Life Lessons From The Great Outdoors with Steve Rinella - Will Cain Podcast

man first of all thank you for yesterday that was a ton of fun the amount of time you spent first west in the boat and then charlie on the shore that was more than just your professional obligation hunting at this point requires a ton of patience for everybody but you're putting a different kind of patience into the equation production hanging out with non-hunters why i don't know man i think that one of the things that inspires me around kids is it's uh i started doing things when i was really young to the point where i don't remember doing them or don't remember beginning getting into it and so for me i harness a lot of excitement by seeing things through new people's eyes you know it's like more exciting for me to see someone catch a fish for the first time say or see my kids do something than it is for me to do it now so i like that i also just in general since the early age was kind of committed to myself to finding a way to work outside and be outside um and invested a lot in making that true so uh just what i like to do and i found a way to really weave it into every aspect of life and then i'm able to take all my experiences that i have outside and harness it into material so a lot of people i think feel like especially people who like to work a lot you get into this sort of tension between doing your work and and playing you know and there's a little bit of a trade-off there you feel guilty when you're out messing around because you should be working but because i find so much value from a professional angle in being outside uh because i'm able to translate that into the material i produce so i always feel like i'm being like productive on every level when i'm outside i remember when i was younger and thinking about what i wanted to do for a living and it's a cliche but people say it don't ever turn what you love into your work because then what you love becomes work that's stupid people told me that same thing um i had a lot of like every kid growing up has a lot of conflicting advice you hear a lot of conflicting advice uh i had a i have an older brother who became a game warden right he loved to hunt became a game warden never hunted again i mean that that's an exaggeration but basically if it was hunting season he was at work so he warns that man don't turn this into a business you know you can get in trouble turning this into a business at the same time the thing the the one thing like my dad never finished high school okay so so he didn't have his career aspirations for him weren't necessarily based off the same level that a lot of peoples are but he implored he's like you're gonna spend a third of your life working you have to find something you like to do um he was a little bit off on that cause i feel like i spent more than the third doing it but he was right like he didn't care are you getting that picking up that dog i don't care oh okay i don't care look that's a live animal in the house at least he's alive behind you is a shot of dead animals so we can accept that there's a lot of wildlife that just kind of distracts me uh yes so on the other hand my dad gave me this like like contradictory piece of advice you told me my brothers all the time you're gonna spend a third of your life working you have to find something you like to do and uh that was really sort of his my in his mind like success was finding an occupation you loved and i focused on that and that's kind of where i landed let's go back to that joy you were talking about sharing catching the first fish or catching a fish with someone like my sons as opposed to doing it for yourself you know we talked about this yesterday i have just a scratching the surface level of experience with guides with outdoorsmanship with an outfitter and so i was behind the scenes a little bit and i know sometimes you know at the end of the day around the cook tent there'd be conversations about you know there could be frustration with the way a hunter who was booking a trip handled a certain situation sure um you don't balance that at all do you get frustrated yesterday with charlie he's learning and i know we don't have to focus on one of my sons but he's learning and he's learning how to roll cast and you've done it a million times and you're sitting there watching a fish get off the hook so that joy you feel of experiencing something anew for someone else is that ever kind of balanced against frustration of people not doing it right yeah well first off i should clarify like i've never guided professionally in my life all not all the many of the guys i hang out with all come from the guiding world i've never done it for money okay so it's like i haven't gotten that level of cynicism that people who who spend 100 days 200 days on the water every year with people they don't know trying to teach them like those guys get burned out um i've never had that it comes in small doses for me if i see that someone's committed to it and someone's enthusiastic and is and is in it for you know what i might call the right reasons meaning they're in it for the experience no i don't i don't get as frustrated but like you know i have three young kids man like it's i would be lying to you i'd be lying in your face if i said i didn't get frustrated being out with them outside sometimes you know you're out everything's frozen there's you know and they stick their hands down through a hole in the ice yeah and you're like how why do you know or what happened to your gloves what happened to your hat why are you doing this what happened to the where did the fishing rod go yeah i mean this is all like questions you have and it it it's a struggle um i can't sit and say that i don't get uh you're not irritated not the right word uh frustrated with with with people who maybe don't have like my level of experience but it's a it's a goal for me to sort of get through that with a smile on my face and and i've learned i've gotten better at it i like to think well your level experience is going to be hard to match which brings me to this actually are you harder on your kids than you were on my kids way way i don't know what but i find that it's true that's the thing i find like i was laughing about this with some of the night it's like when i meet a parent you know and their parent a parent immediately kind of like starts talking bad about their kids i always assume that their kids are probably great you know when a parent's like oh my god my kids i'm like i bet they're all right just because just because you're because you have a critical perspective you know you and i were joking before we started this conversation my one takeaway from this weekend is to quit being such a sports dad because you have an entire philosophy run don't spend your weekends doing sports get outdoors for me it's important that's for me and like i put it this way like okay i bring a certain bag of tricks to fatherhood right like i know how to do certain things that are fun here's i put it this way there down on a podcast episode let's say and i'm not trying to equate myself to michael jordan on level but a friend of mine i said like name for me an athlete and someone said okay michael jordan i'm like all right michael jordan's staying at your house and he says i would love to take your children out to the the court and and shoot some moves and you'd say no no no i'd rather you take them uh bowling yeah right no one would do that so if it like i feel that i have an enthusiasm for like a certain discipline you know or disciplines hunting fishing whatever um that's what i want to do with my kids because i can i can show them what it's like to be passionate about something and they can have that set of experiences and naturally some things are going to get left off the list and i'm definitely afraid of uh commitment what does that mean weekend commitment um i like to take off for the weekend and take my kids out doing stuff or just be free to go and i don't like the the every saturday you gotta do whatever you're not trying to equate yourself to michael jordan but you are comparing yourself to michael jordan no i am i am only in order to make a point okay if you imagine like his expertise at his discipline and mine at mine his is higher you know what i think would be miserable would being michael jordan's son trying to play basketball sure i'm curious um no no no every sports dad i think who drives their children into sports and i look at myself in the mirror and they're sitting right over here behind us yeah on drives home from practice on drives home from games all the mistakes i've made i'm pushing too hard not that i'm some type of special athlete but it's a point of focus for our relationship as it should be because that's your passion it is my passion i hope i can expand it i would love to share this with them as well they loved fishing yesterday and they want to hunt and they have a ton of questions that they told me to ask you about hunting but i'm curious um do you do you worry about being hard on your kids about hunting or in fact driving them away from it because of your passion because it is a point of focus i think every sports dad has to wonder that am i pushing this too hard are you worried about that when it comes to hunting it's definitely on my mind i kind of can't believe some people think that i'd like drive my kids a little bit to do stuff it's nothing like what i was brought up with i can't believe that it didn't backfire with with me my two older brothers the way our dad was um but it somehow didn't backfire and i kind of don't care if it does when i first started having when i first started having kids people come to me and say like what if your kids don't like to hunt and fish as much as you do i would reply like not many people do right so i i don't really expect it if you told me that in 20 years my daughter would live in a large metropolitan area and have nothing to do with hunting and fishing a i wouldn't be surprised b i i wouldn't be that disappointed because i would know that whatever she went on to do she carried with her lessons that we learned growing up primarily things about how to be comfortable being uncomfortable okay and just certain lessons about the way life and death plays out in the woods in the wild um how to be around people who are competent how to handle stressful situations and not get panicky how to deal with risk right how to assess risk and deal with it in a practical realistic way how not to be petrified when you see a bear track right so she'll carry those lessons onto whatever she does i'll still love her just as much as i do right now i don't see it necessarily it doesn't have it's not a means to an end right it's not like we're doing this now because you'll always do this the rest of your life it's like we're doing this now because this is an important thing i view it as an important thing to learn the same way that someone might enroll their kids in sports be like okay teamwork right sacrifice discipline there are many paths to that end goal you know and and when you if you get your kids playing football i don't think you have a realistic expectation that they're going to play in the nfl but there's valuable stuff to take away whatever you're going to do maybe when you're 65 someone's not laying you low with tackles but you know what it's like to get tackled right it's the conversation we have all the time we're learning not so much about the perfect past we're learning about resilience how to deal with failure working within a team concept how to be a good winner we're trying to learn those things that apply to life not necessarily to soccer or to football i think as well i think it warrants like i'm anything but an expert parent but i've talked to enough parents that have been through what i've been through um who who've told me that if you're gonna do one thing it's you're demonstrating that someone's watching and they care right they care enough to take you along and care enough to make you go do stuff so um i think that just doing that is probably really impactful and this just happens to be how i go about doing that so this leads me into the question i thought i was going to start with you on today um and that is why why do you do all this now i've read a ton of interviews you've given i've read about you i watch meat eater and i know you're a pretty philosophical dude especially when it comes to hunting calling yourself an environmentalist with a gun in other words you're thinking about things and you're answering the question of why on a lot of levels but i'm curious why is it important for you to spend i believe as you said probably half your year not a third but a half of your life in the work environment so what is it about outdoorsmanship and hunting and fishing why do you do it that's kind of impossible impossible for me to answer because the thing was there before i bothered to ask why do you follow me like you can see someone going through life and then they they start putting all these realizations together and they and they start reading and they realize man i need to make some change about myself right and then later you'd say well why did you have this fundamental shift in your lifestyle maybe like it was this calculated decision based on you know research and understanding you know for me it was very different because it was something that that i would like being an outdoorsman was something that i've always defined myself as there was never a decision to do that right the decision was sort of made for me before i was born in a way it was just like that's how i was brought up i never stopped doing it i never questioned doing it i never paused and re-engaged so all my analysis about why i'm interested in what i'm interested in is all after the fact if i had never stopped to even think about it in any kind of philosophical sense i would probably still be engaged in the exact same activities i'm engaged in now instead i just look now and then like why does it appeal to me um i'm curious about why it appeals to me but i don't know that there's any answer i would come up with that would change what i feel to be like a very elemental part of myself what's more is in all the examinations i've done i've never come to this idea that it's something i should stop in fact i've learned that that the what i'm interested in is a sustainable practice if done right it's a thing that has always gone on no matter how you want to define the beginning of human history we've been engaged in these pursuits non-stop without pause so i'm part of this like long continuum of human activity it's interesting to me but it's there's nothing there's probably nothing anyone would tell me that would make me all together uh stop it's just it's too inside okay so i get what you're saying it's part of your identity and it's been part of your identity as long as you can remember but look i'm listening to you and you're very introspective and you read and you love history and you're talking about this continuum through human history the outdoorsmanship has played and i just i feel like you're flirting around the edges of something i don't know that it's identifiable but it's definitely deeper so what is it that keeps driving you out into the mountains like when you're out there and there's no cameras oh and there's no media is it spiritual for you is it a connection to history clearly i just heard that from you um what is it that it means to you beyond just i don't know and it's going to be hard for you maybe it won't be hard to put into words yeah i got yeah i got what you're saying and it's something i think about a fair bit one of the things uh i was writing something about fishing one time and i was talking about how every time you make a cast it's like you're sort of asking the water a question you know there's like a constant curiosity about what will happen i think that um the unpredictability of nature the unpredictability of wilderness is very like that draws you in this idea of there's there's innumerable factors like take fishing yesterday there's a numeral innumerable factors that you can't control some you can understand some you'll never understand so like water temperature barometric pressure what's happening in the mountains with water coming down from snow melt right all these factors the aquatic insects and what they're doing where the fish want to be right you can't assemble all the pieces to understand it you have to kind of go experience it and look at it that draws me in all the time another thing that draws me in is i'm very interested in the history of human engagement with nature um and so to be i can be my own case study and what that looks like right i'm interested in environmental health i'm interested in you know the kind of fecundity of the land right its ability to produce wildlife and produce animals and produce experiences that i like to enjoy so i just have to see it like knowing it's there isn't enough i want to like see it and breathe it and experience it whatever it is that you're connecting to in nature and in this practice i mean i think it's clear that more and more people are seeking something in that connection you know i'm not trying to give you the answer to the question that i ask you but if i ask myself why do i want to do this more and you touched on some of the lessons but the lessons lived on top of something else i think i don't think hunting and fishing is particularly or exclusively masculine but i think masculinity is something that a lot of men are searching for a reconnection to a practice that men have been a part of throughout human history i think being a part of nature um i don't know what your your faith might be but um what it i mean i think a lot of people get out there and have a connection to god you know i think something happened in the last couple years when more people are seeking whatever is out there yeah i think there's a there's a matter of being involved in something larger than oneself i also think if you look we saw across the board in outdoor engagement whether it's it's going camping boating hunting fishing whatever the pandemic for kind of like two reasons greatly increased outdoor engagement and i think this is global but we'll talk about it nationally one you for a minute stripped away people's ability to go and do activities they might normally engage in just out of sort of inertia right like people weren't going to restaurants they weren't going to music venues and so you know people want to get out and they go and do that so there's this kind of thing you take one thing away from someone and then they have to go to plan b and as it turned out overwhelmingly plan b was outdoor activities there's something else was at play though i think is that you kind of wrestled with this idea of like things that are out of one's control right we're getting all these like like global issues with with how disease moves around the world um transportation was impacted i think people had a strong desire to go and do things where they could really feel the result of their own efforts and just kind of like take control of something if you look right now i mean this is just talking besides the pandemic we have very little uh we live in a very specialized society right there's so many things we don't do for many of us now like you don't change the oil in your car you definitely don't process you know your own waste you turn the faucet on water comes out everything is very automated and i'm not condemning that that's a celebrated aspect of civilization right you can focus on the things you love to do but with outdoor pursuits you can kind of get this feeling of like what it's like to like really be in control of a situation if you're going to be out in the cold and be warm is because you're taking action to be warm you know if you're going to go out and try to secure your own meal with like a make it to make a meal from wild foods uh it's your chance to go and witness the sort of a to z process involved and i think that really appeals to people because it makes you feel like for once right for this moment you're in control of every aspect of something and get to see the entirety of something play out and then i think sp you know that really speaks to people it speaks to me that's one of my driving things with my kids is uh you know i'm going to mutilate the quote there's a quote from aldo leopold where he talks about um thinking that ah never mind scrapped the quote i can't i don't care i'm mutilated too bad by the way start to finish this is my podcast as well as this interview so that this is uh this is they get to see the real you the one that uses the quote in real time okay so let me tell you let me let me tell you the quote then okay it's something to the effect of uh uh you know the sin of thinking that heat comes from the stove and food comes from the store yeah or whatever it is meaning they've never chopped wood yep right you haven't chopped wood and you haven't seen food produced and i think that um as much as i admire that guy he's got a real san connie almanac right let me tell you another great quote that i can remember um is the same guy it is a poor life that achieves freedom from fear um and that's another thing i like about the outdoors right another thing i like about hunting and fishing is that you're kind of living in this this arena of consequence you know remember yesterday when we go to get on the boats and we're talking about okay if you fall in here's the deal uh it's like a realistic thing it's a cold river fast moving water there's rapids in there right you fall in that's trouble man and you're gonna live right on the edge of that trouble and you're gonna hold in your head like what you're gonna do when that trouble happens and if you do this long enough it will happen right um so i think that like being in proximity or like i said that an arena of consequence right you're in a world where you do this and you'll suffer from that right i like that space lifetime of hunting and fishing what's the closest you got to paying that consequence oh man you know the most dramatic ones for sure because they're just they're just dramatic it'd be like grizzly bear encounters you know i've had a few of those um one very close call what's that mean how close like it's open a gaped mouth here really oh yeah yeah within a foot or two probably 18 inches i need to know the details of how an open mouth bear comes within 18 inches and we're sitting here talking eating lunch okay eating lunch meet like imagine me and you and a few other guys and we had a elk hanging in a tree um we were coming back to retrieve we hauled half the meat away and we come back to retrieve the other half of meat and we decided for some stupid reason to have lunch under the tree with all the meat hanging in it and when this this brown bear this is not a island in alaska when this brown bear came in it came in and for some reason passed me by and went for my buddy and he smoked it across the nose with a set of trekking poles i mean like he's there i'm here it's here and he flap and when he hit it it spun and my other buddy who was standing right here like it somehow stepped on my ankle and i had my ankles messed up for a while it spun my other buddy fell on it and rode its back down a hill so this bear goes down over your shoulder and got bit no one got spare comes in over your shoulder yeah your buddy sees it charging i assume because he's looking over you're my friend johannes yeah he goes right here yeah smoked it right across the bridge and he knows what he said he had a pistol and pepper spray but when when like the rubber met the road the closest thing trekking poles and it spins the bear spawn it which is kind of odd i think the truth you said it was the most he he described it as the most sort of like unexpected outcome of something would be that it would run from that yeah but i think also when it came in it didn't know that there was many of us as there was and i think it surprised it and one of your buddies jumped on its back fell on its back fell on its back and wrote it down dude i'm telling you it's a close call man it messed me up for a long it messed me up for a little bit because um i there's all this weird psychological stuff that happens you know like moments of high stress they actually train people you know there's two kinds of in analyzing this event how everybody behaves and what they did there's people that go into us and there's people that go into a traumatic situation they focus on a thing okay let's see you come in as a horrible vehicle crash right you come in there's a injured person on the ground that's all you see and then later you recount it you're like man this was so i didn't see anything but this right or there's people who don't focus on anything and they're like describe it as all the blur right i'm the kind of person who uh focused on one thing a set of teeth and then entered into what i call a mind movie where i was living in the future and someone had died well someone died right now and i was living in a future where i was suffering that remorse so you're saying when you revisit this moment that's sort of the prism through which you can always see even though it was like that long that's what i was doing i wasn't hitting with the tracking pole i was like in i was paralyzed for some moment to put it this way you're honest on me i didn't know that you hit it with a tracking pole really no how important are you by the way with giannis's reaction to that moment what's that how impressed are you with the honest reaction to that he's the guy who should have been i should have grabbed it by the scruff of its neck hey when i saw this by the way you said multiple so to be honest like god oh that was yeah but tell me that's the main one yeah that's that's one of the main ones but i mean i i guess yeah like they just occupy a lot of mind space yeah grizzly bears dude i mean in this state you know they kill a couple people every year so yesterday like typically when that happens and you hear about it it's typically people i would call like not friends of mine but my peer group yep um there's people doing the activities i like to do so that's the thing that stays with me because it's so dramatic far more people die of hypothermia um and i've had hypothermia but it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't like or i've been in a hypothermic state but that doesn't stick to you because it doesn't have it doesn't have that psychological force yeah that i think our stuff does uh hit up in alaska hitting a you know boating and hitting a submerged log right i look at that um i was with my wife before we were married um hit a submerged log took on a bunch of water if we'd have gone in that water you mean you've been dead in 10 minutes absolutely you'd absolutely been dead there's no way you would have lived so uh that was close but it doesn't have that it doesn't have that cool factor like like bears do you know bears just live with you man i'm kind of like i'm i don't want to say i'm obsessed with them but uh we have my buddies and i have a term we call it called paranoia right where you're just like deathly afraid of bears i try to i don't have that but i think about them all the time well it i can't speak for you but it's the one thing out there i guess the mountain lion as well but it's the one thing out there that is hunting you as much as you're hunting everything else and mountain lions man it's like non-issued right they they just don't do anything to anybody ever well for instance i remember recently washington had its first mountain lion fatality medium outline that killed a person in 90 years oregon had its first in the state's history it's just it's not an issue black bears aren't an issue but grizzly bears are like they're like you know there's something man so you said a lot of things here that that made me think first of all we have similarities maybe i'm flattering myself but we have some similarities um i started trying to write in 2000 you started writing in 2000. i was in missoula by the way okay submitting articles to the missoulian oh really at that time but what you said that that i feel like i just be friends with the guy you needed to know i didn't know him um here's the sports guy there the thing is that's exactly the guy i probably submitted the article to i can remember it um fear we shouldn't run from the concept of fear but i struggle with this because i think the united states i think the world has been driven by the emotion of fear irrationally over the last two years oh yeah man but i like what you said pandemic really brought that out oh it to me it brought out the fact that's the human that's the primary human motivator not ambition it is fear if you ask us if you break us down to our most elemental driving force it is fear um and you know but you shouldn't run from that so i told you yesterday i got my boys into skateboarding when they were younger yeah and part of that's because i want them to learn how to surf so we'd have a hobby we could do when they got older but the other part of that for me was here you got to drop in on this eight feet of concrete and it's terrifying and by the way for the record i've never done it in my life yeah but i'd like you to do it but you have to do it you have to do it because you need to face that fear and learn to overcome it because if you give in to the fear you lean back you crash you fall if you overcome the fear there's a lot of joy and accomplishment on the other side of that fear so i really like what you said i agree with that idea of you can't run from fear it's going to be here and you have to learn to live with it yeah i i that that's one of the primary things that that i've tried to you know motivate myself is recognize speaking of the outdoors particularly um recognizing those things that make me nervous and finding a way to be through it i remember growing up we would hunt deer out of tree stands okay and this is in the michigan heavy forest uh my old man would take me out when i was 12 okay and even a little bit 11 12. take me out and set me in a tree stand okay down in some ravine right and then he'd be like i'm gonna come get you after dark i'm telling you man that period of time between when dark hit and when my dad showed up felt like a week of night time it was it was terrifying it was terrifying and like you're watching it get dark and everything turns into a black bear right every noise is whatever you couldn't even tell what you were afraid of right uh i gradually over i overcame that now i could be quite confident i don't want to go back out no no but i'll tell you what going bow hunting okay um i would now and then if i woke up in the morning i would kind of be hoping that the weather was too bad that he wouldn't go because if there's no way that if they like if my family went there's no way i cuz i would feel too guilty i'd feel like a failure so i would sometimes be like god i hope they don't go because the last thing i'm gonna do is not go like i have to go i don't wanna go that was it was like that kind of a environment but uh being petrified of that stuff man i'm not now you know uh i get out in in southeast alaska we spend a lot of time out doing stuff in small boats right big water small boats um that's scary the last thing i'm gonna do is not go but it's a thing like why is it scary what things could happen how do you be prepared for those things to happen and then you can do all that gaming right you do all that scenario planning and having your equipment dialed having your expertise down but they're still when you shove off there's still like this little thing right um this little thing in the back your head that like you're kind of in a serious situation so i want to go back to i want to start talking about meat eater but i want to go back to another thing you said that resonate with me and i'll i'll match you butchering leopold's quote is that what it was okay yeah yeah by butchering one you're gonna miss quotes yeah absolutely i don't know if you've ever seen it because i don't even know if it's a quote if it's a poem or what it is but the the mystery of the pencil that no single person in modern society could create a pencil from scratch there's no one out there that could you know mine the aluminum chisel the wood find the lead do whatever it takes to create the eraser from rubber no human being could do everything from start to finish from it's a society of specialization i know not me but i know a couple of contenders but you're probably good all of it the racer the if you gave a couple decades they'd come close um but that's that's a mark of a society who has specialized and advanced and it's a good thing to your point yeah but over the past two years i think people have been attracted to what you said the idea of self-sufficiency and the numbers have have borne it out yeah i think from my home state of texas hunting licenses are up something like seven percent your home state of michigan i think i read up 67 yeah they had yeah a huge increase in first people doing the hunter safety courses right yeah for sure so so when did you realize you were going to be a tv star i there's a i'm going to give you since we're matching quote for quote uh there's a humorist named jerry clower from mississippi he died in the late 90s but he had always said that he backed into show business i kind of backed into show business to be honest uh i was very dedicated to being a writer i still regard myself as a writer if if when someone like chisels something on my i don't want a tombstone but if i did and someone chiseled something on it i would much rather say writer than television host right i was just focused on that but that like there's a trajectory that folks go through um i started doing magazine work magazine work led to doing books i started doing books books led to doing television in a weird way television led to doing a podcast right uh one might look and think like that there was a sort of drift or a mission creep you know that i went from like actually writing everything i did to make money to doing all those other things and to large measure oftentimes talking um but the set of ideas i've dealt with has been constant you know i've dealt with the natural world and humans and the natural world in that relationship i i've dealt with that the whole time looking back on it now it's not that strange but it did feel very weird to me at first to get into to get into tv because i had a kind of uh you know i went to mfa school i had a kind of snobbish view of um the hierarchy of media and i held being a writer very high um but you don't if you have a thing you want to share with people uh a set of ideas you want to grapple with and share with people i think you need to be pretty elastic in in how you traffic in those ideas what was that initial transition how did you end up on tv the first time oh like really like in a in a total pragmatic way you know if you if i looked at my career and there there are moments there are if you said where were the big transition moments with the big trampoline moments i could probably point those out i could tell you exactly what was it so i started once i started writing and doing magazine work i would go i would be out finding out about stuff doing stuff having adventures right and then in television producers they don't have that luxury of being out and so i would get i would get the best word for is i would get like summoned to tv meetings where people kind of want to feel you out about what's going on out in america you know yeah and and i i guess at some point someone thought uh instead of just being a source of ideas here's a person that would potentially be the the one who would deliver those ideas i went through development agreements i did like this development agreement at history channel right that didn't pan out they went up doing a eight series or a eight part show for travel channel just because like it was pitching ideas off my writing um but i was dragged into it like i became a writer by like a very a force of will okay i like i i i wrestled that out of my life um tv wasn't quite like that like i think that in some measure other people wrestled it out of me right they saw that i could do it and i found it in me to do it but it wasn't a thing that i fought for what was a big trampoline moment i mean i'll be real i didn't see the show when it was on travel channel or i think you had one on sportsman channel netflix was a big yeah for for us when we started seeing you and watching your show it was when it appeared on netflix it was the trampoline moment for me was when i fell into the orbit of 0.0 production in new york so most famously they made all the bourdain properties over the years and um once i began to collaborate with them and try to find something to do like they liked my writing and they understand writers and understood writers uh once they took an interest in what i was doing it was probably at that point it was going to happen when was that in 99 maybe in 99 oh no no no no that's not true sorry i was off by a decade that was probably around 2010. that's what i was thinking yeah yeah i finished school i finished school and i finished graduate school in 2000 and i started to film like to do sort of speculative pitch type stuff in 2009 and the media started in 10. we started we started meteor decades ago yeah yeah decade ago yeah and that was the thing that we owned outright so i i built that with 0.0 production before we turned it into its own company i built that as a joint venture between me and 0.0 production we owned it so as you probably know normally with like if a production company makes a show for a cable network when i'm talking to people who aren't in the biz i always kind of explain it like a contractor builds a house for someone once they hand them the keys like the contractor doesn't walk back in the house right you're handing this property over to the commissioning force what we do with meat eaters we build something that we owned everything we only license we we never done anything besides licensed mediator to people we've always owned it every production still everything just come out of it we own um which is a very very different way of going about it and in 0.0 kind of like if they if they had some sort of visionary moment around the stuff we were doing it was to make a thing that we owned so to this day that's our that our company owns everything we've ever filmed from a piece of content what do you think it is that sets meteor apart from the dozens if not hundreds of other not just hunting book cooking shows out there what is it that makes meat eater popular man i don't know i can't really answer that uh one of the things that that helped it there was three there's there's three guys that when we when we started coming up with the idea there was three guys i was working with jared jared andrew canis nick brigdon and dude named mo fallon these were all guys at the camp that had come up from working on bourdain's show these guys didn't that didn't definitely didn't hunt barely fished okay but they understood story and they understood personality and they understood like what it's like to have an opinion okay they had no interest in hunting oh i shouldn't say that no background in it but they were like this thing that you do is cool and has all these elements of like what's a great story so they came at it from a storytelling media perspective and didn't come at it with like preconceived notions about like what it should look like typically in the sphere i'm in okay if we get into like like outdoor television it's often everyone involved in the production is all coming from the same world that i came from people that are like the camera guys the editors they're all people that grew up hunting and fishing typically right and they all have consumed that media for their lives and so they're making a they're making a i don't want to say a facsimile but they're making something strongly based in a pre-existing thing there's like they're aware of this idea that there's like outdoor television and here's what it looks like here's how it feels let's go make our version um i i didn't take in that kind of material growing up um didn't really look at it was largely unaware of it and i was working with people who had no preconceived idea of what it was supposed to be so we were able to start from a very clean place and we accidentally made something different in fact when we first started doing meat eater i would often have conversations with people and and they people would feel that we were making a commentary on hunting television that that our thing was deliberately different in a way that was meant to comment on this genre that was the last thing on my mind i would never i like it was no way any kind of comment on anything other than i was capturing a thing that i liked how i liked it and i was working with people who were really good at capturing stuff was the concept of meat eater actually reflective of how your passion for hunting applied to your life in other words it was as much about the cooking and eating aspect of it as it was to the the gaming aspect yeah because that was a very important thing to me and we did this travel channel showing the shows i mean that process was miserable right there was too many people trying to make it too many things for too many people it was a complete and total mess i i didn't know enough to know how stupid it was right it was bad right just way too many voices in the room when we came out of that i came out of that being friends with the people i just talked about and we're like man if we when we get the chance we're gonna do the most stripped down bare bones version of this that's like an actual true like capture like an actual living true relationship with hunting and just do that and let that speak for itself and see how that works and that's we did we did something clean i mean we're doing we were doing whole episodes that might be in six square miles with one person on camera right everything's like very just stripped down i have a friend who hunts a lot um and he actually wanted me to ask you this how much does the production aspect disrupt the hunt depends how good the guys are like we have we we have a lot of the same people we've worked with for a very long time the camera guys and they become good at being in the outdoors but it can be it can be pretty if you just took people who are totally green to it um it'd be pretty miserable because there's a thing there's like you need to crew okay like camera guys need to understand that they're gonna have to sacrifice some parts of what they think they should be doing like how they're getting the shot because i always tell them like if we did it your way there's gonna be nothing to film we're gonna have to find a way to compromise here where you're gonna film and i'm gonna do what i need to do and if you give me room to do what i need to do you'll have cool stuff to film if you don't give me room to what i need to do ain't nothing going to happen so like you got to get comfortable the fact that everything is not perfect and it's a fun tension we laugh about it and fight about it all the time uh and have like it's kind of one of the driving tensions between me and them is um i know what needs to happen they know what needs to happen these are different things like they want coverage i want action and and we find a way to make those two things work as much as there's more order you know you hunt big game animals right there's like more human odor and human orders your enemy there's more movement movements your enemy but there's also in a lot of ways there's more eyeballs and camera guys we work with that we've worked with for years develop a pretty good game eye man and a lot of times they'll be like there's just a few benefits there there are some benefits like i said we have a lot of fun with it and we laugh about it but yeah it's way way easier to do stuff without them around but i really enjoy like i've developed very very close friendships um with the the folks i work with and i love being around them what's your favorite hunt and maybe if i asked you you were only allowed to hunt one game for the rest of your life what are you going to choose uh we have in this state we have a youth deer season where it's a two-day season um kids only i would just haunt youth if i had to do one thing the rest of my life i would hunt youth deer season with my kids it's the most fun in the world there's no one around uh yes it's a riot and then there's like some states have youth cherokee seasons i just think it's just a riot because the thing is i couldn't hunt if i wanted to it'd be illegal so i'm just able to really focus you know on them and that's a good time to me i'll never miss i'll never miss the youth year season the way my kids are laid out they can do it for five years i got many years of youth deer season ahead of me but you and i were hanging out yesterday you were talking about free diving spear fishing off of oil rigs in louisiana dodging infrastructure of the oil rigs going to hawaii clear water spear fishing i know you've gone to i think it's bolivia and hunt monkeys yep i mean well yeah i was with amber indians who were hunting monkeys and then i had to not had to ate the monkeys with them and what's monkey taste like just like you know what tastes like uh the way they cook it tastes like smoked cables i mean like if you put liquid smoke on a piece of steel cable yeah that's how they that's how they that they really okay so what's it really what's the worst thing you as you've done this and prepared what you've you've killed what's the worst thing you've eaten um i wrote a book about buffalo uh called american buffalo and um i would read about practices of the hide hunters like mountain men and hide hunters and you know other uh people who lived off the land and i would read about how they would take sometimes they would flavor they just get burned out any buffalo meat they'd flavor it with weird stuff they put gun powder on it oh and eat it and one time i read about how they would put a bile well that's the comanches did i just learned that last couple weeks they'd take the vial and squeeze it onto the meat yeah it was a delicacy i read about bile on liver yeah and um that was probably the worst thing that i've ever put in my mouth really oh yeah it'd be like if you you know if you took a nine volt battery and held it i just read that the comanches would call the kids over hey we got the buy already dude there's a lot of things there's been some real surprises and that's one of the things i like about history so much is you read about these food items uh there's this guy bill jalmer uh stefansson who spent a lot of time with the with eskimo and intuit hunters in the you know northern canada northern alaska and he would say that when they would kill a caribou first thing they would do is pop out the eyeball and they'd like the fat they like to eat the fat from behind the eyeball okay so we do this all the time now where you get a gob with that fat and eat it and i'm telling you man you put in your mouth and you think you had pizza dough in your mouth so and it's like it's absolutely like putting a piece of raw pizza dough in your mouth so that's kind of an interesting discovery the mountain men the beaver trappers they rise cooking beaver tails and i didn't even when i used to read that when i was a kid i didn't know what it meant i thought there i thought it was like uh someone messed up and wrote the wrong thing down and then meant that they ate like the back hams the back legs but they meant the tail and when you cook that tail and get the scales off it's just it's like the fat and gristle from a beef steak hiding inside the tail so you imagine that you're eating this like this diet of extraordinarily lean meat all the time you're just like living on game meat um you get deprived of fat and so imagine here's this like beaver tail and it's like this little pocket of fat and oil and how good that tastes you know if you imagine that you go hungry for a long time for days and you're just not getting what you want you know how like how a pepperoni pizza emerges in your mind that's sort of like at least does for me like you just want something like you know you're hungry and you're not thinking i'm gonna get the biggest salad man's ever seen right you're like i'm gonna get the greasiest pizza you know and it has it satisfies that that urge oh that explains when i read that stuff about indian squeezing bile onto liver on to me my assumption was well think about our palate today we've been exposed to so many different flavors that we're always searching for something new that tastes good theirs was so limited so that was the that was the delicacy that was exotic it'd be like how you're saying also their body was speaking to them i need i need high protein i need fat i need something and then you reverse engineer that into tasting good yeah i think that i think that that that's that both the things you're saying i've thought about i think both things are true one there's a monotony and you're breaking the monotony of taste right and you can see that where if you look at other groups people who are introduced to new things um you know you like take people who've never had sugar and introduce them to sugar they taste it and they love the way it tastes and something their body is like it's like a high energy thing something their bodies like eat more of that you know um but with the food thing too with all the weird things people used to eat and i like to experiment with it is you can't you can't just eat lean meat and stay alive right you have mineral deficiencies vitamin deficiencies you have to eat this wide array of things so when we look at it now it just seems like bizarre stuff but you're just giving your body what it needs um i don't need i found that i don't need and don't relish uh bile but i tried it and it was probably the definitely the worst taste i've ever had other things have been surprising for me there's like there's things that you think will be bad and they are in fact bad okay bile i'm like that can't taste good in fact brains i'm sure you've had brains yeah don't like it okay don't like it there's things that you oysters rocky mountain oysters love them we love them really prepared properly yeah we used to go this thing every year called the testicle fast i lived right next to the tennessee but i'll tell you where i live i mean i literally lived a nine iron from the testicles i didn't mind those so every september we'd have those um and prepared a lot of them uh we make them out of you know we take game animals and do them uh like we make a dish called hot buttered bucknuts and we'll cook oysters that way uh some things though you expect them to taste good and they do taste good and that's fun but right um predictable the things that i like are the things that you think would be horrible but you taste them it's actually not that bad like what you know like bone marrow i think a lot of people think of marrow as being something they probably wouldn't like you know remember the first time years ago we started sawing open bones on like elk bones and cooking the marrow out of them which is another thing i learned from reading about you know ice age hunters paleo indians they seem to have there's a lot of evidence that archaeological sites they were always cracking bones open mm-hmm um like why the hell are they cracking the bones open well probably to extract marrow what's that all about right you go eat it it's like shockingly good it's a thing that that i will prepare now and then if i'm just trying to make something that would interest people and taste good well yeah i like that you're tying history into this i mean i grew up hunting a fair amount but what we always did is fry it whatever it was oh and i know i read that you guys did the same growing up and so everything everything tastes good battered and fried yeah almost everything so you're being creative you're being culinary but you're also being historical about it i want to go back to business for a second we're talking about trampoline moments um there's several different moments if i look from the outside i would have to think the move to netflix exposure to yet a bigger audience i would have to think the pandemic shoved a bunch of new viewers your way as well and clearly what's going on at this moment hanging out with you yesterday is you're in a massively explosive moment for meat eater i mean you're i heard you're hiring multiple people every month um i know you took hedge fund or venture fund financing a few years ago i mean this is a whole different thing steve right now i mean doing what you're doing bootstrapping it it seems to me looking from the outside you're moving you're making the transition from a bootstrap entrepreneurial perspective to something else you're moving into the phase of we're an operation that license our brands create multiple products and have a ton of people under the ceiling yeah uh it's been great it's been it's happened very fast and it's uh multiple ways of looking at it one just from a productivity standpoint if i look at like projects that i myself am very involved in um when i was doing but it takes two years to do a book right i did the first three books i did i did totally on my own and i'd spend a couple years working on those books so you you put out something and there's a long point in time when you're just working very quietly behind the scenes right from a media perspective now that i work with a team of people um we have we're currently working on three books we have i don't know four or five more projects under contract so we're able to like because i have a team of people that work with very closely and very effectively we're able to greatly increase the output weekly podcasts we're putting out video material every day right so it's fun to see this where ideas go from conception to reality really quickly and that's rewarding another thing is if you if you imagine um an outdoor media business uh which we didn't invent the idea of having an outdoor media business they would often have like they would find funding or you know generate revenue by basically being a a an ad source okay people buy advertisement against your your website or your magazine or whatever uh when we when i started working with tcg the investment group that enabled us to create meat eater into a company right and turn it into a full-fledged company we were able to we had funding and also expertise to go build our own revenue streams right so we have done a number of acquisitions in the outdoor space um one of our first sponsors this is like a traditional sponsor of our show was was an apparel company called first light they became a sponsor us when they were making merino base layers right we grew up together they now make a full-fledged like everything full line of like stellar hunting apparel okay but we grew up together and did something pretty unusual where here's this media entity that in the end acquired this apparel company even though we grew up together like we acquired the apparel company and we're all rolled into the same thing now um there's a phelps phelps game calls a game call company i became friends with the founder we did a bunch of work together we were able to to bring phelps game calls into meteor same with fhf gear i knew the founder we hung out used their products were able to mature that relationship and bring it in where we were able to come in together under the same thing so that that like that approach is unprecedented and you've got a lot of help as you point out now and you're giving me and it's awesome to watch you grow i mean i know you're licensing the mediator brand as well to i think for example benchmade knives or other people exist out there but i got to think you know here you were you were a writer first of all and then pretty much you're part of a team always but a solo driven entrepreneur and now you're you're something different now you're first of all managing people is tough and it changes your day-to-day has that been hard it's extremely hard man uh and i i don't do much of it there was a period of time where me and one of my colleagues tracy crane we had to sort of co-ceo our company for a while and i don't like that that's not where my that's not my strengths man uh anything around the pandemic drove me crazy from a management perspective i don't i like to make stuff yeah i like to like i like to work with people that i can collaborate with and i like to make stuff there's two they say there's two different kinds of entrepreneurs those that start the company and those that keep the trains running on time yeah and you're moving into the trains running on time phase of this to some extent and here's the other thing that i look at and i think has got to be a big transition for you taking outside financing now you have someone else that you have to answer to um well not whether they're a boss or not yeah i i just i i meant go ahead and ask the question well i mean you were only answerable to yourself and taking on financing for any business is a big change in the potential relationship of how that business runs yeah but my i could see how that would go with people but my situation was so different so we own like i owned me eater which was only a t it was just the tv shows nothing more than a tv show okay i own mediator as a joint venture with a production company we didn't have any like we had no designated dedicated leadership and no like like built-in financial um which i think how to put it like how we kind of ran it there was no like sort of mature finance organization about what we were doing as a business okay we were rolled into a bunch of other broader projects and everyone was working on a bunch of things when we took outside financing we took in order to like make a company so for me being a person going it alone i was a person cranking out a book every couple years right i had big aspirations about what i wanted to do no way to go and do it so when i found financial partners and i worked very closely with them now all the time it wasn't that i had to like surrender something there was nothing for that there's nothing i surrendered like it was all upside to me because it enabled me to for it enabled me to find a way to continue doing what i wanted to do in a way where i had like a much higher level of influence i could definitely see people in a different situation but there's something like very peculiar about where i was at in that moment and had to do this in order to do it it wasn't like i would do a smaller version on my own um i could do a smaller version or a bigger version it was that that had to be the version that had to happen i see because of who you were before yeah there wasn't like i wasn't walking away i wasn't walking away from something right i was just walking toward what i wanted to do and that's how i was gonna do it here's a question from west does it bother you when people call you mr meat eater yeah meat eater it does i mean like i mean like you know if a a scale of one to ten bother i guess it'd be down around the one but yeah yeah no steve's good that works for me i will say i told people i'm going to interview the meat eater you know i i understand it but uh yeah steve works well charlie wanted to know um how do people who grew up in a city get into this do what you do not what you do but get into outdoorsmanship if you live in new york city you live in san francisco which by the way i've read you have big audiences yeah in the city yeah we do yeah how do they get into this you just can't take no for an answer you know i mean you just got to have like you just gotta decide you're gonna do something to go do it you know and and don't don't be so picky about what version you're gonna get right off the bat when you know my two older kids were born and they were born in new york when we had those kids we were living in brooklyn man we do all kinds of stuff you know we'd go out and just explore an age we'd go to parks we'd go fishing we'd probably fish in places you're not supposed to fish um we would just be out doing stuff if we had a chance again leaving town for the weekend we'd go up and go canoe down the delaware and fish and just whatever like you can't take no for an answer we'd go to the parks and find wild edibles now and then that we could experiment and pick up acorns and i'd show them how to boil acorns to get the bitterness out of it uh just going we would make gardens um yeah you just i find like if i had a gripe with people would be that that's kind of a weird statement one of my gripes of people if i'd agree with people it'll be that there's i people a lot of times have a sense of what they want to do what they ought to be doing and they just let everything get in their way they get in the way of themselves you know they they just don't have you have like when you want to do something you have to decide i'm doing this and i do not care what happens like we're going like we're going right you have to have that if you don't have it i don't know what's going to happen to you no yeah you told me if you told me about that though yeah yeah i think you're going to be talking to him in a couple months but yeah and and people would come up to and be like what are you doing yeah i don't think you're like whatever it is you're doing i don't think you're supposed to but you can you can do it anywhere to your point um you know there is an intimidation factor that people would put in their own way as well and again i think uh to me when you're being out i know you told me your wife likes skiing and you don't count that as outdoorsmanship no it's just hunting and fishing no it feels like it feels like a man-made environment see i think anything uh surfing for me personally whatever it is we started this conversation with spirituality i find the same thing when i'm sitting on the ocean that i do when i'm in the woods but there's an intimidation factor for anybody but here's the thing i can't really defend this but to me surfing feels more um more like the out like feels more like the outdoors than skiing yeah because the waves are there but the snow they're always pumping it out of those snow yeah like if they had to like manufacture a wave and you do they do a wave pool yeah i'd view a wave pool like i'd be like i'm a little skeptical but servant's not perfect but it's close that's like okay i get a i get part of your philosophy you want things to be as close to its natural state as possible and then for you to participate in that natural state well yeah but it's a little more complicated because i also wanted to produce food okay that's your next level what i really want is it produces food that's why that's interesting that that's so much a part of whatever it is your connection is to it the food aspect yeah i guess i'm just like i'm like uh hiking doesn't do it for me i have a problem no it's that's funny too because i like to go hiking if i love to go hiking if i feel like i'm like scouting something out yeah you know but i could never like i could never be happy uh it'd be hard for me to be happy hiking somewhere where i didn't feel like i was learning information that i might put to use in in hunting and fishing to go back and kill something so i might go there and look around and be like that's great because i can at least write that area off i didn't see anything interested me back there but what about the intimidation factor for people i mean there's the gun involved there's no ignorance involved there's the ignorance confronted with expertise being the guide even though you're paying a guide or you're paying an outfitter there's a lot of intimidation involved in jumping into this yes but okay a few years ago i went to paris with my wife okay and all i've ever heard is like oh they're so mean to americans and if you don't know france you're gonna have like i went into it like i went due to probably that i probably went into as is nervous and paranoid as some people might be walking into a mountain range where there's grizzly bears right i wanted to be like oh it's gonna be miserable and we're not gonna know what to do and we won't be able to find anything and you go and you figure it out we went figured out my wife wasn't all nervous about it but i had apprehensions and i went there and everything was totally fine i had a great time right we figured everything out i think that you like you're stepping out of your comfort zone and you're going and doing something if you're the kind of person that's gonna look and be like ah just seems like too many problems like what i might have been going to you know a city in another country um or someone grabs you by the ear and drags you along and you realize that all that fretting and worrying was totally unwarranted and there's also like the worst case scenario the worst we went fishing yesterday it was not good conditions it was very windy to the point where we were even questioning at a point if it gets any worse it would be unsafe to be in boats on the water so what was the worst case scenario that would have happened we would have not caught anything i can live with that that was west's biggest fear it wasn't falling in the water because i'm not a very good fisherman it's like it's gonna be on tv i'm totally fine like i can i can i can live with that i can suffer a lot of unsuccessful outings and so someone is looking at the the sphere of outdoor pursuits narrowing on like the worst thing that would happen to you um if it came to hunting and fishing the worst thing is going to happen is you don't get anything or you get lost for a minute or turned around but it's like ask yourself are you really going to die right probably not probably not last two things i want to ask you so i'll tell you my story then i want to hear yours the question is why montana so we talked i moved to montana for a little while and people asked me why did you go to montana and i know my answer very very specifically and that is that i loved loved the book and movie lonesome dove and then secondarily i love the book travels with charlie by john steinbeck okay which we now know he made up a lot of that he didn't actually travel across the country with his dog well lonesome does made up well but that he's being honest in the olive hotel isn't you know yeah it's there in mile city so so but in travels with charlie steinbeck says if you took a boy from washington dc and said describe for me texas what he would in actuality describe would be montana and as a proud texan i'm like well i've got to move to montana i got it so what what made you make montana the base of your operations in your home uh i moved to montana after i finished college so it had been 1996. a dear friend of mine that i grew up with had moved to montana as well and when i was applying to graduate schools i actually got a full ride at colorado state and i got no and i applied to the mfa program at university of montana and got in but no assistance whatsoever so i knew i'd have to come here and get a job and there i had a full ride with a teaching scholarship or teaching fellowship and i was sitting with my buddy who had moved to montana and i'm like from a hunting fishing perspective what do i want to do and he's like just not a doubt in my mind man like you don't want colorado you ought to go to montana i went and told my dad i'm like you know i'm not going to take the full ride thing i'm going to go somewhere where i got to pay and get a job he was supportive but like thought i was insane um and that was the first time lived here for i think 11 years really liked it and had always kind of figured i was going to wind up montana wyoming alaska just somewhere um wild yeah well more so a lot of stuff to do you just you know there's a lot to do here man you can't do it all um i like the mountains a lot i like the cold lot i like the diversity of things from a landscape perspective so i just knew i was gonna wind up somewhere back here and it took a long time and i don't know where i ultimate i don't know where i'll ultimately wind up anyway i like to joke my wife that you know eventually we're going to move to toeic alaska um i don't know that that will happen probably not but it's like uh i just i have a hard time um settling down you know or settling in just today when i was driving my kid to school he's like do you like montana i'm like y'all i love it he goes oh cause you always talk about where you're gonna go next oh really yeah he brought up just this morning on that kid we should have similarity i feel like i've been too much of a nomad in my family's life like never allowing them to fully plant their roots in one place we're not going to stay in new york but we're really texans oh yeah go back and i i wonder i struggle with that you got to give people a sense of roots but also a sense of adventure at the same time yeah i can't but our little boy our our oldest i think he went he went six or seven years and never he went six or seven years in six or seven houses yeah or something like that a lot you know to the point where um this is the first time this is the first time that they've been that our kids have been allowed to like really settle in to an environment where there's not talk of like perhaps immediately doing something different and we've kind of given them a commitment that will hold tight while they do the whole school thing like i i really can't picture uprooting them again we put them through a lot it's a couple of decades then for here yeah yeah unless they come and say like we're out of here and they all want to move but but right now i think it'd be a little bit brutal to do that to him again all right let's end where we started i kind of started talking about parenting and spirituality with you so you said something middle of our conversation i want to follow up on you said um if i had a tombstone i would want it to say writer instead of television star but then you said but i'm not gonna have a tombstone why oh um i i know where i want but ideally i know where i want my ashes spread and i've explained it to people um ideally though and this this is i'm only i'm only mostly joking i do though i'd like just my whole body brought out there and let just set out there on a patch of trees or something and let whatever happens happens but um barring that it'd be long it's a long way to carry it uh barring that i would just like to have my ashes dumped i'm not gonna tell you but you have it picked out oh i can tell you a little bit you see that brown skull back there not far from where i found that well your wife afraid told me where you found that so now i can desecrate because i can desecrate the action she doesn't know where i found that but you know you know you want yourself no and i've explained i've explained to multiple people and at some point i'll write it down in great detail with my kids why is that what you want because it was um it's in this state because that came uh there was a time in my life when i had sort of entered my um the the height of my professional insecurity coming out of school coming out of graduate school and i just and i honestly didn't know what was going to happen to me like i didn't really know what happened to people who finished you know i was getting an mfa right there's zero practicality coming out of that i was just i honestly didn't know i mean in the most like highest level existential order did not know what would happen to me but at that time i was spending a lot of time in this place because we were up there a lot messing around and it became just like a favorite place of mine and i felt very much at ease there and what's interesting years later when i was living in new york um i happened to be out here messing around and was back in that area and it almost had like almost like put a lump in my throat right to see that place i was like i like that place so that's where okay where i dump it you know what's funny i haven't i haven't been back there in probably 10 years i've seen you try to struggle to describe what you are environmentalist environmentalist with a gun conservationist hunter i don't know is it i don't know exactly what a naturalist is but there's something i like that too there's something key to you about and i think it ties into even the skiing thing you know there's something key to you about the natural state of things i mean provided you can get food from it and do something but you kind of don't be on government policy and i don't we could do that conversation but i think it's deeper than that for you like you know you want sort of the the untarnished the back to the natural this is my observation natural state of things including the way that you go out yeah i want i want something that actually confuses a lot of people because they can't reconcile they can't reconcile conservation environmentalism with the fact that you kill animals or kill fish right they can't reconcile it some people can't you know um and it confuses people like what i talk about confuses people um but i want something that that strikes me as being like extremely simple uh i want clean healthy wildlife habitat clean air clean water lots of animals right vibrant ecosystems and i want access to those natural resources if if they can be if they can be utilized in a sustainable fashion like it's very simple um those are the things i want as much as it baffles people they don't know what to make out of it i think i know what to make out of it no i bet you do i bet you do when i say they yeah i mean there are those who who that confuses but yeah you get it this has been awesome thank you for yesterday so much time with us all the time you gave me as well today appreciate it it's good to meet you [Music]

Channel: Fox News

Views: 156,666

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Id: rH7d3fz2JK0

Length: 73min 16sec (4396 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022