Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Steven Rinella, The MeatEater

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Steven Rinella, The MeatEater · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:05
  Here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 0:07
  Is it okay to kill torture, slaughter, animals because you like the taste of their flesh?
• 0:14
  Don't worry, this is not an episode that is going to badger you about becoming a vegetarian
• 0:18
  or a vegan.
• 0:19
  Indeed, today's guest is quite the reverse.
• 0:21
  He's one of the most important advocates for hunting in the United States.
• 0:26
  Indeed, he's the man who got Joe Rogan interested in hunting.
• 0:31
  We were connected via our common friendship with Mr. Rogan, and once I started watching
• 0:36
  and reading Steven Ellers' work, I was struck by his depth, his humanity, his sense of
• 0:42
  humor, the kind of guy who I just instantly want to be friends with.
• 0:48
  He is the host of a television show and a podcast called Meet Eater, and he's written
• 0:53
  ten books dealing with wildlife and hunting.
• 0:57
  And I wanted to get inside the brain of someone who is committed to an enterprise that is
• 1:02
  so alien to me as an effort in the city, latte sipping, chardonnay, swilling young man
• 1:11
  who wouldn't know a gun from his ass.
• 1:14
  And Steve has incredible ideas about ecology, about the natural world, about the morality
• 1:19
  of eating meat.
• 1:20
  I try to get into it with him, I try to wrestle with these ideas, and I try to understand
• 1:26
  what motivates the hunter.
• 1:29
  Steve is totally fascinating.
• 1:30
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did this conversation with one of these Steve Rinaldo.
• 1:37
  Hey, Ben.
• 1:37
  Good.
• 1:38
  Yeah, I'm good.
• 1:39
  I briefly got to enjoy the beauty of your visit, and the deep rich timbre of your voice
• 1:45
  for about three minutes during a spot exactly next year.
• 1:50
  And you are dreaming of it ever since, Steve.
• 1:54
  You came to the U.S. too, right?
• 1:56
  Yeah, that's right.
• 1:57
  That's right.
• 1:58
  Man, that was a whistle.
• 1:59
  That was a whistle-stop trip.
• 2:01
  I'm glad I didn't try to squeeze it in.
• 2:04
  I'm bummed I didn't get to see you while I was in the States, but it was already like
• 2:10
  one day here, one day there, one day in the next spot, and you guys were a slight detour.
• 2:17
  No offense.
• 2:18
  You're the center of the universe and everything else revolves around Montana, but that was
• 2:24
  a aviation flight schedules and commercial flights.
• 2:28
  It was going to be a whole.
• 2:29
  Yeah, it's a little tougher.
• 2:31
  Well, sorry to miss you.
• 2:33
  That's all right.
• 2:34
  How do you manage it?
• 2:35
  Do you have a private jet?
• 2:37
  No, no, I do not.
• 2:39
  I was with some fellows the other day that were telling me about their private jet, and
• 2:43
  how convenient it is.
• 2:45
  But no, I don't.
• 2:46
  I don't have one.
• 2:47
  I just fly around on the regular airplanes.
• 2:50
  Yeah.
• 2:51
  I know.
• 2:52
  The private jet thing reminds me is one of those things where if you go there, you're just
• 2:56
  never going to go back.
• 2:57
  You're always going to do whatever has to be done financially to make your private jet
• 3:01
  work for you because standing up and standing on the TSA line and then boarding with everybody
• 3:09
  else for the birds, man.
• 3:11
  Yeah.
• 3:12
  It'd be hard to go back.
• 3:13
  Absolutely.
• 3:14
  I'm probably going to stay where I'm going to stay where I'm at, I think.
• 3:18
  And just never leave?
• 3:20
  All you mean, never fly by?
• 3:21
  No, I mean, I'd be like, yeah, we have humans, you know, we just get used to what we got,
• 3:27
  right?
• 3:28
  Like, I was telling my kids the other day, my daughter was, we're going to new bed for
• 3:33
  my daughter, and I was telling them how for a couple of years, I slept.
• 3:36
  I had a couch that I turned into the wall to make like a little coffin shape.
• 3:43
  And instead of the couch opening out, I just shoved it, I flipped it and shoved it against
• 3:47
  the wall.
• 3:48
  Right.
• 3:49
  And I was saying, well, I was explaining to her that I went so many years without a bed
• 3:53
  bed and would sleep in that little coffin couch or I would sleep on those foam shipping
• 4:00
  mats.
• 4:01
  Yep.
• 4:02
  You know?
• 4:03
  And now that I have, you know, I'm not going to go like, now I have like a nice bed.
• 4:08
  I'm not going to go back to that coffin couch, dude.
• 4:12
  No.
• 4:13
  So if I was to start flying around in my own arrow plane, I'm not going to, it'd be very
• 4:18
  hard for me to go back to like 20, 26 D on United.
• 4:23
  Yeah.
• 4:24
  Yeah.
• 4:25
  I know.
• 4:26
  Absolutely.
• 4:27
  So the coffin couch bed, what did this flip up against the wall, are you saying?
• 4:33
  Because picture how you'd normally position a couch against the wall.
• 4:36
  Yeah.
• 4:37
  The back of the couch is against the wall.
• 4:40
  Yeah.
• 4:41
  Well, imagine if you, then it had big armrests on the ends, if you flipped it.
• 4:48
  So the back was away from the wall and it created like a little bucket.
• 4:51
  I created a little.
• 4:52
  It's a coffin.
• 4:53
  That heads the coffin.
• 4:54
  Yeah.
• 4:55
  And I would sleep.
• 4:56
  Because you know, it's just a boxy and real nice.
• 4:59
  You're not going to fall out just that little box.
• 5:02
  I would sleep in a little box.
• 5:04
  You'd feel secure.
• 5:05
  I feel like a little bad job who's made his little nest.
• 5:08
  No, nothing's going to get you.
• 5:09
  The eagle would have to swoop down vertically to take you out.
• 5:13
  It could never get in the sun.
• 5:15
  Yeah.
• 5:16
  It's not getting out of there.
• 5:17
  When you first said that it was against the wall, I was envisaging one of those like
• 5:21
  1970s, born staff, flipped down beds that would come down from the wall and then, you
• 5:27
  know, a Murphy bed, a Murphy bed, I think that's what it's called.
• 5:31
  You could put it, but it's very kind of Harvey Weinstein, you know, come into my office
• 5:36
  and enjoy this wall, which also turns into a sex dungeon.
• 5:43
  Man, you know, it was funny.
• 5:46
  My, you mentioned him when I sold my first book, they bought my first book, Mirror Max
• 5:58
  did, and when I met my wife, that's where she worked.
• 6:03
  Wow.
• 6:04
  Really?
• 6:05
  Yeah.
• 6:06
  She worked for Mirror Max and Weinstein Company, yeah.
• 6:09
  What was she doing?
• 6:10
  Dare I ask?
• 6:11
  She worked.
• 6:12
  She's always worked in book publishing.
• 6:14
  Right.
• 6:15
  And Mirror Max had a book publishing arm.
• 6:17
  They had a book publishing arm.
• 6:19
  Yeah.
• 6:20
  I can't remember.
• 6:21
  I'm trying to remember who ran it for within the years I bought it.
• 6:23
  He was like a long publishing guy.
• 6:26
  Um, I'll never, I, I should say I'll never remember his name, I can't think of his name
• 6:33
  right now.
• 6:34
  Yeah.
• 6:35
  Yeah.
• 6:36
  Yeah.
• 6:37
  Yeah.
• 6:38
  Mirror Max had a book publishing arm.
• 6:39
  As soon as we stopped talking, you'll remember.
• 6:40
  You can send me a text.
• 6:41
  A lot of their titles that they, a lot of the titles they did were like, you know, they
• 6:46
  did a lot of titles that were kind of like Harvey's friends, man or, or people that Harvey
• 6:52
  would owe favors to or, you know, I remember they had given a book deal to like a page six
• 6:58
  columnist, you know, probably to keep them friendly.
• 7:01
  It was like a political figures they would publish.
• 7:04
  She was now, now looking at the whole thing now, one, you realize some of the decisions
• 7:09
  that were made.
• 7:10
  And then two, I think of how in the world, like, why did they ever buy my book?
• 7:18
  What kind of favoritism was he angling for?
• 7:21
  Yeah.
• 7:22
  What did you have to do?
• 7:23
  It was, it was, it was peers that driven snow and there was nothing to get out of you.
• 7:28
  There was nothing to, you're trying to keep me from telling anyone.
• 7:33
  That's interesting.
• 7:34
  Now I have to look into your sorted past and try to figure out if you were on an Epstein's
• 7:38
  rape island and Harvey was just trying to show up or something.
• 7:42
  Exactly.
• 7:43
  Man, no, I'm telling you, not going to find it was just a good on its book, it's a good
• 7:47
  honest book.
• 7:48
  He doesn't even fly private, I mean, come on, he wasn't in there with Epstein, hasn't
• 7:53
  even been on a private jet.
• 7:55
  Yeah, you know, it doesn't fly, you know, it doesn't fly to that island.
• 7:59
  No, that's right.
• 8:00
  No hand jobs, even in first class, even in, even what do they call it in your business
• 8:06
  first thing, United Polaris, even I think in Polaris, you get a handy, I think that's
• 8:13
  all right.
• 8:14
  Yeah, I think that comes with the Polaris ticket.
• 8:16
  Oddly long hole, only on flights of over 12 hours, you get pajamas and a hand job.
• 8:22
  Steve, was the book option for a movie when you sold it to Weinstein or was it just for
• 8:27
  publishing?
• 8:28
  No, I've never had, I haven't had, I'm trying to think, I've never had, I've had articles
• 8:35
  option for shows and movies and stuff, but I haven't had, I haven't had a book option,
• 8:42
  I haven't had a book option and that book was not optioned.
• 8:45
  Okay.
• 8:46
  It wasn't really, it wouldn't have really fit that well, it was, it was a, no, I don't
• 8:50
  know, I guess it could have, because it was strikingly similar to a book that did, it
• 8:56
  came out around the same time too as Julie and Julie, do you remember that book, Julie
• 9:00
  and Julie, and it wanted to be in a like a Merrill Street film, I think?
• 9:04
  Sadly, I do.
• 9:05
  I never, I've never dealt into it.
• 9:07
  Yeah, a Merrill Street played Julie a child, my book was right around then and it was,
• 9:11
  and they were remarkably similar, I didn't, I hadn't ever talked to the author, but my
• 9:15
  first book was, it was about, there's a, there's a French chef, a scophier, and when I'm
• 9:25
  trying to explain this to, when I'm trying to explain him to people or get people to recognize
• 9:30
  the name, if you're watching, when you, when you watch apocalypse now, you know, which
• 9:35
  is the greatest movie I ever made.
• 9:38
  And when Chef and, and Captain Willard go into the jungle looking for mangoes, Chef has
• 9:46
  explained to Captain Willard that he went to the, like, the scophier school, and then people
• 9:53
  know Ritz, like the Ritz hotels, right, Cesar Ritz, the scophier was Ritz's chef in, in,
• 9:59
  in his hotels.
• 10:01
  He invented all these dishes, but in 1903, he published this 5,000 recipe compendium
• 10:09
  on old, like, like French old cuisine, so high cuisine.
• 10:14
  And I did a book about finding all of the, all the shit from the book, like, like, hunting
• 10:22
  and fishing and scavenging and collecting all the ingredients from the book, because at
• 10:29
  that time, it was much more common, like, like, wild game, and all these esoteric foods
• 10:36
  were really popular, and it was, it was the food of the royalty.
• 10:40
  So I did a book about just traveling around and finding, you know, an exploration of all
• 10:45
  these ingredients and eating habits over the time, and I found all these, these ingredients
• 10:51
  to cook 45 courses over, over three days, I prepared 45 courses from a scophier's book
• 10:59
  and so is about, like, changing habits, and also about wild, American wildlife and food
• 11:08
  and things, and no one made it, and no one made it in any kind of movie.
• 11:13
  I can see the, not too late, if you remember you're out there, I'm not too late, man, I had
• 11:18
  an option this shit, I'll play you, Meryl Streep will play the escoffier, what does
• 11:24
  an escoffier do, what does that mean?
• 11:29
  August, like, oh, no, no, he was a person, oh, that's a, that's a person's name, escoffier.
• 11:35
  Yeah, August the scophier, and his, yeah, August, you know, August whatever, escoffier, he
• 11:43
  was a man, he was a, he was the, some people call him the father of a cuisine, like, he,
• 11:50
  he took, he took this, this classical French tradition of cooking and put it into words,
• 12:01
  put it into a book, and sort of like, and captured, codified this, this, like, French
• 12:08
  haikwazine in this culinary guide, that was, that was his big, famous masterpiece was the
• 12:13
  culinary guide.
• 12:14
  Like, it says 5,000 recipes of just sowing, like, you know, sowing pigeons inside animal
• 12:24
  bladders and poaching them and truffles and taking a carp and stripping all the flesh
• 12:32
  off a carp and then molding it back into the shape of a carp with its head and tail,
• 12:38
  and then recreating the scales with truffles, you know, all this stuff, like, just like, just
• 12:44
  outrageous, just this whole outrageous culinary tradition.
• 12:50
  I know that when I'm cooking dinner for my six-year-old kid's steak, the first thing
• 12:54
  they asked for is a whole cop ground up and then reshaped into a cop with truffles for
• 13:01
  scales.
• 13:02
  If it wasn't for escoffier, they wouldn't, they'd be eating nothing.
• 13:04
  I wouldn't be, they're like, daddy, daddy, make us the pigeon, stop sowed into a bladder.
• 13:10
  Yeah, it was so wild.
• 13:13
  It was really wild and really extravagant.
• 13:16
  It came out of this time period of just like incredible opulence, and when you're reading
• 13:21
  about that era, you know, you find that like, everyone suffers from gout, you know, just,
• 13:25
  there was just this class of people, there was this class of people, and there were some
• 13:31
  in the US and many in Europe who were just, they were gourmands, you know, I mean, like,
• 13:36
  your life was, your life was comprised of social events and elaborate feasts and feasting,
• 13:44
  and who could like, outdo who on feasting, and that you could somehow manage to eat a dozen
• 13:51
  oysters, you know, was sort of like a, was like an achievement, right?
• 13:57
  It wasn't just, it wasn't gross, it was an achievement, you know, you could go and
• 14:04
  in a day drink, you know, two bottles of champagne and eat what they would call a gross, you
• 14:12
  know, eat a dozen dozen.
• 14:15
  It doesn't, have 144, four pastes.
• 14:19
  Wow.
• 14:20
  You know, a half dozen oysters is romantic, a dozen is opulent, a dozen dozen is like,
• 14:27
  I'm just a French king, roll me into the Atlantic Ocean.
• 14:31
  No, it was, it was, yeah, it was, it was just an outrageous era.
• 14:36
  So that was, that was the book that, that was the book that, to bring us back around
• 14:40
  to our body RV, that was the book that Harvey bought.
• 14:43
  I mean, I also loved the kind of awful thing, the thing you mentioned about how back in
• 14:47
  the day, it was considered a bit working class to eat the working meat of an animal that
• 14:55
  like the, the muscles, the stuff that we eat today, the flesh, that wasn't, that wasn't
• 15:01
  fancy.
• 15:02
  The fancy stuff was all the soft protected gooey bits on the inside that were hard to
• 15:08
  get to and that there weren't very many of the kidneys and the hearts and livers and things
• 15:13
  like that.
• 15:14
  It sort of reminds you of how arbitrary the things that we find gross is.
• 15:19
  Are you familiar on a plucked, unplucked foul, like a whole plucked foul?
• 15:26
  Are you familiar with that?
• 15:29
  What would be the tail of the bird in the base of the tail?
• 15:33
  Like the feathers are gone.
• 15:34
  Sounds like it's butthole.
• 15:35
  Like you're talking about a butthole.
• 15:36
  I'm telling you, it includes its butthole.
• 15:40
  It's its butthole, the base of the tail and that little stub of tail and it's called
• 15:44
  the Pope's nose.
• 15:45
  Oh, yeah.
• 15:46
  I don't know why.
• 15:47
  We call it the Pastel.
• 15:48
  We call it the Pastel's nose, but yeah, it's the best eaten bit.
• 15:51
  Oh, no, no, your parses.
• 15:52
  Okay.
• 15:53
  Maybe parses.
• 15:54
  Yeah.
• 15:55
  Either way, when I was working on all this all these years ago, I found a reference
• 15:59
  of someone explaining just how rich someone was and their way of it putting it of expressing
• 16:10
  it was, they, when they buy a chicken, they only eat the Parsons and Oaf.
• 16:23
  I mean, you're supposed to be like, good lord is that man, well, I'll fuck that's
• 16:30
  funny.
• 16:31
  Oh my goodness.
• 16:32
  How many, if someone's cutting off a chicken now, they're like, I can take what parts going
• 16:37
  in the garbage.
• 16:38
  No, I'm eating the Parsons nose.
• 16:40
  I love the Parsons nose, but the idea that you would have to murder like 25 living
• 16:47
  creatures just because you're so particular, you'll only eat the little knobby bit above
• 16:52
  its butt hole and throw the rest away, give it to the cat.
• 16:59
  That's hilarious.
• 17:00
  Yeah.
• 17:01
  It's wild, isn't it?
• 17:02
  And then you go to different parts of the world and different people are prising different
• 17:05
  things and different kinds of animals and like, have you ever eaten dog?
• 17:11
  Yeah, I have.
• 17:13
  Years ago, I did a, I was working on a, I did a story for, I used to write for outside
• 17:21
  magazine quite a bit.
• 17:22
  That was kind of my first, when I came out, when I, when I got out of graduate school,
• 17:26
  my first kind of like real writer thing to happen to me was I started working for and was
• 17:33
  on the mast head outside and I was never under, I was never under contract, but I was doing
• 17:38
  a lot of work for outside and it was, it's kind of the glory days of magazine writing.
• 17:43
  It seems, it seems so distant now, but just, you know, you'd go and, you might go and
• 17:55
  do a feature and, and blow 9, 10,000 bucks on travel, you know, it's just a different
• 18:00
  time to be a magazine writer, but I did, I can't remember now how I got on, why I got
• 18:07
  on to the idea, how I got on the subject, but I went to Vietnam during the, for the
• 18:13
  Lunar New Year celebrations, for the Tet celebrations, that'll, they'll find you, you
• 18:18
  dog mate.
• 18:19
  I ever had them.
• 18:20
  Yeah.
• 18:21
  Yeah.
• 18:22
  And it was, and as I learned and explained in my story, it was a, it's a very auspicious
• 18:26
  time of year to eat, dog, me, particularly in the north.
• 18:33
  And it was regarded as, there was something I kind of struggled with and explaining, because
• 18:37
  there was, there was described to me in regarded as a very hot food.
• 18:42
  And I laughed about that because the feeling, I would get a hot feeling like I would get
• 18:47
  like a guilt, like a hot sweaty guilt feeling, eating it.
• 18:54
  But they meant hot like it was, it had the ability to change, it had the ability to change
• 19:01
  luck, it had the ability to, to correct your course in life.
• 19:06
  Now that perception wasn't the same in, in Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City, just in the south
• 19:11
  of the country, as there was a much more, you could kind of get away with eating it, year
• 19:17
  round in certain places.
• 19:19
  But in the north, in Hanoi, around the, the, the, the days of the New Year celebration,
• 19:29
  these, these, like, dog me places would just spring up.
• 19:32
  I had a bunch of dog me right on the shoreline of that lake where they fished John McCain
• 19:37
  out of the lake after he got shot down, and they would serve the pause and all manner
• 19:42
  of things.
• 19:43
  And, and I, I had a guy explain to me, for instance, he said, he couldn't have children,
• 19:49
  okay, he and his wife couldn't get pregnant.
• 19:54
  To turn the tide, he went out and, and a dog meet on the lunar New Year, on New Year's.
• 20:01
  And then, got his wife pregnant.
• 20:05
  So here he was in his situation, he explained to me, he doesn't eat it now though.
• 20:09
  So that was like, man, you probably started eating all kind of dog me then.
• 20:12
  And he's like, well, no, I don't want to have 300 children.
• 20:17
  Well, no, he didn't want to initiate that course correction.
• 20:23
  He didn't want to do another thing that could alter his luck.
• 20:28
  Like, he'd landed in the right spot.
• 20:31
  I mean, other people had different relationships with it, but just to give you a sense, man,
• 20:35
  and this is quite a while ago that I did this piece, but I ate it for a week.
• 20:38
  And my, my wife was my girlfriend back then, but she was with me some of that time and
• 20:41
  she went out and ate it.
• 20:43
  And then we ate it all, man, your ways, man, like, all man, your ways.
• 20:48
  Another really kind of stunning thing that happened out of that was I had hired a translator.
• 20:53
  And he was a veteran of what he called the American War.
• 20:59
  And it actually been injured during the American War.
• 21:02
  And we spent a lot of time talking about that and he lived right in the old part of Hanoi.
• 21:08
  And when you opened his door, man, like, there was about six inches of space and you were on
• 21:13
  that's what seemed to be the busiest street.
• 21:15
  And you know, I mean, a thousand moped's per minute, right?
• 21:19
  Pouring by and he had a dog.
• 21:21
  He had a dog in a, in a, in a little kennel, like he, like a travel box.
• 21:27
  For whatever reason, I don't, but I just like, I said to him something like, well, how do you,
• 21:32
  how do you go for a walk?
• 21:34
  Because it was so treacherous just to be out, to step out of his door.
• 21:38
  I couldn't picture doing it with a dog.
• 21:40
  He was the only reason that I would have asked him how you take your dog for a walk.
• 21:44
  And he looked at me, he looked at me like he didn't know what I was talking about.
• 21:49
  And he was my translator.
• 21:50
  So he was fluent.
• 21:52
  And I'm like, well, how do you, when you go to walk a dog, where do you go?
• 21:58
  And in our conversation, I realized that, that he brought, he had brought that
• 22:03
  dog home in that box and that dog had never been out of that box.
• 22:07
  Yeah.
• 22:08
  And he explained to me, I don't eat dog.
• 22:11
  I have a pet dog.
• 22:13
  And he kept the dog like a bird.
• 22:16
  It was like, he kept the dog like a bird in the cage.
• 22:20
  And just the, I mean, America, I don't know what goes on.
• 22:26
  Your neck of the woods there.
• 22:27
  America wasn't half as crazy about dogs 20 years ago.
• 22:33
  It wouldn't have been 20 years ago.
• 22:34
  They weren't half as crazy about dogs 17 years ago when I had this experience as they
• 22:39
  are now like dogs have become like honorary American citizens since then.
• 22:45
  But at that time, 17 years ago, and dogs were kind of just still like dogs, I was blown
• 22:50
  away by it.
• 22:51
  And then you realize like that's one of the, you know, of course, one of the beauties of
• 22:54
  travel is you realize all the different angles one can take on being alive.
• 22:59
  And it was just different.
• 23:01
  Not totally, I mean, also the idea that an animal would need to like have a human
• 23:08
  walk it, you know, like, I mean, even if you, you know, it's an animal.
• 23:14
  You're like, even if you accepted the premise that the dog shouldn't be in a box,
• 23:18
  you would just let it out of the box.
• 23:20
  And the dog would go and fuck off and, you know, go for a walk or a run or whatever
• 23:24
  the fuck it wants to do.
• 23:25
  There's no need to keep being working for the dog.
• 23:28
  You're right about the, you know, the elevation of canines in our, there will be a
• 23:33
  time when there will be a Kardashian who was president and the vice president will
• 23:37
  be a Chihuahua.
• 23:39
  The vice president will be a Chihuahua and a fucking handbag, Steve.
• 23:43
  I was trying to explain to my kids here today.
• 23:45
  We have a dog.
• 23:46
  My kids have a dog.
• 23:47
  They got a dog from the dog pound and we got one of those buried wires that
• 23:50
  keeps dog from running away.
• 23:52
  I don't know what that is.
• 23:53
  What is that?
• 23:54
  Oh, like you get them this a little electric collar, little little being, you know,
• 23:59
  give them a very slight zap because I'm talking about how infatuated way I would
• 24:03
  dogs just spend a thousand dollars and a fucking electrified underground call a system.
• 24:07
  Looking no further than my home, but I was trying to explain to my kids.
• 24:11
  I was like, when I had a dog, when a dog got up in the morning, it left and it ran
• 24:17
  around with a pack of dogs from around and at night, you'd go out and yell.
• 24:24
  It's named for 20 minutes.
• 24:26
  Yeah.
• 24:27
  And it would eventually come in and then one dog and him and his body would take
• 24:33
  off again.
• 24:33
  That was what a dog did.
• 24:35
  They're like, that wasn't a bad life for a dog.
• 24:37
  And then one day the dog would not come back when you called and that was the end of
• 24:43
  rover.
• 24:45
  That was the end of your relationship with Fido.
• 24:48
  Yeah, man, I've got a, I've got an indoor cat.
• 24:51
  We got a cat last year for my kids who were six year old twins.
• 24:55
  And you know, they wanted to kitten.
• 24:57
  And it's, I don't know what it's like in the States, but here there's a big controversy
• 25:01
  over allowing cats out because cats are not native to Australia.
• 25:07
  We have a lot of vulnerable native critters.
• 25:10
  You know, we just got a little problem.
• 25:12
  We have a huge feral cat problem.
• 25:14
  But even setting aside the feral cats, we have a ton of native birds who are
• 25:18
  going to get killed by domestic cats.
• 25:21
  We have a huge number of tiny, hopping, vulnerable, gray, furry, cute little,
• 25:27
  mushy, bill things bouncing around that get devoured by domestic cats.
• 25:32
  So there's a big movement that you're supposed to keep your cat inside.
• 25:36
  But man, I don't know.
• 25:38
  I'm like six months.
• 25:40
  Don't tell me let's get out.
• 25:42
  No, I haven't yet, but I'm like, well, kind of a life that is it for the cat.
• 25:48
  Yeah, I love, I, I follow wildlife politics.
• 25:51
  And so of your, of your native land there, the only thing I, when I'm reading
• 25:58
  about your country, I'm just reading about your wildlife politics.
• 26:02
  And I just love wildlife politics.
• 26:04
  And so I read about your, your kangaroo issues.
• 26:10
  I read about your house cat issues.
• 26:12
  I read about your qualas.
• 26:14
  I'll have an STD's like, yeah, the koalas do have STD's.
• 26:20
  Yeah, it's true.
• 26:21
  They have, is it syphilis or chlamydia that's killing them?
• 26:24
  No, I think everyone's like, got a chlamydia problem.
• 26:26
  Everyone's like, save the koalas, save the koalas.
• 26:28
  I'm like, we're trying.
• 26:30
  Can they stop being so filthy that dirty little hoes should spread in their own
• 26:35
  venereal diseases?
• 26:37
  Yeah, it's interesting.
• 26:39
  I mean, what do you think?
• 26:40
  Should I let my cat out or should I leave it inside?
• 26:44
  I can't remember the, in the US, I can't remember what the estimate is, but,
• 26:49
  but house cats, so feral or not, you know,
• 26:54
  just house cats out on the landscape, pets that are out during the day or feral kill
• 27:02
  over a billion, um, songbirds a year here, right?
• 27:10
  Uh, and so as much as people like to point fingers about wildlife issues, I mean,
• 27:18
  cat propagators and cat owners have a lot of blood on their hands.
• 27:24
  When it comes to, comes to Tweety birds, there's a cat that runs around.
• 27:29
  I'm actually friends with the people on it.
• 27:31
  There's a cat that runs around our neighborhood without a little bell on it.
• 27:36
  And I always think about catching it and putting a bell on it.
• 27:40
  And then, you know, I wouldn't like shoot their cat, but, uh, I don't
• 27:45
  want to tell me that if you're going to let that cat out, just get it, get it.
• 27:48
  I put a hang of bell on them.
• 27:50
  Someone told me the bells don't do shit.
• 27:52
  No, I, I, I have a very hard time believing that you reckon they work.
• 27:57
  Oh, hell yeah.
• 27:58
  I mean, maybe that 100% of the time, but I mean, you strad, you saddle that thing
• 28:01
  with making all that racket.
• 28:03
  It's going to kind of blow his whole program straight ahead.
• 28:05
  It's true.
• 28:06
  It's hard to be stealth.
• 28:11
  I think fuck thought I was trying to sneak up on this bird.
• 28:15
  Uh, okay, I'll keep the damn thing inside.
• 28:18
  But I mean, you know, this sort of brings us to the bigger issue of like,
• 28:21
  why exactly do I need to care about the songbirds when I meet with impunity
• 28:28
  and dominate my environment and marry at other ways that I should probably
• 28:34
  mitigate before I care about the one or two songbirds.
• 28:37
  My cat might catch over the course of its lifetime.
• 28:40
  Uh, I would answer that by talking about, um, preserving
• 28:47
  endemism and biodiversity.
• 28:52
  Uh, and there's, uh, you know, endemism is like an endemic species is something
• 28:58
  found in one place, right?
• 29:01
  Like it's distribution is limited to a specific area, right?
• 29:06
  Uh, we've lost for, I mean, you know, extinction is forever, right?
• 29:15
  Um, well, you could say that, but at a time in the future, that might not be the case.
• 29:21
  But let's just say, let's say for now and for the last collection of millennia,
• 29:27
  extinction is forever.
• 29:29
  And we have lost dozens of species of ground nesting birds to
• 29:38
  mongooses, cats, rats, basically two non-native creatures that have been brought
• 29:45
  to and introduced onto landscapes where their prey base hasn't adapted to their
• 29:52
  presence.
• 29:53
  So you have a ground nesting birds and for the history of time, they've developed
• 29:59
  certain strategies to reproduce successfully.
• 30:02
  And then you throw something into the mix that just was never accounted for,
• 30:07
  never adapted with and it devastates it to, uh, how someone might think that,
• 30:19
  that a person that eats, uh, deer meat from a species of animal that is a,
• 30:28
  I use like a international conservation union species of least concern,
• 30:33
  meaning a very abundant, very prolific species that occupies all of its historic
• 30:40
  range, um, and is very carefully managed.
• 30:45
  How eating that deer could somehow make it that you are not free to have an
• 30:51
  opinion about saving ground nesting birds from extinction, um,
• 30:59
  the fact that some people think that those are like irreconcilable activities of
• 31:03
  perspectives is kind of, is, is, to me, it's crazy.
• 31:07
  Right.
• 31:08
  I eat deer, but I think that's where you get a deer and I sure care about, um,
• 31:12
  I eat deer and I care about biodiversity, um, a tremendous amount.
• 31:18
  Maybe I care about biodiversity because I eat a lot of deer meat.
• 31:23
  Yeah.
• 31:24
  I mean, I think that's, I think that's where someone like you gets your
• 31:26
  credibility from when you talk about sustainability and second,
• 31:32
  second to you would be someone who I think is a hardcore vegan who thinks about
• 31:38
  these things very deeply and is taking a principled and extreme position.
• 31:43
  And I think the people with the least credibility to talk about environmental issues,
• 31:48
  sustainability and biodiversity are people who like much like a friend of mine who
• 31:54
  was talking to the other day said like, you know, I just want to be able to go to
• 31:58
  the supermarket and I want my chicken breasts to look clean and glowing and shiny
• 32:03
  in the Styrofoam with clinging film over them.
• 32:06
  I don't want to think about it.
• 32:08
  I don't want to pay more for the organic shit.
• 32:11
  I don't give a fuck.
• 32:13
  You like, you know, just, I want it to be an ingredient.
• 32:17
  Yeah.
• 32:17
  And I feel like that's sort of the, that's, that's the source of all the, the,
• 32:22
  the problems in the natural world.
• 32:25
  I, it's very normal though.
• 32:27
  You know, it's a normal opinion.
• 32:29
  But my wife does a hunt.
• 32:30
  She eats more non-game than bear sharks.
• 32:33
  My wife does a hunt.
• 32:34
  She eats more wild game than a lot of the hunters, I know.
• 32:40
  She's quite comfortable eating deer meat without having killed a deer.
• 32:46
  You know, in a way, I've expressed this over the years would be
• 32:53
  a society has allowed humans to become very specialized.
• 32:58
  But if you go back some number of years, if you go back before the agricultural
• 33:03
  revolution, you'd find the humans weren't as specialized.
• 33:08
  Most humans weren't as specialized, meaning you would conduct a lot of the,
• 33:12
  you, you would be, you and your family would be responsible for many of the things
• 33:16
  you needed to stay alive.
• 33:17
  Meaning you might produce your own fabrics, okay, from animal hides, from plant
• 33:23
  fibers, you might sow those fabrics, you might produce your own cookware, you'd
• 33:29
  secure your own food, you'd deal with your own waste, you'd construct your own
• 33:35
  home, you'd construct your own bed, you'd deliver your own children, you'd
• 33:41
  administer your own healthcare, right?
• 33:44
  And then we got, we eventually got to where we could all become great specialists.
• 33:48
  And then we would be that you kind of do a thing, you know, you do a thing and
• 33:54
  you farm out all of your activities.
• 33:56
  So now I don't, for instance, like I don't process my family's raw sewage.
• 34:03
  I pay some money and that's handled elsewhere.
• 34:07
  When we have car problems, if it's anything major, we farm that out to somebody,
• 34:12
  we don't do it.
• 34:15
  So I am guilty of handing things over to other people because I don't want to deal with
• 34:22
  certain things that I find to be not fun, but you might say it's like it'd be like gross
• 34:28
  to process your own sewage so you don't, they're better at it.
• 34:31
  I like that, I like that you're idea of a self-sustaining hunter gatherer of society
• 34:36
  is that there was such a thing as processing your sewage.
• 34:40
  I believe processing your sewage was you threw a bucket of sewage towards your neighbor.
• 34:45
  So that it wasn't around you.
• 34:47
  How have you deal with it?
• 34:48
  The Bible has instructions about how you feel.
• 34:51
  But yeah, it also has ministering your own health and you're like, we don't administer
• 34:55
  our own health care anymore.
• 34:56
  Well, yeah, administering your own health care used to be, you would look at the wound
• 35:00
  and you'd go,
• 35:02
  ain't good.
• 35:03
  I think you're fucked.
• 35:07
  But of all this stuff, like I, of all these things that we hand out to other people,
• 35:13
  the part, the one that I don't like to hand out, there's one that I like to hang onto
• 35:17
  is I like to hang onto getting my own, I like to hang onto getting my own food.
• 35:22
  Like that one's really important to me that I hold onto.
• 35:24
  But point being what I'm trying to get at is for me to then blame someone who's not
• 35:29
  out killing their own chicken, you know, I'm like, who am I to cast judgment on them?
• 35:35
  There's all kinds of things I don't do.
• 35:37
  I didn't build my own house.
• 35:39
  So the fact that they're like, for me to like act like I'm going to be critical of someone
• 35:42
  who buys chickens down at the grocery store, it's like, I'm not, you know, I can't sit
• 35:47
  here and look you in the eye and tell you that that I've personally gone and secured
• 35:52
  every comfort I have in my life.
• 35:54
  So like I said, I didn't make my house.
• 35:56
  No, but then that ought to be somebody else.
• 35:58
  I mean, you're being more generous than I would because if there was a system of home building
• 36:03
  that we knew was catastrophic to the the lived experience of hundreds of billions of sentient
• 36:12
  creatures and was devastating for the planet's environment.
• 36:17
  And if you were choosing to save a little bit of money on by getting the cheapest, you
• 36:23
  know, type of plywood or something for your house, instead of paying 10 to 20% more
• 36:28
  to build a house that was sustainable.
• 36:32
  And you were justifying that by being like, you know what?
• 36:35
  I just like not having to think about it.
• 36:38
  I'd be like, well, you probably should, you know, you probably should think about it.
• 36:43
  Yeah, you've taken, yeah, you've taken the metaphor, you've taken our metaphor very deep.
• 36:48
  You're right.
• 36:49
  Uh, that's a good point.
• 36:51
  I was going to get at something I wish I would check your memoirs, I was getting at
• 36:54
  some broader with all that, but no, you're right.
• 36:58
  You could make a, you could make an adjustment.
• 37:00
  Um, yeah, I'm not saying everybody has to be Steve Rinella, but I think everybody has to incorporate
• 37:05
  a worldview that, that places them in a, in a, a position of some kind of moral responsibility
• 37:12
  in the network of living things.
• 37:14
  If you, if you believe that it's wrong to soar the leg off a dog while it's alive,
• 37:20
  then you believe that animals are capable of feeling pain and probably having some kind
• 37:26
  of aspirations.
• 37:27
  And if you think that it's bad to, you know, rip baby pigs away from a mother pig while
• 37:33
  she's squealing and screaming about it, then you're implying that the pig has an internal
• 37:38
  life that's worth giving a shit about.
• 37:40
  And if that's the case, then you should have a consideration that's more than just the
• 37:45
  number of cents of pennies that you pay for a pound of the flesh of an animal.
• 37:51
  When you're doing your shopping and we should probably all collectively have, have tighter
• 37:55
  rules about the treatment of animals.
• 37:58
  I mean, even just look at the hypocrisy between the types of animals.
• 38:00
  You know, you mentioned dog, I've eaten dog in Vietnam, didn't really care for it.
• 38:04
  I've eaten crazy animals partly because I think it's sort of almost my moral duty.
• 38:10
  I almost felt like I'd be hypocritical not to eat dog if I was going to eat pig.
• 38:15
  It's sort of arbitrary.
• 38:16
  Like, why is one good and one bad just because I happen to be born into a Western country
• 38:22
  in the 21st century?
• 38:23
  Yeah, I'm not sure.
• 38:25
  If it was in a different time and place, we'd have different norms about animals, which
• 38:29
  is not to say that there isn't like a hierarchy of animal sentience and suffering that I would
• 38:34
  take into consideration.
• 38:35
  I'd be much more comfortable eating insects than I would, you know, prawns and crustaceans
• 38:40
  than I would at chimpanzee.
• 38:43
  And when you're talking about relatively comparable, like, psychological capabilities, like a pig
• 38:48
  and a dog, then it kind of just falls down to arbitrary choice, doesn't it?
• 38:53
  And I feel like we should either be all in or out.
• 38:57
  You know where I'm going to hit, I'm going to hit, I'm going to frame this in a different
• 39:03
  metaphor.
• 39:04
  So speaking of metaphors, and I'm going to try to capture a little bit of where, how
• 39:08
  I think on this issue, and you mentioned earlier, you know, the morals of a vegan, a practicing
• 39:17
  vegan being, you know, like, there's a clarity there, right?
• 39:23
  There's like an unassailable clarity and mission there.
• 39:27
  A way I've come to think about animal welfare, and I'm speaking in terms of the animals
• 39:34
  that I engage with, okay?
• 39:36
  The animals that influence my life, the species that I engage with, the species that I try
• 39:41
  to help preserve, the species that I utilize for personal use.
• 39:44
  I think of them as one might consider and let's say an apple tree, okay?
• 39:55
  Where I imagined that the apple tree is the environment than habitat, okay?
• 40:05
  And if that apple tree is cared for and fertilized, that thing is going to produce apples.
• 40:13
  And once those apples are done, and they've ripened, and they're close to falling from
• 40:18
  the tree, or they've already fallen from the tree, no matter what you do to that apple,
• 40:25
  that's not damaging that tree.
• 40:29
  It'll, it's a, it'll be come a sort of perpetual motion machine.
• 40:35
  So I, with my worldview, with my mind frame, I remain very concerned about the tree.
• 40:43
  An animal rights perspective or a vegan perspective would probably be more like this, it would
• 40:48
  be, it would be that they put a real value on the well-being of the apple, right?
• 41:04
  And I, and, and I think that they might look at me and think that I have a, that I don't,
• 41:11
  I'm incapable of assigning a unique identity to those apples, I just view them as the product
• 41:18
  of something, and I don't afford them individuality. And I would look and say, man, you're so worried
• 41:26
  about the apple that you're just not paying attention to the tree, there's always going to be apples.
• 41:31
  If you take care of the tree, the apples don't matter. And they'd say, man, I think each and every
• 41:35
  one of those apples matters. And if the tree quit producing apples, that's okay, because then there's
• 41:43
  not, it's not making these apples that would need to suffer when you yank them off the tree.
• 41:49
  It's just like, it's in some way, you know, I think it's in some way these,
• 41:58
  these like perspectives are incompatible. Yeah, I mean, I'm with you up until the final move,
• 42:04
  which I think only the most extreme vegans make, which would be, it wouldn't matter if the apple
• 42:10
  tree dried up as long as there was no suffering of the apples. I mean, that analogy would be to say
• 42:16
  that it doesn't really matter if an ecosystem collapses as long as it's no longer producing animals.
• 42:23
  Well, the reason I'm saying that is because I mean, that would be an extreme vegan position.
• 42:27
  No, I think most of them wouldn't say you want the ecosystem to be healthy and you also want
• 42:32
  the apples. Okay. I'm not seeing that though. I get what you're saying. And I don't think that,
• 42:36
  and I don't encounter animal rights activists who say they don't care if the tree stops producing.
• 42:45
  But when I look at where their focus is, when I look at where their focus is,
• 42:50
  um, they're fixated on the apples and they're not, it hasn't occurred to them to pay that much
• 42:58
  attention to the tree because you can have certain, um, groups and certain systems in place
• 43:05
  that are meant to support the tree, but they will damage those systems, neglect those systems,
• 43:11
  deny that system. Can you give me an example of the apple system? Okay. I will.
• 43:20
  In the United States, um, I know we have this little problem of the, we're in distinct places
• 43:27
  with distinct conservation histories and distinct management. That's all right. Half my audience
• 43:32
  is in America. Okay. In the United States, all 50 states have what we call state fishing
• 43:42
  game agencies. Okay. They're administered in different ways, but the way they basically work is
• 43:47
  you have a state agency that has a commission or a sort of board of directors. There's a head of
• 43:55
  that agency and these agencies are in charge of all fish and wildlife. Almost universally,
• 44:04
  they're in charge of fish and wildlife within the state. In some cases, those same agencies
• 44:09
  might have oversight over certain marine resources. They might have oversight over certain chunks
• 44:15
  of land and things, but just the one safe way of putting it is they're in charge of fish and wildlife
• 44:21
  up until the point that that fish and wildlife that a species would become so degraded
• 44:30
  that it would warrant federal protections. And then we have a layer of federal oversight
• 44:36
  through the saying of the Endangered Species Act. We have this layer of federal oversight where
• 44:41
  the feds can come in. The federal government can come in and start dictating to the states
• 44:45
  about how they're going to manage some resource. But up until that point, the vast majority of the
• 44:50
  all the fish and wildlife is administered by the state. Where state fishing game agencies get
• 44:56
  their funding, the state fishing game agencies, the one true area they get their funding is from
• 45:03
  sales of licenses, tags and stamps. They're funded through the purchasing of fishing licenses,
• 45:09
  hunting licenses. And they're also funded through a grant program through this very convoluted
• 45:17
  process by which sales of sporting goods, particularly firearms and ammunition, have a 13%
• 45:25
  excise tax. Every time a guy buys a gun, if you bought a gun for a hundred bucks, 13 of those
• 45:32
  dollars goes into this fund which pays for wildlife habitat. And the work of the state agencies
• 45:40
  who have teams of biologists, so they deal with disease outbreaks, they deal with access issues,
• 45:45
  they deal with monitoring, all this stuff. And animal, when I talk about an animal rights person,
• 45:51
  maybe not explicitly saying that they don't care about the tree, here is this support mechanism.
• 45:59
  If we have this tree metaphor, the arborist, the person that the gardener is a state fishing
• 46:06
  game agency, which is by and large funded by hunters and anglers and gun owners,
• 46:11
  they're paying the gardener's salary. But then you go and say, I care a lot about the apples
• 46:20
  and what I'd like to do is I'd like to see the gardener's funding cut off. Because I know where
• 46:26
  he gets his money. He gets his money from these bloodthirsty hellbillies who want to eat those apples.
• 46:33
  This metaphor has gone far enough. You're like, I'm out. I set it up for you zeps.
• 46:44
  I've teed it right up. If you're not following me, I'm done. No, I get it. I'm going to
• 46:50
  get in the metaphor just move on to talking about it more specifically. But that's what I mean.
• 46:55
  That's what I mean when I say that. But I gave you a, I gave you a like 30,000 foot moral
• 47:02
  question right about the culpability of people who live in an industrialized 21st century
• 47:11
  economy that is highly reliant on factory farming for getting our food and industrialized farming.
• 47:19
  And you've taken it to a frankly, sort of narrow logistical question about the political
• 47:25
  aspirations of anti hunting lobbies in the state of Delaware. You know, if you talk to Peter
• 47:35
  Singer or we know one of the founders of the animal rights and animal liberation movement,
• 47:39
  you know, who is then what he's been on about is not we need to defund, you know,
• 47:45
  provincial gaming license licensing bodies in provinces and states. He's saying,
• 47:54
  he's saying the superstructure of industrialized food in which the only consideration basically
• 47:59
  is corporate profit and the reduction of cost to the end consumer has to end because it's
• 48:06
  a calamity for all of the apples. Now, your idea about the apple tree being more important than
• 48:12
  the apple, he may concede. He may actually say, yeah, thriving bio, you know, thriving ecosystem
• 48:19
  is a good in itself as well. And yet for him, the talk about the tree with no focus on the apples
• 48:28
  would sound like you're you're needlessly degrading or ignoring the ability of the apples to have
• 48:38
  experiences and to feel pain. Like Apple is a nice analogy because we know that apples are
• 48:44
  pretty inert and we bite into them, you know, without feeling bad about ourselves. But if it came
• 48:50
  to light that various different types of fruit had various capacities for experiencing pain,
• 48:57
  hardship, hopes, aspirations, the suffering, then wouldn't your analogy about the tree have to
• 49:03
  be modified to incorporate concerns about the apples? No, because here's where I'm incriminating
• 49:09
  myself a bit. I don't give a shit about that apples. No, I do because I would never think if my kid
• 49:19
  was picking an apple, I would never say, man, don't just slowly twist the apple until it falls,
• 49:28
  just pluck the thing off. Why are you making the apples sweat it so bad?
• 49:33
  That's right. I'm interested in humane, not interested in, I strive for humane slaughter and
• 49:45
  responsible use. So yeah, you know, it's not like all analogies, it's imperfect. But I do want to
• 49:58
  stay, one thing I'm not going to walk back is I am almost wholly focused. I'm almost wholly
• 50:09
  focused on the tree. There are considerations I have. There are considerations I have about,
• 50:16
  there are considerations I have about animal welfare. But when I get a deer,
• 50:29
  when we get a deer, when I get a deer, I'm happy that I got a deer. I'm just happy that I got it.
• 50:39
  Now, if I get, if I hit a deer on my bow, I had a deer last year, I hit my bow and that deer
• 50:45
  went, I hit it and hit a little far back. I caught one lung down low and that deer went,
• 50:52
  I put it in the meters for you, 1200 meters, which I think is 1200 yards. So I can say that.
• 51:00
  1200, you know, roughly, maybe off by one or two, went 1200, you know, the different 1200 yards
• 51:08
  before it collapsed. Okay. A part of me is like, man, I fucked up. If I'd have caught both of
• 51:17
  its lungs up higher, it wouldn't have gone 40 yards. It would have been dead within seconds.
• 51:25
  But it wasn't. It took quite some time to go 1200 yards. And so I fucked up. But still,
• 51:32
  I was happy that I got it. So, yeah, let me ask it this way. Yeah, I think we can tell that
• 51:45
  there's an instinct that the apple, the type of apple must matter because you would probably
• 51:51
  behave differently. If the, if instead of hunting deer, you were just hunting, I don't know,
• 51:58
  centipedes or something like that. And maybe you would act differently. Would you act differently
• 52:03
  if the, if the ecological scenario was exactly the same. But instead of you living in an ecosystem
• 52:10
  where it was deer, it was chimps.
• 52:16
  Well, now I got to tell you that I've had monkey too, but it was served to me in South America.
• 52:26
  Didn't like that either. Let me give you, I'm going to arm you. I'm going to arm you here with a
• 52:35
  great example. If the next time we're talking to an American, if you have this discussion,
• 52:40
  again, I'm going to tee you up for a good thing to poke at them about. We have, and I think you do
• 52:45
  as well in Australia, we have a problem with feral pigs. So it's, there's, there's the, all pigs
• 52:54
  are suce scroffa is the Lenin name for pigs. And if you went back prior to Europeans arriving in
• 53:03
  the New World, so Europeans arriving in North and South America, this species of pig, suce scroffa,
• 53:09
  I mean, they were from Siberia to North Africa. They were everywhere, but they weren't in the
• 53:13
  Western hemisphere. And Europeans brought them and cut them loose in the Western hemisphere and they
• 53:20
  created, they, they wreak ecological havoc. They, they are an economic problem because they
• 53:28
  cause love crop damage and agricultural damage. They're a water quality problem because they
• 53:34
  muddy up a lot of water. They're a native species problem because they devour and destroy
• 53:41
  native plants. They devour and destroy eggs from imperiled bird species. They're just a problem,
• 53:47
  okay? People like to hunt them. I hunt for them. I eat them, but they regard it as a problem.
• 53:54
  And an interesting thing that I've found is there are guys that would, that when hunting deer,
• 54:02
  there are guys that would never think of just hitting the deer in the back of, in the back leg,
• 54:09
  if that's all you could see. Meaning you see a deer in the woods and you can just see his back leg
• 54:15
  and you know, oh man, I can hit in the back leg and it ain't going to go anywhere. I'll get it.
• 54:18
  They would never in a million years do that because why would you make a deer suffer?
• 54:24
  It would be so frowned upon. You would be like x communicated from your group of hunters if you
• 54:30
  deliberately shot the back deer back leg out of a deer. Someone hunt pigs, they're not going to
• 54:39
  think a thing about that. They're not going to think a thing about shooting a ton of pigs and
• 54:44
  leading them land. They wouldn't think a thing about shooting a pregnant sow. They wouldn't think
• 54:49
  a thing about shooting a sow with a bunch of piglets. Why? Because they're such an ecological,
• 54:55
  they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they cause so much ecological damage.
• 54:59
  But what in the world does that have to do with that individual pigs suffering?
• 55:07
  That pig can't, that, that, to think that you could imagine that that pig could comprehend
• 55:13
  that it's a non-native, causing ecological harm. Therefore, he'd be like, man, they blew my back
• 55:20
  leg out while I have piglets trying to nurse from me. But I sure had it coming because, um,
• 55:30
  DeSoto brought my, uh, forefathers here in the early 1500s. Yeah. But you can make the leap.
• 55:39
  I had to make the first conversation with someone who was trying, who was trying to give me
• 55:43
  shit for having eaten dog. And this guy was saying, how could you eat dog? And I said, well,
• 55:47
  what's interesting eating a dog and eating pig? He said dogs have been by our side for thousands
• 55:52
  of years. And I was like, yeah, but not the dog I ate. Yeah. Not the dog I ate hasn't been by
• 55:58
  our side for thousands of years. He doesn't know shit. And what, you know, what the pig, why are you
• 56:02
  punishing the pig? Because the pigs for forefathers weren't around a campfire with like cavemen who were
• 56:08
  ancestors of yours hundreds of thousands of years ago. Uh, it doesn't matter to the individual
• 56:13
  sentience of the creature. But I mean, that's a nice story. What do you play all these? Yeah,
• 56:18
  but you're kind of dodging Steve the version of like, if you were, if you were in an environment
• 56:22
  in which the, in which chimps had the same. I thought I just answered this is so dodged. Oh,
• 56:27
  sorry. Do it. Yeah. I just want to dodge it. So, you know, if you were in an environment in which
• 56:33
  chimpanzees occupied the same position in the ecosystem as deer do, then would you hunt chimps
• 56:39
  the same way that you hunt deer? I don't want you to accuse me of dodging this question,
• 56:46
  but I'm going to tell you something. Yes, they'll talk. No, I'm going to get to it. Yes, they'll
• 56:51
  talk to you. Okay. I was talking to a kid yesterday. Not a kid. He's like out of college.
• 56:56
  A young man. And, and we were talking about cultural mores around, around the world.
• 57:06
  And I said, when you're young, you think you're the way you are because you're you.
• 57:17
  The older you get and the more you travel around, you start to realize how much you're the way
• 57:22
  you are because of where you're from and who you grew up around. But you like to think that
• 57:31
  you're that you're morality, you're do's and don'ts, or some individual creation. You know,
• 57:38
  you're like created your product of your environment. I earlier talked about going out and
• 57:45
  Bolivia with some Amerindians, some D's that were Chamane, and they were out hunting monkeys.
• 57:53
  Okay. They're like, they love red-howler monkeys.
• 58:01
  If I even that if I had moved in that day with those hunters and I admired those hunters,
• 58:08
  like man, it had to change my life hanging out with those hunters. That's what I would have become.
• 58:16
  You know, and if it's just I like I was born of a place where we just like didn't deal with primates
• 58:25
  like that. But knowing that I'm a hunter, I would probably it's safe to say that I would largely
• 58:33
  adopt the I would largely would probably adopt the lifeways of the hunters that I was around.
• 58:41
  So you don't even have to go to some crazy end of things to say that if I was
• 58:46
  went to live with the Chamane was then moved in with the Chamane, which wouldn't be half bad.
• 58:53
  Yeah, man, we need a lot of serubi calffish and we'd probably hunt a lot of monkeys.
• 58:58
  I think there are two, yeah, so there are two questions. My dad actually told you that's not a
• 59:02
  dodge a little bit, but I'll explain why. I think there are two, I think I've given you two
• 59:07
  questions in one. So let me tease the two questions apart. One question, which you've just
• 59:12
  answered is about how culturally contingent our behavior is, right? If I'd grown up in South.
• 59:18
  But people forget that it's true. Exactly. If I'd grown up in the south of in the deep south of the
• 59:22
  United States, I would have a different relationship to guns than I do growing up in Australia. If I,
• 59:27
  you know, if we lived in a place where dog was eaten, we would be eating dog. If I grew up in
• 59:33
  Afghanistan under the Taliban, then maybe I would be doing all kinds of things that I regard as
• 59:38
  being beyond the pale, having grown up where I do. That's a different question from whether or not
• 59:46
  I'm in a position to say that I would be wrong if I were a jihadist. Like, I can recognize
• 59:53
  the psychological reality of the fact that if I were raised as a jihadist, I would be a jihadist.
• 1:00:00
  But I can, there's a second question, which is, do I think it's just as good to be a jihadist
• 1:00:06
  as it is to be a liberal Democrat? And I would say on the second point, no.
• 1:00:12
  So you answered the first point about, you have, of course, if you were raised in a society where
• 1:00:17
  it's okay to kill primates, then you would kill primates. But on the ethical question, I mean,
• 1:00:23
  there's only an answer to answer. Yeah, your apple tree analogy. Like, do we, in other words,
• 1:00:28
  do we care at all about the interests of the apples? And if you made, if you turned up the volume
• 1:00:33
  on the apple's capacity for sort of thought, whatever, I'm ready to answer it. I don't think,
• 1:00:41
  I don't think that I'm better than hunters from the Congo or hunters from South America who eat
• 1:00:49
  monkeys. I don't think that they are wrong. These ancestral hunters producing traditional
• 1:00:58
  lifeways. I don't think are wrong. 200 monkeys of any sort. I don't know how common it is.
• 1:01:07
  I think that it would become wrong at the point, say, in the case of grillas, a host of other
• 1:01:19
  things, it would become wrong. It would become morally wrong, categorically wrong, at a point where
• 1:01:24
  they were emparaling the species. But up until the point where they're not emparaling the species,
• 1:01:32
  I don't think they're wrong. Right. Why are humans exempt from this analogy, by the way?
• 1:01:40
  Why is it bad for us to eat each other? Yeah, like, I mean, because if we're going up the sort of,
• 1:01:48
  yeah, well, yeah, I mean, if we're going up the hierarchy of consciousness, right, from your
• 1:02:02
  caterpillar to your eating your sewer rats, to eating your dog, to eating your deer, to eating your
• 1:02:09
  chimp. And if you're your kind of load star, you're shining light on the hill, is the tree,
• 1:02:16
  right, is the wellness of the tree. And the apples are always subservient to the tree. Then
• 1:02:24
  what if what if the ecosystem would be better if there were fewer individual human beings?
• 1:02:32
  Like, why do we get? Oh, I assume that you, you know what I mean? Like, why do we get special
• 1:02:38
  license to be the our special apples as much as we want? Because if I were particularly stupid,
• 1:02:44
  I could use your analogy to justify genocide, right? I mean, it's a bit like, you know,
• 1:02:48
  oh, the Nazis loved the tree of life. And they wanted that. Who gives a shit about the individual
• 1:02:54
  apples? You know, you got to break a few eggs to get to a brighter future. You know, this is
• 1:03:01
  what Stalin thought about human lives. Why are animal lives different? I acknowledge earlier,
• 1:03:07
  the imperfection of the analogy. And I also tried to leave the analogy behind the old apple tree
• 1:03:13
  analogy. But, uh, yeah, that's a great question. It's so far on that fucking analogy. It's going
• 1:03:18
  to hold it. It's so far, you know, to take this question of, yeah, in service of the apple tree,
• 1:03:23
  should, would someone go out and decide to start, uh, in service of the apple tree? Should someone
• 1:03:33
  go out and justify fracture side? Uh, let's dig it on that for a minute. Um, half of your listeners,
• 1:03:42
  more than half of your listeners will know what I'm talking about. Uh, when I mentioned Ted Kaczynski,
• 1:03:48
  the unibomber. Here was a person who in service of the apple tree was willing to start
• 1:03:59
  whittling away at his brethren. I mean, that was his mo, he was a, he was a, he was an, uh, an
• 1:04:08
  environmentalist who'd been radicalized that it's a young man and got to the point where we were
• 1:04:13
  going to wage war on humans. He was going to wage war on humans to save the environment,
• 1:04:20
  to save the apple tree. But, you know, at this point, it's like, like, I have never been in a situation
• 1:04:25
  where I sat around, like, thinking about whether I should start, uh, eliminating humans and
• 1:04:32
  west on the right now, Steve. Well, to get to this, to get to this part on the food thing,
• 1:04:38
  I think that it's like, take, if you take hunter gatherer cultures that live in,
• 1:04:45
  you take hunter gatherer cultures that live around primates, you just find that not, not always,
• 1:04:52
  but it's quite common for hunter gatherer cultures that live around primates to prey on primates.
• 1:05:03
  Cannibalism, cannibalism is just such a wild exception, you know? I mean, you could kind of go and,
• 1:05:12
  you could make like a pretty short list of, of cultures that practice cannibalism and the many you
• 1:05:19
  pull out religious factors around immortality and achieving and consuming someone's aura and
• 1:05:31
  all this spiritual stuff, like, the list gets even smaller, meaning like, people who are out there
• 1:05:37
  practicing cannibalism for sustenance, it's just so, I mean, it's just, it's so limited that
• 1:05:45
  my mind never goes there. For you, for you, the existence of a culture that's practicing the
• 1:05:50
  practice is also morally relevant. Man, I'm trying to think I was reading a book right now.
• 1:06:02
  I'm reading Hampton's side's new book, The Wide Wide World, and it, uh, it's about
• 1:06:10
  Captain Cook's Third Voyage, where he leaves, you know, he leaves England and, and, um, goes down
• 1:06:18
  around Cape Horn and goes to Tasmania, goes along, uh, Vises New Zealand, then goes along
• 1:06:25
  Australia, goes to the Hawaiian Islands, goes to Alaska, comes back to the high Hawaiian Islands and
• 1:06:31
  gets cut up and eaten, a bit maybe. But, and, and their journals and him and his ship maize journals,
• 1:06:40
  they encounter this weird because they run into multiple cases of cannibalism, they run into
• 1:06:45
  cannibalism in New Zealand, um, they run into some cannibalism in Hawaii and elsewhere, and, uh,
• 1:06:52
  in reading it, like normally when I'm reading that book and they're hunting walrus, I'm like,
• 1:06:57
  man, that's so cool. You know, the, the natives are hunting purposes, and I think, man, that's so
• 1:07:01
  cool. And you get to Alaska and they're hunting whales, and I think, man, that's so cool,
• 1:07:06
  they're catching big halibut. But when I get to the parts about eating folks, there's no
• 1:07:11
  part in this, like, man, that's so cool. I'm not trying. It's just there's some deep, there's some
• 1:07:20
  deep deal. And, and yeah, like, uh, there's some deep deal where, right, but that's what we give,
• 1:07:26
  like, we give our species, we give our species, um, a past, but it's, it's not universal. Like,
• 1:07:34
  you know, it's a, have you heard of Kodiak Island in the, in the, in the illusions in Alaska?
• 1:07:38
  Well, when they do, like, when you look at a, um, when they do, uh, food surveys,
• 1:07:45
  uh, like a, like a mainstay, a dominant food source, a predominant food source of male brown
• 1:07:53
  bears on Kodiak Island is brown bears. It's one of the main things they eat.
• 1:07:59
  In the Rocky Mountains, the greatest risk a wolf has is it'll die from a wolf. The number one
• 1:08:08
  killer of wolves is wolves. So there are cases around where it's, that's not extended.
• 1:08:17
  Our sense of like, man, I got my limits. I'll eat a chimpanzee. I'll eat a red howler monkey.
• 1:08:23
  I'll eat a dog. I'll eat a horse. I ain't eating folks. It's like, there are exceptions, but it's
• 1:08:29
  just not even something. Well, I mean, of course, a wolf doesn't give a shit. I mean, and of course,
• 1:08:33
  a bear doesn't give a shit, right? But I mean, I think, no, the reason why, you're right,
• 1:08:39
  but the reason why we would say that it's wrong to eat a person unless we're using a religious,
• 1:08:46
  I love where this conversation has gone. The reason why we would say it's wrong is not just
• 1:08:50
  because we are members of that species. I think, I think, uh, I'd like to ground it in something
• 1:08:58
  more objective than that. I mean, I think humans have a, I mean, I might include chimps in
• 1:09:06
  in this as well, and maybe dolphins or something. I don't know. I'm not a, you know, environmental
• 1:09:12
  bio neurologist. Not an animal scientist. I'm not, I'm no animal scientist, folks.
• 1:09:19
  Uh, but the capacity of a creature to contemplate its own demise plan for the future, you know,
• 1:09:28
  have complicated arrangements, social arrangements with large networks of friends and colleagues,
• 1:09:34
  to, yeah, aspire to, to aspire to anything other than just sort of sniffing around in the dirt
• 1:09:43
  and trying to find mushrooms. Uh, I think that gives us a reason why each apple to go back to
• 1:09:50
  that analogy is worthy of consideration in addition to the addition to the apple tree. And,
• 1:09:58
  and in extremists, that would, that would fall apart. Like, I don't think there's anything wrong.
• 1:10:02
  If I was in, if I was in the plane crash in the Andes, I'd rather be one of the guys who's
• 1:10:08
  annoying on someone else's little, dead leg than one of the guys who's dying in the snow.
• 1:10:14
  Right. But I wouldn't want to make a habit of it. No, I would, when, uh, in the times when I've
• 1:10:22
  been curious about cannibalism, I always thought that a good way out of it would be that you knew someone
• 1:10:29
  and they like lost in the appendage in a car crash or something and your bodies with them. And
• 1:10:35
  you guys like, partook. Yeah. Like, may I, may I have your
• 1:10:43
  blessing? You're not hurting anybody. They weren't going to do anything with it anyway.
• 1:10:49
  And you can send it to your body's leg. Steve, make it your leg. You lose a leg.
• 1:10:55
  You're able to consent. You're frying up. That I would never be able to find that appetizing.
• 1:11:01
  I don't know. That would be tricky. That would be tricky. What if it's your own dick? What if
• 1:11:07
  you're, what if you lose your dick? Then you, you sort of tie it up and you put it in a hot dog
• 1:11:12
  bun with some of that. I'll get it. I'll get it cremated and spread the ashes around various
• 1:11:19
  places where I felt that it's hard, where it's hard lied. I love it. Um, so where do you get,
• 1:11:26
  so do you get most shit from, uh, yeah, where does, where do, do you get much shit for being a
• 1:11:33
  hunter? And where does it come from? Other hunters. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you'll hear,
• 1:11:43
  like, now and then you'll hear from people from animal rights. But I feel like they think that,
• 1:11:47
  you know, I mean, the people in the animal rights movement, I mean, they got in their head that
• 1:11:51
  I'm a lost cause. And also there's nothing they can do to me. You know, when animal rights people
• 1:11:57
  come at someone and someone that they can impact, right? Like let's say you have, uh, you know,
• 1:12:02
  you have a Hollywood, you know, you, you have a Hollywood celebrity and that Hollywood celebrity,
• 1:12:10
  you know, were to do some, uh, some thing. And they're like, well, how can we deprive them?
• 1:12:18
  Right. What would we do to them to get after them? Well, we'd kind of
• 1:12:24
  tarnish their reputation in their community. We'd strip their advertisers, you know, like,
• 1:12:30
  that's how you punish people. There's nothing you can, there's nothing they can do to punish me.
• 1:12:35
  There's no advertiser, there's no advertiser that I work with that would,
• 1:12:41
  um, do you know what, Steve was made to be like, you, what? Steve killing, what?
• 1:12:46
  Yeah, he did what we're pulling our funding. My publisher, I publish with Penguin Random House
• 1:12:52
  and I, what I, I publish information about the very thing that, um, I publish information about
• 1:13:04
  the very thing that would piss animal rights people off. So they're well aware because they're
• 1:13:09
  editing and publishing the work. There's no like secret. Now, when you get it with like, when,
• 1:13:16
  you know, uh, hunters are, um, cannibalistic in that, uh, we're very, we're all very passionate
• 1:13:26
  and we're all very opinionated and, um, you're likely to, you know, they're all likely to go
• 1:13:35
  after someone who's a little different, meaning I'm ever growing up. I grew up in the Midwest and
• 1:13:41
  my family went, we went to a Methodist church. If you to ask someone growing up what the main
• 1:13:47
  risk was, if you'd ask someone from the Methodist church, what a real risk was, what's a real risk?
• 1:13:54
  They're not going to say, oh, I got it. It's devil worshipers. They'll be like Mormons because
• 1:14:00
  it's a little different. Yeah. The narcissism of small differences. Yeah, you're like,
• 1:14:08
  there's a little, just don't know, like, there's a little difference. So yeah, that's all the bit,
• 1:14:12
  the like, the bickering is all like, yeah, I know you like to hunt everything, but you
• 1:14:17
  did this or you don't do that or you, you know, you name it. It's just that. It's not even like
• 1:14:25
  shit because it's like, it's not like getting shit. It's just like these little squabbles and
• 1:14:29
  bickering and somehow you wonder why you're not hearing from the main people that would be really
• 1:14:36
  insensed by your behavior, but it's because they can't, I'm just rigged up in such a way where
• 1:14:41
  I'm not vulnerable to the attack. Yeah. Yeah. Also, they know that you're not going to change.
• 1:14:46
  It's your whole thing. It's like, yeah, I don't find this as well politically, right? I mean,
• 1:14:50
  you'll find someone some very agitated social justice activist who spends more time demonizing
• 1:14:59
  people on their own side of politics for being insufficiently adherent to the ideology that they
• 1:15:05
  do attacking a wild right wing conservative who would be then their natural opponent, but they
• 1:15:11
  just conclude that that person is a lost cause. There's no point. You know, so they focus on
• 1:15:16
  on their potential allies instead. So what if that's a great point? Yeah, you see a little like
• 1:15:23
  not a wholesale rejection of the orthodoxy, but you got a little piece wrong. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:15:31
  I mean, that's where I get most hate from. Most hate comes from me from the social justice left
• 1:15:36
  because I don't, you know, now they've reached single platitude that they want me to or hold
• 1:15:39
  every position that I'm supposed to. And I'm like, guys, it's not the it's not the conservatives who
• 1:15:45
  are attacking me. It's all you've got. You know why they had hope in you, man? They had faith
• 1:15:52
  in you. Exactly. That's right. I was supposed to be on the same team and now I'm an irredeemable
• 1:15:58
  bigot. But so what am I missing? I feel like there's my uncle in New Zealand was a hunter and I
• 1:16:07
  haven't killed anything apart from apart from fish and killed a bird once by accident.
• 1:16:17
  What do you get out of it that I don't see? Man, I'll tell you, I'd never ever
• 1:16:26
  would go to someone who had no desire to go hunting or go fishing, no desire to harm an animal.
• 1:16:34
  I never would go and try to talk them out of that perspective ever. Right. I'm not like, oh,
• 1:16:40
  just give it this one chance and you'll see. Right. It's just like, I don't, I don't
• 1:16:48
  proselytize in that way. Now what I do like to do, I do like to say, I do like to say, well, when
• 1:16:59
  when you see that happening, when you encounter the people who do do that, I'd love it if you kept
• 1:17:06
  this in mind and considering them and in regarding them, these are some things I'd like you to keep in
• 1:17:11
  mind. But I don't say and you should come tomorrow and I'll take you to go do it because I don't,
• 1:17:17
  I never do that. Now people who arrive at the fact, who arrive at a feeling that that's something
• 1:17:24
  they really want to do and they're dying to try it or they need to explore it or they can't get
• 1:17:33
  it out of their head. Then I, you know, then I, then I, I usually extend if it's possible. I'd be like,
• 1:17:40
  man, if you're feeling that way about it and you thought about it, you seem to you thought about it a
• 1:17:44
  lot. I would love to have a chance to like take you out and, and expose you to that and do that
• 1:17:50
  with you. But it would be, it would be like, because I like you. You know, I'd be like, oh, yeah,
• 1:17:56
  you're like, you're cool. We hit it off. I enjoy your company. I like being around you. You're
• 1:18:02
  curious about this. So as a friend thing, I would love to, because I enjoy you. I would love to
• 1:18:07
  take you out and show you what this is all about, right? But that's the only time when I, that's the
• 1:18:12
  only time when I feel like like actually facilitating someone having a set of experiences. They have
• 1:18:19
  to be like, yeah, I want this. I want to do this. I never tell people that they should go against
• 1:18:25
  a deep feeling they have. Because I think they're going to get something out of it, you know?
• 1:18:31
  Well, let me let me rephrase the question. Let me rephrase the question then. What do you,
• 1:18:36
  what do you get out of hunting that you wouldn't get if you hadn't been born into a situation where
• 1:18:44
  you'd never tried it? Yeah, I'll tell you that. Okay. Now, I'm sorry, I didn't understand your question.
• 1:18:50
  Um, I have a, I have a great reverence for the natural world, nature of the natural world,
• 1:19:03
  wildlife. When I was, I had it ever since I was born, I probably got it because I was raised
• 1:19:11
  up by a hunter and a fisherman and someone who loved nature and they brought me up that way.
• 1:19:17
  I've always had that feeling. I feel most at home, most at ease, most engaged, most inspired
• 1:19:26
  out on natural landscapes. I'm a hands-on person, okay? I like to like, I can't,
• 1:19:36
  what, because I love that world and I like being in that world and I like that it's like an arena
• 1:19:41
  of great, it's arena, an arena of great consequence. And I like to be in it, but I like to be in it
• 1:19:48
  as an active player, okay? I like to be active, like a predator on the landscape, a thing on the
• 1:19:55
  landscape. And there is no, at this point in my life, and I would have said this when I was 13
• 1:20:03
  years old, at this point in my life, there's no other way that I could ever agree to be alive.
• 1:20:13
  If I can't have that and be in that arena and be in that space and be a participant in nature and
• 1:20:21
  the participant on the landscape and engage with animals as one to another, like I'm not going to
• 1:20:28
  do it, like I don't care to be alive and go on. If I can't have that, there's no way,
• 1:20:39
  there's no way I could give up. It's my complete, it's a huge part of my identity. I identify
• 1:20:47
  through work, I identify through my wife and children, and I identify through my relationship
• 1:20:55
  with nature, like those are the things. I've even said to my wife, my program is broken up into
• 1:21:03
  three things. It's my work, my family, and the outdoors. And that's it. There's other little parts,
• 1:21:12
  but like that's one, I mean, you're thinking about at any given time, I'm thinking about one of
• 1:21:16
  those three things. And I can't lie to you guys. I was hunting so fundamental to the outdoors. I mean,
• 1:21:23
  I know people who are forestry managers who have been responsible for rehabilitating forests. They
• 1:21:32
  are engaged in pest eradication. They might kill a whole lot of animals in traps in order to
• 1:21:38
  restabilize the ecosystem. They manage the ecosystem. They feel responsible. They feel custodian
• 1:21:45
  ship guardianship over a certain area. In some ways, they can stand back at the end of it and say,
• 1:21:51
  look, that entire ecosystem over there were that whole forest. It wouldn't exist without me,
• 1:21:57
  but they don't feel the need to pick up a gun and shoot animal. It's not because I could,
• 1:22:04
  like there's an old joke, you know, I like two things. I like hunting and fishing. So I could give up
• 1:22:09
  hunting. No problem. Not no problem. It'd be tough, but I'd have to fish all the time then.
• 1:22:15
  And I'd have to go pick mushroom, pick wild mushrooms. But yeah, if I had to pick between
• 1:22:20
  hunting fish, I'd probably choose fish. It's like, I need to be out. I'm going to be, need to be,
• 1:22:26
  have to be, I'm going to be out engaging with and getting my food. I'm going to be out getting my
• 1:22:33
  food on a wild landscape and sharing that food with my family. It's just, it's, um, I can't,
• 1:22:41
  I can explain it. I can't apologize about it. And I'd be, and I'm not articulate and smart enough
• 1:22:48
  to really tell you why exactly that has to be that way. It just has to be that way because
• 1:22:53
  that's how I, um, that's just my mental existence. Yeah. It's my mental. It's a lot lost.
• 1:23:10
  Yeah. I probably, you know, that's, that's interesting. That's just not a term that we use.
• 1:23:15
  It's not a term we use. Um, I have a real desire. Yeah. I have a desire to be successful. But the
• 1:23:22
  reason I don't think it's a bloodlust is because if I'm hunting morels, that's a kind of mushroom.
• 1:23:27
  If I'm hunting morels, um, I'm real bummed when we don't get one. And I'm real excited when we get
• 1:23:35
  one. And I would rather find one morel. If someone tried to give me morels, I don't even want them.
• 1:23:40
  It's like, I mean, I'd take them, but I'm interested in the morels that we found.
• 1:23:45
  I like, uh, I like diving for scallops. I like digging clams. They don't bleed.
• 1:23:54
  So it's something about self-selection. I like picking berries, man. I like picking berries.
• 1:24:00
  Um, a lot. Me and my kids go pick an aqua berries in August.
• 1:24:05
  If it's a wet, I'm just envisaging. I'm envisaging you dressed like the sound of music,
• 1:24:10
  uh, like doing little twels dressed in a beautiful dress on a berry field, a top of mountain.
• 1:24:15
  There's a shallay in the background. Sounds good. Yeah. I'm just out. I'm out. Um,
• 1:24:23
  I'm out. You know, I just out there doing it. Like, I don't know, man. I imagine like,
• 1:24:27
  this is going to sound crazy. It's going to sound half arrogant stuff. Like if somehow you could
• 1:24:31
  bring in a, if you could somehow bring in a coyote and interview him and be like, hey,
• 1:24:38
  you know what, man, here's a deal. Um, I can just give you, you can just stay in this room and I'll
• 1:24:45
  give you, uh, this, this, this, uh, vegetable protein concoction. And you'll actually be totally fine.
• 1:24:52
  You don't need to be running around killing all kinds of, uh, birds and, and small rodents and
• 1:24:58
  eating turkey eggs. Like, what is this right here as well? It's the coyote to be out. Is the coyote
• 1:25:03
  is the coyote going to be like, oh, sweet. Or is that coyote going to sit by the door?
• 1:25:08
  You're like, man, I gotta get out of here. It'd be like, what do you got a bloodlust?
• 1:25:11
  Do you got a bloodlust, Mr. Coyote? Well, look, the coyote may have a bloodlust because the coyote's
• 1:25:16
  not going to be happy getting berries in your sound of music landscape or your moral mushrooms.
• 1:25:22
  But it sounds to me like yours is different. But what you're talking about is this kind of a sense
• 1:25:26
  of self-sufficiency of self-reliance, like, yeah, of playing a role, playing a meaningful role
• 1:25:34
  in your ability to feed yourself. Yeah. And I, and I bring my kids up to, you know, they do all the
• 1:25:41
  things that every kid does, but I bring my kids up in the same way because I want them to have like,
• 1:25:46
  like a, a certain girl, you know, I want them to have like a raw edge to them and I want them to
• 1:25:52
  have like a, like a survival instinct and I want them to have like a toughness and a self-sufficiency
• 1:25:58
  and ability to put up with some discomfort and, you know, and like a, like a sharp tooth.
• 1:26:04
  Yeah. You know, like, like, I'll just say it, like, I like them to have that little bit of,
• 1:26:11
  of viciousness somewhere down in them.
• 1:26:16
  Hmm.
• 1:26:18
  It's well, they're going to, yeah, I mean, I think in terms of parenting, they're going to have that
• 1:26:23
  because people have that because humans are mammals and we do have it. And so it's going to come out
• 1:26:29
  in some way. And if it doesn't have some healthy way of expressing itself, it's going to come out
• 1:26:35
  in some dysfunctional way, like domestic violence or self-harm or Andrew Tate or whatever else,
• 1:26:42
  you know, people might pursue to try to scratch that itch. So, yeah. And that's a challenge for
• 1:26:49
  people. I mean, that's a challenge for people living in big cities like myself and raising kids and
• 1:26:53
  trying to find ways. We've actually just moved for that reason out of a more densely populated
• 1:26:58
  part of the city to a slightly more wild part of town where there's a bush walk on our doorstep
• 1:27:04
  and you can go to out of the river and you can look for oysters and you can hunt for crackers and
• 1:27:09
  lots of stuff. Yeah. Well, you should go, you should go read my book, Outdoor Kids in an
• 1:27:14
  Inside World because I talk about the early years of my kids' lives when they were living in New
• 1:27:20
  York and the extreme, the extremes I went through to begin educating them about nature in that
• 1:27:27
  environment. Fabulous. How'd you get Joe Rogan into hunting? Do you have another five,
• 1:27:34
  ten minutes? Joe reached out. I've told Joe this before. I didn't know what a podcast was.
• 1:27:50
  I work with a woman and we're still bodies. We don't see much each other but we're like
• 1:27:55
  email bodies. A woman named Helen Cho and she's always been in television production.
• 1:27:59
  And I remember one day Helen Cho saying to me, hey, you're not going to believe this.
• 1:28:08
  Joe Rogan wants you to come on his podcast and I had two questions. I was like, who's Joe Rogan
• 1:28:15
  and what's a podcast? Another long time ago. It was a long time ago, you know. Yeah, right.
• 1:28:23
  No, I mean, I just fell in love with a man. He's such a
• 1:28:32
  genuine, intellectually curious guy and such a generous person to his friends and things.
• 1:28:37
  I didn't know that at the time, I just decided like a huge heart. You know, and you can sense that
• 1:28:42
  when you're with him. But he was curious about hunting. In the same way earlier, I was saying
• 1:28:48
  that I don't go and tell people that don't want to go hunting, they ought to go hunting.
• 1:28:53
  But here's this guy that really wanted to go and had learned enough about it to know what he
• 1:28:58
  was saying when he said he wanted to go. And he's just like, he's fascinating. He's very
• 1:29:05
  accomplished and interesting. And so why would I not want to have a chance to spend time with him
• 1:29:11
  and hang out with him and show someone who's so cool like a thing that I'm interested in.
• 1:29:20
  But it was it was it was him. I mean, he wanted to go do it. If I had never come around, I don't
• 1:29:26
  think that it would have been too got off much longer and you'd have been hunting someone else.
• 1:29:30
  By that point, he was interested, man. You know, he was interested. I didn't tell him some secret
• 1:29:36
  I didn't tell him some secret thing that changed his mind about shit. You know, he had
• 1:29:42
  he'd grown up fishing and watched a lot of stuff and watched stuff on YouTube. I was the right
• 1:29:48
  I was the right guy at the right time. You know, I didn't I didn't do something to change his mind
• 1:29:54
  about it. And where did you take him and what did you hunt? We hunted north central Montana,
• 1:30:01
  which is where I live now. We went home in the north central Montana and went with buddy
• 1:30:06
  mind. I'm still colleagues and great friends with Ryan Callahan. And we took Joe and his friend,
• 1:30:12
  Brian Callahan hunt. And then later I hunt up a Joe open Alaska and I hunt up a Joe and
• 1:30:18
  then one time at my friends place in California, we hunted down in Nevada one time.
• 1:30:24
  We got to hunt in Texas. So we've hunted around a fair bit together over the years. But I've,
• 1:30:31
  you know, we've been friendly for quite some time. So every yeah, every year, every two years,
• 1:30:36
  we'll we'll get together and go do something. Has he gotten better? Oh, yeah, man, because
• 1:30:44
  he became he became an archer and and yet in archery requires a lot of discipline.
• 1:30:53
  Like like hunting requires a lot of like really to like really hunting requires a lot of discipline
• 1:30:58
  because there's so many aspects to it about biology, ecology, landscape, geography,
• 1:31:03
  on and on and on. But Joe got very obsessed with archery and to be good at archery, you have
• 1:31:11
  to shoot a lot of archery. And so he just got to be like a like a top tier archer.
• 1:31:21
  And I'm not, right? But he really just got into that and fell in love with the discipline required.
• 1:31:28
  And so he is got to be where he's just better with a bow than a lot of bow hunters than a lot of
• 1:31:34
  life-long bow hunters. Well, he used to shoot like tournament pool, you know, billiards, you know,
• 1:31:40
  he's not on a costume to do and shit with his hands, man. You know, I mean, yeah,
• 1:31:45
  I love that guy. I mean, what an adventurous and insightful mind as well. And I'm so glad
• 1:31:51
  that he's achieved the success that he has. I mean, he's really, I was so much of my success to him
• 1:31:56
  because I was on his show for the first time 10 years ago. And after the show, he was like,
• 1:32:01
  you should just do a podcast, man. Just forget about all the, you know, working for media companies
• 1:32:06
  and a lot bullshit, just go and do a podcast. I was like, okay, Mr. You seem to know a lot about
• 1:32:10
  things like podcast. And if I, if I didn't have my 10,000 hours of experience doing another podcast
• 1:32:17
  while I was in New York, thanks to Joe, there's no way that this operation would be, you know,
• 1:32:22
  providing a living for me and my family. And he's just, there's that story replicated so many
• 1:32:27
  times for so many younger people who he has inspired or given, you know, been generous with his time
• 1:32:34
  with, you know, he's had me back on the show at times when I've needed to promote something and
• 1:32:38
  it's given me a big boost. He's like just a, such a solid stand-up person. And I wish that
• 1:32:44
  everybody knew that about him. And, you know, sometimes when I talk about, when I talk about
• 1:32:51
  generosity, I mean, besides he's just, you know, I guess, you know, like, he's like emotionally generous
• 1:32:58
  to people. And you hear that when you listen to a show, but, um, yeah, he would never like,
• 1:33:04
  like in his mind, he never like, well, I'm not going to have another comic on because I'm trying
• 1:33:09
  to launch my own special right now. No, that's right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:33:16
  I mean, that's, but that's interesting, isn't it? And we can wrap here because I know you're
• 1:33:19
  going to, you're going to run, but it is interesting. I think about success that successful people tend to
• 1:33:24
  have that attitude of the pie being unlimited. And they're not petty about other people take,
• 1:33:30
  other people success, like as far as Joe's concerned, the more people doing podcasts, the better.
• 1:33:35
  And it, it, this has always been the case, even before he had the biggest podcast in the world.
• 1:33:38
  He was like, the more people are doing it, the more excitement they'll be, the more energy they'll
• 1:33:43
  be, there's no limit to the number of hours that people can spend listening to podcasts. So it's
• 1:33:47
  not like we're all fighting over a finite pie. Let's just all do it. And that's the kind of supportive
• 1:33:53
  attitude that I find successful people have, whether that's in comedy or entertainment or writing
• 1:33:58
  or whatever else it might, it might be that you're doing. People who are unsuccessful, it strikes me
• 1:34:04
  are people who try to cling to their own patch of turf and gelously guard it and are always worried
• 1:34:12
  about other people stealing their ideas or getting somewhere ahead of them and like a focused
• 1:34:17
  more on where they are relative to their peers that on increasing the size of the pie for everybody
• 1:34:23
  and like Joe is the master of the latter. Yeah. And picture it just outside of any strategic
• 1:34:30
  concern. Just ask yourself which life is more enjoyable to live. Right. Right. You know,
• 1:34:39
  one of that or one of like one of generosity or one of just jealous guarding of my teeth.
• 1:34:45
  I'm sorry to strategy. I'll take a jealous guarding of my turf. Thanks, Steve.
• 1:34:52
  Steve, great to talk to you. I'm glad we can finally make it work. I enjoyed it a little bit.
• 1:34:58
  Thank you for, thank you for your time. Next time you come to the good old U.S. of A man, let me know.