Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X Hunt creators are
Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor
Speaker 1: where you stand with on X Doug, you'll be able
Speaker 1: to relate to this story. Guy wrote in and he
Speaker 1: got his uh, got his nipple pierced, And sure how
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be able to relate to this story. This
Speaker 1: is a joke I stole from Brian Cowen where if
Speaker 1: you're telling someone a story that has you tell us
Speaker 1: some story that has really in a crowd. You'll tell
Speaker 1: like some like perverse story and you'll say like, oh
Speaker 1: you know, Billy, this will you'll appreciate this, Bill, And
Speaker 1: you tell like some stories and people are like later
Speaker 1: they're like, why would you know? So that's why I
Speaker 1: wanted to correct it right away. So a guy guess
Speaker 1: his nipple piers and he writes in about it and
Speaker 1: he's out shooting his bow. You can imagine when this
Speaker 1: is going right, Oh god, yeah, very painful. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that's something i'd be writing you about well, we've
Speaker 1: been talking about stuff people getting It started off with
Speaker 1: hunting scars, and Gala rode in to say she had
Speaker 1: jumped jumped to barb wire fence ripped her nipple, and
Speaker 1: then the ripple nipping nipple ripping stories have come in
Speaker 1: and rolled in. She was jumping a fence to go
Speaker 1: dove hunting, and yeah, we told the whole story anyways,
Speaker 1: and then she had made a joke about how her
Speaker 1: husband and later she said, my husband called that one scarface.
Speaker 1: And then other people wrote in, Um, just nipple ripping
Speaker 1: stories catches free people that are slower the take. He
Speaker 1: gets his nipple pierced. That's one. Like, that's one. I
Speaker 1: just I mean, God bless right, but I just don't
Speaker 1: just that not on my list before I went tongue piercing,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah for sure. But if you wrote down all
Speaker 1: the things you could get pierced in a list, and
Speaker 1: I had to start like from the top, and I
Speaker 1: know when it would end, I would that won't be
Speaker 1: real low, real low on my list. Um, but he
Speaker 1: catches it on his bow string, right, I would. I
Speaker 1: would if that happened to me, I would say that
Speaker 1: it happened, you keep it secret, No, I would say
Speaker 1: it publicly. Yeah, Like, I don't know how to say this,
Speaker 1: but in the last few years, but I I've increased.
Speaker 1: I've never been I've never I've never I've never been
Speaker 1: like reluctant to publicized when I do something stupid. But
Speaker 1: it's gotten the point where I really wanted out there.
Speaker 1: It's like a kind of a form of masochism. Well,
Speaker 1: you dumb motherfucker. People are gonna know about this too,
Speaker 1: you know, it's maybe it's like some kind of form
Speaker 1: of like self betterment, Like, well, I think it's I
Speaker 1: think it's helpful too, because the worst thing you can
Speaker 1: be as a blowhard. Yeah, so if you are generally
Speaker 1: competent person and you it's like under promising over delivering.
Speaker 1: And if you're very vocal about what you've screwed up,
Speaker 1: but you are generally competent, it's only gonna do good
Speaker 1: for you. And I have found that when I have
Speaker 1: like contractor a contractor over that staid as the plumbing
Speaker 1: problem is beyond me to figure out if I have
Speaker 1: a contractor over and I say, you know, I'm such
Speaker 1: a dumbass when it comes to this right, It just
Speaker 1: makes the whole thing go better. Then if you're in
Speaker 1: there acting like you but got it solved, do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? You're also putting yourself in a
Speaker 1: position to learn a little bit more, probably too speak
Speaker 1: of things. Then it's good stories you could tell to
Speaker 1: the world and kind of get it, you know. Up
Speaker 1: a I saw a picture, but I didn't really get
Speaker 1: a story. Yeah, No, that's kind of where I was
Speaker 1: going with this. Yeah, so this is yeah, this is
Speaker 1: me putting on sackcloth and ashes right here. Is that
Speaker 1: a biblical reference? Mm hmm. What part of the Bible?
Speaker 1: I don't know, isn't the sa and ashes? And then
Speaker 1: also I think it's all I think it's in several
Speaker 1: places in the Old Testament. And I think that when
Speaker 1: one is wearing sat cloth and ashes there there it
Speaker 1: was a stupid way. It wasn't the right usage because
Speaker 1: it's usually you're repenting for something, but not repenting hat.
Speaker 1: I'm wearing a hair shirt in the Bible, I don't
Speaker 1: know when Usually when somebody's wearing set cloth and putting
Speaker 1: ashes on their face, they're they're also gnashing their teeth.
Speaker 1: That seems to be my boy, does that my four
Speaker 1: year old. I have a lament that does it. I
Speaker 1: think that nipple piercing just got replaced by you know
Speaker 1: where this is going is you're gonna tell them? Yeah,
Speaker 1: But first I got asked, you have a Llama shirt
Speaker 1: on right now. Somebody gave me this. It's a little
Speaker 1: tight on me. So it says Wikipedia fact number thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred one. Llamas like to wrestle. Yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: like that shirt. I don't know. Okay, go on, So
Speaker 1: what happens? Um? They do like to wrestle though, they do?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I thought I was just being stupid
Speaker 1: and cut. They like to wrestle. Yeah, sometimes I go
Speaker 1: out in my pasture and break it up because I'm
Speaker 1: afraid one of them is gonna get hurt. Really, what
Speaker 1: is that, Doug? What was your thing about farm wrestling? Well,
Speaker 1: Duc threatened the farm wrestle. It was a typo. It
Speaker 1: was no, no, it was him. He was He was interested,
Speaker 1: like I don't know what that is, but I want
Speaker 1: to happen. He wanted something from me, and I said, well,
Speaker 1: I'll arm wrestle you for it. But I think I
Speaker 1: spoke into my phone and I said farm wrestling because
Speaker 1: farm wrestle anyway. So there are playing with your bow
Speaker 1: and arrows. Yeah, I Um, I was shooting out of
Speaker 1: my house this winter because it was bit or cold,
Speaker 1: you know, and I but I wanted to kind of
Speaker 1: keep up on the shooting a little bit. So I
Speaker 1: open was opening up the window and shooting out the window.
Speaker 1: And I went out to fetch my arrows. And I
Speaker 1: had an idea why I was out there. It's like, man,
Speaker 1: I cannot see my pins very good inside the house.
Speaker 1: So I went out into the garage and I got
Speaker 1: a got my head lamp and it was zip tieing
Speaker 1: to my site pin and then I got back in it.
Speaker 1: You know, things a little bright, you know, So I
Speaker 1: was you know, I was like there was a lot
Speaker 1: going on, and I freaking forgot that I had closed
Speaker 1: the window. Did you hit the target? I never found
Speaker 1: that arrow. It took me a few seconds to even
Speaker 1: realize what happened. I was like, what that window? Um? Here,
Speaker 1: uh another quick thing. I was just reading. I'm reading
Speaker 1: a book. Oh you know, Randall, you'll appreciate this watch out.
Speaker 1: You'll appreciate it for real. Remember I was recently asking
Speaker 1: you about the historian Elliott West because I'm enjoying his
Speaker 1: books so much, his collection of his essays, one of
Speaker 1: which is an essay that really counters the idea that
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark had discovered, you know, from a European perspective,
Speaker 1: had discovered the like the great planes, right, And he
Speaker 1: goes on to explain, at the time Lewis and Clark's
Speaker 1: um journey, there were Indians on the Great Plains who
Speaker 1: had been to Europe, met the King of France, and
Speaker 1: returned home at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Speaker 1: So you forward me that story a long time ago.
Speaker 1: I know, Well, I wasn't got the book that that
Speaker 1: piece of podcast listener that sent that that essay in,
Speaker 1: and I went and got the whole book, and then
Speaker 1: I was trying to and I wanted to get the
Speaker 1: dope on Elliott West. So I asked Randall what Elliott
Speaker 1: West's reputation was, and he told me about Elliott west reputation.
Speaker 1: Then I get the book and I'm reading and there's
Speaker 1: a piece about the difficult job of a historian to
Speaker 1: uncover the unheard voices in history, meaning that we follow
Speaker 1: like oh, Lewis and Clark, right, And we know all
Speaker 1: these monumentas things, but like the the details of people's
Speaker 1: lives and people that weren't spoken for, right, people whose
Speaker 1: recollections aren't like like he talks about the paucity of
Speaker 1: of accounts from Chinese immigrants who worked in the mines.
Speaker 1: Right there, they didn't leave a written history, so now
Speaker 1: you're trying to like find these forgotten voices. And in
Speaker 1: there he's some about this guy and his brother that
Speaker 1: are going out to the California gold Rush. And they're
Speaker 1: leaving the East coast, going to California gold Rush by boat,
Speaker 1: so presumably going all the way around Patagonia at the time, right,
Speaker 1: no Panama Canal. His brother dies on the way, so
Speaker 1: there's two brothers. They leave and his brother dies on
Speaker 1: the way, and he gets a barrel of brandy and
Speaker 1: packs his brother into a barrel of brandy. The dead
Speaker 1: Brady packs into a barrel of brandy, gets to California
Speaker 1: and to bury his brother at home, promptly sets out
Speaker 1: on an overland journey with the bear, the brother packing
Speaker 1: the barrel of brandy to bring him back home. Him again,
Speaker 1: he's so intent on bringing his brother home. Why why
Speaker 1: was it easier to do that, and then if he
Speaker 1: opted to do the ocean one, do you have a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff with him? He doesn't explain that, and
Speaker 1: I haven't dug into the footnotes to find where he
Speaker 1: pulled that story from. But I don't understand why. I
Speaker 1: was like, let's go one way. Maybe they were moving
Speaker 1: a bunch of Maybe they're moving stuff, and he left
Speaker 1: the stuff and it was quicker to packed him and
Speaker 1: Brandy just wanted to change the scenery. Yep. Um. A
Speaker 1: couple of other things I wanted to touch on real quick.
Speaker 1: A guy wrote in he's fishing and his brother hooks
Speaker 1: into their fishing on the East coast. Where were they fishing?
Speaker 1: Could fishing off Maine? And his brother hooks into a
Speaker 1: big fish. Uh no, I'll appreciate this. Yeah, hooks into
Speaker 1: a fourteen foot blue shot and they're just fighting it
Speaker 1: for the fun of it. And it's a strenuous fish fight.
Speaker 1: That's a sharp go. A couple of days later, he
Speaker 1: develops this horrible pain in his chest. I can't figure
Speaker 1: out what it is. Thinks he pulled the muscle. Can't
Speaker 1: figure out, but it gets worse and worse. Pain goes
Speaker 1: to a doctor and he's got this tumor that he
Speaker 1: didn't know about and would have killed him. And somehow,
Speaker 1: fighting that fish tweaks something in that tumor pressed up
Speaker 1: against the nerve and alerted him to the presence of
Speaker 1: that tumor, and they removed the tumor. Now he's fine.
Speaker 1: Well all the story. Go fishing fish more with your brother. Finally,
Speaker 1: here's here's one last one before we start, before we
Speaker 1: get some other stuff. Um guy uh takes his dad
Speaker 1: turkey hunting. His dad's sentimental type takes his dad turkey hunting.
Speaker 1: They his dad gets a turkey and he gives the
Speaker 1: kid the fan because he wants the fan mounted. The
Speaker 1: guy's dog destroys it. I think it was his dog
Speaker 1: destroys it. Wife's dog. Oh, you saw this story, wife's
Speaker 1: dog destroyed. Like, what's the difference between your dog and
Speaker 1: your wife's dog. Oh, I think it's just and it's
Speaker 1: the same as I think it's the same thing as
Speaker 1: if you tie the tune into your girlfriend's car. No,
Speaker 1: my girlfriend's dog, No, one says my wife. I guess
Speaker 1: they do, you know what I'm saying. Like, at a point,
Speaker 1: we have two dogs. My dog is the good one.
Speaker 1: My wife's dog is a bad one, and it's like
Speaker 1: the white's dog. My wife she decided to get it
Speaker 1: when we started dating. And and you don't, you've never
Speaker 1: acted like it was your our dogs. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's our dog, but it's her dog, she said,
Speaker 1: she's we're we're living together, and she said, um, I
Speaker 1: want you to know, I put a deposit on a
Speaker 1: chocolate lab puppy. So if we're gonna keep going with
Speaker 1: this thing, we need to move into a pet friendly apartment.
Speaker 1: And you, you know, do you want to go looking
Speaker 1: for apartments with me or not? And so she made
Speaker 1: that decision on her own, and he was going to
Speaker 1: move whether you did or not. Yeah, she was like,
Speaker 1: she was like, you want to you want to keep
Speaker 1: this thing rolling for another year's lease, We need to
Speaker 1: go find a pet friendly apartment. But she she put
Speaker 1: a deposit on a puppy and did that all on
Speaker 1: her own. And her dog. He's seven years old and
Speaker 1: he's terrible and then uh what does he do? Uh,
Speaker 1: he's just he's like now he's now on dog, big
Speaker 1: difference between your dog dog go on randall. Now he's
Speaker 1: just he's too much. He's just hyper. He's a yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a hunter pound lab and lab people are overwhelmed
Speaker 1: by them. We actually had someone come over for dinner
Speaker 1: and they hadn't seen him in about a year, and
Speaker 1: they said, oh, wow, you know, you guys are great.
Speaker 1: Most people I know wouldn't have kept that dog, no joke,
Speaker 1: and and I mean we looked at each other like,
Speaker 1: I don't really know very many people that would get
Speaker 1: rid of a dog, you know, just send him on
Speaker 1: his way. But yeah, we got that from someone else.
Speaker 1: You kept that thing around, didn't you. So But then
Speaker 1: right before we got married, we got a second dog
Speaker 1: and I got to pick that one, and she's perfect.
Speaker 1: She's an angel. That's your dog, Rosie. Yeah, that's my
Speaker 1: daughter's name. Kind of it's a good name. You know.
Speaker 1: The only thing I have to sorry, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 1: The only thing I have to compare that too, is
Speaker 1: when I was younger that when um, we would get
Speaker 1: one of my siblings that I would get in trouble.
Speaker 1: It seemed like, uh, the one the parent who was
Speaker 1: pointing that out to the other parents, they would say,
Speaker 1: your son did this. Yeah, well that's because they're seeing
Speaker 1: that behavior. I would guess being married and having kids,
Speaker 1: they're seeing that that behavior the result of your influences.
Speaker 1: Well they said that. They're saying, like, because of you.
Speaker 1: What they's what they're saying is because of you, your son,
Speaker 1: the parts of our child that are that oh to
Speaker 1: you are responsible for X. Can I get it back
Speaker 1: to this thing? His mas dog eats it. He then
Speaker 1: his mom and dad must be divorced. So is my
Speaker 1: dog eats the His mas dog eats the You follow me, yeah, mom, mom, Mom?
Speaker 1: And yeah, okay, well by the people might duck ducks,
Speaker 1: probably losses. So I was just thinking childhood. I'll make
Speaker 1: a flow diagrams. A guy. There's a guy, we'll call
Speaker 1: him the kid. He takes his old man turkey hunt.
Speaker 1: His old man shoes turkey. The kid then takes the
Speaker 1: old man's turkey fan. His job is to mount the
Speaker 1: turkey fan as a gift to the old man. He
Speaker 1: then takes it to his mom's house to store it.
Speaker 1: The mom's dog, if they are divorced, it's because the
Speaker 1: mom's dog is still right out for vengeance, eats the
Speaker 1: turkey fan. He then goes and gets a different turkeys fan,
Speaker 1: mounts that gives it to the old man. And never
Speaker 1: tells the old man the truth. So the old man
Speaker 1: when people come over his house, he's stuck in the
Speaker 1: awkward position of pointing it to the on the wall
Speaker 1: and being like, see that, and then telling all about
Speaker 1: what happened, when in fact it's a lie. But the
Speaker 1: old man is not stuck in that position because he
Speaker 1: doesn't know. He doesn't know. The guy is like, am
Speaker 1: I that immoral? What do you think? I think it's
Speaker 1: keeping the peace, you know, between the parents, the divorced parents.
Speaker 1: I'm reading that into it. I don't know. Oh, I'm
Speaker 1: just guessing if that's the case. Though I agree with you,
Speaker 1: if there really is at keeping the peace, that was
Speaker 1: a part of it. I feel like he would have
Speaker 1: said that it was a part of like that his
Speaker 1: folks were divorced and now the ma know. I just
Speaker 1: think he felt bad. Yeah, it's not like he's trying
Speaker 1: to like preserve some little semblance of you know, some
Speaker 1: little semblance of family, you know, dignity this left after
Speaker 1: this tumultuous divorce. He's not laying out that level of trouble.
Speaker 1: It all comes down to whether he can live with
Speaker 1: his little white lie or not. I think that it's immoral,
Speaker 1: and I would tell the old man. You might not
Speaker 1: remember this. Are you innocuous? Do you remember? Well, let
Speaker 1: me tell you a lie. Let me tell you something
Speaker 1: that happened to me, and you'll know all the players
Speaker 1: probably has something to do with something. So when we
Speaker 1: were little, real little, you know, how daddies to take us,
Speaker 1: like you could go fishing on your birthday. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was my flied. I don't remember that, like you would
Speaker 1: often get the you would get the play hooky if
Speaker 1: you wanted an ice fish on your birthday, because I
Speaker 1: had a February birthday or whatever, different activities. He took
Speaker 1: me out and a guy caught a big northern not not.
Speaker 1: Our party was me and Dad and I think alcoholic
Speaker 1: was with us and a guy do people know who
Speaker 1: that is? No, you've introduced him before, but it's a
Speaker 1: great name. But he would develop such a thirst. He
Speaker 1: would develop such a thirst, uh during his outings that
Speaker 1: he offered, couldn't had to get home. Um. Another guy
Speaker 1: catches a pike and he doesn't want and Dad wants it,
Speaker 1: wants it, so Dad takes it and it freezes up
Speaker 1: like how they do. And my dad says to me
Speaker 1: hey and throws it to me and I catch it. Uh,
Speaker 1: and he says, you just caught a pike. And I
Speaker 1: later told Ron Spring, who was a commercial bait fisherman.
Speaker 1: Ron Spring made a living catching wigglers and digging worms
Speaker 1: and catching mentals. I told Ron Spring, I caught a pike.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know if I if it's a
Speaker 1: good use of our time to do a post mortem
Speaker 1: on those two lies. But that one, that one seems
Speaker 1: far worse. It's just I'm putting myself, Yeah, that's real bad.
Speaker 1: But I'm putting myself in the role not of the dad.
Speaker 1: I'm putting myself in the role of the sun where
Speaker 1: he's living with a lie. But there's the whole bit
Speaker 1: that that that the dad actually did get a turkey,
Speaker 1: and it's just, yeah, you know you didn't get ship
Speaker 1: and then you made it. I'm not putting myself in
Speaker 1: the role to dad. I'm putting myself in the role.
Speaker 1: And I it would have cost him anything to come
Speaker 1: clean and be like, look, here's a deal. This is
Speaker 1: what I did, is what happened. Let's go get another
Speaker 1: turkey next spring. What I would do is record this
Speaker 1: and send it to him. And let him put it
Speaker 1: together or tell him after he gets into their turkey,
Speaker 1: because maybe it won't be like you know, Pops, you'll
Speaker 1: you'll appreciate this. Okay, let's get on what we're fixing
Speaker 1: the talk about. Oh, not one last thing. Rand Williams
Speaker 1: is here, yes, uh minus his pituitary gland. Yes. How
Speaker 1: does it feel? Um? Are you as smart as he
Speaker 1: used to be? No, I'm not really categorically not really. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tell me more. Um, A lot of issues with memory
Speaker 1: and um, short term and long term memory. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1: I didn't know. I was joking when I said that
Speaker 1: we can cut this out. So you've been feeling you've
Speaker 1: been since since it's been it's been a pretty uh,
Speaker 1: it's been a pretty rough road, just ups and downs.
Speaker 1: But yeah, for I mean, I had a lot of
Speaker 1: symptoms that were pretty similar to like a traumatic brain injury. Really. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wasn't worth of that the bad that I asked.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm pretty upfront about it all. Are you replacement? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm on. Um. I'm on a couple of different hormone
Speaker 1: replacements like testosterone and thyroid hormone, and I take hydrocortison,
Speaker 1: which replaces cortisol um. And then I've got stimulants, I've
Speaker 1: got antidepressants, I've got sleeping pills, I've got the whole mix.
Speaker 1: Are you serious? And and and growth hormone. So every
Speaker 1: morning I'm like Barry Bonds really, yeah, yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: real deal. Oh, I mean I knew that this is
Speaker 1: a big deal, but I didn't know that you were.
Speaker 1: Really I didn't know there's that much to it. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: it's been a pretty serious Uh, it's been been a
Speaker 1: pretty serious um struggle. But better than the alternative. I'm
Speaker 1: all good. Yeah, you're on the right side of the gray.
Speaker 1: He did get big, he did get a big bear.
Speaker 1: I did, Yeah, I got a big bear. Um still
Speaker 1: hunting still, that's true. Yeah, I just meant in the
Speaker 1: general sense, I have tags for this, not yourder get
Speaker 1: in trouble. No, Yeah, it's been pretty crazy. I m
Speaker 1: start a new job around that time, and I had
Speaker 1: to postpone the start of that job for about a
Speaker 1: month while I went to California and got surgery. And yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's gonna learned a lot about the human body
Speaker 1: and a lot about myself. And uh, yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: mean to make this so serious. No, you didn't. But
Speaker 1: I guess what's happened is you being so casual about it.
Speaker 1: It was like effective, Yeah, at least in the way
Speaker 1: you're putting it forth. You were putting it forth to
Speaker 1: your friends. That just seemed the casual about it. So
Speaker 1: I thought it was more casual than it is. No,
Speaker 1: I mean I've been uh, I mean I haven't. I
Speaker 1: haven't held any secrets, um, but I haven't really broadcast
Speaker 1: a whole lot of this stuff. I don't put any
Speaker 1: of that on social media or anything like that. But
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to This is a little bit
Speaker 1: worse than the UM. Well, yeah, no, I mean it's
Speaker 1: some of the symptoms like I can't hide, you know,
Speaker 1: like sometimes for a while there, I was like crying
Speaker 1: all the time and just have very little control over
Speaker 1: my emotions and all that stuff. So do you enjoy
Speaker 1: movies more now? You know. I've always been a crier
Speaker 1: at the cinema, so that that hasn't changed much. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's pretty crazy all these chemicals and processes in
Speaker 1: your body, and UM kind of take for granted that
Speaker 1: at all works. But we're figuring it out, and luckily
Speaker 1: I've had a lot of help with that. So yeah,
Speaker 1: anything else, No, I'm typing something. I just feel like
Speaker 1: I'm at the doctor's office my symptoms, and you're taking notes. Um,
Speaker 1: if you read the doctor's office, another dude will come
Speaker 1: in here a minute and ask you the saint set
Speaker 1: of questions. And I didn't have a cope when I
Speaker 1: like I was saying, like I was saying to the
Speaker 1: other person that was just in here a minute ago. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I mean it's yeah, I mean just to some up.
Speaker 1: It's been tough, but it's all good. We're figuring it out. Damn. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's weird. Later I'll ask you if there's anything else
Speaker 1: we can do to help. I don't think so. Um, well,
Speaker 1: back when you had your pituitary glad you uh all
Speaker 1: the people here, So the reason what what? What? One
Speaker 1: of the commonalities I'm trying to say, one of the
Speaker 1: commonalities that binds our friend Randall Williams and Doug during
Speaker 1: my brother matt Ronello is that they were all uh
Speaker 1: participants for good and bad um in the documentary film
Speaker 1: that we recently released called Stars in the Sky and
Speaker 1: we're gonna we want to talk about this a little
Speaker 1: bit and kind of do you know talk about the
Speaker 1: making of an aftermath of and the themes that we
Speaker 1: explore in the movie the movie if you uh, if
Speaker 1: you want to go watch this and that that's what
Speaker 1: this is really about. I learned that there's a writer,
Speaker 1: Ian Fraser, and he always says that he's written a
Speaker 1: lot of book books, and he says he likes the
Speaker 1: very cleanly um in the beginning of his books, tell
Speaker 1: people what a book was about. So he begins a
Speaker 1: book with the line, this is a book about Indians.
Speaker 1: You want if people know what they're getting into. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the goal this here is that you will
Speaker 1: go watch this movie somewhere to watch the movie, honest,
Speaker 1: you have to go to you know you have. It's
Speaker 1: called Stars in the Sky a Hunting Story. But what's
Speaker 1: the website? Stars in this guy film? And it brings
Speaker 1: you to Vimeo and you gotta pay some money. But
Speaker 1: it's like really helpful to us if you do. You
Speaker 1: gotta pay some money and you can stream it and
Speaker 1: download it. Super helpful if you do. We started the
Speaker 1: film like it was kind of such it's such a
Speaker 1: weird story how it went because we started the film.
Speaker 1: Do you even remember that's how I met Brody who
Speaker 1: now works with us. When we film the first bit
Speaker 1: of the film was several summers ago. Shifties in the
Speaker 1: film and she's five, Well does that help? Well, it
Speaker 1: was no more than five years ago. Oh, I see,
Speaker 1: But but that was not even when we started making it. Oh,
Speaker 1: I started making it several summers ago. You didn't film
Speaker 1: me first, No, the first thing, like after me, you
Speaker 1: filmed me in fifteen or sixteen? Was it really that
Speaker 1: long ago? Oh? My god? It was right after we
Speaker 1: did the first podcast, which was like June of and
Speaker 1: we had we had already filmed parts of it then
Speaker 1: because the first like, going into it, we knew we
Speaker 1: were gonna do, we kind of knew we were gonna
Speaker 1: do two things going into it. It was gonna be
Speaker 1: this exploration of um sort of the mindset and conflicts
Speaker 1: and contradictions and loves and hates and worries and joys
Speaker 1: of contemporary America and hunters. Ah and I felt that,
Speaker 1: you know, when we started working on it, we felt
Speaker 1: that to do this you needed to kind of show
Speaker 1: like what a hunting trip looked like, to demonstrate to
Speaker 1: people what it could be and how it could feel
Speaker 1: and smell and look. And so the first thing we
Speaker 1: did in the movie was we just went and recorded.
Speaker 1: We went and filmed a hunt, and we filmed the
Speaker 1: hunt in Alaska for Sia blacktail deer. And it was
Speaker 1: meant to in some ways. If people watch Me Eat
Speaker 1: Meat Eater or the TV show You kind of Get You,
Speaker 1: you can almost kind of imagine what this hunt might be.
Speaker 1: Though it's it's structured very differently, but just like this
Speaker 1: kind of like through line. It starts with someone leaving,
Speaker 1: leaving a building and striking off into the woods, and
Speaker 1: the ends with someone coming back to a building. Um,
Speaker 1: and what I thought when I when I mapped out
Speaker 1: in the movie like the things I wanted to talk about,
Speaker 1: the thing, the themes I wanted to explore and ask
Speaker 1: various hunters from around the country their impressions of and uh,
Speaker 1: I realized that all of these topics were things that
Speaker 1: could pretty easily spring off of conversations that one might
Speaker 1: have or thoughts that one might have, or spring off
Speaker 1: actions and things that could happen on a hunt. So
Speaker 1: this through line of this hunt winds up being winds
Speaker 1: up presenting these conversation starters and later over the one
Speaker 1: of being Over the years as we were able to
Speaker 1: do it, we interviewed a great many people from all
Speaker 1: around the country and asked them uh their particular thoughts
Speaker 1: and this is kind of where some of the contradictions
Speaker 1: came into place, their particular thoughts about these themes and
Speaker 1: issues that come up, and then assemble this thing like
Speaker 1: like a documentary film. And in an added voice I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring in, it's it's I'd like to actually
Speaker 1: want to get him on an added voice that I
Speaker 1: brought in as a philosopher and an animal rights ethicist
Speaker 1: named Robert Jones. And he's a steady line as being
Speaker 1: someone who's not connected to hunting and is actually adversarial
Speaker 1: to hunting, like opposes hunting outright. And he also speaks
Speaker 1: about these different themes we did we we want to
Speaker 1: interview in add that. He's definitely he's definitely a star
Speaker 1: of the dock. I think that very credible. He really
Speaker 1: adds a lot. You know, it's a very smart move
Speaker 1: I think on your part on directing that. But I
Speaker 1: mean just to have both view points. You know, everybody
Speaker 1: that I talked to is like, I mean, good thing
Speaker 1: you had him in there, you know, one thing you
Speaker 1: always get from people is you always get get people.
Speaker 1: We can kind this a lot because when you're like
Speaker 1: dealing with the ideas, people get angry when you give
Speaker 1: someone a voice. They think that giving someone a voice
Speaker 1: in media, the giving someone a voice is tacit approval
Speaker 1: of what that person has to say, or that you
Speaker 1: by giving someone a voice, you endorse what they have
Speaker 1: to say. And I hear about it a little bit
Speaker 1: for his inclusion in the movie, like why would you
Speaker 1: give voice to him? And then when we had Rob
Speaker 1: Bishop on the podcast and like like we have a
Speaker 1: pretty consistent pro public lands, like like you know, as
Speaker 1: a company whatever, we have a pretty consistent pro public
Speaker 1: lands philosophy. And Rob Bishop is um I don't want
Speaker 1: to call him anti public lands at all, but he's
Speaker 1: you know, uh opposes a lot of the things I
Speaker 1: believe in around public lands management. And people are like,
Speaker 1: I can't believe you get Rob Bishop a voice. Like
Speaker 1: Rob Bishop is the Chairman of the House Natural was
Speaker 1: the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. I don't
Speaker 1: know that he's lacking a voice, Like I wasn't like
Speaker 1: I went and found someone who had no way to
Speaker 1: I mean, the guy could talk to anyone wants anytime
Speaker 1: he wants, and this animal rights guy as a professor
Speaker 1: at a school in California, doesn't lack a voice, but
Speaker 1: it want to be in one of That was probably
Speaker 1: one of my favorite interviews that we did for that
Speaker 1: because it was so it was really challenging to It
Speaker 1: was challenging the kind like if we were sparring um.
Speaker 1: It was challenging. He brought up some really challenging ideas.
Speaker 1: So if uh, like Richard Spencer R Kelly haunted, would
Speaker 1: you have them on UM's It's a really good question, Like,
Speaker 1: knowing what we now know about R Kelly, if we
Speaker 1: were doing a film, you know why I probably wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I probably wouldn't because what he's most known for, which
Speaker 1: is sex abuse of minors in the case R Kelly,
Speaker 1: what he's most known for, isn't what I would be
Speaker 1: asking about. It was so peripheral to the conversation that
Speaker 1: that aspect of their personality or that aspect of their
Speaker 1: biogopy would be this this like really weighty thing in
Speaker 1: the room. Yeah, we just sat down and did an
Speaker 1: interview with We did an interview with Bo Jackson about
Speaker 1: his relationship with hunting. Um. And as part of that,
Speaker 1: you can imagine that we talked a lot about his
Speaker 1: career as an athlete, because it would sort of be
Speaker 1: the it's like weird thing to have not come up,
Speaker 1: the elephant in the room. Yeah, and so in that case,
Speaker 1: I see, like that's good Devil's advocating. But in that way, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was trying to put you in a spot. I
Speaker 1: was just legitimately it was legitimately curious. Oh yeah, but
Speaker 1: but this dude was fascinating. Um, Like his main thing
Speaker 1: is that that the main point he tries to get across.
Speaker 1: You have to watch because I could, like I kind
Speaker 1: of cheery rather than like picking moments where he didn't
Speaker 1: do great. I picked I felt like I that I
Speaker 1: should say, ah, that we working on it. Kind of
Speaker 1: picked his best points, you know. And and he countered
Speaker 1: like he has really good counters for things where hunters
Speaker 1: love to Hunters love to talk about it's natural, right, Oh,
Speaker 1: Man's always hunted. If we didn't hunt, we wouldn't be
Speaker 1: here today. It's natural. And he brings up there are
Speaker 1: a lot of things that are natural fratricide, matricide, right,
Speaker 1: that have always occurred. Does that it's yeah, does that
Speaker 1: mean it's like, does that in and of itself in
Speaker 1: an endorsement of the activity? Right? That's not it's not
Speaker 1: a vindication of hunting that's always been done. I mean
Speaker 1: we've always, like in the Grand in the like from
Speaker 1: a historical historical perspective, we've always not driven cars, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So let me finish my I want to finish my
Speaker 1: little preamble here. Then were gettato a couple of other things,
Speaker 1: cause Janni has Yanni has some uh he's thought about
Speaker 1: how how to discuss this, and he's got a good
Speaker 1: idea for it. But the preamble being but I had
Speaker 1: this idea that it felt very cohesive. Um, and then
Speaker 1: we talked to so many people, and then you run
Speaker 1: into this problem where how long is something? So then
Speaker 1: you in the end you have ninety minutes or so
Speaker 1: hundred minutes, and you go through the very very painful
Speaker 1: process of narrowing this down to where you have a
Speaker 1: hundred plus hours of interviews with people that you need
Speaker 1: to fit into one minutes, and then you wind up
Speaker 1: with something where someone would watch it and not. This
Speaker 1: isn't saying something is good or bad. It's just a
Speaker 1: fact of life. Someone would watch it and never have
Speaker 1: and never have any idea what it was, how you
Speaker 1: framed it in your head, because it only makes sense, right,
Speaker 1: the framing of it only makes sense to someone who
Speaker 1: felt that they were seeing like a process that they
Speaker 1: were trying to put in place. When it's all done,
Speaker 1: you can't expect that people would watch you go like, oh,
Speaker 1: I see what you're doing, you know, because so much
Speaker 1: falls away, Like when we started this show that you're
Speaker 1: listening to right now, I had like a precise idea
Speaker 1: of what I was trying to do. No one has
Speaker 1: ever written and said, you know what, I see what
Speaker 1: you did there. It's just it lives in your head
Speaker 1: only you know. But the the guiding through line is
Speaker 1: just these these these themes, And we're gonna ask you
Speaker 1: guys a little bit about your feelings about these themes
Speaker 1: and thoughts that you might have had um and and
Speaker 1: you could speak to like kind of like what you
Speaker 1: meant and what was represented in the movie, or if
Speaker 1: things that you wish you said and hadn't said. And
Speaker 1: one thing I want to start with with Matt and
Speaker 1: and this was like in there almost up to the end,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's in there. It's not in there.
Speaker 1: It was the ending for a long time. For a
Speaker 1: long time, the ending of the movie, almost the ending
Speaker 1: of the movie was you saying, if you woke me
Speaker 1: up a hundred years from now is how many years
Speaker 1: he had said, if you woke me up hundred years
Speaker 1: from now and told me there was no hunting, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be surprised and I wouldn't care. M hm. I
Speaker 1: don't remember saying that, but but yeah, I guess I
Speaker 1: still I still that still were saying, I don't believe
Speaker 1: in hunting for hunting's sake. I'm just stuck being this. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't think that. I don't think that
Speaker 1: hunting makes someone a better person. Mm hmm um. If
Speaker 1: you want somebody to be a better person, there's better, other,
Speaker 1: more constructive uses of their time. It's like I was
Speaker 1: going to advocate for something after that that's gonna carry
Speaker 1: on after I'm gone. It wouldn't be hunting. I mean,
Speaker 1: reading books maybe, or volunteering, you know, being a good
Speaker 1: civil servant. It's far more important to me than the
Speaker 1: future of hunting whence I'm gone. If I if I
Speaker 1: care about hunting at all after I'm gone. It's because
Speaker 1: you know, I it's I guess it would be. I'd
Speaker 1: have to be convinced, and I partially am that it's
Speaker 1: it's good for wildlife conservation. I guess there's part of
Speaker 1: me that wants to look down from the heavens and
Speaker 1: see wild animals running around still, But yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't see hunting is making people better. When we
Speaker 1: were assembling the movie, we took all of the people
Speaker 1: that we interviewed and asked them about their hopes and
Speaker 1: fears for the future. Everyone was really when when talking
Speaker 1: about like a future everyone um, except for two individuals,
Speaker 1: my two brothers. We're the only people out of everyone
Speaker 1: we talked to who didn't in some way worry about
Speaker 1: what would be lost. Hm. And these are two the
Speaker 1: people that I know that like it the most. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I uh, I just watched Dr Mary for the first
Speaker 1: time a couple of nights ago, and I do remember, like,
Speaker 1: I'm proud of the way I described it, that I'm
Speaker 1: I'm stuck being a hunter. I would, I mean I
Speaker 1: would just I would have an identity crisis that forty
Speaker 1: eight years of age would be just kind of jarring.
Speaker 1: If all of a sudden I stopped hunting, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know what I do or how I would
Speaker 1: relate to what might what would preoccupy my thoughts, you know. So, um,
Speaker 1: that's why I guess I hunt my kids recently. I
Speaker 1: brought us up a couple of times, I think, but
Speaker 1: my kids were recently asking about like why we had
Speaker 1: to go? Um, I think it was ice fishing on
Speaker 1: a cold day, and like why do we have to
Speaker 1: go ice fishing? It's so cold? So well, you know,
Speaker 1: I can think of a bunch of reasons, but one
Speaker 1: would be you'll get to hang out with way cooler
Speaker 1: people if you learn how to do this. And so
Speaker 1: when I think, when I think about, like if someone says, oh,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be in fifth years, it will be gone,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't I wouldn't be able to have a huh.
Speaker 1: It would like really make me sad. But a lot
Speaker 1: of it would be nostalgia. Nostalgia for like a verse,
Speaker 1: like the version of it that I experienced and imagine
Speaker 1: that other people would experience. Yeah, yeah, there's I mean,
Speaker 1: so many of my positive memories about hunting our about
Speaker 1: the people I hunt with. I mean that is, it's
Speaker 1: the it's um doing these adventurous things with UM people
Speaker 1: I care about. I don't like. I don't like it
Speaker 1: as a means for meeting new people very much. I
Speaker 1: just have this small group of people that I hunt with.
Speaker 1: If I'm gonna make friends with somebody, I don't want
Speaker 1: it to be like through hunting. Probably that's it's in
Speaker 1: a vehicle for forming friendships for me really, although like
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of my closest friends I've
Speaker 1: met through hunting, but I don't want to. I don't
Speaker 1: use it in that way. You know, like if if
Speaker 1: you're at a wedding reception and someone looks across the
Speaker 1: room and says, oh, you know that guy likes the
Speaker 1: hunt a lot, you don't feel like a gravitational point.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to him about it, and then
Speaker 1: but if if he's if he's, I mean, there's just
Speaker 1: some first first out and show me all the big
Speaker 1: ship they got, and then I'm gonna be jealous, and
Speaker 1: then I'm gonna wish that you would go they'd go away.
Speaker 1: You know, you could always I met Doug and Janice
Speaker 1: through hunting, and I could see very good friends of mine,
Speaker 1: so I don't know. I just really think this out. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what you always on the conversation is gonna
Speaker 1: go wrong when you had like and when you had
Speaker 1: a wedding reception and you go and talk to the
Speaker 1: guy that someone says like the hunt, you'd be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: what you has been what have you been hunting? You're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we've been getting a lot of turkeys used twelve gauge. Always,
Speaker 1: you always know that should be the twentiest thing, you know,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah, I had a guy. If it's
Speaker 1: not like, oh yeah, where do you guys go, I
Speaker 1: had a guy on the ranch where my the my
Speaker 1: wife co owns and works Dude ranch. Another co owner.
Speaker 1: He likes to careful now he likes to talk hunt
Speaker 1: once in a while. Careful. You should have set it
Speaker 1: up different. Yeah, yo, thank you, thank you. Man. I
Speaker 1: would not. I wasn't even thinking about that. I guess
Speaker 1: I've grown comfortable with this podcasting thing. I just think
Speaker 1: it's conversation. Yeah, you know, No, you're right, You're absolutely right.
Speaker 1: It would. It could be devastating. I don't know, we'll
Speaker 1: cut it out. I don't know if she listens to
Speaker 1: this or not. We'll cut it out. Um no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you don't need to cut it out. I can keep
Speaker 1: this part in. Yeah, really, yeah, I'm willing. I mean,
Speaker 1: we didn't don't even say where I was really going
Speaker 1: with it. There's an everything you say in the movie,
Speaker 1: and you do say this in the movie, and I
Speaker 1: love the line what I just I was now I
Speaker 1: want to know you can ask him later. There was
Speaker 1: another there was another person, different in a different locale,
Speaker 1: and they said, they said to me exactly, you say,
Speaker 1: when when when? Then your armor? The weapon is the
Speaker 1: first thing that comes up. It's just a bad sign
Speaker 1: of renversation is gonna go. And uh, because I just
Speaker 1: think of weapons is something that you used to slow
Speaker 1: down animals so that you can cook and eat them.
Speaker 1: I don't give a funk about that ship, you know, halftime,
Speaker 1: I can't even remember what calumber my goddamn rightful. Um
Speaker 1: so uh he said, so what do you used to
Speaker 1: kill them? And he wanted me to go over fifty five?
Speaker 1: You know, I said, a shotgun. Your ship's a shotgun
Speaker 1: with bullets, and um, the thing you say in the movie,
Speaker 1: and I love it, and people it's like the one
Speaker 1: line that people bring up the people like the most
Speaker 1: in the movie. And I don't even know what you
Speaker 1: really mean by I mean, I know what you mean,
Speaker 1: but but you're saying, Uh, you said if if used
Speaker 1: to have cabbages head legst them too. Yeah, I think that.
Speaker 1: So is it that you like to hunt things that
Speaker 1: have legs? Well, I like to hunt things that are motile.
Speaker 1: I mean I also does that word mean that they move? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Not mobile? Well? Yeah, I think it's just another way
Speaker 1: of saying the same thing. I'm checking. There's also well,
Speaker 1: you know what a one animal? It doesn't move? Is
Speaker 1: there an organism that doesn't move? Is cecil? It's a
Speaker 1: cecil organism. No, you're right, capable of motion. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I like I like to gather cecil organisms. I just
Speaker 1: gathered some horse mushrooms the other day. How you've been
Speaker 1: doing a while asparagus kicking ass? It's been really, really good.
Speaker 1: My PA's been stinking every day. That's good. Can you
Speaker 1: tell people a hot tip and find a while to asparagus?
Speaker 1: You taught me? Oh uh, you spot it driving down
Speaker 1: the river in your boat at full tilt. You gotta
Speaker 1: look for last year's stems. Do you have it in Wisconsin. Yeah, ditch,
Speaker 1: we we have that too, but no, that, yeah, is
Speaker 1: a pretty pretty abundant there um if you know where
Speaker 1: to go. You know, yeah, your riverboat isn't fast, but
Speaker 1: you've I've seen you spot it at full tilt. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And and and you know I can also spot green
Speaker 1: new stems full tilt. Really yeah, I just kind of
Speaker 1: get a search image in your brain. Tell them about
Speaker 1: to tell them about last year's growth, because this is
Speaker 1: a hot til. Yeah, so you look for the last
Speaker 1: year's stalks, as you know, and it puts off a
Speaker 1: branch at a perfect, perfect ninety perfect perpendicular to where
Speaker 1: the branch with the stem creates two perfect forty five
Speaker 1: degree angles. And that's key because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: other plants that superficially look like you know, the death
Speaker 1: stems look superficially like. But the way that branch comes
Speaker 1: off that stem like you could square a house with that. Something.
Speaker 1: Bit man, I've been finding something like I don't know why,
Speaker 1: but it seems like at the tail end of the
Speaker 1: season they get fatter, and I've been finding some freaking
Speaker 1: quarter pounders lately. Figure around as a silver dollar. It's
Speaker 1: like a steak knife. Yeah, it's just as good, right,
Speaker 1: And that's interesting. And I realized that because I got
Speaker 1: some that was growing in a garden from Doug's wife.
Speaker 1: That's the easiest way to find it is just to
Speaker 1: actually propagate it. And when she first over in that
Speaker 1: part of my garden over there, when she first busted
Speaker 1: him out, I'm kind of like, oh, those big old things,
Speaker 1: because when you like, I never buy asparagous it looks
Speaker 1: like that in the store because it's gross. Oh, but
Speaker 1: out of the ground, man, you can get like a
Speaker 1: carrot stick. Yeah, I mean just unbelievable the difference, Like
Speaker 1: you said, just as tender and as tasty as the
Speaker 1: little guy. It's all non native, right, yeah, it's all
Speaker 1: like fair It's like Farrell house cats, but fairrell asparagus.
Speaker 1: So uh if cabbages had legs that hunt them too, well.
Speaker 1: I think that Dan Doty was there that day and
Speaker 1: he asked me, what is it about meat? And that's
Speaker 1: what precipitated all right, So I guess there. I don't
Speaker 1: want to, I just just seemed to be there, like
Speaker 1: that's all about meat. It's like, I love to eat
Speaker 1: all kinds of food. I love vegetables, I love. It's
Speaker 1: just so yeah, that's that's the product of hunting. The
Speaker 1: food product of hunting just so happens to be meat.
Speaker 1: But if if cabbages ran around the woods, I would
Speaker 1: freaking love to go hunt me a cabbage. You don't like,
Speaker 1: not that you won't do it like you're eating restaurants
Speaker 1: Like the rest of us, you don't relish buying meat. Well,
Speaker 1: with one exception, my it just so happens that my
Speaker 1: three favorite foods are um conventionally raised meat products. Tell
Speaker 1: me more do um bologny No, chicken wings with ranch,
Speaker 1: chicken wings with blue cheese, and chicken wings are my
Speaker 1: three favorite foods. Well, that changed because your old favorite
Speaker 1: food was pizza and your second, No, your favorite food
Speaker 1: was hot wings. Your second favorite food was pizza. And
Speaker 1: then one day, this is a big deal, this is
Speaker 1: a big moment. I like the story. One day you
Speaker 1: go into a restaurant and they had hot wing pizza,
Speaker 1: which was not and you ordered it and were surprised
Speaker 1: that it wasn't good and it really likes shook it
Speaker 1: up too much, And remember how delighted you were. It
Speaker 1: was like the first time we when I'd done I
Speaker 1: think Nita was there and we were in Ennis maybe
Speaker 1: and we went to some random, you know restaurant that's
Speaker 1: that was the first year was opened, probably last year
Speaker 1: was open. And you looked at the menu and you're like,
Speaker 1: this is my kind of place. All was was like pizza,
Speaker 1: hot dogs, wings, and you were one of everything and
Speaker 1: ate one of everything and just happy it's convenient. Do
Speaker 1: like I do like the bar food we and another
Speaker 1: thing I really like. And I just gotta say this
Speaker 1: and I'll stop talking so much, But I really like
Speaker 1: I'm asking you questions right now. I really like I'm
Speaker 1: working around the way you don't deal poker. I'm going
Speaker 1: to Okay. I like, um uh, some thin sliced turkey
Speaker 1: on wonder bread with a bunch of mayo and cranberry sauce,
Speaker 1: like Thanksgiving leftovers. That's a favorite food. So you've expressed
Speaker 1: like you don't relish buying meat. I don't buy him.
Speaker 1: I don't buy me because it's it's a it's a
Speaker 1: major treat and my wife, but you don't you go
Speaker 1: buy wife ways probably a hundred and what do you
Speaker 1: think thirty pounds? Yeah, she's one thirty. He eats as
Speaker 1: much food or more food than I do. And I'm
Speaker 1: not exaggerating that woman can freaking monster truck some chicken wings,
Speaker 1: and so it's kind of like something we do together.
Speaker 1: So so, uh, what I'm getting at here? Let me
Speaker 1: tell you where I'm going with this. You don't relish
Speaker 1: buying meat, No, I don't. I don't buy me except
Speaker 1: when I go to a restaurant. Yeah, and a lot
Speaker 1: of that, like it comes from a couple of places,
Speaker 1: I think. And you've expressed this, and I'm sure you're like,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you're feelings about it evolved and changed over
Speaker 1: the years, because all of our feelings evolved and changed
Speaker 1: over the years. But I think that you are a
Speaker 1: naturally very frugal person um, and you would never be like, well,
Speaker 1: why would I buy something when I have like an
Speaker 1: approximation of it in my freezer? And you're not any like, sure,
Speaker 1: it's more convenient that it's all like ready to roll
Speaker 1: and thought out, but you'll go home and thought helped
Speaker 1: meet out and your microwaiting and eat it because you're frugal.
Speaker 1: But there's also a little bit of ethics mixed in there.
Speaker 1: There's some ethics and there's also another dimension that I
Speaker 1: tried to explain um when I was interviewed for the
Speaker 1: documentary didn't make the cut. And I can see why
Speaker 1: because I wasn't very clear and I probably won't be
Speaker 1: now either. But there's this child like it's from child hood.
Speaker 1: This is where this feeling emerged. Was in childhood for me,
Speaker 1: this giddy sense of getting something from free, to eat
Speaker 1: from nature, and that is an abiding component of what
Speaker 1: drives me to haunt and gather is in fish? Is
Speaker 1: that what that giddy feeling of, like you doing it
Speaker 1: yourself and getting uh your food from nature for free.
Speaker 1: Like it's like it's like a thing that I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about. We've been eating a lot of Morrel's from
Speaker 1: dogs Farm that he picked. Morels are good. A right,
Speaker 1: they're good, but they're not that good. They're not that good.
Speaker 1: I mean they're great, but people's enthusiasm for listen, listen,
Speaker 1: they ain't chicken wings no here. I like, Okay, I
Speaker 1: like Morrel's, love Morrells, but peoples and people who look
Speaker 1: for and find Morrell's have an enthusiasm that exceeds the
Speaker 1: flavor of the morrell Yeah, it's I it's like, it's
Speaker 1: not like they're like, dude, come may, I'm eating a
Speaker 1: shipload of Morrell's, whether I got to buy them or not.
Speaker 1: That's not true people that hunt Morrel's. If all of
Speaker 1: a sudden there was a drought and no Morrel's came up,
Speaker 1: It's not that they're gonna be driving around calling to
Speaker 1: stores to find Morrel's because they have to have morels.
Speaker 1: They morels are great because you find the sun's bitches
Speaker 1: growing out of the dirt. Yeah, and then they're great,
Speaker 1: and they're what I'm saying. It's like, you can't un
Speaker 1: you can't untank, like you can't disconnect the two. I
Speaker 1: remember when I did. I did a deep dive on
Speaker 1: mushrooms for a number of years, three or four years,
Speaker 1: when you were infatuating, learning a lot of different SPECIs.
Speaker 1: You got to where you knew more about mushrooms than
Speaker 1: anyone I knew. And I remember learning that they have
Speaker 1: no calories, and that was very disappointing to me because
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, being it really so this isn't like
Speaker 1: getting a food item anymore. UM have protein in them?
Speaker 1: Oh dude, it really it's interesting. They shure taste like
Speaker 1: they what they taste like freaking meat man when you
Speaker 1: put a little oh good yeah flower on them and
Speaker 1: brown them in a bunch of butter. And I'm like, good,
Speaker 1: do you guys see what I'm saying. I'm not this
Speaker 1: in your morals? Man, Okay, well let me see this,
Speaker 1: Doug was less than you bought aom Morrell. I have
Speaker 1: never bought m call and I've never sold a morale either.
Speaker 1: I've given a lot of them away. And I agree
Speaker 1: completely what with what you're saying about the fascination with
Speaker 1: going out there. And I mean, I was so frustrated
Speaker 1: this spring because I'm looking and I'm looking, and you know,
Speaker 1: I'm going one out almost daily because the conditions are
Speaker 1: right and I've got great spots. And my wife and
Speaker 1: I were out looking for him, and and uh we
Speaker 1: we came around and we had taken a pretty good
Speaker 1: hike and ironically found this big batch that that you saw,
Speaker 1: and then you got some right behind the barn, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, a hundred and fifty yards from the house,
Speaker 1: and uh, I had left that tree alone, but we
Speaker 1: came around there and it's just this fascinating sort of
Speaker 1: magical thing to come there and see this little village
Speaker 1: of of these little little village, you know, a little
Speaker 1: scaring and and you sem and then you look away
Speaker 1: for a second and you look back and okay, I
Speaker 1: know there was one there? Where did it go? And
Speaker 1: we we spent Trish and I spent an hour and
Speaker 1: a half. They're picking Morrel's and just keep looking and
Speaker 1: you know, and and Trish said, we picked a hundred
Speaker 1: and moreles there and she said thank you for everyone
Speaker 1: that she got the earth well in the I mean,
Speaker 1: there's it's the magic of it. It's it is. You
Speaker 1: can take somebody that's never seen him morell, never eating
Speaker 1: him morell morell hunting, and they'll get that like that
Speaker 1: about it. And with those things too, Like that that
Speaker 1: makes an extra special is that you can't farm them, right,
Speaker 1: something wild about them? Yeah, they're wild. It's like people
Speaker 1: get excited about the asparagus. But you can go to
Speaker 1: the store and buy them, but it's still toials of
Speaker 1: times cooler to find it. You can grow. They completely
Speaker 1: defy cultivation. I think that I think that when you
Speaker 1: see Morrell, it's wild grown. I don't think you can
Speaker 1: I don't think yeah, I don't think you can cost effectively,
Speaker 1: But I think I know that you can buy these
Speaker 1: little pots where you water them. And that's my understand
Speaker 1: is no one's figured out a way to like make
Speaker 1: money could state somewhout You just your relationship, which is
Speaker 1: like the meat, right, and you talk about like isn't
Speaker 1: like the meat because I hunt cabbages? Um. But then
Speaker 1: you have some pasture land at your house and you
Speaker 1: guys raise up you and your bodies raise up some lambs.
Speaker 1: We did for a while, Yeah, and then you know
Speaker 1: you'd go out and have to dispatch, say the lamb,
Speaker 1: and you didn't like that, hated it. No, I know
Speaker 1: I'd not relish that. There was like and then I was,
Speaker 1: let me do, let me lay one more part on.
Speaker 1: Then you can talk about the whole experience because you
Speaker 1: don't like that, kind of dread it. And then but
Speaker 1: then you really enjoy the lamb meat. M hmm. So
Speaker 1: is that connected to hunting or is that as different
Speaker 1: from hunting is picking asparagus? You know what I mean? Like, like,
Speaker 1: what is that in the movie we see your place
Speaker 1: and you're kind of a little livestock area there. Um.
Speaker 1: So the raising the sheep. I was doing that with
Speaker 1: some friends that they hunt a little bit but not
Speaker 1: a lot. And they got young families and they were
Speaker 1: using the meat and I would take a little bit
Speaker 1: of it, but it was more to encourage them to
Speaker 1: spend time at my house and just like something to
Speaker 1: do with my community of people, you know, my friends. Um.
Speaker 1: I think that when I kill an animal hunting, it's
Speaker 1: like it's it's usually after a tremendous amount of work.
Speaker 1: So the feeling of accomplishment kind of kind of offsets
Speaker 1: the sadness a little bit, you know, kind of overrides
Speaker 1: it a little bit, because there's so much work involved
Speaker 1: in finally getting something. But when you kill domestic animals,
Speaker 1: just the sadness without that other component to it. Does
Speaker 1: that make any sense? I puzzle over with the because
Speaker 1: people like, oh, you'd like to kill, but then when
Speaker 1: you go out to like then maybe some people don't,
Speaker 1: but anyone that I have that we're some livestock, but
Speaker 1: I know they might really love to hunt, but never man,
Speaker 1: anyone who's really excited to go out and shoot the pig. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like hunting right up to the point where I
Speaker 1: pull the trigger, and then I stopped liking it, to
Speaker 1: the point where the animal is starting to become me
Speaker 1: really yeah. Huh. The other that that, you know, if
Speaker 1: you're tracking something or have to finish something off as
Speaker 1: too nerve racking and and sad you're watching the life
Speaker 1: go out of something. I know the sadness is really
Speaker 1: because I've seen so many people cry but then be
Speaker 1: really glad that they did it. But I don't. I don't,
Speaker 1: And I know people talk about it, and I feel
Speaker 1: like I've even paid some lip service to it. But
Speaker 1: when I really think about I'm really honest about there's not.
Speaker 1: The sadness is only when it goes bad, when you
Speaker 1: make a mistake, then awful. But no to see something
Speaker 1: go bam down on the ground, never sadness. Never, it's
Speaker 1: the only one is ugly. Um, Doug, one of the
Speaker 1: themes Matt was themeless, mass conversation was steamless, meaning I
Speaker 1: asked you about all the themes, but your perspectives are
Speaker 1: just interesting perspectives. But Doug is like part, like Doug's
Speaker 1: role in the film as part of a theme. Okay, Um,
Speaker 1: did you feel manipulated by the movie? Not at all?
Speaker 1: Did you feel manipulated? No? I felt like I hope
Speaker 1: you weren't because I was. I was kind of hoping
Speaker 1: that that's who you were. I mean, you look, no,
Speaker 1: let me tell you what. Let me tell the way
Speaker 1: in which Doug seemed like Doug to me. No, it's Doug,
Speaker 1: it's Doug. It's Doug. Absolutely. But if you were manipulated,
Speaker 1: the manipulation occurred with what's said before you're segment, what's
Speaker 1: said before your profile piece, and and the first sentence
Speaker 1: that comes out of your mouth in the movie, which
Speaker 1: was not the first sentence that came out of your
Speaker 1: mouth when we sat down to interview. So there was
Speaker 1: a manipulation of what you said, and there was a
Speaker 1: manipulation of when you said it, the amount of emphasis
Speaker 1: you might put on it, and then to have it
Speaker 1: be the first thing out of your mouth really sets
Speaker 1: that teas up a point. And it starts out with
Speaker 1: the animal ethicist Doug. Segment is kicked off by the
Speaker 1: animal ethicist and animal rights activists who says the most
Speaker 1: egregious form of hunting, mm hmmm, I know where you yeah,
Speaker 1: And then the next sentence you hear is Doug saying yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you said. Yeah, I guess I'm a trophy
Speaker 1: hunter or yeah, I do some trophy hunting. Which I'm
Speaker 1: gonna let you go. I want to, I just want to.
Speaker 1: I just wanted that scene a little bit. And then
Speaker 1: the movie tells the story of a particular deer and
Speaker 1: the way it would the way I feel that it
Speaker 1: might have been taken by you to be slightly manipulative.
Speaker 1: Is it takes your life story and family story and
Speaker 1: the death of your brother, um to sort of serve
Speaker 1: this thing of to sort of make this point that
Speaker 1: when you go into a person's house and you see
Speaker 1: a dead deer hanging on their wall without asking them,
Speaker 1: you will never know. You might have assumptions about what
Speaker 1: that thing represents, and assumptions about what it stands for
Speaker 1: and what it's supposed to mean and what it's supposed
Speaker 1: to make you, as the looker feel, but you will
Speaker 1: never really know when you look at something dead hanging
Speaker 1: on someone's wall. Is kind of what even like your
Speaker 1: story is so beautiful as a free stay thing, but
Speaker 1: it's kind of like it it's taken to service that point, like, hey,
Speaker 1: let's yeah, let's talk about a dead deer on the wall.
Speaker 1: I know, just the fucking deer that dog's house. Um. No,
Speaker 1: I didn't feel manipulated, but by it at all. And
Speaker 1: in fact, I think before we even started to roll camera,
Speaker 1: you said that you had been speaking with this fellow
Speaker 1: Robert Jones said his name and who I was my favorite.
Speaker 1: He was my favorite person in the in the film,
Speaker 1: I mean, other than everybody in this room. But um,
Speaker 1: it was a good save. But I mean because I
Speaker 1: like the way he asked the questions or made the points,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't disagree with his ideas. Um, it was
Speaker 1: more the exploring of him that I was more interested in. Um.
Speaker 1: And in the case of the of of that deer
Speaker 1: you had before the cameras rolled, you said, uh, so
Speaker 1: we were just talking to this animal ethicist and and
Speaker 1: uh and you said so he said the most egregious
Speaker 1: thing is trophy hunting and and and you said, well yeah,
Speaker 1: before the cameras rolled in the bar, sitting in the bar, yeah,
Speaker 1: And and you remember the deer hanging on the wall
Speaker 1: full of deer, I said, well, there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: trophies right there, like you know, what's the um And
Speaker 1: we didn't talk about those deer at all. We talked
Speaker 1: about a particular deer in the story behind it. And
Speaker 1: my it's interesting because one of the things my wife
Speaker 1: said about about the movie is that you were a
Speaker 1: younger man when this was made, because of the time
Speaker 1: had passed and and not only was he a younger man,
Speaker 1: I was you know, my my thinking. She was saying,
Speaker 1: you were a younger man. Your wife said you you
Speaker 1: were a younger man. Yeah, she's noticed that. That That wasn't
Speaker 1: as great feeling frisky after watching um anyway, I don't
Speaker 1: remember exactly I watched it the second time, remember you
Speaker 1: looking like that? I watched it the second time the
Speaker 1: other night with my daughter in Chicago, and um, that
Speaker 1: was a really interesting thing too. So how things have
Speaker 1: evolved for me since? Um as we tell as as
Speaker 1: the as you tell in the In the movie, UM
Speaker 1: my brother, my younger, my late brother, Matthew, UM and
Speaker 1: I had talked about deer management, and um it was
Speaker 1: conservation based deer management, but really a part of it was,
Speaker 1: you know, we're sort of we've been killing with these
Speaker 1: little forkis, you know, the thing that we get a
Speaker 1: basket full of and um uh and we had started
Speaker 1: talking about deer management, things that we could do better,
Speaker 1: and you know, habitat work and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And then and then he died tragically, and um, I
Speaker 1: kept that that ideal alive and uh we I think
Speaker 1: we did a good job of of of conservation, you know,
Speaker 1: dear management, and it sort of culminated in the fact
Speaker 1: that I got to kill it here. And uh, it
Speaker 1: was you know, as I said in the movie, it
Speaker 1: was sort of a remembrance of that of that whole process.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like, oh, yeah, we manipulated our landscape and
Speaker 1: we let all these bucks go and then all these
Speaker 1: things happened and then and and it wasn't that. It
Speaker 1: was much more. I mean, the first thing I thought
Speaker 1: about when I killed that here it was him and
Speaker 1: uh and and what we had done and how close
Speaker 1: it was to where that at all happened and uh
Speaker 1: and so it was really the remembrance of a whole
Speaker 1: the whole um group of things that happened in over
Speaker 1: a period of time. And and then it wasn't that important.
Speaker 1: I mean that deers is real important symbolically. But what
Speaker 1: I've learned since is that uh, or acted on since,
Speaker 1: is that the conservation and was way more important. Um
Speaker 1: any of those restrictions or attitudes that we had about
Speaker 1: not you know, shooting younger deer. That's all gone now
Speaker 1: because the thing that's more important now is conserving to me,
Speaker 1: conserving the resource and doing the right thing for the species.
Speaker 1: And um, far down that road we want to go.
Speaker 1: But because of where our farm is located, that's you know,
Speaker 1: it's a part of it. And so to me it
Speaker 1: was just sort of people you're talking about because they're
Speaker 1: gonna confused if now, Oh yeah, I'm sorry, but but
Speaker 1: it brings up, it brings up the NFC, the point
Speaker 1: where you and I find it's all the time, like
Speaker 1: you know, you always leaving these these sort of time
Speaker 1: stamps by things you say. But then earlier I mentioned
Speaker 1: to Matt how people evolve over time, and and your
Speaker 1: understanding of yourself and understanding of things around you change,
Speaker 1: and you try to Um, you know, I have these
Speaker 1: certain like things I feel consistently throughout life, and I
Speaker 1: explained them in a way, and then I started to
Speaker 1: realize that that I know that the thing is there,
Speaker 1: like let's say there's some like undeniable that there's some
Speaker 1: undeniable truth, Okay, they can't be debated, that it's there,
Speaker 1: Like there's an objective reality that's there. And and I
Speaker 1: feel that that that objective reality stays constant through life.
Speaker 1: And I'll look at that objective reality and I'll say
Speaker 1: to people, um, you know why that's that way, right,
Speaker 1: it's that way because and I'll explain why it's that way.
Speaker 1: And then ten years ago by the objective reality is
Speaker 1: still there and I'll say, you know why I think
Speaker 1: it's that way, and it will be different, and some
Speaker 1: people will be like, well, you used to think, and
Speaker 1: I'm just like yeah, and I came up with a
Speaker 1: long to ago me like I used to ship my diapers.
Speaker 1: I used to ship my diapers. You usually say it
Speaker 1: like this, I used to shoot ship my diapers, but
Speaker 1: things change. It became when comfortable. No, that's not it.
Speaker 1: That's not it. The devil's in the details with this.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, I used to shoot ship my diapers too,
Speaker 1: but things change, that's how you say. And you may
Speaker 1: well still again reality. So point being, there's a saying,
Speaker 1: what's that saying? It's uh, once a man, twice a boy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's good. Or what walks on um for legs in
Speaker 1: the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs.
Speaker 1: That's what you had to say. That's what uh was
Speaker 1: the Oedipus. I think you're right when he like Oedipus,
Speaker 1: his deal was we talked about the support Oedipus, didn't
Speaker 1: we up. This deal was he was raised not by
Speaker 1: his actual parents, but he didn't know that they were
Speaker 1: in his parents. And he goes to a soothsayer. The
Speaker 1: soothsayer says the Oedipus, oh, you know what's gonna happen
Speaker 1: to you. You'll kill your dad and marry your ma.
Speaker 1: But he doesn't know that. He thinks he lives with
Speaker 1: his parents, so he splits. He splits to to to
Speaker 1: to get away from his thing, and then winds up
Speaker 1: in some crazy town. And to get into the town,
Speaker 1: you gotta answer a riddle. And he answers that riddle,
Speaker 1: and the guy that gave him the riddle dies and
Speaker 1: he kills him, and he goes into town, gets in
Speaker 1: a fight with the guy, kills him, marries the gal
Speaker 1: is dad. Ma Um, that's where the riddle came from. Well,
Speaker 1: but what I was trying to get at was this,
Speaker 1: that's the riddle that he had to solve, not what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to get your time stamp and in this movie,
Speaker 1: moviesn't not in the digital as I'll live forever in
Speaker 1: some form or another. Um, your time stamp is a
Speaker 1: guy that's like interested in growing big, huge giant bucks
Speaker 1: because in your mind, like big huge giant box are
Speaker 1: emblematic of like a healthy deer population. And then chronic wasting.
Speaker 1: And then the movie ends and you get really concerned
Speaker 1: about chronic wasting disease. And it emerges that that like
Speaker 1: a leading theory on the spread of chronic wasting diseases,
Speaker 1: the deer most likely to go all over to damn
Speaker 1: place um and that's young Bocks. And then you start
Speaker 1: the you kind of have an attitude was trying to
Speaker 1: lower deer numbers in your area because that's the game
Speaker 1: agency objective too, is just the drive deer numbers down, down,
Speaker 1: down to slow the spread of chronic wasting disease. So
Speaker 1: had we made a movie about you, uh five years
Speaker 1: two years after we did right completely except the thing
Speaker 1: so there you are saying stuff that you don't even
Speaker 1: believe anymore. Not true. He believe those things that the
Speaker 1: circumstances were still the same. But the what was the
Speaker 1: no appreciate this now the thing that's consistent throughout it,
Speaker 1: and you and I've had this conversation before, and we've
Speaker 1: talked about it on the show, and we're talked about
Speaker 1: on podcasts we've had you know, is that it's a
Speaker 1: part it's the conservation of of the area and a
Speaker 1: part of what we were doing in growing you know,
Speaker 1: bigger and older buckses that we were not going to
Speaker 1: population called big huge giant bucks doug. Uh, I really
Speaker 1: don't like that expression, but um, so, you know, more
Speaker 1: mature whatever were It was a part of, oh, we've
Speaker 1: got a population problem, and that was expressing itself in
Speaker 1: our in our woods. Um and and you know, we're
Speaker 1: there was overbrows and we're trying to regenerate oaks and
Speaker 1: so um and we're killing a bunch of deer, but
Speaker 1: we happen to be targeting Uh does more. And then
Speaker 1: I'm learning why you can't really stockpile box. It's not
Speaker 1: like you can just turn the whole farm into a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of bucks. And because you know, and then
Speaker 1: it's you know, and then the other thing is interesting
Speaker 1: about big giant bucks is once there starts to be
Speaker 1: a lot of them around, it's not that unusual. It's
Speaker 1: not that special anymore. Deer are special to me, um,
Speaker 1: and the fascination of seeing them in the woods. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so it was conservation based and that has been the
Speaker 1: overriding theme through through my lifetime. That's what I meant
Speaker 1: by the objective reality. That's what's the phrase that I
Speaker 1: was looking for, um that I couldn't remember. Um, the
Speaker 1: objective reality fixed the fixed thing, the fixed things conservation.
Speaker 1: And so I don't think that I've been accused um.
Speaker 1: You know, well, I guess in some ways negatively about yeah,
Speaker 1: well you used to be the guy who's all about right.
Speaker 1: I didn't think you killed that was I thought you
Speaker 1: were a big buck hunter. And you know, I've been
Speaker 1: accute said and of that in in in bars and
Speaker 1: things like that, and UM my responses, well't no, it's
Speaker 1: just always been the same ideas that we're trying to
Speaker 1: do what's best. Um. And one of the by products
Speaker 1: of that was bigger bucks and older box and U uh.
Speaker 1: And so that was one of the things that happened
Speaker 1: of it. And I felt like, not only was the
Speaker 1: was the standard as we came to we never named
Speaker 1: you know how white tail Guy's named dear when they
Speaker 1: see him on the camera and stuff. When you don't
Speaker 1: name them till they're dead. Well and A and a
Speaker 1: friend of ours had said when he saw it, he goes, well,
Speaker 1: that is the standard by which all dear in the
Speaker 1: future will be judged. And so you know that was
Speaker 1: how that happened. And UM and and so that that's
Speaker 1: the part that made sense to me. And and now
Speaker 1: that UM, the resource because of chronic wasting disease has
Speaker 1: been uh, it's threatened. I mean, we have high prevalence
Speaker 1: in our area. UM, I can't I have trouble with
Speaker 1: the visualization now of seeing a hundred deer in the
Speaker 1: field and and uh, you know, realizing that up to
Speaker 1: that hundred deer are carrying a fatal disease that there
Speaker 1: is are also spreading around. UM, not in our area yet,
Speaker 1: but south of us. So I'm trying to do what
Speaker 1: I can for it. So the conservation ethic of it
Speaker 1: is that overriding theme, or that that continuum of it.
Speaker 1: And and the fascination of of deer in the woods
Speaker 1: and the time in the woods is also the the
Speaker 1: part of it that's been real consistent for me. But
Speaker 1: UM Jones brought up a lot of the questions that
Speaker 1: UM and I never was offended by anything that the
Speaker 1: guys that um or and I thought it was a
Speaker 1: fascinating guy because he talked about moral responsibility and UH
Speaker 1: and I and I feel that responsibility. UM. And I
Speaker 1: think that UM all the folks that I like to
Speaker 1: hang out with anyway and hunt with and stuff, that
Speaker 1: they feel that responsibility for it too. UM, just like
Speaker 1: I feel a responsibility. You know, you're talking about, UM,
Speaker 1: the livestock that you raise, you know, as you know,
Speaker 1: I raised cattle, and UM, there's I have a have
Speaker 1: mixed feelings about that, but at the end of the day, UM,
Speaker 1: there's a I feel a responsibility. I would never grow
Speaker 1: cattle in a way that you know that they are
Speaker 1: done on a large scale. I just it's just not
Speaker 1: something that I would do. And I'm in a position
Speaker 1: where I don't have to because you just like large
Speaker 1: scale because it's large scale. You're just like what you
Speaker 1: assume comes with large scale or what you know that
Speaker 1: what you know to come with large scale, what I
Speaker 1: know to come if you have if you have an experience,
Speaker 1: if you create an experience, it's that's the right word.
Speaker 1: You create a reality or an experience for your cows.
Speaker 1: If you can what's the difference if you're doing it
Speaker 1: for that experience for twenty year, that experience for a thousand,
Speaker 1: if it's how they're raised. You know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that you brought up was that like the desire
Speaker 1: of people now to know that their meat is humanely raised,
Speaker 1: that their animals like you see what I'm saying, right,
Speaker 1: it's not that it's large It's not that the fact
Speaker 1: that it's large scale. It's like what efficiencies come with
Speaker 1: large scale that you don't like or or there's I
Speaker 1: don't want to but there's probably an environmental component exactly.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, Like if you have a lot, if
Speaker 1: you're doing a thousand and then you got a lot
Speaker 1: of manure you're dealing with and for a finite fine
Speaker 1: feeding operations or environmentally problematic to say the least. And
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, when you drive around our
Speaker 1: area was and you guys have been there a farm here,
Speaker 1: farm there, farm there, and and and sort of everything
Speaker 1: that was happening. Yeah, green hills, red barn silos, black
Speaker 1: and white cows and uh you know, the manure that
Speaker 1: was being uh produced on that farmer those cattle was
Speaker 1: pretty much going back in the field, and and there
Speaker 1: were times that you you know, you kind of wish
Speaker 1: you had more because it was you know, it was
Speaker 1: it was it was. It wasn't a byproduct or a
Speaker 1: waste product that you're getting rid of. Um. So there's that. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's the living on concrete, you know, a cow, a steer, whatever,
Speaker 1: living its life out in an environment like that. For me,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not going to judge other people that
Speaker 1: are doing it, but for me, I don't think that's
Speaker 1: um morallily responsible. I raised grass fed beef. I'm able
Speaker 1: to do it in a way that uh um. I
Speaker 1: think about all the time, like, am I doing this right?
Speaker 1: Am I treating them? Well? Is it? Uh? Um? Uh,
Speaker 1: it's just you know, environmentally sense at um. And then
Speaker 1: Robert Jones would say, you know that's all great, but
Speaker 1: in the end, you kill it. Yeah, he'd say it,
Speaker 1: let's take it one step further and now do it
Speaker 1: at all. Let's finish let's finish it up. Well. Um,
Speaker 1: but you're sort of saying like no, you're sort of saying,
Speaker 1: I have to do it. This is the best I
Speaker 1: can do. He would challenge the idea that you have
Speaker 1: to do it um, yes, yes, he sure would. Um,
Speaker 1: but I think that that idea when he talked about
Speaker 1: instinct for instance, well, you know, we don't act on
Speaker 1: all of our instincts, but we can act on our
Speaker 1: instincts and a morally morally responsive. Interesting point, he said,
Speaker 1: when I smell bacon, I think, man, that bacon. It
Speaker 1: was really interesting to hear him say that. Yeah. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: I mean I don't take any of it lately. You know,
Speaker 1: you were asking me about this last night or the
Speaker 1: day before or something, and um, it gets harder for me. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, I loaded up a bunch of six months
Speaker 1: old calves, uh six months old steers and heifers last
Speaker 1: year and sent them down the road and listen to
Speaker 1: their mother's beller and they you know. I mean it
Speaker 1: was a it was a decision that I had to
Speaker 1: make because of the cattle and all of that. Um,
Speaker 1: and it was I'm literally changing how I'm raising cattle
Speaker 1: because I don't want to do that again. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to raise them differently, um, and not
Speaker 1: have big groups of cattle like that. I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: them through their lives so that in when they do um,
Speaker 1: go to slaughter and I really want to move towards
Speaker 1: um being able to be a USD. And they have
Speaker 1: a U s D inspected mobile, butcher come to back
Speaker 1: into the barn, walk them on there there and and
Speaker 1: they do all the work right there. Um because the
Speaker 1: inspection is important to me because I sell the beef.
Speaker 1: But rather than even putting them on that truck to
Speaker 1: go to the locker where they then settled down, spend
Speaker 1: the night, and the next morning they die. That's how
Speaker 1: we do it now, um. But I can tell you this,
Speaker 1: they have a great life up to that point, just
Speaker 1: like the deerer on our farm do. UM. And I
Speaker 1: and I and I try to balance that with you know,
Speaker 1: with that that's that responsibility that I feel. And I
Speaker 1: think that um that as you said, I think that's
Speaker 1: the best I can do. Quick story for you, little digression.
Speaker 1: I was at my friend on his house one time.
Speaker 1: Her dad was a vet but also a rancher, and
Speaker 1: she had a bunch of friends over, including some vegetarians
Speaker 1: are over. And they get there and they got this
Speaker 1: little they got this little crawl right off their house
Speaker 1: and it's all the lambs are in the craw And
Speaker 1: I said, what's going on with the lambs, you know,
Speaker 1: and she makes like a throat cutting gesture to me,
Speaker 1: like this is a sensitive subject considering the people she
Speaker 1: has over And while we're there hanging out and living him,
Speaker 1: a truck backs in and the guy's custom plate is
Speaker 1: one shot j J. She looks out the wind and
Speaker 1: she's like, oh, and JJ got out of his Tony
Speaker 1: two and set to work. What did they think of that?
Speaker 1: No one really liked it, but they he set to
Speaker 1: work right then and there. Well, I no one went
Speaker 1: out to view, but it was just like, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was like, the guy one shot JJ's here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he had the whole he had his truck, but
Speaker 1: then he also had his whole mobile. Anyhow. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: been real matter of fact about it in the past
Speaker 1: because I grew up with it, you know, with the
Speaker 1: slaughtering of animals and and and hunting and all of that.
Speaker 1: I think that's key, and I think that that that's
Speaker 1: like what makes you realize that it's just it's kind
Speaker 1: of like there's a lot of things, a lot of sense,
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of tough issues that if
Speaker 1: you were raising a range of environments, you'd come out
Speaker 1: thinking the same thing, like, we'd all agree that no
Speaker 1: matter what kind of householder were raised in, that violent
Speaker 1: crime is bad. That you know, beating somebody up as bad.
Speaker 1: There are people who question, well, yeah, but I mean
Speaker 1: depending on how they are raised often or their level
Speaker 1: of sociopath but people would agree that perpetrating violence against
Speaker 1: somebody's wrong. But with hunting um or killing animals, whether
Speaker 1: you were great raised in like a vegetarian household or
Speaker 1: hunting how farming household has a huge bearing. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: you end up thinking as an adult. Yeah, I know
Speaker 1: that because I've had, I continue to have so much
Speaker 1: exposure to people who had such a very different upbringing
Speaker 1: in the things that I think of as just a
Speaker 1: very matter of fact or sometimes shock to people. M Yeah,
Speaker 1: like look at uh, look at even people that have
Speaker 1: been exposed a lot to hunting and fishing, like my
Speaker 1: my wife. You know, she's been exposed to hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing on an offer whole life, and ranching and ranching.
Speaker 1: She doesn't hunting fish, but she's been exposed to it.
Speaker 1: She thinks it's deplorable that we don't kill pan fish.
Speaker 1: I've talked about this on this here programming a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Uh, to me, that is just I was told
Speaker 1: when I was a little kid that they don't feel stuff.
Speaker 1: Hold on expand on that, because not just that we
Speaker 1: don't kill pans. Okay, so we catch the fish and
Speaker 1: we don't dispose. You got a catfish and throwing the
Speaker 1: bottom of the boat. She acts like you're driving around
Speaker 1: with a deer flopping around in the back of your truck,
Speaker 1: or you'd have a rabbit in your game pouch kicking
Speaker 1: around back there. And and when that's exactly how and
Speaker 1: when I try to counter her, my arguments are extremely thin,
Speaker 1: like I don't know what that thing is feeling. You
Speaker 1: know that narrative which I love, it's like this sort
Speaker 1: of thing and I'm not for Pat Durkins explored that
Speaker 1: narrative of of your family farm and this like and
Speaker 1: b n y that we get into in the movie
Speaker 1: Not Nice Buck Next Year. This sort of ethos or
Speaker 1: this conservation ethic that perhaps is the elastic in some way.
Speaker 1: Uh that it's like a really um it's it's really
Speaker 1: like compelling, beautiful and very tidy story. It's like this
Speaker 1: nice tidy package when you want to pluck it out
Speaker 1: and so and to have it be in a movie
Speaker 1: that you like, pluck this little package out and book
Speaker 1: ended with other people's sentiments, it has it wants up
Speaker 1: feeling like conclusive, you know, but then it ends and
Speaker 1: ship goes on and let the story continues, just like
Speaker 1: the story has continue to that farm for a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifteen years. And one of the interesting things to
Speaker 1: me is how in the ark of my lifetime we
Speaker 1: went from a few deer too more dear too now
Speaker 1: to too many deer and disease. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: that's how if you're just isolating the deer and at
Speaker 1: the same time we have these other conservation issues on
Speaker 1: our on our property, in in our in the whole
Speaker 1: driftless area, um, that are all sort of interwined together.
Speaker 1: And so I see them as as a group of
Speaker 1: of issues that are interwined together as opposed to you know,
Speaker 1: people who are most interested in or in some cases
Speaker 1: solely interested in deer and dear only. UM. And I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know exactly how to um wrap that
Speaker 1: all up real tidy, but uh, I think that with
Speaker 1: the kinds of themes that we're talking about, the bigger
Speaker 1: ball of all of these things together is is you
Speaker 1: know where I rest, my rest, my case and all
Speaker 1: of this that I'm not just caring for one thing
Speaker 1: or trying to do one thing. I'm trying to do
Speaker 1: and a lot of folks that I know um doing it.
Speaker 1: And really the people that I personally respect the most
Speaker 1: are trying to do a u something that's much more
Speaker 1: a wider conservation based idea. Yeah, that's that's Leopold, the
Speaker 1: whole community. Yeah. Yeah, well he's from the soil all
Speaker 1: the way up to this guy. What was his Uh
Speaker 1: he didn't coin biome what did he coin? He he
Speaker 1: would have known him for. Yeah, but the but the
Speaker 1: land ethic and that that I mean. And Leopold is
Speaker 1: my he's my hero. Um. He used to take out
Speaker 1: his recurve and take seventy yard shots a deer. Just
Speaker 1: see if you get hit him. Yeah, there's a book
Speaker 1: I can't there's a later book of his words, just
Speaker 1: see if you hit him. Yeah, there's a later book
Speaker 1: of his where he's hunting in New Mexico with some
Speaker 1: friend of his and there's a lot of questionable shots.
Speaker 1: If now, if you just hunting now, you think he
Speaker 1: was a perfect perfect segue. If we wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: jump into the ethics thing. Oh I thought we were
Speaker 1: talking about ethics. Oh well, we talked about this idea
Speaker 1: of one of the things we talked about one of
Speaker 1: the themes. Rattle off a handful of themes and I'll
Speaker 1: touch on this quick, but I want to get I
Speaker 1: want to get to Randall too. Um, the patrilineal passage
Speaker 1: of hunting. So we had, Yeah, Yanni had this idea
Speaker 1: and we just, you know, conversations like movies going their
Speaker 1: own direction. Um untied that of bringing up a bunch
Speaker 1: of the themes that we explore in the movie, and
Speaker 1: we're just you's gonna throw them out and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: give a handful of snap shots and then we're gonna
Speaker 1: move into talking to talking to Randall. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: we explore like patrilinnial descent being that's how most like
Speaker 1: just I'm not talking about I'm not talking about the
Speaker 1: way things should be. I'm just something about the way
Speaker 1: they are. The people to buy a hunting license in
Speaker 1: this country are men, and most of those pick it
Speaker 1: up from their dad. We talked about that, and then
Speaker 1: we talk about cases that aren't that, and and and
Speaker 1: and it's sort of this chorus of characters talking about
Speaker 1: what it like, what it was that pushed him in
Speaker 1: this direction. And I oftentimes find that the ones that
Speaker 1: are most interesting are the ones that aren't just the
Speaker 1: same old, same old, which is like, un is your
Speaker 1: dad hunted, you hung as your dad hunted, young as
Speaker 1: your dad hunted, You hung as your dad hunted Randall, No,
Speaker 1: my dad didn't hunt. There you go. We're um, we're
Speaker 1: still justically skewed right now. There should be nine of
Speaker 1: us in one of you. No, No, that's not true.
Speaker 1: That's not no, that's not that. I'm mixing that up
Speaker 1: with the I'm mixing that up with the with the
Speaker 1: with the gender thing, red alof not one real quick
Speaker 1: Johnny H Hunters pr problem. Yeah. The way in the
Speaker 1: movie we get into try to explore this idea of
Speaker 1: the way a hunter experiences their actions and activities and
Speaker 1: the way those actions and activities look to people who
Speaker 1: are not that they are seeing. There's a there's a
Speaker 1: really good book if you guys, let read Milan Kundera.
Speaker 1: Kundera's book, The Unbearable Likeness of Being. It's a good book.
Speaker 1: There's a guy and his girlfriend and his novel and
Speaker 1: and she was from the Soviet block and he's not.
Speaker 1: And they talk about when they see a parade, when
Speaker 1: they watch a parade, what she thinks when she sees
Speaker 1: a parade and what he thinks when he sees a parade,
Speaker 1: same thing. Well, they conjures very different, very different emotions
Speaker 1: in them. Um. So we get into that a little bit.
Speaker 1: Um the question like why have ethics become so intertwined
Speaker 1: with today's hunting? Yeah, meaning, um, you know, if you
Speaker 1: go back to the first people, the first Siberians that
Speaker 1: came into the New World, the western hemisphere what's now
Speaker 1: the US, Um, what was there? More? Did they feel? Uh?
Speaker 1: Was there an ethical conundrum? Was the sadness there? Or
Speaker 1: other animals that are alive now on our planet? Is
Speaker 1: there sadness when the wolf when that elk finally bleeds
Speaker 1: out and dies? Is the wolf? Like, dude, I'm always
Speaker 1: kind of balmed. I imagine the fact that like ancient
Speaker 1: man didn't have it choice, some major mitigating factor. And
Speaker 1: if you look at you know, we don't explore this
Speaker 1: fully at all, but if you look at there was
Speaker 1: also like kind of a hallmark of indigenous hunter gatherer cultures.
Speaker 1: And this is something Robert Jones brings up and he
Speaker 1: winds up contradicting himself. It's not in the movie, but
Speaker 1: some dad like to release the whole interview. He winds
Speaker 1: up contradicting himself because he's okay with indigenous hunting. Yet
Speaker 1: his point is, then animal doesn't care about your things
Speaker 1: that he kept telling me, Like you talk about ethics,
Speaker 1: but animals don't care about your ethics. They're getting killed,
Speaker 1: they feel pain, and they die. They don't care what
Speaker 1: kind of trip you're on. Yet he expresses to me
Speaker 1: being okay with indigenous hunters because it has religious connotations
Speaker 1: for them, and I'm like, the animal doesn't know it
Speaker 1: has religious connotations. You're contradicting what you just told me.
Speaker 1: And maybe I feel something that's borders on the religious.
Speaker 1: But it's a thing where like people that are anti
Speaker 1: hunters oftentimes had to find these ways to make other
Speaker 1: things that they feel should be okay okay. And the
Speaker 1: thing that's hard for them to explain is it's harder
Speaker 1: than to be like, well, why can indigenous people hunt?
Speaker 1: Because they don't want to say they can't. It's like colonialism,
Speaker 1: But you wonder why then, like how like this brings
Speaker 1: it all the way back around to what we're just
Speaker 1: talking about with Leopold and like Pope and Young. Right,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of stories those boys going out on hunting
Speaker 1: trips with hundreds of arrows because they were known to
Speaker 1: fling it a distances now even the best archers think
Speaker 1: are long and far with today's equipment, right, And so
Speaker 1: even in that short period of time, what is that?
Speaker 1: When when did Pope and Young come around? Like, I
Speaker 1: think what was it? Was it? That it could have
Speaker 1: been like really weirdly early too, but I want to
Speaker 1: either way within the last within the last hundred years, right,
Speaker 1: So look where the hunting ethics is coming that short
Speaker 1: period of time. Yeah, or just some of the classic
Speaker 1: gun writers are lobbing bullets out there taking shots with
Speaker 1: That's why we call Yanni, not because I love shots.
Speaker 1: We call me Anie Van's Wall too, but um yeah,
Speaker 1: Yanni O'Connor, Jack O'Connor. He they'd like roll up on
Speaker 1: a group with big horns and just everyone and start
Speaker 1: shooting and they're going they're like, oh my gosh, we
Speaker 1: want to before Well there's also I mean this is
Speaker 1: going that late no really, yeah, but that's that's the
Speaker 1: that's when it became an official club, Pope and Young themselves.
Speaker 1: I think we're doing things prior to that. But the
Speaker 1: Pope and Young Club and art right, I think so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because Boone and Crockett Club was early eighties all right, Randall? Yes,
Speaker 1: so that might do any justice Yanni on on the
Speaker 1: themes you're in the point. I want to move on
Speaker 1: to Randall though, since we got him here. Yeah, those
Speaker 1: boys are hunting together, just to wrap it all up,
Speaker 1: nineteen eleven twelve. In those years, I hope they like
Speaker 1: each other. They liked each other because they're like nuts
Speaker 1: on a dog now. Yeah, yeah, they're just together. You know. Um, Randall,
Speaker 1: if you had like a one to ten, if you
Speaker 1: had a sliding scale of one to ten and you
Speaker 1: had to rate our job of capturing what you had
Speaker 1: to say on a one to ten, where are we
Speaker 1: four or five? Where are we? Like when you watched it, Like,
Speaker 1: what was your level of disappointment? Oh? I was thrilled?
Speaker 1: You were thrilled? Yeah you were disappointed? No, I mean
Speaker 1: we had we talked to you a lot. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: did one interview. There's probably like three and a half
Speaker 1: hours and one that was probably to something and uh,
Speaker 1: somedoy who release all these as just a giant transcription?
Speaker 1: Oh god? You know, like I I walked away from
Speaker 1: each one of those interviews feeling kind of punch drunk,
Speaker 1: like did I really say that that way? Or did
Speaker 1: I get it backwards or did I flip that? You know,
Speaker 1: did I actually get across what I was trying to say?
Speaker 1: And and when I pressed play on the documentary for
Speaker 1: the first time, my hope was that I would just
Speaker 1: make sense and then I wouldn't say something that was
Speaker 1: categorically false or outrageous. Um. And I thought, I I
Speaker 1: thought I came out pretty good. Can you tell people
Speaker 1: what it is you did that first put you on
Speaker 1: our radar? Yeah? So I did, uhum a PhD in
Speaker 1: history at the University of Montana, and my dissertation was
Speaker 1: a study of hunting in American politics and culture in
Speaker 1: basically the second half of the twentie century, called Green Voters,
Speaker 1: Gun Voters, um, Hunting in American Politics and Culture in
Speaker 1: the twentieth Century. I think, did we know that that
Speaker 1: was the title? Back in the day? You do that?
Speaker 1: I knew that, Um, Yeah, it's not published. He was
Speaker 1: ahead of his time it's not published. I started working
Speaker 1: as an editor after that, and at the end of
Speaker 1: the day I just wanted to put away the computer
Speaker 1: and not look at another word document, so I never
Speaker 1: kind of picked it back up. Um, did you uh? Did?
Speaker 1: Did you get your a little piece of paper that
Speaker 1: says PhD? I did? I did, And I just realized
Speaker 1: the other day I have no idea where that is.
Speaker 1: No one's I was looking at my wife's degree on
Speaker 1: the wall and I was like, man, I don't don't
Speaker 1: really know where that that went. No one said, no
Speaker 1: one said to you prove it and you had to go,
Speaker 1: and you've had to go get it. No, I have
Speaker 1: a PhD. How would I have this? I have two
Speaker 1: PhDs and I don't know where one is. This is
Speaker 1: a joke. Don't tell this joke, pretty huge, don't tell
Speaker 1: this joke. Go on, Randall, Um, is that gonna get
Speaker 1: cut because you didn't You didn't all the joke. I
Speaker 1: was actually gonna alert Randall to check in with you
Speaker 1: about your joke. Later used that you used that line
Speaker 1: on me in the first podcast. I think that's I
Speaker 1: learned that from a girl I was dating, and she
Speaker 1: learned on the TV show Friends. Is that right? Wow? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know that that Friends was like risk a man,
Speaker 1: I had a girlfriend love that show? Go on? Um yeah,
Speaker 1: So basically, I, um, it's part of my research. I
Speaker 1: had just looked at hunting and fishing magazines over the
Speaker 1: course of like sixty some odd years, and looked at
Speaker 1: other public representations of hunting and hunting where it popped
Speaker 1: up in the news or another, um, you know, forms
Speaker 1: of popular culture, like when Sesame Street in the seventies
Speaker 1: or eighties does something on hunting, what does that look like?
Speaker 1: Or how our hunters represented in Looney Tunes things like that.
Speaker 1: So just basically tried to um digest this huge volume
Speaker 1: of material and think about, um, how hunters have represented
Speaker 1: themselves over time, and what others have thought of hunters
Speaker 1: and they um the dialectic between those two things, and
Speaker 1: how that's evolved in this period in which hunting's place
Speaker 1: in popular culture has really changed a lot. Have you
Speaker 1: ever seen that cartoon where it's like it's not part
Speaker 1: of Looney Tunes or anything, but used to be on
Speaker 1: like Saturday Morning once in a a while, where it's like
Speaker 1: deer hunting and it's just like people shooting each other
Speaker 1: and stuff. It was all from the fifties, from the fifties,
Speaker 1: and like one of those in the embedded in his
Speaker 1: like an ad for the mother in law deer hunting suit,
Speaker 1: and it's like she puts it on, it's a deer suit,
Speaker 1: so she gets it's so she gets shot. And then
Speaker 1: a guy in that same cartoon, a guy shoot the
Speaker 1: buck and then says to his body, I got one
Speaker 1: that's got antlers like this, and he gets his head,
Speaker 1: holds his hands up to show the antlers and his
Speaker 1: friend shoots him. Yeah, and there's one Joe. I don't
Speaker 1: know the lead. I remember the lead up, but it
Speaker 1: ends up with like the deer's driving the car and
Speaker 1: he strapped to the bumpers. I haven't seen that, no,
Speaker 1: And I said before Sesame Street. What I'm thinking about,
Speaker 1: think is the Muppets, And there's like a scene in
Speaker 1: the Muppets um that I came across where that Buffalo
Speaker 1: Springfield song, like you know, that's one of vivid memories
Speaker 1: of these animals are walking through the forest and their
Speaker 1: hunters there and whenever it stopped, they start shooting. I
Speaker 1: don't remember that. Yeah, and they're they're like these these
Speaker 1: hunters are creeping through the woods looking for the animals.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and it's like a protest anthem. So it
Speaker 1: has by a band that's named after a rifle. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I talked about that in my buffal little book Buffalo
Speaker 1: Springfield and what that name? What that name is all about? Um.
Speaker 1: I teach my kids to recognize anti hunting bias and
Speaker 1: the things that they look at. And they're good, my boys.
Speaker 1: My boy is good at picking it up. And we
Speaker 1: talked about in children's literature. It is almost I don't
Speaker 1: want to say daily, but weekly. I bet you I
Speaker 1: got I got to just like stop and be like, okay, girls,
Speaker 1: let's just think about what this book just said and
Speaker 1: like really go through it and and dissect it. Because no,
Speaker 1: wild animals don't need our help. And when you don't
Speaker 1: have to put food on the window sill so that
Speaker 1: the birds will continue to live, like what in the world.
Speaker 1: That's why you gotta read your kids. Light in the Forest,
Speaker 1: Hatchet my side of the mountain. There's plenty of books
Speaker 1: out there. Man. The worst anti hunting show is um.
Speaker 1: One of the worst anti hunting shows is Wildcrats. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen it. That show so what's this on this
Speaker 1: on the sliding scale, all of your complex ideas, we
Speaker 1: kind of mostly just had you be like a little
Speaker 1: bit of a demographics guy and a little bit of
Speaker 1: a Roosevelt guy. Yeah. I was fine with that. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: I felt there's so many people. It's it's funny because
Speaker 1: there's so many people that I feel, UM like getting into.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what I was getting into, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't know how hard it was gonna like. I didn't.
Speaker 1: I just knew I wanted to capture, like we're gonna
Speaker 1: go capture tons of stuff. And then I knew that.
Speaker 1: You know, I've watched hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of movies.
Speaker 1: I know how long they are. Um, And I didn't
Speaker 1: put those two things together like I didn't. I didn't
Speaker 1: think about I wasn't thinking about um. I was thinking
Speaker 1: about it. I wasn't thinking it was gonna be like
Speaker 1: Ken Burns a civil war or something. But never I
Speaker 1: wasn't think I knew what was gonna wind up being.
Speaker 1: It was gonna be like a ninety minute whatever. And
Speaker 1: I wasn't picturing that's what I want to do another
Speaker 1: one someday. I wasn't imagining what would happen to all
Speaker 1: of these ideas. Not only that, like that you need
Speaker 1: to like simplify things and pare it down for a
Speaker 1: couple of reasons so that the viewer could understand, and
Speaker 1: you also have the sense of allegiance to the subject.
Speaker 1: And you're like, I can't have the subjects say ten
Speaker 1: things incompletely. Yeah, I'm gonna have to find they're just
Speaker 1: gonna have to say two things in a way that
Speaker 1: makes sense, yea, rather than letting them right there giving
Speaker 1: them sound bites about tons of stuff. It's like, I
Speaker 1: gotta this is gonna be like like if you're gonna
Speaker 1: boil it down, what are some things? And then the
Speaker 1: problem with like with friends, and there's so many friends
Speaker 1: of mine in it, you know, Rogan's in it, Robert
Speaker 1: Abernathew's in it. I don't want to point like, I
Speaker 1: don't want to posset these problems their problems only in
Speaker 1: my head, because they're not problems for someone to watch
Speaker 1: the film. I really want people to watch films I do.
Speaker 1: I like, I like, I want people to see an
Speaker 1: experience it. So there's the thing we keep talking about,
Speaker 1: like these things and it's like way as you perceive them,
Speaker 1: there's the thing, and the thing as a freestanding entity
Speaker 1: is something I want people to see, but I can't
Speaker 1: watch it without all of the the noise in my head.
Speaker 1: And part of the noise in my head is like
Speaker 1: I had these friends who have really interesting experiences, like
Speaker 1: like Matt, who's sitting here, has this very refreshing like
Speaker 1: everything out of MAT's mouth is delights me, Like everything
Speaker 1: he says delights me. So um, Doug, you know, like dogs,
Speaker 1: like this generous, beautiful person with kind of this like
Speaker 1: a way to express, to explain his life in the
Speaker 1: way that's very moving and instructive. Right, And you have
Speaker 1: this like really cohesive view of something that's really complicated
Speaker 1: and like a real knack for sort of blaming this
Speaker 1: activity that is so influenced by history and influenced by
Speaker 1: demographics and sort of like making it seem like a picture,
Speaker 1: you know, like like presenting it and and I'm friends
Speaker 1: with you guys, and so then to put you there,
Speaker 1: I'm also like what I want them to look like?
Speaker 1: What I see when I see them, It's just it's
Speaker 1: just complicated. Man. Oh yeah, I'm kind of haunted by
Speaker 1: the I'm haunted by the process. Well, I think that's
Speaker 1: I'm good. I'm I'm so. I'm glad as to be
Speaker 1: sitting here talking because I want to make sure we're cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're all good. And this also goes out as an
Speaker 1: apology to all those other people that the interview that
Speaker 1: didn't make the cut. Well, I know, I mean, I
Speaker 1: a lot of what you're saying resonates with me because
Speaker 1: when I, UM worked on my dissertation, you're telling a
Speaker 1: story and you're trying to explain something through the storytelling process,
Speaker 1: and you have to choose a beginning and an end
Speaker 1: and an arc to it, and you can't compress everything
Speaker 1: in there. And UM. So that's like, when I go
Speaker 1: back and look at my dissertation, I remember all the
Speaker 1: things that started to become threads that I wanted to
Speaker 1: weave into this and I had to I had to
Speaker 1: cut them. UM. And I have, you know, boxes and
Speaker 1: boxes of photo copies and notes and things like that
Speaker 1: that have been traveling around with me for a couple
Speaker 1: of years and UM, and they're all little things that
Speaker 1: I wanted to cram into that. UM because when I
Speaker 1: read what I wrote, I think, like man, it's it's
Speaker 1: more complex than that. There are several other layers that
Speaker 1: I need to to weave into this thing. Um and
Speaker 1: and so yeah, I mean I think especially with you know,
Speaker 1: I'm lucky because I I didn't have a page limit. Um.
Speaker 1: But when you're making a documentary film, obviously there's that
Speaker 1: window of time that you have to fit it into.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter how good the stuff you get is. Um,
Speaker 1: you have to make those really really tough choices. You
Speaker 1: ought to cred sism we got early on about the movie,
Speaker 1: which I would have thought would have been a compliment,
Speaker 1: but it was always issued as a criticism is it
Speaker 1: doesn't come down hard enough on anything. It feels too
Speaker 1: open ended. And I always want to be like, that's great, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean if people wanted to be like
Speaker 1: a like a like a Michael Moore kind of thing.
Speaker 1: I try not to surround myself with people who come
Speaker 1: down hard on stuff like there's what's the point, you know?
Speaker 1: And to the point earlier about having this animal ethicist
Speaker 1: as a leading figure in the documentary, like having an
Speaker 1: open exchange of ideas and questioning your own ideas and
Speaker 1: reflecting on what you really think or what you really
Speaker 1: believe or what values you have. Like if you just
Speaker 1: are in an echo chamber and you're you know, talking
Speaker 1: about the people on the outside, or you're talking about
Speaker 1: how great the people in this room are, what are
Speaker 1: you really doing? You know, it's not it's not a
Speaker 1: real serious intellectual exercise. And so yeah, I'm you could
Speaker 1: have made a movie of people saying, dude, if we
Speaker 1: don't kill all the deer, we'll get overrun. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think, like, you know, one other thing too,
Speaker 1: is like it's really easy to like write a book
Speaker 1: review or a movie review and and slam it. Like
Speaker 1: and this is something that at least in graduate school
Speaker 1: you could recognize people are starting to write book reviews.
Speaker 1: They just trash everything or it's the greatest thing they've
Speaker 1: ever read. But it takes, you know, it takes it
Speaker 1: takes a lot more effort to to you know, pick
Speaker 1: something apart and ask questions of it and go back
Speaker 1: and revisit and chew on it, and and that ultimately generates,
Speaker 1: you know, more questions. Like a film reviewed on NPR,
Speaker 1: You're like, I can't tell that dude really like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I think that's so he might not want
Speaker 1: to bore his listeners with whether he liked it or not. Yeah, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I always want to know because I'm like, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is his job. He liked it, I'll I might
Speaker 1: be more inclined to see it. Yeah, if you're always
Speaker 1: to be thought provoking, I think he succeeded there. I
Speaker 1: think everybody can't agree on that, right, Yeah, it's I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's it's nice to see something that, like hunting,
Speaker 1: as you're saying, is often portrayed as this cartoonish activity
Speaker 1: and you're either the hero or you're the villain, and
Speaker 1: that's not the reality of it. And so to see
Speaker 1: this like nuanced, um exploration of what we're all doing
Speaker 1: and why we do it, and why we think we
Speaker 1: do it, why we may actually do it. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I found that refreshing. It would be interesting
Speaker 1: to like hear what I don't ten people from various
Speaker 1: uh walks of life that don't hunt. What did what
Speaker 1: did anything change in their perception upon it? If you
Speaker 1: could make them, If you could take people who were
Speaker 1: ambivalent or hostile to hunting and somehow forced them to
Speaker 1: watch and then do a post interview, Yeah, I could
Speaker 1: set that up. I just haven't done it yet, but
Speaker 1: it'll be interesting to it. Definitely do it. And you know, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I need to hear it now.
Speaker 1: Maybe when the making of it I would have been
Speaker 1: interested here, but now it's like something that would be
Speaker 1: the reason that I would do it. Uh. You know
Speaker 1: remember how I began. You want to you want to
Speaker 1: see some full circle? Right? You want to see it
Speaker 1: like Uh, as long as you're gonna allow me to
Speaker 1: to do a concluding question, you can including questions you
Speaker 1: want to see me bring something full circle. Remember how
Speaker 1: earlier I mentioned uh Ian Frasier, what did I say
Speaker 1: about the in Fraser earlier? He starts his books with
Speaker 1: he likes to tell people right away in his books
Speaker 1: about there about he thinks to will start reading the book.
Speaker 1: They want to know what. They don't want to wait
Speaker 1: to find out what it's about. He also told me
Speaker 1: this when he's right. He's a nonfiction writer. When he's
Speaker 1: writing and he's profiling people, he'll get this feeling that
Speaker 1: they're not gonna like what he's writing, and he always
Speaker 1: um mitigates that by getting a very flattering physical description
Speaker 1: of them. Where she says usually can undoes any harm.
Speaker 1: They're like, you know, I really like that. You know,
Speaker 1: I likes what you had to say about our conversation. Uh,
Speaker 1: I didn't need to do that with you guys, because
Speaker 1: it's a movie, and so people can see just how
Speaker 1: wonderful you all are by going to Vimeo and watching
Speaker 1: Stars in the Sky. That was that is, that's from
Speaker 1: years of That's why you do it. And just picture
Speaker 1: him with a little more grain and Doug just imagine
Speaker 1: you see Doug now, just imagined him when he looked younger.
Speaker 1: It'd be it would be even better if you just
Speaker 1: went to Stars in the Sky film dot com and
Speaker 1: bought it there, wash it there. That was a little
Speaker 1: more blunt. We could, but then we can we could
Speaker 1: track here, We could track your watching better, and we
Speaker 1: could report numbers to people that give a ship and
Speaker 1: it would help us out. So Stars in the Sky
Speaker 1: film dot Com you told me when you first started
Speaker 1: doing this that, like, really the end goal was to
Speaker 1: do it well enough so that you would be allowed
Speaker 1: to make another one. That's the wardy Allen Maxim. Yes,
Speaker 1: but you have his movies were good enough that they
Speaker 1: let him make another one. But you thought that that
Speaker 1: would be like a measure of success. Yeah, so do
Speaker 1: we know that now or if not, how long will
Speaker 1: it be until we know? I'll make another movie. I'll
Speaker 1: make another movie. Um, but just my circumstances are such that,
Speaker 1: like it doesn't matter. I'll just find a way I
Speaker 1: would like to make it on a movie. And uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, I'll write more books and I'm gonna make
Speaker 1: another movie. I don't know if it's gonna because someone
Speaker 1: let me, or if it's gonna want someone let me.
Speaker 1: What's gonna want to be because I went and did it?
Speaker 1: But yeah, I love it. That's my favorite. Um. If
Speaker 1: I if I had to be honest with you, if
Speaker 1: I had to pick up medium a medium, if God
Speaker 1: came down and put a gun to my head and
Speaker 1: made me pick a one medium, one thing that I
Speaker 1: could take in for the rest of my life, it
Speaker 1: would be films. And if he really subdivided it out,
Speaker 1: I would say documentaries. H yeah, because even if I
Speaker 1: went blind, I could still listen to him, and if
Speaker 1: I went deaf, I could watch him. Good point. Tell
Speaker 1: him that website again, Yanni Stars Film dot Com. Al Right, everyone,
Speaker 1: thank you so much guys for coming down I really
Speaker 1: do love you guys, and you people listening. I meant
Speaker 1: I was talking about these guys, but you guys do
Speaker 1: not don't know them, But you'd love him if you
Speaker 1: got to know him.