Ryan Callaghan & Kenton Carruth

00:00That's why you have a producer. Jamie's on the ball. You want to talk a little closer to the mic? Yeah. Get that sucker right up to you. Just pull. You can move it around. Bring it to you. You don't want to feel uncomfortable. These chairs are huh? They're very nice. Oh, yeah. We're live. Oh, we're live. Live live. L live. Uh, I'm here with my good pal Ryan Callah. How are you, buddy? I'm doing well. How are you doing? And, uh, his good pal, Kenton Kruuth. Uh, met you before at the First Light booth at the Shot Show. That was the first time I met you, right? I think so. I think that's it. Yeah. And we I wanted to have you guys on first of all because I like I love your company. You guys got a great company. Uh First Light makes really cool uh hunting clothes, outdoor clothes made out of you started out with marino wool, which I think uh before I went with uh Ryan and Steve Reanella, I

00:45really had no idea about the properties of marino wool. I didn't know that it keeps you from stinking, that it, you know, like it that it really keep retains heat while you're wet. So it's got so many awesome properties to it. Like if you go out for people that don't know, that don't go in the outdoors, but if you go out and you walk and it's cold out and you hike like a long distance and you get sweaty, if you're wearing cotton, you're kind of If it's really cold out, once you start getting sweaty, your body starts shivering and you get in a real bad place. Wool has this really weird quality, and maybe you could help me explain that where when it gets wet, it somehow or another still retains heat. So if you sweat in it, you still feel okay. Like, oh, what's going on there? Well, you know, it just it naturally moves the sweat off of your skin and kind of tries to get it to the

01:35outermost layer and at which point then it can evaporate fast. But, um, you know, sheep have to live in crazy environments. You know, it'll be hotter than in the summertime and then, um, you know, super cold in the winter. So, you know, over the course of evolution, they've got, you know, a coat that will deal with a massive amount of of variance, you know, and wool is pretty much the same. It's like you can wear it when it's when you're sweating bullets, it pulls a sweat off and then um dries pretty quickly, but even when it's wet, it retains 80% of its heat. Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing stuff. And is there a synthetic uh material that does the same thing? Well, every synthetic is trying to a mimic down or b mimic marino wool because those are the two most efficient um you know temperature regulating fabrics or materials out there. Um and that's

02:28that's how you got into your primolofs and your all your military testing and that's where you saw synthetics really take off. Um so yeah it's so like a primolaf for example or um some of your fleces they basically um combine something that loves water and something that hates water. So the thing that love loves water is going to pull moisture off and the thing that hates it is going to repel it and try to push it to the outside. That's interesting. So it's like sort of a two-layer process where something's trying to keep you dry and something is trying to like literally suck up the wet like a sponge. Yes. And then somehow or another your body heat then can regulate it because your body heat you're you're staying warm because the dry is close to your skin and then the heat comes off your skin and can it can dry out that stuff better. Yeah. Exactly. And your body heat your like

03:18your natural um you know your natural zone how much heat and how much moisture you push out is a major factor. Um, and especially when you get into like some of your waterproof, breathable, uh, membranes and things like that. Uh, that's something that I think really would surprise a lot of people when it comes to uh, hunting clothing. They really would have no idea like how much how much how technical the stuff is and how much thought is put into it and how how like involved the process is of creating this stuff. You know, it's funny because we all kind of came from the traditional like ski, snowboard, snowmobile world, you know, grew up whatever skiing. And so we've been, you know, involved in having super, you know, technical clothes since I was, I don't know, eight years old. Right. Right. All the underwear stuff for skis, all marino wool, all the different

04:16polies when that kind of came out and replaced cotton when I was a kid. And you know, um, they work great. But it wasn't until we kind of started using Marino that we found something that I mean, you know, if you go skiing or snowboarding or snow sledding, snowmmoiling, right? You're sweating bullets and if you get stinky, whatever. It's just how it always was, you know, but for hunting, it's a really a big deal. You know, if you can possibly kind of, you know, shrink your stink footprint just by a little bit, it can be the difference between succeeding that season or not, you And so we also are wearing Marino for whatever you know all of the other sports you know like skiing and snowboarding and you know pedal biking and whatever. Um and once we found out that it didn't stink that was like whoa that was a big deal you know cuz you could wear it for days and

05:04days and so that was kind of the impetus and at the same time it started taking over I would say the traditional outdoor space you know. Yeah. And your company is really popular with public land, do-it-yourself hunters, uh, guys who go out backpacking for long periods of time, and that's one of the reasons why they like that Marino wool. And one of the reasons why I wanted to have you guys on is to talk about what's been going on lately with uh, HR 621 and now HR 622, these two recent bills. They pulled HR 621. and Steve Ranella wrote a big article about it, but for the uninitiated, what these bills are about is they're about selling off our public land, uh, giving the states the ability to do whatever they want with it. Right now, these lands are federal. They're owned by the people of the United States. It's a very unusual situation that we have here. It's it's an amazing

05:55situation and there's very few countries in the world that have anything even remotely close to it where there's millions and millions and millions of acres that are available for anybody listening to this to go on. It's it's you. It's literally your land. Like backcountry hunters and anglers have that great shirt that I wear all the time. It says public land owner and I've seen you on it and I'm going to tweet the picture of you and I um from Shot Show um where I was I was with you and you were wearing that shirt. That's that's a such an important point for people because they I didn't know it at all until I went with you guys until I went with Reinella and the crew. We went to Montana that first trip with Brian Ken who's hopefully coming. That's why that door's open, folks. If you're watching this, we're leaving that door open because uh Ken is trying to make

06:37his way over here right now. Um but I didn't know that this public land system even existed. And I think most people are unaware. They just don't they don't understand how unique this is and how incredible like the the our forefathers like their their their vision to make something so incredible that no one can go in and just put malls up in. It is an amazing thing and I think this is like the easiest battle in the world if we can somehow tell people or you know communicate even a fraction of our appreciation for it. Yeah, it's just it is the reason I get up in the morning. Well, especially where you guys are because you guys are like you're in the boondocks, man. I mean, you guys are in Idaho and you're in a beautiful area, but you could literally like go out your back door and make a straight line through public land for forever. Like, you could just go walk and disappear.

07:37Oh, I mean we can walk straight north and cross uh uh two highways and one interstate and keep going across the Canadian border. Um cross two more highways and be in the Yukon basically. So it's a wild chunk of ground. It's amazing. It is. And it's open to everybody. Everybody. And you know, it's it's an interesting issue because sometimes, you know, you'll get mountain bikers get after the equestrian people or the you know, the the the hikers get after the motorbikers. But it's an issue for every single person because no matter what sport you do or how you choose to enjoy the outdoors, that's your land. Once that's gone, it's gone. Yeah. I mean, and there are regulations like as far as where you can take motorbikes or where you can ride even bikes, right? even trail bikes. But that set aside, man, there's there's some amazing country that you could just go

08:37get lost in. Just go wander, pitch a tent, drink out of a stream, and you could stay there for long periods of time, and it's totally legal. It's totally yours. Your tax dollars literally fund and support it. And all the money that comes from buying hunting equipment, from buying tags, from all that stuff is what pays to keep fish and game uh employed, make sure that people are monitoring the health and the populations of the animals that live there, making sure that no one is breaking any of the laws. I mean, it's really an amazing amazing system. It is. It's unreal. And you know, I want to clarify a couple of things like all these national forests um any BLM grounds, they all have their own regulations. So yeah, you can Bureau of Land Management for folks that don't know management. You guys are deep on the inside. You got Most people listening to this don't know what the

09:33you're talking about. That's right. So um different forests um have different regulations as far as like how long you can stay camped in one spot. Um typically um it's 10 to 15 days and then you have to move again depending on where you are x amount of um you know sometimes it's 100 feet sometimes it's 20 miles um and then you can set up camp again. It is not arbitrary. There's some smart folks out there that um study the impact of man on the land and they want to try to keep, you know, that pristine experience that we all love to go find right there for everybody. And they have an incredibly tough job because their mandate, their federal mandate is to manage that land for everyone. How did you guys become a company that's so connected in people that do go into the outdoors and people that do hunt and you know enjoy your products? You guys are like really connected to public land

10:38conservation and you know and these do-it-yourself public land sportsmen like you guys are like very very connected in that world. Like it's you're very it's a very respected company in that world. Thanks. I mean, you know, we do we see it from all angles. You know, all of us have, you know, the summertime we'll, like I said, we'll ride mountain bikes and the winter time backountry skiing and it's all of a sudden, you know, and then hunting, of course, it's huge. But you just see it from all angles. Like places that where you recreate 365 days a year, all of a sudden start to get sucked up and it's just like, wait a minute, wait a minute. You know, like if this wasn't if we didn't have public lands, we wouldn't have a business, right? It it it would just wouldn't exist, you know? Wasn't a committee decision. Our board of trustees didn't say it's high time we

11:29Well, if you look at the United States being only founded in 1776 and you just look at the massive amount of land we occupy now with there's just the greater Los Angeles area where there's 30 million people and you know you go up all through the Pacific Coast Highway and just see all the cities and see all the buildings and see all the stuff that you would encounter if you try to try to drive from California to New York. The only thing that's stopping that whole area from being covered with buildings and malls and gas stations and anything else they can stick in there is the fact that it's public land. It's that it's it's federally owned land and you can't build on it. There's some folks that want that. They want it. We drove that what is it? Trapanga Tanga Canyon. Yeah. Yeah. Um and I was like, "Oh, there's a good looking house." And I was like, "Oh god, there's houses

12:18everywhere in here." Yeah. And then we came around the corner and there's this sign that says open space x amount. I was like, "Yeah, cover that open space up. Get rid of that stuff." It said that open space open. I wonder what they mean by that. Wonder if it's like Oh, it had an acreage sign on it right there and it was like like a park. Oh, no. Like a for sale sign. Oh, open space for sale. Yeah, this space is still open. Yeah, there's a lot of development up there. Tanga is very unusual though because if you live in Los Angeles, you could be in Tanga and look like you're in the woods. It's cool, I got to say. And right now it's all greened up. It's beautiful up there. Oh, right now it's spectacular. Right now, I mean, it would trick you. If you came here from somewhere else, you're like, "Oh my god, this is the most beautiful place ever." Then you

13:03come back in August, you're like, "This is a fire hazard. We got to get out of here. Everything's dry and people are throwing cigarettes out their car windows." Kenton's a serious audio file. So, when we were driving up the road, you know, we opted to go over the Pacific Coast Highway and then come over that way um out of LA and Kenton's like, "Oh, man. I bet Neil Young walked walked through that door hundred times." Yeah, I bet he have. I mean, there was a house that was for sale in Tanga and I found out about it before it was it was already sold by the time I found out about it, but it was a house that Jimmyi Hendricks owned. It's like, I would buy a house that Jimmyi Hendricks owned in a heartbeat. by a garbage can then. Yeah. I mean, that whole place was just it's hippies galore up there. It's a really interesting spot. Yeah. Oh, 621. HR 621. Uh, what does HR stand for? Uh,

13:54I believe it's House Rule, right? Is that right? No, we're going to have to Google that up. I'm I'm not real good on some of the nuts. You'll get it for us. Uh 621 was um basically uh to authorize the sale of pre uh approved lands 3.3 million acres of uh federal federally managed lands that uh had been designated as um basically disposable disposable right now. How do they decide what's disposable and what's not? That's a fantastic question. I've asked it a ton and I don't know I don't I certainly haven't talked to anybody who was on that committee that came up uh under Clinton I believe. 3 million acres. Yep. 3.3 million. That seems like a lot. Oh Jesus. State. Yeah. Yeah. HR just means it started in the House. So House of Representatives HR and then uh 622. So 621's off, right? Right. Well, the guy pulled it after the backlash and his name is Jason Chavitz.

15:04Is that how you say his name? Yep. Representative Jason Chav. And what's crazy is this guy's a hunter and a fisherman apparently. Then he took a picture with him wearing camo. Hey guys, I'm one of you. Come on, stop attacking me. Because as soon as people found out about this bill, his comments on his Instagram page were just overwhelmed with hunters. They just took over his Instagram comments, you know, and were really upset. And some people kept it classy, a lot of people didn't. And I'm sure he felt that the the heat of that. Yes, absolutely. Which is really interesting like now because of social media, because of guys like you guys and I mean there was a million people, the Gritty Bowman, Reinella, uh I got involved. There's a lot of people involved and there's a lot of different, you know, you look at all the, if you calculate all our followers up of all

15:52the different people that were making posts about this, it reaches a lot of people and then it it gets people who might have been like me before I went with you guys to Montana who just might have been curious like what is this all about? Then you read into it and then you start looking into this public land system that we have and how unique and beautiful it is and you just go wow they want to sell that. And Paul Ryan had proposed that as well, right? Didn't he propose selling it off to pay some some of the land off to pay for the debt? It's something that comes up uh all all too frequently because I mean it's it's a it's something that we've watched, you know, state by state by state. Um do, you know, it's like you get a bad fire season. Um all of a sudden you're up to your eyeballs in debt and it's raise taxes or it's sell off some land. Sell off some land. Yeah. It's so

16:39shortsighted, you know, when you you think about the possibility that this land could not be there for your children or your children's children like it's been for us and it's been for our grandparents. I mean, it's just an amazing system that we have here. And what is HR 622? Okay, so HR 622 is right now it it is very black and white. It's basically to remove um federal law enforcement officers, LEOs, um which um the BLM has its own law enforcement officers. Um Forest Service has its own law enforcement officers. Um remove those and then give county law enforcement uh the authority to enforce laws on the federally managed lands. Huh. So if their resources are tight, which they are, they probably wouldn't stop poachers. They probably wouldn't do a good job of keeping people of, you know, making a mess out of the place. Yes. Yeah. And basically what it does is it

17:43sets the federal land system up to fail. It's like a booby trap. It's like, all right, now we're going to pull, you know, all this all these resources out. And then five years later, it's like, oh, look what a disaster it is. Now it's move it to state. You know what I mean? It's right. So, it's it's weakening the structure of it to facilitate a collapse. Correct. And there's nothing there's nothing against county law enforcement here. The the thing is it's like, you know, you go grab your local sheriff or sheriff's deputy and say, "Hey, uh, you know, how many mushrooms can I pull off of this burn on, you know, the Seea National Forest?" I mean, that guy's going to look at you crosseyed. you know, uh, ask him how many cords of wood you can go up and cut for your fireplace in the winter. You know, the guy's not gonna have a clue because it's not not his job. He's got

18:33bigger fish to fry. Got totally different laws, right, for federal, state, for federal versus state. And yeah, I mean, it's a different job. Now, what explain to people what is the difference between BLM and the other organizations that control public land? Okay, so um, Bureau of Land Management. Yeah. So the homestead act, right? Uh go west, young man. Everybody gets 140 acres. Um the uh so basically we got pushed a lot of people out onto this big open space because uh you know the east needed money. So we really need to populate these areas and start the economy rolling again. Um the basically the areas that failed like a large large chunk of the Missouri brakes is block land management or bureau land management. Um the areas that failed and were not hospitable um became BLM ground and basically the impetus of BLM is um they're they're more revenue focused than um your forest

19:42service lands are. So BLM um are is is more focused towards grazing. Um so leases like oil and gas grazing. Um and the grazing lease was the big thing with the Bundy's. That was the big thing up in Oregon where there's a standoff with the the Rangers and all that jazz, which is chaos. Chaos. But they owed a ton of money. Yeah. And they didn't, you know, didn't want to pay it. They owe a ton of money. Yeah. They still do. But how does that work? Like cuz we've been on hunts before. Like we were recently with uh Reanella and crew. We were in Nevada and we're on a mu deer hunt and you know you'd be stalking on a mu deer and these cows were everywhere. I mean everywhere. I mean if you were hunting cows boy you would be golden. Like dude we're eating good tonight. cows everywhere. But we were hunting deer. So you you would have to get away from the cows to get to

20:35the deer and the cows would sometimes spook and then the deer would realize that the cows saw something and they would boing boing. Yeah. Where the cows would want to come check you out. Yeah. And you would step in cow everywhere. And I was like, this is so crazy. Like, how are these how does this work? And, you know, they were trying to explain to me that these people just sort of let these cows wander through. And we we've found that in Montana as well. Yep. People just let their cows wander all over the place, then they round them up. Yeah. And that's something. So the, you know, we the people have a have these programs in place to where we lease that ground. Um I I would say more often than not, if not a 100% of the time, far below market value to uh you know, the rancher and it's right at first refusal. So the first guy to say, "Hey, I want to graze

21:26my cattle on this property." he's his name is going to be on the lease until he doesn't want it anymore and he and it comes up for renewal and then um you know there's uh rangeland biologists um who go out and they say this is how many days and how many um you know animal cow calf units um can be grazed on this area for this long and doesn't that affect local wildlife as well cuz I would assume if you're having animals graze on this land. They're eating a lot of stuff that the deer would eat or maybe a lot of the other wildlife would eat. But you got to keep in mind, man, is it a tough call? I mean, yeah. I mean, where we are, you know, the the in the lowlands, it's the analopee and the and the uh and the analopee and the cows live pretty harmoniously. In fact, a lot of that, you know, if there's a lot of grain they use to a lot of cow feed, then, you

22:21know, it could help. when done properly, it it it works really well because, you know, basically our beef has replaced our bison, right? Our buffalo. So, there was a major grazer out there prior to the beef being out there. Um, you know, super dense grass lands are good for some things, but you know, often times your upland birds need open areas um uh for, you know, picking up scratch and it's better for the bugs and a number of reasons. So when that system's respected and done well, um it's it's good for everybody or can be good for everybody. Now, what are your opinions? I'm sure you guys are aware of this whole American Serengeti project that they're trying to do in the Midwest of this country or in the middle of this country, which is really quite fascinating. They're trying to buy up private land and turn it into what they think was essentially like what America

23:19was before people came here. Yes. And I am not I'm not super studied up on it, but yeah, that is the kind of the nuts and bolts of it. And at the end of the day, if it's going to be privately held and I I want to say Nature Conservancy, American Prairie Reserve. There it is right there. This is uh a little piece on it that uh Jamie just pulled up. But you know, they want to reintroduce bison, like wild bison all throughout areas of Wyoming. It's Montana, Wyoming. There's a bunch of different areas, right? Where is it? Yeah. It's bigger than I know it's been talked about in a number of different states, but yeah, I think it is, you know, kind of the traditional, you know, the um yeah, the kind of the Oklahoma, uh, South Dakota, North Dakota, like the the true prairie region there where it used to be like giant herds of buffalo wandering through the land. They want to

24:18recreate that. Yes. And they're also going to open up block management on that. Right. So, this is going to be an area like once it gets established and once there's populations of animals there, then people are going to be allowed to hunt those animals. Yeah. And I mean, if if that's the case, that's great. Like I said, I haven't been super studied up on it, but you know, I mean, I love the idea, man. I mean, I it's fascinating, you know, that they're doing this and buying up private land that's right now being used for whatever and they're going to turn it into public land and they're going to allow people to uh to go there and you're going to be able to see like great herds of bison roaming through some of these states. I mean, that that's going to be incredible. That's something we always talk about on this uh land transfer stuff. You know, once it's gone, it's

24:58gone. So, if these guys are out there trying to make some more of it, Yeah. I say good on them. Yeah. I mean, they literally are trying to make more public land, which is kind of crazy. What are they going to do about predators? Are they going to bring in predators? Are they going to bring in wolves? And man, if they're going to say that, Jamie, here we go. Uh, does the APR attend intend to reintroduce predators such as wolves, grizzly bears, which are historically present in the region as a non uh as a private nonprofit organization, American Prairie Reserve does not have the authority to reintroduce species to the area, even if those species were historically present. Species reintroduction falls under the jurisdiction of Montana Fish and Wildlife Parks andor the US Fish and Wildlife Service and any decisions regarding the reintroduction of wolves

25:41or grizzlies in the region will need to be made by these agencies augmented by the will of the general public. Interesting. Yeah, reintroducing grizzlies is a tough zel are going for it though. Oh, in Montana it's crazy, right? That area that you and I were in Missouri Brakes. I mean, that's east of the mountains, right? Right. Um, they every other year or so, they catch some loner, um, typically a young male grizz way out in the prairie, and it just looks like he's just kind of naturally getting funneled down to the Missouri brakes, which, you know, is historic range for them. And, uh, somewhere along the way, he get, you know, his hunger gets the best of him. He knocks over some sheep and that's kind of the end of them. But wolves going to be the same thing. Wolves are going to come whether you like it or not. Yeah. How do you guys feel about wolves? Cuz you guys are in Idaho and

26:36Idaho has a really interesting relationship with wolves whereas a real lovehate relationship. Like I got to imagine it's got to be cool as to be out at night and hear. It's interesting. I got to say it's amazing. So at first hair I think I'm sure it was it before you could hunt wolves and before it was it was totally unchecked it it the elk hunting sucked because they killed all the elk cuz they came in the elk didn't know what was going on they hadn't had wolves there in a long time over a hundred years and then explain to people that there's a reintroduction of wolves into the Yellowstone region in 199 something or another six maybe or two it it was I'm not positive when it started but and this was not voted on either this is a really controversial subject among sports people and also among wildlife people. A lot of wildlife people completely support it. They think it

27:25balances out the ecosystem and that the unulates like the elk and the deer were running rampant. They were destroying a lot of the grasses and the plants that would like provide homes for a lot of other animals and that this whole thing was kind of unbalanced. Just like with beef, man, overg grazing's a bad deal. Absolutely. But our so you know prior to us being able to hunt them and stuff um it was it it really was skewed. The elk had no idea how to deal with the wolves. So for instance a pack of wolves would come in the bull a bull would go out and try to fend off the wolves and it would just get crushed by the wolves, you know, right? A bull elk should tell anything. Yeah. Full bull elk, right? But nowadays after maybe living together for and I mean I've seen this it's in my happening in my neighborhood like as we speak there's wolves in my neighborhood

28:18right now and it literally you can tell when the wolves are around the elk they pod up kind of um kind of get into a circle and they they don't try to go out and fight one-on-one. They'll just sit there and the wolves will kind of come in and they work together, you know, and and it's it's an interesting it's an interesting thing. our our elk hunting is quite good and it and the elk don't run. They don't run. They don't split off. They've kind of figured out this symbiosis like how to live with wolves. It's it's an interesting thing. That's fascinating because they always did live with wolves, you know, until people came along, right? And well, and elves tradition elves, what am I talking about? This is where my mind is. Uh elk traditionally before people came around, there's a debate as to whether or not they were mountain animals at all. Right. They were they spent more time

29:08and sto starved going through the Nespers territory, right? Like they there was so little game in the mountains when they were out there. That's one of the major arguments for that. But right, um yeah, you know, there's there were animals covering the prairies if if you you know, believe every word of those Lewis and Clark journals. Well, it kind of makes sense if you think about it because if you see the way they're adapting to wolves and every animal adapts, I mean, there's a crazy documentary right now. I mean, this is a little bit off topic, but on Netflix about rats, it is so disturbing. If you haven't seen it, it's amazing. It's called Rats. It's called Rats. I've heard about Morgan Spurlock, the guy who did uh Superersize Me and a bunch of other documentaries, he created this. Rats, like they're gross. Everybody knows they're gross. You know, you just

29:59steal when they start pulling parasite. They catch a bunch of rats, start pulling parasites out, and they're like, "Well, this one will kill you if you have an open wound and this gets on you, you're fucked." Black plague, right? Yeah. Oh, it cames from rats. Yeah. And they they pulled a botfly out of this one rat that was literally the size of its head. It's just like this gigantic thing. And then at the end of it, they kind of explain like one of the guys who's an exterminator explains how smart rats are and how much they adapt. And what they'll do is if there's poison or if there's traps, they literally the smart rats, the older rats will hang back and they'll let a young weaker rat go towards the food. And you know, he he gets his head crushed by the the trap and they go, "Yep, I thought something was up about that. Let's get out of here." And they you

30:42never killed them all. Like to be able to kill them all, the most effective method that they were using in this documentary was dogs. They had bunch of terriers. It was an all these little dogs. Cute little dogs, man. Little cute little dogs. You would think a little sweetie. Those little Jack Russell terriers. Those little suckers were meant to kill rats. That's why they made them. And they just run after these rats and they're all ripping them apart. It is ruthless and brutal. But it just highlights the adaptation that animals undergo when there's pressure. Any kind of pressure makes them adapt and change and they just sort of figure out what the the problem is. Brian Cowen on the way. Yeah, I grabbed a There it is. This is a scene in it. I mean, oh, there we go. Look at those things are pissed. Oh my god. These little are monsters, man. They just crush these rats and they rip them

31:37apart. Like they play tugof-war with these rats. It is in the This is a This is not in the movie, right? This is just something else. Yeah. This is just on YouTube called Ratting or something. Ratting. Yeah. And this is how they rides of rats in like really heavy areas. They don't eat them, though. They just kill them. No, they just crush them. Well, sometimes they eat them. In the movie, they were eating some of them. Speaking to the uh parasite side of things. Kent and I were cruising down uh uh where were we last night? See a Kardashian Ventura Boulevard. No, there was a possum. Yeah, same thing. Cal grabbed the possum by the tail. I thought it might have been grabbed it. I couldn't help myself. It was the first possum I've ever seen. Sounds like a good idea at the time. You never seen a possum before? I've never seen a possum. How's that possible? Oh,

32:19you're in the woods 300 days a year. Awesome, man. Wow. Yeah. So, I grabbed the thing by the tail and cuz I wanted to see if it'd play dead, right? That's the thing. And then immediately I just ran inside, washed my hands cuz I was like, "Oh god, I'm in LA and I grabbed a paw. That's a dirty possid." So, the adaptation thing is 100% true. Like those elk got punished when the wolves were, you know, coming on the scene and they just figured it out. And prior to that, they got punished by people and they moved into the mountains. They realized, look, these people, the the lazy ones, they want to pull up in their truck and shoot off the hood and uh just stay away from cars. Let's Hey guys, let's get let's go up here. It's hard for them to go up here. They get tired. There's not that much air. Let's go higher. The wolves are super smart, right? They don't mess around. like they

33:10if once the bullets started flying they would you know they were you know that's like you know there's a wolf quota and rarely in our unit does it get met you know so it's I don't know now explain that to people that are the uninitiated so what it is is the wildlife biologist and this is a really controversial topic because when they reintroduce wolves there was a target population that they wanted to reach and they felt like we could reintroduce these wolves and what's interesting is they got them from Canada and the guy that trapped him that the legend holds he just found the nasty biggest like, "Oh, you guys want to bring wolves?" Cuz in Canada, like where where I got this moose in BC, they have so many wolves that uh Mike Hawkage, my buddy who lives up there, one of his neighbors, they it took out a cow and you know, they they'll just get these big packs and they'll just

33:56attack things. They roll in at least like four to you know, a pack of four is small. I mean, they nine of them. And but all right, one, I'm not like some wolf hater, right? No, no, no, no, by any means, but it's it is they are gnarly predators. Like I've seen them, you know, kill stuff and it's I don't know. It's it's interesting to me how people have this real soft spot for wolves. Like they're amazing creatures and they can do amazing things. They can travel amazing distances, but nice they are not. And it's not like this furry kind of thing. They're they're pissed. Well, people think of them as dogs cuz they look a lot like huskys. We think of them as some beautiful forest creature that lives this natural existence and they do, but they're also ruthless predators. And they are the only predator in North America like that that size that operates in packs. Mhm.

34:47And that's some scary I mean, coyotes kind of do it, but they're a lot smaller. And, you know, it's just they're they're more going after rodents and and fawns and little things. They can get a hold of wolves to take out a full-blown elk. you come across a kill and it's that thing did not die in any sort of a nice Disney sort of way. Oh boy. From the back to the front almost always when we were in um um BC in that place where I was getting to with my friend Mike Hawkridge up there. We uh came across a kill. It was pretty fresh. It was a uh a calf, a moose calf. And it was just the stunning thing about it is first of all it was pretty fresh. Like you look down at it like it probably happened the night before maybe at the very earliest like a day ago and there was hair everywhere. Like that's what I didn't expect. Somehow or another I thought like like oh I didn't

35:37expect to see so much hair but it's like almost like they shaved it and it stays for like a long time. You know you could come in the next summer and it would be just this big it looks like a carpet. Well up there in BC where he lives you can shoot as many wolves as you want. There's no quota. The reason being is that there's so many of them. They have to control the population and they're so smart. They're really hard to kill. And so these people that have cows up there and their various farm animals up there, I mean, they're constantly under pressure. They're constantly under threat of these wolves. And as well as him, Mike shot a wolf that came at him and jumped at him off of a ridge. He was going up a ridge, rifle in his hand, and he had uh made some howls. You know, he he can imitate a wolf's howl. And the wolf saw him and literally was jumping at him and he shot it in the air. That

36:28is amazing. That's like full Africa style, right? And he's got this wolf mounted in his house like this with his feet up to remind him of that scene. I mean, that easily could have been the end of him. I mean, if he's up there without a without a gun, that wolf could easily have killed him. It's the teamwork and the wolves. Oh, yeah. It would be horrific. The worst. So, we called in a wolf. So, yeah. We should go back to like the quota thing because this is kind of a pet peeve of mine. People look I I try to encourage everybody at the office to go to our local fish and game meetings and the the town hall meetings and things that happen there and catch them Idaho. Um, the one of the arguments that came up was just so backwards, but it came from a place of com I can see the logical sequence here, but typically if there's a really really long hunting season on something, it means that

37:24hunters are doing a really bad job of filling their tags, right? Okay. So if there's a really short season, it typically means that hunters are doing a really efficient job of filling their tags. So we have this very long season on wolves. And um several people from town stood up at the fishing game meeting and said, "Hey, this is just immoral that you know we we're putting hunting pressure on wolves for eight months out of the year." And the truth of the matter is is hunters, myself included, are doing a very very poor job of putting a tag on these things. And I've I've called in one in our area and it was an absolutely amazing experience. But uh you know, basically our south facing slopes are wide open, our north facing slopes are heavily timbered, and I could hear the wolf calling below my uh friend of mine, Jim. uh is a amazing shot. Old retired Forest Service dude. And uh he got set

38:31up for the shot. I'm calling at the wolf. As the wolf's coming up the mountain, it all of a sudden starts making noises that I just cannot make. So I kind of knew I was screwed, right? Um but it was amaz The vocal range is unbelievable. What kind of what? Just like barks and wolves like wolfs and growls. Like it just sounded like this thing was getting more and more pissed off the closer it got to us. And that was my job, right? I was like, I'm going to make this thing so pissed that it just keeps coming and Jim's going to get a shot at it. And that thing broke the tree line at probably 500 yards, made it at a dead sprint about 60 yards from the timber, all of a sudden hit the brakes, turned around, was gone, and that is the closest I have ever gotten to killing a wolf in Idaho. And saw it for maybe a second. Now he there's a lot of people that are listening to this go why the

39:23would you want to kill a wolf man you know what do you got a little dick dick doesn't work you know that always that's the big one that always comes up is your dick so small man you want to kill a wolf what I think is lost on people who don't encounter wolves or who don't understand the science behind wildlife management is that there is nothing else that's going to control their population. It's only going to be people. They're going to survive through the winter. They're going to eat as many elk as they can, as many deer, as many whatever the they can get a hold of as they can. And especially since they had this kind of crazy head start before the animals figured out that they were there, cuz they'd never been there in over a hundred years since they were extrapated from the American Southwest. And the, you know, what they had done was with wolves, they had shot like

40:11horses, like wild horses, then injected them with strick nine, right? Yeah. And then they had shot like an alpha wolf and rubbed his scent and his glands all over the meat so that the other wolves knew that he had been there so they thought it was okay to eat that stuff and so they would eat it. They would get the strick nine and they would die and they it was a mass kill off the Judas wolf. Yeah. Yeah. Judas wolf. Yeah. Yeah. Um yes. So yeah, there is management, right? And the thing is like one of the hottest topics in our area was um in the winter, especially a heavy winter right now, all your game animals get congregated um in lower elevations typically on these south facing slopes that get a lot of sun. heavy winters like we're experiencing right now. These animals are basically pushed into that farm and ranch country and those um operators down there are feeding their

41:05winter livestock. Um and the wolves and the coyotes are right in on top of everybody in cving seasons right now. So then you get uh typically a very large um mortality rate. Yeah. mortality rate spike spikes because you got animals that are in distress and there's you know after birth from the birthing process everywhere. You got easy pickings on the cabs and uh hunters aren't knocking these numbers down. So the state and you know like cattleman's association will go together and fund helicopter gunning so aerial gunning to go out there and shoot those animals. So, um, you know, I I would love to hear the tiny dick argument. Um, well, you want to kill a wolf cuz you got a tiny dick. Why would you want to kill a wolf? They're beautiful, magnificent creatures, and they are. But it's important to recognize that there have historically been gigantic problems with wolves and

42:03people. That's where all the Little Red Riding Hood comes from. Uh, the wolves in Paris story, I'm sure you aware of that story from the 1400s where they killed like 40 people in Paris. Right. Well, Paris has wolves in it again. Do you know that? No. Yes. There the people are being told, there was an article about it recently where people are being told to not fear the wolves that are in the streets of Paris because they're only looking for four-legged prey. Like, these people don't remember the story from the 1400s, this historical story where the the people of Paris had to gather together with spears and corner these wolves and killed them in the town square. It's an amazing story. you know, how much of it, you know, obviously when you're dealing with something from 1400, there's no film, so we don't know how much of this is accurate, but it's a historical story

42:51that they had to kill a ton of wolves. And I'm sure you guys know about the story from World War I. The Russians and the Germans had a ceasefire because so many of them were getting killed by wolves in Russia, they decided, "Let's go kill these wolves and then we'll go back to killing each other." I'd never heard that. You never heard? It's a great story. It's a great story. I I think the I mean the populace at large what they I think what could benefit the most from is there's people on extreme lovers and extreme haters but in the middle there is somewhere in the middle there's a right thing to do and I think that the government definitely puts their best foot forward via scientists and whatever to figure out that balance you know and I think that to say that you know we need to have you know 10,000 wolves in Idaho is naive because that would happen for for

43:39instance if they were just let you know right to procreate at will. So I, you know, these people are trying to be good, right? That's the that's why they're callulling them. That's why, you know, that's why they reintroduced them to create a balance, you know, and I think that that's that needs to be realized. Both sides. Both sides. Both sides. The people that don't want any wolves to die. They don't want wolves to die because wolves are amazing. And then wildlife is amazing. It's totally well. You can go to Yellowstone and I I went this summer and you go and see a herd of buffalo just chilling on this field like you know and I was there with my kids and I was giving them the binos and they're staring at these buffalo and they're only like 100 yards away and like this is amazing. Like and and my kids are like those are wild. I'm like those are wild. They go wherever they

44:23want and like that's like in their head like that's a wild this just giant furry Star Wars beast is a wild animal. They'll never forget it. They'll never forget it. Yeah. And I mean, and it was sinking in their head, too, that this is wild, you know, because it's one thing if you see something behind a fence and you go, "Oh, that's a cow." You know, "We're at a farm. That's a cow." And I'm like, "No, honey. Those things live in the woods. They go wherever they want. There's no boss. No one tells them what to do. They just do whatever they want." Totally. Well, coming full circle, like the whole wild thing is that, you know, with public lands, people get to have these crazy wild experiences, i.e. by hunting. Like there's very little that things that you can do where you go out and it's it's raw, right? Things can go sideways and you know you can get caught out that I

45:10mean it's it's it's it's a unique thing to be able to do to see these to experience this wild stuff. Yeah. And what you mean by get caught out there is like you could go somewhere and the weather can turn ugly and you can get snowed in, get lost in the mountains. Yeah. People die every day. Yeah. Bob uh Bobcat Goldweight had a really fun video, a movie rather that he did called Willow Creek about and the the the movie was about all the different people that get lost in the woods and his movie was saying that Bigfoot was eating them, right? pretty ridiculous. But but or is it or is it but it was a fun move. Bobcat is a nut. He's he's a Bigfoot fanatic. I was like I was trying to tell him from people that actually go to the woods, you know how many hunters see Bigfoot? Zero. Zero. It's zero. How many get hit by cars? Zero. zero. How many get caught on trail cams?

46:01zero. And you gota that's the other thing like with the the number of trail cams that exist today in in you know in the woods that put people put up to scout to try to find out where the animals are. And then on top of that the number of phones that people have that have cameras on them has gone through the roof. But the Bigfoot sightings have shrunk. There's way less of them. Interesting. And UFOs with my Bigfoot and UFO thinking. When was the last time you saw a good UFO video? They're non. They're none. Our area. The magic is gone. You going to see a UFO? You could. We have zero light pollution, right? And the air quality is insane. Oh, you guys must have like crazy skies at night, huh? UFOs all over the place. Yeah, you guys must have beautiful night skies. It's unreal. So, we're I mean, the office is just under 7,000 ft and then within 20 minutes of the office,

46:56you can climb to 11,000 ft. Wow. Try breathing up there. It It's difficult. Bring one of these kettle bells up there, get yourself a workout. You feel good. You feel good and then you have, you know, a couple days worth of stuff on your back and you're like, "Yeah, why is it that you have to uh drink so much water when there's high altitude? What's that about? Just dry. Generally speaking, where we are, it's just low humidity. And you breathe, you know, every time you breathe out, you breathe out a little water, right? Yeah. That's what the mist is. When you see people at night and it's cold, that stuff that's coming out of your mouth, that's that's actually water vapor, right? And it exists all the time. You just don't see it because there's not a big difference in the temperature between your body and the air like it is when it's really cold out. I think that's why people are more

47:43hung over in the mountains, too. Huh. Certainly my excuse. Yeah. Well, it's got to be because you're dehydrated, too, which is the big factor in being hung over in the first place, right? Exactly. Like the people that are pros, they they'll pound booze and they'll have a jug of water. A buddy of mine drank with JeanClaude Vanam and he said, uh, this is like way back when Jeanclaude Vanam was, you know, big movie star doing all these movies. He said he would do booze and he had a gallon of water with him. He brought like a milk jug size gallon filled with water. So he do a shot and chug the water. Like he was really consciously boozing, which I've never seen anybody do before. That's an aggressive mindful boozing. Mindful boozing. Health boozing. He was health boozing. That's a guy that's going, "Look, I'm not going to stop being a degenerate, but I'm going to take care

48:32of my body in the process." He comes to catch him. So he used to and we'd hear stories about looseness, but I don't know. I've never witnessed it myself. So looseness, you know, going to the bars and getting loose, getting partying. Yes. He gets crazy and catch him apparently. Used to throw throw sidekicks off the roof and Yeah. You know, shots for everyone. Shots. First time I ever heard a wolf. And this goes back to like the hair on your arm standing up. Um I was working with a buddy of mine in the Frank Church wilderness. Where's that? It's just straight north of Ketchum. It's the largest contiguous wilderness in the lower 48. Really? Yep. It's huge. And it tried to get people, right? We tried to force people in there to mine it and farm it and it just didn't take. So there's old homesteads and stuff and there's some eerie stuff like the Missouri brakes. Yes. Yeah. Very very

49:20similar. This is just, you know, on a kind of a grander scale. Um much more timber and stuff. Your guys' first experience out there. I think I still think about that because that was I would love to put some of these like land transfer people out there on that same trip. Oh yeah. These guys showed up. It was like 34 degrees, trying to snow, mostly just rain, overcast, gray skies. It was perfect. Nothing merry about it. Yeah, it was awesome. That's the worst temperature to deal with. Well, then it got down to like nine, you know, it was getting real cold towards the end, right? It was awesome, man. It was awesome because it's just it's one of the things about being in the real wilderness is how like beautiful but lonely it is. It's kind of lonely. There's something weird about it. Like you could die and it doesn't give a Like you have this illusion like if you died right here, if you had

50:14a heart attack and tipped over, we'd all be bummed out. Like god, we lost Ryan Callahan. I can't believe it, man. And you know, we'd be bummed out. But the woods wouldn't give a No. You would just you'd fall dead and everything would go. It's just the the humble the feeling of humility and the the the feeling of insignificance is so overwhelming and unavoidable that it's just this intense realization of your peace like where you are as a person where you fit in in this grand gigantic mandala of life. Yes. Yes. And it's it's like and it's amplified the f the further you go back, you know, when you know you're a full day plus walk away, you know, or you get dropped off somewhere, you know, it's like, whoa. I mean, we're here and, you know, it's it's a it's a cool feeling, though. That's the whole thing, right? You're outside your comfort zone. That's what

51:07makes it so pleasurable. My friend Adam Greenree went on a do-it-yourself hunt in Montana, an archery uh uh elk hunt. And he went, I think he went at least 12 miles in. He might have went more by himself. Shot an elk. Big Packed it out by himself. Four days. Four days of packout. So he's got 100 pounds on his back and he's got to walk 12 miles back and forth for 4 days to get this elk out. That's heavy. For folks who don't know, that is 4 days of misery. That's not four days of looking around and enjoying whistling through the woods. That's just work. And he's in decent shape. I mean, he works out a little bit, but he's not Cam Haynes, you know? He's not like some crazy marathon ultrarunner. He's Yeah. It's not his job to be fit. Yeah. I mean, he's a professional bow hunter and he he's got a mining job in Australia. And that's the other thing. He lives in

51:59Australia. So, even though he brought all that meat back, he couldn't even take it home. He he could only eat what he had here in America. and and donate it. Yeah. You can't bring it back to Australia. They don't allow it. It's a shame. Australian customs, they won't allow you. Four trips. So, let's say he did uh a little bit of meat and his entire camp out on the first trip. That's three loads of just meat. 80 lbs a load. Yeah. I mean, that guy brought out a lot. He brought it all back. He brought it all back over four days. But, you know, when he described it like how brutal the experience was by himself shooting this animal and then he called a buddy um to uh to help him. This guy helped him pack out a little bit. So, imagine your bones laying there on the prairie in eastern Montana. There's a good ch because hunters do the same thing, right? And game kind of does the same thing

52:51generation after generation, generation. Think about you tip over dead. There's a very good chance in that country there's probably like a crow or sue set of bones underneath you. Maybe somebody's horse bison antiquas all stacked up underneath you. Yeah. Like it does not give a Doesn't give a There's plenty of bones out there. You just join in the pile. And there's a whole system like the idea of waste is ludicrous, you know? Like if anything that dies, it's not going to waste. Like you're not going to waste. Your dog dies out there. It's not going to waste. Something will eat it. Yes. And it is that is the whole system. There is a a I mean it doesn't seem like it to you as a person. You're like, you're not supposed to eat Fluffy. He's my dog. No, that's a dog. And the dog is an animal and an animal that dies. There is a whole system in place for handling that for

53:45sure. I mean, from the wolves, then the foxes will come in, then the birds, and then, you know, then you bacteria, bugs, everything, and it'll be gone. It'll be down to bones, and then eventually something will eat the bones. Yeah. The picture of the archery bowl I posted this year, it just left the face on and then took all the meat off. You did an amazing job. That's so important to post, too, because you didn't waste an ounce of that meat. You cut every in between the ribs, you know? You were I mean and people were like commenting on that photo like that is the respect that you give an animal when you hunt it and you shoot it. That's the right way to handle it. Yes. Now the reality and I I think so too and I I try to go above and beyond because I'm an organ meat guy too. I love heart and liver. I'm medium on the organ. I got to need I'm going to start with

54:34tongues this year. I was thinking about your liver. Oh, dude. I had that was the worst thing to be vocal about ever. I used to I used to get called up all the time like, "Hey, I got a tongue for you because I know you like them." Right now it's you just overwhelmed with tongues. No, everybody keeps their tongue. They keep their tongues back. They keep their damn tongs and pass out of the bag. Yes, it is. But you will love it. But um the thing is like yeah, you should take every single thing, but there are little things that get wasted and like the the rib meat chunks, especially later in the season when there's not a lot of fat on these animals. Like if it's if it's going to take you some time to get out, that's the stuff that's going to get super dried out before it you can even make something out of it. So, right. You were saying about liver. Oh, yeah. So, you

55:24made a comment that you eat a lot of liver. Yeah. Like, is that is that a typical LA dish around here? No. No, no, no. It's me. Just organ meat's really good for you. It's so high in vitamins and iron. It just And it's just something about it. It just feels good when I'm eating it. You know, that's I'd read about wolves that wolves like that's one of the ways that they they um that they establish the alpha. The alpha is the one that eats the the liver. When he kill when they kill an animal, the alpha immediately eats the liver. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. There was this guy that was living with wolves and he had these wolves sort of convinced that he was a wolf and uh it was he was a wildlife biologist and a wolf expert and I forget where this was that he was doing it but it was a whole documentary on it. But one of the things they did never cry wolf was it? I don't remember

56:11the name of it unfortunately. Maybe Jamie can find it. But one of the things that this guy did was he would put a liver in a downed animal. like they would kill an animal, place it, put a a liver in it, and he would eat the liver in front of the other wolves so that he would be the dominant male. And where he got up is he had to leave because he's a wolf expert. There was a farmer that was being inundated by wolves. So, they had set up this whole way to uh keep the wolves away from this guy's property without killing him. And one of the things that they did was they set up all these speakers and they projected the sounds of these alpha wolves with these giant speakers. So, like, look, there's a new king just moved into town. Everybody get the hell away from these sheep. And they set up these big ass speakers all over. And it worked, but it took a long time to keep

56:58these wolves away, like a couple of months. And so, when he came back, the there was a new alpha that had taken his place and he wanted to kill him. And it's a horrific scene where this guy is standing there whimpering in front of this wolf. And this huge wolf is in front of him bearing his teeth. And you're just thinking at any minute this wolf is just going to tear this guy's face off. Is this real? Oh yeah, it's 100% real. Yeah, it's 100% real. It's gnarly. When the wolf's in front of him like and he's like I mean he's got to like hope that this wolf does not decide to attack him. That shows him mercy. Yeah. But he established a friendship with this wolf when he was the alpha to the point where it's going to accept the changing of positions and he has to show no resistance to this change. So, it's a really critical moment in his life, man. Cuz it might end right there

57:47with that wolf in a bad way. Yeah. I mean, you know, everything's happy when there's food around. So, if if late in the season and food's scarce, that would be a tough proposition to make. Yeah. Early in the season when everybody's happy, lots of calves on the ground, easy pickings. Yeah. Yeah, I was reading this article about bears in this one region of uh Alaska where is this salmon run and it's uh we had a video of it where there's a guy I'm sure you've seen the video cuz it's a famous video where this guy is sitting there. He's got a little lawn chair and they're taking photographs of the bears and this Volkswagen bus with fur walks up to him and just hangs out. And there's no danger. There's no fear cuz this be this bear is fat and there's salmon everywhere. And then as the guy pans away, he he he goes, "Get out of here, bear." And the bear the bear leaves. But

58:40I mean, it's 1500lb bear. It's an enormous enormous. I don't think people even get how big they are, right? Until you're right there, you probably can't. No. But as this guy pans away, you see that there's just like a dozen bears in this one area, and they're so well fed. This historically has an incredibly low incident or low rate of attack. There's like like almost no attacks by bears on people in this one area. This is it. No, food is food is the deal. Look at that thing. Oh yeah. You can see it in this one, too. Oh my. I mean, that is that's a tanker. Oh boy. Did Did we contact Did you get a hold of Adam about that TV? I told him to contact you. Did he contact Okay, we got to replace this TV. August, size that Just decides to sit down behind you. This TV sucks. Keeps cutting out. Yeah. So, he's this guy has to chase this bear off. But now, look as the bear

59:34goes, "All right, whatever." I mean, he's got a big fat belly and you turn and you look down at the river and it's just overrun. Look behind you. Look behind you. that TV. That TV's such a piece of But look behind you. Look at all those Look at all those bears. I mean, that's insane. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14. There's 14 bears in just this limited perspective. And this guy's taking photos of them because it's just And there's more. It's just overrun just overrun with fish. We were fishing up up in Prince Wales off Steve's fish shack up there and and u we had his little boy in the canoe. So, it was three of us in the canoe and we had it was high tide and we paddled the way up this creek and there were six black bears in this creek that's I mean as wide as this room and we're just sitting in the canoe and we kind of pushed the the uh bow of the canoe on this stick so

60:27it' hold us in place. And Steve's kid, you know, being a kid, he's like, "Bears are bad. Bears are scary." He's like, "What are we doing here?" But you could watch these bears take turns. And there's one laying in this creek. And as the salmon would, the water's dropping, right? The tide's going out. So the salmon would come up, the bear would wait for one to be easy, grab it, walk into the woods. The next bear would come down, lay in the same spot, and just wait. So it was like a line. It was a food line. And everybody was totally cool with each other. They're like, "We're all going to get some." Yeah. Plenty of food, no conflict. I mean, isn't that the same with people? Yeah. I mean, it's like kind of universal amongst all species. As resources get scarce, gets weird. Yeah. I mean, and that that is one of the things that's sort of important to bring up

61:22when people are talking about wolves and predators and populations like you can't ensure that these things are going to have an adequate food supply, especially as their numbers grow higher and higher. It's it's a really controversial subject. And I think the one thing that people don't understand from the outside that really don't understand the whole idea of hunting predators, they I feel like you really kind of have to be there. I feel like you kind of have to like almost be just really involved in that whole ecosystem. Just be there physically to kind of get it. I I think that's probably accurate. Like I think it would be almost odd to be like I'm going to go shoot this some animal you've never seen know nothing. You know what I mean? That would be there's a certain cruelty to that. But maybe maybe not. I don't know. But once you're once you've seen the

62:16cycle like in person, it kind of I don't know. It brings everything together if you will. you see like, you know, wow, that's interesting that, you know, that that that they're um you know, that they're around now and I hope they don't get too many of them, but you know, maybe it's a good thing and maybe, you know, certainly in our unit things are elkwise are fine. Well, balance is so super important, which is one of the reasons why places like New Zealand are so odd because they brought over incredibly odd. They brought over all these animals in the what was like the 1800s the Europeans brought them over, England brought them over. Is that what it was? Might have been earlier than that. Earlier than that all the way to because I think God I think Roosevelt gave them uh Canada geese and the malard duck in like 19 05 or something like that. So what they did was they brought all these

63:07animals over there with no predators at all. And so they have wild stags and these red deer and all these different animals that are not native and they're overrun to the point where they have to do helicopter runs on stag. They have to fly over and dut poison. Like they'll poison a whole valley cuz the possums or whatever go crazy, you know, and there's nothing left to control it. It's nuts. And you got to think the thinking was no predators. This is going to be great. Everybody's going to get along and it's going to be and we'll have food. Well, the idea was that New Zealand was going to be an exotic hunting ground for the wealthy. It was going to be like a Texas ranch for the English or something. Really? Yes. They were going to come over and they were going to choly good time. I'm going to hunt a stag. And they would go over there and um so they put these animals there, but then

64:00they just there's nothing killing them other than people. And so they're just like crazy and making baby stags and just woo. This is a party. It's plenty of food. It's all lush and green. It rains like crazy, so there's plenty of food. It's beautiful place. Oh, stunning. Kenton's been over there. I have not made it yet. Did you hunt over there? Yeah. What was it like? It was cool. We just um kind of we went over there and met our uh some of our wool growers and they rented a helicopter and they kind of dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. So, they said, "We'll see you in a couple days." Yeah, exactly. They dropped us off on top of this hill. We I was ready to get out of the bird, frankly. It was like crushing snow and I mean I I don't I've been in helicopters a solid amount and I don't love them and I was like I'll walk back like let's get down. So we got down and

64:49you know and just made our way out. Ended up shooting a really nice shammy. Oh those are really wild looking animals. Wild. Yeah. I mean we didn't even know like how big anything. We were just out there and we're like there's a shammy. Shot it. Those aren't native to that area either. No. No. We took it apart and you know put got all the meat and everything and started walking out and almost left the head there and then like let's bring the head you know it turns out it's some you know it was like a sei gold and we never seen one before they're all so small you know they taste phenomenal so that night we got out it was a sei gold is that what you're saying you saying like the size of it it was like a trophy sized animal yeah and it was which I thought which is how they pour all that stuff they do it in gold they have like silver bronze you know the inches Right. But then it puts you

65:34into a different category. So it's like a 400 in elk. Yeah. Like that kind of thing. Or a 200 in white tail. Like there's this Yeah. Like a number that very few people ever achieve, right? Yes. But it was um I don't know. I'm not a huge number. Of course, I like to pay attention, but whatever. But um it's super yummy. Shammy's like super good. What does it taste like? Just kind of tastes like I don't know. Tastes like lamb. I would say a cross between like a lamb and a really good white tail. Look at that thing. What a weird animal, isn't it? Wow. And they're everywhere. Whenever I see a big fat guy with a dead animal with a rifle, I feel like there's something wrong there. Yeah. I mean, how how does that guy get up there? How how you know I feel like you should I mean, this is totally ignorant on my part and very biased, but I feel like you should have to be in shape to kill something

66:27that lives up there. When I see a fat guy that just figures out a way how to do it, I'm like, "All right, fat guy." Short roped in. Yeah, that's how I call it. Short roped? What's that mean? Yeah. Like when guys climb Everests that are not fit, they'll have a guide that just basically short puts a short rope on and drags them basically. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Holy Aggressive guiding. What is What the is wrong with someone that doesn't get fit and want to climb Everest? I just think that they have no idea what it's like to be above 8,000 meters. like they might sit there and, you know, go on the treadmill every single day and I don't I don't know. 8,000 mters is what's really important because 8,000 ft sucks. I used I lived when I lived in Boulder, we were at 8,500 ft and I would do uh my kettle bell routine at 8,500 feet and it was just like it was like trying to like run

67:16through water. It was like Jesus Christ this is hard to do. Yeah. It was incredibly hard to do. It was so much more difficult than it is to do at sea level. I couldn't imagine what 8,000 meters is like. Gnarly. It's like 3% I think you lose something like 3% efficiency every thousand feet. You come down to sea level and you feel like 8,000 ft. Every thousand feet,000 meters. You're talking about 24 thou 25 26,000 ft. That's insane. It's insane. It's insane. Yeah. You come down to sea level and for me I'm like ah running's pointless. This is been running for a while now. Don't really feel anything. Yeah. Yeah. That was one thing that I noticed when I did live up there for it was only like for four months, but when I go down to sea level, I felt like I could run through walls. Yes. Like now I get why those guys like train at elevation and then go and fight at

68:03sea level cuz that's a big thing with fighters. A lot of them train in Denver or up here. They go to Big Bear. Sure. It goes away fast though. It literally like you're you're you acclimate here probably back down. I don't know. seems like not 5 days and you're, you know, it takes the same when you go back up though. If you've been at sea level for a while, you go back up, it takes a while before you're kind of Yeah. I think I think they say that the best way to do it is actually to train at low altitude, but to live at high altitude. So, cuz you can put in more work. So like you go down for the training like say if you were next to Big Bear, you would drive down and then train at like you know wherever down there and then bust your ass in San Bernardino or whatever and then go back up the hill and sleep and eat and do all your stuff at high altitude. So where

68:54your high workload is like for the maximum efficiency of your training because you can get 100 reps in at low elevation. Exactly. Get more work in. You can do more work. You can you can do it also like for fighting it's super important to not be tired while you're doing certain technical work like you're going to be a certain amount of tired but you don't want to be exhausted because your brain doesn't work right. No you drop your hands you develop shitty skills you you you start uh making errors in your technique and those errors in your technique will manifest themselves under pressure. So, it's like one of the things about fighting is it's super important that you do everything in training exactly how you would do it if your life depended on it. And if you don't, you're going to pay a price. Like guys who slack off in training, they almost never become champions. I mean, unless you're

69:41some physical freak who can get away with it. The the reality is in order to compete against like-minded people that are also phenomenally fit and motivated and understand the consequences of not being fit and motivated and and well-trained, you have to do everything right. And especially now, like MMA, you can get away with a lot. When I started uh doing commentary in 1997, you could get away with a lot because it wasn't not a lot. I mean, there just the level of competition just was not the same as it is now. But now the people are so good that the margin of error is so small and the difference between victory and defeat is so small that it's just so much high level activity going on in MMA fights that you can't you can't around in anywhere with your nutrition with your recovery with your you know like all the different things you're doing um outside of training like

70:31cryotherapy or floating or all these different things that people do sauna that's another thing a lot of guys do all those different things are like hugely important because these little tiny edges but also So technique like your technique has to be efficient and has to be correct so that in the heat of the moment you you're you never think of doing things wrong because you've never done anything wrong. Every time you're training you're doing things correctly and that might not even save you. You still might get head kicked. So you're like still basically you're you're at when you're at your worst you're still the best. Yeah. Well there's no that's the problem. the best fluctuates when you're at dealing with like world championship level, right? Like say like let's a division like say the UFC's 170lb division, very competitive division. So competitive that the last

71:15title fight resulted in a draw and uh one of the first draws. There's only three draws in the history of the UFC in title fights. So this fight lines up in a draw and then there's a bunch of other guys just straight killers waiting in the wings to have their shot at the title. So, on any given day, one of these guys might be able to beat one of those guys. Like, one of these guys comes in a little bit sick, has a little bit of a cold from training, or maybe they're breaking up with their girlfriend, their head's a little up, which happens a lot. Yeah. I thought that was a train thing was like, stay away from the ladies. Ah, that's Yeah. Sometimes sometimes it's actually better to have sex because then you're not thinking about sex, you know? But everybody has You see movies all the time, right? That's like, yeah, you got to be off the ladies if you're going to train for me.

72:01A lot of a lot of fighters do think that though. Like Hicks and Grace, he was one of the greatest jiu-jitsu fighters of all time. He wouldn't have sex for like months months out. No wonder he's just furious. Should be a fighter. Mike Tyson, Mike Tyson would get his dick sucked right before he knocked someone the out. He didn't give a He was like, "That's I'm here for pussy." Like, he has a great quote. Mike Tyson has a great quote. He said, "Uh, if a god invented anything better than he's keeping it to himself. So he would have sex like right before he fought and just destroy everybody. So interesting. Put that in perspective. It doesn't make any sense. He's not known to be a wordssmith either. That's He's actually not the most educated guy obviously, but not a stupid man at any by any stretch of the imagination. I heard that show he did was fantastic. I

72:49heard it's amazing. I never got a chance to see it. That uh I saw the documentary, but I never saw the live show. It was live show. It's supposed to be amazing. Oh, he did a like a standup show, right? Sort of. Yeah. Like a just a story of his life kind of, right? Yeah. It's supposed to be just insane. Everybody I know that's seen it said, "You got to see it. It's amazing. That's cool." Yeah. But anyway, sex for him. Yes. He would have the sex. Not for everybody. It's just I mean it certainly would lower your testosterone a little bit, but I mean if you're fit and prepared, it might relax you where you get a good night's sleep, you know, because that's one of the things about these guys is like anxiety, staying up late, you know, just trying to get your together, making sure you get a good night's sleep so you could you don't get sick. Don't let the don't be

73:32overwhelmed by the pressure of the moment. It's a lot going on. Hell yeah. And you know, you've once you've introduced the the possibility of just getting the kicked out of you, that raises the the anxiety significantly. Sure. Now, think about the anxiety of releasing a perfect arrow on a beautiful animal. You know, there's a lot of anxiety involved in that. It's something that people on the outside I've heard people say ridiculous things when it comes to hunting, but one of the most ridiculous things that people love to say is, you know, there's no skill involved in that. All you're doing is, you know, you're shooting a defenseless animal. Like, do you you have no idea. You You don't know what you're talking about. It's insanely difficult. It's so difficult to keep your together in that moment. And if you're a person who is compassionate and who understands the

74:20consequences of wounding an animal and what's what's at stake here and, you know, the responsibility of making a perfect shot and and a clean kill, it's very anxietyfilled moment. Absolutely. And I'll I'll tell you right now it, you know, I've been around a lot of death. Um, not necessarily by my hands, but, you know, doing the guiding gig and stuff like that. Um, I I did not ever think I was susceptible to that anxiety of being behind the trigger because I'd been around it so so much. So, what I'm trying to say is once you get that skill to be calm behind the trigger or on the string if you're releasing an arrow, it's not necessarily something that's going to stay with you, right? It's not an automatic deal cuz I I missed the largest mu deer of my life this year with a rifle at 90 yards. No way. Largest mu deer I've ever seen. Bigger than the one that you killed with

75:14Steve? Yes. That's insane. That one was massive. That one that Steve killed was huge. How was it bigger? this thing, man. I just don't We hiked for uh two and a half days. My buddy uh Kyler Reird and he's the dude who boiled out your mu deer skull uh your Montana animal. Um we I mean we hiked for two and a half days. He he and uh his wife were having a baby so we were like got to make this hunt happen cuz it's not going to happen next time. How far in did you guys go? We were um seven miles probably. Um, so you're going over and under, over elevation, climbing mountains. Yeah, basically, you know, uh, big river crossing, um, big climb, try to follow a major drainage up, couldn't find anything or found very, very little. Um, just nasty, nasty country. Um, finally find one mu deer fawn. Sun's setting, there's a mu deer fawn on this rgeline. I'm like, well, let's just camp here. Um because

76:19we had to leave the next day, but that's the only sign of life that we saw. Whoa. And so we camped and uh Kyler's all fraught because he's like, "God, this is I thought this would work out. It was his spot. Wasn't my spot." And uh the next morning we get up and just stare at this hillside. Kyler leaves to go take a And yeah, 4 hours later there's a a buck crosses and I can't get a range on my rangefinder. It's too far away and I'm just pissed at the whole situation. Kyler comes over and he's like, "Hey, I found some deer." And uh we slipped around and in this tiny little you had to be there. It wasn't something you could see from two miles away. You had to like stumble into this pocket. There were seven bucks chasing one dough. Seven mu deer bucks chasing one dough. And we're looking at these deer and we were so far in, you know, it typically you're just not going to shoot a buck

77:26for meat when you're that far in. Um and out of when you when you say a buck for meat, you mean a small buck? A smaller buck. Yeah. Because you've put out so much effort, you would like to get an older, mature animal when you're that far in. Yeah. You're still going to eat the meat, but you want something kind of exceptional, right? Exactly. But for people, for the uninitiated, which a lot of people listening to this are, the meat buck, you would think of like a young fork buck where it doesn't have big antlers. So, you're talking about you're looking for a big mature animal. Looking for a big mature animal, which is a difficult challenge. It's there's a lot involved in an animal like that. And it's also an animal that most certainly has bred. Yes. Spread its genes. And so, it's a good animal to take out of the gene pool to allow other animals to also breed. And in fact, this is the only

78:11deer, only buck in that group that was going the complete opposite direction. So everybody else, all his six buddies were on that dough following her. And he was going the opposite direction. Smart. He's like, "Listen, bitch." Yeah. I ain't got no time for these games. You know where to find me, hooker. Good luck. Good luck, honey. Yeah. He probably drove his Ferrari over the top of the hill. When you're ready, I'll see you later. My whip. I'll be over here in my mansion. And uh man, I had this thing dead two rights. I mean, a shot I can make any day of the week. And I missed that thing at 90 yards with a rifle. Was it off hand? Oh, no. I had a big beautiful rest. I had no excuses and I just lost my trigger. man. You don't know? I I know exactly. I mean, I I mean, it was I've been in this situation a lot. Like, okay, deer's undercover. He's going to step into this opening. I had had a

79:09round in the chamber. Finger was off the trigger. I was just waiting for him to step into that opening. Crosshairs were there. As soon as his nose came into the scope, I pulled the trigger. Oh. And went right in front of him. Yep. Oh, you panicked. Oh, I I lost it cuz he was just You saw all those antlers. I just I never even looked at the buck through my binoculars because I knew I just knew how big he was. How big he was. How big you think he was. If you had to guess like inches wise, I would say once in two lifetimes. Like I will never see a deer that like a 290. It was like one of those Arizona strip bucks for me. Yes. For me, yes. But I I would say it was well over over well over the 220 mark was my thought. For people who don't know what that means, that's a that's like me with my arms out. Like that's how big the antlers are. It's a if you see that thing that

80:03is there should be a lot of for me there's a lot of misery in seeing that thing for it should be a a major pat on the back because that's just something nobody gets to see. Yeah. It's super rare right to for them to get that big. That's genetics age. It's a wise animal. There's a lot involved. Certainly that unit. Yes. Yeah. I mean it was just So it's this is a overthec counter unit. Yeah. Which means that for people the uninitiated, you just you don't for a lot of places like where I just said the Arizona strip. The Arizona strip is like this legendary area that borders between Utah and Arizona and it has these monster mule deer in it. Like every year they pull these just insane deer out. They've gone over 300 in which is just it's like the one tenth of 1% of the world's population of deer. It's just so rare to see an animal this big. And this one area consistently produces these

80:59animals. So, it's really hard to get a tag there. Really hard. Like, you could put in for 20 years and still not get it. What that means is there might be thousands and thousands of people. Well, they are there are thousands of people that are putting in for a tag there and they might pick a very small amount. Very, very small amount. Yes. And so, this was like an animal for there. And this is some like like I said, no excuses. We shoot a ton. And we have a reloading bench in the basement. We shoot our bows in the basement of the office. We have multiple shooting facilities that we can go to within 15 minutes of the office. Spend a ton of time behind the trigger. Do you have a process that you do in your mind? Like when you see an animal, you're about to pull the trigger. Do you have like a thing that you do? Yeah. Yeah. Because they say that that's a good thing to

81:43have like almost like a mantra for sure. With archery, like the more you do it, the better you are. Like the way you take your arrow out of the quiver, the way you put it on the string, like you want that to be to where if you are just gripped, right, it just happens. Exactly. Like fighting. I'd say that's probably same exact thing. Same exact thing. Dealing with anxiety and having this like pattern that you've carved so deeply into your mind and your body, your neurons that your body just knows automatically. Like when I was competing, there was moments where I did something where I didn't even know I did it and it was over already, right? You basically don't even remember what happened. Well, you're just moving on this total reaction and training. Yeah. You know, and for uh archers that moment like you have to kind of like carve that path also because like if you're if

82:36you're fighting, you get to spar a lot. So, you get to hit people a lot. You get used to the idea of moving away and hitting someone. But how often do you get to shoot an animal, right? I mean, it's really rare. I mean, you shoot one like maybe once a six months, you know, once uh once a year if you're a busy person. If you're lucky, maybe you go a year and you don't even get a shot at one cuz you don't see maybe you get this one trip a year and like uh what you know, you go somewhere and like you were saying, you didn't see anything until you saw that fawn. That could have been the whole trip. It could have been the entire It happens all the time. You go, you'll be out there for days and days and days. you don't see a goddamn thing. And then next year comes along and then next year sucks too. And then the year after that you finally get shot and you're like Jesus your whole body is

83:18just racked with anticipation and nerves. And I've seen people where their legs are shaking, their arms are shaking. Like I've seen videos of guys hunting elk where you see their arms shaking as they're pulling back. Their body's just jacked with adrenaline like Jesus and they're just trying to keep that pin in the general area of that animal and pull through the shot. For those of you who don't know, this is like stepping into a place that you have never been before. You're not sure what's going on and you whistle and a 6 to 800 lb animal with big chunks of sharp bone coming out of its head and its dick slapping against its belly, spraying piss all over the place, wants to come in and either mount you from behind or beat the piss out of you. Yeah. Or stab you with his antlers. It's a forest horse with swords growing out of its head. I mean, it's it's these are

84:10they're amazing. You freak out, man. You freak out. It is. But, uh, one every five if you're an archery hunter, once one bowl every five years or one successful, uh, season in five is the national average. That's why Cam Haynes is such a freak cuz he has not been he's he hasn't been unsuccessful on an archery hunt since 2009. And the guy goes many times a year. Many times a year. But all the ultramarathon running and all the weightlifting, all the crazy he does and constant practice with archery, he just like when the moments come, he's there. He's so dialed in. He's so ready to go. It's really really impressive, you know. I mean, I don't think people understand. So, when I see people on like his Instagram page going, "That takes no skill. What you're doing is you're a coward. Why don't you fight that thing hand to hand?" Like, oh my god. You have no idea what you're looking at. The

85:08onetenth of 1% of all the hunters. That's what that guy is. He's the He's the onetenth of 1% of the hunters and he's out there being way more successful than anybody else doing something that's insanely difficult. But to the uninitiated or to the people that just have never experienced it, it looks like he's a animal-hating monster who's out there shooting God's beautiful creations. Right. Sometimes Brian and I will go hunting with military guys will come out and um back to the just having the process. It's the craziest thing. Guys that are really good at this, you know, and it's like it's almost like a robotic action when it's go time. It's like sit their pack down, you know, just it's pretty wild to watch somebody that's that's so practiced at that, you know, the way they load, the way they reload on target on glass. Like it is it's it's amazing, you know, when you

86:01see true pros at, you know, well, that's a totally different world when you have to shoot people and they're trying to shoot you, too. I mean, you think of the anticipation, the anxiety that's involved in shooting a beautiful deer like you missed. Now imagine that's some you're in some foreign land and this is uh some enemy guy that you're engaging with and he's trying to kill you and you know like yeah you got to be I mean that's where legit like that's one of the interesting Do you know who Joel Turner is? I do not. Joel Turner has a whole series on target panic for archery. It's really interesting. It's an online series. Um what is it called? Uh something see if he can find the name of Is this guy a traditional guy? Yes I've heard of this Is he out of uh like Denver maybe something like that? Um I'm not sure where he's out of but it's an instinct fighting instinct or something

86:49like that. Iron Mind. Yeah, Iron Mind Loop guy. Yes, closed loop open loop guy. And he he's got this whole system that he's put together and I actually paid for it and watched it. Very good stuff. Very wellthoughtout, very interesting stuff, but a lot of it is on the mindset because he was a he was training police officers. He's training like SWAT team members and and how to keep it together in the middle of a firefight. And he actually was talking in one of the interviews that I saw him in about uh a conversation that he had with a police officer that was in a firefight with a bad guy and heard this heard his words and his instructions going through and executed correctly and did the right thing while this guy's shooting at his car window and glass is flying and bullets are flying at him and he stayed calm and killed this guy who was shooting at him. But that um that this

87:42process of having a thing that you like a mantra that you relay in your head that relates to a physical action and that you drill it into yourself. So it's like it's unavoidable. Like this is how you do things. Well, that situation we described with the bull coming in like Yeah. You shake. Yeah. Your heart goes a million miles an hour. Like if you don't have something to fall back on, the odds of you making a mistake I feel are way higher than you being successful. Yeah. Yeah. You got to there's got to be a thing in your brain that you can like press play on, you know, and then once you do that, you can like there was an article that I read recently about uh it was about choking in sports and it was essentially there's the article was essentially saying that what you have to do is figure out a process that removes your conscious mind from the equation.

88:34Like figure out a process of training where you know what to do. like someone's you have a basketball, someone's coming at you, you juke left, you go right. You know how to do this. You've done it so many times that this is just a natural reaction and get it to the point where you don't have to think about it. So you're not overwhelmed by this moment and the anticipation of what if I this up? Oh my god, so many people are watching. What happens here? What if I do that? And you'll you'll see those moments where people just lock up and they panic. You see it in fighting all the time. You know, the trad thing versus the compound traditional bow. traditional like a recurve, right? That introduces that's when this can get crazy because say with a compound, you draw back, you hit the wall, right? The bow only let you draw back so far. You look through a hole, you light up with

89:18another hole. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's no picnic, but then, you know, once you start shooting a traditional, there's nothing that's super repeatable. I mean, you try to do it, but you pull it back as far, or if you don't pull it back far enough, you goof up. You know what I mean? There's no aiming. Um, and it's a funny experience when all of a sudden the first time you draw back on an amulet, you're like, "What the hell is go?" Like there's no reference, right? Your brain is just kind of bouncing around. And I think where that uh what was the guy's name? Joel Turner. Yeah. Where he is just, you know, he shoots with a thumb loop. He shoots Mongol style. You know what Mongol style is? The Mongols used to have a thumb ring. They would have a bone ring that they would wear around their thumb and that's what would fit on the groove of the string. So they would

90:05hook the string with their thumb and then close their index finger over it and they would draw back like this. And according to Dan Carlin from if you've never heard this before, if you've heard me rant about this before, I'm sorry. Just just ignore me for a moment. There's a there's a amazing um uh podcast series called Hardcore History. It's by this guy who's a friend of mine. His name is Dan Carlin. this genius historian who is so good at relaying this. He'll he'll say he's not a historian. He definitely is. He's a super humble guy, but he's so good at relaying information in an entertaining and dramatic fashion. And he has a series called The Wrath of the Con. And it's a five-part series. You have to pay for it now. Um but it's like a dollar an episode. It's so worth it. It's worth a hundred times more than that. But it's a five-part episode on the Mongols. And he

90:52he said that their bows were like 160lb draw. They were just these senuy savages that were incredible archers that were they had developed this ability to release the arrow as the horse was in its gallop. So when the horse was in the air where there wasn't a disturbance. So they would time the release of the arrow to when the horse was actually in the air. They had it like down and they had a thumb ring and that's how they would draw back. So not with your fingers like most people do. They would draw back with the thumb. loop the index finger over the thumb. And for some reason, they found that to be a better method. I'll bet it's like a it's like a, you know, it's like a primitive release. That's the thing with the trad. Your fingers you can pluck. You can There's a hund different ways to screw up, right? Whereas if you had that, right, you let go, it's probably a

91:38lot more consistent all you know. Well, that's the whole Yeah, there it is. You can see that that's the the bone thumb rings. And a lot of people like to uh shoot that way now. It's really kind of interesting stuff, man. and see how it holds. And then you you throw your finger over the uh top of that thumb ring and you know your your thumb pushes back on it and your finger your index finger closes over the top of your thumb. It's not dissimilar to a modern release in a lot of ways. Yeah. Like um when I shoot a compound bow, I shoot I use a a Carter release and it's a thumb trigger release. It's a good back. Yeah. It's I use one called a wise choice. It's um but I use a tension based one too. The evolution or it's one that John Dudley put out called the silverback that I I really prefer. Screw you up going back and forth. No. No. No. Because it's the same motion. You know,

92:29the the idea is you don't ever pull the trigger. You you lock in. You pull in place. You put your thumb over the trigger. Then once you're in place, you concentrate on the muscles that are in the center of your back and you pull those and the release goes off and you get a surprise shot. So the idea behind that is there's never a moment when you're like now. and you punch it and then you move like the arrow or you move the bow to like did I get it? You know, this all that is out of your head because all you're doing in the shot process is pulling and concentrating on those muscles in the center of your back and your scapula and contracting those and as you do that the release just goes off because your thumb is pressing against that trigger and it just goes and but you have to resist that that urge that everybody has just now now. Yeah. Punching. So that's the difference

93:13between like John Dudley's approach versus Joel Turner's approach. Like John Joel Turner has the same approach and even talks about it when it comes to um compound bows of using uh a thumb trigger of pulling and letting you know letting the shot go off automatically. But Dudley um he thinks that you should start off using a tensionbased release, which the way that works is you actually hold the safety. You hold the trigger until you lock in place. And then once you're ready to execute, you release the safety and all it takes is like a couple extra pounds of pulling and it goes off. Interesting. Yeah. So it's like a Carter evolution or he he has one that he makes called the silver back that is a two finger version of the Carter Evolution. So he feels like the least amount of fingers that you have on it, the least amount of tension. I mean this is the point to try to people like what the

94:01are you rambling about? What what I'm trying to rambling about is like this this thing is insanely complicated. So to the people that look at this and say, "Oh, there's no skill involved and oh, you're just, you know, killing this defenseless animal." Like, it is the most difficult way to get your food. Yes, it's the most difficult way. There's no more difficult way to get your food than shooting an animal with a bow and arrow. It doesn't exist. Unless you want to use a spear. I mean, I guess that's it is not getting groceries. I guess you could jump out of a tree with a knife and Yeah, but that's stupid. I mean, but it is that, you know, the animal comes first, right? Like for me, if it is proficient and proven to be proficient when Kent and I were making the switch to go back to traditional archery. Why did you guys decide to do that? Man, I I got so tired of the stuff.

94:53Tough stuff changing every year. New sights, new strings, new this, new that. I got to hate hate setting up a compound bow. I hated it. Why? because there's just so much going on and I'm like, "Oh man, is that me or is the bow out of tune? Did my string stretch?" Cam timing and twisting your strings and I'm going back this year. I'm going to get a bow. But like to Cal's point. Plus, wait a minute. You going back to traditional or you going back to compound? We're going back to compound. A company is making um uh called G5 really nice bows and a camouflage pattern. I'm I'm pretty excited. And plus, I don't know. I I I I've had very mixed success. I struggled a little bit. Yeah, I'm sure. Um but how could you not? But the um but the but frankly the the simplicity of it is so appealing. You know what I mean? It's it's fantastic, right? Versus setting everything up. And plus, you know, you

95:47get to a point where a modern compound bow, if you practice a lot, meaning for years, right? You you'll get to 90 yards to where you are professional all day. People are going to complain and I don't know. It's not it's not really that ethical for most people to shoot at 90 yards, but it is for a guy like John Dudley or, you know, a guy like Cameron Haynes cuz they do it all day every day. This man is a very technically proficient shooter in anything that he shoots. And he won't say it, but we used to sit in the ski area parking lot, Greyhawk parking lot, and 106 yards is as far as my adjustable sight would go on my bow. So, he would stand there. He could shoot a lot further, but I mean the groups that he would put in at 106 yards were amazing because he's got that mind to do it. So he can shoot, you know. I But the thing is is that after a while, you get to the

96:41point where I don't want to shoot something at 50 yards. I want to shoot my next elk at 15 yards. You know what I mean? So I think that's largely it. And I think without a doubt in the past three years, I've become way better hunt. We've both, you know, both I mean, Cal's killed a bull both years with his trad. I missed a nice bull two years ago, but it's just hard. It's, you know, and if nothing else, you're going to get way better at hunting in the sense that you're going to hunt more because you're not going to kill right, at first, right? But, you know, being having to go from, let's just say 80 is a max yard. And I don't want to get into the argument about distance, but let's just say that was, you know, your max on a perfect situation with a compound bow. the compound bow down to uh say 25 or 30 yards. It uh it's interesting. It just makes you in your head just so much more

97:34you have to try so much harder, you know. And um I don't know. I love that experience. People have no desire whatsoever to hunt. Even if you're a lifelong vegetarian, you're never going to eat meat. Just go shoot a bow and arrow at a target. It is so relaxing in some weird meditative way. It cleanses your mind in some strange way. Zen stuff, man. It's like fly fishing kind of same thing. It's like you're not necessarily I don't know, you have to concentrate, but at the same time, it's like taking a nap or something. You go shoot for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and you're done. You're like, "Okay, what was I thinking about before?" Right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love to do it when I've got like a business issue I'm dealing with or something I'm trying to like sort out in my mind. I'll just go out in my yard. I got a a big rubber elk out there at 85 yards and I'll just

98:20start shooting that sucker. And just you don't think about nothing but that shot. You just like center that pin, try to stay calm, relax your hand, let the bow go off, and you there's no room for anything else. And and it's activities. Yeah. And you walk up there, you pull your arrows out, you walk back, you're concentrating like the whole process. I don't know. I think it's it's cleansing in some sort of a weird way. And I'm not a traditional bow shooter, but I would imagine that would accentuate it even further because uh it's even more like instinctive that you have that involved as well. So like instead of using a sight, you're sort of like calculating in your mind the drop of the arrow over distance. It can, but it can be more frustrating too. Way more with the compound. I've gone out I mean with the recurve, I've gone out and shot two arrows and was like, "Fuck this. I'm I'm

99:07done." And it's like just but you know the the Kenton and I I' our old uh our uh our first accounting gal retired and so we all went out and had some beers with her and I was a little fuzzy the next morning and I forgot my tags. So I was like I'm just going to call for for Ken and we took off into the woods and called the bull in within 20 minutes. Didn't have a shot at oh my gosh this a great day. We ended up calling in three more three more bulls that day, but the bull that Kenton got his shot at. Um, he would have shot four times before it ultimately came in to recurve distance, right? But it did come in. It came I mean it was in four yards at one point. Oh my god. Yeah. I mean it was it was like this close. That's so crazy to have an animal that big that close to you. It was crazy. But to Cal's point, the beauty was was that it was hanging up out at, you know, 50 yards for five

100:09minutes and that would have been the end of that experience, right? I would have not had that same experience. And then then it comes up and to Cal. What? It licked you basically, right? It came in my ball cap in front of my face. I was looking through the mesh in the back of my calf. Really? Oh, it was insane. It's screaming and it come straight towards me, but I it kind of caught me, you know, to where I didn't have a shot. Um, and then it went and looked and I missed it. I'll never forget that. But, um, I was say it was the experience of having of having to get that close is really cool. You know what I mean? If like like I said, it would have been done and we'd have been packing it out and it would have been cool, but whatever. And that would have been incredible to shoot it there, too. But but just to be that close and visceral and it's like, holy smokes. I mean, this thing is here.

100:59Yeah. It's one of the things that um I talked about with um Jason Haristston from Kuyu. We were talking about the difference between like mountaineering and hunting. And it's like all these things and hiking and hunting. It's like all these things are beautiful and they're amazing, but then add the add to that this experience of this really intense moment with a wild animal where you have to execute something. You have to execute a shot and you have to everything has to come together. It has to come together perfectly. And that is what makes this so addictive. And that's something that man, I try to relay that to people and I try to explain it, but I just feel like my words aren't adequate. I feel like everything everything I always say to describe it, I feel like I just I'm just rambling and it's not going to work because you have to you kind of have to see it to understand.

101:48Yeah. I mean, there's very little reference, right? And that's what you're talking about. It's like you can say, well, it's like, you know, imagine, you know, skiing a perfect um, you know, 50° powder line, right? Or whatever. Something kind of, you know, heavy with consequence, but it's totally different like than that. It's like it's just raw. I don't know how else to describe it. There's no else to describe it. It's there's certain words like there's no words for a giant mushroom trip, you know? Like I've had I've tried to talk to people who've never done anything. Like, what's it like? You see things? You see like pretty colors. Is it really worth it? Like you can see God. you just got to take enough like like yeah you could definitely see colors but I mean I just saying those words to people and then you know you talked to somebody about it and then like a year later they

102:29go dude I did it. Whoa. Like a buddy of mine recently just did DMT and uh he had talked about it for a long time and he finally did it and then he just he sent me a text message. He's like dude I met the elves. I was like oh there you go. He texted you mid trip. No, no, no. He texted me after it was over because, you know, he had been thinking about doing it forever. And then it's one of those things like unless you do it, whatever I say, the way the words that I'm using to describe, they're just not going to work. I think that's the case with so many experiences in life. Like try to describe being in love to someone who's never been in a relationship. You know, there's no way. You could never do it. You can never explain the love of your children to someone who doesn't have kids. What is like like the way I love my dog? Like, oh man, figure it out. It's like,

103:12you know, and I think certain intense experiences in life like hunting or just even I mean we even forget the hunting. I mean just being in the woods like attempting to hunt an animal is an insane almost psychedelic experience. Like one of the things that I described people the first trip that we went to the Missouri brakes when I I shot that deer when I locked eyes with that animal the f for the first time and I was sitting uh on a pack uh looking down the scope of this rifle and I was looking at this animal and then I look at this animal through this rifle scope and he's looking at me. I was like, "This is a weird life form that's living in this very barren and desolate place where there's no people for miles." And I'm locking eyes with this thing. And it was oddly psychedelic. It was oddly like paradigm shifting. Like the moment was so intense and weird. I was like, "Wow,

104:08I didn't expect this." Like this is this is like I mean count I mean I'm re feeling like cuz this thing's looking at us. feeling that this thing is thinking like what are you and what are you doing? It's probably never seen a person before. What are you? What are you doing here? And should I be worried about you? Right? He's going that wasn't here yesterday. What is that? What is that? And you know he's like all he's seen is like baseball hat and this the metal barrel of a rifle and he's not seeing much. He's just seeing us resting over the top of a ridge looking down on him and he's like what the is that? It's it's a really weird in intense experience. It is and the because you you do look at things in a much different way and and you know kind of the point of talking about all this public land stuff is that I I do feel like people who hunt and fish carry a

105:02big load of this burden right through the taxes that we pay that are taxes that if you don't hunt and fish you don't pay them. So, and we've highlighted that on the show, the the actual amount of it. We've showed like from the Rocky Mountain Elf Foundation, their Instagram page. They have a really good Instagram page that has a bunch of different examples of different states of the sheer volume of money that comes in because directly because of hunting and fishing and it's staggering. It's in the billions. And it is by far above and beyond anything else, by far the the largest amount of conservation money that comes into this country. the largest by far. It is. So, how close your fisherman? I mean, nothing even close. It's amazing when you think about it that way. And in that sense, this system that we have here with public land and with using these tax dollars to

105:50pay for for all the wildlife biologists, to pay for the fishing game, to pay for the population management, it's amazing. It's an amazing system. But if you're a hiker that you know, you're a peak beggar, right? You're finding names on the map and you're like, I'm going to hike to this lake or I'm going to hike to this peak. You're a That's what you call him. A peak bagger. Peak bagger. Bag and you know bag a peak. How many peaks have you been to? Yeah, exactly. That's interesting. A peak bagger. Big sounds like big in that boulder community, right? Boulder. Yeah. Yeah. 14ers and Yeah. bagging a lot of peaks. Yeah. People fall off those peaks too, man. Yes, they do. They get stuck up there. Prepared. That sucks. But you know, you are taking a trail, an established trail, and you're covering miles and you're getting to your goal and maybe you're snapping a picture or

106:38spending a night and then you're coming back on that trail or maybe it's a different trail. Whereas, you know, a hunter is, you know, as soon as you step away from the truck and are out the trail head, you are plotting your own course. You're making your own moves and there it is a totally different experience. Everything means something different to you. You're looking at in a different way. You're trying to interpret different signs and you're you know basically there's no path and your your your choices are pretty much limitless. They're absolutely limitless. Like when you leave as soon as you get off the trail, you're just like, you know, hopefully you you hear something or you see something or you smell something and that begins your day. But you don't know. You might you might not leave a hundred yards that day and you might cover, you know, it might be a heavy,

107:29you know, 8 mile, you know, 5,000 foot day. You don't know. And that's I don't that's the craziest thing. You just have to be prepared for whatever. And so, you know, we get people who are like, well, there aren't any wolves here anymore cuz in Idaho, wolves were you could see them a lot, especially in in the Ketchum area, the Lman area. They're wolves that, you know, they they're smart critters. they know that they knew that nobody was going to shoot at them. And so they were a fairly common occurrence to see. And then once the season opened, once they let people go out and they issued tags, um they picked it up really quick. And you didn't just see them hanging out next to the road. And people said, "Well, the hunters killed all the wolves." But oddly enough, the hunters are reporting wolf sightings. No, I saw this. Yeah. They're not killing all the

108:18wolves. They're killing a pretty small number, right? Yeah. We're doing a poor job as hunters. We're not we're we're not getting getting the numbers that we're supposed to get. So, what do they do? Do they are they hiring professional wolf killers to to go after uh wolves like they're doing in California to go after cougars since they killed since they stopped the hunting season on mountain lions. They haven't stopped killing mountain lines. That's something people don't understand. Like there was a depradation order on a mountain line up in the Malibu Mountains that had killed 11 alpaka and a goat in one one sitting. Yeah. This big just and they know the the lion too cuz it's tagged. It has a collar on it. And uh this just found an alpaka farm and just went to town. Just had a glory killing spree. Wait. So in California they can't no no mountain line hunting

109:04whatsoever. But they're everywhere especially in rural areas. There's a place called Tahone Ranch where that bull came from that you see out front. There's one uh lake that they have like a pond they have out there and they have a trail cam up. They've got 17 different mountain lines on trail cam. Oh my gosh. You hear about it meeting people fairly fairly often out here. Huh. Well, it can. It's, you know, it's a lot of it's joggers or um bikers, like people on trail bikes because they think they're trying to get away. Yeah. You know, they think it's almost like a cat with a ball of yarn. They just can't help themselves. Fight or flight response. Someone's running, they're like, "Bitch, where you going?" But, you know, the the the thing is it's like hunters are are doing something different than your typical recreator out there. Yeah. You know, we're not

109:50sticking to a game plan. So, I feel like And you're there different hours. Yeah. Different. And you're making predator prey noises, right? Yeah. Yeah. You're just doing things differently. So, I I think feel like I I get a little torqued sometimes where people think, "Oh, well, of course hunters are going to say there's wolves out there." Yeah. It's it's this is good information for biologists because we're out there actually our point in the woods is being out there looking for animals. Now, one of the reasons why I wanted to have you guys on is to really sort of discuss this public land issue and also to allow people to understand what's at stake and to uh give them uh options to to look into and uh to different resources that they can check in on like like uh backcountry hunters and anglers. Uh BHA Yeah, backount backount hunters and anglers. I can't say it. my my mouth

110:45starts shutting down after two hours these days. But what they're doing is uh amazing like highlighting like what this is and how important this is and what are the other things that people can do if they want to look into this stuff. Yeah. So BHA is big loud voice um and I think they're one of the best groups out there right now to really just raise awareness um on public lands and access issues. Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership does a phenomenal job. There it is. back country hunters, National Wildlife Federation. And by the way, you can buy that t-shirt there, too, folks. If you want to buy that public land owner t-shirt, they have it there. Yes. Now, um, so what the the main issue is, and and Kent and I we talked about, you know, you have an incredible platform here, Joe, and we don't want to waste it. So, the this is a nonpartisan issue.

111:37If you don't like hunters and hunters or anglers, that is still your land. If you never leave downtown LA, all this public land contributes to your quality of life through clean air, clean water. Just knowing that it's there should be it something that is warm and cozy for you because it is your birthright as an American. in in this country where 95% of the people eat meat. It's something it's might even be higher than that. It's depending upon it. And there's so many so many discussions these days about where your food comes from. There's no better way to find out where your food comes from than to actually go out and get it. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. But man, if if you're buying beef or lamb off off the grocery store shelf, those grazing permits that we talked about, that happen a lot of that happens on federally managed lands, whether it's BLM or uh or forest service ground. And

112:38the the thing is this is nonpartisan again. And one of the things that ticked me off about old Jason Shavez on HR 621 is said, "Hey, you know, this uh started under Obama." No, you said Clinton. or Clinton, right? Yeah. I said Clinton took designated these lands as useless. Yeah. Who cares? Yeah. I don't care. It was Clinton, Obama, Trump. That doesn't matter. Yeah. Who cares? You're taking Who cares? Yeah. I mean, to Cal's point, too, back it's a nonpartisan issue. And I think a lot of times, uh, people would like you to believe, oh, if you're a Republican, you're against this, or if you're, you know, pro- second amendment, you can't vote for that and this. And the fact is is that you can if you have a Republican leader um in your area, they can change their mind. You need to be involved, right? And if and if that's the way you feel, that's great. But you

113:30have to realize that you can have your cake and eat it too. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Like, you know what I mean? You you can be uh conservative and still be pro public lands, you know, and and you need to work and call and do what you need to change them if they're not because if once it's gone, it's gone. and use social media because social media is an amazing tool and that's what killed HR621. It was directly killed by social media and it was killed quick. It was killed in a couple of weeks. You know the pressure that they faced from guys like me posting it to 1.8 million people on Instagram, one and a half million people on Facebook, 3 million or whatever the it is on Twitter. Like all those people add up and then those people find out about it. they jump in and they realize that this is a this is a this it's a really important issue. It's a giant

114:17issue. And Reinella always points out that he's uh and by the way, Reinella wrote a great article about all this and about how killing HR 621 is just one battle in the overall war. And we're not there's no not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. And that article is available right now. If you go to um his uh Twitter, it's on I think it's on u meatater.com. Is that where it is? Yeah. Yeah. But no, that's not that's one. But there's one that I tweeted today. This is the one from January 20th. There's one that I tweeted today that he just recently wrote. And um he calls himself a political unic cuz he's like, "Look," he goes, "the Republicans want to sell off the land and the Democrats want to take away your guns." He's like, "I don't know where the to go." You know, in in that sense. Well, my my point simply is that you can change. You know what I mean? It's like if you you

115:09need it's not a partisan shouldn't be a partisan issue. Your representatives are there to represent your interest. This is the article. It's Roosevelt robber barons and the continued fight for our public lands. And he just published it today. And is that on meater.com? Yes. Themeater.com. Somebody owns meater.com. Yeah. Isn't that weird? Give it up, Whoever you are agreed. I'm going to give it up. What is meater do? Go to medeater.com. What is that? I think it's you. Is it available? Is one of those things? It has been just like a picture of a steak for years. Yeah. There you go. Garlic top sirloin. Yum. It's delicious. Best cow in school. So, is this like someone just holding it? I think the person may have died or something. No, they're dead. Uh, but so 622 is going to Yeah, they have a fork with a piece of meat. Look, here is my food. Chicken drumstick. Look at my food. HR 622 is

116:02going to gut uh the folks that are supposed to be out there protecting our resources, making sure people play nice on on public lands. Yeah. Um you know, the uh planning 2.0, just a terrible name, not sexy at all, but that is the new management plan for uh uh Bureau of Land Management that just got shut down. It's going up to the Senate right now. So, the thing is, if you want to know what you can do, you have got sign these petitions that are going around. TRCP's got a great one, the sportsman's pledge. Um, you know, join a rod and gun club, BHA, National Wildlife Federation. These lands are here for everybody. It's not just hunters and fishermen. Um, and man, all you got to do is write emails and call your duly represent your officials that are there to represent you. And by the way, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers has a form that you could fill out on

117:03their site. They'll send it for you. You enter in your email, they they have like a a letter that's already written up. Yes. So, it's super easy to do. And they'll they'll direct you to where it needs to be sent. And, you know, they're doing a great job of setting that up. and letting people know. I mean, we got to be we got to be wise about this. This is we have an amazing place. It's an it's an amazing thing. The the fact that you guys live like you were saying that uh what is it? Church. Frank Church. What is it? Frank Church. Frank Church wilderness. I mean, can you imagine if you went up there and it was mall? Oh, you know, somebody chopped all the trees down and well, put up a go-kart thing. So, if you look at the state land example, right, these state lands are there to make money for the states. And like we said, state gets in trouble, they sell those lands. Yeah.

117:49Fire, anything, right? They just it just sucks all the money out of the state and then the states literally mandated not to have a negative balance. So that once that happens, it's like, how are we going to make our money? How is Roosevelt so wise? Oh, he had just panic, fear of God put into him because he had this realization that he's like, "Oh my god, the entire reason I am who I am today is because I had this opportunity to go out and chase animals and and if I saw a horizon line, I could go over the top of it because nobody owned it, right?" He's like, "That made me who I am. I got to try to make sure that this is here for the next person." Well, a lot of people don't understand that in many countries that's not really possible. And that's actually the story of Robin Hood. The story of Robin Hood wasn't really about stealing from the rich and stealing their money and giving

118:41it to the poor. It was about hunting lands. That was the original. Yeah. It was about the king did not let anyone hunt in the kingdom's hunting lands. And Robin Hood was like, "Fuck you." And he went out there and he was shooting deer and getting people food cuz people were starving. Yeah. And that that is something that we can do here in America that you can't it's like it's one of the reasons why you get so much hate mail from Europe. You get a lot of hate mail from places where they don't have recreational hunting because they to them they don't they don't even understand and they're eating steak. They're eating steak. Like my wife got in an argument with one of her friends husbands where um you know she was saying that uh I was on a hunting trip and this guy was eating a steak, carving a steak. Literally they're at dinner and he's like well that's deplorable. That's

119:26deplorable. He hunts animals. Like, you don't have to do that. Like she And she's like, "You're eating a steak." She's like, "Well, these animals are farmed animals." And they're I go, she goes, "Well, don't you think that that animal lived a horrific existence and then finally was killed? You think that's better than someone just out of nowhere, you're hiding behind a bush making cow calls and you blast an arrow through the heart of some wild beast and then take that thing down off the mountain. You have the experience. You have the food. You also have this wild encounter with this this magnificent beast that you have this connection to that every time you eat. Like every time I eat a steak off of that elk, I think about the experience of hunting that thing, I think about seeing it. I think about cutting it up and carrying it out of there. That the whole thing about it

120:11is all it's all connected. Loading it into the truck, hoisting it up. Like the whole thing is like in my mind every time I cut into the meat. I mean, people at the end of the day are genetically hardwired to do that. Yeah. It's weird, you know. It's weird when you tap into that file like, "Oh, you didn't know about this file." It's working for it, man. Work. I mean, that's the other experience on public lands. There is it's just we talk about this at length all the time. And Kenton's got this like nicker analogy and we're walking around Shot Show and there's this European hunting company down the road and he stops me and he's like, "Hey Cal," it's like we lose all this land. This is what we're going to be making. Knickers. Well, you know, it's like this. It's like this like fake hunting. I'm not going to say there's fake hunting, but it's like canned experience, right?

121:01Shooting clothes, not hunting clothes. Let's go here and private lands where they release feeasants out of the back of a truck. And that does happen, folks. There's a thing called like pheasant shoots, European feeasant shoots, and they literally release these birds and the birds fly away and guys stand there with guns waiting for them to release from their cage and shoot them. That's how Dick Cheney shot his friend. Remember that? Yeah. People don't remember that story. He shot his friend in the face. And uh that was a canned hunt where they just open they literally open a can, the birds fly out and they wait and boom and shoot them. We got them. Ah, I mean the hunting thing it's honestly like being outside of your your comfort zone. That is it. Yeah. That I mean and I mean you know and if if that's not going to happen I don't know. I'm not interested. I don't

121:48No, man. The public hunting experience is man we're all you know you that's why you follow the rules, right? Yeah. Cuz everybody gets the same experience then. Right. And on our side, we are constantly like analyzing our clothing and analyzing our days and we're getting to be totally truthful. Uh, man, life at First Light's pretty freaking good, man. We get to spend a lot of days in the woods, way more than your average Joe gets to. And that's how we make stuff good, right? And well well the way you guys do it is you you have new pieces and then you give them to like your representatives like people that you guys have like what what do you guys call them like ambassadors or something like that? What do you call them? You know team guys. Yeah. So you have a bunch of like guys who I follow on Instagram hardcore hunters who spend a giant chunk of their life out in the

122:42woods. Yes. Some are public, some are not. Mhm. But the idea is to send to send them to people that use them in tons of different environments. Like, you know, we hunt in Iraqi, so, you know, we've got plenty of experience there, but it's cool. We'll we'll send stay stuff to, you know, guys hunting in BC or guys hunting in AK where it's raining all the time. But that's the that's the goal, you know, where it's hot. But being able to send stuff out and have it used in these tons of different environments allows us just to build better stuff, you know. Yeah. And it's a real trial and error thing where you're taking these super experienced guys and when you said uh some guys are public, some guys are not, what you mean is some guys have public profiles and some guys they just stay under the radar and just Yeah. They're you have a lot of guys like that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

123:30And I mean that's it. Everything gets thoroughly tested and that's the fun part. But the amazing thing about us and one of the things that I love is we get interns and people from all across the country that have, you know, sometimes very little experience and sometimes their input is the most valuable because you get a bunch of people who are like, I know it all, right? Oh, no, don't worry about that. Nobody does that. And then you get this, you know, girl from Ohio and she's like, well, what about this and this happened to me? And you're like, really? Yeah. you know, because it's a fresh, brand new perspective, somebody who just started hunting. And I think that that's been incredibly valuable on our line, too. So, living there, too, is it's living in the mountains, you know, you get to take stuff from all different sports, whether you're, you know, riding your bike or

124:21whether you're backcountry skiing, like a lot of that stuff crosses over, you know, and I think that allows us to round things out nicely. Like, you know, hiking, hunting is quite different than hiking, right? Like hiking, people want to build the lightest thing they can build that can do whatever. Hunting's totally different. You're off the trail, you're going through bushes, like you kind of have to throw that lightest thing out the window. You know, you you more have to approach it of like how heavy can I actually build this and have it still work well because it's going to get thrashed. You know what I mean? So, you've got to approach it from kind of a a different shift and how, you know, when you build stuff, it needs to be versatile, right? Like you can't have, you know, I don't know, the equivalent would be like having a guy that was a construction worker and he's got a 8

125:05penny nail and he's got a 16 penny nail. Does he have a 8 penny hammer and a 16 penny hammer? It's like, no, you need to be able to do everything with, you know, a certain amount of stuff because you're going out in the woods and, you know, you might be walking slow, you might be stopping, you might be going uphill, you might be going downhill, you know, and it just allows carrying fewer things that do more jobs. Then you might have to go through thick brush and you might have to have clothes that are durable. Or if you're in Texas, you might have stuff that has thorns and and it's going to be ripping your clothes and yes, don't go to Texas. Don't go to everything stabs you and there's ticks and it's Texas is that Texas is a great example of what could possibly happen if we lost public lands because Texas is weird. I love Texas, don't get me wrong. I love the state. I love the people.

125:54It's one of my favorite places on earth. But Texas hunting is very strange. There's a lot of it that's high fence and a lot of it is like over feeders. They have like these feed machines and these animals come to the feed machines and they're overrun with wild pigs and then they have these weird African animals that you can hunt anytime you want. I mean there's more there's a bit from my last special, but it's true. There's more tigers in captivity in Texas than there are in all of the wild of the world. Really? Yeah. Really? Tell me that's not true. Totally true. There's more tigers in dudes backyards. Private collections, not zoos, not wildlife sanctuaries. More tigers in private collections in Texas. Is that legal? 100% legal. There's no laws in Texas. You just can't have weed. No weed. Queer. That's it. No gay marriage, no weed. I want to hunt in

126:44Texas. Keep it clean. But you know, I've never hunted there, but I would like to. I've hunted there. It's awesome. I love Texas. But you like they have like scimitar orics and elins and all these weird African animals that are running around. Look at that. There are more captive tigers in Texas than in the wild. Whoa. That's real. That's real as But yeah, man. You don't need the type of innovation. 20,000 privatelyowned big cats, including tigers, lions, and cougars currently living in captivity in the US. The exact number is unknown due to insufficient recordeping. I none of your business. Are you sure that doesn't count? Like those little kind of half cats, those little whatever. No, man. I've been to Texas and I've I've I have a friend in Texas that has a buddy of his that has a tiger thing in his yard. He's got this giant fenced out area. He's got a giant ranch and in his

127:36ranch he's got a bunch of tigers. And he'll feed them like a cow. They'll like a live cow. No, they Well, they could if you want to. Maybe they won't admit it to me, but they take a cow, like a calf, shoot it in the head, toss it over the fence, and these things tear it apart. Unreal. And they watch it. Yeehaw. They drink a couple of Budwires and their cousin. And yeeha. Look at that. The chief of Dallas and his wife are the proud owners of three 600B Tigers they have raised since they were born. Jesus Christ. Police chief in Dallas. Former police chief. Jesus Christ. Like many Texans, Bill Wthburn is no longer satisfied with an ordinary pet. Well, I had a German Shepherd, but that queer. All you want to do is hunt my leg. Tired of this. Need a goddamn American animal. These cats tend to mind me even though I use no discipline. He says, "No discipline at all. Shut your

128:32mouth before you get killed." He has 22 tigers. This guy said he has even trained these tigers to remain tame. Oh my god. you. Unfortunately, you can buy a tiger for less than $1,000. Rescue tigers or anything? No. No. See, Texas has completely different laws when it comes to wildlife. Wildlife in Texas is not it's it's private property. It's a whole different situation. I mean, they have tags when it comes to like whitetail deer and indigenous species, but when it comes and who knows if even the white tails are indigenous there. I mean there's they're bringing them in from farms so they have bigger racks you know they have a lot of weird they do I wonder it must be if you have a high fence Mhm. then it's once you that thing's like fully fenced everything within becomes private. Yeah. Must be I think that's exactly what it is. But there's a lot of like elins and uh orics

129:26and all these African animals and axis deer that have gone rogue. They've gotten through fences and now they're just wild and free range alad. What do they call them in in New Zealand? Convicts. Escapees. Escapees. Yeah, I would that would be crazy if a cat got loose. It could go nuts out there, right? And all of a sudden, yeah, man. I'm sure it's happened. I'm sure if you could drive down a road somewhere in Jasper, Texas or something. You see that tiger? I saw a tiger. The scariest thing in the world, right? Tigers in Texas. We don't even know how many there are. I don't I I'm blown away right now. I never heard of this. I have a whole bit about it, man. You should watch it. The strangest thing you saw come out of the woods this season. Yeah, it's it's a very Texas is a very odd place. But what I wanted to highlight is like, man, you don't want that to be the only way you

130:14can get a hunting experience cuz Texas is it's weird. I mean, we wouldn't have jobs, man. I mean, the reason for innovation is that competition, that being outside, that pushing yourself, you know, climbing new peaks. Why is the hunting clothing industry like a bunch of high school girls? Because there's there's a there's a lot of weirdness like clicks. Like you if you wear Sitka, you're not supposed to wear cuyu. If you wear cuyu, you're not supposed to wear first light. Man, I thought you were an Under Armour guy sitting over there with that First Light shirt on. Like, what are you a bunch of girls? Little high school girls. Not Not there's anything wrong with being a girl or being in high school, okay? I used to be in high school and never been a girl, but I have no problem with I'm glad you picked that to clear up. But you know what I'm saying? It's like it's like a

131:00clicky little weird thing where they're on teams like hey there's there's no goddamn teams you like I had a conversation with one of the you know Sitka Harist Jason Harist who found the Cuyu started out with Sitka and then he they you know they pushed him out and they bought it out and now the the Sitka guys and the Cuyu guys don't get along like what you you guys are out of your minds pro staff thing maybe that's where that group team it's team mentality man it's the same thing is people from Texas that don't like people from Wyoming. You know, it's like, you know, we played y'all in the Super Bowl and kicked your ass. I think it'd be really hard to believe. I don't, you know, we're very friendly with Yeah, you guys are. You guys are. Um, but I think it'd be real hard for me to believe that anybody's out there being like, "Listen, if you put this on, you hate those people." Oh,

131:50definitely. There's people like that out there. I think people kind of just pick it up and run with it. Wow. Well, some I'm sure some people are ultra competitive and it comes from that. Like me, that's just the way it is in business, right? Instead of concentrating on what you're doing, a lot of people concentrate on the other people that are doing what you're doing and they say, "These are trying to get us and we need to man." But the competition is good. That's the good part of it, right? Yeah. The competition is amazing because you guys are constantly elevating your game. Like I was raising the bar saying, "Ryan, I wore your stuff when I went to um Nevada and I was like, man, those um what is uh Oh, you like the corate pants. Yeah, the corugate guide pants. Those They're great, man. They're so like loose. Like when you're walking in them, there's no binding at

132:31all. They're tough and durable. And I'm like, you guys nailed it. You know, you nailed it on a lot of stuff. Thank you. It's a cool system in that, you know, generally speaking, you go to a few different shows like the outdoor retailer and whatever. And you get to see all the best stuff, right? Like whether it be from, you know, Patagonia. Yeah. Everything. Um and you know, you get to build the best thing you can build. And there's like, you know, a couple few companies that literally like us that cost is kind of no object. I mean, it's way down the list. And I I wish we're making things as cheap as we can and that's still expensive. But it's a fun thing to be able to make the best you can make, right? And some people might, you know, say, "Oh, our stuff's better cuz we I don't know, whatever." You know, it is what it is. But I mean, everything is so good now. Yeah. It's so

133:19good now. Selfishly, we can make it for ourselves. Well, you know, it's so much better than when I started hunting in 2012, which is incredible. In the four and a half years that I've been hunting, stuff has gotten a lot better. Really interesting. That's awesome. Yeah, there's an accelerated curve out there of competition and innovation. And it's and for people that don't even hunt, like you can get your stuff in solid colors and it is amazing outdoor wear. It's as good as you're going to get. Like I have this this jacket that I was wearing the other day when it was cold out and my wife was like, "What? A skiing jacket?" I'm like, "It's a first light jacket, Check this out." Cuz it was just black, you know? I'm like, "This is the warmest jacket. It's so light and so thin, but you know, it's what is it? Your puffy? Is that what you guys call it?" The

134:05uncompreet. I mean, it's just it's the perfect jacket for like when it's kind of cold out. It's And I wore that in Montana when I was doing Anthony Bourdain show, too. I'm like, it was freezing out and I'm like, this jacket's amazing. Doesn't weigh nothing. Buddy Good Time and Dan Bailey, the feeasants forever, dude. Who's Good Time and Dan Bailey. I don't like the way you say that. Lanky, dude. Nervous with the two. He had the two griffons, the two pointing dogs. Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Real good, dude. Oh, that's awesome, man. Yeah, I'm bird hunting is fun, but it's it's like way down on the list for me. Well, dude, you're sk you. So, we were talking about elk hunting in Idaho. Yeah. Are we doing that? When are we doing that? Here's some time out. Okay. Well, it's hard. Give me some days. It's hard. I got kids. I got a wife. Everybody's bitching at me. I've heard of those

134:52things. I've heard of those. Ken fights those battles all the time. You've managed to stay clean. Kenton's got restrictions, right? Donald Trump has made your house a swear free zone. Is that what you were saying? Yeah. What happened? I know. My wife doesn't I might not have the same political view. So, we've we've gotten pretty uh um Was it the grab by the talk? Pushed her over the top. It did me no favors. Let's say that as far as having a house that was pretty free and loose. Do you have boys or girls? Two boys and a girl. Oh, okay. You're lucky. Yeah. There's like a balance there. You got two girls and two boys in your house and then you for me, dude, it's all chicks. My whole house overrun by chicks. And my mom, my wife's mom lives nearby and she's over the over the house, too. It's all women. All women. You get a lot of time shooting your bow. All women. Yeah. Daddy's going to go

135:39outside and pretend he's still a man. hide. Hide from all you sirens trying to bring me to the rocks. It's It's It's funny though, you know. So, what what laws did get established in your household? Oh, I don't know. You know, we just uh we just have to be concerned with what what that we say doesn't isn't isn't negative. How did Donald Trump bring this about? I don't know. I think like you said, I think there was enough like, you know, I have two boys, right? So, they're not afraid to call each other a if something's going, you know what I mean? Right. They heard it on the news. Yeah. No, but they're, you know, they're into their extreme sport. you there skiers and mountain bikers and you know inevitably it's like you know there's a jump built or something and first thing like it's called is you know the P word in our house in my that was the first

136:31thing my wife's like no no no no you're a dick you're a dick do you like that I was like whoa she's serious like she did not that was not going to be a derogatory term and that's fine whatever it shouldn't be but you know it was funny because you know they'll heckle each other and you know they're boys they they you know want to get after, you know, some nast gnarly ass, you know, jump or whatever on their bikes and somebody's got a guinea pig and sure enough, it's probably the one that got called a first, right? So, we don't do that. Well, for for me, when Donald Trump that whole story came out, it was great because then all of a sudden, everybody so many people are saying and it seems like this country is like backing it. We had gotten into some weird politically correct phase just in the last couple years where people are so mad at so many different different groups are so mad at

137:19the way our culture is that there was all these words that you weren't allowed to say anymore. And there was all these new things like you're not allowed to wear sombrero cuz it's cultural appropriation. They were getting mad at people for cooking other cultures dishes. Like people got so politically correct that like the the good thing about Donald Trump being in office is that I said that political correctness just took a missile to the dick cuz like that guy as the commander-in-chief man that political correctness it's like it doesn't seem very effective. It didn't work here. Like you can't you can't and people are fighting it of course and rallying and protesting and all that jazz but it the good thing about it it's like you realize like oh that's just a word like is just a word like and that guy was saying now he's the president like it's not really like this

138:04like taboo word that summons demons you know it's it's just a word and it's intent that's important. It's not demonizing words and making these words impossible to say because we've made them like there's certain words now that you just can't say in our culture or people get upset at you that were real common like You call someone a You're not saying someone has a disease. You know, you're saying someone's a knucklehead. Oh, that guy's You you know the intent of that word, but people are saying no, don't say that anymore. That's offensive. Well, the more you create offensive words and the more you create words that are not they're you're not allowed to say them, the more you're going to give those words power and people are going to they can't wait to say them. They can't I mean then those words become like nuclear power. Say the nuclear option. Then you've got

138:51something, right? Oh, you've got the the cword, you know? Yeah. That's you're always holding on to that one. If a chick gets crazy, you like listen Like what? It's just it's impossible to come back from. There's not an equivalent word for men. Like you you by telling us we can't say that word. You can call us dicks all day long. You dick. Yeah. Guilty is charged. Say got on TV now practically, right? You can. It's as long as it's not like uh you know, I mean, I think like NBC, CBS, they still don't use it. But like any cable show, they use that now. All I know is Kenton's wife tends to look at me like that is the source of looseness right there. That's single man with a mustache. Exactly. If this man got cut loose to spend too much time with him, it could all go down here. Just go feral. Yeah. What's why? Like no one tells Ryan where to go. Ryan can just go into the woods anytime he

139:44wants. I don't think that's right. Yeah. What about He doesn't have a leash on. How many times does he call and check in? Ryan's just out there with no leash. Does he have a collar? I get a long leash. I get a long leash, especially during hunting season. But Mark, my That's still a leash. You have a leash. Ryan doesn't have a leash. He's just out there. He doesn't have to call anybody. He just goes where he wants. Anarchy is what it is. Joe, what if he just decides to take that mustache and go for a hike? Nobody can tell him. That that that pisses women off because then then the man goes, "Yeah, hey, Ryan's just out there with no leash. He's doing whatever he wants." So, I wish I was like that. Like, I love being married. I love having kids. I love the whole deal. I love having a family. But I got a buddy, my friend Ari. You know what Ari did? He just went off the grid. Shut his

140:27phone off. He won't answer his emails. And he just disappeared. He went to South Pacific for how long? Just wanted to do it for a few months. He's he's a he's a stand-up comic. Hilarious guy, successful show on Comedy Centrals, doing great, kicking ass. He just decided, you know what? I need some experiences in my life to write about, to talk about. So, I'm just going to stop talking to people and disappear for a few months. I haven't talked to him in two months. I haven't talked to him. I don't know where the he is. You call his voicemail, it just says, "The subscriber you have reached has shut off incoming call." I'll play it for you. That's amazing. Yeah, dude. This thing is just I know the most devious creation on the planet. Agreed. It is. It is. It is. The subscribers request. This phone does not accept incoming calls. Message NV1. Shafir is rocking. Message NV1. He

141:19doesn't give a He went straight NV1. Yeah. So, if my wife heard that, well, he's out there with no leash. You think that's good? He's got no one to call into. He can't even check in. But he can check in, right? He can do whatever he wants. But he can call and say, "Hey, everything cool?" "Yeah, all right. Late." Boom. He can call me. I'll pay I'm still alive. And then hang up the phone. That's it. I'm like, "Oh, god damn." They're free. The ability to check out. We can I mean, where we are, it is narrow valley, public land everywhere. As soon as you get off the valley floor, you're on public land. Like we talked about, I can hike I can hike to the freaking Yukon, man. Yeah, that's crazy. And you can be disconnected as disconnected as you want to be. And man, there is no price tag on that. That is the most invaluable thing. And I need it. Well, that's the constant

142:08dilemma amongst a lot of hunters, especially the really hardcore guys. A lot of the podcasts that I listen to, like uh there's a bunch of them, but the big dilemma is how much time does your family allow you to get out? How much how much time can you spend? Can you do one of those 30-day trips? You know, like there's a lot of guys that do like a 30-day trip. That's pretty heavy. That's heavy as But there's some street cred to that. Or should I say trail cred, right? Right. You might have coined a new term. She like, you know what Reella said to me once? It was really funny, man. We were laughing. We were talking about Grizzly Man. We were talking about the Warner Herszog documentary and uh Reella was laugh. He goes, "I'll tell you what though." He goes, "That guy did some hard camping." He goes, "I got to respect that guy. That guy was a hard camper." And that's coming from a license the

142:53hard way. He does. He loves it. No one loves it the hard way more than Vanilla. He does, man. But there's something to be said for it cuz I think just like we were talking about, you know, things get more PC or whatever. It's you start patting yourself and all of a sudden you don't know what rough is. Save spaces. Nerf the hard edges of the world. It's super important that we be totally inclusive. The competition is not a bad thing. And there's no more primal competition than you trying to go out and get your own food that's running around trying to stay alive. And what do you have? You got a pointy stick you're trying to shoot through. Another misconception. Every time a hunter goes into the woods, something dies. That's what I That's what I hear all the time. It's like, well, I saw five people go into the woods behind my house on a public easement. I was at a

143:42a city council meeting listening to this gal talk. Somebody public easement so people can access public land. Only way their housing development got built was so that because they allowed a easement so people could get to the public land. She's saying that five people went past her house and five elk died. It's like not the case. I'll tell you right now, it's never happened. I don't punch my tag until the absolute last day because as soon as I clip it, I got to be back into work with that guy. You know, it's like I mean Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've had conversations with people that don't understand. They're like, "You know, you go out there and you shoot these animals." I go, "No, you go out there and you try to get an animal." She's like, "Well, how often are you successful?" I said, "Well, I went on five hunts last and I'm super dedicated. I practice constantly. I'm absorbed in

144:27it. Five hunts. Three of them were unsuccessful." So, that's and that's a good average. That's a good average. So, you're spending 15, you know, like each each hunt at least five days out in the woods and just nothing. Sorry. Come back home. Nothing struck out. Yeah. You know, and you go, "Oh, that was an absolute failure." My kids look at me like such a loser. Like, nothing. Like, nothing. Struck out. Like, you didn't nothing. Nothing. Nothing. You little You can't figure that out. It's hard. Come. Come with me one day. Right now, you're too little to hike. You're lucky. What are the ages? Six and eight. Oh, getting close. They love They eat everything though, man. They've eaten bear, elk. They eat elk all the time. They've They've been eating wild game since they were little. They, you know, they don't know the difference. They like it. They love elk. Yeah. Bull

145:13skiing. They've been skiing since they were two. Nice. Nice. Yeah. I took them when they were just so little that they just pizza down the like when they they had the little connector to with the two skis and they just slide. My daughter Rosie I don't even think she was two. You have a Rosie? Yeah. No way. Oh, no way. Oh, no way. Oh, cuz Steve daughter, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Didn't know that. Yeah. kids are, you know, it's an amazing thing to have a little person that you're raising and you get to see them learning things for the first time, which will never happen again. You know, everything they learn for the first time. Like every the first time they went skiing, I remember like this look in their face like they got the mittens on. They're like, "This is crazy. I got a helmet on. Whoa." They're so happy and excited. Like there's never going to be

145:54a first like that again. And the more firsts you can have in this life, I think the better and more rich your life will be. the more first experiences, the more times you can learn things. And people get locked in to these patterns in their life. And I don't know why it happens. And I don't know what causes it, but we get a job and we get a career and we get a path in a neighborhood and that's boom. And then the firsts stop. There's no more firsts. And then it becomes the same over and over again. And life becomes mundane and life becomes tired. And that's how you grow old, right? In a lot of ways, other than aging. But the other thing that happens is you realize that this is what's going on. And then you seek novelty. You seek new experiences. And hopefully that's what happens to more people more when they listen to podcasts like this and they they they hear you guys talk about

146:44your experiences and they they say, "God damn it, I need some of that in my life." You know, I need I need to just go camp. I need to just go out there. I need to wake up and hear bulls bugling, you know? I need to like wake up and hear birds that I don't recognize chirping and squawking and look over the ridge and see a bear. I'm like, whoa, the is that's a wild bear. He's just hanging out, chilling, being doing bear stuff. Like all that stuff is like having new experiences like that. It's just giant for your life. And again, if you're not into hunting, you don't even want to go. Just try archery. Just try that. Just try that. Just do a new experience. Go somewhere. Find a place that gives lessons. Oh, just go Yeah. Drive out to the national park. drive out to, you know, Bears National Monument. Go check some things out. Yeah. Road trip, right? You will. Car

147:32camping is fantastic. Hard to get people out of their comfort zone. It's hard. It is. But baby steps, man. Go do it. Go do it. One of the most fulfilling things I do. I try to do take somebody out on their first hunt every year and it is one of the most fulfilling things I do every year. I'm sure. It's just the best. It always blows somebody's mind. I mean, all you have to do is hear a bugle and people are just like, "What?" Yeah. I mean, it doesn't sound like a real animal. Jamie, ceue up some elk bugle because for people who never heard it before, they don't know what the we're talking about. You live in a city somewhere, you poor bastard. It sounds like an animal from the Lord of the Rings. It doesn't sound like a real thing. It sounds like some crazy exotic beast. Is it a good one? Heard a little bit of it. Did you just pick the first one you found? There it

148:26goes. Now, that's not even like a crazy one. That's like That sounds like a little bull. But this is a 1,000 lb forest horse that's making That's a real bull right there, baby. Oh my god. That That guy is like, I get all the Yeah. And the other one's saying I'm no I do whatever. Look at them screaming and then they they throw their head back and just launch that in the air. So these guys are going back and forth in this video. What a crazy animal. It is not something you get sick of hearing ever. Never. Man, every time I've been elk hunting, and I've been elk hunting a few times now, you see one and you hear it and just your whole body like tingles. It's like, wa, what a magical experience just to be around these things. To feel that to feel that noise in your chest. Jesus, look at the size of that Yeah. God. I mean, the things that are keeping those things alive are the money that

149:35comes from hunting. That's super important for people to recognize. There was a time in this country where those things were almost extinct. In the early 1900s, there was very few. There's very few deer. There's very few anything. And now there's more deer in this country than there were when Columbus didn't really discover this place. And that's why people are so passionate about this, man. Look at the history. Like we landed, we said, "Hey, this place is going to be different than where we came from. The land or the animals belong to the people. We that up real quick with market hunting." Yeah, market hunting is an interesting thing. Tell people about that. Most people don't even know that that was a real thing. They know that we killed off all the buffalo, but they don't really understand that back in the day before refrigerators, you know, you got to get

150:16meat like pretty much then. Yes. Um, man, read Mitchner's uh Chesapeake that there's a great description on market hunting in the Chesapeake Bay. Guys going out with um lowprofile boats with cannons on them, stuffing them full of shards of nails and stuff. and they'd go up to these big rafts they call when uh ducks and geese um sleep in the middle of the night on big bodies of water. They all get huddled up together in the on on uh this is in the Chesapeake Bay, but it happened in the Great Lakes also. big rafts of birds and uh you would you know push off in the middle of the night, sneak up really slowly on these big rafts of sleeping birds and touch this cannon off, shoot this cannon and then and that's how the Ches Peak uh Bay Retriever was uh basically bred into existence was they needed a big hearty dog that could withstand cold water. This dog would spend hours never getting

151:16back in the boat, but just constantly retrieving for hours cuz they'd shoot, you know, and probably a mouthful of nails, too, right? Yeah. Hundreds of birds, right? Hundreds of birds. And then that dog had to then sit on the pile of birds and defend it the next day from everybody else, right? Because those birds are worth money. So, they were taking them across to uh So, they had to be guide dogs or guard dogs, rather, and they also had to be retrievers. Yes. Whoa. Yeah. Whoa. And then they would bring those to market by the barrel full and that's and they were only good for a couple days. Yeah. And people would, you know, they would try to keep them cool and then people try to buy them as quick as they could before they spoiled and they'd have to go right back out and do it again. And that process resulted in just a devastation on the wildlife in this

152:02country where Yes. And the same thing was happening with uh you know white tail deer, elk, black bears, everything. Bison obviously. Yeah. Obviously. Yeah. That's the one that everybody harps on, but they don't realize that it was pretty much everything that we could eat they shot. We could put we could put a price tag on, right? And that's one of the major issues that, you know, we're seeing in Idaho is they want to and with some of this auction tag stuff is we're starting to put a dollar amount on our game again. What do you mean by auction tags? Where um we're pulling tags out of the general pool. So, like right now, um let's say in the state of Idaho, um uh we could all put in, you know, a thousand people put in for uh four elk tags in a prime unit, the unit that grows the biggest bulls. Well, in order to raise more funds, they've started to remove one of those tags and auction

152:58them off. So that's putting a a you know whatever we could all put in for $30 for the remaining three elk. But if we choose to, we could all try to bid on each other for that fourth tag. So if there's a limited amount of tags, people have to realize that your chances of drawing that tag are probably pretty slim unless you build up points. Every year you build up a certain amount of points and that makes it more likely that you're going to draw a tag. So people that don't understand the process. So, one person, they'll take one tag and they'll put it off and they'll allow it to be auctioned off and sometimes they'll go for hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? Like crazy rich dudes. So, there's two schools of thought. One school of thought is look how much money is going to conservation because this one rich that wants to spend $400,000 to kill a big horn

153:42sheep. Yes. And I think, you know, saying it like you do, the rich thing, that's how everybody says it, right? And of course, I get really frustrated with that cuz I'm like, well, aren't we as the remaining sportsman in this pool supporting the rich by giving him the ability? Why don't the thousand people in the pool just agree to spend a couple extra bucks on the tag? Well, that might help, but is it really going to get you the hundreds of thousands of dollars for that one tag? I mean it seems like without burdening the regular sportsman who doesn't want to spend like didn't Montana like significantly raise their tags the the price their tags recently there's a lot of complaints yeah there uh but they put a lot of the burden on the out ofate hunter not the instate hunter yeah the resident hunter gets a break right they get right our instate um you know I I'm

154:35I support a a tag fee increase for resident hunters because we haven't had one in a lot of So, what's a tag like an overthec counter tag for elk right now in Montana or excuse me in Idaho? I I want to say 40 bucks, 35 bucks. That's amazing. Yeah. And I want to say Montana's 17 as a resident. Do you know how amazing that is that for 17 bucks you can get 500 lb of meat. Yeah. And mostly your effort too. Most hunters I mean speaking for the guys that I hang around with and nobody else, we like to drink our beer. What? Yes. plan spending $17 on a case of beer that has gone in I'll generously say a couple of weeks, right? I love I love to hunt aland deer. Absolutely love it. It is I mean it's just something that I look forward to the year long, right? I I can very more than willing to spend more than 17 bucks on on the potential the thrill of the excuse to go hunt for

155:42sure. Yeah, I think that's reasonable and that pretty much within anybody's budget. I mean, just raise it to 20 bucks and then all that money is going to go back to the state and it's going to help and it's still very very very reasonable. Yeah. I mean, collectively, I was going to say, I mean, the reason we don't know the exact price generally is because you can buy a sportsman's package. So, I think it's forund, I don't know, $5, you can hunt and fish like basically anything that's not a draw. Everything over the counter as long as you don't go over the limit of what you could get pretty much. I mean, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. And Idaho is a true lottery, right? So, there are no points. Oh, it's one of those states. That's interesting. Yeah. And I truly like it because it it spreads out the pressure. M. So our draw odds are fantastic. So now where where someone

156:27wants to auction those things off like what is a like one of those crazy elk tag cuz I know the wild sheep is the big one, right? Like big horn sheep are the ones that people spend for 305. Is that what it was? $35,000. And so the same for an elk tag. Uh sheep wow breaks area that um that we hunted that I think last year went for over half a million. Whoa. But you got to keep in mind sheep sheep are the the the rarest thing that we have. Like they're doing really well in the areas that that they're doing well in. But in the brakes, we saw a ton of them. It's crazy. They were everywhere. But disease, you know, they're super susceptible to disease. Domestic sheep diseases. Correct. Right. Cuz there was a Sitka video that they did. They did did this short film about the u heard. Is that how do you say it? T N D R O Y. Yeah. Tendroy. Yeah. And these uh sheep are suffering from diseases

157:25that are coming from domestic sheep. So they're trying to figure out a way to breed a domestic sheep that doesn't catch this disease so that they can reintroduce healthy sheep into these areas and not have them be infected by these different diseases that they get from. It's really fascinating stuff. Do you remember uh Kit Fisher was on that hunt with us um in the brakes? He was rowing one of the boats. um he works for National Wildlife Federation and that's what he does is he does conflict uh mitigation basically. So he identifies those uh grazing aotments um and most of them are on public land um and he identifies the conflict of grazing aotments um mostly for big horn sheep that could put domestic sheep that could potentially be carrying diseases in contact with these wild sheep herds. So he's looking to, you know, typically pay the rancher that has that grazing

158:22aotment fair market value for that grazing aotment and he just turns it back over to uh the US uh forest service. And that's a real issue with buffalo, right, with wild bison because there's two schools of thought and there's one school it's about brucyosis and that brucyosis will somehow or another be transmitted from the bison to cattle. Um, but apparently a lot of people say that that's kind of a argument because it's really about the bison eating up all the grazing land and forcing out the domestic cattle. So they're using the brucyosis as an excuse to say that this is the reason why we need to kill off the bison and get them out of the way. I think there's some legit a little bit on both sides. Yeah. And and the difference between the sheep and the bison is sheep don't carry a disease. Bison definitely do carry uh the brucyosis, but domestic sheep do carry some diseases. Domestic

159:16sheep do, but the wild ones don't. The wild wild ones don't. But they can catch domestic sheep diseases. Yes. And they have no they can't fight no immune systems, right? They just die off. Uh but yeah, the bison one is, you know, I got a big eastern Montana family. Takes a lot of ground to grow beef out there. And if that's your livelihood, absolutely. You know, putting more animals on the countryside. Yeah. some Hulk bison thing that's way bigger than a cow. Yeah, it's a scary thing, man. It's going to directly impact your livelihood. But I think just as we were talking about earlier, man, there's some there's some happy medium there. Yeah. And if especially if we're looking at, you know, um some of this oil and gas stuff that's getting scary right now, like especially with like all of a sudden we're saying that you don't have to clean up after yourself after you,

160:06you know, start a big mine somewhere, right? Like I would much rather have bison out there than like let's raise funds through sportsmen or recreationists than digging a big pit in a beautiful spot. Yeah, I don't know if that's going to cover it though. I mean, like the place the Dakota pipeline like what they're talking about there is just like I mean the amount of money that's going to come from that is just staggering. And so the amount of pressure that's involved in making something like that go through is also pretty staggering. It is, you know, but it's dangerous, you know, and what the disaster that could take place is you can't put a price on it because what what what could be done if they ruin a river system, if somehow or another this gas line breaks and you have oil flooding a river system the same way they had that BP oil rig disaster out in

160:59the Gulf. God, could you imagine? Still dealing with it, right? Yeah. yeah. yeah. And how about the people that had to deal with it that were living near there that were sick? You know, there's all sorts of diseases and there's all sorts of lawsuits going on and all the cleanup crews. I mean, they had they made prisoners clean up the the BP mess and there's a lot of weird involved in that, right? It uh I'm truly not educated on the economics of it. And my, you know, my brain says that no, there's, you know, we couldn't, there's no warm fuzzy eco, you know, lodge that we could set up that would match the funds from, you know, oil and gas. But yeah, man, yeah, I'm just trying to think long term and ew, boy, they it'd just wreck that landscape. And the landscape is what I've, you know, been in love with since a little kid. So yeah, you know, and nobody wants to be able to light your

161:52toilet water on fire either. You know, you ever see this the Gas Land documentary where it's coming right out of the tap and the guy sticks a lighter to it and his water's on fire and people like, well, they've always been able to do that. That's always been the case. Not with these people. With these people, it's directly related to fracking. Like, there's all these apologists for that stuff. It's like, how many earthquakes do you need to have in Oklahoma before you go, hey, um, is this okay? Like, what do you guys have a thousand earthquakes a year now? Is that cool? like, yeah, as long as it's under a thousand, we're looking at, you know, we as long as we only like pollute like three or four wells a year, it's like we're survivors. It's fine. Yeah, we you we got plenty of bottle water. But man, I mean, there's just it it's a constantly evolving thing. You know, technology all across

162:37the board is getting way way way better. We know way more about these migration routes than we used to. We know way, you know, intact migration routes are what we need for healthy mu deer, healthy elk. Um, yeah, that's like a recent thing. They realized how far mu deer travel, right? It kind of blew these biologists away. Mindblowing. Yeah. Hundreds of miles. We have deer in our unit that migrate 170 miles. Whoa. Yeah. Wow. They have to. I mean, like years like this, we've got, you know, right now we've got, I don't know, six, seven, eight feet of snow on the ground, right? If they don't travel, it's they're curtains. Yeah. But when you come here and you see no snow but so many people, what's better regarding I don't What's better? No snow and a massive swarm of humans or 8 ft of snow, not that many humans. What do you guys I think as long as you guys stay

163:31where you're at and I stay where I'm at. Yeah, exactly. Is this like a trick question? No, it's not a true question cuz I I always want to talk to people that come from a place like Ketchum and you come to Los Angeles and see the swarm, the hive, the get on that 405 and go, "What in the is this thing?" Dude, I I'm not going to When we hopped on the bus, just go get a rental car last night. I was gripped. Yeah, it was felt like I was in a NASCAR race. I on a bus car. Oh, yeah. They're aggressive. very super aggressive. Yeah, you have to be. You know, they did a study that showed there's a direct correlation between the amount of footsteps people take per minute and the population that they're in. And also the faster they talk, they if the population is higher, they they will say their syllables faster. They will say words faster. They'll say more words in a minute.

164:26Well, I there's a direct correlation. People from New York definitely talk faster. Oh, yeah. Agreed. Oh, for sure. But it's fascinating. They walk faster, too. Like there's there's a here it goes. Senator, what is this? Amy clears way for finishing Dakota. Oh, Army. Oh, Amy. Finishing Dakota Access Oil Pipeline by granting easement. Opponents likely to appeal. This has happened. This is Oh, just now, huh? Yeah. Uh but yeah, you know, where where you guys live, it's just a completely different kind of place. Look at Oh, come on. Look at the first quote. Go back to that. Go back to that. You should mention that Obama approved this project in the first place. So the libtards can't blame Trump. All right, face. Libards. Oh, that is one of the best words that's come out of this whole right versus left. Oh, man. I mean, like I said, I'm just speaking off the cuff

165:19there. Like, you know, I love I'm an outside guy. I I don't want that stuff to ever change, but I realize there's got to be something for everybody, too. I mean, we're a big country. It's more than just me. And like you said, super out of the way place in Idaho. So I don't ever want to live in New York City, but I know a lot of people who love it and good have it. Good luck with it. But it's interesting when I see guys like you that come from Idaho and then come down here to Los Angeles and I see look in your face, you're like, "Fuck this place." You're like, "You can't wait to get out of here. I live here. I'm raising a family here. This is where I do my work." You guys are like, "Fuck this place." Right. Yeah. I It's just interesting. It's like the driving. I don't know, Cal. I I like ran a stoplight already. I'm like, I don't know. You know, it's high. Two

166:09lane. Too much going on. It's crazy. Feel it. You feel the pressure. Putting your blinker on means like to the next guy. It's like when you put your blinker on to change lanes, that means here it means like close that space. You know, speed up. Don't let that in. Exactly. He's gonna slow me down by one10enth of a second. It all adds up. In combat. It is. It is. It all adds up. It's very intense. It's very intense. All right, gentlemen. This has been a fun conversation and uh I hope we illuminated a lot of these issues with people and uh HR 622 and uh any bills like it and we need to do the same thing we did to 621, we need to do that to 622 and contact that guy and start the whole campaign all over again because you you just can't remove the resources that are going to protect those those lands. They're going to keep coming. It's very important. So thank you guys for what you do and your

166:57website is firstlight.com l i tre first is it with first lightighhunting.com or firstight firstlight.com firstlight.com one word and uh anything else thank you buddy thank you guys bye everybody see you Good too. Yeah.