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At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question now with the. Cybernetic organisms living tissue over metal embryos go to Paris, so. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Temperature, where it is my job always to deconstruct world class performers of all different types, to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, whatever that you can test and apply in your own lives.

My guest today, I'm very excited to have on finally Steven Rinella all and L.A. You can find him on Instagram at Meat Eater, also at Steven Rinella, Steven with a V. He is the host of the Netflix original series Meat Eater and the Meat Eater podcast. He's also the author of seven books dealing with wildlife conservation, Hunting, Fishing and Wild Foods, including a forthcoming book, The Meat Eater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival, coming out December 1st.

Twenty twenty. You can find all things meat eater on the Meat Eater Dotcom. And you can also find Steven on Facebook at Steven Rinella, Meat Eater. Steve, so nice to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. That was a good delivery there, man.

That was a great hosting. Well, you know, we we met I was trying to do the math on it. And I'm guessing I want you to correct me if I'm wrong, but I want to say maybe mid to late 2011 and I was trying to do a trip down memory lane. It's almost ten years since we first met, which is just bonkers. And I promised that if I screwed up the intro, I would not make you suffer through 20 retakes and that I would fix any flubs later.

But it seems like lifetimes ago that we first met in the context of the four hour chef, and I thought perhaps a trip down memory lane, at least as I've been doing prep for this, there's been quite a bit of that could be fun for setting the stage, because they're certainly going to be some listeners of this podcast who have hunted and they're going to be many, many who have not. And I wanted to read just a tiny little piece from the first chapter.

I had someone on my team pull everywhere. You appeared in the four hour chef. It was like a quarter of the book.

So I really dug into a few pieces. But there's a chapter called the A. Hunter's First Hunt at the A. Hunter referring to me because I grew up on Long Island, having very bad associations with the hunters who did a very poor job in my neighborhood and around my house where I grew up. But you are the counterpoint. So I wanted to set the stage. I'm going to skip things a little bit. But the heading is six a.m. South Carolina, and then I'll skip down.

Stephenville is tutelage and all things hunting was encyclopedic. By six a.m., brains struggled to absorb a motley assortment of miscellaneous point. Deer are classified as crepuscular in simple terms. They move mostly at dawn and at dusk point. Kiefer Sutherland was once swindled in a cattle rustling Ponzi scheme. Forgotten that one point. If Steve could only one meat for the rest of his life. Let me know if this has changed a monthly fifty pound allotment of any wild or domesticated animal.

It would absolutely be elk, specifically cow, elk or young bull point. The original version of The Joy of Cooking had instructions for how to fatten a trapped opossum with milk and cereals for ten days before slaughtering and cooking. It point the neck of a male deer and mating mode. In other words, a ruddy book in quotation marks can double in size, making it look like a linebacker point. Skinning a rabbit is easier than taking off your socks.

Grab the scruff and peel pulling down towards the head. Eating rabbit requires caution, though, as you can die from Tularemia, an infectious disease named after Tulare County in California. Steve, is this to this won't go too terribly long. So bear with me. Steve is his down to earth, as you would hope and you could be. But he didn't fit my stereotype. For instance, he applies physics terms to skinning and most relevant to my food quest, as he put it, quote, There are far better chefs out there than me.

They're far better hunters out there, too. But there aren't many who can combine. The two like I do, is a master of turning the wild into, quote, ingredients people recognize. Now I'm going to need some French help. In 2004, he prepared a three day forty five course. So let that sink in for people. A three day forty five course banquet from Escoffier Landmark 1983 classic. Is it La La Gaede now how do you.

I have no idea how to say that.

I'll tell you what I do. I say what do you honor? Guide the culinary guide. All right. And then the last, the last paragraph I'll read here is by prepare I mean that he forged, killed and otherwise procured every ingredient from the outdoors, then recreated the feast himself, which took more than a week. This experiment was chronicled in his first book. Now here's another French word, the scavenger's guide to Haute Cuisine. I've been well trained in this one.

And still, every time you do it, you get corrected, oat.

OK, no, I just got out. I say without the scavenger's guide to cuisine. There you go. That was great. And I was better. Thank you.

You know you know, I've been I've been working on my French on the set. He started trapping for income in rural Michigan when he was ten, now thirty eight. That's, of course, changed. He writes for a living and his work is as likely to be seen in The New York Times as in Field and Stream. So I wanted to set the stage because I think a lot of people in their minds, as soon as I mentioned hunting or anything else, will have an image pop up.

And I don't think that image matches you all that well, at least the kind of stereotypical image that will pop up for non hunters when I was younger, I think, or to match me perfectly well.

Men. Hmm. Saboor So I grew up in Michigan, but across the lake, you know, not terribly far away. So that state of Wisconsin and my good friend Pat Durcan in Wisconsin had once said something along the lines of. You know, where he lived that if you weren't a deer hunter? You at least slept with one, there wasn't a ton of you know, there wasn't a ton of self reflection at the time and also raised up by a generation that hadn't been invited into and cultivated any kind of real conservation ethic.

And there was a bit of a get what's yours while you can get it mentality that I grew up on. But I don't want to derail you. You know, I just get a little bit more able to touch on this later on.

Often you can't derail me. I often get accused of being somehow different than hunters or different than normal hunters are different than what you'd expect as a hunter and man. Like, I feel like I'm a lot like the people that I spent a lot of time with. I'm a lot like a lot of the people that I spent a lot of time with.

Let's dig into it. So, for instance, in an interview that I read and prep for this self-described as a hunter conservationist hyphenated. And I want to talk about that. And I guess by showing you the way that I did what I wanted to point out and I'll just personalize this, is that, you know, growing up, my exposure to hunters was very limited. It was limited to seeing wounded deer with, like arrows like stuck in them on my property, my parents property, because people were a trespassing be just not doing a very good job of hunting, understanding that you're not going to have perfect shots all the time.

But they're like beer cans everywhere. And it just wasn't a positive association, sir. Now, in contrast, though, at least if we look at. I guess at the time. Thirty eight year old Steve, who I went to South Carolina with from my first hunt, the experience and the explanation and the care and the attention to detail was something that I never would have associated with hunting growing up, I suppose. All I'm trying to do is contrast those two things, which were largely an imaginary figure in my head based on a few bits of exposure as a kid and in my experience with you, which were very, very, very different.

And that's not to say that most hunters are what I experienced as a kid and not what you are. But let's dig into it. Like, why do you call yourself if you still do or identify as a hunter conservationist? I absolutely do.

Even sitting where I'm at today. So, you know, you're reading from one, you're thirty eight. I'm forty six.

Even sitting from where I am today, when I look back at what our relationship when I say are my families, the people I was around, what our relationship was with nature and the outdoors was very much based on a deep, deep love and appreciation for resources, for wild places, for nature. It was almost like we would have never have put these words to it, but it was a sacred thing and it was almost like a sort of worship for animals in a worship of wild places, but.

The perspective on it, I didn't know the history of how things came to be the way they were. We had a lot of national forest around us. We were sort of on the southern terminus of the Manistee National Forest. I think now is the here on Manistee National Forest. It was combined with another national forest. We were sitting at the southern terminus of that national forest. I couldn't have told you the first thing about how that place came to be, what sacrifices were made in our history to have the abundant wildlife that we had.

I couldn't have told you how bad things had gotten in this country in the late 80s and early 90s with regards to wildlife. If there was a sign on that national forest that said close to vehicular traffic, if it wasn't physically blocked, that would that sign wouldn't really mean much to us. If it looked like somebody else drove there, we would drive there as well. I at times when faced with like an abundant surplus of things, sold things for money that sold wild game for money, knowing you weren't really supposed to do that with some species that we would sell.

But it was a thing that people around you did. You didn't really know that it was wrong. At the same time, we would see behaviors that we recognized as abhorrent, things that would probably blow away any negatives that you might have seen growing up. I've probably seen worse behaviors from hunters and anglers than you have. So I always lived with a even if from my perspective right now, we had some poor behaviors, some ill thought behaviors, I always recognize the spectrum of bad behavior.

And there were things that were to happen around us that my father would be incensed about and would like disassociate with people who had extraordinarily bad behavior.

And if you look at that sense of there being a spectrum of ethics or a spectrum of a conservation ethos throughout life with education and with like various epiphanies that come with just learning how to think and having exposure to books and ideas, scientists, biologists, ecologists, philosophers, whatever, it's become more fine tuned. And I now have a very acute sense of what it takes to have wildlife in wild places. I have a good understanding of that now. I understand our history now, and that has led me to like an extraordinary amount of reflection over the years about what role a hunter or an angler should play when it comes to environmental stewardship and hunting.

So I associate as a conservationist because I try to really put my money and actions where my mouth is on conservation, meaning clean air, clean water, lots of animals, lots of wildlife habitat. Those are things I stand for. And I see that that is a thing that's increasing among my kind. But it's a little tough for me to think of myself as somehow extraordinary because I see many, many people go down the same path that I did.

A long exposure to this seems to lead in this direction for most people, for people who not only have no exposure to hunting themselves, but who have no real familiarity with how hunting works in the U.S. from an economic perspective, the ecosystem, not necessarily the natural ecosystems or the fiscal ecosystem. I was reading an article and you seem to comment on the decline in hunting and fishing license sales is worrisome. Could you expand on that or speak to that?

I'd love to give people an idea how funding works, how funding works. Yeah, I would love to.

This is something that there's a catch 22 almost within this, but yeah, I'd love to talk about that. So I know you have a global audience. I'm going to run down how it works in the United States. I can claim subject matter expertise in the U.S. and I have a passing familiarity with other places being a focus on the U.S. The US has fifty states. Right. So all fifty states have a state fish and game agency. And your state fish and game agencies are responsible for the stewardship of wildlife in your state.

There are exceptions to this because migratory birds and some migratory fishes and things where an animal isn't going to live its entire life sort of in one in the confines of a particular state, then you'll have federal oversight over what happens in a state like there's sort of a some federal guidelines about how a state might handle its now its wildlife resources. There's other exceptions to when you get an Endangered Species Act and things like that. But generally you could say that the people in a state own the wildlife in that state.

So if you're sitting in New York and you see. A dear you as a New Yorker, own that deer, that deer is managed for you by your state agency, so it doesn't matter what that deer is sitting in a cemetery, if it jumps a fence into a county park, if it jumps a fence onto a farm, it jumps a fence into a national forest. That deer is the state's meaning. It's yours. These agencies manage wildlife in terms of access to it.

Oftentimes, states manage like boat launches and trailheads on state lands and things. But they also do disease work on wildlife. So they do, you know, researching diseases, wildlife management, enforcement of wildlife laws. So someone's poaching, that's a state issue. And that all comes from your state fish and game agency. Some state fish and game agencies get no hard funding when you pay your taxes in your state. And a lot of states, none of your general tax money goes to your state.

Fish and Game agency. The bulk of state fish and game agencies finances come from the sale of licenses, tags and stamps, hunting licenses, fishing licenses, permits, tags, all the stuff that goes with hunting and fishing. And another major funding source. For state fish and game agencies is excise taxes on firearms, ammunition, very use, specific sporting goods items, marine gas, fishing tackle, fishing line, these excise taxes, which can be like on guns and ammo, these excise taxes committed around, you know, 11 or 12 percent.

So when you go down and buy, you know, some person that lives in New York City goes down and buy and they have a concealed carry permit, say, and they go down and buy some ammo for a concealed carry permit. But 11 or 12 percent of the cost they pay on that ammo goes to fund wildlife. And that's how we pay for this whole system. There are complexities to it, but that's how we pay for it out.

A fear about declining hunting and angling numbers, you know, angry numbers. This is since covid. There's a pretty strong uptick in fishing numbers with people like I think people weren't able to go do what they would normally do. The like if I could go fishing, you know, and we're seeing a fair bit of that. Whether or not they'll be fishing in two years is not known of fear about declining Hunter numbers. And I'll tell you an interesting point.

I think that there are about as many hunters right now is there were in the years following World War Two, and they were low after World War Two. Well, that was the peak in terms of per peak, all those dudes. This actually plays into my I got to remember where I was that this actually plays into my own sort of genesis. Right. Is my dad. My dad had me. He was old. My dad had had me when he was 50.

He fought in World War Two. And when he came home from World War Two, he like just about every other guy that went off and fought World War Two, got into hunting and fishing. It was sort of the that er of the late 40s, early 1950s. That was the birth of the modern American sportsman. People had money, they were buying cars. They were traveling around. There was this we were fetishizing the great outdoors. And my dad was part of that generation.

But I'm staying hunting. Participation was so high then. I don't know, like, I guess you could look up real quick what the US population was in 1947, say, but or 1950. But, you know, I think we've quadrupled our population, but we had about as many hunters then as we have now. So participation rates decline in many cases, numbers of people who hunt decline and long term fear. Besides, whatever that might mean for like a disassociation with nature and a disassociation with wildlife, it has funding implications because states, even if you hate hunters and anglers, you can't get around the fact that hunters and anglers fund your state's wildlife apparatus.

If people aren't doing those activities anymore, those funding structures fall apart. What are some of the components of the wildlife apparatus like water for somebody? Let's just say someone to say I don't care about hunting, so why should I care about this? Well, some components. Pieces, exactly.

I'll give you a great for instance, anyone who hunts ducks, anyone in this country who hunts ducks, any kind of waterfowl, migratory waterfowl, ducks, geese, cranes, whatever, besides buying your state license, state hunting license, you usually need like a bass hunting license. You need a state waterfowl permit.

You need to go buy a federal duck stamp, and for years, the federal duck stamp had been 15 bucks it just raised up. It raised up into the 20s, all of that money from all of those millions of individuals buying those federal duck stamps, all of that money goes into fund waterfowl habitat, meaning it goes into wetlands work. Any time you if you have a bear in your yard or say you realize that you have a bear in your yard getting in your garbage when you call a number, that's going to be someone from your wildlife agency is going to show up.

That wildlife agency individual will show up. And when they show up their salary, equipment, everything like their agency is funded by expenditures from hunters and anglers. So a fear is that if Hunter numbers go down, our ability to fund habitat work like habitat improvement, habitat expansion, habitat acquisition, wildlife work, disease work, reintroducing species that were extirpated from the landscape, that a lot of that work will lose its funding structure and will go away.

Can you define extirpate for people who are not familiar with that word? Yeah, it's great word. I also want to get into the catch 22 of this all. But yes, yeah, extirpate is people are familiar with extinction, right? Extirpation is regional extinction, meaning grizzly bears are abundant. Grizzly bears are recovered in portions of Wyoming. Wolves are recovered in portions of Wyoming. Wolves have been extrapolated from the bulk of their range. In the U.S., grizzly bears were extirpated from California.

They're not extinct, but they're regionally extinct. So you could say that they were extirpated like brought to regional extinction in California.

There's an ongoing bit of effort, much of it funded by hunters, for instance, around reintroducing species that were extirpated through habitat destruction, overharvested, for instance, at a time New Mexico had literally run out of elk. They had none. Now they have thriving populations of L. L hunting seasons, you know, across the bulk of the state, but still with as many elk as we have, as much as we associate elk hunting and seeing elk elk are still missing from some 90 percent of their historic range.

Everywhere was elk habitat. And there they've been exterminated. They're gone from those places. Some of the work that's done by state agencies and other like wildlife groups, many of them hunter based wildlife groups, is doing as much as we can to put those animals back where they belong. If you think if you look at it in terms of Turkey, at the time of European contact, we had wild turkeys and probably thirty nine states. There's some debate about where they were and it wasn't static.

Right. Like Wildlife's dynamic, you know, it expands its range. Its range shrinks. We provide turkeys in 39 states by the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. We only had wild turkeys in nineteen states. They vanished from ten. Only a couple of states maintained any sort of turkey season. Most states it was illegal to touch a turkey. We now have turkey hunting seasons in forty nine states. So they did recovery and then some on turkeys and that was driven by hunters.

And you could someone could sit and say like, yeah, you guys did that because you like to hunt turkeys. And I would say, yeah, there's a lot of truth to that. There's a lot of truth to that. There was an incentive to do it, but it was done, you know, and this is the sort of work that go down that you would lose if you lost that funding mechanism. Now, the catch twenty two is that and this is legitimate.

The catch twenty two is that if Hunter numbers go down, it's great for any individual hunter who has less competition. You could live in a world where the only guy that went out hunted.

You'd have a pretty sweet situation as long as you had public approval and didn't lose in the legislative process. And hunting got banned everywhere, which would probably happen pretty quickly if you were the only guy up to it, because there wouldn't be a lot of people there like guarding the gate. Right. So that's the catch 22. That's the hard part of this. Some people find it deeply offensive, well intentioned, well reasoned. People find it deeply offensive that you would want to expand Hunter numbers like what are you talking about?

Why would you do that, if you like? When I was in, I think it was an eighth or ninth grade. I had a civics teacher. No, he was in high school. I had a civics teacher who was supposed to help all of us kids get registered to vote. And he was like, why would I want you people to register to vote? Why would I want to dilute my vote?

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If we look at the different extirpated species in portions of the United States, that whole spectrum are hunters. Ninety nine percent or one hundred percent focused on reintroducing basically target prey species, or are they also involved in reintroducing species? I'm not saying necessarily, but you mentioned the grizzly or other carnivores who would compete with them for the game that they hope to capture themselves. Yeah, that's where it gets pretty tricky, man. I would like to tell you oh, I would love to tell you that my my hunting compatriots were as supportive of efforts to recover non game species as they were game species.

But that's not true.

When you look at the habitat work, you'll find that we have these terms we use like capstone keystone species, OK?

And when you look at organizations that do habitat work, they would tell you in their right and telling you this, that there is a massive trickle down effect. For instance, let's look at the work work by two groups like Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk found it. Or we'll do three Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Wild Turkey Federation. OK, now you listen to those names. We'll throw a fish in one in two and say Trout Unlimited.

Right. You look at those names, these are like species specific conservation groups and their constituencies are hunters and anglers. I'm sure there's probably some person that belongs the national wild Turkey. I'm like a lifetime member of National Turkey Federation. I'm sure there's people born in National Wild Turkey Federation that don't hunt turkeys. But in the words of Pat Durcan, I bet they sleep with someone that does right.

What their work winds up focusing on is it's not so much that you're managing the animals, though. That happened at a time at a time like wildlife work in this country really was focused pretty heavily on moving animals around, OK, putting them back in places that's become complicated for a variety of things, including disease transmission and other issues, just like red tape issues, bureaucratic issues, disease transmission issues that make you can't just willy nilly truck animals around the country dumping them out where you wish they were any more.

It's tough. These organizations now mostly focus on habitat work. Oftentimes their primary thing is simply buying and protecting habitat. When you get into something like keystone species, let's say your Ducks Unlimited and you take money. And you buy wetlands, you're looking for pristine, imperiled wetland habitats and them often through like a willing seller willing buyer transaction, which is one of the things also one of the things Rocky Mountain Foundation does and Turkey Federation, these places all often do the same playbook.

They get grants, they raise money from donors, they do fundraisers. And a big part of their work is they identify keystone habitats for like, you know, and you hear like keystone species. So it's a thing that they want. It's a thing they like. And by securing habitat for that animal, you're securing habitat for everything that that that lives.

They're restoring natural ecosystems.

In the West, for instance, one of the more imperiled eco types in the West is like large riparian areas, elk winner in these large riparian areas, meaning they go down along main rivers, they go down into big river valleys to get out of the elevation, get out of the snow, get into good grasslands and eat if you want to help elk. It used to be the best way to help Elk was tranquilize them, lift them up with the helicopter and move them over a couple of mountain ranges and letting them back go again.

Now we recognize, like the way to help Elk is to look at like where is the bottleneck in their well being in the bottleneck? And their well-being is often riparian habitat areas. So we're going to go and preserve, protect as much riparian habitat as we can. Who else uses riparian habitat and who else likes are a lot of elk while wolves like it in the winter, wolves need a lot of elk. So by helping elk through improving their habitat and protecting their habitat, you're helping everything on the landscape from songbirds to insects, pollinators, raptors.

You're helping everything. People definitely recognize this when they participate in these activities. But the motivation is that people like Elk, they like to hunt elk and they want a shitload of elk. And you can critique their motivation all you want. But then you can't really you have to then look at like what is the something? The some part of it is that a group like Rocky Mountain Foundation or National Wild Turkey Federation. Right. They have every year they add to the net amount of pristine wildlife habitat that exists in this country.

And you cannot say the same thing about PETA. You can't say it when it really comes down to really saving animals. That's saving habitat. The animals, you give them the right place. The animals, for the most part, take care of themselves. And that's what's being done by hunters and anglers. I suppose that would. And you know so much more about this, but that would be, in some respect, conditional upon letting the full spectrum of species flourish that are supported by this preservation or conservation of habitat for, say, the elk during winter periods.

Right. So I forgot that part. Yeah, there's a lot there's a tremendous amount of animosity. There's a tremendous amount of animosity toward wolves among in the hunting community. It's definitely not across the board. I know a lot of hunters that really like to see wolves and welcome wolves on the landscape. But yeah, I should clarify that when it comes to speaking very generally here. OK, I'm speaking very generally. I would say in general, let me put this way.

Let's take a state that doesn't have wolves. I would say that if someone proposed reintroducing wolves in Missouri, they would get an enormous amount of pushback from deer hunters when someone decided to do reintroduction work in portions of Missouri on turkeys. I do not think they would have gotten any pushback from hunters.

So, yeah, what people like all predators. I look at a little bit like this, you know, when a coyote runs into a red fox, he likes to kill it. When a wolf runs into a coyote, he likes to kill it. Predators tend to want to reduce their competition. And I think that you could say that about hunters. In general, though, there are many, many, many exceptions. I know some very avid hunters, lifelong, very avid hunters who really welcome wolves as wolves expand their range every year, welcome wolves back on the landscape.

And even within those people that welcome back on the landscape, you'll find differences. There's a push right now. There's a there's like a referendum vote in Colorado coming right up to sort of like mandate the reintroduction of wolves in Colorado. A lot of people are uneasy with that. The reason they're uneasy with that is wolves are coming in naturally drifting down from Wyoming. It's as nuanced as this. You'll have people say, why would we reintroduce them when they're showing up at their own pace?

Through natural migration, and that's like a pretty nuanced perspective, right? I welcome them walking in. I don't welcome them flying in. So it's hard to draw these sort of like real hard and fast rules about people's attitudes about it. And there's a real contradiction like like a funny part of this I'd like to point out to people in Alaska still has wolves and grizzlies. You know, I don't cross ninety nine or 95 percent of their historic range in Alaska.

Alaska doesn't have large they don't have large land mammals on the Endangered Species Act. Right. They've maintained all their stuff. Wolves, everywhere you go, there's a likelihood of running into wolves. You're going to run into grizzlies. Yet American hunters all dream of going up to hunt in Alaska. And you always want to point out, like, are you sure you hate wolves? That place is full of wolves. There must have been the game in Alaska.

How could there be game in Alaska? They have wolves. And you would think with some people that wolves coming back into certain areas would mean the sure death of all ungulates that live there. And I think that's an exaggeration. But wolves don't eat granola bars either. You know, they eat seven pounds of meat a day, seven pounds of meat a day. There are live 365 days a year. They kill a lot of shit. And to say like how hunters think about it is really tough, man, because it's the full array of thoughts.

But I'll say this. We don't like those wolves as much as we like those elk. And that's that. I can promise you. It's true.

You know, the the wolf conversation. I remember somebody put it to me as an wolf.

Well, wolves in general are the Middle East of conservation. He said, if you want really, really strong emotions and a lot of popularity, then that is the right place to focus. There's a really good piece in The New Yorker. There's a profile and I think it's Karen Vardaman called The Persuasive Power of the Wolf Lady, which is about a go between between these these two polar extremes. And you actually had I had a someone named Mike Phillips.

I don't know if you know that name whose is in Montana but was involved with the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you had a scientist also on your podcast, Diane Boyd, that was outstanding. That was that was a really, really, really dense and also entertaining episodes for people who want to to dig into that. And I think Dave Miach, is that another might get in there at MSH? I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.

He's also somebody people want to learn more about this. He's another person who who focuses quite heavily on the the wolf component.

Yeah. Colorado is faced with a very similar situation. That is what Montana was faced with when they did a reintroduction. And, you know, essentially in Wyoming, you know, in Yellowstone National Park is that there were animals coming in naturally. There were animals coming in naturally from Canada. We would have landed eventually. Where in the future from today, we would have lands where we are now without doing the reintroduction. And some people would say the same thing about Colorado.

They're headed that direction. There are wolves showing up. It used to be like a rumor. It was debated. It's just an absolute fact now, like there are wolves in Colorado coming in on their own. And some people prefer that because the social tensions become lower. There's a thing that can happen with animals. You might call it the spotted owl. If occasion of certain species where one conservation becomes so partisan and so political, oftentimes an animosity toward the animal develops because the animal becomes emblematic of what some people might view as federal overreach.

Right. And like something being shoved down their throats. And so politically and culturally, it seems that it's a little safer to let things happen gradually and naturally than it is to force your hand by politicizing biology. It seems super, super tricky, right, because you have. So many subtleties here and like you said, whether it's face masks or spotted owl or wolves, once things become politically associated, whether by just circumstance and momentum or by some kind of engineering on one side or both sides for voting purposes, it complicates matters a lot.

And then I would also say that it's really interesting that you I love that the mention of face masks were. Yeah, you're right. We're not talking about face masks. Yeah, we're not talking about it's like we're not actually talking about the thing on your face. We're talking about like this whole set of ideas associated with the thing.

Right. That's a good point. Exactly. Exactly. And humans are motivated. Right. So you really have to take into consideration the motivations of whoever is speaking, whether they are hunters, not hunters or anyone with incentives in the world. Right. And because there are people who would say and we don't have to spend a ton of time on this, but that wolves were so forcefully removed, I don't apply the word artificial, but they were certainly with overwhelming sort of show of force and poison with they were removed with intent.

Yet within like poisoning a specific stated intent. Elk were removed, not with a they were removed, not with specific intent. No one set out to be like, I would like to remove elk from the landscape. It just happened. Right. Right. Yeah. Wolves are like, oh, it was a plan. There was a bounty. There was poison. There was a plan. And the plan worked too well. Yeah. Yeah. So if anybody wants to wait until the Middle East of conservation, that's a good place to do it.

You mentioned friendships and over wolves. Men. Yeah, it is a tense conversation for a lot of folks. You mentioned Alaska. I want to talk about Alaska and I want to give a slice of life many profile of Steve Rinella. So this this is going to be another flashback moment. And for those interested, this is captured on footage, but I'm not sure all of it is captured. So you and I traveled up to Alaska at one point and ended up, fair to say, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

I mean, one of the most remote points in North America got grounded for weather for a while. And it was just an incredible adventure. And we had at one point actually more than one point, but at least at one point on camera, we had a grizzly, a barren ground grizzly, which you could explain run into our camp. And the reason I bring up that is a that was something I'd never experienced before. And I and other members of the film crew were like, Steve, what do we do, Steve?

What do we do in this bear was running around this body of water straight towards camp. And I don't know how far away was let's call it half mile. You can correct me, but let's just say a half mile, which is not very far. And meanwhile, you had just gotten out of your tent. This is the part that I don't know if it's on camera. You just got out of your tent. And I don't if you remember this, a bunch of mosquito repellent had spilled in your tent.

100 percent had spilled and eaten a hole through the floor of my tent and warped my phone case and ruined my phone.

So. So you get up and you're like God in a hole, a hole through my tent. And that's exactly we were on our skin.

You are. So you're just like stamping around, furious, cursing at while this bear is is running around this body of water and everyone's like, Steve, Steve, what do you want to hear Steve say, Steve? And you're like, God damn it, motherfuckers. So angry.

And eventually. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you like grab a shotgun and shoot in the air and wave your hands and spook this bear, which was a pretty large grizzly bear. You could speak to it, at least from my perspective. Certainly a lot bigger than my dog ran like a quarter mile away. I kind of sat down and looked at us and just kind of waited. But could you could you maybe add some color to that story?

Because it certainly burned and etched the experience indelibly into my mind. But what are some of the details that are missing here? Yeah, you're right about the deep the bottom one hundred percent want to ruin a lot of my stuff because I had I had given it a lot of time to fester, spilled in the corner of my tent, leaked out like it was a mess in terms of the Bay Area. So I'll point this out. We've been talking about grizzly bears.

We've touched on grizzly bears in the lower 48. Any time we use the word grizzly bear, if you ask the taxonomists like a geneticist, they would tell you that grizzly bears in the lower 48 brown, what we call brown bears, Kodiak bears bear and ground grizzlies up on the Arctic slope where we were up in the Brooks range. It's all the same species, right? So they have big differences, physiological differences.

They look. Different, they act different in these different places, but it's just different, you know, kind of like manifestations of the same animal. And one of the things that these barren ground grizzlies up there or, you know, bears in the interior think they're known for is they have these enormous home ranges, a brown bear, let's say a Kodiak brown bear preserve, that like biggest bears in the world, biggest, you know, brown bears in the world.

They might have a very, very small home range. They eat a lot of salmon. They live in a resource rich environment. They got their spot and they stay there and defend it against other boars. Put up in these areas. You have. It's a hate, I don't want people to take it the wrong way up in the like the Arctic slope and in the Brooks range, it's a resource poor area. It looks amazing. It's gorgeous.

When you're out in front of a migrating her to Cariboo, it looks like the land is like crawling with animals. But the thing is, you could sit there at times of the year, you could sit there for months and nothing will come by. And so a big animal like that just covers ground. And they need to be extraordinarily opportunistic, they're going to be eating primarily, probably the bulk of that animal's diet is going to be vegetation, berries, roots.

But they're just on the move all the time because they're always out looking for, like that big windfall. A big hit, like a big protein hit, and so they cover ground, then they have an amazing nose on them. I one time was caribou hunting in a different area east of where you and I were. And we had gone three miles up a tributary to a river and killed a cariboo and gutted it and hauled the meat back down to the main stem.

That night we were sitting on the main branch of the river at the mouth of that tributary and watched a grizzly coming down, digging up roots in the gravel bar. And it got to the mouth of that tributary and you could see something strike its nose to where like a scent. And it stood up on its back legs, waved its nose in the air for a long time, spun around, did it again, and eventually ran up that tributary.

And I didn't go check. But I am certain, based on the wind patterns that he smelled that got people from three miles away and that's what they're out doing, man, they're covering ground. And so on that trip we were on, we had, I don't know at the time, one or two Cariboo on the ground and there's no trees there.

You know, it's a bear and, you know, a treeless environment in the trees that are there are shrubby and doesn't do any good. Meaning you can't hang it up in a tree to keep it safe. So if you have a cash ameet that you're trying to protect, the best thing is to put it where you can keep an eye on it, like close to camp. If you move it away, a mile is going to get, you know, consumed and you won't even know you won't be to protect it.

You don't even know that it happened. If you put it right in your camp, you're inviting stuff to come right in your camp. So you just kind of put it off or you can keep an eye on it 75 yards away, 100 yards away, depending on what's going on. And this bear comes along to claim that Cariboo, he's probably done that a ton of times. He comes in and probably has in his life countless times fought off other bears to claim a dead caribou, fought off wolves to claim their cariboo in that place, too.

It's very likely that that animal had never had a direct experience with a human before, sees aircraft, right, whatever. Maybe smelled people somewhere, but probably never had direct experience. It just is known that its cruising along and probably had miles away long before we knew it was there, had smelled that animal, it was coming to get it and then it gets there and you present to it in a way that's kind of like authoritatively saying this is already mine, this thing is claimed, you have no right to be here, like that's what you're trying to express to that animal.

And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. I got a lot of friends. You know, people lose stuff to those things all the time. But in that case, that little show of force, like, I'm not afraid of you, this is my shit. Does not your shit worked? And he ran off and and surprisingly didn't come back in the dark and try again.

I remember going to bed that night and it was just like, you know, in these skin thin single person tents. And I'm saying to have blanking on his name. Was it Nick? Is Nick. Yeah, it was Nick with us. Nick Brigden. Yeah. Nick, yeah. Nick was with us and I was like, well. Hope you don't die tonight and is like you, too, man. Oh, yeah, because they can have a real attitude about and stuff, man, you know, claiming to kill and people get every year.

It's kind of amazing to think, you know, every year in the lower 48, you know, multiple people get killed most every year from grizzly bears. This is going to sound callous, but you know, that that could happen is like I hold that risk is kind of cool. I like it. Like, I don't mind there being something big and scary like that out there. In fact, I drive a lot of emotional satisfaction from it.

And this is beyond any sense that that I don't like it when humans play God and decide to remove animals from the landscape. But just I just I like that I feel more alive, better, more engaged, happier in places that have that full suite of large predators, omnivores, you know, out on the landscape. So I relish those interactions. And I also am aware that, you know, at some point in time, I'm part of a very high risk group around bears.

And I don't think that something will happen to me. But I'm part of a high risk group and it's like I'll feel lucky if I get out of life without having someone. I'm very close to get mauled by a bear or killed in a small airplane crash.

You know, it's just like things I recognize, like those are actual those are actual real threats. People fixate on the wrong things when they imagined danger. But if you spend a lot of time hunting in these areas, that's not a fantasy that you could get mixed up with a bear. It strikes me that if we're talking about, for instance, the bear attacks, which are so visually memorable for anyone who's seen The Revenant, for instance, they're going to they're going to have a movie they can play in their mind of what a bear attack looks like where a small plane crash may just be off menu.

They just don't have a reference for it.

But that's great. We don't we don't have one for hypothermia. Yeah, we don't have one. I know how it goes. No, it's being like, dude, I hope I don't die of hypothermia. But you know what that's like. I'd be watching out for that.

Yeah, it's not it's cinematically compelling, but it sure will kill you just as well. And are you more afraid because you take a lot of small aircraft? I would imagine. I mean, certainly we did. We took these Bush planes, tiny, tiny aircraft. And you are not landing on a perfectly manicured asphalt at all times. Right. And do you worry more about the aircraft or in this case, bears, predators?

The thing about the aircraft is like there's a sort of statistical bit of it, right? Like you can look you go to a place like Alaska where it's like it's a primary mode of transportation. Like most places they have it. A private single engine plane is a hobbyist writer, like a flying enthusiast, you know, oftentimes flying for the sake of flying, you know, a place like Alaska and much of Canada. You know, it's like that's like how you get around, right?

Right. It's like how you do it. I remember as it was Ted Stevens in Alaska, I think it was him that had talked about an occupational hazard of politics in that state was small aircraft and then died in one.

But you could look at like ours, you know, like crashes per hour or whatever. So someone like me, you know, I don't have any real reason to worry about it. I have a brother who's a who's an ecologist in Alaska and he spends a lot of time in single engine aircraft, lot of time and, you know, fixed wing and helicopters and. Yeah, man, you get to a point where all those people that do that, they all know people.

Right? They all know people that that's happened to IVD to the point now where, like, you know, I've been in planes that I later knew crashed.

That's spooky. Yeah. But it's like for me, it's just so minor, like, you know, you know, some number of trips a year. But the people I know, like especially people in the in the Fish and Wildlife who do Fish and Wildlife work up there. I do worry, man. I do worry like my brothers. There's a lot of time in those things and I worry about that. But for me, if you're at least open to thinking statistically, personally, I have no reason to be concerned.

Well, for people who want to get a glimpse of Alaska, you can certainly read some amazing books like Coming into the country. Yeah, but John McPhee. But if you want a visual sampler, I just pulled this up. I don't know if this is accurate because it's on IMDB. It could be. It's a season three episode. One of meat eaters that sounds or is is our episode where we travel to the remotest corner of Alaska to catch the annual migration of the famed Western Arctic caribou herd.

Can people find where can people find, if they can, these these older episodes? You can find all the older episodes if you go to the Meat Eater Dotcom and you'll go there and. You'll find you'll find your avenue to all the older episodes. OK, great. It looks like the episode is called True North Alaska, North Slope, Cariboo, Season three, Episode one. We'll put that in the show. Notes also, guys. Yeah, those are also they're also available in our broadcast by Sportsman Channel, you know, like Outdoor Channel and Sportsman Channel.

But then you can also find them by going to the meter dotcom. They're not available on Netflix. We're going to be doing some things soon around distribution with some of our older material, but that's where you can find them right now. Perfect. Let's move from television to books and in this case, books that are not yours. We can certainly spend more time on books that are yours. But I read that you recommend and I don't know how old this interview was, a few books very commonly.

Son of the Morning Star by Evan Connell, Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez and Boon by Daniel Morgan. Do you still or would you still recommend knows what's special about these books?

Some of the Morning Star is about the events leading up to and including the battle at Little Bighorn where Custer's Last Stand. It's a great story. I mean, it's just like a story that just makes its own gravy.

It's just incredible. The brutality and just just weirdness of that campaign. The culmination of Custer, his involvement in that campaign. One of the things I love most about it, besides just like phenomenal reporting, is the openness with which the author approaches how different people remember things. And reading it, you get a sense of how there are at any given time. You know, and this is just so applicable today. There are a hundred truths. I don't mean one hundred like one zero zero.

There are as many truths is there are people about what went on during something and his exploration of people's accounts, of what happened that day and the days surrounding it when Custer died and who did what, who was where and who thought what and what was going on. It's just the question marks that loom over that stuff are unbelievable. It's a great telling. It's a great piece about just like human memory, but also a phenomenal history of the American West and a phenomenal history of the Indian wars to say, like what led up to the battle of little big horn.

You can approach that hunter man. You can take a five hundred year approach, right. You could take a decade approach. You could take a week long approach.

And he kind of manages to sort of like cover off on all those ways to lead up to how in the world did a couple hundred U.S. soldiers get wiped out, killed off by Plains Indians, armed with antiquated firearms and bows and arrows in to quote one of the Sioux participants in the battle named Gaul, in the amount of time that it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner, it's just so bizarre.

It's just candy like it's history, Candy. And he's such a great he just great. I view it like a Western literature masterpiece. Arctic Dreams is a work in natural history. Arctic Dreams is a book about the Arctic. One of the most profound parts about it for me is that the author, Barry Lopez, is very uneasy with hunting. I would venture to say that Barry Lopez would probably not like me too much. But what what would he dislike about it?

Just very uneasy with hunting. Got it, he's you know, if you read, he's uneasy with hunting, he spends a lot of time with indigenous hunters in the Arctic. So he spends a lot of time with the Eskimo Inuit hunters and he is at peace. He's relatively at peace with that, though. He recognizes the violence, but he's at peace with that indigenous approach to hunting. You would look at that and I find that it's often quite true.

People who would be like they don't want violence toward animals. Right. But they're very accepting if it's done by an indigenous person, as though the animals somehow feels that pain differently. You can't really ignore that if you're a walrus getting shot in the head on the ice floe, I don't know that you care who's pulling the trigger.

Right. I really don't think that that is of issue to them. But people are tend to be much more comfortable with that. And he gets into it in our dreams. Also, just someone trying to comprehend an incomprehensible landscape to of you remember being out there on the in the Arctic there.

You remember the tussocks?

Oh, well, I was going to you know, I was going to bring those up because you mentioned the lack of trees. I was going to make T-shirts for everybody to remember that I love Tassajara because those fucking ankle breakers, man, you got to I mean, there you can describe them. They're like one third inflated. Volleyball's covered with fucking dog hair. I mean, yeah, it's just like the most dangerous things you can think of it.

It's just like many, many hundreds of square miles of these things.

Yeah. And you can't decide if you're going to try walking between the tussocks or tussocks and the tussocks are you know, they might be like 12 inches, 18 inches tall and they flop round.

I always liken it to if you filled a gym full of six inches of water and then took basketballs in somehow, like, tethered them to the floor so that all the basketballs are touching and then try to walk across, then you'd be like, you've got to go across there for a few miles and then you might figure out some way to walk on those basketballs. I don't know. Or you might find some way to get your feet wedged down between those basketballs.

But either way, like I invite you to do this little journey. But in our genes, one of the best parts of our dreams is about a botanist who's spends their day face down on a tussock look counting, doing a survey on that tussock of the vegetation, on that tussock and the thousands of blades of, you know, sedges and forbes' and. Right. And just trying to comprehend like what's going on on this tussock all these plant species.

Right. Incredibly dense. And then having this feeling of like doing that and then looking up in any direction you can look as far as the eye can see, it's just more and more and more of those tusks. Right. It's just like an incomprehensible landscape. And that book does a wonderful job of spelling that out. And it does a wonderful job of like challenging some things, of challenging some things and challenging some assumptions in that book. Won the National Book Award.

Yeah, I was looking it up. It's funny. That's that's that's no joke. Just as a just as a side note, I still want to hear about Boon, but the I think perhaps the most nervous that I was at any point in that trip. In the Brooks range was, well, if I'm being honest, is probably the grizzly bear acutely, but nothing happened. But when I had a lot of time to meditate on the dozens of ways that I could, like, fracture a leg or dislocated hip and really be fucked, because you know how hard it is to get to this place.

And it's not like you just call someone on a cell phone and, you know, an Uber helicopter shows up in five minutes. Like you could be stuck there for a very long time.

Oh, well, yeah, weather depending you'd be there. Yeah. So when we were packing out the meat from the Caribbean and so imagine you're in this, this gym that you visualized earlier, right.

With the six inches of water, with all the basketballs touching and tethered to the floor. And you have to walk across that and then take a backpack with I don't know, you tell me. I'm not I don't recall what percentage of the body weight of a Cariboo would end up being harvestable meat. But I don't know what, 60 to 100 pounds on each person's back, maybe something like that.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, you'd have a total of, you know, over a couple, you know, a couple hundred pounds potentially. So that might be a bit much. But yeah, you'd be with the bones in there. You're moving, you're moving a couple hundred pounds for sure.

Right. Yeah. So that impacts ranging like at fifty pounds. A backpack is substantial. It decreases your mobility at 90 and one hundred pounds. A backpack is you're like wow this is sort of. You need to step carefully like you like you could hurt yourself carrying this weight, like it's not good for you to carry this weight. And I remember you commenting that if there were a sport that just involved carrying heavy weights for long distances, that you could be the one sport that you're good at.

And in my case, it's like, when's the last time that I walked on half inflated volleyballs for a mile with one hundred pounds or eighty pounds on my back? And the answer is never. And I was like, wow, like, OK, my like glute medius and all these stabilizers in the hip have no training for this whatsoever. So thank God there are people like Dan Dhoti and other monsters behind the cameras are like, yeah, let me just grab that for you.

I'm like, OK, hurts my masculine pride a bit, but I'm less interested in fracturing both my legs, so I'll take the help. Thanks very much.

Trained tussock walkers. So Boone by Daniel Morgan.

Yeah, I've had a lifelong fascination with Boone and any little kid that grows up loving to hunt and trap and fish and stuff like you're aware of Boone, right?

You're aware of this pioneer, Boone. And at various times in history, he was remembered as, you know, an Indian fighter. Right. Even though he never he didn't really have a big appetite for that. And if you look at what he did, he actually went out of his way, typically went out of his way to avoid violence. But an Indian fighter, a pioneer and explorer, hunter, trapper. And, you know, at various times in my life, I've been in love with different aspects of what he did.

But and he often in old books, you know, he was kind of presented as this swashbuckling, you know, Davy Crockett figure. Right. Whistling through the woods, just being a hero. But there's a lot of complexity there around this person is sort of this idea that he was heavily involved in destroying what it was that he loved. He made his money in a variety of ways. And he was a horrible had made a lot of business mistakes, a lot of land mistakes and different investments and stuff.

But like for the most of his life, he was a commercial hunter and he was a trespasser. So he was hunting places, one that had Native Americans that claimed it and lived on it. And they fought amongst themselves over ownership of these hunting grounds. But there was that which meant, you know, next to nothing to him. And then there was the fact that he was trespassing on land, that he wasn't supposed to come on from his own government in the time of the colonies.

The whereis striking these deals where we would assure the tribes like, oh, no, no, this is about it.

We're not going to go anymore west. We promise our settlers won't go over that line and the rest, that's yours. We'll take this. And and Boone didn't care about that stuff at all either. You just went where you wanted to go. And we now do this. We described this as a sort of celebration of freedom. But it be if you took that attitude today, you would be called an interloper and a poacher and you'd wind up in jail.

But he was pursuing his trade. He hunted deer for leather, not not so much meat. They hunted deer for leather leather work where it was sold and tanned. And they made like the equivalent of making Carhart's today. He did that for a lot of the year and then he hunted bears for the oil and meat markets. He would go out, kill bears, smoked meat, render the fat, sell the smoked meat, bear bacon and sell the bear oil.

And that's how this guy made his living. The book does a great telling of all this stuff. But a thing that I love about Boone and I've come to respect about Boone is he exemplifies this part of my history as a hunter. When I say my history, I don't mean the things that happen in my life as a continuation of a sort of discipline, as a continuation of hunting in America. He's just really pinnacle moment where you have this person that loved wilderness, loved the outdoors, risked his neck day to day to go to the wildest places and celebrate them.

And he liked those places. He wanted to be there. Boone would sometimes go on a hunt that would last two years. Gone from his wife and family for two years hunting and lost all the hides he built up twice by having them confiscated by Native Americans who resented his trespassing. He liked it. He could have found a hundred other ways to make a living. That was what he was. He was a woodsman, but he was one of these guys in our own history who was instrumental in wiping wildlife off the face of America.

And it's this part of this conundrum we're in where we look. And I'm like that I, I celebrate that guy, right. His skill set. You can't begin to comprehend his skill set. All the shit they did, they did without flashlights. It's like you can't begin to comprehend the skill set and admire and like if I could go back in time, my number one pick would be to go through the Cumberland Gap with Daniel Boone, the first time he went through the Cumberland Gap and cross down into the hunting grounds of Kentucky to do that, walk with him.

But my God, the damage like the damage that was the damage, his influence, or was it just the manner in which that he hunted and what he represented being done on a wider scale? What was the damage?

Both influence by opening up those places. It would have happened anyways. Someone else would have done it by opening up settlement, opening up, clearing the road for the displacement of indigenous people, clearing the road for people who would destroy the habitat, but also just the mechanical physical removal of all that wildlife. He one time process. I think it's right around us. I think this is correct. I think one time he processed one hundred nine black bears in a year.

That's a lot of bears. Oh, listen, they wiped them. We talked about Extirpation earlier. They were wiping out stuff without even knowing they'd wiped it out. There used to be bison in Nashville, just a guy that saw a thousand bison at a mineral lick near Nashville. One time people came into New Orleans and saw a bison there on the beach. It seems as though people ran in or near Washington, DC. These guys shot stuff. They shot stuff so fast and so thoroughly that the ship was gone and they didn't know it was gone.

Yeah, it's incredible. We now sit around people. We sit around now, like the last bear of, you know, he killed the last bear in Indiana or whatever.

You know, it's like it's like he's a kind of celebrated I mean, they were just rapacious, but they had no compre.

I don't think they had any comprehension of what they were doing. There's a story I like to tell a lot about with bison. There's a story like tell a lot about the high hunters that can I pause you for once? Just please just establish your bona fides. So I'm looking at one of your many books, and this one is American Buffalo in search of a lost icon, one thousand two hundred and thirteen reviews, average five stars. So you you've done a lot of reading and research related to this.

Please continue.

Oh, yeah. I knew that world real well back when I was working on that book. But this is a great story about like what the damage the hunters do without knowing they've done it is, you know, so I'm going to just throw some wild round numbers out, like at the end of the Civil War, it's estimated there maybe about fifteen million buffalo bison on the Great Plains. Right. And we were hunting them for their tongues meat, but mostly we're hunt them for their hides.

There a there's a strong market for leather and hides and we had a lot of market hunters chasing after him. So the civil war ends. People say there's maybe about fifteen million and we really turn our attention west. We start cutting railroads. We open up avenues of trade. I mean, you could kill Buffalo and stick the hides on rail cars and send them to market. We had we are feeding an industrial revolution and so there's a lot of money to be made shooting hides.

And they kind of killed off the ones in the south from the Texas Plains, Kansas. Right. And then they started working on the northern herds. And some people say that by the time the Northern Pacific Railroad made it into had crossed the western Dakotas, made it into eastern Montana, there was maybe a couple million left in the last wild herd. And they shot that herd out in the winter of 81, 82, 1881, 1882 gone. Right.

A couple of years later, this guy, Hornady, William T. Hornaday, goes out there to collect specimens for the Smithsonian. Like the assumption is, they'll just be gone. They'll be exterminated, extinct. And he wants to collect some hides and bones and stuff so that man in the future will be able to behold what these things looked like before they were driven to extinction. And he comments when he gets out the Mile City comments, how the people that live around Mile City, the ranchers, the merchants were people that had been involved in that last big slaughter.

And then they were just hanging around waiting for the next herd to come through. Everybody knew there must be a bunch more up north or somewhere. And they waited and a year goes by and none came and they waited and two years goes by and none came. And eventually they kind of got like, huh? And set up various businesses and ranching operations and gradually occurred to them that like, oh, shit, we got them all. Accidentally, right?

It's like so when you look at these people, like getting back to this Boonen thing, which is the question, when you look at these people that were engaged in stuff like I don't think they they knew they knew that something was amiss and they knew that like things were changing because that's why Boonen had to constantly move Pennsylvania to North Carolina. He constantly marks West. By the time he died, it's rumored that he had made it all the way up into the Rockies, followed the Missouri River up on a hunting trip.

He always had to move west because they killed everything and it forced them to need to move. He was aware of this, but I don't know that they really were like villains. I don't know that they really were acting with malicious intent. But my God, are they destructive and also just cool. It's like it's a good book. It's the best piece of work about Boone.

Well, these are all amazing stories. Your story is pretty incredible. And I want to rewind it to your first sold piece of writing. So you mentioned this in passing. We didn't get really into it. But your plan A was to be a professional fur trapper up until something like twenty two. Right. I had to give up and I had to give up for a whole host of reasons. And you decide that Plan B was to become an outdoor writer.

So you're your first story sold in to outside, is that right.

Yeah, that was the first like piece I like sold for money. What was that piece about?

That you remember? Oh, I do, I'm still mad about the title of You Don't Get to pick your own title.

They called my article Getting Jiggy, which I'm still mad about it 20 years later.

I love dearly. I love dearly.

And I'm still friends with the person who oversaw that process.

I've never told her about my my anger, but it was about so for a while, for a semester when I was young, like I was young in Michigan and everyone, if you hunted and fished, you know, where you needed to go live was what we called the up. That was like the cool spot. And so some of my closest friends, my brothers, they like went up to the up to go to college up Upper Peninsula, Michigan.

Yeah. So and it was just like kind of like the Promised Land, you know, that's how we viewed it anyway.

And I went up there to live for a semester at Lake Superior State University. My brother Dan, he stayed up there and graduated from there. So I was in and out of there all the time. And there's this hydroelectric diversion canal in Lake Superior where they peel water off the St Marys River and run it through a channel and run it through a hydroelectric dam. Right. So just turn turbines to make electricity in this canal had a lot of aquatic insects that lived in it.

And so fish would gather at the out wash of this dam. So where they release the water after passing through the turbines, they release this water back into the St. Mary's River and it would carry with it a lot of food. And you'd go up and we would actually tire boats up to the dam. And you're just fishing for Whitefish, Lake Superior, Great Lakes Whitefish.

You're fishing for whitefish in the out wash of the dam. And we would sometimes my brothers had figured this out. You could leave the bar. It was competitive to get the right tunnel, the right turbines. That seemed to hold a lot of fish. For whatever reason. I never understood certain turbines held a lot of fish, no matter how early you got up, you know, some due to be some old timer beat it to the spot. So my brothers hit on this idea just to leave the bar at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, whatever, and go out with a sleeping bag.

OK, and there was a technical term, you mean the bar, no screw screwing up five, let's just sleep there.

So I would go out with my brother Danny and he'd run we'd run a boat up and we'd go in the tunnel like you're like in the bowels of the dam because it's warm in there from the turbine. And there's like little hooks in there. And you could drive your boat into the tunnel and tie off and just like sleep in a sleeping bag. And then at 5:00 in the morning, when some old, you know, some old timer fishing fanatic shows up.

Lo and behold, you know, you're laying there, hung over in a sleeping bag, ready to fish. And I wrote a piece about this. Oh, you know what? I was wrong earlier. That wasn't the one they called Get Jiggy. I was mistaken about that. That was called Dawn Patrol. Again, geegaws with another article I wrote about something very similar in Seattle. I'm sorry, Ausmus. I screwed that up. Dawn Patrol.

And I saw I was still in graduate school and sold, I remember, for four thousand bucks and I couldn't imagine that amount of money.

It was like an unfathomable amount of money. Were you partied for days after that? Were you always a enable writer or did you do something between. I guess 20 to or whenever you begin thinking about outdoor writers and option, what enabled you to get to that point? Because I am not a features writer, a magazine writer. So it's hard for me to I don't it's hard for me to speculate in that world. But I wouldn't imagine that most folks start off with a four thousand dollar payment for a magazine piece.

They're probably doing a bit small stuff here, there. I did all that small work after that.

You know, it took a long time. I got encouragement. You know, it's so hard to pick out, like what exact moment turned. But absolutely this goes out to all the schoolteachers out there. When I was in 10th grade, I had a English teacher named Bob HeatIn. Mr. Heaton took interest in me as a writer. You know, I later went to I did a, you know, master of fine arts. Right. I did a study with phenomenal writers.

I've had many mentors. I've had people pull strings for me. I've had great advantages. Right. Expert technical training, all this stuff. It's really hard to talk about how you got somewhere where you are. But I feel as though if Mr. Heaton, if this 10th grade English teacher hadn't spotted something there and made me aware of it, that I probably wouldn't have done what I did. I think that's pretty fair to say. He this is kind of interesting.

Go round this. I don't know if you're how much you pay attention the to, you know, like the education system today. But there's this thing where, like, we're more and more into, like grooming kids for the sphere, that we're more and more into grooming kids for standardized testing.

And like I guess at that time, Mr. Heaton really give it. He didn't give a shit about he didn't give a shit about whether you like you're like doing the assignments. I mean, if you were a slacker or weren't trying, he wanted you to do the assignments, you know, but this guy gave a lot of room. If he saw something you liked, he just gave you a lot of room to, like, focus in and explore.

It sounds like a lot for 10th grade English. And you're there for an hour, day and half the time. You're not paying attention. But in that time, in a couple of classes I took with a master in that time, he, like he took the time to develop things in kids and maybe took the time to develop things in kids who otherwise didn't have a lot of prospects. And that's what led me onto the path. And it spread like wild because, you know, go on and I want to be a writer and kind of backed into doing television and backed into doing a podcast and now helping to run an outdoor media company.

But yeah, man, maybe it boils down to that. And the trapping thing is I started I've set my first trap with my brothers in 1984, and there had been these insanely high four prices since 1978, 1982, and people were making a bunch of money trappin muskrats and stuff. I came in at the tail end of that and fur prices just went down, down, down. But in the beginning of that, I thought that I would that's what I would do for a living.

Now, you've you've expanded quite a lot, as you mentioned, beyond the writing before, we believe the world of writing. If you were teaching a class and for all I know, maybe you have. But if you were teaching a class, not an English class, but a writing class specifically, could be the tenth graders, could be to freshman in college, doesn't really matter, but I would say could be MFA. But by that point, people have already kind of decided and honed some of their skills.

So probably let's just call it 10th grade through to end of college. You could pick the age. What would you do? What would your approach look like? Are there any core books or practices or anything that you would you would use in your class?

Yeah, I'm not going to do the tenth grade one, but I'll do the college one, grad school one. I just don't have the expertise.

It's hard for me to understand tenth graders, even though, you know, Once upon a time was one I understand like I'm more aware of where I was just more cognizant by then if I was going like just writers in general, like writing in general, if I was going to give advice to someone, because I don't know if anyone else gives this advice this way. I would read everything you can get your hands on. I would pay a lot of attention to the things that you read that really speak to you, that make you feel jealous, that you wish you would erode it.

I say got jealous of the writing itself. You're like, oh my God, if I could do that right. Pay attention to the things that make you feel like like you want to die. It's so good and you're so jealous. Find that handful of writers that that make you feel that way, try to understand what they're doing and then don't try to mimic one of them, but create a way in which you're trying to mimic or you're trying to capture the thing that you envy about three or four different writers because they're too smart to be emulated.

You can't copy them. They're geniuses in trying to copy them. You will if you're lucky and you're good, you will come up with something new because you will never succeed in copying them. That would be my advice to writers. Dig it. That's what I did outside of the books that we already talked about. Is there a particular writer who inspires that? Jesus, if I could just do that, oh, for me, sense in you, yeah, Joan Didion, this is I'm dating myself because these are the books that were cool when I was in graduate school.

Joan Didion, Ian Frazier, John McPhee and David Foster Wallace. That's good. Those people those are the people that were like, if I could do that. I would be happy, like those are the magicians, black magic shit, man. Yeah, black magic. Yeah. There's like I don't know how they do what they do. Yeah, yeah, they're definitely those experiences I've been having those experiences in fiction quite a bit, even though I'm not a fiction writer, but it's funny when I talk to I don't know if I don't know if you've written fiction.

I have not ever and I've spoken to some very competent fiction writers have been like, oh, non-fiction is too hard. And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me?

So yeah, I don't like not good. Nonfiction is hard. Don't get me wrong, I like to do anything really well. Takes dedication and some degree of talent I suppose. But what I read really good fiction, I'm like, yeah, no I can't do that. Yeah it's that, that's art like that's art. It leans in the direction of art and I think non-fiction leans in the direction of craft. Yeah. Yeah I agree with that.

We were talking about season three, episode one. You have Season nine of Meteor that just launched and you have all these different projects. But if we're looking at Meat Eater, the television show, you've more than 100 episodes now. Are there any particular episodes that really stick out for you? Any particular trips that are favorites could be to film or experience. And maybe that's a lazy question, but I'll throw it out there anyway if they're any different.

What we do is it is an overly produced. And so there's a huge amount of a lot of it you just can't produce because you can't be like the animal shows up now, you know, they're not overly produced, which means that there's like an actual trip happening. There's an actual journey happening with a question mark around it.

Since it's not scripted, it's like so there can be the actual journey, you know, the trip, the physical trip. You go on and then there's this like this product that comes out of it, this piece of work, this craft that comes out of it, which is the show, you could have a trip that isn't like hugely impactful. But the thing you make from it, the piece of entertainment that you make from it is like memorable.

You love it. You know, you're like, man, like, I want to have that. If in the future Tombstone's have like something playing on tombstones instead of just inscriptions, I would like I'd like my tombstone to play that episode over and over again. Right. But it doesn't mean that the trip was great. I think of the things I've done, the trips I've been on that were like phenomenal trips. And in my view, great episodes were the handful of times, a couple of times when we've been able to go travel on rivers and hunt and fish with Amerindians in South America, particularly in Guyana, in Bolivia, hunting with people who are ancestral hunters and gatherers, who are on a landscape hunting and fishing on a landscape that from their view, is that they've been hunting and fishing in perpetuity, probably for thousands of years, father, grandfather on down the line and the level of intimacy they have with the land and water where they have been raised and where they hunt and fish two hundred, two hundred and fifty days a year to see.

That is a very eye opening. It's an eye opening experience because it really invites you to imagine what was lost here where we live in terms of this continuity, that there's still places there where indigenous peoples, even though there's technologies emerging and stuff happening all the time, and and people are going to have email addresses where there's like a continuity of like the same people, the same culture, doing the same practices in the same place for hundreds or thousands of years, a level of awareness and like fine tuned thinking comes out of that, which is like stunning to witness.

And then is the cool shit, like just how they cook and and hunting practices, fishing practices. That's been things that have really impacted my world view episodes that doing them impact my world view and then also the delivery of the product. The thing that people go watch when they're sitting on their living room couch at night is, in my mind, like good work, like we did good work and we did those shows. You mentioned the awareness. Are there any particular sensitivities or types of awareness and the examples that you could give where you just thought to yourself, oh, wow, that's something I haven't seen before.

That's something I haven't felt before. Do any snapshots come to mind? Yeah. Spending time with these people, tracking OK, like detecting signs on the ground, footprints, broken blades of grass bent things just like animals passing through and knowing that they passed through an awareness of bird sound in a place where it just feels like a cacophony of people.

Watch that movie about the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo movie. But, you know, that is so strange that you're bringing this up. The burden of dreams. Yeah, I just started watching it last night. Ah, that's super. Bizarre, and that's not I mean, this is not a movie that hit here, though it's not widely known.

So, yes, but I literally just started watching it less than 12 hours to get to a point where he is very sick of the jungle and he's explaining that birds don't sing, they scream in agony.

But it's this incredible cacophony sometimes of just noise and that they could sit there and dissect that. You know, it's this blog, it's this, it's this, it's this is that where does that bird is that bird that was impressive hunting being able to hunt with. Bows and arrows made entirely from native materials, except for a piece of wire cut from a fence that was then hammered into the shape of a projectile point, finding a plant called Plant, which you get your arrows shooting a black Curaçao to get his feathers for Fletching, taking a yuckier type plant and pulverizing it, brading it into a string, waxing that string with rubber from a rubber plant, lashing the fletching onto the shaft, making a glue from native materials with which to put the things together, cutting a tree, making a bow string, and then wading out into a river and seeing a fish that I can't see and shooting it with an arrow.

It's good stuff. This is good stuff, man. And you're also watching it, you're watching things change a thing, I come back to you again and again about that is that there's an individual I love quite a bit down there who he was explaining to me one time about the white pessaries that they haven't been seeing a lot of white lipped pessaries. And there's a fear in his village that the shaman from a neighboring village has grown jealous of his village.

So this neighboring shaman is mad at my friend's village because they're so prosperous. And he is like a pig. A pig like an animal.

Yeah, it's a yeah, it would add a passing. Javelina is a collared peccary. People in the southwest, like in Arizona, western Texas are familiar with have haplessness. Yeah, that's a collared peccary. There's a slightly bigger, more gregarious version called the white lipped peccary. And he said that he was concerned that this shaman in a neighboring village had grown jealous of his village and had locked up all of their pessaries in a mountain. And they had their own shaman trying to develop the necessary skill set to release their herd at their pessaries from that mountain.

And I'll point out that you can email this individual if you have a problem with what he's saying. So they are at a real crossroads. Oh, yeah. And it's been a long crossroads. But the Intersect to intersect them at this place at this moment was fascinating.

Yeah. What a time to capture the experience on film. Mm hmm.

And I'll I'll get the specific episode information from you afterwards and we can put those in the show notes as well.

Oh, great. Yeah. Well, last question for for this conversation, actually, maybe second to last for people who want to reconnect, attempt to reconnect with nature, whether by themselves or with their families. I've also spent quite a bit of time in South America and other jungle based communities. And you do see this, what they sort of take for granted. It's almost you mentioned David Foster Wallace. It's like the old fish that swims by the two young fish and says, how's the water boys?

And they kind of nod and they go by and they go, what's water?

So to them that I'm referring to the communities in places like you mentioned, the idea of being separated from nature is just inconceivable that they would they would describe that problem. Yeah, it's just the problem itself would be hard to explain. So for people who are listening to this and want to reconnect, feel engagement, kinship with nature. What would you suggest? It's interesting you ask, because we're working on a book right now about kids, kids and nature, kids and nature, but you could also say Kids in Nature.

And I've been thinking about this a fair bit because there's a risk of making we're talking about these extreme forms of nature, right. The jungles of South America, Arctic, Alaska, we're talking all these extremes. And you can create this problem where people think that engagement with nature needs to be a radical version. I think that as I've pondered this a lot lately, I think that there's some things that I find myself trying to do with my kids that aren't for kids only.

And I think you need to start trying to develop the mindset of what it is to be like native and not trying to take away. I don't mean native in terms of that. You'd be Native American, say, or Native Alaskan or Amerindian. I don't mean that. I mean native like that of trying to belong to a place we associate ourselves belonging to a fan base belonging to a social media community, belonging to a municipality belonging to a political persuasion.

But if you want to start thinking about yourself as belonging to nature, start a list of all of the first. Define what your yard is. It could be the grounds on an apartment building where you live, could be your yard. Whatever it is, start a list of every bird, get a good bird, but get the Sibley's. Get Sibley's Guide to Birds of North America. If you live in North America, how do you spell Civili Sibley?

I believe he's Sibilia. He's an illustrator and ornithologist Sibella UI. I believe it. All right, get that book and start a list of every bird that you see from your property, from your place where you live, from your balcony or whatever. It is, a list of everything you see and be and allow yourself to count things that you see way off. So if you're in an apartment in New York and you can see out over the Hudson and you catch a seagull, count that and allow yourself to count every bird that you hear and then do a couple other things acknowledge.

The solstices and the Equinox and those days acknowledged what is happening, that today, the day is as long as the night or today is the longest day, the sun will shine for the longest time tonight or this will be the shortest day the sun will shine, the shortest amount today and tomorrow, the sun will start marching back in another direction. Ask yourself when you turn on your faucet and water comes out, where did that water come from? Did it fall as snow?

Rain? Where was it collected? Is it from an aquifer? What feeds the aquifer? And then ask yourself, when it goes down the drain, what is its path to where it hits the ocean and make a mental map of if you were to take a piss in your yard, make a mental map, it would flow into this ditch and that ditch flows into that stream and that stream flows into that river and that river flows into that estuary and that estuary drains into that part of the ocean and make a mental map and look at that map.

These are some of the things you can do sitting in your at your desk. And I think that as you do these things and think about them, you'll start to realize that you're a participant in something and you'll start to realize that there are things that are extremely reliable. The solstice is like the solstice equinox. Those things are so unbelievably reliable and there's things that are so chaotic, like you're passing the coming and going of birds. As you do those things, you'll find yourself feeling a part of something that's way cooler outside of being a part of your community and family.

That's way cooler than being. Part of a fan base or part of a social media network, do that and then go down to South America and start start at home again, like you're never going to understand if you can't, like, just understand, like where you're sitting and how it fits.

Might get some awareness like you're in nature, manure in nature. Is just we're trained to not notice, it makes me think of the thousands of tusks that I walked over, never actually getting down on my stomach and looking at one plant in face.

And one of those things. Yeah, like the like very like Barry Lopez describes.

Those are great recommendations. I think I will actually look at the water investigation later this afternoon. It's fascinating. Well, I haven't gone so far as to make my kids memorize it, but I try to talk about it a lot. Well, Steve, we're going to hopefully do around two of this. That's the plan. I would love to. And is there anything else that you would like to mention? Any closing comments, any asks or requests of the audience?

Of course, people can find a lot of what you do at the Meat Eater Dotcom, and we'll include all the social at Meat Eater at Steven Rinella and Instagram. Steven Rinella, meat eater on Facebook. So anything else you'd like to say before we could be.

So yeah, if if if you allow it. And I could be so audacious as to just ask people to go to the media dotcom, you'll find not only stuff from me and about books I've done, but from, you know, all of my great colleagues and our podcast network and daily stream of written material and other things. So please go there and check it out.

And for everyone listening, as mentioned, I'll also include links in the show notes which you can find it teamed up blog for such a podcast to the website, meaning Stephen's website, the podcast, specific episodes of the TV show books and many other things that have been mentioned in this conversation. So people can find those as well in one place. And Steve, what a pleasure to catch up. It's been a little while. Yeah. Thanks for taking the time.

And it was fun to talk to you. As usual, you do a great job. Thanks, man. And we'll we'll figure out scheduling for a round two very soon and to everybody tuning in until next time. Thanks so much for listening.

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