Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you
Speaker 1: by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands,
Speaker 1: or scouting for el First Light has performance apparel to
Speaker 1: support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at
Speaker 1: first Light dot com, f I R S T L
Speaker 1: I t E dot com. Chrin. You know how a
Speaker 1: lot of times we come up with what the show
Speaker 1: is gonna be called, but then we forget and it's
Speaker 1: called something.
Speaker 2: Different that doesn't really happen.
Speaker 1: I feel like it does. I feel like a lot
Speaker 1: of times I'll be like, hey, let's call the show this,
Speaker 1: and it winds up not being called that. Okay, pind
Speaker 1: Titty should be this episode. No one's gonna know why
Speaker 1: for now, but later they'll know. Okay, Tommy knows what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Tommy knows exactly what I'm talking about. Joey. We're recording
Speaker 1: today from the Flagship First Light store in Haley, Idaho.
Speaker 1: What is that, you might ask, It's the flagship First
Speaker 1: Light Store in Haley, Idaho. If you want to find
Speaker 1: the best hunting gear on the planet, you come into
Speaker 1: this store and get it. And to give you a
Speaker 1: real virtual experience of what it's like we have today.
Speaker 1: Keith and Spa should be a spatch ye, but it's not.
Speaker 3: We all agree it's an.
Speaker 1: Spa and Dom Cooper and between you guys, can you
Speaker 1: quickly calculate someone walks in the door, what's the likelihood
Speaker 1: they'll encounter one or both of you?
Speaker 4: I would say seventy. I've live in here, so probably
Speaker 4: even more than that. Tom's in here a lot though.
Speaker 1: So there's like a likely that you would come in
Speaker 1: and they would find you, guys, So after this they'll
Speaker 1: be comfortable coming in knowing who they're looking for.
Speaker 4: Just give me a high five. I'm here every day.
Speaker 1: Okay. Now you'll know because one of them has an
Speaker 1: insane mullet.
Speaker 4: I've been working on it in a while, man.
Speaker 1: And one of them's Australian. Sure and get it out.
Speaker 1: So you know we've had we had another Australian on recently.
Speaker 1: You guys have been making a strong showing Yep, we're
Speaker 1: an interesting braid of people. Great this other Australian is
Speaker 1: a pH in Africa and and you're here, and so
Speaker 1: we're catching them as they kind of get spun off
Speaker 1: into the broader outside world. Also joined by Tommy Edson,
Speaker 1: known as the blue collar scholar, always bragging up how
Speaker 1: good he does? I meet you? To trivia? He came
Speaker 1: down lost.
Speaker 2: Then the pause gate scandal broke.
Speaker 1: What was that?
Speaker 2: Blue collar pause is my new nickname at work?
Speaker 1: Oh and then we caught when that Yeah that he
Speaker 1: what The reason he performs well in private is he
Speaker 1: pauses the show.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna let you finish. Go ahead, Well, oh you
Speaker 2: want me to go?
Speaker 1: Yeah? You pause, think about it longer, which is like
Speaker 1: if I could like pause it for a couple of days,
Speaker 1: a couple of days and like be like.
Speaker 2: It's actually yeah. It was more like, you know, for
Speaker 2: four days.
Speaker 1: Do you ever do a little research while it's paused?
Speaker 5: No, I'm I'm working a high play in a fast
Speaker 5: placed environment. And I was like, but at the same time,
Speaker 5: I could pause the game, continue with my job while
Speaker 5: I was communicating with somebody at work and not miss
Speaker 5: like I didn't know. There's times where I don't have
Speaker 5: time to stop even for the five seconds and write
Speaker 5: my answer down. So it's like and so, but then
Speaker 5: it does, Dick. I got to thinking about it and
Speaker 5: it gave me a little bit. I thought, does it
Speaker 5: give me a combetitive advantage? And so then I said
Speaker 5: something to Joey, one of the guys on the Rodeo team,
Speaker 5: and I even.
Speaker 2: Texted you and You're like, oh you cheater.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So Tommy, here here's why we're gonna name
Speaker 1: here's why the show's gonna called high and titty Tommy. Recently, Doug,
Speaker 1: my buddy Bubbly Doug Durren sends me a screenshot of
Speaker 1: an exchange he has a Tommy Tommy has this to
Speaker 1: say to Doug. Quick cow question. If you're milking a
Speaker 1: cow and it's a race, which utter or nipple are
Speaker 1: you going for? Is there something in particular I should
Speaker 1: be looking for in an utter? We're gonna dive into
Speaker 1: all that. Let's do because in due time, because I've
Speaker 1: pointed out a couple of times, we talked about a lot.
Speaker 1: You know, we came out with the shirt. We came
Speaker 1: out with the wild Cow Milker t shirt. Correct, because
Speaker 1: we dug deep here. We take our art, you know,
Speaker 1: we take our spending. Seriously, we dug deep and sponsored
Speaker 1: Tommy's wild Cow Milk and rodeo team for three hundred
Speaker 1: bucks and he sent me in. I shouldn't say this
Speaker 1: because people are gonna start pilfering my mailbox.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say it. You could, well, you could.
Speaker 1: Say, Tommy sent me the winnings in cash rolled up
Speaker 1: in a paper, and.
Speaker 3: You do that.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't do that.
Speaker 1: No, that's fine. So now they're just sitting on my
Speaker 1: desk like an envelope of cash that I need to
Speaker 1: go and find some way to integrate into. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: hand it off to somebody.
Speaker 2: I figured.
Speaker 1: That's why I like it, because I like to feel that.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a good feeling.
Speaker 5: When that judge hands you that water cash. You're like,
Speaker 5: there's a picture somewhere in me.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Hobby tournaments you guys done.
Speaker 5: That would be, uh the third one I think to
Speaker 5: this is our second year.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, I mean how many uh, how
Speaker 1: many rodeos you participated in so far this year?
Speaker 5: I think that's the third one. Oh, this this year?
Speaker 5: That's holdly, we only do two a year? You do
Speaker 5: two a year. When's the next one September. Oh that
Speaker 5: I knew there was more.
Speaker 1: To come, all right, So we got we recoup some
Speaker 1: of our money and the money is going into the
Speaker 1: Land Access Initiative, Media's Land Access Initiative, which we need
Speaker 1: to do. We need to We're gonna get heavy duty
Speaker 1: on raising some money for that initiative coming up. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna get into what because we had a lot
Speaker 1: of questions. A lot of questions came in about I
Speaker 1: don't understand how that's a thing. What wild cow milking,
Speaker 1: wild cow milking and rodeos. Oh, I mean people kind
Speaker 1: of get it like bull ride and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been exposed to that. That resonates with me. Team
Speaker 1: roping people will be like I've seen that around right,
Speaker 1: wild cow milking, they don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: It's like most rodeo events like have a they have
Speaker 5: a where they originated. You know, you have like tie
Speaker 5: down roping, calf roping where you tie down your calf
Speaker 5: and you got to go back to your saddle bags
Speaker 5: and grab your whatever. Shots go up give, but you
Speaker 5: had to make sure he was stay tied. That's why
Speaker 5: the time is set for I think it's five or
Speaker 5: six seconds. You cow's gotta stay tied while he's down.
Speaker 5: All these events have like beginnings.
Speaker 2: Like where they begin from. No, we'll get into the history.
Speaker 1: We're gonna do that pretty soon, and then we're gonna
Speaker 1: get We're also joining us here in the in the
Speaker 1: first light store is zeb Hogan. I have two ways
Speaker 1: to describe you, and they seem contradictory. One is host
Speaker 1: of nat Geo's Monster Fish Show or the United Nations
Speaker 1: Convention on Migratory Species Scientific counselor for fish just seems different.
Speaker 1: I would lean into the latter one because it sounds like,
Speaker 1: really the guy you'd want to talk to you if
Speaker 1: you want to talk about fish. And then you're also
Speaker 1: author of Chasing Giants in Search of the World's Largest
Speaker 1: Freshwater Fish, which is available now.
Speaker 3: Correct published last month, Yeah, polish.
Speaker 1: Last month and in it and I watched some things
Speaker 1: Krinn sent me, And what what really hooked me on
Speaker 1: talking to you is the question of how. Why is
Speaker 1: the question what is the big what is the biggest large? Sorry,
Speaker 1: the question what is the world's largest freshwater fish? Why?
Speaker 1: It takes a book to not quite answer that question.
Speaker 1: It's a rich question, and we're gonna get in a
Speaker 1: little bit into the richness of that question, which is
Speaker 1: definitions stacked on top of definitions, and also a a
Speaker 1: kind of a that that a lot of the the
Speaker 1: a lot of these fish that might be contenders are
Speaker 1: in an alarming state population wise. Yeah, it seems like
Speaker 1: the modern world is not friendly to huge freshwater fish.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna spend time on that. But first off,
Speaker 1: I want to jump back into what happens when you
Speaker 1: walk into the first Light store. So what happens when
Speaker 1: you walk into the first Light Store? I come in
Speaker 1: and I say Hi, Then what will happen?
Speaker 3: Man?
Speaker 4: The First Light Store is such an experience. The first
Speaker 4: thing I usually want to let people do is just
Speaker 4: kind of take a grasp what they're walking into. It's
Speaker 4: really cool. You get the whole first line product. Not
Speaker 4: anywhere in the world where you can see this. So
Speaker 4: when you walk in here, we've got a huge line.
Speaker 4: Even the First Light employees walk in, They're like, I
Speaker 4: didn't know we sold this much stuff?
Speaker 1: Oh boy? Yeah, everybody I've been in here with it's like, God,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that this was all here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's unbelievable. Between the waterfowl, the ladies line, all
Speaker 4: our Western big game, huge amount of product we can
Speaker 4: point a customer towards. So it's really cool. What I
Speaker 4: really like at the store is the ability to like
Speaker 4: see that customer, talk to the customer, and like figure
Speaker 4: out what they want to do in the world. Like,
Speaker 4: we've got a ton of people that are just doing
Speaker 4: elk hunts and Idaho, but then we get We've had
Speaker 4: people from every state in the country at this stage.
Speaker 3: Oh really yeah cool, So it's really cool.
Speaker 4: You know, we help out people that are doing their
Speaker 4: first Africa trips. We've got people going down to Mexico
Speaker 4: for mule deer. We've got all the sorts of waterfowl hunters,
Speaker 4: bear hunters this spring, We're all over in the store.
Speaker 4: So I just it's really cool to live vicariously through
Speaker 4: them and see what they're wanting to do and then
Speaker 4: to dial in what gear exactly they want. Super fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah where were you born? Where you brought up?
Speaker 4: I was born in Colorado, but I've been an Idaho
Speaker 4: boy now for most of my life. So I grew
Speaker 4: up in Idaha Falls for the most part, went to
Speaker 4: school up at University Idaho, up in Moscow, and I've
Speaker 4: been in the Wood River Valley now for about eighteen years.
Speaker 1: Oh, a long time.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I managed to store up and catch them a backpacking
Speaker 4: store and outdoor store for a long time, just to
Speaker 4: block away from the old First Light headquarters. So I
Speaker 4: was there from the beginning with friends, with all of
Speaker 4: that crew and watch the brand grow. And then when
Speaker 4: they came up with the idea of that store, it
Speaker 4: was something I could not say no to. It's too
Speaker 4: cool not to work here.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: How many people come in and they don't really know
Speaker 1: what they're walking into, and how many people come in
Speaker 1: knowing what they're up to?
Speaker 4: You know, I'd say a majority of the people come
Speaker 4: to check out the store. This is a destination store.
Speaker 4: People do trips around the store. So, but then we
Speaker 4: definitely have people to walk in here and they do
Speaker 4: like two or three steps and they there's a lot
Speaker 4: of cameo in here, and you can see them just
Speaker 4: do a reverse and walk out. It's just not the
Speaker 4: right store for what you're looking for. Yeah, So but
Speaker 4: the majority of people are so stoked to come check.
Speaker 3: Out the store.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And uh, Dom, walk me through. How did you
Speaker 1: come to what's the like the Australia the Haley Path
Speaker 1: to the typical Australia the Haley Path.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: See, it was always an outdoors blug. But I came
Speaker 6: over to America when I was fourteen and, uh, you know,
Speaker 6: kid reading a little the Rourke in Hemingway, I thought, uh,
Speaker 6: you know, I grew up fishing and hunting was the
Speaker 6: next step?
Speaker 3: Is?
Speaker 2: It often is?
Speaker 6: And I came over when I was fourteen and I
Speaker 6: went on a pheasant hunt and a coyote hunt, and
Speaker 6: it was probably the most miserable experience ever. Like you
Speaker 6: came over as a visitor, it came over as a
Speaker 6: visitor at the time. Yes, I had an old Model
Speaker 6: twenty one sixteen gauge that someone lent me and I
Speaker 6: went on peasant this pheasant hunt and there.
Speaker 3: Was no dog or anything.
Speaker 6: And it was on Blm Land in southern Idaho, and
Speaker 6: I think we got one bird up all day and
Speaker 6: I didn't have the gear, didn't have the gear at all,
Speaker 6: and I actually had frost nip on my hands and
Speaker 6: the one bird that flew up, I didn't even pull
Speaker 6: the trigger on because I couldn't work the safety.
Speaker 3: On that little Model twenty one.
Speaker 6: And at the end of the day, I was like, man,
Speaker 6: that's a miserable experience. But you know, going back to
Speaker 6: guys like you know, Teddy Roosevelt talking about this strenuous life,
Speaker 6: I was like, man, this really sucked, but I had
Speaker 6: a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: What is it in me that really enjoyed this? And
Speaker 3: ever since then, I was.
Speaker 6: Just absolutely obsessed.
Speaker 3: With Western hunting.
Speaker 6: So ever chance I got, every holiday, I'd come over
Speaker 6: to Idaho and hunt. I nearly got kicked out of
Speaker 6: college twice because I was trying to do that.
Speaker 1: But were you hunting in Australia too?
Speaker 3: A little bit?
Speaker 6: So I'm from Queensland and there's you know, a lot
Speaker 6: of Queenslanders and Australians listening to this. Know that Queensland
Speaker 6: does not define any game species of our game, so
Speaker 6: we have, you know, we have quite a quite a
Speaker 6: robust population of red deer and fallow deer and shittle
Speaker 6: deer and pigs. But they're not defined as game by
Speaker 6: the state. They're defined as pests. So it's a lot
Speaker 6: of control rather so than managing them as a as
Speaker 6: an actual asset to the people. So I did a
Speaker 6: bunch of that over there, A lot of bow hunting,
Speaker 6: but it just never did it to me in the
Speaker 6: way that Idaho managers game and the relationship with public
Speaker 6: lands here. So I knew as soon as I finished
Speaker 6: finished my education there and finished my time, I wanted
Speaker 6: to move over.
Speaker 1: Were you involved some kind of ranch and type radio
Speaker 1: tape activities over there?
Speaker 6: Yeah, So I always had a bit of a question
Speaker 6: for adventure. So my mate and I basically worked out,
Speaker 6: like what weeks we needed to be at college in
Speaker 6: which we didn't so that we could just scrape by
Speaker 6: and pass because.
Speaker 3: We want to do it to cowboy and hunt.
Speaker 6: That was basically our life over there, and Mum and
Speaker 6: Dad went too fond of it at the time, but
Speaker 6: you know, they understand it now. And I was very
Speaker 6: lucky my old man and my sister actually came out
Speaker 6: last year and we came on a hunt with me
Speaker 6: for the first time, and we were lucky enough to
Speaker 6: harvest and elk together and work our butts off for
Speaker 6: it and pack it out. And it's a very very
Speaker 6: very special experience. Have you guys married, No, at least
Speaker 6: this guy is married for a long.
Speaker 1: You've been married a long time fifteen.
Speaker 6: His wife's actually he's watched a hairdresser and one of
Speaker 6: the most highly acclaimed hairdressers in the valley.
Speaker 1: So you got like a revolt going against your wife.
Speaker 4: She you know, she tips a big game. How she
Speaker 4: doesn't like it, but she gets a glass of wine
Speaker 4: in hair and.
Speaker 1: She want to run her fingers through the back of
Speaker 1: your hair.
Speaker 4: It's got the Kavorka man, you can't.
Speaker 1: All right, So there you have it. So if you come,
Speaker 1: if you wind up anywhere in the vicinity, come down
Speaker 1: to our flagship first light store, only place on the
Speaker 1: planet right now where you can walk in touch stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a pretty neat experience.
Speaker 6: A couple of weird looking dudes get some great products
Speaker 6: in your hands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well now they know, now they know, Like it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: a couple of alarming looking fellas, but deep down, a
Speaker 1: couple of hearts of gold.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't go that far.
Speaker 4: We like to hunt, man, that's the most important part.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Ever, if you can speak to the equipment, that's great, man. Yeah, absolutely, well,
Speaker 1: thank you man. Thanks for letting us be down here too,
Speaker 1: because we had to lock the doors.
Speaker 4: Oh absolutely, Now, this is a really cool experience. That's
Speaker 4: awesome having you guys here.
Speaker 1: I'll point out that there was a person out there
Speaker 1: that wanted to come in who had a pretty very
Speaker 1: set She knew exactly what she wanted. Absolutely, that was
Speaker 1: an educated customer coming in.
Speaker 4: We get a lot of those, Definitely a lot of
Speaker 4: people they know exactly what they want to put their
Speaker 4: hands on. They just want to try it on, see
Speaker 4: what they need. A lot of times we can close
Speaker 4: that sale right here.
Speaker 1: Yes, she wasn't here to run her fingers through your hair.
Speaker 1: She was here to make a purchase. Oh you never know, man,
Speaker 1: All right, Tommy, thanks coming down now, help enlighten, enlighten
Speaker 1: people about the rodeo event called tell me what it's called?
Speaker 7: Do?
Speaker 1: I want to make sure I got it right.
Speaker 5: Technically, our turn our our event is called shoot Cow
Speaker 5: milking shoot cows.
Speaker 2: Basically you and you want me to just start like.
Speaker 1: The I want to know the history. I want souped nuts.
Speaker 5: As I understand it, the history is like basically you're
Speaker 5: loading cows like with manpower instead of with horsepower.
Speaker 2: And you know, basically the way that's.
Speaker 5: Kind of the crux or the beginning of how where
Speaker 5: that rodeo event started. What, as I understand it, how
Speaker 5: it works is your basic rodeo arena, your basic oval.
Speaker 5: One side is almost always grand stands. The other side
Speaker 5: is your bucking shoots, and you're where all your rough
Speaker 5: stock is bulls horses, bucking horses, whatever you have.
Speaker 2: In most standard proteo arenas, you have six bucket.
Speaker 5: Shoots three and three with a gap in the middle,
Speaker 5: may or may not be a gap in the middle.
Speaker 5: Wild cow milk and what they do is it's a
Speaker 5: three man team. You have three positions on that team.
Speaker 5: You have a milker, a mugger, and an anchor. Anchor
Speaker 5: is kind of self explanatory. Usually it's your biggest guy
Speaker 5: on the team, and he's a guy that usually is
Speaker 5: in charge of not letting go of that rope and
Speaker 5: can in case there's catastrophe, like two guys go down
Speaker 5: or one guy goes down, the big guy can usually
Speaker 5: just set down on his bend his knees and squat
Speaker 5: down and stop a cow or ski around or get
Speaker 5: drug around. But basically the mugger's job is to stop
Speaker 5: that cow you at some point. We'll get to that
Speaker 5: in a second. The milker's job is pretty self explanatory.
Speaker 5: His job is to milk it. They run six cows
Speaker 5: wild heifers into the bucking shoots. Usually there's an event
Speaker 5: of some kind going on, a drill team or a
Speaker 5: clown show going on about that time, so that each
Speaker 5: team draws a number out of a hat one through six,
Speaker 5: whatever durn number you draw. You draw number three. That's
Speaker 5: your cow, and that's your shoot. Shoot three. You inside.
Speaker 5: You take a rope alter. Everybody, every team has issued
Speaker 5: a rope pulter in a clear beer bottle like a
Speaker 5: Corona bottle. Yeah. Yeah, they're not making it easy on you.
Speaker 5: You take somebody's got to get in the shoot with
Speaker 5: the cow, put the rope alter on it, and usually
Speaker 5: you wait for the event to and they'll go through
Speaker 5: and announce everybody's sponsors.
Speaker 1: But they presumably they've checked to see if the cow
Speaker 1: is lactating.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, but that's something too as usually sometimes you
Speaker 5: do get one that's not nearly as moist as the
Speaker 5: rest of them.
Speaker 2: You know, you'll try it one once in a while.
Speaker 2: That's what hands my question to Bubbly Doug.
Speaker 5: You know, I want every upper hand I can get, yep,
Speaker 5: So I went straight to the man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but.
Speaker 5: Then the buzzer goes off and all six shoots open
Speaker 5: that you will all six guys open their shoots, and
Speaker 5: six cows come bull dozing out of there, and it's
Speaker 5: your job to stop them and not get run over.
Speaker 1: And there's eighteen people in the arena.
Speaker 2: Correct, the rules of.
Speaker 3: The of the.
Speaker 2: Of the event are.
Speaker 5: You cannot touch that cow with your hands until she
Speaker 5: crosses a chalk line about twenty five feet.
Speaker 2: Out in the arena.
Speaker 5: You can hold onto that rope, but you cannot physically
Speaker 5: touch that cow. Put your hands on that cow. As
Speaker 5: soon as she crosses the plane of that chalk line. Boy,
Speaker 5: she's fair game. And usually the go to move is
Speaker 5: just wrap her up in a headlock and just hang on, man,
Speaker 5: just don't let go. Okay, but there's a lot going
Speaker 5: on there too, because your anchor is usually trying. Once
Speaker 5: somebody gets a hold of her, an anchor will usually
Speaker 5: try to either stabilize her back end so she's not
Speaker 5: pivoting around in a circle because a milker is not
Speaker 5: going to be able to get her. But a good
Speaker 5: milker can milk her if she's moving, but not at
Speaker 5: a dead run.
Speaker 1: So so you do you try to snake that teat
Speaker 1: right down into that beer bottle.
Speaker 5: You try to squirt it into the squirt it in there.
Speaker 5: You need one good squirt. The last rule of it
Speaker 5: is one good squirt. You need one good squirt. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you don't got to fill the bottle. No, the rule
Speaker 5: is is that you go out once you.
Speaker 1: Find we just had it. We I'll point out we
Speaker 1: just had a where we did a deep dive on
Speaker 1: competition regulations. I was proudish thing. Yeah, yeah, one good
Speaker 1: squirt isn't gonna.
Speaker 2: Cut it for me. No, it's not gonna cut it
Speaker 2: for you.
Speaker 1: How who defines a good squirt?
Speaker 2: The judges?
Speaker 5: Because once, once you get once the milker yells the
Speaker 5: word milk, it's the mugger's position to pull the halter because.
Speaker 2: The milker has runner back up, back up.
Speaker 1: Okay, it runs out of guy's holding the rope, correct
Speaker 1: crosses the plane, somebody stops her. Okay, someone grabs it,
Speaker 1: and someone tries to stabilize it. The milker goes in
Speaker 1: with the bottle.
Speaker 2: Yep, okay, get some milk. The rules are that you
Speaker 2: need one drop to come out of that bottle in
Speaker 2: five seconds of it being upside down. But you gotta
Speaker 2: have the halter.
Speaker 5: That's what I was looking for and sprint all the
Speaker 5: way across the arena to in front of the grand stands,
Speaker 5: where there's a judge standing.
Speaker 2: There with a flag in a rope.
Speaker 5: When you step into when you step into that ring,
Speaker 5: she'll she'll draw, she'll throw a flag and say time.
Speaker 5: You got to turn that bottle upside down. And you
Speaker 5: got five seconds from that moment for one drop to
Speaker 5: produce a drip?
Speaker 2: One drop?
Speaker 1: How uh, here's the thing I struggle with. How if
Speaker 1: you put muttons? Okay, picture of dial and mutton busting
Speaker 1: is here, and bull riding is here? Where does this
Speaker 1: fit about dead Center?
Speaker 2: About dead Center? Nor? Yeah? Yeah, it's like it's it's
Speaker 2: just like a thing where like dudes that like like me.
Speaker 5: You know, I'm getting on and get into my mid forties,
Speaker 5: and my only good excuse is that, man, I just
Speaker 5: missed some good old girk conflict.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 2: You know, you can't get away with ragged on dudes
Speaker 2: in public anymore. You got to get into a rodeo
Speaker 2: for that.
Speaker 1: Man. Yeah, you got a boss at work. You know
Speaker 1: when I was a boy, he just went up and
Speaker 1: just beat somebody up me too. Guys. Now everybody's all touchy.
Speaker 2: You got a boss at work that's real. He likes
Speaker 2: to give his business, you.
Speaker 3: Know what I mean.
Speaker 2: And the guy at the gas station you know, I'm right, zep,
Speaker 2: the guy at the gas station that gave you a
Speaker 2: ration of it last week and.
Speaker 5: You let it go. But you can let all that
Speaker 5: girl out in the rodeo arena. What are you laughing at?
Speaker 3: Cream? It's true. It's so true, man.
Speaker 2: So that's all you're looking for, just and a and
Speaker 2: a buckle. I want first place, of course. I'm a
Speaker 2: competitive dude.
Speaker 1: Don't want to win, and you want there to be
Speaker 1: cold hard cash at the end of right and a
Speaker 1: sweet T shirt and a sweet T shirt. How did
Speaker 1: you first become aware of it?
Speaker 5: A good friend of mine from high school? And uh,
Speaker 5: they running? Do We compete against them in that rodeo
Speaker 5: twice a season and they run in other ones. And
Speaker 5: We've been buddy since, you know, high school. I've seen
Speaker 5: him do it at the rodeo and I ran into
Speaker 5: him out to dinner one night at a little kind
Speaker 5: of local pub, water and whole place, and I'm like,
Speaker 5: you ever get down and man, I'll jump in there.
Speaker 5: You need a man on the team.
Speaker 2: He's in. Uh. I was like, you get down too,
Speaker 2: I might need I might know somebody else. It's interested.
Speaker 2: He's like, y'all to just start your own team.
Speaker 1: You only need one more.
Speaker 2: Like you know what, Joshua point yeah, no, yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: a beat him for a buckle. I beat him this week,
Speaker 2: this last one. You did you know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know that joke where you say that you're
Speaker 1: milking the cow. My dad did this to me and
Speaker 1: you say, hey, did you know there's always a star
Speaker 1: on the end of a cow's teeth and you go
Speaker 1: to look and.
Speaker 2: Right in the face. No, I never got that.
Speaker 1: That's a good joke.
Speaker 2: That is a good joke.
Speaker 1: My old man he had a buddy. So he had
Speaker 1: a buddy that ran that was a ran a dairy place,
Speaker 1: and my old man and go down there, and the
Speaker 1: way I remember, man, he'd always be coming back with
Speaker 1: that milk, but no pasture eyed milk. And like in
Speaker 1: my head, I'm sure it wasn't true. In my head,
Speaker 1: I remember that there was grass, it's like moss in there,
Speaker 1: and we hated it, man, and we would call it
Speaker 1: cow's milk. He'd be like, the hell you take all
Speaker 1: the other milk? Kids, you know, like no, not cow's
Speaker 1: milk all layered out the fridge like like I said,
Speaker 1: I remember it with like chunks of grass in there,
Speaker 1: and oh, we did not like that milk. But guy
Speaker 1: had some of it recently at my buddy's dairy place
Speaker 1: where super chilled. It goes into that like oh, it's
Speaker 1: like thirty three thirty two point one degrees or whatever. Man,
Speaker 1: it is good, dude. Yeah, but when I was a
Speaker 1: little kid, I was definitely afraid of that milk.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You ever take a big swig after that competition?
Speaker 5: Oh No, it's usually reserved for in front of the judges.
Speaker 2: But you know, I'd be game. Yep.
Speaker 1: You know when someone asked a question and they're sort
Speaker 1: of like acting like they're asking a hypothetical question, but
Speaker 1: you realize they're actually asking a question. No, it'd be
Speaker 1: like one of those questions. It's like, let's just say, Okay,
Speaker 1: this guy writes in this big, long letter about recovering
Speaker 1: a k Craig. If I get some of this wrong,
Speaker 1: I'm trying. It's a long letter. Basically a dog gets
Speaker 1: killed and they wind up with a fawn and say
Speaker 1: also that his wife is producing someone in the family
Speaker 1: is producing way more milk than their kid can drink.
Speaker 1: Like I remember my wife, she'd have so much she'd
Speaker 1: be feeding the baby and filling the freezer with frozen
Speaker 1: bags of milk. So he's like, let's just say, would
Speaker 1: that be good milk for that baby fawn?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Am I getting this more or less correct?
Speaker 2: You lost me his wife's milk? H Oh, okay, now
Speaker 2: you got me back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I don't know what the're right to him?
Speaker 2: Uh cholesterrum.
Speaker 1: We haven't replied, Oh, because we.
Speaker 2: Have an answer or not a real answer.
Speaker 1: Oh half a finger weighed in on it.
Speaker 2: Oh, he's the man for the question.
Speaker 1: But you know this just came up, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: bring it up again. The half a finger brought up
Speaker 1: a great point, and I feel like raising it twice
Speaker 1: because how throughout your entire life you have been told
Speaker 1: if you touch a phone, it's mother will abandon it.
Speaker 1: Like how many times have you heard that?
Speaker 2: Growing up? Including birds too? You were always told to
Speaker 2: never touch birds either.
Speaker 1: Halfle finger brings up a great point where he's like
Speaker 1: half a fingers Like all the collaring research that is
Speaker 1: done on funds, right, they net them tranquilize and whatever,
Speaker 1: handle them, draw blood, wave them. If what you've been
Speaker 1: told your whole life was true, all of that would
Speaker 1: be in vain because those fauns would all be dead.
Speaker 1: But they're not.
Speaker 2: That's a good point.
Speaker 1: When you go to a bear den and they work
Speaker 1: up bears in a bear den, s, what are they
Speaker 1: doing handling all of them everything? They got them inside
Speaker 1: their coat. Yeah, I see where they got them in
Speaker 1: their coat to warm them up. But then on the
Speaker 1: same hand, you're told your whole life the minute you
Speaker 1: touch it, it will be abandoned. Helffle Fingers first point.
Speaker 1: The doe wasn't dead. Helfel Fingers first point. The fawn
Speaker 1: is not abandoned, hundred percent sure of that. Does spend
Speaker 1: almost zero time within sight of the fawn only to nurse,
Speaker 1: and then they leave them for many more hours. My
Speaker 1: son had a new burn newborn fawn in his yard
Speaker 1: last week against the backyard fence in Texas, and my
Speaker 1: brother did the week before in Wisconsin. It happens all
Speaker 1: the time, and they are not abandoned. Stepping away from
Speaker 1: Halfflefinger for meant to remind bear hunters of something uh
Speaker 1: I have watched like almost anywhere you go pretty much
Speaker 1: anywhere you go, anywhere you go on the lower forty eight,
Speaker 1: anywhere you go on eighties.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Ninety percent of Alaska, you're not allowed. During blackbirar season,
Speaker 1: you're allowed. You're not allowed to kill asau with cubs.
Speaker 1: Most people in granted, don't get a lot of opportunities. Most
Speaker 1: people site check it like is it got a cub? Nope,
Speaker 1: But likewise, in the early spring on their first So
Speaker 1: those babies are born, right, they're born in February January,
Speaker 1: and they come out, and that early spring when they
Speaker 1: come out, she probably has that thing hidden. I have
Speaker 1: watched sows have a have on an avalanche slide. I've
Speaker 1: watched sows put their cubs in the brush and go
Speaker 1: out and feeding that avalanche slide for thirty minutes, and
Speaker 1: go back in and check on that cub and go
Speaker 1: back out into the avalanche slide. And you would, if
Speaker 1: you were just watching her, you'd be like, oh, she
Speaker 1: doesn't have a cub.
Speaker 3: Really, well, there's your argument for bay biting right there.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: Where are that louse? He's leveraging this for political purposes?
Speaker 3: Don't get me started.
Speaker 1: We want to protect that in this stet. So yeah,
Speaker 1: is it that risk?
Speaker 4: I think it's at risk everywhere.
Speaker 1: Sure it is. Oh yeah, well you get Clay nukeomb
Speaker 1: started on a subject.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, lusty or to yeah, big time.
Speaker 4: I was talking to Clay this week about bear hunting.
Speaker 4: We shot a bear on Wednesday and couldn't find it.
Speaker 4: I heard a death mone right before dark and I
Speaker 4: could not find it. And masters tell me it's like,
Speaker 4: oh yeah, that bear is dead somewhere right in the timber.
Speaker 4: And got in there that morning with a dog and
Speaker 4: found it right away.
Speaker 3: Oh great, Yeah, it's cool.
Speaker 2: Still good, it's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Back to Heffelfinger. The notion that human scent will
Speaker 1: cause the mother to abandon it is an old wives
Speaker 1: tale perpetuated by biologists to keep people from touching newborn fawns.
Speaker 1: Researchers handle fawns all the time, and although they use
Speaker 1: gloves to minimize scent transfer, the mother does not abandon
Speaker 1: the fawns. The farmer anecdote is more proof of that
Speaker 1: maternal instinct is strong. Number three right, Tommy, I'm ready.
Speaker 1: Human breast milk is better than whole milk from a cow.
Speaker 1: Again see number one above. Don't touch the fon. I'm
Speaker 1: sure a faun would gain weight nicely on human breast milk.
Speaker 1: But a better use for all that breast milk is
Speaker 1: the soak dove breasts in it before wrapping and baking
Speaker 1: and grilling. He says, That's why they call it breast milk.
Speaker 1: I like Jim Dude, he's the funniest guy in the
Speaker 1: world that he's a fuddice guy in the world. So uh,
Speaker 1: any more, you'd like to add about your about about
Speaker 1: your competition, because I got another question I want to
Speaker 1: pursue with you. H We're coming for buckles in September,
Speaker 1: are you?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, Me and the rest of and the rest
Speaker 2: of the team, Joe Wee, Steve Maby We're coming.
Speaker 1: And what's the buckle saying on it?
Speaker 2: Usually I think they say shoot cow milker or champion.
Speaker 1: Champion, Yeah, like, but you rest your arm on that.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And then here's my other question for you while I
Speaker 1: got here, Can you give me give me a layman
Speaker 1: like a like a like a Joe blow, like a
Speaker 1: Joe blow. Washington perspective on what's going on with the
Speaker 1: with with the with your Guys Game Commission in Washington
Speaker 1: funny you ask, can I can I give you further
Speaker 1: endorsement please. Tommy is the kind of a hunter and
Speaker 1: fishermen who instead of just sitting around complaining, follows and
Speaker 1: is involved in his follows and isn't involved in his
Speaker 1: states wildlife management.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you keep yourself educated as most as best I can.
Speaker 5: You said it best when you said Layman's because like
Speaker 5: I don't. There's a lot I'm very trusting and that's
Speaker 5: probably a problem given the current state of our commission.
Speaker 5: Our commission has been a lot of guys that use
Speaker 5: the word compromised, and a lot of guys use the
Speaker 5: words infiltrated. But there's definitely some red flags going up
Speaker 5: about what's going on in our commission.
Speaker 1: And you guys have a governor appointed game commission of
Speaker 1: how many folks nine folks nine folk?
Speaker 5: That way, there can never be a split, you know,
Speaker 5: typically it's x amount, or it's so many from the
Speaker 5: eastern side of the state, and typically and so many
Speaker 5: from the western side of the state. I think that
Speaker 5: is that way because the western side of the state
Speaker 5: tends to be standing in a different place than the
Speaker 5: eastern side of the state as far as politics, and
Speaker 5: it makes it in the past.
Speaker 1: It's remember it if you looked at it on a
Speaker 1: map and you imagine it split apart and the parts fell.
Speaker 1: The side that would fall to the right correct leans
Speaker 1: to the right. That's great way. I'm never going to
Speaker 1: forget that.
Speaker 2: That is a good way.
Speaker 1: That is a side that falls to the left right.
Speaker 5: There's uh, there's some serious like red flags and question
Speaker 5: marks being raised in Washington's game commission as far as
Speaker 5: decision making.
Speaker 2: Totally ignoring the biologists that are paid to.
Speaker 5: Do the studies they do to find out to come
Speaker 5: to the facts we do. We lost our spring bear
Speaker 5: season mm hmm, but like we don't. And it's because
Speaker 5: interest groups. People that love animals don't want other people
Speaker 5: that love animals killing animals is basically what it's coming to.
Speaker 1: The approach they've taken is historically those game commissions have
Speaker 1: been populated by people with skin in the game. I
Speaker 1: mean that. I don't know if that's the point. I
Speaker 1: think I know what you mean. Well, people from fisheries outfitters, right,
Speaker 1: It's been people who are like who generally have It's
Speaker 1: been people who come from varying perspectives that would be
Speaker 1: in support of the general I idea of the North
Speaker 1: American model of wildlife conservation, meaning that we have a
Speaker 1: renewable resource that's like that wildlife is a citizen owned
Speaker 1: renewable resource held in trust by an agency that assesses
Speaker 1: and allocates the resource in a democratic fashion with an
Speaker 1: eye toward people utilizing it but not damaging it in
Speaker 1: the long term. And the new trend there is to
Speaker 1: be like, well, there should be people on the Game
Speaker 1: Commission who are opposed to hunting. There should be animal
Speaker 1: rights people on the Game Commission. There should be zoo
Speaker 1: keepers on the Game Commission.
Speaker 2: Correct. Correct, And.
Speaker 5: Where we're at now is that there's a new draft
Speaker 5: policy and I think there's some litigation that's been done
Speaker 5: or taken action against them.
Speaker 2: As a rebuttal to this, to completely like.
Speaker 5: Basically rewrite the goal for Department Official Wildlife's Commission in
Speaker 5: and of itself, it's unfortunate, And look, I'm not the
Speaker 5: best at when it comes to complaining about things.
Speaker 2: I'm just not. I'll just find a way to do
Speaker 2: what I want to do in a manner.
Speaker 5: But so maybe I'm not the best spokesman. It's unfortunate
Speaker 5: that now we don't have the luxury as sportsmen in
Speaker 5: Washington to sit around on our laurels and just complain
Speaker 5: about it because I as soon as I hear it
Speaker 5: from somebody that I know for a fact is never
Speaker 5: sent an email to the Commission, has never done the
Speaker 5: homework or cited a study. That adds to the fact
Speaker 5: that we're trying to work under the North American mettle
Speaker 5: of water wildlife Management. Why are we going away from this?
Speaker 5: Because that's what we're doing. I shut down and we're done.
Speaker 5: We don't have the luxury of it anymore. We have
Speaker 5: to be involved in Washington. We all have to. There's
Speaker 5: no more finger pointing all the tribes took them all,
Speaker 5: or all the fly fishermen are getting the best water.
Speaker 2: We all have to get enough of that shit. We
Speaker 2: all got to come together. That's enough of it. You know.
Speaker 1: Well, I've talked a bunch like I'm a believer and slipper.
Speaker 1: I'm a believer in slippery slopes. A lot of people aren't,
Speaker 1: but I think there are, Like I think I think
Speaker 1: Wildlife Management that there is a slippery slope. There's a
Speaker 1: playbook that it goes by. You're generally going to go
Speaker 1: after Like if you go and pull there. There's some
Speaker 1: recent polling stuff recently some polling data that if you
Speaker 1: phrase it a certain way, over eighty percent of Americans
Speaker 1: support regulated Depending on how you phrase it, you can
Speaker 1: get over eighty percent of Americans or maybe it's seventy
Speaker 1: eight right now support regulated hunting and fishing. The minute
Speaker 1: you put specificity, it goes down. So I say you
Speaker 1: do you do you support scientific base regulated hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing and be like, well, of course, And I'd be like,
Speaker 1: do you support someone using a dog to hunt? Oh wow,
Speaker 1: I don't know about that, right.
Speaker 2: Do you support them using a gun? You know?
Speaker 1: I don't know about that, right, So it starts the
Speaker 1: specifics peel away, right the playbook and attacking hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing is to peel out, to peel out the easy parts,
Speaker 1: meaning you would never go you would never start a
Speaker 1: group that, you would never start a group that was
Speaker 1: out in front of whole foods collecting signatures to ban
Speaker 1: hunting and fishing in Washington State. It'd be a fool's
Speaker 1: Errand instead you'd go and be like, Okay, we're going
Speaker 1: to go after spring bear season because there's the issue
Speaker 1: of cubs. We're going to go after using dogs, because
Speaker 1: there's a a in my view, completely like a completely
Speaker 1: bogus argument of fair chase. We're going to go after
Speaker 1: and then it'll be anything with dogs. Uh, we're gonna
Speaker 1: go after steel traps, followed by conna bears and snares.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go right and you you slowly dismantle it. Sure,
Speaker 1: and if you if you understood, if you went and
Speaker 1: looked at what the people driving that's private conversations are
Speaker 1: Their private conversations aren't that they have a problem with
Speaker 1: the particulars. The private conversation is that they have a
Speaker 1: problem with the whole thing. But this is the most
Speaker 1: productive way to go after it. I think too many people,
Speaker 1: I think too many people that would that would articulate
Speaker 1: a support for hunters and anglers would think that they're
Speaker 1: never gonna get that as they whittle away, they're never
Speaker 1: gonna get to the stuff. I like, right, you mean
Speaker 1: you're like an upland bird hunter, you'd be saying yourself,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but like they're never gonna like come around
Speaker 1: for me, you know, So I'm not gonna get involved
Speaker 1: because they're never gonna get to me.
Speaker 2: That's exactly true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people think that way, But I think that if
Speaker 1: you look at I think that if you do a
Speaker 1: case study of some issues in Washington, you do a
Speaker 1: case study of some issues in California. I think that
Speaker 1: most anybody that does any extractive use of renewable natural resources,
Speaker 1: like wildlife resources, would at some point be like, man,
Speaker 1: I probably should start paying attention to this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 5: You know, Monday mornings have become my mornings for what
Speaker 5: I call hate mail. It's not because I'm sending off
Speaker 5: nasty messages. It's because I hate the fact that I
Speaker 5: have to sit down and spend twenty minutes on my
Speaker 5: Monday mornings sending off these emails to these wildlife commissions
Speaker 5: about this topic.
Speaker 2: The only thing we can do, man, is just get involved.
Speaker 2: You have to send off the you have to do it.
Speaker 5: We have to do it in Washington anymore, because they're
Speaker 5: gonna come. I mean, predators are up next. Commissioner Baker
Speaker 5: has talked about it. I hate to name drop, but
Speaker 5: it's true, has talked about want to do away with
Speaker 5: coyote hunting.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 2: Back last spring when we were having this spring bear
Speaker 2: just discussion, they wanted to do away with any and
Speaker 2: all spring hunting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then turkeys, like do you know?
Speaker 2: And then when that was brought up that I'm not
Speaker 2: gonna name who in question brought that up, but they
Speaker 2: didn't even know turkeys were hunted in the spring.
Speaker 5: That's how far out of our square we have a
Speaker 5: trying to fit a square through a round hole in
Speaker 5: the block box.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, but what's the what's your
Speaker 1: guys governor's stance been on this?
Speaker 5: He's pretty silent on it, and he's the one to
Speaker 5: put Yeah, it's best I can understand.
Speaker 2: I think he's included in the litigation. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's uh, you know, like in the Constitution they say,
Speaker 1: like the rules to be president, like you gotta be whatever,
Speaker 1: forty sure, you gotta be born here and in America
Speaker 1: they should be that you gotta hunt and fish.
Speaker 2: I agree. If you're gonna make rules on it, you
Speaker 2: should have to do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't have to worry about all this garbage.
Speaker 2: I agree.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Tommy, You're welcome. You got any more you
Speaker 1: want to add? How much money could you win at
Speaker 1: the best if you did the best, if you did like,
Speaker 1: what's the possible winnings for the next rodeo.
Speaker 2: Best.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how much money was going that envelope you already
Speaker 1: sent me.
Speaker 5: I'm not gonna say more than one hundred and fifty bucks,
Speaker 5: less than three hundred bucks.
Speaker 1: So when it's all said and done, we have made
Speaker 1: money or lost money, you'll make money.
Speaker 2: You'll make a little money.
Speaker 3: Good.
Speaker 1: I don't want any kind of pencil pushers. No, no, no.
Speaker 5: At the very high end of it. I think the
Speaker 5: very high end of it. I think we're looking at
Speaker 5: at least six hundred bucks.
Speaker 1: Oh double. You're gonna have people lining up to invest
Speaker 1: in you. Man, good, send three hundred to get in.
Speaker 1: You can double your money. You can't do that on
Speaker 1: the stop. I didn't.
Speaker 2: I gave you that offer. That offer doesn't stand for
Speaker 2: everybody else. Yeah, sponsorship changes. I might start keeping some
Speaker 2: of the money.
Speaker 1: We'll see, all right, Tommy, stay tuned, because you're gonna
Speaker 1: have a lot to say about this big about this question.
Speaker 1: Uh Zeb Hogan, host of Gels Monster Fish, author of
Speaker 1: Chasing Giants in Search of the world's largest freshwater fish,
Speaker 1: and United Nations Convention on Migratory Species Scientific counselor for
Speaker 1: fish who came up with that title. Did you make
Speaker 1: that title up?
Speaker 3: No, they did.
Speaker 1: The help title you would be the u n COOMSSCFF.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's only United Nations group I've ever been involved with,
Speaker 3: but there are a lot of names like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, got it? So what uh I know, I know
Speaker 1: you can't answer this. We can't answer this. But if
Speaker 1: I come to you and I say, hey, man, what
Speaker 1: is the world's biggest freshwater fish? Tell me all of
Speaker 1: the hemin and han that needs to go into that answer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's how this all started. Yeah, I was
Speaker 3: working in Thailand two thousand and five. Did my PhD
Speaker 3: there on uh oh, migratory fish, migratory catfish of the
Speaker 3: Maekong River. Yeah, looking at the impacted dams on migratory fish.
Speaker 3: Most fish are migratory in the Maykong, so they're getting
Speaker 3: like salmon, and so they're moving for what purpose for
Speaker 3: spawning and also so the Maykong there's a huge flood pulse,
Speaker 3: so water comes up increases tenfold in the rainy season
Speaker 3: from the dry season, and the fish they spawn. Surgeon
Speaker 3: will do the same thing, but they'll spawn during the
Speaker 3: floods and all those fish get dispersed.
Speaker 1: Downstream, they spawn up high.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they spawn not not necessarily the headwaters, but like
Speaker 3: in the upstream spawning areas, and then the fish all
Speaker 3: go in the.
Speaker 1: Floodplain tributaries are in the Meo.
Speaker 3: In the Maykong or there's like a thousand species of
Speaker 3: fish in the Makong, so they are they really Yeah,
Speaker 3: so they do everything, but like a couple hundred.
Speaker 2: A thousand species of fish.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so more more species in the Maykong than they're
Speaker 3: in the United States.
Speaker 2: What.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the second most diverse. Amazon has over four
Speaker 3: thousand species.
Speaker 2: Huh. That's man.
Speaker 3: Tropical tropical big tropical rivers have a lot of different
Speaker 3: kinds of fish and a lot of big fish. So
Speaker 3: that's how I got involved. I was doing my PHDT
Speaker 3: there working with local fishermen. The fisherman that I was
Speaker 3: working with caught a six hundred and forty six pound
Speaker 3: catfish and you saw it. I saw. This is how
Speaker 3: I first got involved. So when I was doing my
Speaker 3: PhD in nineteen ninety seven, I saw a fisherman catch
Speaker 3: one of those fish for the first time, and I
Speaker 3: I had no idea that fish got that big in
Speaker 3: fresh water, Like you see something that big, four hundred,
Speaker 3: five hundred pounds. The one I saw was like five
Speaker 3: hundred pounds. I've seen many since then, but the first
Speaker 3: one I saw was big.
Speaker 1: And this is hook and liner net net. Okay, And
Speaker 1: so that's so that's just making a mess out of
Speaker 1: that net.
Speaker 3: It's a big net. It it's just the meshes like that.
Speaker 3: It's just a big only designed for that fish.
Speaker 1: I s yeah, okay, okay.
Speaker 3: So it's a traditional they've been fishing that way forever.
Speaker 3: It's a only during that few weeks only using that
Speaker 3: kind of net, specifically catching.
Speaker 1: There after hogs after job.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And there's a ceremony associated with it, really. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they're doing it for commercial purposes, like they're selling fish.
Speaker 3: They sell it, no, but they only catch I mean,
Speaker 3: the whole time I've been working with them, they probably
Speaker 3: caught ten of them. So it's not like you're not
Speaker 3: gonna make a lot of money.
Speaker 1: Got it?
Speaker 2: Got it?
Speaker 3: So the first time I saw it was in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety seven. This is right up in the Golden Triangle area,
Speaker 3: right where Thailand Laos and Miramar meat, so way up
Speaker 3: in the northern part of Thailand. First time I saw
Speaker 3: the fish was ninety seven. That's when I realized these
Speaker 3: things were out there, got interested, started doing my PhD.
Speaker 3: And then in two thousand and five, the same club,
Speaker 3: like the same group of fishermen caught the six hundred
Speaker 3: and forty six pound fish, and so that's when I
Speaker 3: just asked the question that you've been asking with it,
Speaker 3: which is is this the world's largest freshwater fish?
Speaker 1: And how impressed were they by that fish?
Speaker 3: They didn't they didn't realize it was the world's largest fish.
Speaker 1: But I mean were they were they saying to themselves, no,
Speaker 1: this is the biggest one we've ever heard of, or
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, that's kind of what they're.
Speaker 3: Like, that's kind of no. So the guys who caught it,
Speaker 3: it's a team five guys, and they were on there.
Speaker 3: They were students on their summer break, like young, young guys,
Speaker 3: and they barred their uncle's boat, went out. You take turns,
Speaker 3: so it's there's like one lane where you can drop
Speaker 3: the net and the fishermen take turns. It's a floating net,
Speaker 3: so you drop it, it floats down for like a coometer.
Speaker 3: If you don't catch anything, you pull back in. The
Speaker 3: next guy goes, next group goes, next group goes. So
Speaker 3: these guys were young kids, like on their summer break
Speaker 3: from school, and they happen to catch this fish. And
Speaker 3: so the club had been keeping records of how big
Speaker 3: the fish were that they caught all the way back
Speaker 3: to like nineteen eighty and so I just went back
Speaker 3: and looked at those records. I said, this is the
Speaker 3: biggest one they've ever caught.
Speaker 2: I gotcha.
Speaker 3: They didn't to them. I mean, it was a big fish,
Speaker 3: but you know they're all four or five, six hundred pounds. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm with you, And so they didn't realize, and so
Speaker 3: I sort of said, hey, is this the world's largest
Speaker 3: freshwater fish?
Speaker 1: Like is that? Like you were asking, is this specific
Speaker 1: fish the world's large.
Speaker 3: Biggest freshwater fish that's ever been caught? And so you
Speaker 3: mentioned earlier like the definitions, there's only one for all
Speaker 3: of this work. There's only one definition or only one criteria,
Speaker 3: which is the fish has to spend its whole life
Speaker 3: in fresh water.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I don't know how fair that is. That's
Speaker 1: kind of one one of the main reasons I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you about it. So let me get kathaway
Speaker 1: with it. For instance, Sure, Okay, when we were when
Speaker 1: we were doing our Fishing Game cookbook, we had the
Speaker 1: fish broken out saltwater fresh water, and it came up
Speaker 1: with a question of salmon, right, and we debated back
Speaker 1: and forth. Is it freshwater saltwater? My brother Danny studies
Speaker 1: salmon the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I said, hey, man,
Speaker 1: what do you think about it, Sam? Is it freshwater
Speaker 1: salt water? And he said, you know, it spends the
Speaker 1: bulk of its life in salt water, but it's born
Speaker 1: and it dies in fresh water. So if I had
Speaker 1: to put it somewhere, I would put it like like
Speaker 1: those key that like key moment. I would put the
Speaker 1: salmon in the freshwater section, which is what we did.
Speaker 1: By God, But.
Speaker 3: Why do you why do you have to choose? Why
Speaker 3: do you have to pick?
Speaker 1: Because the cookbooks only we didn't want to make it.
Speaker 1: We didn't want to make a category that had like
Speaker 1: bull sharks, salmon and straight baths or I don't know whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know in American eels.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this, like the criteria is just it's just
Speaker 3: for the I'm a research professor at the University of Aderina.
Speaker 1: So you guys like you guys like the off you skate.
Speaker 3: No, but it's not it's not splitting. It's a simple
Speaker 3: criteria that fish, that particular fish has had to be
Speaker 3: spent its whole life in freshwater. That's the only criteria.
Speaker 1: Okay, how do you know one of them I want
Speaker 1: to move on from this, But how do you know
Speaker 1: that one of them big ass cats didn't one day
Speaker 1: go down and get into brackish water.
Speaker 3: Well that's what that's what that's what we study.
Speaker 1: Okay, what happened?
Speaker 3: They don't?
Speaker 1: Oh, all right, there you go.
Speaker 2: I think the interview is over.
Speaker 3: They just don't.
Speaker 1: They don't like brackish water.
Speaker 3: Some fish do. But you know, the point or the
Speaker 3: sort of the work that I do, and the point
Speaker 3: of the asking the question was that if you if
Speaker 3: you just ask, okay, what's the biggest freshwater fish? Then
Speaker 3: you have white surgeon bluga surgeon in Europe they can
Speaker 3: get like three thousand pounds.
Speaker 1: So what's the great lake surgeon? Lake surgeon that they
Speaker 1: just not contenders.
Speaker 3: They don't get big enough. But okay, but they only
Speaker 3: fresh water yeakay, so there's actually they would count for you.
Speaker 3: Soty River in northern Idaho has a population of white
Speaker 3: surgeon that does not go down to the ocean.
Speaker 7: So does the Snake River, Yeah, because of the dams. Yeah,
Speaker 7: oh yeah, that's another that's anotherness there. But there are
Speaker 7: some sturgeon that choose not to go to it's just
Speaker 7: their ecology, okay, yeah, and so one of those could
Speaker 7: be a contender.
Speaker 1: Or do you have to not because the species will
Speaker 1: go to saltwater?
Speaker 3: The fish just the fish.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're interested in the individual fish.
Speaker 3: But as a way to learn about all these fish,
Speaker 3: like the the reason why this is an interesting question,
Speaker 3: Like I didn't I didn't know what I was asking
Speaker 3: when I said, Hey, is this the world's largest freshwater fish?
Speaker 3: What makes it interesting is we don't know, and we
Speaker 3: don't know anything about these fish. So there are probably
Speaker 3: forty species of fish that get over six feet long
Speaker 3: or weigh more than two hundred pounds in fresh water
Speaker 3: in the world out and they're over fifteen thousand freshwater fish.
Speaker 3: So you're talking like just a small number of fish that.
Speaker 2: Hit me in North America. Hit me with what we got.
Speaker 3: Alligator gar white white sturgeons.
Speaker 1: Also back up on the parameter six feet in length and.
Speaker 8: What was the way or over two hundred pounds either
Speaker 8: six feet long or over two hundred pounds, and we
Speaker 8: got go ahead. Alligator gar, alligator gar, Mississippi American paddlefish, white,
Speaker 8: certain populations of white sturgeon, lake sturgeon. Some people say
Speaker 8: Colorado pike minnow used to get that big. They don't
Speaker 8: really anymore, But that's North America's largest minnow. About blue
Speaker 8: cats blue cat, blue cats and flathead get.
Speaker 3: Up to about one hundred what's the record these days?
Speaker 3: I think the records about hundred fifty pounds.
Speaker 1: So they don't break, they don't break.
Speaker 3: But you read like old like Mark Twain, or you
Speaker 3: read old accounts from eighteen hundreds. There are accounts of
Speaker 3: catfish that big you don't know whether, you don't know what.
Speaker 1: Like hawk Finn looking at it there and he says
Speaker 1: it's two hundred pounds.
Speaker 5: What about What about the old tales about guys in
Speaker 5: the eighteen hundreds dragon white sturgeon out of the Columbia
Speaker 5: with teams all, Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true as far as I know. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean surgeon, white surgeon fifteen feet.
Speaker 1: But those are saltwater fish, though.
Speaker 3: They're fish that don't spend their whole lives with fresh water.
Speaker 3: They're they're they're an adamus fish. They move back and forth.
Speaker 3: There's not there are lots of fish like that, but
Speaker 3: the ones that move back and forth they can get
Speaker 3: bigger because they typically when fish are out in the ocean,
Speaker 3: generally they have access to more food and.
Speaker 1: God, they're able to utilize marine resources. And yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so go on on the numbers.
Speaker 3: Oh so yeah, so it's just a small number. I
Speaker 3: think that's it. So, I mean.
Speaker 1: There's I thought there's fifteen.
Speaker 3: They're there are like thirty or forty big fish all
Speaker 3: over the world, Okay, and there we have it in
Speaker 3: the US we have five or six.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm sorry, I thought fifteen, and they get really big.
Speaker 1: So just a small little collection. Yeah, let me just
Speaker 1: there's the thing I can't move on from because I
Speaker 1: want to understand it. You know, when you hear a
Speaker 1: crazy story and you probably know this better then some
Speaker 1: bull shark go away?
Speaker 3: The hell? Up?
Speaker 1: The how far did a bull shark go up? With
Speaker 1: the Mississippi so like Illinois.
Speaker 3: I had a book when I was a kid that's
Speaker 3: had them in the Great Lakes. I think they're I
Speaker 3: don't want I don't want to say something that's not true.
Speaker 3: But the book I had when I was little said
Speaker 3: that they made it all the way up to the
Speaker 3: way up they will, is there that's unusual?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, very unusual, right, But I'm just it's a
Speaker 1: physiology question. Yeah, if you look at a shark that
Speaker 1: they can go and spend like we're in at least
Speaker 1: an individual can go and spend presumably months in fresh water. Uh, physiologically,
Speaker 1: like could two of them go what? Why can't two
Speaker 1: of them go up and reproduce in fresh water? Or
Speaker 1: is it or is it open that they maybe could
Speaker 1: or like, like what what winds up happening to them?
Speaker 3: Bull Sharks as far as I know, don't breed in freshwater,
Speaker 3: So it is physiological, but I don't know why that is.
Speaker 3: They're they're very adaptable. They can live in saltwater, they
Speaker 3: can live in fresh water. They don't breed in freshwater
Speaker 3: as far as I know.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, there has to be some barrier because they're
Speaker 1: there's not reproducing populations of them up in the Great
Speaker 1: Lakes whatever, yeah, yeah, or wherever the hell, right, So
Speaker 1: there's some like reason why it doesn't work, but it's
Speaker 1: that's not well understood now.
Speaker 3: But you have another. So three of the largest freshwater
Speaker 3: fish are freshwater stingrays, which are related to sharks, and
Speaker 3: the species I study the most is just a species
Speaker 3: in Southeast Asia get over six hundred pounds freshwater stingray
Speaker 3: and it breeds in freshwater, so it it'll do that
Speaker 3: every every every fish is different, yep.
Speaker 1: And the fact that you can take this is always
Speaker 1: puzzled me as well. Is that you can take stripe bass,
Speaker 1: which are right, it's an anagamous fish spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time in brackish water, can spawn in purely fresh water.
Speaker 1: But then you can take them one day and throw
Speaker 1: them into some reservoir and they don't even change tune.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, yeah, I mean some fish have the ability to.
Speaker 1: It's just I don't know, it's hard to understand how
Speaker 1: that could be.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, we have and I live in Nevada right now.
Speaker 3: We have Lahan cut through trout. They can live in
Speaker 3: brackish water, and so that's actually like they're they get
Speaker 3: really big in Pyramid Lake near near Reno, and that's
Speaker 3: actually what's one of the things that's kept them in
Speaker 3: that lake is that, like we invasive species haven't been
Speaker 3: able to get into the lake because it's brackish, got it.
Speaker 3: So they're like rainbows browns in the river that flows
Speaker 3: into Pyramid, but they can't survive in the brackish water.
Speaker 1: So that's how they get it for themselves. Yeah, oh no,
Speaker 1: kidd okay.
Speaker 3: It works with some fish as advantage.
Speaker 1: All right, So pick a back up. I can't remember
Speaker 1: where I left you fish.
Speaker 3: So the so the book, it starts with the catch
Speaker 3: of the world record fish. And so what I've been
Speaker 3: working on for the last twenty years is just trying
Speaker 3: to travel all around the world together as much information
Speaker 3: as possible about these big fish because, like you said,
Speaker 3: like seventy percent of them are endangered with extinction. So
Speaker 3: some of them are like all the Meekong species are
Speaker 3: basically on the brink of extinction.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so my kind of where my background is
Speaker 3: working in Southeast Asia. Maekong has like seven or eight
Speaker 3: really big species of freshwater fish. And then Mongolia, which
Speaker 3: has the world's largest trout species. Yeah, what's that fish
Speaker 3: called timen?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Is the arapaima airpima's one yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: One of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So it's like a diverse assemblage of fish air
Speaker 3: breathing arapaima. You know in South America. South America has
Speaker 3: short tailed sting ray, which you get up to like
Speaker 3: five hundred pounds. So what it like most people never
Speaker 3: heard of short tailed river ray, but that's like, that's
Speaker 3: one of the biggest fish.
Speaker 1: I've seen in South America. I've seen a bunch of
Speaker 1: the big ass yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And then big catfish they can get up to like
Speaker 3: four or five hundred pounds that migrate from the foothills
Speaker 3: of the Andes and then they'll migrate all the way
Speaker 3: down to the Amazon Estuary and all the way back
Speaker 3: just like seven several thousand kilometers.
Speaker 1: Does the surruby catfish get up to two hundred.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, uh huh yeah, like in Argentina,
Speaker 3: are there all over actually, oh yeah, they'll get that
Speaker 3: big cool fish.
Speaker 1: And how many does the mekong have to get that
Speaker 1: the hill criteria.
Speaker 3: Like seven or eight? So giant freshwater sting right, yeah,
Speaker 3: giant catfish, child catfish, seven stripe bar wallago catfish, a
Speaker 3: lot of more catfish. Big carp the world's largest carp species.
Speaker 3: You can get up to ten feet long.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, what like what makes that river so product? Like,
Speaker 1: what makes it so that.
Speaker 3: It's a big river? No one, No one really knows,
Speaker 3: because they should. If it just went by numbers of fish,
Speaker 3: then the Amazon should have more. But for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: the may Kong has the most and it's like super productive.
Speaker 3: There's a giant lake in the Mekong called the Tonelysop Lake,
Speaker 3: which is huge, like you know, one of our great lakes,
Speaker 3: but it's in the dry season like two meters deep.
Speaker 3: So it's basically just a big flooded area that the
Speaker 3: fish all move into in the rainy season and feed
Speaker 3: and get big, and then they move back out to
Speaker 3: the river in the dry season.
Speaker 2: Got it?
Speaker 3: So no one knows for sure. Tropical big tropical rivers
Speaker 3: with lots of different kinds of fish, you'd expect to
Speaker 3: have big fish too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So does have had you uncovered since that work?
Speaker 1: Have you uncovered one that top six forty six that
Speaker 1: hits the definition?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Really?
Speaker 3: So the book ends with the catch in two thousand
Speaker 3: and five, or no, it starts with the catching two
Speaker 3: thousand and five and then ends with the new record breaker.
Speaker 3: And what is that giant freshwater stingery? Oh, six hundred
Speaker 3: and sixty one.
Speaker 1: Pounds oh barely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean where it come out of, out
Speaker 3: of in Cambodia. Yeah. And the cool my favorite part
Speaker 3: of that story is that in two thousand and five,
Speaker 3: the catfish was that giant catfish was killed, you know,
Speaker 3: fair enough, but critically in danger species. So that catfish
Speaker 3: was killed and sold for meat. We were working in
Speaker 3: Thailand or in Cambodia this last year and working with
Speaker 3: the fishermen, and we made a deal with them that hey,
Speaker 3: we want to tag this fish for research, and so
Speaker 3: when they caught it, they gave us a call, we
Speaker 3: went out. We're able to tag it and we like
Speaker 3: are falling around right now, so we know, so we
Speaker 3: know where it is.
Speaker 1: So I want to I want to back up on
Speaker 1: that catfish. In what form are they selling it? They're
Speaker 1: butchering it into selling by the poun I mean, not
Speaker 1: the pound, but you know what I mean, Like yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in Thailand for whatever reason, So back up a
Speaker 3: little bit. Like in Thailand the meat is very prized
Speaker 3: and it's said to have certain qualities long life or
Speaker 3: I'm not exactly sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, on those big catfish specifically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, have you eaten them? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Were they good tastes?
Speaker 3: Like catfish. Yeah yeah, I mean yeah, they're good, I
Speaker 3: mean most Yeah, but he can't tell like someone told
Speaker 3: me it was actually like a tourism thing, like it
Speaker 3: wasn't actually like a real traditional belief that it was
Speaker 3: some part of a tourism campaign or something. I don't know,
Speaker 3: I see that. But in any way, in Thailand, it's
Speaker 3: very expensive. So like we were working with fishermen up
Speaker 3: there tagged. We did tag a few fish up there.
Speaker 3: One fish would sell for like two thousand bucks, which
Speaker 3: you know that's in like nineteen nineties. That's a lot
Speaker 3: of money. It felt like a lot of money at
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 2: The equivalent of two thousand US dollars.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Wow, it was like twenty thirty bucks a kilo
Speaker 3: or something or yeah, just as flays yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: So it would be butchered and then sold a lot
Speaker 3: of times. The restaurants or you know that even send
Speaker 3: it to restaurants like in Bangkok or like not local restaurants.
Speaker 1: And the people buying it are they care.
Speaker 2: What it is?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's why it's where so much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not just like generic fish. It's like the
Speaker 1: big ass crazy catfish.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But in Cambodia. So this is I actually kind
Speaker 3: of shifted work to Cambodi because in Cambodia it doesn't
Speaker 3: have any special significance and in fact, people don't like it.
Speaker 3: So in Cambodia it was fifty cents of kilo. So,
Speaker 3: and what I was doing is I was I was
Speaker 3: working with the fishermen. I would compensate them for the
Speaker 3: fish whatever they could get market rate, and then tag
Speaker 3: it and release it so we could follow it.
Speaker 1: Oh really, so you'd buy it off of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, so, but in Cambodia I could do that,
Speaker 3: but in Thailand.
Speaker 1: It was still exportant. You'd burn your budget.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, and then how much of those fish moving?
Speaker 3: They migrate at least six seven hundred kilometers. I mean
Speaker 3: they're making big, big migrations. They'll move out of that
Speaker 3: big lake down in the Maykong and then way up
Speaker 3: into the may Kong.
Speaker 2: Are they spawning way up in the Mekong and finer water?
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, so they'll find like that. It
Speaker 3: seems like they like Rocky, like they the Tony Stop
Speaker 3: and the lower Maykong is all kind of silty, and
Speaker 3: they seemed like they go up in these deep pools.
Speaker 3: The Makon can be up to two hundred fifty feet deep,
Speaker 3: so really deep, and uh, it seems like they're like
Speaker 3: those deep pool areas. Say that again, two hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty feet deep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Mekong River.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the Congo is over seven hundred feet deep.
Speaker 3: So some of these river yeah really exactly true. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but yeah, but the make make the cool thing about
Speaker 3: the Maykong. I didn't even appreciate this. We we start
Speaker 3: started doing some filming in these deep pools last year,
Speaker 3: so we'd send came cameras down. You get down like
Speaker 3: ten feet are like twenty feet. It's completely dark because
Speaker 3: the water is silty. So you get down like we
Speaker 3: tried scuba diving.
Speaker 2: Sit.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But yeah, it's just y'all. I always, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm always seeing the fish at the surface, and even
Speaker 3: when we're doing our research and stuff, we were always
Speaker 3: seeing these fish like they live in a in the
Speaker 3: total darkness. I don't know. I just I just didn't
Speaker 3: didn't compute to me. Before we actually sent cameras down,
Speaker 3: We're like, oh man, it's in The fish are down
Speaker 3: there like doing their.
Speaker 1: Things, smelling and feeling. Yeah, I can't see squat you ever,
Speaker 1: I'm guessing you never tried to noodle one of them,
Speaker 1: big son.
Speaker 3: So have you ever done that? So I did it,
Speaker 3: like not in the not in the Maykong, but in
Speaker 3: in the US. And it's actually like I I it's
Speaker 3: a like a real rodeo. Yeah, like it's no, So
Speaker 3: I didn't. I just went out with people who knew
Speaker 3: how to do it. But like you dive down, you do.
Speaker 3: It's teams, teams, three person teams a lot of times,
Speaker 3: and you dive down and the fish grunt. They make
Speaker 3: a noise when you get close to them, so that's
Speaker 3: and you can't see anything. And so the fish grunt
Speaker 3: and you know, like usually they're under rock or something.
Speaker 3: And the people you get around it and then one
Speaker 3: person agrees to stick their hand in the fish's mouth
Speaker 3: and then you just pull it out. But it's like
Speaker 3: a real I mean talking about while cow milking, like yep,
Speaker 3: it's like noodleing. It's like a real real thing.
Speaker 7: It looks it looks funny, but but that's not practiced.
Speaker 1: And uh, there's no version of that that you found.
Speaker 3: And no, no, for most catfish, the easiest place to
Speaker 3: grab them is on the mouth. So even in the Maykong,
Speaker 3: like when we handle the fish, we just grab it
Speaker 3: like it's lip. The Maykong giant catfish doesn't have any teeth.
Speaker 3: The Wells catfish in Europe, that's Europe's largest freshwater fish.
Speaker 3: It does have kind of teeth, and we also grab
Speaker 3: it by the mouth. But you'll get your you'll get your.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, why did they want that big? Do they
Speaker 1: do they butcher those big sting rays or is that
Speaker 1: just bycatch.
Speaker 3: Every in the In the Maykong amazon is a little
Speaker 3: bit different. In the Maykong, everything is eaten, so it
Speaker 3: doesn't like there's nothing that they catch that that they
Speaker 3: don't eat. So yeah, so the sting ray would be butchered.
Speaker 3: The crazy thing about the sting ray is that like
Speaker 3: big and this is just human part of it's like
Speaker 3: human nature. These big fish people seem to have a
Speaker 3: reverence for even if it's not like religious, you're around
Speaker 3: a fish that big, and it's just it's pretty special.
Speaker 3: And so even though it's not illegal to catch the
Speaker 3: sting ray, people will usually keep it pretty quiet and
Speaker 3: like everything, like catch it at night. It gets butchered
Speaker 3: and you see it in the market. The next morning,
Speaker 3: but you don't. Actually, it's actually was really hard to
Speaker 3: get information about that fish.
Speaker 1: Like there's a sort of taskit and acknowledgement that it's
Speaker 1: like you probably shouldn't have cut that one up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but like for our for my I mean for
Speaker 3: my work, I get it. I I workretty much exclusively
Speaker 3: with with fishermen who are fishing for food. So I
Speaker 3: mean that's one of the reasons we compensate the fishermen
Speaker 3: is because otherwise, why would they why would they want
Speaker 3: to work with us?
Speaker 1: You know, in Guyana, they like there was there's red
Speaker 1: redtail cabs a couple times that I've been down there,
Speaker 1: Like they'll they'll kill that one and cook it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the srubies they'll kill and cook. But then there's one
Speaker 1: I wish you probably you might know the name of it.
Speaker 1: There's a big dark one they called Toro. It's like,
Speaker 1: a yeah, that's it Jiu. I forgot the other name
Speaker 1: there's They thought maybe I would know it as Toro,
Speaker 1: which is like the like from Spanish infusion. Yeah, jau uh.
Speaker 1: They don't kill that one like these like they when
Speaker 1: we hooked one of those there, it was just kind
Speaker 1: of and then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, those are cool fish there they want that one
Speaker 3: kill h they're they're like more rare, So maybe there's
Speaker 3: you know, there's yah, it's just.
Speaker 1: Kind of you know, we had all kinds of other
Speaker 1: fish like no, no, that's not one though, I mean
Speaker 1: its enormous.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean maybe they don't taste good. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know. They just kind of had a
Speaker 1: different different you know, like there's like a language barrier
Speaker 1: so you can't really establish what it is, but there
Speaker 1: was that was something that Yeah, it was kind of
Speaker 1: like like the same way. I don't know, but I
Speaker 1: don't want to use the word taboo. There's just things
Speaker 1: that would seem edible that they don't eat. The same way.
Speaker 1: If you were walking around here and someone's like, why
Speaker 1: are you not eating that dog? Be like, how do
Speaker 1: I even explain why we're not eating that dog? You know,
Speaker 1: with this big ass caffish, there's just not well, let's.
Speaker 3: And you bring it up. Like in Cambodia, there's the
Speaker 3: same feeling. So people feel like if they kill a
Speaker 3: giant catfish and it's a make make giant catfish, it's
Speaker 3: one species, there's a belief that if they kill it
Speaker 3: they'll get bad luck, and like it kind of is
Speaker 3: self fulfilling. I've seen it a lot of times someone
Speaker 3: will catch one and then within like a week they'll
Speaker 3: have a death in the family or something really bad
Speaker 3: will happen. And it's hard to you know, it's it
Speaker 3: doesn't seem like it would really be actual bad luck.
Speaker 3: But they always associate if they actually do keep one
Speaker 3: of those fish, sure they always find something drollable. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and they like recognize that. And so we've actually started
Speaker 3: to see the fishermen in Cambodia just with that one species,
Speaker 3: they'll release them on their own.
Speaker 1: So what like, what could you say is true? Is
Speaker 1: it always a different culprit or if globally we're imperiling
Speaker 1: or globally we're damaging and potentially losing giant freshwater fish,
Speaker 1: Is it just like a different enemy in every ecosystem
Speaker 1: or is there are there general truths?
Speaker 3: It's mainly dams really, So yeah, that because like overfishing,
Speaker 3: overfishing very rarely causes extinctions, so it'll you could get
Speaker 3: the population down really low. But with fish at least,
Speaker 3: it's very rare that you could like catch the last ones.
Speaker 3: It's just hard, like these big systems. So fishing is
Speaker 3: usually not the culprit in terms of extinction. It's usually
Speaker 3: something that changes.
Speaker 1: Then it can drive scarcity, but yeah, doesn't.
Speaker 3: Drive like the disappearance. And so like with dams, they're
Speaker 3: it's blocking spawning habitat changes water temperature messes up their
Speaker 3: spawning cues. So you see this like the Chinese paddlefish,
Speaker 3: which is a fish that could get up to like
Speaker 3: twenty feet long, just went extinct like two years ago
Speaker 3: because of three wards.
Speaker 1: I mean, I didn't know about the damn fish, but yeah,
Speaker 1: really yeah, so talking about that fish then.
Speaker 3: So Chinese paddlefish one of two species of Have you
Speaker 3: ever seen an American paddlefish? Yeah, so they're cool, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, so Chinese paddlefish was a predator. American paddlefish
Speaker 3: are like filter feeders. No, they when they open up
Speaker 3: their mouths, it looks like a basking shark or something.
Speaker 3: The Chinese paddlefish was a predator more like a billfish,
Speaker 3: and it would use it like a sharp paddle, and
Speaker 3: it would use that paddle to hunt, and.
Speaker 1: It was actually going after catfish and whatever else.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, probably yeah, carp catfish.
Speaker 2: And grew to twenty feet long.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, kid, Yeah, but the last one that was
Speaker 3: seen was like early two thousands.
Speaker 1: When they built that big ass dam.
Speaker 3: They built two big dams, Kazuba and three Gorges. Three
Speaker 3: Gorges is the really big one. And those dams just
Speaker 3: made it impossible for the paddlefish to survive to spawn.
Speaker 3: It must have blocked there. They couldn't access where they
Speaker 3: need to spawn anymore.
Speaker 1: And did someone point out that this is a question
Speaker 1: I've had about the dams we've done on the you know,
Speaker 1: the dams we've done on the Columbia system and the
Speaker 1: others were was there someone that said, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: if you do that, that fish will be gone? Was
Speaker 1: that a known thing?
Speaker 3: I don't know. I wonder what people knew one hundred
Speaker 3: years ago. We know that now.
Speaker 1: But no, no, I'm talking no, no, I've asked that
Speaker 1: question many times around salmon. There was always a way
Speaker 1: that that there was probably in people's bag that there's
Speaker 1: always a way people felt they could explain away ways
Speaker 1: in which it wasn't the end of salmon because it
Speaker 1: was gonna be ladder, you know whatever. No one would
Speaker 1: there was no one saying like and yes, this will
Speaker 1: be the end of King Salmon or in yes, this
Speaker 1: will be the end of that run. They didn't put
Speaker 1: it like it wasn't laid out like that sort of arrangement.
Speaker 3: You know, maybe it never maybe it never is. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we used to have King Sammon and Nevada, believe it
Speaker 3: or not. We used to have runs that came all
Speaker 3: the way up to Snake.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But with these newer dams in China, you know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't know you would that they would blink this
Speaker 1: fish out.
Speaker 3: The biologists know, but you know.
Speaker 1: We tend not to listen to those guys. Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: when it comes to they never get invited to the
Speaker 1: last meeting.
Speaker 3: That's that's true. I mean I could laugh about it,
Speaker 3: but it's true. Like they're stronger interests at play. But
Speaker 3: on the Maykong it's and you know this happened on
Speaker 3: the Columbia too. It's like what you really want. So
Speaker 3: you know, there's just I think salmon populations are like
Speaker 3: ten percent of what they used to be on the
Speaker 3: Columbia or whatever. But Maykong is the same way. Like
Speaker 3: two million tons of fish produced by the Maykong River
Speaker 3: every year. So if you're gonna build dams, Like think
Speaker 3: about that, because there's it's like they're so important, so
Speaker 3: that what you want is like not to be totally ignored,
Speaker 3: but just like okay, hey, we'll take we won't build
Speaker 3: the worst ones. We won't build the ones that are
Speaker 3: going to collapse of fishery or cause extinctions of all
Speaker 3: these fish whatever. So that's I mean, that's and my work,
Speaker 3: that's basically what I do is just to try to
Speaker 3: provide information about all these fish so that like the
Speaker 3: worst dams aren't built.
Speaker 1: So you can go in and say, here's this, here's
Speaker 1: this species of fish, Here's what its life history is,
Speaker 1: here's what it's habitat needs are. If you do this that,
Speaker 1: here's the price you'll pay. Yeah, do with it what
Speaker 1: you will.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And that's happening right now. So in Cambodia, this
Speaker 3: world's largest sting ray is just swimming around. It's actually
Speaker 3: in a small area that's protected by the local community.
Speaker 3: It's right between two of these big proposed dams where
Speaker 3: it lives just stuck there. Well, no, the dams aren't there,
Speaker 3: so it's just swiming around happy. I mean, it doesn't
Speaker 3: know any difference. But so and that's an area where
Speaker 3: hundreds of fish spawn. It supports the whole fishery for
Speaker 3: the Mekong River. And they're right now there's a debate
Speaker 3: do we build these dams or oh, I'm sorry, yeah,
Speaker 3: or protect area. So the decisions that you're talking about
Speaker 3: there that's happening right.
Speaker 1: Well, where are they leaning If you had to guess,
Speaker 1: if you had the crystal ball.
Speaker 3: The Cambodian government has said no dams before twenty thirty.
Speaker 3: So that's good. It's good in the sense that they're
Speaker 3: always altern you know, technology improves, alternatives could them up.
Speaker 3: So it's as far as like that type of development
Speaker 3: decision energy, it's always good if it happens in the
Speaker 3: future because things are always improving.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Isn't it a funny kind of reverse colonialism that
Speaker 1: we have a little bit where we've uh really effectively
Speaker 1: developed our country and created this economic powerhouse and all
Speaker 1: this infrastructure and dams and the ability to generate so
Speaker 1: much electricity and be global players, and then you then
Speaker 1: go to the developing world and and uh and say, man,
Speaker 1: I'm here to tell you not to do the things
Speaker 1: we did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, because you're yeah, exactly no. But it feels
Speaker 3: that way. Yeah, but it's not don't do it. It's like, hey,
Speaker 3: because I mean I'm trying to think of an example
Speaker 3: in the US. I mean, we're starting to bring down
Speaker 3: some of our dams in the US that are like
Speaker 3: the ones that don't generate very much electricity or that
Speaker 3: totally messed up the fishery.
Speaker 1: We're taking them down fast, and we're putting them up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but we had our one hundred years of you know,
Speaker 3: building a lot of good and I don't know good
Speaker 3: and bad dams whatever. But I think what the goal
Speaker 3: is in places that are still developing and building a
Speaker 3: lot of these dams is just don't, like, you know,
Speaker 3: using the best information that's out there, just try to
Speaker 3: make the best you know, like maximize benefit, minimized cost.
Speaker 3: I'm with you, rather than like, hey, you can't do this, rather.
Speaker 1: Be that you can and if you do it this way,
Speaker 1: you'll decrease the damage.
Speaker 3: And anyway, like if or biologists, you know, if some
Speaker 3: of it doesn't do much good to say you can't
Speaker 3: do this anyway, I mean, no one listens to just
Speaker 3: say hey you can't, you can't do this. You have
Speaker 3: to say why you have to. I mean fisheries are
Speaker 3: everyone relies on fisheries there, so they like yeah, oh yeah, breakfast,
Speaker 3: lunch and dinner.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I wanted I forgot. I was gonna
Speaker 1: tell you about the thing with fresh water salt water
Speaker 1: are you meet with the Susitna River system in Alaska,
Speaker 1: so in south like the Seuxsitting that flows out near Anchorage,
Speaker 1: So south central Alaska. There's this big river system and
Speaker 1: very important like big salmon runs kay like you know,
Speaker 1: kings like just everything right, I realized, I don't know
Speaker 1: if that river gets sac eyes, I should know, but
Speaker 1: King runs, silver runs pinks. All this stuff goes up
Speaker 1: this river system and someone and I can't remember when
Speaker 1: they know when it happened. Uh, someone moved northern pike
Speaker 1: into it. Okay, So of course northern pike are native
Speaker 1: to Alaska, and like the Yukon system has northern pike.
Speaker 1: But someone helped, you know, at some point in time,
Speaker 1: someone helped pike into the Susitina and there's the potential
Speaker 1: for it to be devastating to salmon and they've really
Speaker 1: spread out. And like another thing with how in trouble
Speaker 1: kings are Kings spent extra time in fresh water kings
Speaker 1: spent an extra year in fresh water, so they remain
Speaker 1: for they have a greater vulnerability to this new predatory fish.
Speaker 1: So there was a lot of interest in how far
Speaker 1: could the northern spread, right the demographics on the population,
Speaker 1: how much damage might they ultimately do to the salmon stocks. Well,
Speaker 1: these northerns, these Northern pike started showing up in different
Speaker 1: adjacent river systems, and the idea was that people were
Speaker 1: continuing to move them around. But they can go to
Speaker 1: these other river systems and look at stable isotope compositions
Speaker 1: in the fish, and those fish are going into salt water,
Speaker 1: which no one thought they would do. They're going into
Speaker 1: salt water being fine and actually entering new river systems
Speaker 1: from salt water.
Speaker 2: Northern pike.
Speaker 1: Northern pike are going out into salt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think blue.
Speaker 1: I think blue colandering around and then shooting up new
Speaker 1: river systems.
Speaker 3: I mean blue catfish will do that too, weren't they?
Speaker 1: Oh I didn't know.
Speaker 3: I feel like I've heard heard of that as well.
Speaker 1: And then you're left to be like, well, how the
Speaker 1: hell did it get in here? Must be those more
Speaker 1: of those rednecks doing bucket biology. It turns out that
Speaker 1: fish is like whatever he gets, you know, I was
Speaker 1: asking Danny. I was like, so do they He goes,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the fish is trying to do.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it wants to do, but it
Speaker 1: does it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they spread, I mean they thinks spread man when
Speaker 3: they You remind me of a story and the Ebro
Speaker 3: River in Spain. So a German fisherman took over like
Speaker 3: thirty baby Wells catfish in his VW bug in the
Speaker 3: seventies and put them in the Ebro River in Spain
Speaker 3: where they're not native. And we were there several years
Speaker 3: ago and that's it's now ninety percent of the biomass
Speaker 3: of fish in that river or Wells catfish just a
Speaker 3: normal Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's one of the big ones, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean yeah, I mean you don't need to
Speaker 1: go that far because the Great Lakes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like if.
Speaker 1: You go back in time on the Great Lakes, like
Speaker 1: there was like a sturgeon fishery whitefish right, yea dominant
Speaker 1: species all the way down in Chicago, like dominant species.
Speaker 1: And it's just been that it's been rewritten and rewritten.
Speaker 1: Cart were put in there because they thought they'd catch
Speaker 1: on as food and then all the accidental, all the intent.
Speaker 1: It's an experimental aquarium.
Speaker 3: Yeah, on the Ibro too, so that they were introduced
Speaker 3: there and people it's catching relief, like it's not catching
Speaker 3: release by law, but all the anglers practice catching release,
Speaker 3: so like no one's eating them either. The Spanish people
Speaker 3: apparently don't like to eat them. The recreational anglers just
Speaker 3: like to catch and release. So that's why there's like them.
Speaker 3: It's you get these weird situations.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now and then they'll make it that it's like
Speaker 1: with certain invasives, they'll make it that it's illegal to
Speaker 1: keep it. Yeah, to return it alive, it's it's illegal
Speaker 1: to have. It's illegal to put it back. But I
Speaker 1: don't want to name his name, but you know when
Speaker 1: they got Lake Trout, they got Lake Trout and Lake
Speaker 1: Yellowstone and they're very worried about the cutthroats and there,
Speaker 1: so they're encouraging everybody to go and you know, they
Speaker 1: wanted people to catch them and kill them. It was
Speaker 1: illegal to turn one back alive. I had a body
Speaker 1: that was always down there fishing, and he's talking about
Speaker 1: letting them go. I'm like well, you know what we mean,
Speaker 1: you letting them go. That's just let him go, he says. Man,
Speaker 1: I love fishing there. I don't want to damage that fishery.
Speaker 1: It's just like people just get whatever we get selfish.
Speaker 5: We had a thing a couple of years ago or
Speaker 5: three years ago, maybe it was a little longer than that,
Speaker 5: when all those Atlantic salmon got out of that net
Speaker 5: pin up up in the San Juans people oh man
Speaker 5: and people were up there just wailing on them things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it was like if you catch one, kill
Speaker 2: it sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Easy to catch.
Speaker 2: From what I heard. I didn't go up there. I
Speaker 2: can't say firsthand, but from what I heard.
Speaker 1: That no one's catching anymore. They all died or got caught. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they didn't take hold.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I haven't heard of one.
Speaker 5: We have a similar thing going on in eastern Washington
Speaker 5: with Northern Pike in Lake Roosevelt.
Speaker 2: And I've heard in a couple other places too, where it's.
Speaker 5: Card yeah, kill them on it's kill them on site
Speaker 5: Northey's and uh it's Roosevelt and Banks Lake in eastern Washington.
Speaker 2: That was what I was told.
Speaker 1: Uh arapaima, that's cool fish.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's something.
Speaker 1: Are they all right?
Speaker 3: They weren't, but it's sort of a success story because
Speaker 3: uh there they don't move that much and so it's
Speaker 3: used to be a traditional. It still is, but like
Speaker 3: a they have to come up for air, so it's
Speaker 3: a traditional like spear fishing, harpoon yep. Uh.
Speaker 1: The boys I was with, like their dads, that was
Speaker 1: a market fish, trade fish. They'd kill them and salt them, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for very small amounts of money, and they just don't know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's gotta be a tough, tough fish. Do they
Speaker 5: make cowboy boots out of them things? Skins?
Speaker 1: They would get a dart and they would get a
Speaker 1: prong into it and then just basically handle it like
Speaker 1: a whale.
Speaker 3: With it with a line.
Speaker 1: Just yeah. The goal is to get it tethered, you know,
Speaker 1: to get a toggle in it, and then you just whatever.
Speaker 2: Nantuckets slowly, Yeah, you just slowly.
Speaker 1: Once you get a rope on it, you just it's
Speaker 1: just a drawn out you were in Ghana, Yeah, but no,
Speaker 1: I never did it, But I'm just saying they were
Speaker 1: telling me about how they would do it. They would
Speaker 1: basically that you had come up or you'd find it
Speaker 1: basking and like the first order of business was to
Speaker 1: get a toggle in it with some rope and then
Speaker 1: and then it would would begin the process.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think the species in Ghana, so there are
Speaker 3: a couple like scientists recently figured out there's more than
Speaker 3: one species, and the species in Guyana is apparently a
Speaker 3: lot like fatter than the other species. And one guy,
Speaker 3: one biologist works down there, says that he actually thinks
Speaker 3: that they'll get a bigger like a seven hundred pound
Speaker 3: or something. He thinks that he thinks that that's the biggest.
Speaker 1: It's going to take the record.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that's it. That's the thing with I mean,
Speaker 3: this whole project. I always assume, like there's no rule,
Speaker 3: like you could fish, the fish can be caught. However,
Speaker 3: like the only thing is like, okay, where you know,
Speaker 3: where was it? How big was it? I always assumed
Speaker 3: that I would hear from people biologists and fishermen and
Speaker 3: all over the world with stories of bigger fish. Like
Speaker 3: I I didn't think it was going to be me
Speaker 3: going out and trying to gather information. Yeah, I thought
Speaker 3: it would there would just be you know, fishermen like
Speaker 3: talking about catching big fish. I thought that it would
Speaker 3: be like reported, but they're just aren't. They just don't
Speaker 3: get that big.
Speaker 1: Remind me again right now, the current fresh water record.
Speaker 3: Is six hundred and sixty one pounds.
Speaker 1: Do you got do you know what you ought to do? Man?
Speaker 1: Why don't you just get like a little pot of money.
Speaker 2: And start like a global derby?
Speaker 3: Yeah. So with with sting ray, we're like, I'm ninety
Speaker 3: nine percent sure that they get up to maybe one
Speaker 3: thousand pounds. So it's just what what we were able
Speaker 3: to record and luckily able to like tag and now
Speaker 3: we're getting information about it. But we're I'm pretty sure
Speaker 3: that they get a lot bigger. You know, what are
Speaker 3: the chances is the one that we found exactly is
Speaker 3: the single biggest fish.
Speaker 1: It's not so no, no, well no that's not that's
Speaker 1: not true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we are most of the biggest fish females that
Speaker 4: you're seeing, Yeah, the sting rays.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and apparently that's the same with marlin as well. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, the big the biggest sting rayser females. Interesting, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they typically anchor themselves to the bottom when you're fishing
Speaker 3: for them. Yeah, so they'll you hook into one and
Speaker 3: it'll go down to the bottom and basically fishing forward
Speaker 3: is trying to get it off the bottom. And then
Speaker 3: it also weighs six hundred pounds.
Speaker 6: But there's been many times where we nearly cut a
Speaker 6: snag and it turned out to be sting, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've had both where I thought it was a
Speaker 3: snag and it was a sting right. Yeah. It's always
Speaker 3: cool when you you just have something that's you're just
Speaker 3: cussing and then it starts to move, dragging the bug.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you don't think there's a great big white sturgeon
Speaker 5: up their land locked.
Speaker 2: Up there, and.
Speaker 3: I'm curious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the global Big Fish Derby.
Speaker 2: My money, and I'm biased, but my money's not a
Speaker 2: good old American.
Speaker 5: White Yeah, I feel it because, well, the other thing
Speaker 5: is choos all these records and stuff, like if you
Speaker 5: start a derby, then you have to have rules.
Speaker 2: Yeah, why don't we talk about that?
Speaker 1: About that, about that Lord Hope of blood Socker. The records.
Speaker 3: So I gf a uh all of the records. So
Speaker 3: they're much smaller than like the largest documented fish.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so like the biggest white tailed deer yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was killed by a hunter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I I gf a record for giant
Speaker 3: catfish sting ray pima. It's all much smaller than the
Speaker 3: largest fish because you have to follow the rules.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's just way different like the biggest whatever.
Speaker 1: It's like wound up being that just washed up on
Speaker 1: the beach one day, Yeah, dead.
Speaker 3: Or whatever, which from a like biology perspective is fascinating.
Speaker 3: So like that's I yeah for my work, I include that,
Speaker 3: but you know it wouldn't work for a derby.
Speaker 1: So your book came out.
Speaker 3: When book was published April twenty.
Speaker 1: Fifth, how's been going. It has been fun good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a great book. Did you book events?
Speaker 3: Yeah, still doing them. Yeah, it's been great. It took
Speaker 3: U took over ten years to write, so it was
Speaker 3: really it wasn't a.
Speaker 1: Ten years ago. Did you know you were writing it.
Speaker 3: Ten years ago? I knew I was interested, Yeah, we know.
Speaker 3: So we I worked with Stephan Lovegren, who's writer with
Speaker 3: National Geographic and we've worked together forever and so we
Speaker 3: wrote the proposal in twenty eleven and then spent the
Speaker 3: last ten years just traveling around together.
Speaker 1: Information here that you know was where was the publisher ever?
Speaker 1: Kind of be like, hey, what happened to the book?
Speaker 3: There were a couple public.
Speaker 2: I got it.
Speaker 1: So but I want of landing with University of the Bad.
Speaker 3: Approach, which is where I work, Yeah, which is where
Speaker 3: you work.
Speaker 1: That's great.
Speaker 3: So it all, it all, it all worked out in
Speaker 3: the end. And we didn't know, I mean started out
Speaker 3: asking what question is? You know what fishes the worlds
Speaker 3: are just? And yeah, it wasn't until this last year
Speaker 3: that we found a larger one.
Speaker 1: So but like I said, there's a question mark that
Speaker 1: lingers over.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they're always there, always will be. And it's
Speaker 3: what I'm gonna you know, it's what I do. So
Speaker 3: I'm gonna keep working on it.
Speaker 1: And but if you, uh, let me ask you this,
Speaker 1: if you had and you kind of answered it, but
Speaker 1: if you had to guess, it's it's if you had
Speaker 1: to guess, do you think the record will stay with
Speaker 1: that sting ray species or do you think that or
Speaker 1: do you do you got a feeling like the catfish
Speaker 1: is gonna blow it away?
Speaker 3: Or what I want the record to be broken like
Speaker 3: because that's that means healthy?
Speaker 1: But are you betting on the sting rays? Are you
Speaker 1: betting on some other things? Like just from your hunt?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Come on, you know Tommy's betting on white Stairs.
Speaker 2: I'm betting on Whittairs and I'm going all in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think it's the sting ray, but
Speaker 3: you do. So they're like, yeah, there's these stories from
Speaker 3: way back when of much bigger fish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, divers from Bonneville Dam coming.
Speaker 5: Up with these stories, and these dudes, these twenty foot
Speaker 5: sturgeon is bigger around as VW bugs.
Speaker 1: I grew up with those stories. Man, well and those
Speaker 1: big calffish eating people.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or like Locked Nest Monster, if.
Speaker 1: It's come on, they'll come on.
Speaker 3: No. No, but I'm saying any like, you hear so
Speaker 3: many stories. Yeah, when those stories turn out to be true,
Speaker 3: maybe not Locknest Monster, but whatever, Like that's good, Like
Speaker 3: that's interesting. It never, it very very rarely turns out
Speaker 3: that those stories are true. But yeah, I hope, I mean,
Speaker 3: I hope someone catches bigger fish next year. It's like,
Speaker 3: if you've been to the Maykong, millions of people fish
Speaker 3: in that river, you you would never believe in a
Speaker 3: million years that the largest fish could occur there because
Speaker 3: of the amount of fishing and other stuff that's going
Speaker 3: on there. So the fact that it's still there is great.
Speaker 3: I hope. I hope there's a bigger fish out there.
Speaker 3: I hope the air pinma in South America. I hope
Speaker 3: they catch seven hundred pounds next year.
Speaker 1: So I got one last question for you before plugging
Speaker 1: your book again. If you go to the Makon River
Speaker 1: and I take a crawler leaf worm, put it on
Speaker 1: a hook and flick it out, am I probably gonna
Speaker 1: get hit fast?
Speaker 3: Oh not? No?
Speaker 1: And I don't mean by the giant can. I mean
Speaker 1: it's a hit in general?
Speaker 3: No? So really?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you can draw on a worm and not
Speaker 1: get a hit.
Speaker 3: There's so many people fishing. So like I went h
Speaker 3: on the river one day and I for like five miles.
Speaker 3: I counted a thousand nuts. Oh yeah, So that's what
Speaker 3: I'm saying about, how it's incredible that these fish are still.
Speaker 1: They got to put on a type species there.
Speaker 3: No, so yeah, yeah, yeah, South I mean South America,
Speaker 3: it's still I mean they have I forget what that
Speaker 3: species with the prana like if you try fishing in
Speaker 3: South America like prana in a second, it has been
Speaker 3: my experience.
Speaker 1: Sure, Yeah, you throw that bait out there, you're gonna
Speaker 1: get a hit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, because in South America, in a lot of places,
Speaker 3: people are still selective about what fish they're eating. They
Speaker 3: want a big fish, certain kinds of fish. In may Kong,
Speaker 3: it's like, I mean, you catch a fish like that,
Speaker 3: that's that's food.
Speaker 1: I was in the Philippines one time and we were
Speaker 1: at a fish market and I was expressing to the
Speaker 1: personnels with that, like, how could all the fish in
Speaker 1: the fish market.
Speaker 2: Be so small?
Speaker 1: Meaning I mean, there's it's all fish the size your
Speaker 1: finger right and squid And he said, yeah, it's like this.
Speaker 1: He goes, Then you'll come in here tomorrow and there'll
Speaker 1: be a forty foot whale shark laying there. He goes,
Speaker 1: It's just what gets caught, man. He's like, it's what
Speaker 1: gets caught. Wow, if it gets caught, it's going to
Speaker 1: be here in this fish market.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Selectivity is.
Speaker 3: We work a lot with local people fishing and we
Speaker 3: monitor we for the last three years, we've recorded every
Speaker 3: single thing that they catch in their fish trap. And
Speaker 3: these fish traps so it's a it's an arrow shaped
Speaker 3: trap made out of a bamboo that can be like
Speaker 3: a klometer long, so it's you know, like a fight
Speaker 3: net yep. So it's a big wall within like an arrow,
Speaker 3: so the fish get like they hit the wall, they
Speaker 3: swim along. It's in the lake, so yeah, but the
Speaker 3: lake drains, so yeah, the fish have to move as
Speaker 3: the lake drains, and they catch like one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty different kinds of fish and each trap, they're like
Speaker 3: ten thousand of these traps. Each trap catches a ton
Speaker 3: of fish a year. So it's like so productive. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's crazy, but it's very much that. You're just reminded
Speaker 3: me that because they like we some days they'll catch
Speaker 3: a thousand of one kind of fish and then the
Speaker 3: next day it's something it's like we're trying to understand
Speaker 3: what's going on.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it is kind of trying to understand the system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like why, well, if you're wondering why, you'll find a
Speaker 1: lot out. You see that Tommy that's hosting You'll find
Speaker 1: a lot out in Chasing Giants in Search of the
Speaker 1: World's Largest freshwater Fish by zeb Hogan with Stefan luvgren
Speaker 1: U host a National geographics Monster Fish, which covers as
Speaker 1: well The show right covers a lot of the material
Speaker 1: in here, but if you really want to read them,
Speaker 1: book Biology Yeah, it's got a big photo section in
Speaker 1: the middle. Normally I didn't get around here. Normally when
Speaker 1: we have people on, I read their book. I'm pretty
Speaker 1: good about it. But I didn't read your book yet.
Speaker 1: I just want I just wanted to tell you, so
Speaker 1: you have to. I don't want you to talk to
Speaker 1: someone lame like that's some bitch. Never even read the book,
Speaker 1: I could tell. I'm just telling you.
Speaker 2: Never read the book. I'd like to.
Speaker 1: It looks good. It's a beautiful book, color photography, chasing
Speaker 1: giants in search of the world's largest fresh water fish
Speaker 1: anywhere books are sold.
Speaker 3: Good.
Speaker 1: Look, man, I appreciate you coming out. Thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. Tommy, You're welcome and boys appreciate it. Head
Speaker 1: down to the to the first Light store.
Speaker 4: We'll take care of you.
Speaker 1: Hailey, Idaho. You'll know when you see them.
Speaker 2: This place is crazy. I'm jealous of the mannequins.
Speaker 3: Plug plug it a little bit morement.
Speaker 2: What do you want me to talk about this place?
Speaker 2: It really is a destination. It's incredible. You walk through
Speaker 2: the front door.
Speaker 5: There's a great, big giant bull laying there with three
Speaker 5: years where the sheds.
Speaker 2: Laying next to it. That's admirable, dude.
Speaker 1: A rifle sitting right inside.
Speaker 3: You can just come in here.
Speaker 1: Stick them up.
Speaker 2: But I didn't know.
Speaker 5: It's the women's section that explains why none of them
Speaker 5: clothes look to fit me.
Speaker 7: Well maybe one day, Tom, he's pushing for your job
Speaker 7: down here, man, I might.
Speaker 2: Be politicking my way into something.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, guys, thank you very much for coming on.
Speaker 3: Man, appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Oh ride all, ride all.
Speaker 6: On a seal ry shine like silver in the sun.
Speaker 1: Ride, ride, ride on along, sweetheart.
Speaker 3: Were done beat this damn horse to death, taking a
Speaker 3: new one. Ride.
Speaker 6: We're done beat this damn horse today, So take your
Speaker 6: new one and ride on