#2258 - Steven Rinella
en
January 16, 2025
TLDR: Steven Rinella's new audio original 'MeatEater's American History: The Mountain Men (1806-1840)' debuts on February 11, 2025. His new TV show 'Hunting History With Steven Rinella' starts on January 28.

In the latest episode of the podcast, host Joe Rogan engages in a dynamic conversation with Steven Rinella, a renowned outdoorsman, conservationist, and the face behind the popular show "MeatEater." In this discussion, they explore a range of thought-provoking topics, from the toughness of modern politicians to the historical significance of hunting and conservation. Here’s a detailed summary of the key points covered in the episode.
Key Takeaways
On Personal Resilience and Toughness
- Redefining Toughness: The conversation begins with a reflection on what toughness really means. Rinella notes that toughness is often misconstrued; it’s essential to recognize mental and emotional resilience, particularly in the face of societal challenges.
- Coping with Adversity: As they discuss prominent figures like Trump and Biden, Rinella emphasizes that true toughness involves the ability to persevere amid adversity—not just physical endurance.
Importance of Purpose and Engagement
- Need for Engagement: Rinella mentions that having purposeful activities or hobbies is crucial for mental health. He argues that people should continuously strive for engagement to avoid becoming stagnant or depressed as they age.
- The Value of Tasks: He highlights the need for tasks and challenges, relating it to the importance of maintaining a busy lifestyle, whether through work or hobbies.
Hunting and History
- Upcoming Projects: Rinella shares details about his upcoming projects, including the audio original titled "MeatEater's American History: The Mountain Men (1806-1840)" and the show "Hunting History," which will premiere on January 28.
- Cultural Significance: He elaborates on how hunting is not just a pastime but integral to American history, emphasizing its role in conservation efforts and wildlife management.
Insights on Society and Governance
Reflection on Politics
- Political Behavior: The duo comments on the peculiarities of political figures and their public personas. Rinella notes how politicians often display a facade that can mislead the public about their true capabilities and character.
- Critique of Modern Politics: They critique the current political landscape, discussing how people are often quick to abandon their principles for personal gain or public approval. Rinella emphasizes the need for integrity and authenticity in leadership.
CWD and Environmental Concerns
- Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD): A significant chunk of the conversation revolves around CWD, its implications for deer populations, and how it reflects on wildlife management policies. They share concerns about how this could affect hunting and conservation efforts in the long run.
Reflections on Anthropology and Human History
- The First Americans: Rinella delves into current theories about the initial human migrations to North America, discussing the evidence that suggests a more complex understanding of how ancient peoples interacted with the environment.
- Preservation of History: He emphasizes the importance of preserving historical contexts, such as archeological finds, to better understand human history and the relationships between ancient communities and their environments.
Closing Thoughts
- Steven Rinella's passion for the outdoors and conservation shines through as he articulates the significance of sharing knowledge about hunting, human resilience, and historical context. The episode not only informs listeners about relevant historical and environmental issues but also encourages them to engage meaningfully with their passions.
Conclusion
This episode serves as a valuable reminder of the multifaceted relationships humans have with nature, politics, and history. Rinella’s insights urge listeners to contemplate their own paths while recognizing the enduring impacts of society and the natural world.
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That was a long exhale. I needed one. Is this Trump's chair? He's not in that chair. Yeah. I want to soak up some of the tenacity. He's got a lot of that. It took me a long time, man.
It took me a long time to see it. Like I remember people talk, you know, there was this thing when he, when he emerged on the scene, it was a thing about like toughness. And I'd always defined, like in my mind, toughness was being able to go through some like alder choked hellhole real fast, or hike up a hill. So I was like, that's not tough.
and later was like oh yeah like that that kind of tough man think about what that guy went through i mean if he had the entire media the entire justice system he had uh... the the deep state essential intelligence agency had all these people was like conspiring to take him out literally an assassination attempt that another one
In and out of the news in no time, nobody cared, no grace period. They waited about a day and then they started talking shit about him again. That's the thing, when I looked at it, now that I've come to understand it better, the fact that most people would crawl into
a hole. I got a buddy out on my say who it is, but he had sold his business and he told me, he goes, why don't I sell my business? I'm going to crawl into a deep, dark hole. Later, he's back out and bought another business. I said, what about crawling into the deep, dark hole? He said, well, I did, but my wife was in there.
I have to get back. I'm not ready yet. I've got to get back out. People, I think that's like these sort of fictional depictions of the future that, you know, everybody wants this future where, you know, you're just holding hands and walking off into the sunset, the golden years. It's all bullshit.
If you're alive, you're going to want to do the same things you're doing right now. You're not going to have some point in your life where you're going to want to do nothing and be happy that you don't have to do anything. You're going to get depressed. Yeah, I think about it. But my wife's smart enough to worry about what had happened to us if we didn't have, like, you know, dragons to slay. Yeah. You know, she feels that it might be essential.
It's essential for life. You need puzzle. You need at least some sort of a very involving hobby. You need something. I mean, you can retire from, if you have a lot of money, you could retire from your financial pursuits, but you need something that you enjoy doing. Human beings need tasks. If you don't have something, you get very dull and that's how people get Alzheimer's. They just fucking get dementia. They just like sit around the house and their brain atrophies and
And then they just die. Yeah, I look at people like that and, you know, part of looking at what Biden and Trump would be at that age, like I plan on at that age to be like really kicking it.
and just screwing around outside. Yeah, just having fun. But that, just thing to perform to the bitter end, man. Well, Biden is not performing. Trying to perform to the bitter end. Whatever he's doing is strange. Trying to keep at it. He's getting propped up. I think there's other people that are pushing him towards the... Get out there, come on. I think Jill's got her hands on his lower back. Just giving a push. Get out there, come on, you can win again. I think you're a good up. Gonna beat Trump.
Yeah, it's, but it's that thing too way people whole one day you'll get to certain age and you'll like, you know, I'm 57 and I used to think, oh, when I'm 57, I'll be done. I'll just, if I have some money, I'm just gonna relax. Yeah. That's nonsense. I don't want to relax. How long do you think, how long do you think you, if you had to guess, how long would you do this podcast? This is the easiest thing I do. Really? Yeah, I'll do this forever. Really? So easy to do. Yeah, as long as I'm actually interested in talking to the people. Oh, how hard is that?
Actually interesting. Yeah, but that's the only reason why I do it anyway. Yeah, like I only talk to people I want to talk to so no one ever Tells me you know have this person on your show. There's there's literally zero input from anyone else So everybody I talk to I look at I go to I want to talk to that guy that might be cool That'd be interesting. I want to find out what makes him tick I want to find out what why she writes those books like that I want to find out You know what what keeps him going that's like
The whole reason why I do is because I enjoy it. Do you picture walking away from stand up before you'd walk away from podcast? I don't know. Why would I do that too? I live my own club now. I'm 50 years old. I'm starting to have all these questions. I think you just stay healthy. Stay healthy and do what you enjoy doing. I think live in the moment. I think this idea of planning for the future is silly.
I really do. I think you should have goals. Like if you enjoy doing things and you're like, I would like to get to this point. I would like to do this. So there's something to strive towards. That's good. But this idea that like, you know, one day you're just going to like stop doing stuff. Like why? Well, are you alive? Are you enjoying doing it? Yeah, let's shut the fuck up. Like you could be so much worse off. There's so many things to dwell on other than whether or not I want to stop doing something that I enjoy. Why would I ever even think about that?
That's a good point, man. That's a good point. These are all questions I had never really thought about, but I've been more interested in them after I crossed that threshold. But I could conceive a time where I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to be a public person anymore. The public aspect of it is the weirdest part. The people constantly wanting your time and everybody thinking that if I can connect with this guy, that I can make a lot of money. I can set up a business with him. I can do this with him. I can do that with him. He can introduce me to this.
You know work with him I could do there's a lot of that a lot of that that's exhausting a lot of these like Opportunists and weirdos. Yeah, you know those those are exhausting. I remember years ago Three four years ago. You told me that you wished you were We're eating barbecue and you told me you wish you were 10% less famous I feel like then you got 20% more famous. Yeah I fucked up
Well, I thought doing the Spotify. I was like, his direction isn't going the right way. That was the whole reason why I took the Spotify deal. I was like, good, they're going to give me a lot of money. And it'll only be on Spotify. So I'll be about 10% less famous. Good. Let me slide off into obscurity. Because I mean, as long as I'm making money, I was like, I just enjoy doing it. I don't care how many people like the people that like it will still listen. So maybe I'll have less casual fans like who cares. Who cares?
You know Yeah, it's a certain level of fame though. That's a little unmanageable and I'm in that level. Yeah, it's very unmanageable. You know what it is? Well part, you know if you'll allow me to tell you what okay, please do and I observe this I've served this My wife who's traveling through right now. I've served this after we'd at dinner with you one time and um Certain individuals you included would be that um
It's not necessarily, it's not just people that don't like you, right? There's people that like you too much. Yeah. It's like you don't like you just avoid you. I know. And so it's like, you got it like at a certain point, you got to worry about the people that like you. Yeah. Believe me, I know because they like you a lot. Oh, I know. Yeah. And they, they're like, I'd like to take kidnap that Joe Rogan to bring him home with me.
They want me to come in my basement. Yeah, I get like letters. People want me to come to their house. I get it, you know, especially if you don't know anyone famous and the thing about podcast too is like you're so intimately connected to that person because you hear that person talk all the time. Yeah. I do four of these a week. So it's like they're hearing me, you know, it's fucking 12 hours a week of me talking to you. You know, it's a lot. Yeah, that thing. I mean, it comes up. It's over observed. Um, Tim Ferriss mentioned to me, he's like,
People think like they think they know you but it's like but they do
Mm-hmm. They do and you don't know them. Yeah, yeah, which is real weird Yeah, they know they know what you think about stuff. They know what you think about current events They know about your background, right? The good thing about that though is if like someone tries to Pretend you're something other than you are if like there's a smear campaign against you people like no, I know that guy Oh, like they actually know you yeah, they really know you like people have listened to me like a hundred hours. There's no
It's no confusion. It's not like guesswork. Like this who I am. Yeah, I'm not that complicated. It's a long charade. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Visible. You know how most wireless plans feel like they're designed to confuse you with like hidden fees, weird subcharges, family plans. You don't even want, not with Visible. On the Visible plan, it's one line of unlimited 5G data for just $25 a month. Flat rate, no surprises. Powered by Verizon's network so you know it's solid and here's the kicker.
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That'd be a long trade that you've played. Yeah. Imagine. Imagine you bullshitted people for that long. That's always amazing. Like a hundred thousand hours of trade. A hundred thousand hours of. A hundred thousand hours of. Bullshitting people. Yeah. But, you know, there's always that suspicion when you see someone on television that they're not really that way because there's been like Ellen, like the Ellen situation. Yeah. You know, people found out that Ellen was mean and all these people came out and said, Ellen's actually a fucking bitch.
Yeah, believe it. She lost everything. She fell apart, disappeared because people found out that this character that she was portraying in half an hour on a television show is not really who she was. Yeah. You know, but I hadn't already known that because I had a buddy work for like and he was like, she's a fucking monster. Yeah. I didn't have a lot of, I didn't really,
had a lot of awareness. You probably did just from being in the business. I only did because of my body. Yeah. My body, Greg, was one of her writers. I was like, she's a piece of shit. Yeah, I didn't know enough to be surprised.
It's just people that they get in those positions of power and if their whole life they've been fucked with and picked on or you know they've been marginalized and then all of a sudden they're in control like oh now it's payback. There's a lot of those folks. That's what happened to Castro. Is that it? Is that what happened to Castro? Yeah I mean like you know I mean it's like the in fact
I would talk about that a little bit and some, you know, I've discussed that in like various conversations around when you watch like certain political fortunes rise as it becomes things become vindictive. I don't even go to Canada anymore. I won't go to Canada for UFC. I don't go over there.
I spent my whole life in the northern tier states, but I've remained somewhat oblivious to political movements in Canada. Well, they don't have free speech up there. They don't have a First Amendment. They have different laws. They have hate speech laws, which are very dangerous because who defines hate speech?
Yeah, you know like so hate speech laws in Canada. They refer to gender pronouns now So like not just male female like if a guy's like if Caitlyn Jenner decides that she's a girl like Bruce Jenner decides he's a girl Now you have to call him Caitlyn if you don't that's hate speech like okay, maybe that's debatable Maybe you're being an asshole, but no they want like all 78 fake genders like zeezer and all these fucking crazy fake ones and yeah them's and
Well, that's where, like, that's, I mean, isn't that conversation what spawned kind of the ascendancy of Jordan Peterson right coming out of Canada? Well, that's how Jordan and I became friends in 2015. And then Jordan did my podcast and then Jordan became a famous guy for speaking out against this. He's going through some sort of bizarre re-education process in Canada.
and he's going to publicize it because it's so ludicrous. So they want to educate him on what he talks about on social media if he wants to keep his clinical license to practice as a psychotherapist. But he doesn't want to practice anyway. He makes far more money doing what he essentially made a monster. They made him way more famous than he ever would have been before.
They highlighted all of Canada's problems way more than would ever get highlighted without this persecution of this guy.
It's kind of crazy though. So he's going through it. He's like, fuck you. I'll go through it and I'll go through it publicly. You guys are idiots. Also, you're going to have to talk to me. Knowing what the outcome will be. Well, knowing he's going to trounce them. Good luck debating that guy. Yeah. Good fucking luck. Like, good luck. Like, who do you got on your side that's going to go up against that guy? Like, shut the fuck up. Who on your creepy authoritarian totalitarian regime is going to stand up and make sense?
competing against Jordan Peterson. Good fucking luck. I wouldn't want the job. Yeah, good luck. Good luck debating that guy. It's just the whole the whole situation up there. It's just like so fucked. And I don't know too much about that Pierre Polovet guy, but I hope that, you know, there's some sort of meaningful change up there they could bring. I still love Canada.
I used to say Canada is like America with like 20% less douchebags. They were so friendly. They're so nice. I used to love going to Montreal. I used to love going to Vancouver. I loved it up there. But the woke shit hit there so hard because they don't have freedom of speech. They don't have a First Amendment. So when they start clamping down on your ability to express yourself, it's like there's a really disastrous implications. Yeah.
But there will probably be a course correction now, which seems like just generally on free speech issues. There's a radical course correction right now. Sure, or you become Iran.
Oh, yeah, you know, roll that way. Yeah. I mean, of course, correction doesn't always work. Like, you know, we think it works because it works in America and it works in America because we have the first amendment and we have the second amendment and those two things work together. And if we didn't have those things, we would be genuinely fucked because every government wants to eventually completely and totally control its population because it's way easier for them to make money. And that's what they like to do. Yeah.
They like to make money, they like to be in bed with the lobbyists and the military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industrial complex and they like to fucking import and pose their will on people. And if you can't express yourself and say, hey, this is fucked up. This is crazy. Why am I doing this? Like these studies show that you're not correct. If you can't say all those things, which right now you can't do in Canada, it's not the same. Like their ability to express themselves on the internet has been severely limited. It's real weird, man. It's real weird and it's happening right. You could walk there.
If you wanted to, you could walk there, and it's fucked. It's on the same patch of land as us, and it's fucked. It just shows you what can happen here if you don't have the right laws. Because people like that fuckhead, Justin, they pretend that they're- You guys don't have a first name basis.
Yeah, that cocksucker. They pretend that there, and I don't talk this way about anybody. No, I'm really surprised. I genuinely despise people like that, and I think it's good to say it publicly, because people need to understand what these people are doing. These people are leading you on the road to legitimate communism. He's leading that country in a road to legitimate communism. It's very dangerous.
And I think most Canadians are fed up with it. At this point, it's just like the party, the party up there has so much control. And he's been forced to resign. So he's got to step down and just hopefully they don't get some new slick talker to con them into the same old bullshit. Hopefully someone comes along that has like real meaningful change.
Which is what I'm hoping is going to happen in America, too. If that Tim Walsh cocksucker, if that guy got into power, like if Kamala died and Tim Walsh, tampon Tim was our fucking president, you know, crazy this country would be, that weirdo puts tampons in the boys' room. And what about our joy? Like he's a complete pathological liar, like a complete liar, lied about being in Tiananmen Square, lied about being a fucking head coach of a football team. Yeah, I thought some of that was
just weird in how avoidable it was. 100% avoidable, but pathological liars, people that are habitual liars, they just lie all the time about everything. But there's a way, there's a way you can do it where it's sort of like no one's ever gonna know. And there's things you can fib about that just find out in five seconds. So you wonder about making the call to embellish something that a person could answer on their phone.
Right right instantly like almost as you're saying it. Yeah. Oh, that's not true No, this was your rank in the military. Yeah, oh you didn't deploy From for war you didn't why you say you deployed at war the weapons you used in war No, no, no you were in it war like oh you were a headfoot No, you weren't a head coach. You were the water boy. Yeah, the fuck are you talking about? I thought some of that was weird. He's just a liar
But that's what a lot of these people are. They're just actors who are ugly. And they're like, well, I can't really make it in show business. And I want a lot of attention. And I want to be a special person. So I'll do politics. I'm good at bullshitting. And most people, they're trusting. They're like, oh, he's saying the right things. If you say the right things, you know, abracadabra. And the next thing you know, you're a fucking governor.
No. You ever going to run for governor Texas? No! No! I'm not running for nothing. I don't want to do nothing. I don't want to do a goddamn thing. I can picture down the road, man. You might be like, I want to be governor Texas. Fuck that. Why would I do that? I have the best job in the world. I get to talk shit with zero responsibilities. If I get something wrong or listen, I'm a moron. Why are you listening to me in the first place?
No, I have no desire in any way shape or form to have anything to do with anything involving politics or I don't want to be in control of it. I don't even like having employees. Jamie's awesome. But I mean, I don't like having employees. But he's just great. He's just great. He's easy. That's why there's so few of us here. You know, like I have a friend who has a podcast, a big podcast. He was like fucking 13 people working for him. People running around with clipboards. I'm like, what do these people do? Why do you have so many people working for you?
Like this is doesn't freak you out. He's only got like inter office conflicts and people are getting fired because people are fighting with each other and fighting over like promotions and trying to get to like backstabbing each other and like. Yeah, maybe you wouldn't like being governor. Fuck that. I would hate it. I wouldn't want I don't want to be a mayor. I don't read nothing. I don't want to be nothing.
But I did get some sort of, not even a mayor. No, I don't want to be a city councilman, I don't want to be a con, I don't want to be shit. I don't like the whole thing about it. It's just, it's not, it's not a good gig. It's just a, it's a creepy business. It's a very creepy and prostitution business. It's just, I don't like it.
Yeah. Yeah. Part of the impetus that pushes people into it is that they want to reverse that. But I think that then there's a... Good luck. There's a magnetic pole that takes you in the direction of being perhaps what you wanted to get rid of. Seems like it happens to a lot of the really idealistic young people that get involved in it. And then then all of a sudden they start doing really well in the stock market. Yeah. They make some good bets. Yeah, they used to be making $28,000 a year.
No, all of a sudden they're worth 12 million. And now they're worth 20 million and they're hanging out with a bunch of other people that are going on yachts on vacations. Like, I'm going to go on a yacht. Yeah. Next thing you know, you know, I want Mercedes and then they like to get you. They slowly get you know, you know, Evan Haver. Evan Haver had a great saying, I've been repeating it a lot too much lately for people to listen to his podcast, but he said, psychology is more contagious than the flu.
And I was like, oh, that's so true. Oh, I mean, like ideas in psychology. Well, being around people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you're around people that are just trying to have a good time that are nice people, genuinely you lean in that direction. Yeah. You know, like, I try to spread that. I want everybody to have fun. Like, let's have a good time.
Yeah, like if you're around a bunch of creeps that are just trying to climb the ladder and claw their way into power like Yeah, how do you maintain your sovereignty? Yeah, that kind of psychological infection Yeah, good luck good luck battling it out with 460 other creeps who show up in DC and lie Yuck Although I did get like a bizarre
I did enjoy affecting the election. Oh, I can imagine. I can imagine. I did enjoy because I didn't want to. I did not want to get involved in any way, shape or form, but it got so weird. Yeah, you'd express that publicly in the past. I don't want to have nothing. And I don't want anything to do it in the future. I don't. I didn't want to. I just felt sucked into it. I'm like, yeah.
Like we can't do this again. We can't do it with these same people that fucked us for four years. And then they're gonna like, we're gonna do it differently now. Like what's going on? Did you see what's going on? Obviously you've seen what's going on in California. But the governor gave this creepy fucking speech where he was talking about speculators coming in and talking about what to do with the land of all these homes that have been burnt down. While it's still only 6% contained. And he did this little dance, like I've been talking
with the governor of Hawaii about what to do. We've got some ideas. We're going to have some meetings. Oh, show it to him, Jamie. It's so creepy because it's happening while these people, their houses have been burned, all their childhood memorabilia, all their stuff for their kids, the photos, the fucking everything they have, everything they have is gone.
air looms, you know, their mother's wedding ring, that kind of shit. Everything's burnt to the ground. And this guy's like standing in front of all this stuff. And he's got a smile on his face. And he's talking about land use. The development plans. Watch this. Play this. I was just talking to Josh Green, the governor.
of down in Hawaii, you've had some ideas about some landage concerns he has around speculators coming in, buying up properties, and the like. So we're already working with our legal teams to move those things forward, and we'll be presenting those in a matter of days, not just weeks.
with big smile on his face. Look at the little wiggle he does with his shoulders. Speculator, watch this. Look at this. Look at this little wiggle. It's excited about the possibilities of speculators coming in. And he's saying, we're moving forward. We're going to move forward on that. These people lost their homes. A lot of those people don't even have fire insurance because the fire insurance pulled out of California.
I think 69% of fire insurance pulled out of California because they're like, this is too crazy. You guys aren't doing jack shit to manage this. You're not clearing the brush. The amount of money they could have saved by just clearing brush.
like filling the reservoir that 11 million gallon reservoir was completely empty during the time of full fire season. Like why didn't you fix that? Like it's all insanely mismanaged. And then this guy is on television talking, really excited about that. Doing a dance in front of the burned down home that people used to sleep in where their children would sleep in. Like this is so disgusting. You know, that's why I don't want to be governor.
Oh, he knows funny. I was going to tell you about on the way down here. I happen to be sitting across from one of our senators from Montana. And after when the flight was getting off, you know, it's hilarious. This, this, this old timer comes by him and legitimate. I'm not joking legitimately brings up to him potholes on the road.
Really? Like I'm the airplane. It's like you got to do something about these potholes. I'm outside of Belgrade and his potholes are terrible. He's like, okay. Yeah. Got it. Got it. Love me. The center. They can't do much about laughing. No, I know, but it's just like it's almost like a cliche.
But, you know, the thing with their guys that I grew up with, you know, like a fish that was very central to our upbringing was a fish called Smelt. It was different kinds of smell. So we had a rainbow smell and they were, they live in the Great Lakes and so on the spring when the smell run,
You know, it was a big deal to go smelt dippin' and we'd smelt dippin' with drop nets and dip nets. It was a huge thing. And when smelt numbers were really high, you know, it was just like, it kind of brought everybody together. A lot of my buddies used to do that in Massachusetts. The smelt run. Yeah. So the ironite, someone had taken out a clip where someone had taken out a chunk of an article in my friend's circle and had sent me a thing where Trump had called the delta smelt like a basically useless fish.
And I was like, man, I feel like there needs to be like a article in the Constitution that the president cannot shit talk, smell, you know?
But that realizes a different smell. So I got my, I, I, I cooled off once I realized it was the delta smell, not our beloved rainbow smell. Well, you can have, there's a balance, right? In terms of like being environmentally conscious, but also recognizing the needs of the human population. And I think that's been distorted in California significantly.
Yeah, but I do get like my hackles get up one. My hackles get up about disparaging disparaging fishes and birds. Of course. Yeah, no, I get it. Play-offs. We're talking about play-offs. You bet we are. Get in on the action with DraftKings Sportsbook, an official sports betting partner of the NFL. Scoring touchdowns is key to winning the playoffs, and you can score big by betting on them at DraftKings, the number one place to bet touchdowns.
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For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see DKNG dot co slash audio. I get it. That's your world. That's your world.
Yeah, it's, um, there's a balance, a balance to be held for sure. You know, I'm not real thrilled with this idea of like continuing to drill for oil and the golf and drill for oil everywhere and knowing that occasionally these things blow up and you have a massive pollution and, but.
Also, I don't think we should be dependent on Saudi Arabia for all our oil. It's a mix. You know, one of the kind of contradictions you encounter with stuff like this, and I've been a little bit involved in this the last few years as I started going down to the Gulf of Mexico to spearfish on the oil rigs. And so the oil rigs are, they're, imagine like a vertical coral reef, you know.
I don't want to call it, but by no means I don't want to call it a goal for desert, but I mean, you could, if you're away from the rigs, you could swim along the surface for miles, potentially, right? If you just swim with a snorkel and mask, you can swim along the surface for miles and not encounter fish. I mean, it's counter where you're seeing them in front of your face. Right. And you pull up to a rig and it's, it's hung in fish.
I mean, they're draped in thousands of fish, okay? So, you know, you grow up with this idea, if you just have a passive understanding of all this stuff, you grow up with this idea that like oil exploration equals a diminishing of natural life, a diminishing of wildlife. And you go in, and there it was this big debate where certain people want to pull the abandoned rigs out, but you have fishermen.
who are like, they're here now, leave them, because that's where all the fish are. And it's this very spirited debate and different administrations will have different plans. They had a program like Idol Iron, which is the pull them out. There was a program called Riggs to Reefs, which is to tip them over so they're not navigational hazards.
The shrimpers don't like them because they cause like navigational obstructions, you can hang your gear up on them. But all the rod and reel fishermen and all the spear fishermen want the rigs there. So you wind up in this situation like that where it's this real complexity and you can picture, it puts people in a situation and viewing it, it puts you in a situation where it's not that clean. Yeah. You're creating.
You know what's hate to say it, because you're supposed to, you know, you're supposed to be, you know, most people from the environmental movement are anti-oil exploration, but then you go and look and be like they created like an accidentally created an unbelievable fishery. Yeah. And the Gulf. And there's dudes now, like I got buddies that spear fish there and fish there.
And it's like you remember in Star Wars, the original Star Wars where they go to that fucking planet and the planet's gone. So like, Hey, shouldn't the planet be here? You know, that scene. I've been with buddies of mine and they got, they got GPS marks for rigs. And you show up and it's like Star Wars. It's like you show up in the rigs not there anymore. Cause there's these ships out there called rig reapers that are out plucking the rigs and they're plucking them faster. They can put them in, but it's got a fisherman pissed off.
That's an interesting situation. Yeah, they want them there now, man. Lake Austin has a similar situation. So Lake Austin needs to be this, it's still very good for bass fishing, big bass on Lake Austin. And the people that live on the lake, the highfalutin folks didn't like all the weeds. So they brought in carp and the carp ate everything. So now the place looks like the bottom of a swimming pool. It's like all the vegetation is fucked.
And so the bass don't have a lot of places to go like, you know, where I live, people go to the docks, like they cast to the docks, you know, and they fish near people's docks because that's like the only cover that these fish have. And so there's talk of like submerging like trees or, you know, dropping. Sure, creating structures. And then there's people that are opposed to that because like,
You know, you have your, you know, the wakeboarders and all the people that like to like recreation on the water. They don't want anything that could possibly fuck up their boat. Yeah. You know, but like you've already fucked it up by bringing in the carp. Like, and you can't get the carp out. Like, how are you going to kill the carp?
You know, Tom, you remember the writer Tom? Was it Tom Robbins or Tim Robbins? No, Tim Robbins is the actor, right? Right. Tom Robbins, skinny, skinny, skinny legs and all. Jitterbug perfume. He had a line where, you know, like in Hawaii, they had this famous thing where they had a rat problem. And then they brought in mongooses to kill the rats. And then now they got a mongoose problem. Yeah. He had some line that like, we used to have a crime problem. Then we brought in cops.
But my first political involvement, my first time I ever approached anything remotely political was on the lake I grew up on. We had an invasive seaweed, an invasive aquatic plant called Eurasian milfoil, and it grew in our lake, but it made unbelievable fish habitat.
And at the time, I was not hip enough to understand the deleterious effects of non-native vegetation. I just knew that when you wanted to catch a fish, you went to the milfoil bed because all the fish were hiding in the milfoil. And they had this proposal to come in and kill all the milfoil and all the lakes. And I went down to our member, I was in high school. I went down to our member, I was the sole person there to represent the milfoil side of the argument.
And then they did it. They went in and poisoned all the milfoil out of the lakes in hopes of bringing in the native seaweeds would take hold. But it absolutely transformed the lake. And from a fishery perspective, not a perspective of native habitat, but from a pounds of fish perspective, the pounds of fish, like the biomass of fish declined by pulling out the weeds.
Of course, you know, and it's again like some you on one hand you look like well Why would you mess up with this just fish everywhere and some people be like well? It's not a native plant and we need to value native wildlife At the expense of what you know a high schooler would look at is like it's where the fish are Yeah, you know, they didn't do what they did to Lake Austin They didn't do it to Lady Bird Lake. So if you go to Lady Bird Lake, it's just hopping with that
Remaining to good fishing. Yeah, for the seaweed and all kinds of, not seaweed, but you know, lily pads and all kinds of shit over there that you don't have on Lake Austin. They didn't bring in the carp. Yeah. The other enormously destructive thing that they've done around the lakes where I grew up on is all that, so much of that, that life, the lake life relies on what you call like the littoral zone. So, you know, the shoreline zone.
And most of these fish species, they like it to be dirty, meaning weeds, fallen over trees, like it creates all kinds of habitat, right, for little stuff to hide. And none of these lakes where I grew up in Michigan, there's been a tendency over the years to round up on your shoreline and then haul in beach sand.
And you just watch over the years, like over the course of my lifetime, you just watch this like really like verdant kind of like vibrant environment become increasingly like a swimming pool and a lot and a lot of those lakes, man. And it's just been, it's just been, it's just been depressing to watch happen.
Yeah, we were talking the other day about eating freshwater fish, how much toxic chemicals are in freshwater fish. It's fucking bananas. Well, they have state advisories, which I've always ignored. I've always ignored. Have you ever get your blood tested? No, but you want to know, I might have told you the story, man.
Did I ever tell you a story about this? That's fine. Well, I'll tell it real quick. So I grew up with a guy who, the guy named Ron Spring. Yes. He had his, I'll tell you the Ron Spring story. Okay. Please do. Oh, I tell the story to talk. I don't think you told it on here. Okay. I grew up with this guy, Ron Spring, and for a living, he was a commercial bait fisherman.
He would catch wigglers, minnows, dig crawlers, catch leeches, and he would supply bait and tackle shops with live bait, and he had spring sporting goods where he sold his own live bait, and he would even hire women to
So what's called a spawn sack, where you take little pieces of salmon roe, salmon eggs, and sew them into a little mesh bag for steel head bait. He was just in the bait business, but also was efficient fanatic and lived off fish his whole life. So he was living off Great Lakes fish his whole life.
The University of Montana started trying to track down old-timers who'd eaten enormous quantities of Great Lakes fish to test them for heavy metals exposure and other toxic things in the environment. He'd lived his whole life like me with complete defiance of health advisory suggestions about fish consumption.
And he goes down there and he would go in every month or two for these little batteries of tests and one of the things they would do with them is they would tell them they'd give them a grocery list. And they'd be like, hey, you got to go to the store and buy like bread, eggs, cheese, butter, whatever. And then he'd wait a minute and they'd say, what were you supposed to buy at the store? And he's telling me this story. And he told me, I was laughing, he said, Steve,
I wouldn't have remembered that list if I never ate a piece of fish in my life. So they were trying to like gauge his memory based on the amount of heavy metal and spark. Yeah, they were trying to they're presumably they tested his blood and found something of interest. And so they were trying to figure out like what happens to a guy. But I lived in Seattle and right on Lake Washington and we would catch a lot of yellow perch because
People, they're full of yellow perch, which are non-native and everyone in that area in the Pacific Northwest is like a trout and salmon snob. So I had the whole fishery to myself. You could go out and catch easily, you know, 100 plus yellow perch out of Lake Washington, but they had health advisory on them and you weren't supposed to, they would tell you that perch over 12 inches, you're only supposed to eat one meal a month or some shit like that. But we just wouldn't keep them over 12 inches.
because there weren't that many over 12 inches anyways. And we'd just eat them all the time. I would have fish fries. And when you fried fish into Great Lakes, there's no person in the Great Lakes region that I was aware of. Like in Michigan, there's no person that would even kind of give a shit about these restrictions. They would be surprised to hear that there were any kind of restrictions, but like the way the different sentiments and different mentalities run. In Seattle, you'd have people that like, they're like, you caught it where? Lake Washington, no way.
Right. Just like in a, like a level of awareness from like an urban environment about those kinds of toxins and growing up where I grew up, it was just not a thing that people discussed, even though they're right in the fishing rigs.
When did it start happening? Like when did freshwater fish become toxic? That would be something I'd be interested in. I think it's like it's mercury, it's certain industrial solvents. It's BPA's too. It's forever chemicals. And I think that with Lake Washington, there was a lot, correct me, maybe I'm wrong. Like as I say this, I might be wrong. I think there was things around bowing plants and old solvents and stuff that went in the water. But mercury,
which comes from different ways. They have ways of scrubbing it now and greatly reducing the amount of mercury when you burn coal. But for a long time, mercury would come from the combustion of coal and it would be distributed globally.
evenly everywhere. So it didn't necessarily matter if you were, it didn't matter if you're eating a pelagic fish. I mean, if you're eating like a vociferous pelagic fish, we seem to be the worst. What does a pelagic mean? Fish live their life up at the surface. Okay. And then ones that eat fish, that eat fish, that eat fish are the worst. So picture you got like a, like a, like a Marlin, right? He's eating tuna.
Tuner eating fish that are eating fish. And so they magnify and accumulate all this stuff in their fat. That's that's like globally distributed in the oceans. And they've slowed down mercury. They've slowed down how much mercury is going out because of the ways they scrub when they clean when they burn coal now.
But it's just, it's stagnant in the environment. Did I tell you my arsenic story? No. Well, I got my blood worked on. You know, I get my blood worked on pretty regularly and I went once a few years back, quite a few years back, 15 years ago, at least. And my doctor said, do you have a lot of arsenic in your blood? And I go, like someone's poisoning me? He's like, no.
Do you eat a lot of fish? Oh, really? And I said, I eat a lot of sardines. He goes, how much? I go four or five cans a night. And he was like, what the fuck are you doing? I go, what are you doing? Well, I love sardines. And when I'm if like I come home from the comic club, I'm hungry. It's easy to have like, I thought was like healthy food. It's just sardines and olive oil. What could be bad about that? And so he said,
Take a few months off and then come back and let's do this again. And I took a few months off and I came back, no arsenic. I was like, oh man. He goes, it's not enough to be concerned. But you're getting arsenic in your blood from the seridines. Sure. I work with a guy, Seth.
He kind of had this perfect storm where we had been in Hawaii, so we had Wahoo and yellowfin tuna. And he fishes in Alaska, so he had all his halibut. And then he's got a bunch of walleye that he catches, you know, his big walleye fishermen that he catches locally. And he wound up had like, there's like kind of like a long term mercury deal and a short term mercury deal, but he had mercury poisoning.
His hands went numb and stuff. Oh yeah. And then I got the reading about it and there's like various cases where there's this other cases kind of interesting. This guy gets on a cruise ship. Never doesn't eat fish. This guy doesn't have fish in his diet. It was a thing that was covered in the news. And he gets on the cruise, a cruise and they have all you can eat sushi things. So he wants to get his money's worth. And so he's gorging himself on this all you can eat sushi during the course of his cruise and generates like a, generates mercury poisoning.
Like a short-term version, you know, and dudes I hang out with in Hawaii that have in Hawaii that have access to a lot of Big Pacific fish They'll they'll sort of like deliberately pace themselves You know like they could live off tuna, right? But they'll deliberately pace themselves keeping in mind The amount of that stuff you're getting in and RFK junior head RFK junior on the show on our podcast and he had had He had had mercury poisoning
Really? From what? Cantuna. Was he eating too much Cantuna? Wow. So maybe I've had it? I don't know. Well, no, I've had my blood tested. I don't know. But I can't picture the sentiment I have bought as a friend of mine.
who fishes flathead catfish, which have, they accumulate a lot of bio or not bio toxins. They accumulate a lot of heavy metals. And he said, and we're talking about eating this stuff. And he said, if I can eat, if I can catch and eat so many big flatheads that it kills me, I win.
Well, there's no cases of CWD getting into humans yet, right? No. No. But that's the big fear. Like you and I are on a text chain with Ted Nugent, and he's always like trying to... How about Ted's kid last night? Which one? Rocker? Yeah. Good kid. You know, Ted is always trying to dismiss the concerns of CWD. He doesn't believe in it. Yeah. He thinks it's overhyped. Well...
It scares the fuck out of me. Yeah, because it's a prion disease, right? Yeah, so if it jumps to people and it has jumped to like certain rodent species, isn't that correct? No, right now it's just it's it's servants. Oh, just servants. Servants. There hasn't been a case of it jumping to like a mole or something like that. Well, they did. You know, when you do, I don't want to get in over my waders here, but
I'd love to talk about CWD at length, but sometimes you can do a, if someone does medical research and they'll have a finding, there's a term for it. Let's say you have a finding that's alarming, but you haven't done peer review yet. But let's say I just, all of a sudden, made some discovery that had huge implications and people would need to become immediately aware of what I might have found out. There's a term for it where you would release these
You release these like preliminary findings, even though it hasn't been held up to academic rigor because it's of such importance. Like a lot of times you don't get to skip that step, but in cases of medical, you get to skip a step and say like, Hey, hang tight. We're not all the way there yet. But look, this is kind of alarming.
They had a case and it all corroded, but these guys had a case where they were able to infect a racist monkey with CWD. But then it wasn't replicable, didn't hold up. But when things like that happen, they tend to get a ton of media.
But then down the road, the media doesn't follow suit. There's been cases where there was one not longer where they were looking at people that had this rare form of dementia. And they found that over these people that had this rare form of dementia, a couple of them were deer hunters who lived in CWD areas. So they come out with, hey, everybody, check this out. But then it winds up being that when you do a statistical analysis on it,
It was no different than anything else. There was no reason that it wasn't like they scored higher, the deer hunter scored higher or nothing. It's just certain percentage of people get dementia. Yeah, so it's like a certain number of people eat dementia, a certain number of people eat venison and statistically you're going to have some overlap if you survey enough people. So even though they gave like a big heads up, it won't be enough in there. But yes, CWD
It's a highly infectious disease. It was first identified in Colorado on a research facility, not a game farm. It was first identified on a surveyed research facility in Colorado, I believe in the early 70s. And then there's been a debate, like some people feel that it was always there and wasn't detected.
right and that we did it wasn't like we found it the minute it came out it was just that it would perhaps had been there and then we discovered that it was always there but it does it does expand its range all the time right
Even in the last few years we've had our first cases in Montana. We keep every year we add like without fail every year we find CWD in states where it didn't previously exist or within states that have CWD we find CWD in counties that didn't have it. Oftentimes you can look and it makes sense because it flows but now and then you get these weird jumps.
Right, where something jumps a big moat of inactivity and then all of a sudden you get like a new hotspot and you look and be like, well, how did it, if it's an infectious disease and deer aren't flying in airplanes, how did it jump? Some of the jumps people tie it to transporting. There's
A theory that is well accepted in law circles would be that moving servants, moving deer and elk to panned operations has facilitated the movement of CWD. What it used to mean to be, if someone was a CWD denier before, it would be that they denied that it was a thing. There is no disease called CWD.
There's generally, it's generally accepted now that there's a disease called CWD, but now the debate is like, does it matter or not? Our mutual friend Doug Dern is heavily involved in CWD, combating CWD, trying to get more money spent to understand CWD. You're looking at, there's two risks with CWD.
One risk is that ultimately it's going to lead to like destruction of deer herds. Meaning if you get like it's always fatal and if infection rates get to a certain point we're going to lose deer, right? Like if it's always fatal and you have infection rates of 50 or 60 percent and it takes a couple of years to kill them like you're going to run out of big bucks.
Cause nothing can live long enough. The other fear is that it jumps the barrier and becomes a human pathogen. You know, so people, you know, all the hunters I know, like the question we always talk about is like, do you, uh, do you, would you eat CWD positive meat? You know,
Right. Even if it doesn't jump currently, you take that risk. So yeah, he's zero. Yeah. And he was recently with a guy and he's like, he's eaten him and his family have eaten four CWD positive deer. Man. I couldn't say I can't like I couldn't serve it to my kids.
I wouldn't need it myself either. I can't serve my kids. I don't. I have a knowing. But here's the thing. Here's the rub. Um, I've said this number before and people like, that's not true, but it's true. I'm telling you hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD positive. Hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD positive meat. I would imagine that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Over many decades. Yeah. Right. So at what point do you, at what point do you get comfortable?
It's a dude. It's a tough one. Yeah, it's a tough one. It's a tough one. It can jump. It hasn't. It hasn't. But when you look at the history of these types of diseases, especially prion diseases like mad cow, prion disease, jumped people. You know the debate between prion and prion? No.
You know, it's you here. I used to say pry on, but then I heard it's high to say pre on it. Well, the, the, the biologist Jim Hefflefanger. Um, you should, that, that'd be a very good guy if you'd have on your show some day. The Biles is Jim Hefflefanger sent me a thing where the guy that named it
The guy that coined the term spelled out phonetically how it's supposed to be pronounced. So then I was like, OK, I'm going to stick with Priya now. It's the guy that came up with it says Priya. Oh, so that's what it is? And not prior. Yeah. He's like, said, he's like, we'll call it this and we'll pronounce it this way. OK. So it's Priya. It's now I'm now I'm trying to always try to remember which one it is. And it's yeah, it's Priya. It's scary, dude. It's scary and Doug.
I've said this a hundred times before. If I say, man, the main thing I'm worried about is people getting it. That pisses Doug off, because Doug's worried about that we're going to lose big bucks. And people. He wants to shut. He likes healthy deer. He doesn't want a disease running through his deer herd. It hasn't jumped a cows or anything else. That's one area where
I'm gonna get myself in trouble, dogging all kinds of ways, because that's the thing I think about is, it's not that they're, I'm not saying the ag world is complacent, right? I'm not saying they're complacent, like there's a lot of interest in the agricultural community to understand CWD better, but if you look and be like, dude, a cow looks a hell of a lot more like a deer than I do, I'm just gonna watch the cow, and all of a sudden these cows start getting sick, then my ass is gonna get nervous.
But I'm like, they're rubbing noses with these deer. Yeah. And it gets on the grass. It gets on the vegetation. Sure. And you can't kill that shit. Yeah. I remember some politician was like, well, I'll just cook your deer meat longer. And I was like, well, I can't remember what it is. You can't cook deer meat to 1,400 degrees. And you don't have to incinerate it. Or whatever else it becomes. But yeah, cooking it isn't the thing. It can survive. That's why if you hunt, there's a lot of restrictions now on moving carcasses around.
Right? So more and more states are implementing that when you go home, they don't want you bringing the head home. They don't want you bringing the bones home. I also fear for a time and to just be terrible if you're for a time where you couldn't bring anything. Like they really restrict movement, you know? Right. Like it's easy to like it's very easy to comply with not moving bones. It's easy to comply with not moving brain matter. Like that's easy, right? Yeah. But picture that this gets out of hand and all of a sudden it's like you can't move venison across county lines.
I don't know, like no one's throwing this out there, but as we look at, as they look at like further and further restrictions, it's scary. And so from a guy like from from from, I don't want to speak for Nugent, but from his idea of being overblown is his idea would be
Like I said, I hate speaking for the guy. It would be that here we are making policy changes, making game management changes, making rule changes, adjusting what you can and can't do in the woods based off a thing that most people would be like, but we haven't proven there's a problem.
Right. That would be his perspective on it. My perspective is it's scary as shit, and as much as our government right now is trying to find a way to stop spending so much money, I support any money that can get spent on finding out if this can be a real problem or not. Yeah. Like, I'll find other places to get the money, but I'd like to channel taxpayer dollars
billions of them into making sure deer meat stays safe. Well, the thing is, that's my kind of pork barrels. There's no way to eradicate it, right? Like you, there's no way to identify the deer that have it, that haven't exhibited symptoms and they're spreading it. You know, they're looking at ways to test live animals. Then there's, there's other cockamamie ideas that
One would be that some deer seemed to be some deer. Yeah, and so that you'd move these resilient deer.
into other populations to try to breed in some kind of resiliency, which, you know, it's a wild animal. Is it ultimately resilient? Cause like mad cow disease has, there's an incubation period, right? This is the, the concern. Like I remember, that's the other thing is that we're all like me, everybody, cause I guarantee I've eaten CWD. In fact, the meat, the other concern is we all got it. We just don't know it yet. Cause it takes 10 years.
But they've been tracking these dudes that went to a fire department fundraiser. They had 100 some people that ate a bunch of CWD infected me at a fire department fundraiser. And they keep following up on those people and following up on those people. And they haven't got it, but that's the other thing is over a decade ago. So that's the other thing is that we all got it, like all these hunters, you know? I don't think this is true, but some people are like, all these hunters, they don't know it yet, but it could be that all of a sudden in 10 years, they all start dropping like flies or could develop dementia.
I don't, it's such a, I really think that I don't like to see any kind of wildlife disease, right? Of course. I do believe,
If you look at prevalence rates and you look at the fact that it's always fatal, whether or not removing the human question to it, I do think that you will find that it'll become harder to produce big deer. I worry about that. And it'd be easy to track. Just go and look at like, go and look at Boone and Crockett entries.
over time from all these counties. So go to Buffalo County, Wisconsin, like a famous giant white tail producing place, right? They get high rates of the CWD prevalence. If you put a line on CWD prevalence, then you put a line on Boone and Crockett entries.
and you're able to track this over many years because we have all this data, do you, does it correlate? Does like CWD previously drive down big bucks? It's like it seems, I'm sure some mathematician out there has started to try to look at like if it's true, but a lot of people on the ground say that you do see population level impact from CWD. And I'm guessing there's no way it doesn't affect participation.
Meaning that people that would like to hunt and the whole the whole promise of wild meat is you know, you're getting like really healthy meat You're able to control the food chain, but then all of a sudden you throw in this question of like well
But it could give you a pre-on disease, hypothetically. That's gonna dampen people's enthusiasm about deer. And I'd hate to see, we get to a point where when I look at a deer, I look at a deer with great enthusiasm and love. What happens when we look at deer and we look at them like a disease vector?
Right. It doesn't become like, like, do you view it like a rat or you see a rat and you like recoil? Like, I don't want that shit in my yard. Right. Right. They carry disease, don't they? If your dog could get it. Yeah, like picture down the road that like deer, which are this like universally loved, praised animal, this kind of like symbol of the American outdoorsman becomes like, yeah.
That shit out of my yard. What is when when Doug talks about, you know, they do a lot of testing in Wisconsin. We're a lot of testing. What's the percentage that come up positive? Man, they have. I think that on Doug's place, I think that like last year, I don't know if they got all the results from this year, but I think last year, they had close to 50% of bucks.
now it's it's it's hovering it's like very high and this is fairly recent like a decade ago they started appearing right yeah i think that i i think that cwd goes back maybe about a decade in his area he's in richland county richland or richland or richland county yeah richland county wisconsin
somewhere in that ballpark. And it's changed. When you were at Doug's Place, remember at Doug's Place, these have this slogan like, nice buck next year, meaning, let dear girl, let dear girl. And Doug has really changed. Over the years, these changes tune and they really want to try to, the idea generally with wildlife managers is that by lowering, you'll slow spread by lowering numbers.
Right, that if you have, you know, 40 deer per square mile, you're going to have increased spread. And if it was 20 deer per square mile, 30 deer per square mile, you might slow the spread. But no one's demonstrated a lot of success in slowing the spread of CWD. So other hunters will look at it and be like, yeah, you're out there lowering deer numbers. And so there's half as many deer on the landscape. And CWD still spreads, right? So there's a, you went up with this question of like, how do you justify
Um, trying to suppress deer numbers when you're not demonstrating a lot of success and slowing prevalence. And the whole thing you're afraid of is lowering deer numbers, but you're lowering deer numbers. Right. But it's like a controlled, it's a controlled lowering to slow spread, but there hasn't been no one has an area to your point. You can't go to a county.
I don't think if I'm wrong, I'm wrong by maybe one county, but I'm pretty positive. I'm not wrong. And this is generally absolutely true. You can't go to a county that had infected deer that no longer has infected deer. No one's gone into a population of deer in a radicated CWD. No one's got no one's gotten rid of it. That's crazy. Has it jumped to moose?
Yeah, I think that, um, servants, so, so primarily white till deer, mule deer, elk, they found it. They've had it transmit to caribou. Um, cow, I should know that. Cause it's the service. So there's no, there's no way it doesn't like, you know, not from that. Right. But I'm saying like the thing about mooses, they're slower numbers and they don't, they don't exist in like packs.
Yeah. Yeah. But since it is a server disease, I should notice since it is, I'm assuming they've found it in there. I can't think of examples. I can think of mule deer, white tail deer, elk, caribou, but I can't think of whether or not there's been a positive case of moose and moose to have a whole host of problems.
right now in some areas particularly the lower forty eight the northern the northern states of the lower forty eight between wolf depredation and uh... and then uh... uh... tick like a tick is really hammering those right now someone told me they went hunting and they got a moose and it was just covered in yeah there was a problem with
in this long series of mild winners, that these extreme colds that would lower these tick numbers down hasn't been happening. So you're having animals literally dying, like a lot of moose literally dying from tick infestations.
Yeah. And then Colorado's becoming like a great. Oh, here's all the founding moose in many state provinces. There you go. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Colorado and Texas has moose. What? Texas has moose. No, no, no, no. He's relatively small areas in the panhandle in West Texas. Yeah. That's that's that's that's that's cock. Do they have moose in Texas? No, no, I think it's mixing up two things.
But it says it there. CWD has been found in Texas. Right. So they're not saying moose in Texas. Yeah. Just Google, are there moose in Texas? There are not. I mean, everything's in Texas in some form of capacity. But no, you're way outside of moose. No moose in Texas. You're way outside of the native range of moose. Yeah. Colorado is becoming like an unexpected, it's blowing up for moose. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Colorado becomes better. I mean, I've always said moose, but like Colorado is becoming like a premier moose state.
When did that happen? Just they had just been kicking ass there, you know, up in the high country, and more and more moose, just coming like a great moose state. And meanwhile, like Maine is really suffering as a moose state. Really? Yeah. So, you know, like Maine's whole brand promise, you know, it was like around moose and Colorado's going to steal it.
No, well, it's difficult to get a tag in Maine, right? That's very hard. That's very hard. Yeah. Yeah. It's for a non-resident especially. I used to ply over there, but I don't apply anymore. Now, what's causing the most decline in Maine? Ticks. Oh, God. Yeah, ticks. Dirty little fucking things. Yeah. Have you ever heard the conspiracy theory about Lyme disease? Yeah. That's a weird one, right? Yeah. It is. It seems like there's some legitimate concern there that it might have been a bio weapon that got out of hand.
Well, I think after the pandemic, we just went through, I think people are more open to that idea. Yeah, it was widely dismissed by people that are a little bit more skeptical about conspiracies. But R.F.J. Jr., he believes it.
It's very scary, this idea of these fucking eggheads experimenting with diseases and making them more infectious, for whatever reason, without also developing a cure. Yeah, it is. It's very strange. I guess the one justification you'd have is you'd be like, well, by tinkering with it, we'll better understand it. And if it ever happens naturally, we'd be able to combat it. Yeah, how'd that work out?
That didn't really work out. That's a problem. That has to be the story you tell to yourself. I think they just make money doing research. I think if you're a researcher, you know, like if you're a carpenter, you want to build houses. They say, there's too many houses. He's like, ah, come on. I'm fucking need houses. You know, I'm a carpenter. I make houses. If you're a researcher in your field of studies, diseases, viruses,
You want to study them. And if the money is involved in some sort of bizarre engineering of these things, which is what they're doing, this fucking strange gain of function shit that they're doing, you do it. And if you can't do it in America, like China, okay, we'll do it over there.
There was a famous Buffalo hide hunter and he had talked about during the great slaughter of the Buffalo. He had talked about now and then he'd commit himself to stop, but say he wake up in the morning and off in the distance. And he's like, someone else is doing it. So I think that probably with the, you know, I'm no pathologist.
But as long as someone's tinkering with that shit, everybody wants to tinker with that shit. Yeah. Because you're like, I don't know. What are they? What are they doing over there? That I, uh, what am I missing out? Yeah. If they're doing it, I want to do it. Yeah. I don't want to be the one that looks like a fool. Then there's research money. Let's take it to grants. Yeah. And you know what? I bet in some ways the pandemic spawned more of that type of research. You think so? Yeah. Cause I mean, like also now you can make the case of how important it is to understand this stuff.
Yeah, but you would also make the case like, hey, how about you fuck heads come up with a cure first? Yeah, start with that. Yeah, start with figuring out how to cure it. Yeah, let's see that. It's just like.
There's just not a lot of trust in the medical research institutions now. No, there's been an erosion of that for sure. For a good reason. I mean, there was a real wake up call for people. They're like, Oh, there's not someone with real objective oversight of all this, like doing a really good job of maintaining everything. It's not, it's not a really well maintained situation.
Yeah, I used to be a dude that, um, uh, prior to that, I was a dude that accepted a lot of, uh, I don't know, I accepted a lot of assurances. And then there was a definite, like many people on the, I mean, I'm speaking for most people in the country, man. Uh, I feel like like many people I gained a new skepticism.
Yeah, me too. During the pandemic. Yeah, I joked about it in my special about government authority, a new skepticism about some types of government authority and a new skepticism about the way health information. Yes. Is spread. Yeah. It's just one of those things where anything involving money, whenever there's an enormous amount of money involved, and then there's a centralized control of information, like where there's people that have a distribution of information, and then
There's also the problem of exonerating people from any responsibility, which is what happened in the 1990s, or was it the 80s? Because the vaccine manufacturers were saying, listen, we can't manufacture vaccines because too many people are getting injured by them.
And we're going to have so much liability that we're not going to be able to make manufacture vaccines anymore unless you give us immunity to prosecute it. And so they gave it to them. And then all of a sudden, you're getting 72 vaccines. You're giving children hepatitis B. Hepatitis B for babies, which is just fucking crazy, a sexually transmitted disease for babies.
Like, what are you doing? Like, why are you doing that? What are you doing it? Because you can't. And because the more vaccines you give kids, the more money you make. And you're not responsible. You don't have to pay off anything. You don't get sued. Which is just you can't do that with these fucking corporations. They're just too evil.
They're sociopaths. They act like sociopaths. They lie about studies. They lie about side effects. They minimize their responsibility, and they profit immensely, and they continue to do so as long as they're not punished. And that's the business that they're in. Yeah, I get the frustration, but at the same time, I've been the recipient of
Remedy's offered by Western medicine Remedy's offered by Western medicine for diseases caused by science. Yeah, you possibly you are Yeah, you are a live disease. Yeah, some things like if you will know it can take a take a natural thing like Giardia The these are you know, I don't think anyone's arguing about that, but I'm not like you get sick shit Oh, listen, you take a pill and you're quick
No one's arguing that medicine isn't amazing. Yeah, I mean medicine's amazing. There's but the problem with medicine is You got your scientists and your medical researchers and then you got your money people Right and the money people they don't even know how to make any of this medicine They just know to sell it. Yeah, how do I sell it? I sell it by you know? Like that's like Remdesvir whether we're selling Remdesvir during the the the COVID crisis Remdesvir is fucking horrible. What does that know that one kidney failure?
They stopped prescribing. Oh, no, I remember that one. Fauci was selling it to everybody. You need to take them. And everybody was dying. That's your first nation. Horrible kidney failure. Yeah, that fucking creep. Read that book, The Real Anthony Fauci by RFK Jr. It's a crazy book. Yeah, I have, you know, I have sat in my body. Seth was reading that book and we got moves on by and read it.
That book will change your opinion on a lot of shit. Yeah, that's a crazy book. And if it's not true, he would be sued. They would skip on get a cease and desist. Well, it's all documented. He's got it. I mean, it's all backed up by like rock solid information. It's all like very well documented. What actually happened during the AIDS crisis would actually happen during the COVID crisis. It's all it's all legitimate. It's all easy to research.
It's just scary that these people that you you don't want to have to think about that stuff all the time You want to just live your life and trust these? Oh, this is the medical institution. They they're here to help us to make us feel better. Yeah, yeah But no a lot of them are just there to make money, but I held that sentiment me too. Yeah, me too till four years ago That's a lot changed dude. I'm fucking super skeptical now. Yeah, I'm also super skeptical of the herd mindset that people fall into
whenever there's some sort of a pandemic, when there's a high level of anxiety, a lot of people fall into this herd mindset. And that scares the shit out of me too, because there's just a lot of people that are cowards, and they're afraid of public humiliation, public, you know,
public criticism, they're afraid of getting ostracized from the community. If they don't follow suit, like everybody else is doing. And so then they start to try to enforce it on everybody else. It's like the people that were yelling at everybody else. Where's your mask? Where's your mask on? Like, you know, there's people, I went to a restaurant the other night, the fucking guy served me had a mask on. Like, I would fire this guy. I would not like, you can't, this is nonsense. You can't be wearing a fucking mask. This is crazy.
I read a op-ed and the free press yesterday, you know, Barry Weiss's publication. And it was about when they had rolled back
that rolled back on masking laws. I kind of forgot all of this. Like you used to not be able to run around with a mask on. Yeah. Because of like criminal activity. Yeah. So one of these, one of these dudes that pushed a, pushed a person from a subway, um, it was must've been premeditated to some degree cause hood and mask, right? Yeah. So you can't identify them on security footage. Right. And then the dude that shot that healthcare, uh, insurance, CEO, like masked, but you don't think anything of it. Right.
So this person was arguing in some capacity, they were arguing that we need to move back to anti-masking rules to fight crime, which I get the sentiment, but I also thought like if you had at a time
prior to the pandemic. If you had told me that there was restrictions on wearing a mask, you know, out of thought, I would have been surprised about that. Cause it seems like how can you dictate to someone that you have a like a little stage coach, robber bandana on your face? Do you know what I mean? It's like a weird, it's like a weird thing is like, can you really, um, can you really tell people that they can't wear a mask?
But this person's saying, you could, we did. And now that you've granted criminal some level of anonymity.
by that you can just kind of like your cool is the walk around totally obscured well it's also your de you're dealing with people that have severe anxiety if they think that mask is actually gonna protect them it doesn't do jack shit sure especially if you were in the bandana the bandana is just ridiculous sure but i'm not looking at it yeah but i'm not looking to have a rational argument right now i'm just just like surprise like something i hadn't considered that you could uh... have a that you could add a you know make a law
telling people about wearing a mask or not. I just forgot all about that shit because it just didn't, but it wouldn't be. If you went back six years ago and you saw a deal with a mask,
in a hood on. Yeah. You might be like, the hell is his problem. Yeah. Now you're like, oh, he's real scared of COVID. Real scared still to this day. I mean, someone sent me a video of this guy where it's mask every day and he's been pushing for masking. He's like, like severely mentally ill. Yeah. Well, that that is overrun with anxiety. Just like, like advocating for masking. We shall be masking and double masking and
If you had a mask on and a hood on all the time, you wouldn't be just 10% less famous, you'd be 70% less famous. I got spotted a lot when I had a mask on. With your mask on. Yeah, with a mask on. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of, yeah. Mom's short and wide, you know, I have an odd shape. You know, I think people will look at that. That burly little man. Little fucking chimpanzee looking dude.
Ball dead. Yeah. Ball muscle. I wear a baseball hat, sunglasses, mask, and they're like, is that Joe Rogan? Even, even without like seeing my tattoos, like I just was getting busted.
You know, it might be because you are known sitting in that seat in that posture. And so maybe when you're in the airport, you should try a different pose lean. Yeah, lean back. They might just be they might be just picking you off by your seating position. I was just walking down the street. I was getting called out with sunglasses on and a baseball hat. Yeah, 10% less famous.
Yeah, that's too late. That fucking chicken is full on the coop. Yeah, that's over. No one doing it now. I think you should stop masking. I think it should be illegal. I think it's ridiculous. In New York, they made it so that if you go into a store, you have to pull your mask down. Oh, facial recognition will work. Really?
Yeah, because they were getting so many people getting robbed. So many stores are getting robbed and you could never catch a guy. Yeah, there's a movement back to that. I think it was the mayor proposing that. But they should just make it illegal to wear a fucking mask. You're a psychopath. It doesn't work. It doesn't work and it's not protecting you. So what are we doing? You're just covering your face. Well, you can't cover your face because we live in polite society. We want to make sure that people can't make crimes wearing a fucking bank robber mask. This is nuts.
It a little bit, you being a very libertarian dude. I don't know if you describe yourself that way. Pretty much. Yeah. I'm a little surprised. I remember you were having a conversation with J.D. Vance and J.D. Vance made a comment about just not the serious comment, made a comment like, you know, dudes shouldn't wear skirts or some shit like that.
And you're like, they should totally build worse skirts. Yeah. Women get to wear them. Why can't men? You know, it was, it was, it was all said with levity. Yeah. But I was a little surprised like I could picture you as well. Um, I could picture you as well really feeling like, how could you legislate?
It's a public safety thing. Obscuring your face. Yeah. There's no public safety. There's no public safety in skirts. So guys get weird knees. I reckon I was a little sneeze anywhere. No. I mean, skirts is just a choice. I mean, if you wear shorts, why can't you wear skirts? It's crazy. No, I get it. It's public safety. Yeah. I've got a public safety sentiment. What do I give a shit? If a woman wants to wear a business suit, am I mad at Ellen for wearing a business suit? You know, am I going to be pissed off at a Hannah Gatsby for dressing up like a man?
Like, come on, you should be able to wear whatever you want to wear. I don't care about that, but I care about public safety. You shouldn't be able to cover your face where you can't be identified if you commit a crime. We've all agreed to that. That's just ridiculous. There used to be a thing that you couldn't do. You couldn't walk into a store with a bank robber mask on. It used to be if you walked into a bank with a mask on, people would freak out. And now, during the pandemic, they probably start shooting at you.
You walk in a bank without a mask, people get angry, put your mask on. It's like we lost our mind. But the thing is they should have realized it very early on that there's no signs to it. And there was a doctor who pointed this out very early on in the pandemic and we highlighted it and people were very upset at us. This doctor was talking, he was a virologist and he was saying, do you know how ridiculous this is? Let me show you. Yeah. And he used a vape.
So he took a big hit of a vape, he put a mask on, and he blew vape smoke through, and he's like, the particles in vape are so much larger than these virus particles. If you're breathing through this mask, if this mask allows you to take in air, you're taking the virus. If it allows you to blow out air, you're blowing out the virus. Shut the fuck up. This is just stupid. This is just pretending.
And in the beginning, I was like, OK, everybody just wants you to be a good person. You wear the mask. But it's so weird because during the crisis, we did UFC fights. And the UFC fights, the corner men used to have to wear masks.
So like I'll see like highlights from like 2021 and you see like the corner with the mouth like god I forgot about this. Yeah, so ridiculous Every and their nose is hanging out. It's like the whole thing, but cover your nose. Oh, okay. Like is it mad like okay? This just really works and you couldn't walk into a store like this people go that's not good enough This is not good enough. Oh, I forgot my mask. What do you want me to do? This is the same goddamn thing like what are we doing? Can I just?
buy toothpaste like this? No, you can't. You have to have an actual mask. Well, what is the difference between this and a fucking bandana? Zero. There's no difference. It's so stupid. I went through two years like needing to yell at my kids all the time, because if you travel with your kids and they never got the stupid things on, you know, you're like, but then you're not even you're not even yelling at them about that you're going to prevent them from
You're not from saving them from a disease. You're saving them from being ostracized and yelled at by the flight attendant. So you spent years being like, put your damn mask on. Put your mask on. I don't think it works. No one it's not about whether it works. You just got to do it to not get in trouble. Yeah.
I had a conversation with my kids, like this does not work. Just want you to know, it's not going to make you safer. They both had COVID early on. They got over it quick. So they weren't nervous about COVID at all. I go, this is just for other crazy people that are riddled with anxiety. You put this on, they feel okay. It's not going to be forever. And we're going to look back on this and we're all going to laugh.
and that's like every now and then I'll go through like my closet and I'll put a jacket on that I haven't worn forever and I reach into a pocket and I pull out a fucking stupid surgical mask like Jesus Christ. I can't believe we went through this. Yeah, we've kind of found them all and got rid of them.
But I would be surprised there's one hide. It was one of the things that Sanjay Gupta brought on brought up when I did that podcast with him like you sell masks on your website. I go, what do you think I'd sell them because they're real? I sell them because people have to wear them. So if you want to wear them, wear a little JRE mask. Like I don't sell them because I think they're good. Yeah. Like shut the fuck up. I wish I wish they were illegal to sell. How about that?
I don't want to make a dollar off those fucking movies for gold the profits. I would pay to have them illegal. I'll give the government $10,000 a year to make masks illegal. Fuck you guys are fucking crazy. The whole thing was crazy. It was really weird.
it was like a psychology experiment on the whole it was just it was a good experiment to see like how many people around you are bitches who just fall in line the moment things got weird you know it's a lot is a lot of people just have no ability to tolerate any discomfort any weirdness any uncertainty any anxiety they just immediately like there's so many people out there
that have always had parents, and then bosses, and then supervisors, and they were always like following rules, always following rules, and assuming somebody has your best interest in mind. And they don't. They don't. There's just humans, just a bunch of humans out there.
a bunch of people that don't want to take responsibility for this fuck up that they've created and they want to lie and distort things and gaslight the whole population and then somehow or another these people that are doing that are allowed to spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars on advertising and on on television and so now the television networks will never criticize them
Because they get all this fucking, you know, this is like the argument about advertising for pharmaceutical drugs. You know, we're the only country other than New Zealand in the whole world that allows pharmaceutical drugs to advertise.
Was that right? Yeah. It's just us in New Zealand. New Zealand's far more restrictive than us. But the way our system is set up, all these television networks, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, they all rely on a giant percentage of their advertising budget. It comes from pharmaceutical drugs. And don't you just love those ads? But here's the thing, it's not to sell more drugs. It's so that those people will never criticize those drugs. Yeah, I'm familiar with the argument.
Yeah, the ads are great. Yeah, it's like some, it'll always be some dude just kicking ass. Yeah, having a great time wakes up jogs with his buddies kicks ass all day at night. He's like at night. He's like out with his lady, you know, and he's like getting ready and it kind of ends at the end of the night. And you're like, that's something that's getting lucky, you know? Yeah. It's like, ask your doctor if such and such. And you're like, shit, I want to kick ass like that old guy. And then they read off the side effects, the side effects at the end suicidal thoughts, powerful diarrhea, like, oh God.
You know bleeding. Oh Christ. We live in a weird world, man. It's a weird world. It's a world, you know, whenever you involve money and things, money, profit, and the ability to lie, you know, you get a lot of real shady things. What frustrates me already is it's going to be impossible to
Explain it like now. I can't it's very hard to explain the 9-11 terror attacks to my kids Mm-hmm, you know, and I want to be when they make in 10 years 20 years whatever when they make a docu series on this on the COVID-19 Mm-hmm pandemic and the social response and the government response like I really want to be in the room on the edit and
I'm like, don't forget about it. The telling of how it happened. If I would like to go into a time machine and go forward and see how it is told later.
Yeah. You know, like we'll watch now, you know, we'll watch documentary now, you know, you watch something about the Cuban Missile Crisis, right? But you just picture dudes that were active during the Cuban Missile Crisis are like, no, right? Right. They're going to be there's even a term. There's a term. It's called, um,
gel uh... some gel syndrome maybe jamie can look it up for us what's the term about it's that it's the alpha no not alphagel syndrome alphagel is the no it's not alphagel it's something gel the syndrome is this
or no amnesia, something gel gel man gel type in gel amnesia if you don't mind it's killing me gel man amnesia it's that let's say you're let's say you're seeing something you have a lot of subject matter expertise in okay so let's say you're reading you Joe are reading a and then someone's analysis explain like here's what's up with with mixed martial arts
Okay, an outsider, an outside journalist who's assigned to do a piece and they do a piece like, what's up with mixed martial arts? Right. And you read it and what's probably the main thing you're gonna be thinking the whole time.
Does this guy know what he's talking about? Yeah, and you can be like, that's totally not. That's not the conversation. That's not what that is. You missed the point. Do you notice that everything you read, where you know a lot about it? Let's say you read a piece of reporting and it's a reporting about the podcast industry, where it came from, how it's monetized. Mostly what you're going to feel is, that's not what that is. That's incorrect. Well, this form of amnesia is that you forget that.
So then later you're reading an article about a thing you don't know well. Right. And you're like, you feel like you're getting the straight dope. Right, right, right, right. But someone somewhere who knows the world well is reading it and they're having the same feeling you have every time you read about something you know well, which is this person has no idea what they're talking about. Right. So you form the trap that the amnesia's you forget.
and you take things you're not aware of, and when you get the dope on them from someone, you're forgetting how fucked up everything is when you do know about it.
Well, the hope is that with AI in these large language models is that AI will be able to distribute information objectively without that. And that is the case in a lot of situations where they haven't been corrected yet. Like AI is subject to human influence, obviously. I'm sure you're aware of the Google Gemini situation. The Google Gemini situation is the best one because they said, you know,
create images of Nazis and they had multicultural Nazis, but if it has to analyze information about the specific things just based on just what's actually available.
oftentimes it will give you a very accurate assessment that you wouldn't get from a newspaper because the newspaper would be more, they would be more interested in adhering to whatever particular ideology they subscribe to. So they would flavor things through an ideology and probably gaslight you a little bit about the other side's perspective.
Yeah. The hope is that in the future with large language models, and especially as they become more and more sophisticated, you're going to be able to get an accurate objective assessment of things that doesn't have any human influence. Oh, man, I don't do. Come on.
Was it impossible? Oh, it's possible with some hope or it's possible, but no, I don't have like sure possible. I don't picture that being the case. Well, there are some large language models that aren't fucked with, especially open source ones.
The problem is they're essentially drawing from the entire internet. So you would have to assess where these large language models are getting their information from. So this is a thing you could kind of game that system by rigging these large language models to accentuate information that comes from more biased sources.
You know, you could distort the information that people would get. And someone would be motivated to do it. Yeah. Until they get so sophisticated that they would be able to discern that and they would be able to base it entirely on objective analysis of statistics and facts and understand what the statistics are.
I did this little, this little event last night at this place here in town called Arena Hall. And um, the moderator of the event, it was like a Q and A or, you know, a chat and he was asking me like as a writer, as an author, what are your fears about AI? And I'm like, AI is like in a very short term, like AI is coming for like certain types of writing, like certain types of writing are going to be made obsolete by AI. Yeah. But
The reason I have it, the reason I don't worry about it as of now as a writer is like it's always going to be representative of, it's always going to be representative of input.
Right. Like the input has to come in from people who are out digesting real experience. Right. Right. It'll get faster. You know, the point I use is if you earlier were eluded to like the assassination on attempt on Trump, the day before that had you asked AI about details about it, it doesn't exist. Right. Like the whole thing gets fed in. So if you if you remain on some level of cutting edge about thought or cutting edge about analysis or cutting edge about what's going on in the world,
You'll have to start being more careful about being like that your work remains at the vanguard of feeding into the system of newness, right? Yeah. And that's gonna be like a big challenge. Like a big challenge as a writer. But I remember coming up as a writer too in the old days and being super scared of the internet in general, right? And I was like, man, this ain't gonna be good.
a writer. Well, they thought about that with the printing press. I'm sure. Do you know what the early books, do you know what most of the early books were about? That was Monks transcribing them, but I don't know. No, when the printing press was produced. Mathematics maybe? No. How's the spot witches? Oh, really? That was a hot topic. Yeah, it was all about witches and witchcraft. Yeah. How's the spot sorcery? No, I didn't know that. Yeah, it was a lot of bullshit.
You would think like, oh, it's just knowledge and information. Finally, the world's going to know the truth. No, no, no. I had no idea. It's a lot of like how to spot witches. They were the most popular books. Yeah. But I think that like creators, yeah, from like a creator perspective.
You got ones that run away from new, right? And you got ones that run toward it. I used to be the run away from. Something came out and I was like, this ain't good. What are you now?
I guess I've like survived through enough changes in the media landscape that I'm not as terrified as I once was, right? Yeah. Like, you know, I always said, like the first time I heard the word podcast was in context of your name, right? And, um, and I remember the first podcast we did. You're like, what is this? We were at the ice house. The whole setup was ridiculous. Yeah, you got a delayed flight. I had a delayed flight. Yeah, we started real late. You're coming back from something. Oh, yeah.
But anyhow, yeah, I used to be like, I used to be scared of incoming. Well, most people were, especially podcasts, it seemed so ridiculous. Most people thought it was stupid. Yeah. And you even said that you were doing them and thought it was stupid.
Well, I did it because I thought it was fun. Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, after a while, I was like, oh, this is actually like a business. You know, I remember having a conversation with you about it. I was like, you should do a podcast. Like, there's a lot of money in this. Like, it's real now. And I wouldn't have done that had you said it.
Well, it seemed... Or I'd been late to the game, maybe. Yeah. Well, you got on early. But you were such a good guest. I was like, this is like something you have to do. Like, you have so many opinions on things and you're so well read. It's like a perfect place for you where there's no interruption. You can just have conversations about something that's like right up your alley. I'm glad I did. And then the other thing is that it just infuses you with
infuses you with so much knowledge. Because like you said, you get to corner people, you want to corner. Oh yeah, that's the best part. The best part is the unintended education. You just have conversations with so many people. And when else would you get an expert to sit down with you for three hours and put their phone aside? And just look me in the eye. Tell me how this started. Tell me, how do you figure that out? What is that? How did you get involved in this? What's the beginning of this?
and then it's beneficial to everybody who listens to it. It's a weird new thing. You know what I want to tell you, Box, it's like this thing I'm trying to hunt down. I recently had a guy on my podcast whose name is Randy Brown and my brother Danny recommended him to because he works. He's a fisheries biologist in Alaska.
So he came out on the show and what he did is in the 70s, he grew up in New Mexico and always wanted to live in the woods. Okay. Like just grew up camping in the mountains and stuff. And in the 70s, he goes up to Alaska and just goes to live in the bush along the Yukon and then did it. I mean, for 15 years, for 15 years, he lived in the bush in Alaska, just built a little cabins and lived off the land.
I mean, it wasn't buying groceries, like lived off the land trap in Alaska. He tells me the story, and I've been trying to put the word out about this. He tells me a story where I have to go check. I think it was in 78.
In 1978, he's on the Yukon River just downstream the Yukon from Canada. He's between Circle, Alaska, and Eagle, Alaska on the Yukon. And him and his friends are living their lives and all these like line cabins. They got strung up and down the river. Two guys come down the river out of Canada. So again, this is 1978. Two guys come down the river out of Canada on a homemade log raft.
This guy in Randy's circle, one of his buddies, he tells this whole story on the podcast, but one of his buddies has a cabin down on the river and these two guys pull in, in this homemade raft, they pull in for the night at this cabin. One of these individuals identifies himself as John the Baptist. Oh boy. Okay.
In the middle of the night, his companion, John the Baptist companion, gets back on his raft and scoots. Oh boy. And abandons the dude. Abandons this guy in 1978 who came out of Canada who identifies himself as John the Baptist. John the Baptist becomes this incredible leech on these guys that are living in the bush.
eating their food, using their stuff, taking their ammunition. He lingers long enough that it becomes that he can't really get out of that area because it frees up on the river. And they keep telling them, you got to go somewhere else. And they say, you got to leave here. You can go stay at one of our other cabins. Don't touch our shit. He goes up to the other cabin that when they eventually go up to the other cabin, he had taken a bunch of stuff. He'd taken some of their furs and made his own clothes.
They boot him out and they tell him what you gotta do is you gotta go down to the river and go up or down, wait for boat and go up or down. But he comes up with this cockamamie plan where he's gonna go to this area. They're like, no way can you walk to that area. He takes off into the woods. Now, when he does, he steals this guy we had on the podcast, Randy Brown. He steals the Randy Brown snowshoes and takes off. Randy Brown gives chase.
It was a real bad snow year. He tracked him for about five miles and just said, huh, never mind. It's not worth it. The next year he takes a different route and goes into the headwaters of this river where this guy had taken off with the snow shoes and he's canoeing down the river and sees his snow shoes hanging in a tree. Okay.
And there's a little cabin there, a little line cabin I had out. And he goes in and hears the guy stoned dead, starved to death in a sleeping bag. Snowshoes are hanging outside, starved to death. He said he's nothing but skin and bones. Nothing but skin and bones.
They take him out and they're way out in the bush. They have no money. They just live off land. He literally has no money. He's got no way to transport a body in the summertime to like Eagle or Circle Alaska. Does he have a responsibility to do that?
isn't this in the 70s man he did like he explains himself he explains himself and did well he didn't he laid that they took the body out of the sleeping bag they wanted to check it out he said it was just skin on bone it brought up something I'm gonna talk about cannibalism and minute but it was skin on bone and
he doesn't know what to do and he's not bashful but we did he lays out like why he had to do what he did and they kept sleeping bag to use it because it was a they're sleeping bag and they laid this body out on the tundra told a few people didn't know what to tell me they never caught the guy's name told to few people a while later he goes back in the body has was gone presumably eaten by something so after we do this interview
I can't stop thinking about this dude. And I'm like, how can it not be that someone out in the world, like someone has a kid or a brother or a uncle? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And they never know what happened to him. Yeah.
There's no, you know. He's from Canada. Yeah. Came in 1970s. 70s calling themselves John the Baptist. Yeah, they do. But I kind of felt like doing it like I kind of felt it put it out on social media. We talk on the podcast and I'm bringing it up here. Like.
Dude, I would love to know that someone said, oh, I used to party with a dude named John the Baptist. In Canada, right. Who is this guy? Maybe this will do it. I don't know. Maybe you talking about it, like someone will reach out. Yeah. But then you got to wonder if someone's just fabricating it because they want information. Oh, for sure. Or they want attention, rather. For sure. It kind of sticks in my head. And I said to him, to Randy, what's crazy is he want to get an honorary doctorate.
And like, once he and his wife had kids, he became like a world's expert on white fish species of the Yukon River and got like an honorary doctorate. Oh, wow. Yeah, he's like a leading authority on certain white fish species in the Yukon, just due to living in the bush like that all that time. Wow. But I told him, he says, man, I thought about it a lot. You know, I thought because maybe you'll maybe you'll figure it out. I thought about it all the time for a while. What happened? I asked my brother, Danny, I'm like, when I had this guy on the podcast, what should I ask him about? And he goes asking about the guy he found.
So he gives me this book. He gives me this book. Uh, and it's called, uh, death in the barren grounds. Okay. And it was this, he's got a, he ran to use the term starved out and you could tell that all the time he spent living in the bush, like starving to death is very much out of his mind. Like him and his buddies even made up a sort of pact. Right. So like, Hey man, like if it comes down to it, don't hesitate to eat my body. You know, which you should.
He gets to just book Death in the Barring Ground and spot these guys in the 20s, these three dudes in the 20s that go up onto the Feline River which flows into the Hudson Bay. And they go up in the, they're kind of north of the treeline, but they're in a timbered grove. And they go up there to trap for the winter and their whole plan is to live off caribou, but the caribou never come through.
And the youngest one keeps this meticulous journal in this book. He keeps this meticulous journal and he documents with painstaking detail the two people he's with starving to death.
and himself eventually starving to death. He let's off at a point. It's unclear when he died. He had the wherewithal to put the journal in the stove and to make a sign that said look in the stove. And when they found him a couple years later, they were able to find his journal. But it got so bad that they're like crushing animal bone.
Um, which is, which is a thing that's on the top of this, with this Donner party deal I was working on is these guys are crushing animal bone and boiling it to get some kind of nutritive value out of crushed animal bone and they're eating animal hide. Okay. Like you scrape away the hair and you can boil animal skins and eat them. I've done that. It just makes like a gel in the kind of tasteless, like leather noodle basically.
And what he's documenting as they're dying from this is the horrible bowel obstruction And they're trying to make like in his journal he's describing this of trying to make these These enema devices and even for a while on each other trying to perform like an operation on each other each other because that bone fragment that they're boiling that bone fragment and drinking and
It, but that bone fragment in their bowel is like reforming. Oh, God. Into bone plugs. And even when they find these guys, years later, a guy from the Canadian Mona police is like doing this very, you know, like a crime scene description of what went on in here. And still laying there a couple years later is a plate full of like solidified excrement. Oh, God. Everything else rotted away. These guys are just skeletons, but that like bone shit.
Yeah. And you look at like, and I just finished this book the other day. And so you look and be like, oh, they're starving death, starving death. But like when you started that, all this stuff is actually going on. And it like that had to have been fatal. And we were working on, you know, Mo who's been on the show, we've been working on this project, which I've, you know,
Wanting to plug but we did an episode on the Donner party Who died up in the mountains in California and the Donner party in addition to the cannibalism they're famous for it was so crazy because before I read that book We're hearing all about that the members of the Donner party were eating the crushed bone and Eating the boiled hides on the other thing is all those hair follicles
Um, would form into dense balls that would like plug your rectum. And he's just describing all this as a diet. It's horrible. But that dude, Randy Brown gave me that book because you could tell that in his mind, man, like, like starving out, like it stuck with him. You know, when he's walking around, handing out a book about starving to death in the Arctic, you know,
because he knew it well. But that was like in that same thing, like Donner part of being like known for the cannibalism and all that is all those people die and probably like a lot of the same thing. Eating that hide and hair and crush bone, just miserable. People have a very delusional perspective when it comes to like surviving, living off the land. How difficult it would be.
And talking to him, when he talked about that guy that struck off, like this is after a long time he spent in the bush, he talked about the guy that struck off and the guy struck off with a 22 pistol. And Randy is like, um, you cannot in that environment, you cannot survive with a 22 pistol. But he just knows a category that you cannot survive with a 22 pistol. And the dude didn't
Yeah, how could you? Well, people would probably think that there's such a bad ass that would. How many bullets do you have? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, he had, but he said you won't, you won't make it. And he made a point that 22 pistol when they found that body, that 22 pistols hanging out of pegs, hanging out of pegs inside the cabin where he found them. I mean, there's no way you'd have enough ammunition, even with a pistol, you're limited in your range, you're limited in your accuracy. No, they did everything with 243s.
in those years that he did that. And they would load like variable loads. Why variable load? He'd make light loads and heavy loads. Oh, okay. For different animals. Yeah, they'd make little grouse loads and shit and they'd load their big game bullets, you know, all the 243 hunt moves to the 243 caribou, the 243.
where's he getting all the gunpowder or is he getting they were loading their own stuff wow so you have to go somewhere to get resupply yeah they would they had a camp that one of their camps they had a reloading station the various guys live in the bush would kind of come in there and use that reloading station and that John the Baptist dude looted that reloading station
Yeah, you got to kill those guys. Those guys of course cause you to starve to death. If you're in that kind of an environment and someone's a mooch? No. But you know what's weird is about it that I can at someone point out to me later. I think John the Baptist, like John the Baptist from the Bible, I think John the Baptist starved to death. Really? So that's like a little bit of a confusion is
Yeah, how would that be? Is that real? Yeah, there's this kid, I might tell you about him, this French kid Etienne Brûlée, that the French brought over, and he's known as Etienne Brûlée, and the French brought him over during the colonial era and gave him to the tribes, so he'd learn their language.
And eventually he gets crossways with the here on Indians and the here on Indians killed them and Allegedly aid him So everybody knows me as Etienne brulee, but which is burnt, right? But did you get the name after before?
Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Yeah, like it's like, well, then he doesn't happen. Like he presumably got burned to death or boy old or whatever, you know, so it's like, is he at the end, brulee, because of what happened to him? Or was he running around with that moniker and then like low and behold? So the John the Baptist thing is baffling to me. Did John de Baptist in the Bible? I'm not familiar. I feel like starved. Can you find that? No, people keep telling me that. Beheaded. Oh, he's bad. Oh, he didn't starve.
that the word on the streets is beheaded in prison. The word on the streets. Someone sent me this big passage talking about his emaciated state. Maybe he was emaciated before they cut his head off. Maybe they were saving him from a fate worse than death. Can I talk about my project? Sure, please do. Well, I'm working out with Mo, who's been on the show before. Mo and I
We did the very early mediators together. You probably met him that way, right originally? Yes, I met him that way. And then when he did Bourdain's show. So we did very early mediators together. And then we've always kept in touch. And he went on and did all that crazy stuff with Bourdain and got heavily involved in that.
And then after Bourdain's death, there was this kind of, I don't know, man, almost like this, like, exodus of talent, like all these people that worked on that great show, you know? And they went on to do other stuff. And then Mo and I got joined up on this, and we've worked on it. Mo's a showrunner on it, and we've worked on it together. And it's coming out January 28, and it's a show on History Channel where we look at outdoor mysteries.
So I brought up, we did an episode on Donner Party. And you might ask, well, what's the mystery about the Donner Party? But it's kind of like what happened? Could it have gone differently? Like what mistakes were made? And most of these mysteries that we do are things that I have that most people have some awareness around, right? Like you've heard, you've at least heard of it. And I think that people think about the Donner Party, for instance, just take an example. You make people make when they're making a joke about cannibalism.
you'd be like, Oh, down her party. You know, I mean, like people don't realize what happened there. But in going to that place, uh, I think I never realized about it. That, that there was 90 people that got stranded in the Sierra Nevada, that winter, 1846 to 1847. Um, a thing that you never ever realized and that changes everything I've ever thought about it. Half of those, more than half of those were kids.
Yeah, you don't think about it that way, right? It's mostly children. And you get all this wild stuff about it like, you're trying to keep your kids alive, right? So there's this sort of like, early I said, I'll talk, you know, touch on cannibalism. I was talking about Randy Brown making that cannibalism pact. You try to keep your kids alive.
And the kids, by and large, the kids survived. The kids survived at a much higher rate than adults. And out of adults that survived, parents did better. Parents were more likely to survive. When they sent a little subgroup off to try to go get help, a lot of the people died on the way of trying to get help. Parents lived. Parents who had kids back at the main camp survived.
So it's this whole weird thing about like the psychology of why I keep going on, you know what I mean? And then like you think about it from that angle, like if your kids were faced with starving to death, you would absolutely feed your kids, human meat. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, right. So you look at it like this American horror story, but in the end, like over those 90 people, like half lived, you know, half of them survived. And they just, they did,
They always did just like what they needed to to live. You know, but then there's like those families still carry the stigma. Of course, you know, like it's terrible stigma, but like getting into that, like getting into that story and starting to
realize that then following that up with reading that book about like the pain and anguish of, of starving to death. Like you wind up like having just more, uh, I want it with a lot more empathy and just, you know, um, you almost kind of want to honor those people rather than condemn them as like these, like, like I said, it's like an American horror story.
You can't condemn them. We've all done the exact same thing. To condemn them is just so. It's a horrible way to look at it. It's a survival story. Human beings, it's like those soccer players that got in the plane crash.
Do you know the story of the two boats that tried to make their way across the Arctic? Was it the terror in another boat? There's a Netflix series about it, but the Netflix series is like a horror series. They bring in a mystical monster and stuff, and the people resort to cannibalism.
but they tried to make it across this path and they got frozen in in their boats and they were waiting in the spring for the ice to thaw it never thawed and they got stuck there and then they tried to walk out and make it to the to the ocean and they never made it and yeah but and there was they wound up having to cannibalize now
Yeah. And in the Donner party, they would have had time in some of these cases, they had a little system where you would not, where you would keep the carcasses separate so that people didn't have to eat their own kin, eat their own relatives. They mostly ate people that died of natural causes, but at the time there was no prohibition. There was no legal prohibition on killing Indians. They had two Indian guides with them and a guy murdered them.
They murdered them to eat them and never faced any repercussions for it. It was more illegal. It was more illegal to kill someone's cow than it was to kill two Native Americans. Wow. Yeah, he just walked.
Everybody knew he did it. Never faced any repercussions for it. Murdered two people to eat them. Other than that, they were eating people that were already there. Jesus. When we were out there filming in Donner Pass, we met these people and they were saying that these guys were doing this thing about places named with Christmas names.
And he had thought Donner. Like Donner and Blitzen. Oh, God. Oh, wow. That's crazy. Yeah. So I spent a ton, like I spent, you know, two months, two months travel, Mo, maybe a little over two months travel, Mo working on this whole thing. It's been fun though, man.
So what is the name of the show? It's called Hunting History. It's not a hunting show. Hunting History. There it is. There's the Animal. That one, that episode, oh, it's like a whole little trailer.
So what is the idea of the show? It's like outdoor wilderness mysteries, outdoor mysteries. And we do some things that are decades old. We do some things that are centuries old. For instance, when I was growing up in the Great Lakes region, the first ship they ever built on the Great Lakes was called the Griffin. And no one's ever found that ship. That ship went missing in the Great Lakes.
And people are still trying to hunt for that ship. It's kind of like, you know, it's regarded as the holy grail of Great Lakes shipwrecks. There's still people actively searching for it. We're doing on Donner Party. What's in the ship that they're trying to get?
would be gone now. It was full of beaver pelts. It was full of about like six tons of beaver pelts. And there's all these different theories about that they just crew, mute, need, whatever. But there's a guy, this dude named Steve Leibert who came out of, who came out of like naval intelligence, the naval intelligence world. And this guy named Steve Leibert is the latest, has the latest claim of having found the Griffin.
So I went and dove, I went and dove that, that site to check out his claim of having identified this ship. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think he's got it. No. What do you think it is? What do you think you found? There are, it kind of blows your mind. I mean, think about the great thing because there are literally thousands of missing ships. And then there are many, many ships that are there, but no one knows what they are.
Mmm, and I think he's got I think he's found a very old ship, but I don't think he's found the six thousand and ten thousand shipwrecks Wow Yeah Wow the burden of the burden of proof on finding the Griffin is is hard. So let's do that You've heard of the guy LaSalle LaSalle. No, he went up dying down in this neck of the woods He built the first ship and he got above Niagara Falls and built a big ship
and built the first ship that ever sailed the Upper Great Lakes. So he went all through the Upper Great Lakes, went to Green Bay, filled with full of beaver hides to get himself out of debt.
sends all those beaver hides back down to Niagara, but they go missing along the way. He makes his way down, he winds up being the first European to descend the Mississippi to the mouth, and then later he gets into like a mutiny of sorts. Down in the lower Mississippi, he gets an mutiny of sorts. One of his guy shoots and kills him, just kind of this whole run of shitty luck, but he lost his ship.
So there's all this different evidence of pointing to where this ship might lie. But it's almost certainly like...
It's somewhere. It's somewhere. You know, because stuff lasts a long. Like in that fresh water, stuff lasts a long. You're going to look, you're going to dive down and look at ships that are 100 years old, 200 years old. Looks like you could refurbish things. Really? You know, the south of rural ones get broke up by ice. Yeah. So that ships laying around. Wow. I'd like to tell you we found it. Oh, God. I hung out with a bunch of dudes that are looking for it. The lakes are so big. Yeah. I hung out with dudes that are looking for it. And now people are getting really good at it because all the sophisticated sonar, that's why they're finding all this crazy shit.
I don't think people understand how big the Great Lakes are. No. They're literally like oceans. No. They're so big. Especially when you add them all together, you know? Yeah. And the place is pretty deep. But yeah, they're littered with stuff, man. And dudes, like, they're just common dudes now that can buy really sophisticated sonar and underwater cameras. And people are just finding stuff like mad.
Oh, now there's more sophisticated. Yeah, because you just cruise around. You can just cut grids on sonars. So you got dudes that are out there just identifying rack after rack after rack right now. You were the first one. That's why there's a lot of enthusiasm that someone's going to turn this boat up. But it has these big cannons. They should have these big French built cannons. And until someone finds the cannons, no one's going to buy what you're saying. Cannons. Yeah, they, yeah, LaSalle brought cannons from Europe, mounted them on the boat.
So that like to in case someone was trying to pirates do they have pirates back they did but also they just would you know try to intimidate Native American tribes and you know they'd get them into the fur trade but also there's like rogue people and you're also at that time the French are duking it out with English had a big toe hold up in Hudson Bay.
Um, so you got the English there. You got the Spanish to the south just a ton of conflict and people still trying to duke it out over who's going to control the Great Lakes Wow, so there's this argument to which is crazy like picture. We had a set picture if we had a naval vessel that sank off france right now It's not frances. It's not frances Boat right right because we have all these agreements in place. It's like our boat So they would have to hand it over to us is flying under our flag. It's it remains our vessel. There's this argument that um
La Salle's ship was flying under a French flag. Whoever finds that ship, there's an argument that the French would be able to claim that ship. So even if some dude, like some freelancer, was defined it and find those cannons and shit and finds this ship, there's an argument that the French could say, we'll take it from here, son. Whoa. Yeah. The flying under our flag and our international treaties mean that that's our boat.
which would de-centivize me in wanting to find out. Yeah, fuck that. Imagine you go through all that work. Yeah, they do it for glory. Goldwrecks, like shipwrecks and people like hunting for those things, that's a fascinating thing. It is, man. That's because if you get lucky and if you find one that's filled with like Roman coins, like you, we were talking about billions of dollars. A lot of money to be made. We were gonna do our last episode when we went and did the Donner party.
What we were supposed to be doing is we were supposed to be hanging out with guys that are still this whole fleet of Spanish vessels that went down off the east coast of Florida. So the Atlantic side of Florida, we were going to go down with these guys that are still.
fighting over and finding all this stuff from all these sunken ships. But then the hurricane passed right over it. So we didn't get to go do that. We didn't go do that show. We did one about that wanted to become a mostly a storied centered around in the 70s. There's this aircraft that was carrying the speaker of the house. Do you remember
Was it neat? Is it neat? No. Hey Jamie, I hate to be treating you like a research assistant here.
hail coke roberts that's who you know you know the journalist coke roberts not npr and shit okay yes yes coke roberts father was this guy hail boggs okay hail boggs was a democrat whose speaker of the house in the seventies and alaska had at that time only want last get a soul congressman there was an airplane that had baggage their soul congressman the speaker of the house
an assistant in a pilot that went down in Alaska in the 70s, still no one's found that plane. Speaker of the house. Like imagine that happened now, you know what I mean? Yeah, 1972. Yeah, it makes sense in the last. Oh, it does, but then you get into the huge number of all these missing aircraft and like all that search centered around this glacier that it would have been swallowed by a glacier.