called The Wild Within and the Wild Within was, it was one of those sort of like life below zero type reality shows where it was like he told me they were they were trying to do shit like they were trying to release a moose and then he shoots it like to ensure that they had an animal for him to shoot and he's like, get the fuck out of here.

[1005] We're not doing that.

[1006] But there was a lot of what that show was that was interesting to me was his explanation of what these people back then.

[1007] Like he had made a raft out of hide and used it to float down the river and, you know, he'd shot this moose and took care of it and did all the field dressing.

[1008] And living like that to me has always been fascinating.

[1009] And I had in my head, I had this understanding that there was.

[1010] is a disconnect between me and food, that I would go to a store and I'd buy a steak, I'd come home and cook it, or I'd order a steak at a restaurant.

[1011] There's so many steps that were missing that my feelings of what a piece of meat were were wholly inaccurate.

[1012] And I knew that.

[1013] And then I'd seen a bunch of PETA videos.

[1014] So I was like, oh, Jesus.

[1015] So I was thinking before Steve took me that I'm going to have one of two options, either I'm going to become a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter because I don't want to participate in this world where these animals are stockpiled into a warehouse and they're shitting into holes in the ground it runs into this giant toxic pond that you see if you've seen the drone footage of pig farming yeah it's fucking crazy and so um I went with Steve and uh my very first hunting experience ever is on video and you can watch it online I shot a mule deer okay I remember I have seen that yeah those first I'd forgotten that that was your first hunt ever.

[1016] Not only was the first animal I shot, I'd only shot a rifle against paper, like two days before that, like four or five times.

[1017] We set up targets out there, and he was basically just telling me, just don't flinch, just squeeze the trigger slowly and let it go off by surprise.

[1018] And I just sort of, he was good at explaining it.

[1019] I got it in my head.

[1020] But, I mean, I wasn't even sure of how, where to look at the scope.

[1021] That's it right there.

[1022] That's it.

[1023] so that was the first animal I had ever shot ever and then you know we ate the liver um that night over fire you know we cooked it on a campfire and I was hooked Steve looks pretty pumped man oh he was so excited he gave you the he gave you the arm slap yeah well he was just excited that it dropped with one shot man hey let me tell you it was still alive I had to put another round into it so not knowing steve real well until the last year and a half or so you know you have questions of like what's this guy going to be like when you're with him or when the cameras aren't on because you know there's a perception of someone that's in media as much as him yeah and man i i i mean i i would i would hope that people would describe me as a hunter i mean like the core motivation of me like i i i just i've been exposed to it long enough that like i can see through the fluff and man i mean it didn't surprise me i knew steve was the real deal but i mean i've hunted a lot with him now and i mean he the guy just loves he loves to hunt he's a real deal he's tough as nails he's he's he's what surprised me is like he came and hunted with us in Arkansas, and before we even hunted, he wanted to go out coyote hunting.

[1024] And it kind of surprised me just like his drive to hunt.

[1025] Like, he's not, he's legit.

[1026] Oh, yeah.

[1027] No, there's no question about that.

[1028] There's no way he could describe it the way he describes things without having a deep love for it.

[1029] Yeah.

[1030] He's very valuable, very valuable.

[1031] He's a rare human that comes along that bridges a gap, and he does it with his deep knowledge of literature and education.

[1032] He's a different kind of person.

[1033] That's what he did is he tied in anthropology and human history into hunting.

[1034] And, yeah, it's cool.

[1035] Yeah, it's cool what the company's doing, too, what meat eater's doing.

[1036] And now how meat eater is connected to all these other really legit companies, too, like First Light, or First Light is now part of Meat Eat Eater, and they make, you know, these amazing hunting clothing and amazing hunting.

[1037] gear and it's just nice it's nice to see that this and that everyone in that community shares this ethic and shares this deep understanding they're all very intelligent people yeah whether it's remi warren who does his podcast through it or ryan callahan or all you guys it's it's it's really nice i'm more impressed from the inside than i am the outside for me either as a company that's pretty cool and i and i i say that in all honesty are you living in montana nope i live in Northwest Arkansas.

[1038] That's the first thing Steve told me when he called me is he said, I mean, like within like 10 seconds of saying, hey, what do you think about coming to work for me here?

[1039] He said, you don't have to move.

[1040] Because, I mean, man, my shtick is in Arkansas.

[1041] Why Arkansas?

[1042] I'm a seventh generation Arkansas.

[1043] We've been there since the late 1820s.

[1044] I never heard that term.

[1045] Did you know that was a term?

[1046] Arkansason?

[1047] Yeah, we've been there.

[1048] And that's your spot.

[1049] Yeah, man. Clay, Gary, Lewin.

[1050] Oscar, Robert, Thomas, Thomas.

[1051] Are you guys embarrassed it all about Bill Clinton?

[1052] My father and aunt went to high school with Bill Clinton at Hot Springs High School.

[1053] No shit.

[1054] I mean, yeah, I'm not going to talk bad about Bill Clinton.

[1055] But, I mean, sure, we are.

[1056] I'm just guessing.

[1057] I'm just throwing a probe out there.

[1058] Yeah, yeah.

[1059] No, it's a great place to live.

[1060] And no one should come there ever.

[1061] Really?

[1062] Yeah.

[1063] You don't want anybody going there.

[1064] Well, I mean, the same thing's happening there that's happening all across the country.

[1065] People are moving out of urban areas.

[1066] You can sell your house somewhere.

[1067] Well, I better be quiet.

[1068] Yeah.

[1069] Well, that's happening right here, for sure.

[1070] Oh, it's happening everywhere.

[1071] Yeah.

[1072] No, yeah, we've, yeah, I was born in Arkansas and not.

[1073] I love it.

[1074] I have a deep sense of, I've decided this about myself.

[1075] Maybe, yeah, I think I came to this conclusion on my own.

[1076] I have an unusually deep sense of.

[1077] place.

[1078] I really do.

[1079] And it's connected to Arkansas.

[1080] Yeah.

[1081] Do you know the story of Barry Seal?

[1082] Yes.

[1083] The Mina, Arkansas, the drug drops.

[1084] Man, you just made my day.

[1085] Yeah?

[1086] Do you know where I'm from?

[1087] You're from Mina?

[1088] Mena.

[1089] No shit.

[1090] Wow.

[1091] That's crazy.

[1092] You just made about 5 ,000 people very happy.

[1093] Wow.

[1094] By saying that name.

[1095] Now, what it's connected to, maybe not so much.

[1096] I grew up in me in Arkansas.

[1097] Yeah, the Tom Cruise movie doesn't really do it justice.

[1098] What is it, American made?

[1099] Is that what it is?

[1100] It's a good movie, but it's, you know, it's fictitious.

[1101] Yeah.

[1102] You know, Tom Cruise is quite a bit more handsome than Barry Seals.

[1103] But the story behind it is that this guy was running drugs for rogue members of government agencies, whether it's a CIA or whoever.

[1104] and he was flying into these countries buying cocaine and then dropping it off in me to Arkansas.

[1105] And there's a long story that goes with it where there's two children were murdered, two kids that saw the drop.

[1106] And then there was a lie that was told that they were high and that they fell asleep on train tracks.

[1107] And then the family wound up paying for autopsies.

[1108] And the autopsies concluded that they were murdered and stabbed.

[1109] And then, you know, and then...

[1110] Wild.

[1111] Yeah.

[1112] So we moved to Meena in 1984 when I was five years old.

[1113] Oh, shit.

[1114] We just hopped a little town.

[1115] So it was right before it all went down.

[1116] Well, yeah.

[1117] And so my dad was, I guess there's no harm in telling these details.

[1118] My dad was in banking.

[1119] So he became a banker in Maine, Arkansas.

[1120] And so he was, you know, he knew a lot of people in the community.

[1121] And he, so it was right after all that stuff, because all that stuff was happening.

[1122] in the late 70s.

[1123] Is that right?

[1124] I'm not sure, exactly.

[1125] Late 70s, early 80s.

[1126] But it was over by the time we got there.

[1127] But Dad has lots of stories just over the years of people that worked at the airport, which I know, I mean, I could list names of people that I know today that work at that airport.

[1128] And there were stories of big jets coming in with no lights on in the middle of the night.

[1129] And how much of it is true?

[1130] It's hard to say.

[1131] What is this, Jamie?

[1132] It's just an art...

[1133] Scroll all the way up so we can read the whole title.

[1134] This is it.

[1135] Activities at Airport and MENA detailed.

[1136] FBI document recently released.

[1137] Oh, shit, this is last year ago, yeah.

[1138] Oh, that's pretty recently, isn't it?

[1139] Interesting.

[1140] So it's a cargo plane.

[1141] So this is one of the ways...

[1142] I mean, there was more than one way, but one of the ways where they got cocaine into the United States.

[1143] They smuggled narcotics into MENA, Arkansas.

[1144] There it is, Barry Seal.

[1145] Extensive joint investigation by the FBI.

[1146] Arkansas State Police and IRS revealed that Barry Seal used the MENA Airport for smuggling activity from the late 1980 until March of 1984.

[1147] I was there, man. Right when you were there.

[1148] Crazy, the heart of it.

[1149] I was thinking it was the late, for some reason I had it was right before we got there.

[1150] Wild timing.

[1151] According to an internal FBI document released last week, Seal, a pilot, moved much of his smuggling operation from Baton Rouge to Rich Mountain Aviation at the Mina Intermountain.

[1152] airport according to the May 1986 FBI memo.

[1153] It's a wild movie.

[1154] It's a wild movie.

[1155] And it's not totally accurate.

[1156] There's better accounts of exactly what went down that you could find.

[1157] But that's that spot.

[1158] Yep.

[1159] Yep.

[1160] A lot of people made a lot of money out of that area.

[1161] I guess so.

[1162] Who knows?

[1163] Right.

[1164] It wasn't anybody local there.

[1165] No. No, I'm sure.

[1166] Somebody else in control.

[1167] Now, as far as, like, the area of Arkansas, like, what, we're looking at, like, I've never been.

[1168] Like, what is it like, topographically?

[1169] So, Arkansas, if Arkansas were, let's just say it was this square right here, there would be a line drawn across from the northwest corner, northeast corner to the southwest corner.

[1170] The southeastern triangle of Arkansas would be Mississippi River Delta country, like swamp country.

[1171] Produces some of the most an incredible amount of rice, soybeans, and wheat, like farm country.

[1172] From you go to the northwestern corner of Arkansas, and it is mountains.

[1173] It's southern highlands.

[1174] And those two places are like two different countries.

[1175] I mean, and it's that abrupt at different places.

[1176] So I was raised in the Washington Mountains.

[1177] I now live in the Ozark Mountains and essentially it would be very equivalent to Appalachia.

[1178] Beautiful, man. Ozarks are beautiful.

[1179] Well, we all get a sense of it from the TV show, Ozark.

[1180] Yeah.

[1181] Which is a wild fucking TV show.

[1182] Never, never watched it.

[1183] Never?

[1184] No. It's good.

[1185] Is it?

[1186] Oh, yeah.

[1187] Does it make Ozarkians look bad?

[1188] No. You don't think so?

[1189] No. But it's not talking about real Ozark culture.

[1190] No, not really.

[1191] It's just a play.

[1192] It's just a place that's used for drama and drug dealing, and it's, it really is, it's more about a guy who, it's a brilliantly written show and brilliantly acted.

[1193] Jason Bateman is a wizard.

[1194] He put together an incredible show.

[1195] It's so addictive.

[1196] And it's more about drug dealing and how these people have.

[1197] Doesn't sound too good, Joe, for Ozarkers, man. It's not about the Ozark.

[1198] It's really about Mexican cartels.

[1199] from Chicago that wind up in the Ozarks and he's just trying to run this it's I don't want to give away too much of it but it's a brilliant show I know what you looking at it from like a state pride perspective or a local pride perspective I mean maybe you won't like it because of that but it's it doesn't make people look bad what it basically is about human nature more than anything yeah and about people trying to like deal with situations that have no pleasant answers no there's no pleasant solutions that they're like real clear yeah it's a wild show no i hadn't i hadn't seen it's good i hadn't seen it but it's beautiful like you know when they're in the ozarks and see i don't know where they filmed that but i think it was in missouri in the missouri ozarks the the topographic core in terms of ruggedness of terrain would definitely be in northern Arkansas.

[1200] So the Ozark Mountains would cover northern Arkansas and a big part of Southern Missouri.

[1201] So geographically, it would appear that much of the Ozarks is actually in Missouri, which it is.

[1202] And it's beautiful.

[1203] I'm not taking anything away from Missouri.

[1204] But the most rugged part of the Ozarks is in central Arkansas.

[1205] And by rugged, I just mean big mountains, lots of relief, big beautiful rivers, bluffy limestone country, a lot of caves.

[1206] It's karst topography.

[1207] beautiful and you know anywhere that you plopped yourself down on this planet like there's incredible history there and there's incredible beauty there in its own way and so i i recognize that where i live is like i mean it's special because i i've added value to it by being there you know.

[1208] And I've heard it said by kind of an Arkansas philosopher who was describing the Ozark Mountains, okay?

[1209] And he said, the Rocky Mountains are grand and majestic.

[1210] But the Ozark Mountains are intimate.

[1211] And if you see a knob, there's probably a pretty good chance that you could walk to the top of it within a half a day.

[1212] And that was kind of his, he was like, so, you know, they're much bigger, more majestic views.

[1213] use, but there's beauty to be found everywhere.

[1214] Ozarks are cool.

[1215] It's a cool place.

[1216] Yeah, something doesn't have to be enormous just to be beautiful in terms of like natural topography.

[1217] Yeah.

[1218] There's definitely beautiful mountains that are less daunting than say like, you know, the continental divide or something.

[1219] Yeah.

[1220] But all of it's fucking amazing.

[1221] But the thing about Arkansas is it's relatively lightly populated, right?

[1222] Less than 3 million people.

[1223] For the whole state of, you know, 50 ,000 square miles.

[1224] So it's just a million people more than the greater Austin area.

[1225] So like Austin's a million and then outside of Austin apparently is another million, you know, that are like closely connected, which is compared to where I'm from, California, this ain't shit.

[1226] It's like hilarious.

[1227] But that, you're talking about the whole state.

[1228] Yeah.

[1229] So the whole state is basically the population of Austin plus a third.

[1230] Yeah.

[1231] Which is nuts.

[1232] Yeah.

[1233] And see, I don't really have a context.

[1234] for that, Joe.

[1235] Like, I really don't.

[1236] Like, I understand what you're saying.

[1237] To me, like, the population density of the planet is gauged against just what I know.

[1238] And it, like, it just seems real normal that, you know, there's three million people in our state.

[1239] And, I mean, I think it's overcrowded.

[1240] I mean.

[1241] And where you live, how many people are in your town?

[1242] So I live in a suburb of Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is a town of about 2000.

[1243] And so So Fayetteville is 2000 or your suburb is?

[1244] My little town, and I'm trying not to say the name.

[1245] Right, I understand.

[1246] So Northwest Arkansas is kind of the hub, the population hub of Arkansas.

[1247] The state capital is Little Rock, which has $250 ,000, something like that.

[1248] Northwest Arkansas has Fayetteville, multiple cities strung together, and it's about an area of about 300 ,000 people.

[1249] And that's where the Walmart home office is.

[1250] the Tyson Home Office, some big, big international companies, and the University of Arkansas is there.

[1251] And it's a neat, it's a neat town.

[1252] And outside of that, how much of that is public land?

[1253] How rural does it get?

[1254] How quickly?

[1255] Quickly you get into rural areas.

[1256] I mean, like, like I said, I think there's 2 .2 million acres of national forest in Arkansas and a lot more just standard like state public land and uh i mean like from fadeville you could pretty quickly be in national forest i mean like within 30 minutes drive being national force but but to be in really rural arkansas within 30 minutes you could be there so 30 minutes and when you're looking at wild game in that area what's is it mostly deer and bear like turkey like what kind of deer bear turkey would be kind of the big three in the highlands of Arkansas.

[1257] And whitetail hunting would be the primary thing that people are hunting.

[1258] Turkey numbers are way down.

[1259] Now, I like small games.

[1260] So I've got squirrel dogs, I've got coon dogs, and I've got mules.

[1261] Do you eat coons?

[1262] We do, but that is not the primary reason that we harvest them.

[1263] What do they taste like?

[1264] They taste like a bear.

[1265] Really?

[1266] I mean, they're red meat, fatty red meat.

[1267] Wow.

[1268] So raccoon's good.

[1269] Yeah, it's not bad.

[1270] and it's it's man I depending on how you prepare it yeah yeah but we're you know there's one of the pillars of the North American Wildlife while I've got to say this now that I've said that I don't know raccoons because we kill a lot of raccoons one of the pillars of the North American model of wildlife conservation is non -frivolous use of wildlife that's one of the seven pillars so it means we don't just kill stuff for no reason most of the North America most of that pillar is fulfilled in that we kill animals we eat them right but there are other reasons that we would kill animals that would fulfill the non -frivolous use but wouldn't mean that we would necessarily kill them to eat okay and this is this is nuanced water I mean nervous sharing it but like so raccoons have an unnatural population I mean there are there are more raccoons on the landscape than there has ever been in the history of the world really oh yeah absolutely that's that because of proven by science just just ecological not garbage just fragmentation all the things that are happening are fantastic for raccoons and so essentially we we hunt raccoons for their hides so they're fur -burying animal so that part of the non -frivolously use with fur -burying animals you harvest the hides and occasionally you eat them occasionally like one out of ten every now and then you just decide yeah yeah but mostly you're doing it because you need to control the populations and for the hides two reasons for the hides and because yeah population control and i mean that's a justification for me i love to hunt raccoons with my dogs what is this is here farmland as a human population in the united states has grown from under three million to over three hundred million providing millions of raccoons with garden vegetables fruits nuts green household garbage on which to feed in the 1800s many areas in the United States supported approximately one raccoon per square kilometer about three raccoons per square mile.

[1271] In 2002, a study of raccoons in Indiana found 222 raccoons per square kilometer.

[1272] Holy shit.

[1273] About 700 raccoons per square mile.

[1274] That's a lot of fucking raccoons.

[1275] Yeah.

[1276] The largest raccoon was 58 pounds.

[1277] Oh my God.

[1278] I found in Texas.

[1279] By the way, those motherfuckers might be in my backyard.

[1280] They open up lids.

[1281] Pull garbage bags out, these fucks.

[1282] They're an incredible beast too.

[1283] So let me tell you about what I saw.

[1284] What we think we saw.

[1285] I have video footage of it, but it's night vision and it's a cat that seems like it's about in the neighborhood of knee high, maybe slightly below knee high.

[1286] and, you know, I'm estimating its weight.

[1287] It could be, you know, 40 to 60 pounds, something like that.

[1288] Who knows?

[1289] But it's a dark cat, and I think it's probably a Jaguarundi, because Jaguarundis did exist in Texas, and people have seen them.

[1290] That's what it looks like.

[1291] Now, okay, did you...

[1292] We have video footage of it.

[1293] Can you show it to me?

[1294] Yes, yeah.

[1295] I'll have, if my security guys are listening, I hope they've...

[1296] Someone must have recorded it, but you can see...

[1297] My neighbor, who's got a headlamp on, who's walking his dog, the cat hears him and run towards him, runs towards him, sees him, and then darts off into the woods.

[1298] So the first episode of the Bergeridge podcast is the myth of the southern mountain lion.

[1299] I don't know if we talk about Black Panthers extensively.

[1300] Oh.

[1301] And this was little in terms of like, I've seen mountain lions before.

[1302] I've seen two mountain lions.

[1303] One pretty clearly That looked like it was dog -sized You know like a 70 -pound -ish thing Yeah And I didn't realize It looked like a coyote almost Yeah And I realized it was a mountain line When I saw its tail It was running across the road And had like one of these tails I was like oh that's a mountain line If I was a betting man And this is not against you But this was in Santa Barbara Okay right right This was in a place that has mountain lines Where I'm talking about This thing was here in Austin And it had a long tail And it was a dark cat Well, in my interview in biologists, what they said is that the number one, the number one culprit for misidentified mountain lions is house cats.

[1304] Yeah, this was big.

[1305] It was big.

[1306] It was big enough where my security guards had to tell me, make sure the dogs inside the house.

[1307] Wow.

[1308] They said, we've got this large predator on video in front of the house.

[1309] Yeah.

[1310] It's whatever it is, it's bigger.

[1311] than a cat.

[1312] It's bigger than a serval.

[1313] You know, those little pet cats?

[1314] It's bigger.

[1315] It's a, it's a fucking real thing.

[1316] Oh, is this it?

[1317] There it is.

[1318] That's it.

[1319] So this is the video footage.

[1320] I mean, it's hard, when you see the guy walk by, I don't necessarily think we should put my neighbor on video, but when you see the guy walk by, you get a sense.

[1321] Okay, I just saw his tail.

[1322] Yeah.

[1323] I want to watch it walk again.

[1324] Have you, as anybody, as a professional, seen this?

[1325] No. Okay.

[1326] So show this again.

[1327] Well, some wildlife person should, what are you doing here, buddy?

[1328] Man, hey, do you don't, you don't know the firestorm that I started about Black Panthers and mountain lines.

[1329] Well, there are definitely mountain lines here.

[1330] Right, right.

[1331] In Texas.

[1332] But this, but this scenario.

[1333] Look at this thing.

[1334] Look at this thing.

[1335] That's a cat.

[1336] And look how big it is.

[1337] Right?

[1338] Is there any magnification of this where it's less grainy?

[1339] No. This is it.

[1340] This is night vision.

[1341] So you can see up close on the ground, right?

[1342] Right in front where it's more illuminated.

[1343] You kind of get a sense of what it looks like at high resolution.

[1344] But this thing is like knee high.

[1345] This is a fucking cat.

[1346] And it's a dark cat.

[1347] You see it run off?

[1348] That is not a house cat.

[1349] It's way bigger.

[1350] I don't want to show my neighbor, but I'll show it to you.

[1351] But when my neighbor walks by afterwards, you can get some scale.

[1352] It's up to his knee.

[1353] Yeah.

[1354] Whatever the fuck that thing is, it's not small.

[1355] I mean, think of that as a cat.

[1356] That's a cat.

[1357] That's that high.

[1358] Yeah.

[1359] That's a big cat.

[1360] Yeah.

[1361] So whatever that thing is, I think it's a Jaguarundi because they were native to Texas and the last time they photograph one here was in the 1980s.

[1362] But you know how dense Texas is.

[1363] You go outside.

[1364] It's fucking woods everywhere.

[1365] If it's nighttime, you don't know what the fucks out there.

[1366] The idea that some wildlife biologist has combed every inch of this insanely massive state, and they existed here in the hill country.

[1367] They're native to this area.

[1368] But there's been people reporting pictures of them or reporting meetings of them and citing them, but there's no real photographic or video evidence.

[1369] Whatever that is, that's not a house cat.

[1370] That's a big fucking cat.

[1371] I'd like to see the scale of it Yeah I'll show you Well I get those guys to get The further video I hope they saved that as well Of my neighbor walking by Or I could stand in that spot And you kind of see And you can get a sense Of what it looked like But I'm telling you The thing is probably What I would be interested in Would be And it's not a high quality video So it's hard But like the gait of that animal like this is why it's so wonderful about these kind of things and I don't know you well enough to like I don't know if you really want my opinion or if you don't I always definitely want your opinion because this is the beauty of these animals out in wild places where there's like controversy over what it is I am by nature a skeptic okay of anything that's abnormal normal because usually people make errors in judgment when they, I mean like 97 % of the time, I would have to, it's, it's, it's, I would like to see the scale of it.

[1372] That would give all the details.

[1373] That's what changed it for me. We'll show you that afterwards.

[1374] Okay.

[1375] What changed it for me is when I see my neighbor walk by.

[1376] Yeah.

[1377] And then I realized what this thing's about that big.

[1378] Yeah.

[1379] It's not a house cat.

[1380] It's like, it's wider than me. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it is it's big yeah it's not big like a mountain line though hadn't seen it again no no I haven't seen it since then but um I know that people have seen similar things like this and these are all anecdotal stories but you got to think that if that jaguarundi was here in the 80s like it's it could still be here fuck yeah yeah there's so I mean how many different times have they thought that an animal was extinct and then they find viable breeding populations of them right it does happen what's what's wild about the myth of the black panther in much of the south is that there are black i mean it is amazing how many stories there are of black panthers any community anywhere i mean really in the eastern united states you go in and say are there black panthers here and some percentage of people will say yes and basically their science has never documented a melanistic mountain lion but they have with jaguars yes so for down here that could count like if you like you could be like well yeah we're deep enough into texas jaguars are coming up from mexico there are some jaguars that their home ranges span into you know the united states Arizona for sure yeah yeah so and there are documented melanistic jaguars and leopards but science has never documented a melanistic mountain lion And so, like, the whole idea of a black mountain line in, like, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, anywhere is just straight up.

[1381] It's not true.

[1382] Well, isn't it also that people see things in the dark and they can't get a good view of what it looks like?

[1383] Oh, man. We interviewed a psychologist on our podcast about cognitive bias and naive realism about how, and it's so funny because my dad, my dad, who is a. he's hilarious but he he talked about that he it was like news to me i'd never heard him say it before but he was like yeah i believe in black panthers and i caught this on audio kind of almost by accident and anyway it goes so deep people are just and it's touchy yeah i mean it like divides families oh for sure like if they're black panthers or not and i love it man i love it and i'm pro I'm pro Black Panther.

[1384] I mean, like, I want the myth to continue.

[1385] I love a good myth, man. Yeah, I do too.

[1386] But this thing, whatever that thing is, I mean, you get a chance to see.

[1387] If that's a house cat, that's a fucking whopper of a house cat.

[1388] And I don't think it is.

[1389] I think it's one of those Jaguar Undies.

[1390] If you pull that photo of that Jaguar Undy.

[1391] Because it looks like that.

[1392] And that thing used to live here.

[1393] And when they say that the last sightings were in the 1980s, man, And that, to me, like that thing.

[1394] Yeah.

[1395] That's exactly what it fucking looked like.

[1396] Yeah, big cat.

[1397] And, you know, those things still exist.

[1398] They're not extinct.

[1399] Like, look at that thing.

[1400] That motherfucker right there, that's exactly what it looked like.

[1401] Hey, well, okay, what's wild.

[1402] Right now on the Joe Rogan podcast, there is a social science experiment happening.

[1403] Because, like, I want to believe you so bad.

[1404] We don't have to believe me. Look at that video.

[1405] What do you think about that video?

[1406] You're playing into what we discovered and even the conclusion that we came to on our podcast.

[1407] Because part of the question, remember, we're answering these bigger questions about human nature.

[1408] And it's like, how could the myth of a, and I'm not talking about Texas, okay, because there could legitimately be a black jaguar down here.

[1409] But how could the myth of a black panther exist in Kentucky when that animal.

[1410] has never existed and like I deeply want to just tell you that I believe you I want to like it's hard for me not to just go Joe I'm with you bro and like fist bump you and go man that's a stinking jaggerrundy in your backyard like I feel this social pressure to do that.

[1411] Well don't don't give in to that and that is the beauty of human nature and community like and so like and that's essentially what has propagated in some ways, false things, but it's also what propagates a bunch of good stuff.

[1412] Like, I want to believe you.

[1413] And you are dead set on what your perception of this is.

[1414] No, I'm definitely not.

[1415] Here's why I'm not.

[1416] I don't have enough data.

[1417] Okay.

[1418] I don't have much data either other than that video.

[1419] Yeah.

[1420] But I do know that there's a lot of exotic animals that people keep here as pets.

[1421] Yep.

[1422] Yep.

[1423] And it easily did you know that every part of the country has that story?

[1424] What story?

[1425] The story of the train, the circus train wreck in the 1940s.

[1426] No, for real.

[1427] It's all over, man. Oh, for sure.

[1428] Like, and everybody has the same story.

[1429] It's so funny.

[1430] Yeah, but you know Texas has more tigers in captivity than all the wild of the world.

[1431] Yeah.

[1432] If that could happen anywhere, it would be Texas.

[1433] It's a wild place.

[1434] So whatever that thing is, I mean, obviously we have grainy footage, but we do have, when we'll show you off air, my neighbor, and you'll get a chance to see.

[1435] Because when you see that, that's when I went, oh, huh, that's a big fucking cat.

[1436] And they're like, yeah, this is not a small animal.

[1437] This is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 pounds, maybe bigger.

[1438] Yeah.

[1439] I mean, the upside.

[1440] It's just whatever the hell it is.

[1441] If you really wanted to test out your theory, this is what you would do.

[1442] And the biologist told me they do this with mountain line sidings is take a cutout, like a piece of poster board and draw a big cat on it, like a big size house cat.

[1443] And put it in that spot.

[1444] Put it in that spot.

[1445] Oh, that's smart.

[1446] And then, you know...

[1447] Film it.

[1448] Yeah.

[1449] Just stake it out there and then walk back in your house.

[1450] Yeah.

[1451] Or just cut a square or a rectangle.

[1452] So you get a sense, well, this is the body size of it.

[1453] If I put that rectangle there, or maybe this is too big or this one's too small.

[1454] Yeah, that's smart.

[1455] Because if I put it in the exact same area, then I can get a real perfect read out of exactly how high is.

[1456] It would help you if you drew out like a...

[1457] Like a cat.

[1458] Like the silhouette of, and make it like a big house cat.

[1459] I have a little, we'll have a project with my kids.

[1460] Yeah.

[1461] My youngest daughter's very artistic.

[1462] I'll explain to her what's going on.

[1463] That's good.

[1464] I want to hear the results of that.

[1465] We have a lot of cool animals in the area, though.

[1466] My God, there's a lot of fucking owls.

[1467] A lot of owls and a lot of deer.

[1468] Deer everywhere.

[1469] And we have one fat fucking coyote that we got on security camera that looks like a dog.

[1470] I mean, he's big.

[1471] Big.

[1472] Big ass coyote.

[1473] and you never hear them I don't hear any coyote how you don't hear yippin no you hear weird fox noises like foxes make those crazy noises at night you've heard fox screams yeah they kind of grow yeah weird but no coyote howls but they're definitely there we have photos of them and video of them but that thing was weird it was maybe wildlife biologists are going to contact me now imagine imagine we find out it'll be solved to me, the next step of data I would need would be a two -scale model of a house cat right there in that spot.

[1474] Yeah.

[1475] Yeah, okay.

[1476] Well, one thing I do have that's a good scale is I have one of those foam pigs, those wild boar targets, a 3D target.

[1477] Okay.

[1478] I can go and plant that sucker out there, and we'll get a real good idea because the wild pig target's about this big.

[1479] Yeah.

[1480] Well, let me know how that goes.

[1481] Those Reinhardt targets?

[1482] What did you think by looking at it, though?

[1483] It's obviously a cat, right?

[1484] Man, I don't want to, I just need more data.

[1485] Right.

[1486] But you think it's a cat, right?

[1487] I'm not convinced.

[1488] Really?

[1489] What did you think it might be?

[1490] It just didn't have the gait and the grainy photo.

[1491] Let's see it again.

[1492] A cat has a very distinct gate and walk, and I didn't initially just, it's kind of bouncy.

[1493] of bouncy that's kind of yeah and like a dog it that was my and i'm not saying that i believe that's a canine but the gate of that animal i'm that is not my conclusion that it is that is a canine i'm that's not what i'm saying but i would i feel like i just feel it moves weird yeah the tail though when it runs off it does appear like a cat yeah when it runs off that looks like a cat That part where it runs off, because it hears my neighbor, let it go right there.

[1494] Yeah, that looks like a fucking cat.

[1495] It does.

[1496] It does.

[1497] Big ass.

[1498] More data.

[1499] Creepy cat.

[1500] Need more data.

[1501] Yeah.

[1502] My wife saw a zebra.

[1503] Oh, from your house?

[1504] Driving, no, driving on the way to Houston.

[1505] Saw a zebra.

[1506] There was a guy that, there was a guy that.

[1507] But there's a lot of fucking zebras out here.

[1508] People are, like, super common, believe it or not, in ranches in Texas.

[1509] for someone that was zebra.

[1510] There's a guy in Arkansas, this farm that we drove past every day to get to our house.

[1511] This guy in Arkansas had two zebras out in this pasture.

[1512] It was when my kids were young and we had like wildlife games that we played when we drove down the road.

[1513] You know, every time we got in the car, it was a wildlife game.

[1514] And we assigned points to different types of wildlife from crows to geese to deer.

[1515] And the highest level was a bear.

[1516] If you ever saw a bear, like we would, we were going to have some massive celebration and take everybody out to eat and the winter got to choose where they went.

[1517] So we had this elaborate mechanism of this game we played.

[1518] And these, you know, when my kids were like four to eight, you know, whatever.

[1519] And this guy, man, this guy had zebras.

[1520] And I used to rant every time we drove past his place because I had to lecture my kids about how, yes we did just see a zebra but those don't live here those are African animals and it was super confusing so to this day now my kids are grown much older every time we drive past that place my son goes dad gum zebra farmer I mean like there's there's like don't have zebras in Arkansas man they're cool when they're in Africa yeah well it's weird how many animals are like that here like oryx which are really yeah very uncommon in the wild.

[1521] They're, they're endangered.

[1522] In Texas, you can go hunt them.

[1523] Yeah.

[1524] They're all over the place.

[1525] Yeah, Texas is a different planet when it comes to a different country.

[1526] Neal guy?

[1527] Yeah.

[1528] Yeah.

[1529] What is this?

[1530] Arkansas judge mauled by family's pet zebra.

[1531] Wow.

[1532] Wow.

[1533] They're a cool fucking animal, aren't they?

[1534] I've heard that they're, uh, my, my cousin actually has a, uh, God, look how wild they look.

[1535] Half zebra, half donkey.

[1536] I don't remember what he did with it, but they're wild critters, man. Oh, they can make a hybrid that's non -viable?

[1537] I think that.

[1538] You're getting off.

[1539] So it's like a mule?

[1540] Well, this is in your wheelhouse, because you're really in a mules, right?

[1541] Yeah, yeah.

[1542] I don't know much about zebra breeding.

[1543] But they can be bred with a horse.

[1544] I think so.

[1545] Wow.

[1546] Man, you caught me on something I really don't know.

[1547] Look at that.

[1548] There it is.

[1549] A zonky.

[1550] That's what it is.

[1551] A zonky.

[1552] Yeah, my cousin, my cousin had one of these.

[1553] I think he still does.

[1554] They have a, they have a big racehorse stable.

[1555] Wow.

[1556] A zonky.

[1557] No, man, mules are fascinating critters.

[1558] They really are.

[1559] Well, that's another common misconception about the best animal to ride across the country during the pioneer days was not a horse.

[1560] It was a mule.

[1561] Yeah.

[1562] Well, man, if you want a spiel, like if you want a little spiel, and I could, I mean, I could talk for hours.

[1563] about it but you know what's the difference between a mule and a horse and why would you pick a mule over a horse okay because that's the biggest question and right for just to inform people a mule is a is a hybrid cross between a female horse and a male donkey okay and it produces non -viable offspring and there's a term in animal breeding called hybrid vigor which means you you cross two distinctly different animals and it could even hybrid vigor could be using a lot of different ways.

[1564] But essentially, hybrid vigor means that the offspring of these animals is greater than the sum of the individual animal.

[1565] Like a liger.

[1566] Yeah.

[1567] And so a mule has all these incredible properties that made it super valuable.

[1568] And that's part of the reason in the Ozarks.

[1569] Like the Ozarks and the southern highlands of the United States are known as in many ways, could be argued but as like the mule epicenter of the world like a lot of mule trainers a lot of mule work and it came from many many things but mules handled the heat better than a horse mules have more stamina than a horse when worked and so that's why you hear people talking about plowing with mules i mean you can plow with a horse too but a mule would have more stamina a mule's feet don't have to be worked on because a donkey is essentially not that much different than a wild animal.

[1570] Like donkeys would have come from somewhere in the Mediterranean, like they would have been wild burrows and different things.

[1571] A donkey is pretty close to what it was.

[1572] A horse has been highly influenced by human selection over, you know, thousands of years.

[1573] And so you get this animal that has been very much so built for our purposes, but But in general, if a horse is not shued, it will go lame and not be able to work much.

[1574] So that's why there's this whole farrier industry, which is where people put shoes on horses.

[1575] What about wild horses?

[1576] What happens with them?

[1577] Well, that's a good question.

[1578] Because if they're acclimated in a certain way, they can become, you know, they don't have to have shoes in the wild, obviously.

[1579] but they're not doing work either.

[1580] They're not having people on them.

[1581] They're not working.

[1582] And it's kind of one of these deals.

[1583] Once you start, you can't stop.

[1584] So if you start shoeing an animal, just like us wearing shoes, if we walked around from the time we were born barefoot.

[1585] Right, right.

[1586] The biggest point and the main thing I'm talking about is that a mule has extremely sturdy, hard feet, and so you don't have to shoe a mule.

[1587] Some people do, but typically you don't have to.

[1588] So less maintenance.

[1589] And that's a major thing.

[1590] If you have a horseman, you've got to shoe that thing every six weeks.

[1591] A lot of investment.

[1592] A mule won't founder.

[1593] And that may not seem like that big of a deal, but if you're an equine owner, if your mule gets in your barn and has access to 50 pounds of grain.

[1594] What does the founder mean?

[1595] It means that if your animal has access to grain and it eats, eats, eats, eats, eats, eats it's it's an intestinal condition where basically the animal eats too much of the super rich food and just dies oh wow it's an intestinal thing so horses found her all the time a mule won't founder so well the horse you have to be very strict and what food do you leave around yes yeah your horse will founder like that wow but the main the main reason that a mule would be the chosen animal for mountain riding is they're they're known to be safer than a horse what makes a horse a thing is that they're very trainable, easy to train, such that they say that you could train a horse to run off a cliff.

[1596] Okay?

[1597] Mm. You could make, because you're in, when you're on that animal, you're in charge of it, and you could give it the cues to make it do something that would endanger its life.

[1598] And in most circumstances, that's a great thing, because I mean, like, you're in charge and this animal's doing what you wanted to do.

[1599] You could lead the horse in a war.

[1600] Yeah.

[1601] A mule has a very, strong self -protective mechanism in it that most people would perceive as stubbornness so you hear people talk about stubborn as a mule well what that is the self -protective mechanism on that animal that that animal you ride a mule up to a raging river out in montana buddy you want to be on a mule because he ain't going to cross that creek if he's going to die so if you're on his back you are you're going to be safe if he if you cue him to go up the side of this bluffy mountain if he'll go just trust him a horse might get up there and roll off and I'm not talking bad about horses I mean like horses are dominant the most for sure most popular equine animal mules are about 10 % of the equine world but what I love about mules what I love about them is that they're very difficult to train and that's why people don't go to them as quickly as they do a horse they're very difficult to train but a well -trained mule is an incredible animal and it's an incredibly safe animal and I want to be on the back of a mule when I'm in rough country but the thing that works against the mule I should be like the mule marketing guy like for the planet because we need some better PR because what happens is people get a mule don't understand how to how a mule works because he thinks way different than a horse much more difficult to train and a mule never forgets I had a yeah well I'll tell you something somebody else said a mule never forgets and you can you can mess up a mule very quickly and so what happens is I get a mule and start to train it, start having some problems with him.

[1602] And problems could be, I mean, just a variety of different ways.

[1603] And then I sell that mule because I can't do anything with it.

[1604] And the next guy gets it, and he starts adding problems because he's getting a mule with a problem.

[1605] And then basically a mule has five different owners, and every one of them's put their own problem on that mule, and that mule basically becomes like a wild beast.

[1606] And so people know, like, stubborn as a mule, man, you don't, I mean, you'll hear a lot of, legit cowboys and guys say, man, you don't want anything to do with a mule.

[1607] What I learned that I had to do was get mules from the time they were young.

[1608] Like, I didn't want a mule that had been messed with by anybody else.

[1609] Like, I want to know every interaction that that animal has had with a human.

[1610] And I've had a lot of luck with that in training these mules.

[1611] But, no, I love it.

[1612] It's, they're safe in the mountains.

[1613] And the reason I want to ride mules is to get deeper into wild places and stay longer, you know.

[1614] And there's some romance involved in it, which I have zero shame over.

[1615] Sometimes when I ride mules with Ronella, he's like, we could just walk.

[1616] You know, he accused me of, you know, like kind of liking the romance of it.

[1617] And I'm like, yeah, of course I do.

[1618] Of course I want to ride a mule.

[1619] But there is some real function.

[1620] And he likes riding mules too.

[1621] He's pretty good.

[1622] And that was the thing that across the country, the early settlers, they rode mules very often, right?

[1623] Yeah.

[1624] Yeah.

[1625] Because they knew about this a long time ago.

[1626] Yeah.

[1627] So Wild West movies.

[1628] It would have been a lot of mules involved.

[1629] And articulation of the feet, this will close my spiel.

[1630] Okay.

[1631] Mules have the ability.

[1632] They say that a horse is able to understand where his front feet go, but his back feet just kind of go wherever.

[1633] this is anecdotal a mule has like great articulation in his feet both front and back so he's able to very much so pick where he puts his feet I mean I see that that's the reason they're like a four -wheel drive horse and when you raise mules you raise mules specifically for use in hunting adventures yeah how many meals you keep I've got four right now but they're I mean I'm not in the commercial mule business right I'm not like selling mules for for anything you know is that a big business the commercial mule business man COVID just like everything has sent the price of mules through the roof really I mean I don't know if it's COVID but my mules are probably triple the value of what they were a year ago because people want mules now yeah maybe it's just because they're cool now they kind of go in and out of vogue oh they're cycles but hunting accelerated during COVID yeah but that's not the primary use of mules is not hunting, I would say.

[1634] It's farm work?

[1635] Recreational riding.

[1636] Recreational riding.

[1637] Just in general.

[1638] Interesting.

[1639] Yeah, yeah.

[1640] Most of the equine world is recreational riding.

[1641] But then outfitters out west sometimes have big herds, big stocks of animals.

[1642] And what, so the mule trade world is there's a lot of, there's trainers all over the country, and there's great western mule trainers.

[1643] But there are a lot of trainers in the east that train mules year round, and then they take them to these big mule cells in the western United States and sell them for big.

[1644] money.

[1645] So this is a secret I will let you in on.

[1646] You could go, you could come to Arkansas and buy a mule for a thousand dollars that you'd pay probably $4 ,000 to $5 ,000 just for hauling him and selling him somewhere in Idaho.

[1647] Really?

[1648] Yeah, I don't tell anybody.

[1649] Too late.

[1650] I couldn't end this podcast without complimenting you on your mustache.

[1651] That's a fucking strong move.

[1652] Thank you.

[1653] I like how you got the beard integrated, the moustress It's sort of a part of the beard, but it's not, it's a great look.

[1654] Much appreciated.

[1655] It's very old westy.

[1656] Like, it's for a guy who's sewing a bear hunting and the outdoors and hunting, you got a perfect mustache.

[1657] That's all I have to say.

[1658] Thank you.

[1659] And I appreciate talking to you, man. It was really, really enjoyable.

[1660] Thank you so much.

[1661] And I'm enjoying your podcast very much.

[1662] It's called Bear Grease.

[1663] It's available on everything, right?

[1664] Spotify, iTunes, all that.

[1665] Thank you, Joe.

[1666] Thanks, Clay.

[1667] I really, really enjoyed it.

[1668] Yeah, thank you.

[1669] Bye, everybody.