Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 510: On Nature and Suffering with Werner Herzog

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Ep. 510: On Nature and Suffering with Werner Herzog · The MeatEater Podcast

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  Speaker 1: proud of. Meet Eater's American History The Long Hunters, available
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: now and explained in greater detail at the end of
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: the show. Is to stay tuned, everybody. I'm very, very
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: excited to announce that I am seated here with the
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: writer and film director Werner Herzog, who's made over sixty
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: films and documentaries, including many I'm sure you heard of,
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: and a bunch of them that you better have seen.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Little Deader Needs to Fly Rescue Dawn, the famous in
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: my circle of people, Grizzly Man, Happy People, cav of
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: Forgotten Dreams, which I believe is your only film that
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: I managed to catch when it released in a theater
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: in New York Cava Forgotten Dreams. His films deal with extremes,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: with struggle, with absurdity, with madness, with happiness, and many
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: are fused, in my opinion, with a very unique perspective
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: on nature in the natural world. If you read about Herzog,
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: you'll often find writers describing it his work as man
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: against man, against nature, man versus nature. We'll find out
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: if he describes it that way. I'm guessing he doesn't,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: as I believe that description would imply that nature is
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: aware of man as an adversary. Mister Herzige, a couple
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: of your own quotes, the universe is monstrously indifferent to
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: the presence of man. You also once said, I believe
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: and murder. Now, many documentarians who deal with the natural
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: world I find personally seem to reflect the relationship with
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: nature sometimes feels to me as though it's as though
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: it's taught, as though it's something they picked up or
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: learned from their peers. It's oftentimes political. But our guest
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: here today, I feel that the things he has to
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: say about the natural world and the way that the
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: natural world plays into his movies is wholly original influence
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: me immensely, not just as a writer or TV person,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: but as a human. I'd say, for me on par
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: with Cormick McCarthy, because both have these immense bodies of
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: work that interplay together as something that is not schizophrenic,
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: meaning they carry this sort of intellectual trademark. And the
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: last little bit of introduction I'll saying this is a
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: very inside joke. When I'm arguing with production people, which
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: I do in my line of work, I've a lot
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: of times dealt with camera guys producers that want to
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: catch the entirety of a process, and if they can't
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: catch the entirety of a process, they don't want to
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: use it. And I will say to them in shorthand.
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  Speaker 1: I will take a line from Happy People and I
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: will say the nets were set the night before, because
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: there's a scene in Happy People which chronicles the lives
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: of Siberian fur travers and subsistence hunters, and there's a
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: scene that opens where they're just checking a net, and
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  Speaker 1: my camera guys would have been like, well, we can't
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: use that. We never saw you set the net, to
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: which I will refer them to Happy People, and I
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: will say to them, the nets were set the night before.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: And that's it. Go on with your movie. Go on
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: with your movie. I want to start our conversation talk
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: a little bit about your your childhood, which I was like, like,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: I said, my avenue to you and your work. It's
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: just been your movies. I've been a fan of your
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: movies for such a long time, and it wasn't I
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: read your new book, which I haven't finished yet. It
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: started a new book. It's every Man for Himself and
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: God against all your life. Yeah, I didn't realize the
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: extent of the poverty that you grew up in.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: Well, it's easy to imagine when you grew up at
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: the end of the Second World War and then mostly
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: post war time and you have to imagine a scenario
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: where everybody here in the country, in the United States
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: is very well aware how Ground zero looked at ninety eleven.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: After nine eleven, complete devastation, but very limited, a very
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: limited area on the island of Manhattan. But you have
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: to imagine a whole country Germany, where seven hundred twenty
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: or so cities were wiped out, the entire cities, some
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: of them not as completely. For example, Munich, where I
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: was born, was only eighty eighty five percent flattened and destroyed.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: And it was one of these Allied bombing raids, carpet
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: bombings that hit our neighborhood and everything around destroyed. And
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: I was only two weeks old, fourteen days old, and
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: where we lived was partially destroyed, and my mother picks
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: me up from my cradle, which was covered with about
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: a foot high shards of glass and bricks and debris.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: But I was unhurt, And of course you get when
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: your mother, you're naturally are scared. And she fled with
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: my older brother and me into the remotest mountain valley
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: in the Alps in Bavaria.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: And your dad had split out on you guys, Your
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: dad wasn't in the picture at this time.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: He wasn't in the picture. Well, he was in the
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: war when I was born. I was born nineteen forty two.
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: The war was over nineteen forty five, and when he
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: came back very soon divorced, and my mother was a
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: singing a singing mother and had to raise Then she
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: had another boy, my younger brother, so she had to
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: raise three children, and there was never enough to eat.
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  Speaker 2: What I remember very well is starving.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, you tell a story of a lesson you learned
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: about nagging your mother, You and your brother nagging your
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: mother about how hungry you were, and her saying, if
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: I could take it from my ribs, I would take
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: it from my ribs.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I can't. But I can't, And you shut
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: up boys in me. Of course that that was a
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: serious moment, and it's engraved in my memories. So and
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: and of course it was not only food. We had
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: literally nothing. For example, we don't have didn't have mattresses.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: My mother stuffed burlap sacks with hay that she made
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: from fern. But when you cut the stem of a fern,
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  Speaker 2: it hardens when it dries, it hardens like the tip
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: of a shark. Yes, she cut it with a side
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  Speaker 2: and it you would feel it at night when you
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: shifted around, all of a sudden you were on two
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: pencils that were stings stinging you. And and fern also hardens.
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  Speaker 2: It's not like hay more fluffy. It becomes almost like cementing.
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  Speaker 2: You have this little dents and I had to navigate
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: the dents in my mattress. So my entire childhood, I
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: never had a flat surface on which I slept. And
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: we had no running water. You had to go to
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: the well with a bucket and bring in the water
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: in no sewage system, no heating, no toy, no real
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: I mean a toilet, but an outhouse which was adjacent
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: to this little to this little house where we grew up.
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  Speaker 1: And you talk about eating a someone killing a crow
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  Speaker 1: or a raven. Yes, yes, and you're being surprised by
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  Speaker 1: the the seeing fat, yeah, fat on a soup broth
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: and being surprised but fat.
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  Speaker 2: I never had seen anything like this until today. This
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: means wealth. For example, the first time I ate a
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: fried egg, what an ache in my life. I must
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: have been about ten or eleven, and it was like
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: an incredible feast. Never ate a chicken for me. Even
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: I see, and even you see, even when you drive
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: by the fast food Kentucky right chicken finger licking good,
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: and it makes an impression on me because chicken means
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  Speaker 2: the definitive feast.
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  Speaker 1: You mentioned another detail of your mother getting a loaf
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  Speaker 1: of bread with food coupons or I describe them, but
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  Speaker 1: then scoring the bread right in seven segments for each
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: day so that she would part she would partition the
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: breadh as the week's ration of bread. And in that
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: passage you mentioned you don't elaborate on it, and I
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: was looking for you to elaborate on it that you
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: said that you have no tolerance for the culture of complaint.
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  Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, yeah, I get it, But explain that to me. Well,
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  Speaker 3: I cannot make it the norm. How I grew up,
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: it was an unusual, unusual childhood because it was in
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  Speaker 3: the aftermath of a catastrophic war that Germany actually had started,
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: and the catastrophe came from our own people, from our society,
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: from our.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: Leader adult Fitland. It was it was really so bad
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: that we knew now what we got. We got, and
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: each one of us had a thin slice of bread
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: per day, and the kind of grooves that my mother
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: carved into the loaf of bread. We knew this was
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: the only thing we have, and of course she would
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: also make some food from dandelion leaves and from syrup
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: from some trees and replacing sugar which we didn't have.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: So when I see in our kind of society's western
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: highly technical societies where a lot of food is being
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: thrown away in the United States, I think more than
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: forty percent of food, and I find it outrageous. And
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: I never say anything because it was my experience and
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: I know the value of food. I now there's something
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: which has to be honored, and it in a way,
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: it pains me when I see so much food being
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: thrown away. Because of my experience, it was unusual, but
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: I never I never speak out loud.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: But you.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: Know, for God's sake, I would be the last one.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: That's not in my nature. Because you have to determine
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: how you live and whether you live a life of
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: consumerism or whether you are more cautious with wasting resources
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: that we have. And I think when you are in
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: other societies hunters and gatherers, they are more careful and cautious.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: There's no doubt in my heart, because that's how we've
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: organized as biological creatures. And so how can I say.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: I see people in the restaurant complaining to the waiter
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: that this wasn't any good and give it back to
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: the kitchen, and so I don't like this complaint. And
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: it's not only about food, it's about whatever. Our lives
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: are so difficult, and gasoline has become so expensive, into
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: all these things. Yes, deal with it, deal with it
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: in the right way, but don't complain too much.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: There was a I got two questions stacked up in
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: my head and when I was going to ask you,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: and when I thought about asking you and decided not to.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: But now I'm going to ask you because you alluded
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: to it.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: Uh.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: My father fought in World War Two serving the European
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Theater and maintained, I don't want to say we we
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: joke about it now, but maintained a deep suspicion of
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Germany through to the end. Rightly, So zero for Japan,
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: didn't zero for Japan. Father? Well, no, no, no, I'm not
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: gonna that. But what was the It's kind of like,
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: outside of a subject matter, I'm like anything, but or
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: that I'm an expert on but what was the How
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: did you perceive when you're thrust in at a young age,
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: when you're thrust into such like this, this devastating situation,
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: and so many of your countrymen are being killed, your
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: cities are being destroyed, You're starving. What is your perception
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: of Germany? Is it gone?
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: No? No, of course not. I'm still a German citizen.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: No, no, I'm saying at that time, how are people
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: feeling about?
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: You know?
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: I mean, is this all happening to them? Is it
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: a thing they created? That was your mom's perception?
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: It's a different response some of them. You still until
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: today you have denious You even have Holocaust denials, which
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: is the most absurd of all, because it's one hundred
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: thousands of times documented survivors are there, the bodies were found,
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, and and a crime of proportions that the
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: world has never seen in any country throughout the entire
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: history of the human race. Nothing like that has ever happened.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: So you, of course, you have to ask yourself what
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: went wrong? What made Germany lapse into a culture from
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: a very solid culture of philosophy, mathematics, writers compose us,
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: you just name it. How does it lapse into a
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: culture of barbarism within very few years. So of course
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: that gave me to think, and of course it has
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: importance always rest something is resonating from from that in
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: my entire existence.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: But where the pot? What was your sense of or
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: perhaps this would be a question that you'd have to
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: answer on your mother's behalf. Where what was the sense
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: of blame? There was the blame the wise was the
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: blame on England the US for doing this?
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: No, I think the overwhelming, the overwhelming part of the
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: population knew it was self inflicted. And you have to
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: also see one strange thing when you speak about Germany.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: As a child, and even when I was six and
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: eight years old, I didn't know that Germany existed, that
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: there was such a thing like Germany. For me, this
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: valley in the mountains that was the world. And beyond that, yes,
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: there was Austria because a border was close, and some
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: young men, that bold young men would secretly smug goods
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: from Austria into Germany, and some of them were my
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: childhood heroes. But I did not notice. I had no
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: concent except that there were countries, I mean Austria, tiar role. Yes,
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: our valley and something beyond it. And my very first
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: memory that I have about I was must have been
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: two and a half years Allied bombers hit the city
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: of Rosenheim, and my mother took us out of bed,
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: and it was in middle of the night ice colt
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: must have been March or April. Still snow out there
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: and very fine. The distance at the end of the
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: valley you could see the entire sky, not burning, not flickering,
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: so a very slow pulsing of red and orange. And
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: she said, boys, the city of Rosenheim is burning. But
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: the city of Rosenheim is forty miles away that far,
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: an entire city burning, And for me it was a
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: very essential moment because I apparently started to understand there's
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: a world. There's a world out there, not our valley
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: alone and not the waterfall in the ravine behind the home,
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: that there was something out there that was different and
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: dangerous and burning, and there was such a thing like
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: a war. Of course, we saw American soldiers coming in,
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: but they were very genial with kids and befriended the kids.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: And for the first time I saw an African American
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: and I was completely enthralled. A huge, big, big guy
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: with a big, resonant voice. A little bit. I could
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: always compare him to Shaquille O'Neill, a very very big
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: man with a very big heart and a wonderful voice,
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: a soft, wonderful voice. That was that was for us.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: We only knew it from fairy tales. The moors, oh
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: the more and there was a more and that was
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: completely completely fascinated and I knew, yes, it's true that
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: some foreign countries like Africa and you have the moors,
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: and there are moors in America. How about that.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: That particular city that burned that the story you're telling
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: your book demonstrates a little bit of the of a
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: different perspective on collateral damage then you see in warfare today,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: where in warfare today there's so much public emphasis on
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: not you know, targetings of billions where you're hitting, and
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: you're telling that story that Allied bombers are actually trying
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: to get to a different place entirely, yes, and they
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: can't get over the mountains because of the weather, and they
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: just find a town.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: Ye sure, and they they want to return to the
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: base empty. And it was probably the reason why the
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: city of Rosenheim was destroyed in a gigantic contralt contra flagration.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: So but only later let me add up one thing
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: with a sky in the distance pulsing in flames. It
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: made me curious, and I knew there was something out
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: I wanted to to understand. I wanted to learn so
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: and that's why I moved out, and that's why I
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: have been so much around. And it's very strange because
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: people ask me, why can you say that you are
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: a writer. And I have always maintained that my writing
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: will live longer, my prose, my poetry will probably live
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: longer than my films. How do you somehow compare that
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: why it is a conflict between filmmaking. No, it is not.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: And I have a simple almost like a formula, films
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: on my voyage and writing is home.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Oh that's your Your films are your forays out into
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: the world.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, writing is home.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. That brings
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: it to a question that I was hoping to share
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: with you, to ask about, Like I said, I had,
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: I was unfamiliar with the level of poverty that you
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: that you grew up in.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: Oh it doesn't it doesn't matter.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, this is no no, no, no.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: I don't want to be commiserated for children. It was
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: a wonderfully incredible time and we had to take responsibility.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: We had to go out foraging. We were the ones
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: who would catch trout in the creek, but since we
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: had no fishing gear, we caught them by hand. You
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: can catch trout slow movement, and they flee under under stones,
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: They take refuge under under tufts of grass overhanging into
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: into the creek, into the water, and you know where
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: they're hiding, and you have to be very very patient
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: and cautious, and you actually can catch them with their
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: own hands. People think I'm making it. You have probably
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: done it yourself.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: When so considering that that that childhood, it made me
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: rethink you're film Happy People. Yes, And within the last
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: day or two, maybe it was even our producer Krinn
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: or Phil the engineer here, I mentioned happy People and
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: he said, you mean that I remember who he said.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: They said, you mean the people that seem miserable but
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: they're happy. And I wondered about that or some joke
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: like that, meaning I just remember watching Happy People, which
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: is about Siberian hunter gatherers and fur trappers, and just
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: seeing someone carpeted into mosquitos. I mean it was like
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: they had apparel, like they're apparel was made of mosquitos,
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: you know, but just working away and uh, without complaint, Yeah,
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: without complaint. And that's what I thought about, because because
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: in Happy People, there's no no person meditates on the
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: meaning of happiness. No person says, well, you know, in
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: spite of appearances, I'm quite happy. There's no matter. It's
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: just the title, it's Happy People. But then it's this
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: portrait of people. And and no, a viewer would not
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: watch Happy People and someone said, what did you watch
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: a movie about, they wouldn't say, I watched the movie
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: about these very happy people.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, and not only happy, they are dignified. They lead
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: a life full of dignity, of awe, of wonder, of nature,
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: of being out there, a life that takes a lot
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: of deep meaning. I envy them. And when I see
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: them in on a on a screen, there's only one wish,
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: old man, I would like to join them.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I can see that.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: And the fact that they do not have let's say,
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: electricity and air condition and mosquito repelling and you just
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: name it. Just their dogs, insane intelligence and rifleent and
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: fishing gear. And they live an incredible life, so fulfilled,
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: so wonderful. And whoever whoever sees this, and I believe
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: those who who actually have ever hunted, they will immediately
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: understand instantly. Yeah I envy them.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah you when you made Grill, I had watched your films,
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: but became interested in your thinking about nature. And you're
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: thinking about animals like I had seen a Geary Wrath
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: of God. I'd seen fitz Crawl though, which are great stories,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: really enjoyable films, and and and and it sparked a
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: curiosity in me about how you view things. But then
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: it then the Timothy Treadwell incident happened. So just to
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: give listeners a quick run through Timothy Treadwell, I think
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: he's born in the late fifties, if I'm not mistaken.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: He had been a he was wanted to be an actor.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: He had actually was in competition with Woody Harrelson.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: Well, that's what he claims.
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: We do not know excectly.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: We can look at him and say he was a failed.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Actor, failed actor.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: And then and then deeply, deeply into alcohol and drugs.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: So he was struggling, struggling to get out of addiction,
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: and in a way that brought him to Alaska because
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: out there in nature and with a task too that
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: he put on his own shoulders to protect the bears
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: against the bad guys, the poachers. Poaches hardly existed all
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: but that was his his fiction under which he lived,
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: and he got himself straightened out in a way. And
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: when you look at Team, of course he has moments
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: where he unravels and where he's completely falling apart, but
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: moments of deep insight, moments of poetry, moments of beauty,
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: what he's doing, what he's seeing, how he describes it,
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: how he depicts things, a wonderful, wonderful kind of life
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: out there in the wilderness.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: In my world at that time, there was this what
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: was getting at about when I became interested in your
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: in how you view these because in my world at
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: that timing, you know, fairly serious outdoorsman, strong Alaska connections.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: There was just people reveled in his death and it
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: was just how stupid he should have known. What a nutjob.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: And I would find myself before you did your film,
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: I would find myself joking like that man would out
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: camp any person I know, and I would say, I
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: would love to see you go spend yeah, thirteen summers, Yes,
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: in an alder thicket on the Alaska Peninsula.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: Population.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: Ye, go do that and then come tell me how
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: stupid the guy was. You might not agree with what
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: he stood for, you might not agree with his practice,
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: but like there was a tenacity and a sort of
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: outdoor expertise. And then your film came out and it's
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: like I had joked about it and commented on it,
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: but your film came out and was so it was
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: so like open hearted and fair. Yeah, but the proper condemnation,
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: the proper respect, which just painted a wholly different picture
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: than what you got from the media, which was just
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: nothing but a nut job.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well that was a small part of the media.
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: But of course it's also unusual that the filmmaker has
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: an ongoing argument with his protagonist who was already killed
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: by a bear ten months before.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: Ten months when you're working on that, you got to
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: it right away.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well I never met him. Of course, he was
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: dead when I heard about and his girlfriend was also
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: killed and eaten by the same bear. So it doesn't
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: matter that I'm that I differ from him, and I
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: differ from him in some basic I said, with caught
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: caution in quotes basic philosophy. He was more a little
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: bit towards New Age, which I can't stand, this pseudo
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: philosophical babble. But behind this new agey aspect of wild
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: nature there's something which I call the disneyization of wild nature.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: For Treadwill, the bears were wonderful, big hearted, fluffy creatures,
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: and you had to approach them and if possibly even
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: hug them and sing a song to them, and tell
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: them how much you love them. And one of the
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: native Alutic people on Kodiak Island, he says on camera,
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: there was something wrong. You do not love the bear.
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: You should You should rather respect the bear and respect
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: the territory, keep your distance, allow the bear, it's territory,
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: but you do not need to love it. You do
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: not love the bear, respect it. And that this kind
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: of philosophy that went awry into Walt Disney fluffiness somehow, unfortunately,
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: unfortunately cost him his life and the life of his girlfriend,
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: and a life of two grizzly bears who were shot
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: by park rangers who found them still feasting on the bodies.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: How when you heard how did you first hear that
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: story and jump into that project.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: Well, it was unusual, because I do things that come
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: with vehemence at me, and it was one of those
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: cases where something stumbles in me into me. I was
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: at a producer's place down in the valley, a few
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: miles away from here only where I'm sitting, and he
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: had helped me very generously with finding partners for a film,
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: and I paid him a visit just to thank him.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: And at the end we were sitting at a glass
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: table full of messy papers and fedexis and half eaten
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: lunch salad. And so when I got up, I got
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: up and I had miss I couldn't find my car keys.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: I swear to God, I was searching for my car keys,
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: not for a movie, and I had placed it on
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: the table and I look at the car key, and
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: he sees it and thinks I spotted some paper and
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: shoves an article to me. It was one of the
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: first magazine articles about Timothy Treadwill, and he says, read this,
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: we are doing a very interesting project. So I took
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: it and my keys went home. And I was sitting
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: literally here, just at this table next behind you. I
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: was sitting there, and normally I don't read these things.
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: I read it, and you know what, I was instantly
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: back in my car and I rushed down and I said,
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: this is this is big, This is so big I
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: cannot believe it. And I said, how far are you
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: in preparations? We have to start in eight days at
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: the latest. There's hardly any time left. We have to travel.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: And then I asked who is directing the film and
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: he said, listen, very very carefully, he said, I'm kind
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: of directing the film, kind of directing these film. So
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: I sensed he didn't know exactly what I was, what
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: he was doing, or how to tack it is. And
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: I looked at him and I said, no, I will
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: direct this movie now. And was kind of surprised and
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: shook my hand and said it would be an honor.
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: And I made the film in that movie, but it
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: was you see, what was clear, this is big. And
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: there's a storyteller as somebody who makes movies and also
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: a writer. I know this is big.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: In that there's the famous scene where you I believe
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: you're at a kitchen table and you put on the
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: headphones and you're able to hear the recording. There was
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: a camera rolling for six months during the attack, and
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: you hear the recording, and your comment does your comment
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: does more to convey the horror of what you're hearing
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: than perhaps hearing it.
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: Because I say comment, I barely comment.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: But you say no one, You say no one should
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: listen to this, Yes, and never let anyone listen to this.
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: And my comment is even stronger because her camera is
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: over my shoulder. You see only the back on the
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: side of my head, and the camera is on the
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: woman who owns the tape, who has worked with treadwell
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: for long, long years, and she tries to read from
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: my face, but I'm hearing how horribleiss it is, and
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: she starts to cry. She can tell from my face
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: that there's something terrible that I'm hearing. No, And I
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: said to her, please don't ever listen to it. And
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: I said to her something very stupid. Please you should
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: rather destroy it, which she didn't do. She was smart
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: enough not to do it. But she separated her from
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: the tape and put it in a bank vault, so
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: it's locked away from her. And you see, as a filmmaker,
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: you do not have to to put everything out, even
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: though it was say and it would have sensationalized the film.
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: Everybody wanted me to include it into the film. The distributor,
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: the TV network, the production company, everyone said, And I said,
• 37:45
  Speaker 2: I will address the tape because it is known. It's
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: out there, but I will make the decision. And after
• 37:53
  Speaker 2: I had heard it, I said, it's not going to
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: be in my film. You have to take me out,
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: but I will resist to be taken out. I'm a
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: formidable opponent. Be careful, i will fight. And this is
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: not going to be in my film because there's such
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: a thing as a dignity and the privacy of an
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: individual's death, and you do not you do not publicize
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: it and sensationalize it. Period. So and I understood. And
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: another example, because I saw the film two days ago
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: for the first time in many years, The White Diamond.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: It's about a jungle airship some sort of that maneuvers
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: in the canopies of trees and nearby in in Guyana. Yeah,
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: and there's a waterfall that kaye to a waterfall three
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: times the height of Niagara Fall, not as much volume
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: of water, but a formidable waterfall.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: I've been waterfall, you have been.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: Wow, h and you have seen the swifts. There are
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: swifts that come down. They come down from from the sky.
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: They form VORTI sees a vortex and then they shoot
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: down and with his speed that is higher than free fall,
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: they swish behind the waterfall, behind this massive curtain. There's
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: a gap, and they have a million and a half
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: a million nests behind there. And I was curious, and
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: we lowered a strong guy in the team, actually also
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: a mountain climber, lowered him on a rope with a
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: camera and he filmed it. And a few days later,
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: a local tribal leader tells us, Ah, you filmed that here.
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: But you know, for us, in our culture, there's a secret,
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: because they are gigantic snakes and that keep the secrets
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: of our people, that keep the treasures of our hearts,
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: and nobody of us would ever look behind the waterfalls.
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: And very politely he says, could it maybe? Could it
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: be that you just saw it, but you don't publish it.
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: And that very moment I said, it's not going to
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: be published.
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that little bit of h Yeah, but I guess
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: there's something. There's something bigger, that bigger than filmmaker. There's
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: something bigger that you have to live with than the
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: films put out for people to enjoy.
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: They're bigger things. And filmmaking, let's face it.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: You've done a number, You've done two, You've done three
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: films about people. You've done three films about people who
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: were shot down or survived air crashes. Yeah, and land
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: in the jungle. So you did one about a woman
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: the soul survivor from an air crash.
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: Yes, and Peru was this the jungle of.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, a plane was struck by lightning. She was buckled
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: into a row of seats, yes, which maybe acted as
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: a parachute. It's just inexplicable. But she and a number
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: of other people's, a number of other passengers fell ten
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: thousand feet hit the forest.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: Cannopy ten thousand. I think it came down, but we
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: can only estimate from five thousand meters altitude fifteen sixteen
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: thousand feet. And she survived it. And probably it's mysterious.
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, there was a violent thunderstorm at the eastern
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: slopes of the Andes and this updraft may even take
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: you high up into the sky. It could happen. And
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: she was on a window seat on the three seats
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: her mother in the middle seat, an obese Peruvian man
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: immediately falling asleep snoring on the aisle seat, and she
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: has fragments of memory that she sailed on strapped to
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: the row of seats, and she complained, she said, people
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: say I left the plane. Now the plane left me,
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: she says. And you know, I was always fascinated by
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: her story because I was booked on that very flight
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: and a huge chain of coincidences took me out of this.
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: And also something as he was had the seat, the
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: empty seats next to her. It's what we call the
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: maple seat effect. If you have the seed of a maple,
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: you have the seat, and then something like a wing
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: and it's virals. It keeps spiraling down to the ground.
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: So that may have saved There were actually other, probably
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: other survivors, because some people were found sitting and leaning
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: against a tree, so they must have crawled there. And
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: it was a very eerie scene. When the first rescue
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: people arrived, they had actually given up the search after
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: ten days or eleven days. It was hopeless because the
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: plane had disintegrated in thousands of fragments and rained down,
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: so there was no impact site that it could spot
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: from the air and suitcases had opened in mid air
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: because it was Christmas eve Day and there were presents
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: dangling in the jungle trees and also human intestines is decoration.
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's an eerie must have been a very
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: very surreal sight.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: But she survives.
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: She survived because she knew about the junkie. She had
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: grown up with her she had grown up with her
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: parents at an ecological station, biological station in the jungie.
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: And then you understood what was going on around.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then you did two films about You did
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: a fictional film and a documentary about an individual a
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: US airman I think a Navy pilot and he was
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. Survives all
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: these just horrific conditions. When he finally gets rescued, they
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: can't the guys at the helicopter pilots that rescue him
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: came tell what he is. They don't know who he is.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: They find a half eaten snake and his backpack and
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: it's this airman that had been missing for I don't
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: know how many half.
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: Half yeah, yes, uh.
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: And thinking about those and then thinking about when you
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: were doing the may when there's there's a documentary made
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: about you, making Fitzgrawal though I remember you saying some
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: of the birds in the jungle and you said the
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: birds here I'm paraphrasing you said, the birds here don't sing,
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: They scream in agony. What what? But you've spent a
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: lot of time in the jungle, yes, I mean, do
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: you what is your how do you feel about the jungle?
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: Where jungle?
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: I say it also in in some written texts in
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: my book Conquest of the Useless, and at some point
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: I'm saying I love the Chungie yet against my better knowledge.
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: But you see, you cannot take it completely out of context.
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: When Les Blank was filming me, it was right after
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: we had two plane crashes, two small aircraft that brought
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: provisions and extras to us. We have just had our
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: camp for eight hundred people in the jungle burned down.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: We ran into a border war between Peru and Ecuador,
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: and my leading character was became so ill that we
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: had to fly him back out to the United States,
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: and his doctors wouldn't allow him to return. Then there
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: was an attack of the tribal group far far up
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: in the mountains that had suffered from the drought. There
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: was a dry stry season in recorded history in memory.
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: And they had wandered down with a drying river in
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: search apparently of turtle eggs. And they clashed through two
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: three people, local people, much againer, native tribal people who
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: had been fishing for us and looking for turtle eggs.
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: And they shot them in the dark of the night.
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: And the man was shot through his throat and had
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: an also deflected arrow at his shin, and a woman
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: shot by three arrows into her body very close, a
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: cluster of three arrows, and so, and we had to
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: operate them on the kitchen table. They would have died
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: if he had tried to transport them. And I was
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: with mosquito repellent spraying away the cloud of mosquitoes, and
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: with the other hand a torchlight illuminating the operation. And
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: all this happens on a daily basis. And then Les
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: Blank says, let's speak about the jungle.
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: So in a way that was the frame of mind,
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: was usual in.
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: The frame of mind, should be mentioned at least, otherwise
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: it sounds like a crazy statement. It was a very
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: natural statement.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: When I describe that movie to people, I describe it
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: probly the way many people do. Where it's the story
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: of a of a rubber baron trying to move a
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: boat from one drainage to the next, and it's just
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: as impossible.
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: That's a huge steam boat over a mountain.
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and so what you do in the movie, which
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: sounds funny in this age of special effects and cgi
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: what the movie does the exact and the making of
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: the movie does the exact insane thing that is portrayed
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: as an insane thing in the movie.
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: No, I do not agree insane. Okay, it is number one.
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: I knew it was doable, and I did it. And
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: it is not insane because it's a big metaphor somehow
• 48:59
  Speaker 2: dormant in us, so big, like let's say don Quixote
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: tackling with his lands the windmills. It's something described, of
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: course by Sevantes and we know, a yeah, that's somehow
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: in us. It's a metaphor or Mobby Dick the Hunt
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: for the White Whale, things like that. And I knew
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: a ship pulled over a mountain by force of human
• 49:30
  Speaker 2: strength and turnstiles and coiling up ropes, and I would
• 49:35
  Speaker 2: move it over a mountain. It's a big metaphor, not insanity,
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: because it's deep inside of us and it has something
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: that I could articulate and others couldn't. But since I articulated,
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: we have a metaphor, one more of the metaphors that
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: are probably dormant in many of us. Absolutely not insanity,
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: clinically sane, so to speak.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: But I did stay in corrected.
• 50:07
  Speaker 2: And at the time, of course, there was no digital effect.
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: It was done in nineteen eighty one.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: You had to do it when you had no not.
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: Not necessarily because twentieth Century Fox at the time wanted
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: to produce the film, however, only with a miniature plastic
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: replica and what they called in a good Jungle, and
• 50:33
  Speaker 2: they meant the botanic garden in San Diego. And I
• 50:37
  Speaker 2: asked them, gentlemen, what's the bad jungle then? And that
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: it became frosty and I knew I was alone and
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: I had to do it alone. I was also the
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: producer of the film, and so I don't want to
• 50:54
  Speaker 2: miss this work.
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: What a how do you look at with all the
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: movies you made, sixty over sixty movies and how many
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: books you don know.
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: It's probably eighty movies by now.
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: And a dozen books or so.
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, in poetry, and I just finished yet another book.
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: You have to take it seriously that that I am
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: deeply inside convinced that the written stuff, the pros, the poetry,
• 51:29
  Speaker 2: has somewhat direct impact something. And it's not the events
• 51:34
  Speaker 2: you see if you're in my memoirs, if you look
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: after event, event event, Yes, of course a wild events.
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: But it's a style, it's a prose. That's what makes
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: the book on.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, you're a I mean like from me to
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: feel the need to tell you this, but I mean,
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: you're a phenomenal writer. And reading your book, I had
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: said Karen, our producer, I had said, I had kind
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: of given up on literary memoirs in exchange for memoirs
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: autobiographies of people who have a you know, a story
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: to tell, right, and this book but this book is.
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: But this book is a combination of those two things.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, this book is. This book is of a
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: high literary merit, like like you know, as a writer,
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: as a person who loves the language, it's of high
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: literary merit, but also does that heavy lifting of telling
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: a story that really ought to be told, which is
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: how you came to view the world the way you
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: do and produce the work that you did. But I
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: have two last questions. With all that work, how do
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: you gauge which How do you gauge which are the
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: your favorites? Like which are the ones you shouldn't have done?
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: What are you going to do?
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: You can stop right away. I love them all, I
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: truly love them all, and they're all good. They're all good.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: There's no one you wish you could put ba in
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: the box.
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: No, for God's sake, never only over made that body.
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: I would allow you to put it away and put
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: it back, but you have to be aware that. Of course,
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: I'm critical as well, and I see mistakes. Yes, I
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: do see mistakes, and I see how I evolved as
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: a kid who made films because I made my first
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: film at the age of nineteen.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: I know you made your first phone call at seventeen.
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: That's true. Yes, nobody, Yes, nobody nowadays believes it. Everybody
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: with a cell phones and applications. So I literally made
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: my first phone call it age seventeen. Yes, all these films,
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: I see mistakes, mistake here, mistake there, but I accept them.
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: I can live with it. And it's the same way
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: like with a mother. You do not ask the mother
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: your five children here, which is your favorite? And you
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: know who the favorites are. My favorites are all the
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: children that have the worst defects, the child that has
• 54:22
  Speaker 2: squint eyes, the child that has a stutter, the child
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: that has a limp. And I would be as a
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: mother the lioness to help them, defend them, make them proud,
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: shine as great and wonderful as they can shine.
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: You mentioned a minute ago you said, over my dead body, Uh,
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: let's move on to your dead body for me? What
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: I have no idea? What you'd say to this? What?
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: What do you what do you hope and fear about?
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: What's going to happen to you when you die? Like?
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: What do you are? Do you entertain an idea?
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: No, I won't be around anymore. I always said, posterity
• 55:14
  Speaker 2: doesn't interest me because I won't be around there anyway.
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: However, But like what what I mean? Do you do
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: you picture? What is your idea? I don't know, get
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: like I don't want to get like terribly personal in
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: a way, it's on card. But what is your idea
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: of an afterlife?
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: I think it's highly likely that there's no afterlife.
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: So your posterity like you don't care about that, and
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: then it's.
• 55:38
  Speaker 2: I won't be around here. However, I did something which
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: was not in my catalog of behavior and thinking, and
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: my brothers and my wife Lynna convinced me there are
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: ad films, negatives, mixes, tens of thousands of photos, manuscripts,
• 55:59
  Speaker 2: you just name it, documents. It should be somehow preserved.
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: And I started a non profit foundation which is has
• 56:13
  Speaker 2: the oversight of the state of Bavaria, where all the
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: rights of all my films, of everything I've created went
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: in Bavaria. Well, because because my culture is Bavarian.
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: I feel like you owe that. I feel like you
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: owe that to the America.
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: No, because you you do not see where I come from.
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: English was only my fourth or fifth language. I mean,
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: but that's the language. It doesn't matter. It's I would
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: not write a novel like The Twilight World in English.
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: I write it in German and it's translated.
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: And your your new book was translated.
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: Sure, yes, very well. The best translator arguably from Germany
• 57:04
  Speaker 2: into English has done it. Michael Hoffmann. It's in German prose.
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but you but you have zero problem communicating in English?
• 57:13
  Speaker 2: Yes, but I do not write poetry in English. You
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: can only do it in your in your mother tongue.
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: But let me go back to the to the after life. Yes,
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: my my work will have after life because it's owned
• 57:29
  Speaker 2: now by a foundation, a nonprofit foundation. In other words,
• 57:34
  Speaker 2: if I become impoverished tomorrow, I cannot sell the catalog
• 57:39
  Speaker 2: of my films to Time Turner Classics or you just
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: name it, because I do not own them anymore.
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: You're protecting yourself and yourself.
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: No, I don't need protection against myself. I understand that.
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: And I was clearly told, sat down at a table
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: by my wife in She said to me, you think
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: your films are your property? Yes, many of them that
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: I produced and wrote and directed technically legally, they are
• 58:12
  Speaker 2: my property. But you know what, you really do not
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: own them. The people own it. The people, the audiences
• 58:20
  Speaker 2: out there, they own it. They owned the books, they
• 58:24
  Speaker 2: own your pros, they own your poetry, they own your memoirs.
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: So and I'm completely at ease with that and let
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: let life go on. I won't be around And that's
• 58:45
  Speaker 2: totally absolutely fine, because we are made into all biological
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: life is made like that. I'm totally at ease, I likes.
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: I got one last question for you, Okay, I haven't
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: gotten to the end of of every Man for Himself
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: and God Against All your new memoir. Do you this
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: one's for from my kids? Do you in the end
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: of that book get into acting in the Mandalorian or
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: is not address in the memoir?
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: I believe I am addressing it, but briefly. But the
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: end it has a very very strange end that he
• 59:25
  Speaker 2: will never see anywhere in world literature. And it has
• 59:31
  Speaker 2: to do with something the Japanese soldier hero Onoda, who
• 59:37
  Speaker 2: fought the Second World War twenty nine years still after
• 59:43
  Speaker 2: the end of the war in the Jungling in the Philippines,
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: and he had survived one hundred and eleven ambushes and
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: being fired at. And he says to me, because we
• 59:55
  Speaker 2: were discussing time, does present time existent? Is there only
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: past in future? And present time is a fiction? Which
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 2: actually is And he says, but sometimes you can see
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 2: the future, because one day a bullet was fired at him,
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: and the sun very low, and he sees a bullet
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 2: coming right at him, and with the sun it has
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 2: this orange copper kind of glow, and he knows it
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 2: will kill him, and he only had time to rotate
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: his body to the side and whist it whizzed by
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: his body. And I was writing on my last chapter.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: I knew it was going to be the last chapter,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 2: the absence of images, the absence of the human race
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: on this planet, maybe two hundred thousand years in the future.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: And I was typing at a window was out there,
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, I have this sensation a
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 2: bullet is coming at me, because I saw in somehow
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 2: I sense something golden and greenish iridescent came shooting towards me.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: And I look up, but it was not a bullet.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 2: It was a hummingbird. Sometimes they shoot straight like that.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 2: And I looked at my text. In the moment I
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: had reached I thought, I don't I shouldn't write any
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 2: more word. And the text stops in mid sentence. The book,
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: the entire book stops in mid sentence.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: And that's it.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: That's it.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: Did you get a lot of pushback from an editor?
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: Now they loved it in audiences those who read it.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: You will see when you finish reading the memoirs, you
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 2: will like it, I guess.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: So thank you very much for joining us. Check out patience. Well,
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: check out all of his movies, and especially check out
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog,
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: and then do yourself a favor and watch Happy People.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, they're highly advisibly.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Picture. We've talked about it a lot.
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: We've talked about it, we've promoted it, we've pimped it.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: It's here, it's finally ready. You can go right now
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: and get it. You can go right now, go to
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: where you buy your audio books, go to where you
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: buy your audio originals, right now, and you can get it.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: It's done. You can get it right now, beating the
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: table because you can get it. What can you get?
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: You can get me Eater's American History The Long Hunters
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five. This is the
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: beginning of a big project, and this is just the
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: first one. We're doing the first installment of meat Eaters
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: of American History, where we explain in great fun, lively, bloody detail,
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: chunks of American history. The one we're starting with is
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: the Long Hunters. If you wonder what a long hunter is,
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: Daniel Boone was a long hunter. Everybody knows Daniel Boone, like, oh,
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: he's some kind of pioneer or explorer. Well he was,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: but he was a long hunter. He was a white
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: tail deer skin hunter. That was his business, that was
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: his craft, that was his trade. The peak of the
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: long hunter era, mean the peak of the white tail
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: deer hide business, as we're going to explain in this thing,
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: runs from about seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: If seventeen seventy five sticks in your head as some
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: a year something happened, that's because it's right before seventeen
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: seventy six. And if you're any kind of American, you
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: know seventeen seventy six Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War. Okay,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: there's a reason that this era ends then, and this
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: you will learn this reason and be fascinated by this,
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: Like why would the long hunters who are hunting white
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: tailed deer skins, having all kinds of adventures and getting
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: killed like flies, why would that all of a sudden
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: end with the American Revolution? You will learn when you
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: get meters American History, Long Hunters seventeen sixty one to
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: seventeen seventy five. It's an audio original. You can't read this,
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: you can only listen to it. It's narrated by me,
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: Steven Ronella, my friend Klay Nukeom and exhaustively researched by
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: me Eater Trivia thirty time champion, whatever the hell he is,
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: Doctor Randall Williams. It's out now now. This is the
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: definitive telling of the story of the long hunters. It's
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: perfect for you if you are a person who understands
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: or wants to understand how backwoods hunting actually happened in
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: the years before the American Revolution, and how market hunters,
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: these are people who hunt for a living, how they
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: actually went ab out their business of killing, skinning, selling
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: scores or hundreds of deer per season, which if they
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: were successful, could be more lucrative than farming. Really being
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: a long hunter, if you got lucky and lived, and
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: you got lucky and had a good hunt, you got
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: lucky and all your stuff didn't get stolen by Native Americans,
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: or they wouldn't view it as stolen. They would view
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: it as taking their stuff back from you, which you
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: stole from them. Was more lucrative than farming, is more
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: lucrative than being a builder, more lucrative than all that.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: In this we start out that there's a phenomenal opening
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: to the book which is going to hook you like
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: a circle hook. But we quickly get into this question
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: what is a long hunter? Now? Like I said, you know,
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: the most famous one of all Daniel Boone, But he
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: was only one of a generation of backwoodsmen who were
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: hunting white tailed deer for the commercial high market. I
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: was tempted to say one of a generation of Americans.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: But as we'll get into, the idea of America hadn't
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: taken shape, and the long hunters did not identify as Americans.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: We talk about that about some of these long hunters
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: like Daniel Boone becoming these sort of honorary founding fathers,
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: but they were anything but founding fathers of America. These
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: guys participated in hunting expeditions beyond the line of British
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: colonial settlement to supply a booming as will explain, global
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: marketplace for white tailed deer skins you might expect from
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: the name. They were gone a long time, months or
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: even years at a time on hunting trips, killing hundreds
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: of deer, killing thousands of deer. These adventures include some
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: of the most hair raising and jaw dropping stories of
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: wilderness living and deer hunting known to man. In this
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: audio original, you're going to hear about buffalo stampedes, bear attacks,
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: people get lost, bodies getting found, long journeys, close calls,
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: in the rise and fall of a forgotten trade, and
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: the skin of a creature that remains America's favorite big
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: game animal. We've always had market hunters. We continue to
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: have market hunters. Okay, keep this in mind as you
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: as you go about getting into this story. We explain
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: all this. You've got market hunters who hunt for whale oil. Okay,
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: if you've read Moby Dick, you've read about whale oil
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: market hunters. You've got market hunters who hunted for beaver pelts.
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: So if you're familiar with the exploits of say Jim Bridger,
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: he was a market hunter. After beaver pelts, you have
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: market hunters who hunted for buffalo hides and buffalo meat.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: Buffalo Bill Cody you probably heard of, he was a
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: buffalo meat market hunter. Davy Crockett market hunter, generally black
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: bear meat market hunter. But these guys were from the
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: era when the thing that the market hunters were after,
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: the money to be made was in deer skins, But
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: our story is not. It's the story of the rise
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: and fall of trade in this particular animal. These guys
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: were engaged in a risky business, and this chapter of history,
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: this broad story that we telling, this includes no shortage
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: of life or death adventures. As you'll see, Daniel Boone
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: is one example. He in this area that we describe
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: and we described as the first Far West. We'll explain
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: why we call it the first far West, And as
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: you'll learn, the second Far West is the one you
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: think of when you think of far West. When you
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: hear far West, you probably think the American Great Plains,
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountains. As we'll explain, that's the second Far West.
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: This is the first Far West, and it was just
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: as harrowing Boone, Daniel Boone, you heard the name. He
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: probably don't know. He lost two sons, He lost his brother,
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: he lost his brother in law, all in the first
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: Far West. And those are some heart wrenching stories. But
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: even these father son tragedies were not limited to the Boons.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: Here's a snippet of a story we tell about long
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: hunter named Henry Skaggs, who witnessed his own son's death
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: as well. This happened in the late seventeen seventies when
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: Skaggs was hunting with about twenty long hunters and what
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: is now Kentucky along the Green River. They're out, they
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: get attacked by Indians. They lose a bunch of their horses.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: Most of the guys that are with Skags turntail and run.
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: They want to head back to the settlements, but three
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: of them stick it out. It's Henry Skaggs, his son
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: John In a hunter named Alexander Sinclair. They go over
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: the Cumberland Gap, and if you've heard of the Cumberland Gap,
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: you're gonna at the end of this, when you buy this, listen,
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: you're gonna know more about the Cumberland Gap than anybody
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: you've ever met. They go over to Cumberland Gap and
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: begin their hunt, but it's one of the worst winners
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: on record. Hunters that winter were reporting large numbers of
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: deer simply frozen to death near Salt Licks. And if
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: you're thinking, what the hell's is salt Lick, you will
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: know more about Salt Licks than anybody you've ever met.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: When you finish listen to this. So Skaggs keeps hunting
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: out right, all his friends take off and sk Eggs
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: hunts it out and we tell this whole story. His
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: son gets sick soon after that guy Sinclair, who's with him,
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: heads off to run his trap line, never to be
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: seen him again. Henry Skaggs leaves his sick child and
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: goes to try to find the guy. All he can
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: finds a hole in the ice, and he deduces that
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: the guy must have just fallen through the frozen surface
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: of the Green River drowned. Apparently, the river freezes back
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: up shortly after that, Skags his boy dies, but the
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: ground's so frozen he can't dig a grave, so he
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: stuffs his boy's body into a hollow log and stoppers
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: up the ends. He then returns to a station camp.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: If you're like, what in the hell's a station camp,
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: you will learn very well what a station camp is.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: And then Skags alone now, after losing his partner and
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: his son, spends his whole winter under an overhanging rock
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: near a salt lick and kills whatever animals he can
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: find that approach the lick, and then in the spring
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: makes his way back to the settlements. This is like
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: nothing compared to other hardships you'll encounter in this story.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: Some of these stories blow away anything you'll hear of
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountains and the mountain men. Here's another one
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: in May seventeen seventy one. This is a story we
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: tell in great detail. Daniel and his brother Squire Boone,
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: are headed back to the settlements after a long hunt,
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: and they need to stop to shoot some game for
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: meat that they're gonna bring home with them. They set
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: up camp and Squire is just heading out to hunt
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: when he sees a lone figure coming in the distance.
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: He's cautious about it. He doesn't know who it is,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: but it winds up being a guy named Alexander Neely,
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: who they'd been hunting with and had vanished on a
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: previous long hunt. The guy's all messed up, his clothing's torn,
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: he's starving to death. His arms and legs are all
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: cut up. Neely explains that he had got separated from
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: a group of hunters and tried to shoot his gun
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: fire off his gun so they could hear him, but
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: he burned up all of his gunpowder, so he had
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: no way of shooting his gun anymore, and never found
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: his hunting partners. Tried to make his way back to
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: the settlement with no gun, so he's got no way
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: of obtaining meat, gets hopelessly lost, and then one day
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: he's resting against a downtree and a dog shows up.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: This dog probably belonged to an Indian hunter, and it
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: runs up to greet him, but Neely strangles the dog
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: and roasts it and makes jerky out of it and
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: stores that jerky in a sack made out of the
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: dog's skin. When Squire Boone finds him, he still got
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: some of this dog jerky in the dog skin bag,
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: and Squire Boone comments how it was quite alive with maggots.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: This is all stuff you're going to hear about. It's
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: just it's stuff that blows your mind. And I had
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: been my whole life, I've read about the long hunters,
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: and these are all like so many of these stories
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: like that one, for instance, are stories that I had
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: never known until he got into this project. Like this
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: is the level of detail stuff that we drug out
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: through research to bring out in this project. And there's
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: other stuff that's going to really blow your mind. Because
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: you might have heard a lot about Daniel Boone or
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: heard the term long hunters even but there's stuff you
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: might not know, like even just the intricacy of game
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: laws back then in the first Far West, meaning there
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: was restrictions on the kind of hunting that these backwoods
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: frontiersmen were supposed to do, whether or not people listened
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: to him or not. There were restrictions passed by lawmakers
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: to try to discourage these colonial backwoodsmen from engaging in
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: the deer skin trade. So this is an era when
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: Daniel Boone these other Euro American hunters are literally having
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: like running gun battles with Native Americans over access to
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: deer herds. Meanwhile there's people trying to impose game laws
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: on them. There was a law meant to prevent these
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: so called quote disorderly persons from hunting deer quote merely
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: for the sake of skins, which lawmakers pointed out were
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: clandestinely carried out of the colony in order that the
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: hunters could avoid paying taxes, or that legislators in some
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: areas had explicitly banned the practice of shooting or killing
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: any deer just for the skin. You could not kill
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: a deer for the skin while leaving the flesh in
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: the woods to rot. If you did, you were subject
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: to a fine. And in this project, as you're listening
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: to this, you'll learn like how that could be reconciled
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: with this history of people who are killing hundreds or
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: thousands of deer for the skins. Likewise, to try to
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: discourage over harvest by market hunters. In North Carolina, check
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: this out, they had a law that prohibited you from
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: hunting deer if you didn't have a settled habitation in
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: the colony. So nowadays, when you hear people complaining about
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: out of state hunters, there were rules like that in
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: place them and we lay these out. I think the
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: reason most stories miss this stuff is because they have
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: an audience that isn't going to understand or they fear
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: they won't understand it anyways. But our audience understands this,
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: and you're gonna be like delighted in these kind of intricacies.
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: You needed to have in certain places. Check this one.
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: You needed to have five thousand corn hills within the
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: colony in order to be illegal deer hunter, meaning they
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: would at that time they would say like no, no,
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: you gotta have you gotta have you can't be from
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: out of town, you gotta have land. Not only you
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: gotta have land, you have to have five thousand corn hills.
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: And you'll learn what a corn hill was and why
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: that mattered if you wanted to hunt deer. South Carolina
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: at the time Boone was out being Boone, South Carolina
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: passed the law that made it illegal to hunt more
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: than seven miles from one's own home in an effort
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: to try to restrict these commercial deer hunters who would
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: come through an area and wipe out the deer to
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: get the hides. There were exceptions of these rules, meaning
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: they still even back then. You've heard of depredation permits now,
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: even back then, pre America, okay, pre Declaration of Independence,
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: there was exemptions for landowners who needed to kill deer
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: to protect their crops, and there were exceptions for people
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: who needed to kill deer for food what they called
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: the necessary subsistence of himself or his family. But even then,
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: they had provisions. Back then, if you killed a deer
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: for food, you were not allowed to sell or dispose
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: of the skin, because they were trying to deter these
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: frontier settlers, these crazy backwoods wild men from hunting deer
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: for skins. These restrictions combined with declining deer numbers are
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: part of what pushed the long hunters to go further
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: and further west into the farther reaches of this first
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: far West. Now, what we wanted to do with this book,
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: I'm just giving you a handful of examples of stuff
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: you're going to learn. We're talking. This is hours of
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: material that's like expert researched and very succinctly presented. This
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: is just me talking about this thing. But this thing
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: is different because it's it's perfect. Okay. What we wanted
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: to do in the book is we wanted to dig
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: into the historical sources so we could tell you who
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: these guys were, like really, who they were, where they
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: came from, what their backgrounds were, what their circumstances were,
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: what pushed them into this this very deadly bloody trade,
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: Why they engaged in the deerskin trade, which means we
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: have to explain what America was then, who Americans were then,
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: what the globe looked like then, what cattle ranching was, like,
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: why there was a shortage of leather, And telling this
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: we explained all this other stuff like why did they
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: use the rifles they use When you hear of a
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: Kentucky long rifle. What did that mean back then? Now
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: you shoot it because it seems old and antique. They
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: shot them because it was the most sophisticated weapon you
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: could get your hands on. They were shooting state of
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: the art equipment, cutting edge equipment. Why was that the
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: way it was? How did they camp? Because I mean, remember, no,
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: they didn't have flashlights, they didn't have lighters, they didn't
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: have tents. But they're gone for two years killing deer
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: in the woods. How did they camp? What did they eat?
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: What were their interactions with native people? What were the
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: long hunter's interactions with tribes the Shawnee, the Cherokee, who
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: had a rightful, thousands of years old claim to these
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: hunting grounds. And this becomes a really complicated thing that
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: will explain. The long Hunters had this idea of this area,
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: against all historical evidence outside of these things that they
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: saw when they were there, they had this idea that
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: it was unclaimed. And we're gonna talk we talk a
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: lot about that. Why did the long hunters think there
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: was on this landscape the first far West? Why did
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: they think it was unclaimed? And why did the Shawnee
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: and Cherokee and other tribes know that in fact, that
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: was not true. It was quite claimed. They had been
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: hunting it a long time and they were not going
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: to stand by and watch these euro Americans come in
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: and rape and pillage the landscape and deplete it of deer.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: So we explore this, just like very different perceptions of
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: the American wilderness. To the long hunters, it was wilderness,
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: it was the unknown, it was the dark and dangerous.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: Right to the Shawnee and Cherokee, it was home. It
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: was their hunting spot. And this disagreement takes many shapes
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: and forms, and we dig a lot into this so
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: you can understand this interplay of America and Native America
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: on the landscape. How did the long hunters like actually
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: hunt deer? This is something like there are audience is
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: going to want to know because you might just read
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: a normal history book they hunted deer. But you know
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: about hunting deer, right, You know about bait, you know
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: about blinds, you know what still hunting is, you know
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: what deer drives are, you know what ambush hunting is.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: We tell you how they were so effective, like how
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: they hunted deer, and a normal history book might be
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: like they sold the skins, they processed the skins, but
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: you want to know more, we tell you, like like
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: how they skinned them, what they did with those skins,
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: step by step, and we're honest with you when there's
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: parts of that explanation that we don't know, and we
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: tell you why we don't know what we know. We
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: tell you why, how we know what we know, and
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: we were straight with you when we tell you what's
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: not known. How the skins get the market, and then
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: how did those skins travel across the Atlantic to craftsmen
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: and consumers in Europe and get this? How did piracy pirates?
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: How did piracy play into this whole thing. It includes
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: a deep dive on the global financial circumstances, the global
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: economic circumstances that drove the deerskin trade at that time,
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: and all of this plays into explaining what would cause
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: a person who could become some humdrum farmer to instead
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: risk fairly certain death, pretty certain death, damn certain trouble
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: and risk to go out and become this thing called
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: a long hunter. Me Eater's American History The Long Hunters
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five, narrated by me
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: Steven Ranella and Clay Newcomb available now wherever you get
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: your books.