#237 Steven Rinella - Founder of MeatEater

49:10Like it's the different ways that not only the different ways people live, the different climates and all that. There's very different ways in which wildlife is managed in Africa. Tanzania has a very progressive view on wildlife management. We were on an area that's – we were on a hunting area that's the size of Yellowstone National Park. It's a 2 million acre dam. Game concession. There are human activities occurring. It's not a people-less environment. Like, there's guys that have permits to commercially fish there. There's guys that do commercial honey harvest in there. But it's like the government has said, like, this 2 million acres doesn't get developed, and they make money off it.

49:54They're able to make money off it by allowing hunting to occur on the place. And so we're out in this, like, 2 million acre thing. We're the only people around. We would some days do 100 miles. Wow. 100 miles of pickups on just trails these guys hack out through the woods you know and you see just crazy stuff but yeah there's guys out on the landscape you know you'd run into the honey season was just finishing up so there's guys out doing honey but we were with trackers in this part of tanzania um in in in eastern tanzania i had was spent some time in maasai land which is the Maasai tribe, where we were was like Bantu peoples.

50:37But we were with trackers, and the trackers they use are by and large poachers that they caught. So they'll catch poachers, and if they're young and ambitious and good, they'll be like, listen, you should come see us. So the two trackers that I was hanging out with were both people that were brought up as poachers. they were in the bushmeat trade snaring and hunting with homemade guns and poison arrows wow in order to sell bushmeat and these dudes are now trackers and um yeah it's it's unbelievable i said to our guy one time the professional hunter who in some ways in some ways acts as a liaison between you and the trackers you know like they the trackers hold a lot of carry a lot of weight like their opinion matters immensely right and you're there you don't know shit and the professional hunter is kind of like he's the he's meant to be like he understands you like the white dude and what you're hoping to accomplish and he understands the trackers and what they know and he's aligning he's aligning everyone's interests and he's also in charge you know i mean like he's there to keep you from getting killed um but at one point we're going along and i would now and then make the i would now and then be like you have to like when they're looking at the ground i'm like come on like what are they what are they seeing and when i would do it they would be like okay if you really need to know one went one walked one cape buffalo walked right there one walked right there one walked right there one walked right there if you look at that piece of grass you see how it stepped on it look how it looks now that has about an eighth of an inch of dryness on it it wasn't it wasn't laying there yesterday it wasn't laying there that night is laying there this morning and they're probably bedded down over that way wow and you're like okay but at one point i said to this guy i've told people this bunch of times i said to the tracker or to the to morgan the professional hunter i said man i don't see what they're seeing you know we're going to a burned area and we're trailing something i'm like i don't i don't see it like i was incredulous and he turned to me and he said he said um that's the point you can't see what they see and he's gotten to the point where he's totally fine with that no kidding he just he's like he's fine with it if they say it's there he's like okay right on man if they say it's there it's there when they say it's not there anymore it's not there anymore i think that stuff's fascinating and just uh just uh i mean yeah i've been all over the world hunting different stuff but uh but through my career but just seeing like it sounds weird but man like i love being in third world countries and seeing you know how people live and survive and oh yeah what they like to do and all that stuff and and and it's just fascinating to me to see how they live in haiti or yemen or afghanistan iraq all south america i mean it's just it's just fascinating to me and it also gives you an appreciation for how fucking easy it is here in the u.s you have the added thing in your life though you've seen a lot of places where it's like there's poverty but it's overlaid with conflict yeah i've seen poverty but i haven't seen it overlaid with conflict yeah and so that's a that's a what you're seeing is a very different version of poverty then peaceful poverty is one thing, but wartime poverty is different.

54:16I've seen peaceful poverty too. South America was all on my own accord. And, you know, what's interesting is how, at least from my perspective, not necessarily where conflict is, but to see how happy people are, especially in south america living in a grass hut yeah you know what i mean or a mud-walled hut and it's it's like dude they're just happy people you know you go around america so everybody's bitching about yeah who knows what politic usually politics but you know what i mean it's it's it's it's we have so much here and yet we are so pissed at each other and so tribalized and it's it's it's and then you go down there and it's they're just they're not even making ends made and you know they have such a positive attitude i think that's cool i was telling someone about this the other day on on my show and i'll i'll give it to you to to think about for a minute too is uh i took this class in college called political rhetoric um and we read you know dr king um this the camille Polya.

55:33One of the things we read was the Unabomber's Manifesto. You ever read the Unabomber's Manifesto? Oh, man. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook. Class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast.

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57:03If you can get through it, it's very difficult to get through, but there's this point he raised, which has always stuck in my head since I was in college, is he talks about there's these different, there's this way he sets out difficulty of task, okay and when he's laying out difficulty of task he stages them like one through five i can't remember if it's escalating or de-escalating but the easiest difficulty of task or the most difficult task is something where if you try your absolutely hardest you have only a slim chance of success okay let's say that's like that's like level one on up to you don't even need to try at all and you'll succeed.

57:48Okay. He said that humans do best at two and three. Like at two and three, it's that if you try really hard, you have a reasonable chance of surviving if you try hard. But he says, that's what was his gripe with technology. He said, technology has landed us at five. You don't need to try at all and you're fine. And he says, that's where all of our neuroses come from interesting because the thing where the thing that he argues kaczynski argued um and again without getting into like sending mails off or sending bombs off in the mail and shit it's just an interesting point is he argues that the thing we were that we're supposed to be trying to do really hard is like to take care of ourselves and take care of our family but now that it's all a given we have all this mental room we have all this mental room to be spoiled and whiny and bitchy because we we wake up and there's we wake up and it's just it's all pointless it's all taken care of i'm fine yeah you know if you don't know where your next meal is going to come from you probably know what's coming right it's an interesting point that was that was his gripe you know kind of hard to argue that and again i always hesitate to bring up where it came from but i need to be intellectually honest to say where the point came from and and going to other places and seeing other things demonstrates that my two boys share a room which brings up all amount of bitching you know and the other day i'm saying to my i'm saying to my 15 year old we're having the same damn conversation around dinner table like them sharing the room i'm like dude you just came from a place they had been out there with me for a week and then my wife took my kids bumming around but i'm like you just came for a place dude people were sleeping and you saw you were there people sleep in grass huts they made for themselves he's like good point now that i'm done hearing about the room thing but at least he's old enough to recognize like yeah you're right that's you're right that's cool you know back to the africa thing i mean they take that i mean i've had a lot of people in the talk that do big game hunting and they don't want to talk about it because they don't want the they don't want the blowback oh yeah you know and and but friends of mine guests that have been on here a lot lots of people but you know from my understanding i've never been on a hunt in africa but they take that shit very they take conservation very seriously from what i understand i mean they have they have contractors uh careers that that hunt poachers correct yep yep and and i can only i'm Anything but a subject matter expert.

1:00:31I can speak to where I was in Tanzania, but in Tanzania, it's a remarkably different regulatory structure than what we have. One of the things that makes the United States of America so progressive and so great on wildlife, like a way that we've achieved success with wildlife is wildlife is publicly owned. okay um the u.s citizens the citizens of a state they own the wildlife and then agencies represent your interest in owning the wildlife it's democratically owned um in tanzania that's not the case like the government owns the wildlife so they there's poverty there what they how they can how they can protect habitat is by declaring these areas hunt areas and they put a fee to the animals and they hold a bid process there's a bid process where a hunting organization needs to go to the government and these contracts renew i can't remember i think maybe a contract's good for 10 years you come in and you're like we will pay you tanzania blank dollars to have access to this parcel land to hunt it so there's revenue for them then they come and they have their biologists come out and do a survey of what's there and there's like you guys are allowed to kill whatever i'm just gonna throw out random numbers that aren't true but let's say um you know you're allowed five cape buffalo you're allowed uh 30 topi whatever the hell it is they'll come out with a list and they'll say that you are obligated to buy 40 % of that wildlife from us, the operator.

1:02:17So then when you get an animal, what they call a trophy fee, your fee just goes to Tanzania. That trophy fee does. And so they're able to draw revenue from undeveloped lands. The biggest risk they have is slash and burn agriculture, which small farmers come in, they cook the forest they burn it they grow a crop they don't have money for inputs they don't have money for fertilizer and other things and so when you cook the soil after a couple rotations what do you do you burn the next chunk it devours the wildlands slash and burn ag does but you're able to come in and stay with these areas and all of a sudden now the government's able to make money off of preserving habitat there's a next to the place we hunted there's this big national park Guess how many, like, I'm not going to make you guess because you never guessed the right number.

1:03:11There's a huge national park of equal size, almost equal size, next to this concession. Last year, that national park had 14 visitors. One four. What? It had 14 visitors. To a national park almost the size of Yellowstone National Park. Fourteen people went and paid a visit to that national park. Meanwhile, the hunting concessions meant money. Damn. For the government. That's interesting. So it's like you can, and that's where like a dude, as a dude growing up in America with holding certain American ideals about wildlife management, wildlife being democratically owned, right? Trying to foresee and prevent ways in which people might commodify wildlife so it wasn't available to like blue collar people.

1:04:01So opportunity, like you grew up with this whole ethos about how to protect the democratization of American landscapes and American wildlife. And you're like, that's the way to do it. Part of travel is you go and you say like, you realize there's other ways to skin. There's always a skin, the cat. Right. And they have got this other system and you could look at it and criticize it. Aspects of it. It's very hard. you know like it's very difficult for a citizen of tanzania to go out and do lawful hunting there's there's not like an avenue for it like i that's too bad i regret it but it's a different place different challenges um enforcement issues poverty issues whatever they have found a way to preserve habitat and to preserve wildlife by assigning value to it and right now that is what holds the line like that is what holds the line to burning it you know burning it and depleting it um and so it's just it's it's hard to condemn it you know i mean and i used to sit back i used to sit like in my pompous you know somewhat pompous american seat and used to be like oh you know pay to play right you got to pay to play in africa that's not america you know that's not the american style It's not the American style, but it's a way to achieve conservation in that place.

1:05:28Yeah. You know? Yeah. And you also can look and be like, we've also, you know, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, because of deregulation, I mean, we almost ruined American wildlife. Yeah, let's move into the history of hunting. Yeah. In America. In the U.S.? Yeah.

1:05:56First off, people who hunted in the U.S., I mean, people debate the number, but somewhere between there were people definitely here hunting 13 ,000, 14 ,000 years ago. People were maybe here hunting as much as 20 ,000 years ago. people that came from siberia passed into alaska very quickly you know at some point by 13 000 years ago it like exploded across the landscape and those were hunting cultures um only later right like many thousands of years later europeans started to come and that's kind of where i'm very interested in in native hunting practices but kind of when we get when we look at the decimation of american wildlife that story begins with the colonials right coming in uh just to get a little extra detail there there is a there is an argument that is a there's a very powerful argument um it's not settled science but there's a very powerful argument that when humans arrived here they wiped out they wiped out many species of wildlife i'm talking like the first the first americans siberian immigrants um they wiped out many species of wildlife people debate it but to me it's it's like to me it's verging unsettled science that humans had a huge were a huge contributing factor into extinction of mammoths mastodons short-faced bears giant ground sloths a host of things like nine genera of animals kind of blinked out around the time humans arrived but then they had this huge period of um the historian dan flores calls it like native america they had this 10 000 year period 10 000 years of hunting in america had the the ensuing 10 000 years of hunting in america had one extinction a flightless bird on the pacific coast people hit harmony like like people hit where we weren't driving shit to extinction for 10 ,000 years on this continent.

1:08:00And then, boom, Europeans show up and that story shifts. To get into kind of like, just give you a little bit about like the first hunter. If people that are like loosely familiar with American history will recognize the name Daniel Boone, like no doubt. I mean, we're kind of in Boone country right now, you know. Let's take a look at Boone for a minute. So Boone's people came from England. At the time in England, you weren't going to hunt, right? The king owned the deer. There was no sort of public hunting. Wildlife was jealousy guarded by the elites. Hunting wasn't a thing. Boone's family comes here and all of a sudden, like there's this rich wildlife resource out there and they pick up hunting.

1:08:49Like these are people that, these are not hunters coming to America. these are very much like non-hunter the european colonists that come over are like not they're not showing up as hunters they're getting here and they're learning from natives um how to utilize these resources and and boone is this interesting figure because he sits right at the beginning of colonial history or he sits right at the beginning of the you know the american experiment like he in the years prior to the American Revolution, Boone becomes a deerskin hunter. During the colonial period, Boone is also an interloper. He's a poacher in two ways.

1:09:31Boone is going, he's living in these settlements. First, he lives in Pennsylvania. Then he's down in the Adkin Valley in North Carolina. He's forbidden for two reasons from hunting where he hunts. um the british the colonial british don't want american colonists who they view as like the the frontier people they view as like the worst of the worst hillbilly rednecks are these american colonists out on the frontier right they question their allegiance and they don't want them crossing the Appalachian Mountains and hunting in native land because it causes so much trouble with the Native Americans.

1:10:15Like the British were somewhat friendly, were somewhat better than the Americans became at like dealing with native relations. So the British would say, you're not allowed to go over there. And then it also violated native law where the natives claim these areas, okay, the Cherokee, the Shawnee, like they claim these areas as their hunting grounds. But these colonists like Boone realized they can make a lot of money going into the Indian territories and hunting deer skins, which they're forbidden, the British forbid them from doing it. The Indians forbidden from doing it, but that's their biz.

1:10:51So like Boone going through the Cumberland Gap, you know, the first time he went through the Cumberland Gap, he's looking for deer skins. And these guys have no they have no cash economy you raise crops you use a family raises crops the family uses 90 of those crops the only access you have to cash is you might sell a small amount of corn or whatever but all of a sudden they have access to a cash economy because they can kill whitetails and we see then this thing that's this deer hunting era late seven like late 1760s into the 1770s we see this phenomenon that we're going to see again and again and again where these guys come up like with a commodity white tail deer we see that they're able to like wipe places clean they're able to go into an area and literally kill everything and what do you when that happens go further down the trail and literally kill everything and from that point we start seeing this like this this de-wilding of america from from commodity hunting from commercial hunting and man i got nothing but respect for boone like i've done projects on boone studied boone um phenomenal phenomenal woodsman but that becomes the american tale is uh

1:12:12deregulation commodification and all of a sudden you just realize that this inexhaustible resource we have we just eat it we just consume it from one end of the country to the other damn you know and uh you know you've heard of jim bridger like the mountain man era i mean they pretty much they pretty much wiped beaver out in the rocky mountains the buffalo i just finished a project on the buffalo hide hunters the buffalo hide hunters from the end of the civil war to 1883 they killed the last 15 million buffalo jeez sold them all 250 apiece 2.50 cents apiece and it's like so when people it's funny because you know i tend to be in many aspects i tend to be like right leaning and then you hear like deregulation and i was like yeah you know in some areas sure but in some areas we've caused a lot of trouble like deregulation has caused a lot of trouble with american wildlife yeah yeah when did we start to see a turn late 1800s early 1900s the name that comes up often, Theodore Roosevelt was instrumental in this.

1:13:20By that point, you start seeing, by that point, the first thing you start seeing is bans on selling wild meat in cities. Like New York, have you ever heard of the Boone and Crockett Club? No. Okay, like Theodore Roosevelt was the first president of the Boone and Crockett Club. When people talk about, you ever hear someone's kill a buck and they say it was a 180-inch whitetail? What they're usually talking about is a scoring system developed by the Boone and Crockett scoring system. It's a way to measure a deer's skull or measure a deer's antler growth. Boone and Crockett Club, all these other organizations start out and they start trying to regulate harvest.

1:13:56And they'll come in and say, like in New York City, there'd be a ban on selling certain wild meats. And then they come up with a thing called the Lacey Act, which gave it some teeth, where if you broke, anytime you break a state's law and cross a state line, it becomes a federal problem. Because you could have states, when they're trying to save wildlife, a state might come in and say, no more market hunting, you can't kill ducks. You can't kill ducks with punt guns anymore and sell it, but they don't enforce it. So then with the Lacey Act, it became like, if you're down and you're in Chesapeake Bay and you're commercially killing ducks with a punt gun, but then you take them to New York and sell them, you now have a federal violation.

1:14:40and so that is when they were really able to start curbing the market hunters there's a great irony with calling the boone and crockett club the boone and crockett club because it takes its name from daniel boone and davy crockett the boone and crockett club and people that came out of that organization that influenced that organization was instrumental in wiping out the wildlife markets but daniel boone and later davy crockett they were market hunters so there's a kind of irony in the name like we associate boone and crockett like crockett was a commercial bear hunter um you know and became a congressman but he was a commercial black bear hunter and he also had military contracts when there was a military campaign during the indian wars crockett would hire on to shoot meat to feed the soldiers interesting that was one of crockett's that was one of crockett's early occupations is like feeding a marching army wow you know i did not know that kill enough shit for everybody to eat that was his job right on man right on yeah he was a badass too not he wasn't a badass like boone but crockett was a badass you know not like boone but you know what made boone more badass there's one time boone boone went over there's there's one point where boone goes into kentucky and goes there with some guys handful of guys um they run into a bunch of trouble with indians they get all their shit stolen one of them gets killed okay eventually boone's one of boone's hunting partners like his brother and stuff like they leave and go home boone stays by himself some accounts suggest that he's he's there so long he needs to make his own gunpowder with using wood ash bat guano um and sulfur for deposits right stays there two years two years yeah stays in the woods two years much of it by himself um builds up a big loot like builds up a big pile of hides twice gets them stolen from him or seized i should be better word for it seized by the natives um and just hangs out two years he was like he he loved being in the woods man you know boone was a badass and and and um it came at a great cost like there was always these conflicts on the colonial frontier boone's um boom was next to one of his kids when he was killed in indian fighting another one of boone's sons was killed in Indian fighting.

1:17:22A brother of his was killed. Brother-in-law was killed. Many, many, I mean, you know, many, many people in his family all, like, gave their lives. If that's the right word. Made enormous sacrifices to live that lifestyle. Very dangerous lifestyle at that time. Because there was active warfare in the colonial areas. And, yeah, and Boone, I mean, he just was hooked. He couldn't picture living another way. you know talking about theodore roosevelt i mean he's the one that put all the national parks in place correct yeah well a number of things they weren't called national forests then but he was designated in these like forest preserves it was instrumental in the national park program too so like the public estate in many ways comes from uh roosevelt there's a famous story with roosevelt where he had authority to declare these he had authority to declare these wilderness preserves whatever nomenclature they used at the time he had authority to do it he was losing that authority while he was in office there was legislation like he was going too crazy they felt declaring all these what would become our national forest system and there's legislation arising that's going to strip him of the authority to unilaterally create national forests um support for this legislation is so strong that he knows he can't veto it because his veto will get overridden so he creates this another huge pile of national forests they call it the midnight forests because his ability to make forest preserves was going to expire at midnight so in a flurry he like sits up with his team and they just start making national forests and then turns around the next day and has to sign legislation saying he won't do it anymore and those are known as the midnight forest that he created um who was right i mean he was hugely controversial at the time that's the thing people forget about like like all politicians would want to be favorably compared to roosevelt now like any any politician is going to take if someone says he's like a theodore roosevelt when it comes to conservation they're gonna be like thank you that dude was controversial at the time and who was right they carved him into rushmore right that's the preservation guy yeah so um he was right you know and it was not popular at the time that's the thing people lose sight of is like what he did at the time was um some people support it but a lot of people hated him for it and then now we recognize that it was a stroke it was genius it was genius yeah i mean What do you, you know, we just had that public land sale, you know, almost go through in the big, beautiful bill.

1:20:07And I was way late to the game on that. I didn't, I saw a tweet from Jocko saying, pay attention to this guy, this guy Braxton McCoy. Do you guys know each other? No, I know of him now for sure, but I have never personally met him. But great guy, amazing story too. But anyways, I saw a tweet that he had thrown out through Jocko, and I was like, hey, I'll be in touch. Brought him on. He kind of told me what was going on, and we released a preview. It got pulled that night. But I was curious. I mean, I know you were a big player in that, and you and Cameron Haynes and a couple other people I follow were, you know, screaming at the top of your lungs like, this isn't a good idea.

1:20:51Yeah. And so I just wound up jumping in last minute because it was like, this doesn't seem right. Were they selling this land to you? I'm glad you did. Yeah, I'm glad you did and everybody else that did, yeah. Yeah. And, well, all of the collaborations together got it pulled. But I was just curious. We were talking a little bit about this at breakfast. What was your take on all of that? Man, it's a thing that comes up in different forms throughout the history of the country, is this question of the legitimacy, the intelligence, or whatever, of having large tracts of federally managed public land that's open to everybody.

1:21:41Maybe it's on a 10-year cycle. My friend and colleague, Ryan Callahan, is a lifelong crusader for public lands. And he and I were talking recently. And you saw about it. It's just like it's a 10-year cycle where in some Western states, the majority of the land is owned by the federal government. Some people look at that and they're like, what an enormous gift that half of the state or more than half of the state, whatever is open to any american who wants to go out on that land to ride atvs in certain areas ride bikes camp up their kids hunt fish live an outdoor lifestyle you don't need to have money to own your own ranch it's just there right it's there for us and not only that it's not developed and it's not industrialized it's like it's it's literally it's money in the bank and it's habitat hat in the bank, right?

1:22:40It's just there. It's an American treasure. Other people look at it and they look at it and they see a huge loss in revenue because you're not able to industrialize or develop that landscape. So someone, you're a political figure in a state, what you want to do is you want to generate economic activity. And then you see that there's these landscapes that aren't easily used now to be fair on these federally managed public lands uh u.s forest service land bureau of land management land um they do mine it they do do alternative energy on it they do oil extraction on it the you know uh what's the big uh festival in california the um burning man the burning man is on blm land so blm land is like is it really yes it's on public land I didn't know that.

1:23:36The Burning Man Festival is on BLM land. The BLM makes money by permitting the Burning Man to occur on their BLM property. All kinds of shit is happening on this land. Cattle grazing, right? It's a multi-use landscape. But what doesn't happen is it doesn't get permanently developed. So in states, Utah is a hotbed of anti-public land sentiment in the political delegation there. A lot of it comes from Nevada, where they want more land to develop. And this public land system, this federal land system, stands in their way of having more areas to develop and more areas to produce revenue from, produce opportunities for friends and developers.

1:24:23And therein lies the rub. There's some states where, like, I haven't lived in Montana. In Montana, there is a, like, it's political suicide. it's political suicide remains political suicide in montana to advocate for large-scale sales of of public land you can't do it you can't do it there in utah you can't in utah you can't and so oftentimes federal land sales where they're like where they want to peel off large acreages there's kind of like in in i think it was 2017 there was talk of uh you know three million acres there was talk of 3 million acres this time of like, we're going to sell 3 million acres of public land.

1:25:08That's usually coming from the Utah delegation. Well, that's where it came from this time. Yeah. They spearhead it. And that is a hotbed. I'm not telling you like a controversial thing. Yeah. I'm not putting like a spin on it. The intellectual architects of large scale public land sales, the intellectual architects of that concept come from Utah. okay this is not spinny it's just that's just the reality it was it was last time around when we went through this and something very similar three million acres i think it was 2017 jason chaffetz house of representatives in utah had had legislation out there which they were calling it um they were calling like excess public lands they were going to sell three million acres and when you get into three million acres you're talking big tracts of public land yeah there's a way to there's a way to move public land like we have systems in place by which we can move public land like if you have a whatever there could be a military base that gets decommissioned there's a way in which that can be sold um and what these efforts usually are are ways to ditch it's usually like a way how can we ditch the process and do this right now large scale and that's usually what happens and um the last time in this time we're identical in the response is of your normal groups that that the The effort to push came from a faction of the American right, came from a faction of the Republican Party, like we should move to sell public land, large tracts of public land.

1:26:39Of course, they know that the tree hugger community, the bleeding hearts, of course, they know that they'll revolt, but it doesn't matter to them. They don't have their support anyways. But both times what has happened is that people that they view as being their people, people that probably normally support President Trump's agenda, people that normally are right of center, they're like, no, not that idea. I don't like it. And then both times with Chaffetz and then this most recent thing was coming from was being pushed from Senator Mike Lee. Both times it seems they were quite surprised that their constituent base hated the idea.

1:27:23They hated it. All right. It was it was it shocked people. But I'm like, I was always like, it should be that shocking. This is what happened last time. And the response was the same. It was like, oh, wow, we're just shocked that all these Republican voters hate the idea of selling off public lands. And they'll focus because, oh, it's only 3 million acres. But what people see lying there is you're kind of like, I'm afraid it's not about that. I'm afraid that at this level, we're having a discussion about the legitimacy of federally managed public lands. you know and so people they're not they tend to not be interested in the details it's like american sportsmen at the end of the day american sportsmen want public lands yeah and they're probably and they're definitely intellectually capable of recognizing that it comes at some cost but look at like what conserve like if you look at like what conservative values and conservative means is like it's not going anywhere it's in it's it's our federal land right if we were to wind up in some national emergency we're wind up in an existential crisis as a country and we needed to utilize some of these lands for extraction or whatever like we were in an existential crisis like a world war ii scale crisis for resources i think you'd have a very different reception if you were talking about the need to industrialize some of our beloved landscapes in order to address an existential crisis.

1:28:57But outside of an existential crisis, it's there. It gets more valuable all the time. It does more for the environment, more for people. It's just a wonderful asset. When you sell it, you sell it one time and you sell it at market value and that's it. So this is just a calculus that gets run and I promise you in 10 years, there'll be another version of it you think so oh absolutely i think they'll learn their lesson no i think there'll be another version of it and maybe someday public sentiment i don't see public sentiment on it switching because it is a thing that galvanizes a huge group of people i got buddies that like they don't hunt fish they like to ski and they don't like the smell of it they don't like public land divestitures it's just it galvanizes people yeah i didn't hear anybody who wasn't in politics that was for that yeah not anybody i i have friends that are definitely i have good friends and some like big hunters that are definitely that that they look and they're like you guys are too absolutist well i mean where does it end we do three million acres right now because that was the big thing right it's just three million acres we're only gonna do it out right outside of the cities and it's like great okay so that's three million acres that's going to become industrialized going to come become housing low income housing and in the bill the language in the bill didn't match the rhetoric because when people went in and mapped out when people met in and mapped out what lands meet meet the criteria you could buy islands you could buy extremely remote islands and tongas national forests were like would follow the criteria of what could happen also in the thing it has to go to the highest bidder in the end even lee acknowledged this in the end he said that the way the legislation was written the government of china yeah i saw that could have been like oh we'll happily take three million acres of america whatever bid you get a dollar more i i think in the end they couldn't prevent this i feel like that was an excuse on oh we overlook this yeah oh you fucking overlooked that it was you just happened to overlook that china's buying up all our farmland and yeah it allowed it was a pathway outside of military bases oh yeah you just uh you just happened to you found that out last minute and that's what it was a pathway out it was a safe it was a face saving mechanism but it was a pathway out not because your ass is about to get voted out of office because you pissed off every outdoorsman hunter fisherman skier rancher in the fucking country no i'm sure that had nothing to do with it but it won't it won't go away it won't go away and and i know you're i know that you like you also from looking at your work like you love to look at things from a variety of angles you know and um i it would be uh it wouldn't be honest to me to to not say like of of course i look like i understand the perspective I understand the frustration of someone in a political position being like, look at all the economic activity that under my tenure, all the economic activity that could be occurring under my tenure, and that I could go in front of voters and be like that I had blank achievements and job creations in certain sectors if I could just develop that stuff.

1:32:22I get it. I get it. I get it. I just don't agree. I don't agree. Yeah. Me neither. Me neither. But, well, Steve, let's take a quick break. Actually, I'm going to have you show me how to shoot a damn bow. Oh, you got a lefty? No. I'll show you anyway. All right, cool. Let's take a break.

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1:33:17I'm Glenn Washington. This is Snap Judgment from KQED. When everything is falling apart, what do you do? Hurricane Helene shut everything down. No roads, no cars, no way through. But his daughter was getting married. And somehow, someway, he was going to walk her down that aisle. All Systems Down, a new Snap Judgment miniseries from KQED. Tap to listen now.

1:33:50KQED All right, Steve, we're back from the break. Thanks for the lesson out there. Oh, yeah. I'm going to get one. Yeah, they're fun. I'm going to get one. I'm going to get good at this shit. Yeah, it's fun. Next time you come, I'm going to out shoot you. Okay. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't be surprised, man. I wouldn't be surprised. I'm not as disciplined as I should be about shooting. I start shooting. I've been shooting pretty good now, but I shoot in prep. I don't shoot recreationally as much. Oh, like a train up? Yeah, I'll shoot like, you know, like hunting season's coming, I'll start shooting.

1:34:24My boy, he shoots league in the winter, you know. Oh, really? Yeah. That's cool. When hunting season's over, this is bad, I hate to admit it, but when hunting season's over, I'll oftentimes, I might not touch my bow for a few months. Right on. You know, I'm like, I like, to me, it's, I shoot a bow in order to hunt, you know. It's fun, but I just, whatever. You like to hunt. Yeah. I like to shoot. I like to shoot guns just for the kick of it. I like shooting guns for fun, but I don't shoot my bow as much as I ought to. You said you shoot a 300 wind mag? A lot. The most time when you're hunting?

1:35:01Yeah. What that comes from is it comes from having this desire to have one thing that you take care of and know well and keep tuned up and rigged up. Yeah. And then I can use it for all manner of hunting. So I like to hunt coos deer. It's a small desert whitetail. I mean, those things are 110 pounds, right? And I'll take the same load as I would kill a bull moose with. No kidding. Yeah, hunting with it, yeah. Just shoot it back from the shoulder. Watch out for the shoulder blade. Gotcha. Just punch clean hole in it. So you do that for a consistency? That's what it stems from. As much as I wind up messing around with all kinds of stuff, I'm just comfortable with it.

1:35:55I just kind of basically understand the trajectory. Do you follow me? And it's just a little bit ingrained. No, I get it. I get it. And it's convenient. My kids shoot 6.5 Creedmoors because I got them started on something smaller. And those are great to shoot. you know but but yeah if i and it's a little that that 300 win mag thing is a little bit a little bit perhaps antiquated as as bullets have gotten so good you know like uniformity bullets have gotten so good that uh you can get away with shooting much lighter rounds now um there's you know you know all this stuff but like there used to be a lot of talk about a flat shooting rifle but with laser rangefinders yeah it's not as relevant like you wanted a point you wanted a gun at 300 yards point of impact right that like anywhere from from zero to 300 yards you're going to be within some number of inches or right with a flat shooting gun but with laser rangefinders it's like just call your shot doesn't matter anymore you know so there's a little bit of a little bit of it's antiquated but yeah that's what i'm currently that's what i currently hunt with yeah i was i was curious i mean like i said i'm not a big hunter but i'm I want to get into it as soon as I clear up some time.

1:37:08But, you know, I've been invited to elk hunts, mooths hunts, bear hunts, gator hunts. Told you I took my first deer last year. But I'm always, like, wondering, and because of my background, people think I know all this shit. I don't, you know. Yeah. And so I'm always wondering, like, how the hell do you know what caliber to use on a big animal versus, you know, something smaller? Yeah. Like I've heard the most dangerous thing to hunt is water buffalo. Is that true? Cape buffalo. Cape buffalo? Yeah. You know what I was talking about, Tanzania? Tanzania has a caliber restriction. Oh, really? Which you don't see in many states.

1:37:48In Tanzania, to hunt Cape buffalo, it has to be a minimum of a 375 H &H. Okay. You know, so that's what I shot was a 375 H &H. Right on. Sorry, minimum of 375. So they set minimums. But there's so many, I mean, there's so many really good.30 caliber, like really good.308 variations. Yeah. You know? But for like, moose is the biggest thing. The biggest bodied thing you're going to hunt in North America is moose. And if you're shooting 180 grain, a good 180 grain bullet, you're fine. It's going to work. Yeah. You're fine. that's that's what i use yeah and i just like i just like the versatility of it but listen man there's guys that'll go there's guys that'll go way deep on small little differences and things like if you get into archery you'll find you'll wind your you'll wind up in all these conversations about like prepare yourself for the conversation about mechanicals single bevel double bevel right all these things yeah and it all matters kind of but in the end if you put it where it's supposed to go doesn't matter it does you know you make a hole through two you make a hole through both lungs on something that thing's got problems yeah yeah it doesn't matter what made the hole have you ever had an encounter where you shot some something and it didn't it didn't drop it came after you oh yeah well plenty of counters where it didn't come after me but i i ran it i I one time shot a moose and a pretty somewhat questionable shot.

1:39:31That was with a 300 variation called a 300 short mag with a 200 grain bullet. And I shot a moose coming on. They got a huge brisket, right? I shot him coming on, straight on. We called him in. So he's coming in. He knows we're there. and I shot him right like this and didn't get in where I needed to get in and it boogied off. We chased it little ways. I shot at it again and didn't know but missed when I shot at it running off because once you hit it once, it's like, you know, once you hit it once, just put lead in it. At that point, you know, you already started a mess so you might as well do what you can.

1:40:17Yeah. So you might take a shot you wouldn't normally take because it's the second shot and you already wounded it. Anyways, I get up there and through some incompetence, I had cleared my chamber. Like I shot, I had three rounds in the chamber and sat down without a round chamber. So I put one in the chamber. Now I got one in the chamber and two in the magazine. I shoot the moose. I then rack around shoot at him again and then instinctively just rack around but then I run up to the moose and I racked around so now I've spit out my last shell I ejected a shell a live round and I'm sitting there on an empty I'm sitting there on an empty chamber and and i'm not kidding dude the timing is so weird we got this is all filmed like we we've used this for a million times but i get up to him and and i realize he's kind of like getting up and i click and at and man he gets up and just comes at me you know and um and uh he like he comes i'm trying to get away i got chest waders on i'm trying to get away and he bowls and he runs over me.

1:41:42He ran over you? Yeah. So then my buddy shoots him and kills it. He's chasing me. My buddy kills it. And I reach around and he's got my back, you know, and I reach around and my hand, my hand comes up and it's got blood all over it. And I think he's punctured me with his antler. But then I realized, cause I'd hit him in the brisket, that when he ran over me, it hit the blood from his brisket had got up my back. So I go like this, you know, and i'm like i'm dying yeah but it wasn't i wasn't heard at all i wasn't heard at all any close any close calls with bears or anything yeah a few little you know here's the thing is is like everything seems like a close call and unless you could interview the bear you don't know if it was a close call or not but had one had a number of little you know little mix-ups and things that could have been stupid that there's this was one time we were bow hunting elk it was kind of a weird day and i remember sleeping on a we were sleeping on a ridge just passing the hot part of the day when nothing's going on sleeping on this ridge and something woke me up from a nap and there's a bull a bull elk coming over the ridge and like i wake up and my bow's laying there and i end up just me trying to grab the bow spooks the elk so i'm like what are the chances as that would ever happen, you know.

1:43:03I fall asleep again. I hear something again, and I wake up, and here's a black bear standing there. And the dude in the same spot, okay? I go to grab my bow. He spooks. Runs down the hill. I just forget about it. He's gone. He spooked. Later that afternoon, it starts getting toward evening prime time, and we go down. We go down. It happened to go the direction the bear went, but just coincidentally went the direction the bear went. get down to the bottom of this ridge where this we're just get down the bottom of this hill where the hill goes down into a riparian area and here nails on bark something climbing a tree okay we i watched this bear go this way so i'm like holy shit it's the bear like i think he's still in the area and in a black bear you'll spook a black bear he might go in a tree so i run up there thinking I'll tree them.

1:43:58And if I tree them, I can just get them with my bow because black bears will climb trees. But I run up there and like it's thick. And I come busting in there trying to like be like a demon coming in there to encourage the bear to not come down but go up the tree because I can hear it climbing. And it's a, there's a sow grizzly standing against this tree. And what I had heard the claws of was her, was her woofing her cubs up the tree so when i come busting in i mean i'm busting i bust in like i mean easy me to that painting you in the helicopter you know like damn oh and i start trying to back out of there in a hurry you know and and she that cub comes down the hill and i remember she like legitimately she legitimately i could be hallucinating this but like i know i saw She swatted her cub to get moving.

1:44:53She's like this, and they kept spilling out of the tree. And that could have been like, that could have been just dumb. Pissed off a mama bear. How the hell do you get out of there? She just left you alone? I got lucky. She went woofing up the hill. And then a couple of things like that. And then one time I was involved with a bunch of other guys in like a legit bear mix-up on a Fognak Island in Alaska. And we had elk hanging in a tree and we were eating lunch under the tree. This is a totally long story about being an idiot, but we're eating lunch under a tree with elk hanging in it that we'd left there for a couple days.

1:45:40The quartered out meat. And this bear came in, and my buddy Yanni, he had sat down, he had spray on his belt, and he had his pistol sitting on his backpack. And when that bear came in, you know what he did? So he's got the pistol laying right here and spray right here. You know what he did is he smokes it across the nose with a trekking pole. I mean, like, right, like, I'm there, it's here, and he flopped across the nose. And this other guy, my buddy Dirt, fell on it. fell on it and rode it down the hill fell on the bear i thought the bear was carried him down holy shit when he he was trying to get out of the way and landed backward on its hump and rode it down the hill into an alder thicket and we thought that it carried him we all read it that it carried him down the hill so all of a sudden everybody's like lunging down the hill and he He comes squirting back out of the alders, running back.

1:46:40Oh, my God, dude. And he rode it. It's this dude named Dirt, Dirt Myth. Damn. He rode the bear. Holy shit. So we obviously got it. What did he say when he got back? I don't remember what exactly he said, but it scared the shit out of us, man. You know what's crazy about that deal? So that's a draw permit on a Fognac Island. You have to draw an elk tag. And they're not. Those elk. So if you're looking at a map, if you casually looked at a map, you wouldn't notice that Kodiak and a Fognak are separate islands. There's a narrow strait that separates Kodiak and a Fognak. Years ago, they brought up elk from Washington's Olympic Peninsula and turned them loose out there on a Fognak.

1:47:24So it's a draw permit. We had that mix up. The next year, some dudes, and you'd probably be able to track these guys down. and one of my friends interviewed him, these Navy SEALs, a Navy SEAL drew that permit. They got attacked by a bear right there. Wow. But they killed the son of a bitch. Damn. They killed it with a pistol. Have you ever seen that video? I think it was that Russian, I think it was a Russian dude. He has a side-by-side shotgun and this grizzly keeps attacking him from all these different angles. Oh, my kid was showing me that. Yeah, and I was trying to question how true it was and he was trying to fish out, but I don't remember.

1:48:05You should just tell it because I don't remember the details. I mean, I don't know any details. Somebody showed me the YouTube video, and I was like, holy shit, what would you do in that situation? I do recollect my kid showing me something about this. I remember I was able to determine that it was a Russian somehow. I think it's said in the description. I can't remember. Maybe it was Reddit. I can't remember what it was. But yeah, I would charge him, and you could just, I don't know if the dude had a GoPro strapped to his head or whatever, but he's just running around this side by side and then he'd come at him from another angle yeah no this is ringing the bell and i remember i i try to teach with my kids i try to teach um skepticism and i remember like trying to so my kid will come to me and be like hey is this legit you know we'll watch stuff and try to figure out what we're looking at but i i don't remember the details on it but um i gotta include on the bear thing i love those bears like i like i like i love grizzly bears i like them you know they're scary but i like them you know yeah i'm not i'm not an anti-bear guy do you get any other close encounters i love hearing this stuff um just little yeah a little like false charge me my buddy cal i mentioned him earlier around the public lands issue he and i got false charged by a bear one time um which was scary and i remember i had like a i made like a line an imaginary line at which i would shoot we were hunting the grizzly bears it was a sow with cubs and i had an imaginary line at which i would fire you know and she turned off at that imaginary line um but again man with with those with those bears it always seems like everything seems close because you can just picture it you know um but that's that's kind of my that's kind of my main little run-ins i've had them too where they're coming and you're just trying to scare them off you know and and i remember uh one was coming and we were trying to shoot rocks out in front of it just to get to not come into our camp and i remember it would run over to look at it would it would run ahead to look at what it was it's like what the hell was that i was like that's not working damn How do you determine where you're going to hunt?

1:50:22I mean, you know, like around here, I've been hunting before. I just never got anything, and it was always on public land around the Midwest, and deer season in the Midwest is, like, bigger than Christmas. Yeah. You know, and I'd go out, and I'd be like, I'm out of here, man. There's, like, 50 people over here. Yep, yep. I'm not doing this. So I'm just curious. I mean, how do you determine where you're going to hunt? You know, it. Because you hunt public land. A lot. I mean, I hunt both. You know, I hunt a lot of private land. I hunt public land. I hunt everything I can get to. I kind of have an odd, not an odd setup, but like at this point, I've hunted for a long time.

1:51:06And I have so many friends that are really dedicated, disciplined hunters that for me to do like research on spots is just very different. that there's not many places you could point to there's not many places in the country you could point to where i couldn't within a within two phone calls talk to a buddy that a buddy or a buddy's buddy that like knows the area real well gotcha you follow me so it just winds up being it winds up being different and i hunt we kind of in hunting you know you a way to split hunting opportunities would be that you have over the counter what we call over the counter hunting opportunities or you have draw hunting opportunities over the counter means you go to the gas station or the sporting goods store and buy a license right so most white tail deer hunting in the east most states just buy a license um but then there's a lot of draw hunts where more there's greater demand than there is supply and so to allocate it democratically they do these lotteries um and they're they're generally in for a resident they're very inexpensive for if you're applying in other states it can be more expensive but they're like they're going to release 20 tags for said unit 100 guys apply for that unit um so no one there's no individual that routinely hunts the spot.

1:52:34Gotcha. So it's kind of new for everyone every time. Okay. If I do that, I'm applying for a unit. Like for instance, I mentioned going to a Fognac. I had applied a bunch of years, eventually drew a Fognac, but because of my social circle and professional connections, I wind up with a buddy of mine who's like, oh yeah, me and my friends have hunted it twice we landed at this lake you want to hike you know we found them over here if you can't find them there go look here and it's just it's just it's a perk that i that i can't act like isn't a big factor so a lot of the time that someone might normally spend needing to work from the ground up which is what i would do when i was younger um a lot of times now i'm able to ask a lot of questions gotcha uh another thing is is um there's other spots particularly like public land spots that i like to go to it winds up being that i there's spots i tend to go to spots i know really well and where and i understand seasonally what they're like i understand the impacts of pressure on those spots um and those are the spots i go to often and there wasn't a reason that one of the reasons i like them in return is i kind of understand the rhythms of the area okay do you know i mean like late november it's gonna look like this they'll have been there like things that were there are probably over here now because of pressure weather when i say pressure i don't mean barometric pressure but hunting pressure weather whatever and so you just kind of get trained up but at a time i had a very you know at a time when i first moved out west um we just went out and figured shit out we were very comfortable with failure uh and had a lot of time not a lot of money and just went and went and that's the guys like that the young guys now that i look up to are the guys that are in that phase of their life where they're just figuring it out and they got they're not they're not bitter yet i look at my kid and his buddies my kid and his buddies man they're just in the exploratory phase do you know i mean they're like we're gonna jump at that bridge and go try to get ducks i'm like man that's cool as shit man that's great you know and they don't if they come back with nothing they don't care they're just in the exploring phase and and they'll someday be like me and they'll and that phase will wind down a little bit for them you know and they'll kind of have their habits they'll have their habits and their their their honey holes just gaining gaining experience you know nice it's a blast when it happens and i look back on it quite fondly but at this point now i just kind of have you know it's just life's different for me yeah yeah let's talk about hunting and health being in the outdoors the difference between game meat and you know the shit we get at the grocery store yeah wherever you want to start yeah uh outdoor fitness um one thing i have the other day i had to run a couple days ago I had to run in the airport I'd left my bag and the dude's like run and get your bag so I had to run back to the other gate to get my bag and I don't run so even just running around in the airport for a while and I'm like I got a shin splint dude from running but I can if I have a physical specialty like to brag for a minute I am very good at just walking for a long time.

1:56:13I'm an expert just walker, one foot in front of the other. And that's like hiking. I like to hike. I can hike. I can out-hike people that would beat me up. I can out-hike people that would outrun me, whatever. But I'm hiking across rugged ground and hiking in hills and something. Something I enjoy a great deal. And that ability comes from just traveling in the mountains. And so that's kind of a little bit of, for me, like a little bit of measure, like the way people might measure fitness. You might talk about whatever you can bench or you can deadlift this or do this or that.

1:56:58For me, it's like if I was going to ask someone a fitness question that would mean a lot to me, it would be like, how long can you walk on how little water? That's like something I'm interested in. The food stuff, we eat, like when we're home, we only eat wild meat. No kidding. In our house. So family of five, like when we're eating in our house, we only eat wild meat. Now and then I'll come home and my kids be like, don't tell mom, I'm telling you, but we had a chicken. You know, mom bought a chicken. She doesn't want you to know. but yeah we're real strict about it like we eat wild meat in our house why is that well because it's it's just cooler it's it's a better it's just better it's a it's that's what i like to eat that's why i want to see my kids eat i can't sit and tell you with a straight face i can't tell you chemically like how it's different do you know i'm saying but it's like it just it feels very good to eat it but i can't so i can't separate out the emotional spiritual psychological aspects of what it's like to eat your own food and how good that makes you feel compared to like the biochem the biochemistry aspects of eating wild meat yeah okay there's a ton of talk about you hear people talk about something being organic well if you're i hate to tell people this if you're hunting deer in wisconsin okay i have a lot of friends that hunt deer in wisconsin you're probably not eating organic meat because those deer are in they're eating gmos those deer are eating gmo corn they're eating gmo uh soybeans perhaps that that if it was certified organic you wouldn't be able to feed it but you can't control what that thing's eating yeah if he could be raiding like you know he could be raiding old lady Thompson's garden where she just put a bunch of where she put a bunch of sprayed a bunch of glyphosate you don't know what it ate it's a wild animal so people be like oh you know it's organic I'm like yeah there's a lot of places you can like you know you kill a caribou on the north slope of you know Alaska some bitch is purely organic but a lot of game eats not organic migratory waterfowl that's a tough claim to make that it's organic but it just feels good Because everything we eat, when we're sitting around eating, everything we eat is like a story.

1:59:35It's a celebration. And we always acknowledge, this is Rosemary's deer. And if I don't bring it up, the kids will bring it up. That's pretty cool. Whose deer is this? This is Rosemary's deer. The other night, we got back from our fish shack. We had a bunch of Pacific cod. The other night, one of my daughters was away with her friend. so i had my two boys my boy's buddy my wife and we ate we were eating cod that we caught we were eating carrots that we grew we were eating green beans that we grew we were eating zucchinis that we grew and um and like that's that that's pride you follow me oh yeah it's like we're we're like proud of that and it makes a cool story um you know one of the more interesting aspects of health is the confluence of where your mental life and your physical life collide.

2:00:31It's exciting to us. And I take an immense amount of pride in it. Yeah, that's pretty. Even if someone came and told me that it wasn't good for you, it wouldn't change my perspective. I got a buddy, a very avid outdoorsman named Parker Hall, and he likes to fish flathead catfish. Flathead catfish eat fish that eat fish. So they do a thing called bioaccumulation, meaning if there's heavy metals in the environment, like mercury or whatever, they bioaccumulate. Because when a little fish gets mercury in its system, it's stored in its fat. And then imagine that you magnify it, where here's a fish that eats fish that was eating fish.

2:01:13So all of that, when he eats a fish, he takes that load of mercury. or whatever heavy metal we might be talking about, or anything, industrial solvents, or all these things carry stuff. But when he eats a fish, he gets that fish's stuff, and it goes into his fat. And then at the end, when he's five years old, six years old, whatever, he's got a lifetime of consuming stuff that was consuming stuff, and so they get a heavy metal load. And the states, they don't do this for domestic meat, but the states will often come out with, they'll often come out with advisories. Sometimes they're very detailed.

2:01:49Don't eat more than one meal every month of yellow perch over 12 inches in length from Lake Washington. It might be that specific. I was saying to him one day, you're eating all these flatheads. And he also likes flathead belly. It's kind of a sort of a flathead delicacy is the belly on a flathead, which they say is where the heavy metals accumulate. This is a very turning into a very long story. I was joking with Parker Hall. and i was like what do you think about like the heavy metal warnings on these big flatheads and he says man if i can catch and eat so many flatheads that it kills me i win that was where he was at right on now so so even if yeah like even if i heard and i've gotten sick from you know i've gotten sick from game meat um it doesn't change my view on it you know i just like there's no one can tell me it's like it's just good i feel best eating like i feel best eating vegetables and in deer meat and i like more and more i i like to eat food we eat like When I cook for my family, which is whenever I'm home, we eat food that you look at and you know what it is.

2:03:07It either looks like something that came out of the dirt or it looks like something that you chopped out of an animal. Like that in my mind is, I can't tell you this scientifically, but that's how I like to serve. A way to live. Yeah, that's how I like to serve. A way to live. So let's move into Meat Eater. How did that start? That's a long story. Again, I came up as a writer. I studied magazine writing, became a magazine writer. Out of magazine writing, started doing books. Out of this came various opportunities in television. The first show I did years ago, I did a show, very short-lived. I did an eight-episode show for Travel Channel a long time ago.

2:03:48I was paired with a production company called 0.0 Production to do this show. um the show tanked but out of it the guys i was working with and and 0.0 most famously worked with uh anthony bourdain they produced bourdain's different shows over the years so i was working with that same crew of guys that worked on that show and um they had all in doing our stuff they kind of fall in love with hunting and so we decided well let's just do our own thing that we own we'll do our own show it'd be like very simple stripped down show about going out you know on hunting and fishing adventures um and so i had a little teeny kid at the time my boy who's 15 was a baby and i would read him mostly books about animals and i always liked you'd be reading about a t-rex or a polar bear or whatever and it'd be like just meat eater this ferocious meat eater right just like a thing and i was like i just called it that it wasn't meant as like a advice it wasn't meant as dietary advice i was like referring to like these species that that's what they eat so we started doing the show and um and we owned it we only like we only licensed it out so we maintain the ip of it right and then later did uh launched a podcast and called it that.

2:05:13It was the Meat Eater podcast. We had a show called Meat Eater. Did some guidebooks under that title and eventually kind of built up a brand. Built up a brand meat eater. It's crazy. And then what's kind of cool about it is because we were doing a TV show, we would get sponsors. And so some of our very earliest people that gave us any kind of vote of confidence and backing like there was an apparel company first light and i knew the guys that started first light they just started it kind of out of their homes in ketchum idaho these like big hunters ski bums and they were making merino base layers for hunters and so we kind of grew up together and then later later on our company meat eater was able to was able to acquire some gear companies so we have an apparel company first light we have a an american-made accessory company called fhf gear we have a game call company dave smith uh or sorry we have a game call company called phelps game calls and the decoy company dave smith decoys and those founders are still those founders are still very much involved with their businesses So we've become media and product, but the vast bulk of my time exists around the media end of it being podcast.

2:06:44We still do print books, and I work in all those kind of projects. Everything from I've done cookbooks, and I'm currently working on an American history series. What's that about? Market hunting. so did meat eaters american history volume one and that was that story of daniel boone and the deer skin trade awesome and that covered 1763 which is the end of the french and indian war to 1775 so right up to the american revolution and then did meat eaters american history volume two the mountain men which covers the beaver skin trade which 1806 so two years after the Louisiana purchase, The Return of Lewis and Clark, which launched the era in 1840 when that era and that market collapsed because of silk, the advent of silk replacing beaver wool as the way that hats were made.

2:07:45So the silkworm kind of killed that market. We just recorded Meat Eaters of American History, Volume 3, which is called The Hide Hunters. It picks up with all the displacement at the end of the Civil War and displaced veterans, Confederates and Yankees going west and picking up the buffalo skin trade. And it ends in 1883 when they killed the last herd in northern Montana. And from there, we'll probably jump up to the Great Depression and do the Alaska fur trade during the great depression or sorry it'll pick up at the end it'll pick up at the with the it'll pick up during the roaring 20s and it'll it's closing year if we do the alaska fur trade it's closing year will be the great depression very cool you remember like the flappers you know like the roaring 20s that we run around with all that fur a lot of that fur was coming out of Alaska.

2:08:48No kidding. And it was like money, all these things, all these different eras we're talking about are the potential for life-changing amount of money for people. And they're all markets that emerge and then die and emerge and die. And usually, there's usually a variety of factors that leads to their death. With the Buffalo one, it died because they were gone. and the crazy part about those guys is some knew what they were doing and some were legitimately they didn't know what they had done on the texas plains the hide hunters were convinced that a bunch of them had run into mexico and there was more in mexico more buffalo in mexico in northern montana they'd all gone into canada and they held out hope and they waited around one year two year and eventually it was like you know what i think might have happened dude is i think we maybe killed them all it's over you know so so that that history stuff is something i love working on yeah the american history series we built one hell of an empire man it's i don't know what i called it yeah um yeah we make cool yeah we get to make cool products it's fun yeah how do you balance all the business and family and all that stuff one of my i'll tell you like if i have a

2:10:26answer that question that picture remember the old cartoons where does the dude with the devil and the angel you know i mean yeah i know what you're talking about like if i carry with me a thing like that it's about what i've done and haven't done for my kids the devil is saying um there has been years in in my all my kids lives there's been years the devil's like dude there's been years when you missed half of their days right you worked half their days or traveled half the days they were alive and the angel says uh but dude when you were home you were home like you were all in you know and that that's a debate that that's a debate that goes on um i i goes without saying like you know i adore my children um we have i have a very strong relationship with my kid i've missed my kids i've missed a lot of their lives but I've also spent some like extremely impactful times with them where I'll be able to just be immersed with them we just spent two weeks at our fish shack where they're like in my sight yeah for two weeks when I'm home I've pointed this out a bunch just to other people that have young kids and stuff like and when I'm home I like what I like them when I'm home they see me serve like they see me serve the family do you know i mean like i i clean i cook when i'm home i make dinner i lay dinner on the table right i call them to the dinner table we when i'm they eat family dinner whether i'm home or not they do with their mom or we all eat it as a family but like i want them to to know that like when i'm there i'm there and and and that's one of the that that is the sort of like that's the compromise is that hard for you to switch it off you know a long time ago my wife came up with this rule where she said um she's like if it's i remember sitting when we first had a kid it's so funny to think about this now because he's like like little enough where they're like in the hanging out the bathtub and i remember needing to go out of town to work and i remember sitting there like weeping I was so sad when I had a little baby, when I had to go out of town.

2:12:55And my wife said, you got to button it up, dude. You got to tighten up. This isn't what it is. You can't display this lament. And then later she had said, it's not going to be a big deal when you go, and it's not going to be a big deal when you come home. meaning when you come home you merge you merge into traffic right like it's not like balloons and shit like welcome home dad it's like you come in and you're you're you're you're in it you know and so no i i i find it easy to come back a challenge i've had and due to all this pales in comparison i was with the guy the other day i was with the guy the other day that came from your professional world of military.

2:13:47And his wife told me, I was with him and his wife, he told me that the first three years of marriage, they were together 200 days. So this is nothing like that. It's nothing like that. But I do find some parallels with people that have dealt with that level of being gone. But no, I don't. My wife would tell you that I don't turn it off well. I would argue that I've gotten better at it. Do you take your kids out with you now that they're older? Any chance I can get, man. any chance i can get to business on business i'm sorry i thought i meant take him out in the woods and out in the field yeah both both my older one i'm just now exposing him my 15 year old i'm just now exposing him to um i'm now exposing him more and more to what i do he's very interested in it we never let him have any kind of social media once he turned 15 and he was taller than me um Seemed weird to tell him when he's taller than me.

2:14:40He's got like his learner's permit. He takes a gun out of the gun cabinet and goes shooting skeet with his friends. And it's hard to be like, you're not allowed to have social media. You can take the shotgun, but no Facebook, you know. So he has social media now. And he likes to kind of post about his outdoor adventures, you know. And I encourage that and keep a tight wrap on it. But yeah, he's real curious in what I do. He's, I'm not a photographer. He's very interested in photography. He's very interested in communication. So I'll be curious to see where that leads. Right on, man. But yeah, the other ones, man, for me, the funnest thing now is to take them out hunting, 100%.

2:15:21100%. I don't even care if I get it. To me, it doesn't matter to get stuff. Just time. Yeah, I just like to be it. My buddies are the same way. Buddies with kids, after a while, they're like, you being the one that gets something, no one cares about that anymore. It's good to see the kids have success. you know yeah man that's like i was telling you at breakfast i just we've been uh i'm official with my son he's a toddler for almost a year this fall it'll be a year it's been so cool to watch him like learn figure out how to cast he learned it like a couple days yeah i mean now it's just it's like trying to dodge bullets when he casts but uh and all the untangling somebody get a Trouble hook in the nose.

2:16:03But, yeah, it's just I love watching them real abasin. It's so cool, man. Yeah. I love being outdoors with my kid. Yeah, it's good. It's good to spend time with. It's good for them. It's good for you. Yeah, yeah. But, well, man, I just I really appreciate you coming in. I thought this was an awesome conversation. Oh, well, thanks, man. Like I said, I've always admired your work and enjoyed watching the clips. My boy likes watching the clips. We have a good time. He does? Yeah. Oh, we'll give him some stuff to take home. Oh, really? Yeah, man. No, he likes it. Again, like me, he likes hearing from all the warriors, man.

2:16:42Cool. Yeah. Well, there's a lot more coming on. Good, yeah. But, Steve, honored to meet you, man. Yeah, thank you, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Cheers, son.

2:16:55Is there anything we didn't cover you want to cover? That's great. Thank you. thank you all right yeah that was awesome i really like that bow stuff dude it's fun that's i could see how that could get addicting yeah there's a lot of guys that find it like quite therapeutic to shoot you know what is your what's the favorite animal to hunt for me yeah maybe like the one you're most proud of oh yeah well i like hunting doll sheep but i don't get as many opportunities to do it but like for day in day out hunting i like mule deer 100 i just love everything about them love everything about them but i grew up on whitetails so it's funny because i got friends out that grew up out west and they're like dude that must be so cool tree stand hunting whitetails but then we grew up tree stand hunting whitetails like that must be so cool to hunt the mountains for mule deer yeah you know i mean it's like it has a lot to do with that but i like that and i've really gotten into um i've been i've doing it for a long time but i like to hunt moose i like to call moose like on the 11th i'll take off to go with my brother danny who lives up in alaska to go call moose you know which is a total mind fuck man it's a slow game it's a slow game like a moose might take days to come to a call like he hears it oh yeah and he might be like yeah eventually i'll eventually get over there right on man yeah it's kind of funny You know, you see them and they're like aware of you, but time for them is different.

2:18:21You know, elk might, he just comes ripping in. But moose is like, yeah, I'll get over there in three days. Is there, is there, I actually meant to ask you in the interview, but is there anything that you think the hunting industry is getting wrong, like in the public's eye? Anything that pisses you off about the industry or?

2:18:46i think that yeah there's a handful of things but it's not anybody but i think that a lot of the commentary around um a lot of the commentary around relationships with predators isn't accurate and i think that people are what our ask needs to be on in the west on wolves and grizzlies well not just that and not west upper midwest what the aspect needs to be on wolves and grizzlies is it needs to be that like they're going to be on the landscape the ask the days of the of it being that they're going to be gone that's not going to happen the ask needs to be that they be managed as game animals gotcha it's like lamenting the existence of large predators or just like you know this whole like smoke a pack a day you know shoot shovel shut up shit about wolves i don't think that that's productive gotcha the ask is like the ask is like get them off the esa what's that what's dangerous species act okay they shouldn't be they don't qualify for endangered species act protection just like categorically when i started doing reintroductions on wolves and when they started doing protections on grizzlies all the people all the stakeholders came together and said here's what recovery looks like recovery will be this this many breeding pairs right this level of distribution we hit recovery on wolves and grizzly bears 20 years ago in some cases even longer ago in some areas and but and there's still is this faction of sportsmen that thinks we're going to go back to having those animals not out there preying on deer and it's fucking dumb yeah like the ask is delist and manage as a game animal um that that's the thing that people gotta and in in order to push their viewpoint they kind of over they like exaggerate human risk on things that there's not human risk there's not like a reasonable human risk like wolves don't well like wolves just don't fuck with people you know mountain lions every now and then but predators need to be there yeah they need to be managed as game animals yeah we need to have hunting you know like it's ridiculous right now that there's no wolf hunting in the upper great lakes it's ridiculous um they need to you know they delisted then they listed again that needs to be a hunted population of wolves but um they're not going away what about um like invasive species and stuff like hogs down south and i mean um i used to have a habit of asking guys that owned land that had hogs on it that bitch about the hogs and i'd be like if you could wave a magic wand i've asked so many farmers and ranchers like if you could wave a magic wand and they would really be all gone would you wave it and i was He's like, I mean, I don't want them all gone.

2:21:52Again and again. You know, I don't want them all gone. I mean, that's ridiculous. Yeah, but, you know, a thing that hunters don't, if you're going to look at from a conservation habitat perspective, non-native plants are probably, I think that you'd probably get buy-in on that statement. You'd probably get buy-in on that statement from most people that non-native plants are a greater risk to hunting in America than non-native wildlife. It's a little bit, there are cases where one could argue that because in the Mississippi system, the Asiatic carp species have to be having an impact on game fish.

2:22:34There's no way they're not having an impact on game fish. So that's a huge thing in that area. Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes is a big problem. But non-native habitat that is becoming that it doesn't support wildlife because it's got plants that wildlife can't utilize, that's a problem. Whole fucking hillside. I mean, whole mountainsides taken over by plants called spotted knapweed, leafy spurge. Whole mountainsides used to support animals or hillsides used to support animals. Now don't. No shit. I did not realize that. Canadian thistle. That's another one. like ecosystems that had game that don't have game because they can't digest noxious weeds interesting yeah i just i never thought about that noxious weeds are noxious weeds are huge will be a huge problem in the future i mean they're already a huge problem like if you anywhere if you went anywhere and talked to someone from like most states if you went and talked with someone it's like we got plant problems more than we got animal problems you're familiar with like the pollinator crisis no um losing losing all of our pollinators oh like bees yeah i have heard of that from habit habitat and also habitat and the fucking pesticides damn herbicides and pesticides and i'm not hacking it dude like people gotta eat you know um if you wanted to live in a world with no herbicides and no pesticides you should probably plan on losing about half the world's population to starvation right it's like a real fucking conundrum um it could be that anyone that's poor dies because we don't use herbicides and pesticides anymore or we continue to like wipe out insect species and wipe out plant species that that are some of the foundation of you know all of our environmental shit you know yeah yeah man that's an interesting aspect I never thought of.

2:24:37Yeah, it's one of those hidden things. And a lot of people aren't hip to it. But I have the luxury of just occupying a world and occupying a conversation that some guy that works his fucking ass off and gets to hunt a few weekends a year, and he's happy if he can hunt four weekends a year. it's just like he just doesn't have time for hearing about all that you know yeah because he's got whatever he's trying to raise his family and so there's people that just there's a lot of sportsmen that don't know and it's not necessarily like ignorance it's just like it's just complicated so they might be like what's wrong with hunting you know why are you not seeing deer and it's like oh coyotes it's like yeah it's more complicated dude that's easy but it's more complicated you know interesting yeah the predator thing is a is a is a and and you wind up fighting both extremes like i wind up arguing um i'm always arguing with people that think that like i'm always arguing with people that think that wolves if i can walk around eating granola or flowers you know be like no dude wolves have a major impact coyotes have a major impact and then i turn around i'm arguing with some guy that thinks it's the only thing that matters is that if we just killed more coyotes, the world would be overrun with wild game.

2:26:08You're like, you guys are both fucked up. Damn. You guys are both wrong. We want to grab some lunch? Mm-hmm. Cool.

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