Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear
Speaker 1: for every hunt. First like go farther, stay longer. Oh,
Speaker 1: you know how I bought these glasses like five for
Speaker 1: ten dollars as one of the eye doctor, not the
Speaker 1: kind I needed. I need a point seven five magnification,
Speaker 1: not a two. That's why it's like, really, he's getting
Speaker 1: me all hooked up? Man. Oh my vision, my normal vision,
Speaker 1: long range um old as I am, and if I
Speaker 1: put these special glasses he's getting me, I'll have Huh
Speaker 1: that's what I have. Do you know what that means?
Speaker 1: You know, I don't never know what it means. Your
Speaker 1: one eye is better vision than you got the machine
Speaker 1: on right now, machines on. Let me tell you what
Speaker 1: it means. I didn't know what it meant either, until
Speaker 1: he's no, It's like I didn't know what the numbers meant.
Speaker 1: All the numbers mean is at twenty ft Okay, you
Speaker 1: can see just as good as average people can see
Speaker 1: at twenty that's all that means. I'm like, well, how
Speaker 1: big is the average? Like, how big is the pool?
Speaker 1: He said, it's like virtually infinite. Now thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of thousands of people have taken this vision test, so
Speaker 1: just means you're job. Oh how can they never test
Speaker 1: you above like to see if you're above the average? Well,
Speaker 1: if I put on here's the thing, I have a
Speaker 1: slight stigmatism in my left eye or something like that,
Speaker 1: And if I put these superglasses on that he's gonna
Speaker 1: get me meaning glasses, Um, they're big goggles. I will
Speaker 1: be able to see the bottom line. Then Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: the bottom line on the test. Listen, that's not what
Speaker 1: it means. I will then have. I will then have
Speaker 1: I will then have meaning you can read can see
Speaker 1: at fifteen feet, I can see at twenty has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with the line on the bottom. Is there
Speaker 1: like a like an accredited like test to see how
Speaker 1: far like you can actually go with that? It's like
Speaker 1: the roor Shart test, but it's not. I feel like
Speaker 1: every time I've ever been to like like an eye doctor,
Speaker 1: they just do like the standard one. They're like, okay,
Speaker 1: you can see good, like you never got to max
Speaker 1: or out. Yeah, exactly. Remember my guy would do it.
Speaker 1: He's nice, tell him to push it out. Remember when
Speaker 1: they read the food pyramid a few years ago because
Speaker 1: we were thinking, maybe we shouldn't just be eating nothing
Speaker 1: but bread. Yeah, but let's let's rethink this. I think
Speaker 1: they should rethink these eye tests. The food pyramid was
Speaker 1: written by the dairy industry though, you know that whole
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory that the dairy people are like, Listen, I
Speaker 1: got an idea for a food pyramid. Put our stuff
Speaker 1: on there up top, you know, well top top at
Speaker 1: the part h Yeah, and I think Dair's near the bottom. See,
Speaker 1: that's it was their idea. It was the dairy industry's idea.
Speaker 1: That's a conspiracy theory. But I don't like to traffic
Speaker 1: in those too much. Joined today by Tom Miranda that
Speaker 1: works bowl hunter extraordinary well Tom Randon too. He became
Speaker 1: famous for two things, like first became famous as a
Speaker 1: trapper and then became famous as a bowl hunter. There's
Speaker 1: a little bit of cross over in there. There's a
Speaker 1: lot across. It's not like you were like a famous
Speaker 1: librarian and then became a famous bow hunter. I was
Speaker 1: an infamous librarian. Actually, oh yeah, you know what, Tom
Speaker 1: and I had drinks last night, not really not really
Speaker 1: like beers um, even though we're both thirsty for your
Speaker 1: drink um you have. He's like a rare book collector.
Speaker 1: Absolutely yeah, and told me his story. I almost want later.
Speaker 1: I almost want you to tell the story about the
Speaker 1: captain cookbooks? Are you? Are you able to do that?
Speaker 1: Because what if the guy hears and realizes what a
Speaker 1: mistake he made? I think he's dead as a hammer there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got a rare book collection and he has narrowed
Speaker 1: in on rare books about piracy. Sounds interesting. See, I
Speaker 1: thought that tid laydon hell out of Spencer. That's also
Speaker 1: we're gonna get it. We gotta cover a few things
Speaker 1: that we're gonna get back into it. Um, tell me
Speaker 1: about your archery, super slam holder. That's North America North
Speaker 1: American twenty nine? Correct? So North America has twenty nine
Speaker 1: big game species that's basically tracked by the Pope and
Speaker 1: Young Club. And how do they break them out? Like
Speaker 1: how many? How many like mule deer, black mule deear, slash,
Speaker 1: black tail are on the list. Well, there's five deer
Speaker 1: there's the white tail, the desert cows white tail. There's
Speaker 1: the cowsman, not a cusman. You can be cus if
Speaker 1: you want cows is correct. Uh, you also have sorry
Speaker 1: about that. So so okay, okay, I interrupted you. I
Speaker 1: shouldn't have done that. That's a backup. On deer. There's
Speaker 1: five deer. There's five deer. There's the there's the white tail,
Speaker 1: the desert white tail, there's the mule deer. There's the
Speaker 1: Sitka black tail and the Columbia blacktail. There's spot deer.
Speaker 1: I thought they like really Hayte and I were just
Speaker 1: talking about this. I thought they really got into all
Speaker 1: those kind of like goofy distinctions where they're like, you know,
Speaker 1: like dividing up the country's white tails and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty clean. Well, there's a white tail slam
Speaker 1: where you can get you know, biologists say there's thirty
Speaker 1: two plus different subspecies of white tails when you start
Speaker 1: talking about it all. But you know, with all the
Speaker 1: different programs, over all the years of seating deer here,
Speaker 1: seating deer there, there's really not about They let them
Speaker 1: all about it pretty much. Only the desert cow's white
Speaker 1: tail is the purest deer of all of them, it's
Speaker 1: it's isolated. Correct. Hit me with a couple of hit
Speaker 1: me with the other ones. I wouldn't be thinking of
Speaker 1: that during the twenty nine. How many cats are in there? Well,
Speaker 1: just cougar, so they don't put up Mountain lion or something.
Speaker 1: Bobcats not included, but they don't consider that big game.
Speaker 1: How many how many bears are in it? There's four
Speaker 1: polar bear, grizzly bear, Alaska brown bear, and black bear.
Speaker 1: I'm still trying to add it up in my head.
Speaker 1: You know, it would be a great trivia trivia question
Speaker 1: for you, Spencer that something like based off that, I
Speaker 1: might have something like that coming up. Is that right? Maybe?
Speaker 1: Is it rigged? In? Tom's favorite? Not rigged? Do you
Speaker 1: know what you're doing tribute with us today? I'll try
Speaker 1: I'm game for anything. Did you listen just that little
Speaker 1: prelude conversation we're having right now? I feel like you
Speaker 1: might be in a unique position to win Sam Holder
Speaker 1: and he's kind of checked out on taxonomy, checked out
Speaker 1: on genetics a little bit. Uh, Okay, we're gonna come
Speaker 1: back to all that bearwood us here. Still free to
Speaker 1: chime in if anything happens, and you know about you
Speaker 1: got me seat belt and roped into this chair. So
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm going anywhere. Okay, we got a
Speaker 1: double new launch we gotta talk about. So Jason Phelps
Speaker 1: taken over at the Cutting the Distance podcast. So Jason
Speaker 1: Phelps and friends, go there. If you already, uh, if
Speaker 1: you already subscribe, what's the word for it, If you
Speaker 1: already hasn't subscribe, if you already smashed that subscribe button,
Speaker 1: I think that's right. If you've already smashed that subscribe
Speaker 1: button for Cutting the Distance, it'll just serve right up
Speaker 1: to you. If you haven't subscribed to Cutting the Distance,
Speaker 1: go do it now. So go where you know you're
Speaker 1: listen to a podcast right now, So going to that
Speaker 1: platform there and subscribe to Cutting a Distance and the
Speaker 1: first Cutting the Distance with Jason Phelps and friends. I'm
Speaker 1: on it talking all about turkey hunting. Also right now,
Speaker 1: speaking of Phelps, we have a hot new limited addition
Speaker 1: thing out. It's our line, one pot Call, our line
Speaker 1: one Turkey Call. They're available, so you can hit pause.
Speaker 1: You gotta make up your mind. You neither hit pause
Speaker 1: and go do this or keep listening and go do
Speaker 1: this depends how good you ared like doing something while
Speaker 1: listening to something else, So pause or not. But go
Speaker 1: to the meat Eater online store. So go to the
Speaker 1: meat eater dot com and you know, follow all the prompts.
Speaker 1: Get one of our sweet limited addition Turkey calls out
Speaker 1: of the black walnut and the o stage orange trees
Speaker 1: that that phelps and I felt we wound up with
Speaker 1: about calls their numbered sequentially. Right, if you've been listening
Speaker 1: to the show at all, you know the whole back
Speaker 1: story here. Years ago, me and my old man. My
Speaker 1: old man build a pole barn across the road from
Speaker 1: this little parcel. He owned a cross road from our house,
Speaker 1: so me and him my brothers built a pole barn there.
Speaker 1: We had to cut down a couple of trees to
Speaker 1: make room for the pole barn, and we got We
Speaker 1: cut down some oaks and had them milled, and then
Speaker 1: my old man stacked him up in the garage on
Speaker 1: little stickers. What do you call that in the lumber
Speaker 1: business when you dry them out, we always called stickers,
Speaker 1: not pearl No, No, I think they always call them stickers.
Speaker 1: Stickers stacked all of our planks up and they're just
Speaker 1: rough planks, stacked them all on in the front of
Speaker 1: the garage. Uh. And then later my dad died and
Speaker 1: they were still sitting there, and eventually took them all
Speaker 1: and cut him into like strips and made a big
Speaker 1: workbench top and made my desktop out of them. So
Speaker 1: I kind of liked that whole you know, it's an
Speaker 1: interesting process to see. So I was telling Phelps, you
Speaker 1: gotta go cut down a tree and see how many
Speaker 1: turkey calls are hiding in there. Because these oak trees
Speaker 1: had a work bench hiding in them. They had off
Speaker 1: his desk hiding in him and probably could have made
Speaker 1: three more deaths out of it. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: how many are in a tree, how many pot calls
Speaker 1: are in a tree? And we found uh. We went
Speaker 1: to Kansas. We filmed this whole thing, and we're making
Speaker 1: a video all about it. We went to Kansas and
Speaker 1: picked out a walnut, a big black walnut tree, and
Speaker 1: we picked out an o s age orange or a
Speaker 1: boat dark and we got out of this walnut tree
Speaker 1: and we kind of fetish eyes the walnut with drone.
Speaker 1: You'll really get to meet the tree. D Oh, that's
Speaker 1: how many was? Did you guys? We cut it down
Speaker 1: in Kansas. Seth was there, he's eyewitnessed. Took it over
Speaker 1: to Walnut, Kansas and milled it, sent that to Phelps's
Speaker 1: place out in Washington where they killed, dried it, and
Speaker 1: it wound up being out of that tree. I took
Speaker 1: enough for a knife handle, enough for a couple of
Speaker 1: knife handles. Um d pot calls were in that tree.
Speaker 1: And that's like select grading. So we're selling. I took
Speaker 1: one thousand and four their numbered. And what's funny is
Speaker 1: we were trying to save number well, this is like
Speaker 1: an incentive to purchasers. We were trying to save number
Speaker 1: one for the guy that owned the walnut tree. He
Speaker 1: want number one, but it got packaged. We got a problem.
Speaker 1: He's like, I already gotta already gotta open up three
Speaker 1: of these packages to find number one, or we do
Speaker 1: something special for the guy who gave us the walnut
Speaker 1: So we gotta figure out his His call is gone,
Speaker 1: so someone's gonna make their order and get O one.
Speaker 1: I took one somehow, Felps. I was like, semyone. Felps
Speaker 1: sent me one thousand and four. That's my special. I
Speaker 1: got one thousand and two. You got a better one
Speaker 1: than Uh. Yeah, they're available the line one pot call
Speaker 1: and may you have you messed with it? Yeah, dude,
Speaker 1: it sounds I was messing messing with it last night.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful, Oh say geornge Peg. I like to point
Speaker 1: out the Felts ruined one. Oh sa geornge remember that
Speaker 1: what do you call that? High chaired it? Barbara Barbara,
Speaker 1: Barbara chaired one like he notched it wrong and cut
Speaker 1: it and split that thing ten ft into the air
Speaker 1: and he had to go find another one. My my
Speaker 1: feling was perfect, of course. The black walnut, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was good. Yeah. I was a black walnut expert guided
Speaker 1: me through it. You'll see that in the video. So
Speaker 1: those are out get him now. Like I said, it's
Speaker 1: like so there. I think they're going to vanish in
Speaker 1: a real hurry um. But man, they're gorgeous. They come
Speaker 1: to Sweet Box. It's it's very it's like a it's
Speaker 1: like a collector's item. Um. Moving down, oh Chester, ke Phillison, First,
Speaker 1: can you start out by what's going on with your shirt?
Speaker 1: This is a Schmidty's oor House, which is a local
Speaker 1: watering hold back on Lake Winnebago. That's where I grew
Speaker 1: up in Wisconsin and it's it's a sturgeon spirit swash
Speaker 1: it No, it sounds Wisconsin schmidtys. Anyway, this place is
Speaker 1: right on the shores of Lake Winnebago, which every year
Speaker 1: in February, thousands and thousands and thousands of people gather
Speaker 1: and they do this thing called Sturton Spirits. I'd like
Speaker 1: to challenge you on that. Thousands. So there's already multiple
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands, so there's more multiple thousands and thousands.
Speaker 1: Well that's just so that's a minimum of six thousand individuals. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we say things like that in Wisconsin, so take it
Speaker 1: with a grain of salt. Anyways, there's twelve roughly, and
Speaker 1: I don't know the numbers so but I think roughly
Speaker 1: twelve thousand tags sold this year. Sold. More could have
Speaker 1: been he could have said three more times, but obviously
Speaker 1: all twelve thousand people are not out there. Spirit. But
Speaker 1: how long is the season. It's a quota season, so
Speaker 1: it just depends. It could be closed already, which it's not.
Speaker 1: It's still open right now. You're like, this is this
Speaker 1: is up to day information as of this record up
Speaker 1: today Tuesday, day four. It says on the Winnibago system,
Speaker 1: total sturgeon spirit is five and nine. What's the quota?
Speaker 1: Um three yea they went on no um. I don't
Speaker 1: know it just it depends because there's like certain number
Speaker 1: of juvenile females, adult females and males, and they'll shut
Speaker 1: the season down when they hit that quota if they
Speaker 1: hit and it has certain it's like that there's like
Speaker 1: a fisher unit where it's a five fisher quota, but
Speaker 1: it's a one female. It all ends with one female. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you can't really tell when they're down there, um
Speaker 1: what they are. But but they give out twelve hundred
Speaker 1: individuals or twelve hundred sheds Shandy's twelve thousand tags twelve.
Speaker 1: I was like, man, okay, I see twelve thousand people
Speaker 1: get a crack at filling a quote that's sub one
Speaker 1: thousand fish probably correct. And so you basically, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you were to show up on Lake Winnebago, there'd
Speaker 1: be road systems everywhere, there would be ice shanties as
Speaker 1: far as the eye can see, and you're trying to
Speaker 1: spear one of those fish, which is like the odds
Speaker 1: are like, you know, it's like a very small percentage
Speaker 1: of the people that spear those fish. Yeah, but you
Speaker 1: run with an elite group of hard players because according
Speaker 1: to the pictures you just said, I mean, you guys
Speaker 1: are tearing it a new one out there. I run
Speaker 1: with my cousin and he is a scouting fool. He
Speaker 1: drives out, you know, weeks prior to this season, and
Speaker 1: there's certain things he's looking for, like feed, like food.
Speaker 1: Well this worm stuff. Um looking for shad, gizzard shad,
Speaker 1: which is a terrible year on the Winnebago system for
Speaker 1: gizzard chad. Um, it's a poor year for from what
Speaker 1: I've heard, for the red worms, which is a lake
Speaker 1: fly larva as well. Um. But the sturgeon our bottom feeders,
Speaker 1: so they're just in the muck. They have these long
Speaker 1: mouths that will stick in the muck and they'll mill
Speaker 1: through there um and eat stuff that has fallen in
Speaker 1: the mud basically. Um. So what you do is um
Speaker 1: night before the season, we call it cutting in. So
Speaker 1: we take a chainsaw and we cut a hole that's
Speaker 1: about probably four ft by six ft into the ice
Speaker 1: and then you take these It's too big to lift
Speaker 1: it out, so you've got to push it under the ice,
Speaker 1: and we call it sink in the cake. So you
Speaker 1: take that slab of ice that you cut around and
Speaker 1: you push it down and you sink it and you
Speaker 1: push it away from your hole, and then you back
Speaker 1: up your ice shack, which is ours. Is like a
Speaker 1: nice metal ice shack um with heat and heat and propane.
Speaker 1: You guys, ever worry that the fish is gonna bang
Speaker 1: his head on that cake you sunk down there, This
Speaker 1: is what I mean if he's cruising a real fast attention.
Speaker 1: This is crazy that you say that, Steve, So no,
Speaker 1: you would never think that. Right. Anyways, I'm going to
Speaker 1: back up just a little bit before I get there.
Speaker 1: So what you do is you cut that hole, you
Speaker 1: back up your shack on it, and the actual frame
Speaker 1: that is of that trailer is on a hinge, so
Speaker 1: you can lower it down to the ice. The ice shack,
Speaker 1: you can lower it right down to the ice. You
Speaker 1: shovel snow around it. It's really dark in there, and
Speaker 1: then you, you know, shut the doors and you look
Speaker 1: down the hole and see what your clarity is. We
Speaker 1: could not see bottom very well, so we lowered some
Speaker 1: white siding down and it's an X on a string
Speaker 1: down to the bottom of the lake, and that gives
Speaker 1: you you can barely make it out, but at least
Speaker 1: you can see bottom a little bit and get a
Speaker 1: reference of where you might want to throw if fish
Speaker 1: comes through. We spear off cameras, so we lower like
Speaker 1: a Markham camera down or awkwa view camera down so
Speaker 1: you can see around you. Um, it would be very
Speaker 1: difficult to spear one if we didn't have that. You
Speaker 1: have to in that depth of water. But that's where
Speaker 1: the sturgeon were. It's a very controversial thing whether you're
Speaker 1: spearing with cameras or not. There's some traditional traditionalists that
Speaker 1: aren't happy about that. When you say spear of the camera,
Speaker 1: you mean only off the camera, yes, Um, like, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't understand that. So this is what I'm getting
Speaker 1: at by that sturgeon potentially bumping his head on the
Speaker 1: cake that you sunk, that's sitting up on top tips,
Speaker 1: so we are only expecting to most likely spear that
Speaker 1: surgeon on the bottom. When we're using cameras, you can
Speaker 1: look down the hole and you can't. You might be
Speaker 1: able to make out a surgeon if it swims right
Speaker 1: over your ex and all you would see is a
Speaker 1: little black mark. But typically we're on camera and that
Speaker 1: camera is facing your ex and you do your We
Speaker 1: have a TV up there so we can watch the
Speaker 1: screen and you'll see a fish swim through and you
Speaker 1: you kind of are almost it's an educated guess on
Speaker 1: where you're throwing because you're looking at that camera and
Speaker 1: you're like, I think he's on the edge of that X.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of opposed to this. And sure, I mean
Speaker 1: I could see that guy in Texas that would lie
Speaker 1: to log in and shoot deer, but they made it.
Speaker 1: You can't do that. I mean, if you were there,
Speaker 1: he's not spearing from Antana spirit off screen. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: he's there, so you won't be out of those twelve
Speaker 1: thousand tags. Steve, it's like, you know, five nine were
Speaker 1: speared over the last four days, very low odds. Um
Speaker 1: that's his party was spearing and left and right. So
Speaker 1: there are guys that will go like thirty some years
Speaker 1: and not spear of fish and they're mainly spirit. They're
Speaker 1: mainly not getting fish because they're not using cameras. On
Speaker 1: a clear water year, they may get one. Yes, Chester Chester,
Speaker 1: what about what about what about like tech fish sonars?
Speaker 1: When you're when you're sitting there perch fishing that stuff. Okay,
Speaker 1: I feel like this is very analogous to that man
Speaker 1: or with those what do you call the live scope
Speaker 1: live scope or something. Yeah, that's true. I do feel
Speaker 1: a little guilty doing that, but like it. All I
Speaker 1: can tell you is it's very hard to spere Surgeon,
Speaker 1: and even with cameras, you gotta put weeks in of
Speaker 1: scouting and like it's his heart. So going back to
Speaker 1: that my favorite you here a guy named Shakespeare. Yes,
Speaker 1: he's got a line on doth protest too much? M hmm. Okay,
Speaker 1: so he hits his head on the block. Sturgeon hits
Speaker 1: his head on the black. I don't know what that
Speaker 1: means either, chick. Uh. So my family spared to Sturgeon
Speaker 1: over the four over three days, the opening day and Sunday,
Speaker 1: my cousin Jake speared one off camera. I was there
Speaker 1: with him. Is Jake who speared one with the honest
Speaker 1: I was. I was so Jake, my cousin spared one
Speaker 1: opening day. He hadn't gotten one in like I don't know,
Speaker 1: four or five years, not even using the camera. He
Speaker 1: used the camera, he saw it, pushed it under the
Speaker 1: ice and somehow hit it. Just yep, they missed that day.
Speaker 1: To my other brother missed second day. We're sitting there.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting with my brother Ike and his girlfriend and
Speaker 1: he misses and he's all bummed, which is pretty typical.
Speaker 1: And it's twenty minutes missing. Missing is like has the
Speaker 1: thing to happen? Yeah, very off camera. It's like most
Speaker 1: of the time you're gonna miss. When you say off
Speaker 1: camera mean on camera. On camera, Yep, that could get confusing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sorry about that. So yeah, on camera, fish are very
Speaker 1: easy to miss. But we're sitting there's twenty minutes before
Speaker 1: it closes at one pm every day, so the quota
Speaker 1: doesn't it close at one so people have to check
Speaker 1: in their fish by a certain time so they don't
Speaker 1: go over the quota. So it's twenty minutes before the
Speaker 1: season closes and we're sitting there and I goes, or
Speaker 1: Tatum goes. Who's that his girlfriend? Tatum t a t
Speaker 1: will Yeah, Tatum goes and it goes and I look
Speaker 1: at the screen and see nothing, So I'm like, what
Speaker 1: the heck? And I looked down and there is a
Speaker 1: sturgeon a foot under the ice right where that cake
Speaker 1: is you know, it didn't hit its head on the cake,
Speaker 1: but it's a foot under the ice, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: I gotta get the I gotta pull up. How long
Speaker 1: it is right now? It's sixty eight inches long, seventy
Speaker 1: four three pounds or seventy three point four pounds, and
Speaker 1: which is like a big fish, but not huge. But
Speaker 1: when you see that thing sneak up on you a
Speaker 1: foot under the ice, it's the most surprising thing. It's
Speaker 1: like zero to but it's like right under. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like if it's shot straight up and come out
Speaker 1: of the hole. Well it's off to the side a
Speaker 1: little bit um and I could. I want to give
Speaker 1: all the details, but it would just be too long.
Speaker 1: There was a crack, a big fourteen ft long crack
Speaker 1: that opened up right next to his check that wasn't
Speaker 1: there the first day. I believe that that sturgeon was
Speaker 1: following that crack because it came along and it was suspended,
Speaker 1: which they they never that never happens. So he sits there,
Speaker 1: grabs his spear and kind of under the ice, but
Speaker 1: just jabs the heck out of it. I didn't think
Speaker 1: he was going to give it enough oomph. But he
Speaker 1: hit that thing hard, just a perfect shot. And once
Speaker 1: you spare a sturgeon like that closely ice, it's chaotic.
Speaker 1: You've got decoy lines down, You've got another line down
Speaker 1: holding your siding X, You've got your camera line down.
Speaker 1: He's trying to hold onto this rope and this big
Speaker 1: seventy pound fish is fighting. I'm sitting there trying to
Speaker 1: pull all this stuff out of the hole, and Ike's like, check,
Speaker 1: nobody cares about that stuff right now. Just get gaff.
Speaker 1: So I get the gaff. He gets a fish up.
Speaker 1: I gaff it, and you know it's just hooting and
Speaker 1: hollering and very rare, you know, to spear sturgeon. Uh.
Speaker 1: I speared one on the fur hat Ice tour that
Speaker 1: Meat Eater did with my family a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: So you can go watch that spearing dinosaurs. Spearing dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: He's a he is a what whoever edited the Meat
Speaker 1: Eater one? They called him a lucky bastard and they
Speaker 1: find that to be pretty true. So then we took
Speaker 1: it to Smitty's or house and had a couple of years.
Speaker 1: That's a good way to bring it full circle back.
Speaker 1: I wish you'd pick me up one of those shirts. Chester.
Speaker 1: I gotta get you one, and you need to come
Speaker 1: back there. I know you're putting in for the uproar.
Speaker 1: Me and Yanni are in big time on the draw
Speaker 1: every year. Man, we're accumulating bonus points on Sturgeon. Uh
Speaker 1: here's what we're touched on real quick. It's just it's
Speaker 1: so upsetting to me. We all the time have video
Speaker 1: game people. I'm probably gonna want to regretting this later
Speaker 1: if I just want to cash in fields video game person.
Speaker 1: Video game people are always trying to get us to
Speaker 1: like collaborate on a video game. Zero interest in that, zero, Sorry, Phil,
Speaker 1: I really wanted to play as Steve. Oh yeah, like
Speaker 1: to do a video game anyways. Now there's like a metavert, like,
Speaker 1: you know, Facebook change his name to meta Yeah, why
Speaker 1: did they do that? Because you're gonna get into all
Speaker 1: this virtual reality stuff where you make up it's like
Speaker 1: you make up a little thing. You know, people like
Speaker 1: make up those little emoji people versions of themselves. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: imagine you make one of those that right, No, imagine
Speaker 1: you it's imagine you had one of those. But that's
Speaker 1: how you lived your whole life. You stay in your
Speaker 1: house and you're like, I'm going to go to a concert,
Speaker 1: and then you put on goggles in your little emoji
Speaker 1: person goes to a concert and it seems like you're
Speaker 1: at a concert. I know there was what you're looking
Speaker 1: through a screen. There are some Super Bowl commercials that
Speaker 1: were like live this happy virtual life. Everybody's very excited
Speaker 1: about this stuff. They're very excited that you can just
Speaker 1: sit at home and be a total loser and be
Speaker 1: just a pathetic loser at home, and you could look
Speaker 1: as good as you want. You could have everything you
Speaker 1: should have had, and you go and interact and make
Speaker 1: like virtual friends and live in the metaverse. Apparently, like
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg is very excited about it. You can change his
Speaker 1: whole outfit to meta. You can buy virtual real estate.
Speaker 1: Is that is that Fahrenheit one with like the Lazy
Speaker 1: Boy in the Seashell you know where where where, Like
Speaker 1: it's it's either that or it's, uh, well, I forget
Speaker 1: what it was, but it's a very famous novel. And
Speaker 1: the whole thing is like they have all these folks
Speaker 1: that are just like plugged in with what they describe
Speaker 1: as like a little seashell earpiece and they're just hanging
Speaker 1: out in these like lazy boys basically and like just
Speaker 1: existing in that virtual reality. I think you're thinking about, um,
Speaker 1: that movie Wally. No, No, I'm gonna look it up.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah. Anyhow, they of course they now have a
Speaker 1: hunting version, but it's like, uh yeah, it's like a
Speaker 1: it's like built on a blockchain technology. Hunting versions, Hunting
Speaker 1: metaverse come on a lot of n f T s.
Speaker 1: You know, someone in our universe has a character on
Speaker 1: one of these games. That's great. I don't care. Okay,
Speaker 1: who's this. Yeah he's into it or not. I don't
Speaker 1: know if he's into it. Might just do one of
Speaker 1: those things people do because they're like, man, it's not
Speaker 1: a bad deal. Um, I don't know, are you in
Speaker 1: one time a negative ghostwriter? If you want to do
Speaker 1: something for yourself by our book Outdoor Kids, An Inside World,
Speaker 1: that book is going to become more important than ever
Speaker 1: once everybody moves into the metaverse. Yeah, I agree, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna sell that book packaged with a hammer
Speaker 1: where you can smash a bunch of that ship and
Speaker 1: read the book. Outdoor Kids, An Inside the World available
Speaker 1: for pre order now. Books tearing it up on preorders.
Speaker 1: It's the it lays out the case for having your
Speaker 1: kids and your family become radically involved with nature. Moving down,
Speaker 1: oh quick questions. Someone wrote in with can you get
Speaker 1: trick noses? If you're cleaning a bear and get the
Speaker 1: blood all over you and you have an open wound
Speaker 1: on your skin? Can you get tricked from it? Uh?
Speaker 1: Like it has to go through your stomach, It doesn't.
Speaker 1: You're like stomach acid have to digest. Yeah, you gotta
Speaker 1: get like a certain number. You gotta get some amount
Speaker 1: of the cysts in your stomach, and your stomach acid
Speaker 1: liberates the cyst. Then it has to go through your
Speaker 1: vascular system. But you're just messing around with bear meat
Speaker 1: and bear blood isn't gonna do it. Are there like
Speaker 1: super long term effects of like that happening to you?
Speaker 1: It can attack your heart and screw up, but it's
Speaker 1: very rare. But when I had it, That's what I
Speaker 1: was reading about, is like the cases where people get
Speaker 1: it bad as they get too much that that that
Speaker 1: parasite load gets too heavily into the muscle, the heart muscle.
Speaker 1: Do you have any idea like what your specific load
Speaker 1: kind of was or if like you're the severity of
Speaker 1: your case. No, but the meat I ate had um
Speaker 1: a half million sists per pound. If you if you
Speaker 1: sat down and ate a sixteen ounce pot rolls half
Speaker 1: a million sists loaded. Because they the CDC came and
Speaker 1: got a chunk of my bear meat and hauled it
Speaker 1: down to Atlanta to their lab, and that's what they get.
Speaker 1: That's what they came back to me with. UM. You know,
Speaker 1: everybody's always trying to end bobcat hunting and lying hunting
Speaker 1: here and there my home. This makes me proud to
Speaker 1: be a Michigander. They're increasing as bobcat numbers continue to climb,
Speaker 1: they're expanding longer seasons, more units. The bobcat is firmly
Speaker 1: re established itself. UM good connectivity among units. So they're
Speaker 1: opening up hunting and trapping opportunities in Michigan for bobcats
Speaker 1: in order to meet the good news of bobcat numbers
Speaker 1: doing great, still recovering from like the Timber Boom when
Speaker 1: they logged live and piss out of that state and
Speaker 1: killed all the wildlife off. As we recover it, people
Speaker 1: are rewarded with expanded opportunities. Anything to think about, that spencer.
Speaker 1: Did you see any there when you were a kid? No,
Speaker 1: but I uh, the first bobcat, yes, but not down
Speaker 1: where I lived. The first time I heard of a
Speaker 1: bobcat where right where I lived was actually on a
Speaker 1: farm where I would trap fox and raccoon, and the
Speaker 1: farmer's nephew was sitting in his tree stand and saw
Speaker 1: to bobcats together. That was the first ordered and that
Speaker 1: was in the nineties, the first reported incident anywhere near
Speaker 1: my home of bobcats. You could catch one bobcat a
Speaker 1: year north of us, but we never focused on it
Speaker 1: because they were only worth bucks because they're not like
Speaker 1: the Western cats. Western cats right now, even though for
Speaker 1: prices are super down, someone just sent me a text
Speaker 1: last night that they just sold a bunch of their
Speaker 1: cats for four bucks. Wow. So spiking up not where
Speaker 1: it was a few years ago. But Hi, these articles
Speaker 1: on our website One State might expand bobcat hunting and
Speaker 1: trapping Season two talks about the future of Michigan seasons.
Speaker 1: Tell me the headlining, and I think I feel like
Speaker 1: that could have been written better. One State might expand
Speaker 1: bobcat hunting and trapping seasons. So that's a pissport headline
Speaker 1: one state might it just doesn't have like a real
Speaker 1: like you know what I mean. Well, it's it's in
Speaker 1: the context of we've recently covered how a lot of
Speaker 1: other states to go in the other direction, like Arizona, Colorado, California, Illinois, Indiana.
Speaker 1: So when you see this on Facebook page, you're like, well,
Speaker 1: who's doing that? Yeah? What I do like about it?
Speaker 1: Krinn and I were emailing, or Krin was emailing me
Speaker 1: this morning about the opposite, like, I guess it's underselling
Speaker 1: an article is okay, But Krinn was talking to an anthropologist.
Speaker 1: Krinn and him, we're emailing about a headline that came out,
Speaker 1: and he was saying that the science when when popular
Speaker 1: news journals, popular news sources cover anthropology archaeology, they often
Speaker 1: oversell and try to create these sort of fantastical headlines
Speaker 1: out of something that the science just doesn't support. So recently,
Speaker 1: like it was this article, perhaps Neanderthal's didn't suffer a
Speaker 1: dramatic kill off, right, And he's like, I'm not aware
Speaker 1: of anyone who felt that they did. A guy on
Speaker 1: Wyoming just got busted for selling poached game meat, and
Speaker 1: it's funny he wasn't even selling it as game meat.
Speaker 1: He's shooting meal deer and antalopen quite a few of
Speaker 1: them and selling his organic beef jerky. He also they
Speaker 1: had suspicions about this dude, and this dude sells access
Speaker 1: on his ranch for three bucks. So some undercover game
Speaker 1: wardens form Wyoming booked themselves a couple of days of
Speaker 1: hunting on his ranch, and as they're wanting around, they
Speaker 1: noticed like burn piles full of carcasses, red flag. He's
Speaker 1: so secretive that he tells the undercover wardens what he does.
Speaker 1: What I do you see? I shoot antalopen deer and
Speaker 1: sell it as organic beef jerky And they're like, you
Speaker 1: know what? Say So they were able to put a
Speaker 1: pretty solid case against him. And did you hear like
Speaker 1: got the ball rolling on this. His ex girlfriend tattled
Speaker 1: on him. Go figure her. I didn't see that. His
Speaker 1: ex girlfriend told girlfriend, I know what great saying about that,
Speaker 1: but I can't say it's too dirty. I'm dying to know.
Speaker 1: It's the blank and you get for the blank, and
Speaker 1: you got I think we get it. Okay, let's be
Speaker 1: a law enforcement We're gonna hand it. We're gonna hand
Speaker 1: it over to our very own Katie Hill, who's gonna
Speaker 1: lay out our first ever inaugural Meat Eater investigates. She's
Speaker 1: like Bob Woodward. That's the compliment of Essentially, she's the
Speaker 1: Bob Woodward of the of the wild of the wildlife world.
Speaker 1: Thank you. So I wrote this story about finding Saga
Speaker 1: antelope porn's for sale on major online retailers UM, Amazon
Speaker 1: at c an eBay, and I found out how you're
Speaker 1: searching for him. Yeah. I it's kind of a strange story.
Speaker 1: So I was working for a different like international conservation
Speaker 1: media outlet, and Katie now works for us. She's toil
Speaker 1: team Yes in the trenches, plug plug the article to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the article is called major online retailers acted as
Speaker 1: black market for endangered animal parts. Great writing from Katie
Speaker 1: and a great graphic from our own hunter Spencer. This
Speaker 1: is Katie's first time on the podcast. Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: do a good job setting out all it's covered now, thanks. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I first found out about Sigo when I was
Speaker 1: working for a different uh conservation outlet run by a
Speaker 1: bunch of banc guys, and I was trying to I
Speaker 1: was building like a Twitter and Instagram profile for them
Speaker 1: and trying to populate those profiles and C Boone and Crockett. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: trying to kind of build up the two profiles to
Speaker 1: make them actually something you know, worth looking at. And
Speaker 1: I found out a saiga and pretty shortly after, you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't take long to figure out that they're super
Speaker 1: endangered and they have like a long history of endangerment.
Speaker 1: They're kind of all over like the Eurasian step grasslands. Also,
Speaker 1: their horns are used pretty heavily in like traditional Chinese
Speaker 1: medicinal practices, and so their horns are now kind of
Speaker 1: considered one of those taboo international wildlife trafficking issues. Kin
Speaker 1: nodded knowingly when you said that, I didn't are you familiar?
Speaker 1: Oh that was that kind of like it was like
Speaker 1: your nod was more like a dozen surprise. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: So my sick, twisted brain like decided that I was
Speaker 1: going to see how long it would take to find
Speaker 1: some online, like you know what you have to descend
Speaker 1: into like the bowels of the internet to find this
Speaker 1: stuff for like where would it crop up on the
Speaker 1: Silk Road or exactly. Um, so I just fired a
Speaker 1: simple Google search sygo horn for sale, and the first
Speaker 1: search result came from Amazon. It was like, it was
Speaker 1: like no freaking white exactly. Yeah, and you can imagine
Speaker 1: what this is done to like my suggested search items
Speaker 1: on Amazon now like so um, I it was it
Speaker 1: was a lot. At first. The first natural thought was like, well,
Speaker 1: there's no way these are real. And also, like made
Speaker 1: a point in the article that they don't really look
Speaker 1: like SiGe horns. They're like lacquered really heavily, and they're
Speaker 1: black um and cigo horns are more of like a
Speaker 1: camel color. So it's kind of hard to tell if
Speaker 1: they're legit or not. But so I went to this
Speaker 1: store on Amazon. They were one pair was about like
Speaker 1: two thirty five and one pair is like to ten.
Speaker 1: Katie had screen shots of all of these listings in
Speaker 1: the article two Yeah. Then I went to the store
Speaker 1: because I was like, well, what else is this guy selling?
Speaker 1: It was listed to the guy was listed in Russia,
Speaker 1: and the store was full of mounts, pelts, full body mounts,
Speaker 1: shoulder mounts, of just a really eclectic mix of species,
Speaker 1: and so I was like, well, how much of this
Speaker 1: is legal? And so I started cross listing. I decided
Speaker 1: I was going to like audit the whole store, and
Speaker 1: I started cross listing the store with the site's database
Speaker 1: the Convention for the International Trade of Endangered Species. And
Speaker 1: as I was doing this, more and more pieces kept
Speaker 1: cropping up. The store kept growing, and so I decided, like,
Speaker 1: while you're looking at his collection is growing, not actively,
Speaker 1: but I would like go check to me, well, because
Speaker 1: of course I'm checking to make sure this stuff is
Speaker 1: still there, but his holdings are increasing exactly like the
Speaker 1: storage exactly exactly. So I made like a hard stop,
Speaker 1: was like, all right, I'm gonna stop stalking this guy's
Speaker 1: Amazon store on December two. And as of December two,
Speaker 1: My why did you want to stop stalking as Amazon store?
Speaker 1: Because I had, like I had to write the story
Speaker 1: and eventually I had to, like I couldn't keeping was done. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: I was done waiting for him to reform UM. And
Speaker 1: so that final audit that I did, he had a
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty four pieces of taxidermy from sites listed species.
Speaker 1: And so I got in touch with Amazon and they
Speaker 1: replied and gave a statement, and UM then proceeded to
Speaker 1: pull down They said, they pulled down some of his
Speaker 1: product and after the story published. UM, I went back
Speaker 1: in and looked and his story that had been probably
Speaker 1: close to like he had like four hundred listings on
Speaker 1: the store. It was down to ten listings. So they
Speaker 1: pulled down a ton of stuff. And it's hard to
Speaker 1: tell like what they pulled down what was sold like
Speaker 1: its cartoon exactly. UM. But right before we were set
Speaker 1: to publish UM, I also decided on a whim to
Speaker 1: go see if eBay and Etsy also had any Sigo
Speaker 1: Horn for sale. Um eBay I feel like was a
Speaker 1: dead ringer. I mean they've had issues with UM, they've
Speaker 1: had issues with ivory trade and trying to suppress the
Speaker 1: ivory trade on um eBay, and so I dug in
Speaker 1: there and they had probably like thirty to forty listings
Speaker 1: for siege Horn, and then Etc. Had maybe ten. And
Speaker 1: so I got in touch with both of them as well,
Speaker 1: and neither of them made statements, but Etc. Did pull
Speaker 1: down their siege Horn listings. So so when you call
Speaker 1: what do you call it customer service over to Amazon
Speaker 1: or did you kind of like bag channel a little bit?
Speaker 1: I have act channeled. They used their public relations like
Speaker 1: their media relations contact. UM. Yeah, what other creators did
Speaker 1: you find that they were selling parts from that they
Speaker 1: shouldn't be. Yeah. So I found there were a lot
Speaker 1: of birds, a lot of birds that are on like
Speaker 1: the Migratory Bird Treaty act um. Give me an example,
Speaker 1: there was there was an Eastern Imperial eagle, which is
Speaker 1: the sight E's Appendix one species, like a fully full body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's screenshots of that in the article too. Um, and
Speaker 1: then a what was it called a white tailed eagle
Speaker 1: as well. Um, we're too kind of made like really
Speaker 1: really endangered. Like the international trade of these animals is
Speaker 1: seriously locked down. So let me let me got this
Speaker 1: question for you, and I might I might be putting
Speaker 1: myself in jail right now. I don't know. Man came
Speaker 1: back World War two. He was in North Africa, and
Speaker 1: he came back with this big gass dagger that has
Speaker 1: a big ivory handle on it. Okay, I would love
Speaker 1: to find someone that can help me figure out what
Speaker 1: it is. An ivory handle and a leather sheath. It's
Speaker 1: like a translucent leather. I have no idea. Um, if
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, like I died and someone did
Speaker 1: in a state sale, Okay, all of a sudden, here's
Speaker 1: ivory right on the market and you kind of look
Speaker 1: and be like, I don't know, it doesn't feel um
Speaker 1: like mal intent? Book him Dano, Book him Dan? What
Speaker 1: does that mean? From the old Hawaii five oh show
Speaker 1: when they would get somebody? Yeah, so like like if
Speaker 1: you see an eagle, I mean, where's the stuff coming from?
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying, Like, how is it not
Speaker 1: that just whatever? Some crazy guy had some stuff and
Speaker 1: then this guy bought it and right like do you
Speaker 1: know that it was a guy he said like listen, man,
Speaker 1: there's a hot market. I want you to go shoot
Speaker 1: the eagle and we'll stuff it and sell it on
Speaker 1: my website. It's hard to tell. Um. All I really
Speaker 1: can say to that is that the way that sites works. Um.
Speaker 1: So if the species, like say that stuffed eagle, the
Speaker 1: stuffed Eastern Imperial Eagle, Um, if that mount were created
Speaker 1: before the Eastern Imperial Eagle was listed under sights, which
Speaker 1: is the seven, if those products were already in existence
Speaker 1: before the listing occurred, then they are legal. So that's
Speaker 1: so that's why you see a lot of like vintage
Speaker 1: ivory products that are you know, very you know, they're
Speaker 1: like they sell for incredible amounts of money. Really, I
Speaker 1: think so valuable it probably is. Yeah, don't sell it
Speaker 1: on it's a pretty healthy honk ivory on there, man. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: that's a good idea. So if it's I mean, if
Speaker 1: it was from before, I mean I can't speak specifically
Speaker 1: to ivory because I don't. I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: of separate rules that apply. But at least with sights
Speaker 1: listed species, if those products were already in existence before
Speaker 1: the listing date, then they are technically That's how they're
Speaker 1: able to sell a bunch of like pianos with ivory keys. Mmm.
Speaker 1: Because old stuff. Yeah, Like I when I was a musician,
Speaker 1: I bought a piano and and it had like ivory
Speaker 1: keys on it. Still, so like puts the ivories back
Speaker 1: into tickling the Irish, or does exactly? So do you
Speaker 1: have is it your what's your suspicion like on the
Speaker 1: stuff that this guy was selling. Is your suspicion that
Speaker 1: this was not stuff he picked up from some old
Speaker 1: estate sale, but that this was like stuff that people
Speaker 1: were doing because they could market it. I think it
Speaker 1: was probably the latter. I mean a lot of the
Speaker 1: species were largely endemic to Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
Speaker 1: And they didn't look like old like things that people
Speaker 1: have been smoking cigarettes next to you. Some of them
Speaker 1: really did. Some of them were disgusting, and some of
Speaker 1: them looked pretty new and well done. Um. There were
Speaker 1: a lot of like really just really crappy pelts. UM,
Speaker 1: a lot of like it almost looks like key chains
Speaker 1: made out of the talents off the birds. UM. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've ever seen a Siberian musk deer before,
Speaker 1: but it's like a deer with fangs. About this not
Speaker 1: in a while, but mounting. I didn't buy it though
Speaker 1: on this sweet website weird it disappeared. So have you gone?
Speaker 1: Have you taken this? And? Um, have you thought about
Speaker 1: going and trying to find some of the real dark
Speaker 1: stuff like like rhino horn? Do you think that, like,
Speaker 1: do you think that you'd find that it was that
Speaker 1: easy to get the things you hear about like every day, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't want to do that on
Speaker 1: my company laptop, I can tell you that I I think. So.
Speaker 1: There was one website that I found in this whole
Speaker 1: searching process that was really strange. Um. They sold like
Speaker 1: dried apple. They were selling abalone shell Those are definitely
Speaker 1: not I think there's some restrictions on abalone shell um
Speaker 1: like dried ox gall bladders, like really weird stuff. And
Speaker 1: they had they were selling bags of saga horns for
Speaker 1: like fourteen point five million dollars pop. Yeah, yep, so
Speaker 1: for a bag of them. Yeah here if I can
Speaker 1: find these were good deals in because I saw eBay
Speaker 1: it was like five hundred bucks for a one pound
Speaker 1: of saga horn. Yeah, you found one of those right now?
Speaker 1: No, no no, no, that's from Katie's article. Katie, but next time,
Speaker 1: because if you like that all that Internet sleuth and um,
Speaker 1: try to find us a deal on a really huge
Speaker 1: punt gun, like a huge punt gun. I'll take any
Speaker 1: any requests for dark web dealing big How long? How
Speaker 1: long have a punt gone to one? I would say
Speaker 1: minimum like seven and a half feet? You know, that's
Speaker 1: when it like catches your eye, like that's that's something good.
Speaker 1: Eight foot punt gun. Someone else is gonna have to
Speaker 1: pay for shipping on that. I'm not so are you
Speaker 1: like inspired now to make um? Are you just moving
Speaker 1: on or do you think you're going to do more
Speaker 1: stuff in this vein? I don't know. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was definitely interesting to see that that stuff does exist
Speaker 1: like right under our noses on the websites that we
Speaker 1: most of us like use frequently. Um, this is like
Speaker 1: a the age of the age old adage of if
Speaker 1: you see something, say something, it's so nerdy, but it's
Speaker 1: definitely true. UM, I don't know, we'll see if I
Speaker 1: if I stumble across any other strange stuff, it would
Speaker 1: definitely be kind of an interesting follow up story. But
Speaker 1: what was the statement that Amazon made? Um, they just
Speaker 1: kind of reiterated their seller policy on animals and animal products,
Speaker 1: which is that they abide by all national and international law. Um,
Speaker 1: and they don't condone selling sits listed animal products. And
Speaker 1: they sort of distance some sellers by saying something about
Speaker 1: like third party sellers. Yeah, because there is yeah, they
Speaker 1: you know, this stuff wasn't like you know, available through
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime. This is like, yeah, exactly, they didn't sign
Speaker 1: off on any of this stuff. Um, they aren't willing
Speaker 1: to put their name next to it, which I totally understand. Um.
Speaker 1: That's that's a constant story and perspective from the tech world,
Speaker 1: whether it's publishing, selling where you have like a platform
Speaker 1: like Amazon, and people say, like why I bought it
Speaker 1: on Amazon? But Amazon is also like a home for
Speaker 1: third party sellers to do what they want to do,
Speaker 1: meaning you could also go find um, you could go
Speaker 1: to like wherever iTunes and find objectionable material that people
Speaker 1: have posted to iTunes, and the people want to say
Speaker 1: like well Apple, an Apple would say, We're just a publisher,
Speaker 1: not our material. And it's like it seems like every
Speaker 1: if you follow the tech industry and all of its
Speaker 1: um trouble spot and hot spots, it often like narrows
Speaker 1: down to places trying to where possible find some distance
Speaker 1: between their platform and the people who are living on
Speaker 1: their platform. Absolutely, and sometimes people buy it, and sometimes
Speaker 1: they expect a little bit more. Well, but I mean
Speaker 1: if you put it, you know, from their perspective, not
Speaker 1: to like, you know, advocate for what they did. But um,
Speaker 1: I mean they have millions of sellers on their platform,
Speaker 1: and I mean I can't even imagine how like how
Speaker 1: big a team they would need to have to like
Speaker 1: scrape every single listing for anything prohibited you know, drugs,
Speaker 1: animal products, people like anything along those lines. Who I
Speaker 1: talked to a guy one time, I might screw the
Speaker 1: stat maybe when you guys can find the stat when
Speaker 1: you fast finger little fellas Um he worked at YouTube
Speaker 1: and he was in he was part of his focus
Speaker 1: was like keeping advertisers happy about what stuff their ads
Speaker 1: are applied to. I think he's telling me that every
Speaker 1: minute four hundred hours of content or uploaded to YouTube.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine being in the office that's February, every
Speaker 1: minute five hundred hours of content or uploaded to YouTube,
Speaker 1: and he's supposed to make sure there's nothing objectionable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's why hence when you get your stuff flagged
Speaker 1: on a social media platform, you're like, I don't really
Speaker 1: get it. But because there's so much machine learning in
Speaker 1: there now and it's like looking for certain markers and
Speaker 1: traces and now and then it you know, obviously hits
Speaker 1: something that isn't or exactly. Yeah, So I mean they
Speaker 1: definitely skipped over this particular store. Yeah, you can put
Speaker 1: up an infomercial about siga horns and probably would probably
Speaker 1: sit there for some number of days. There probably to
Speaker 1: be active for some number of days where someone found it.
Speaker 1: Katie crushing with this story. It's not often we do
Speaker 1: stuff for him, like Vice would be jealous of this
Speaker 1: or New York Times would be jealous of this, but
Speaker 1: they were not often. It's not often they wouldn't come
Speaker 1: to getting that house cat. I stand by my New
Speaker 1: York Times. New York Times probably burned up that didn't
Speaker 1: get not often that they would be really jealous. They would,
Speaker 1: in fact be jealous of this. If you want to
Speaker 1: read it again. Major online retailers act as black market
Speaker 1: for endangered animal parts. Headline, I ask, what's the what's
Speaker 1: the read on that? That saucy? But it holds up?
Speaker 1: It holds up. Well, we had to go through many
Speaker 1: rounds about it, get pr for meat eater involved to
Speaker 1: make sure that they were cool with it, and that
Speaker 1: was where we landed. But make sure they're cool. How saucy?
Speaker 1: That headlines sounded correct? No blowback though minor from the
Speaker 1: from the saucy from the sauce police. Yeah, I like
Speaker 1: that toned down at sauciness. Well, thanks should come on
Speaker 1: next time you write an article, come tell us about it.
Speaker 1: I would be happy to thank you. You know how
Speaker 1: about you know what we could do this is you
Speaker 1: could write an article on it could be something like
Speaker 1: Steve's dad's dagger. Actually, isn't that interesting or something. You know.
Speaker 1: What I could do is I could try to sell
Speaker 1: it on Amazon and see how much money. I My
Speaker 1: first object is I want to know what off what
Speaker 1: ivory it was. It's a it's a big chunk, man.
Speaker 1: I feel like you could get that figured out, though,
Speaker 1: I mean, they must be able to use you say
Speaker 1: you'll get it figured out. I'll do it. After we're
Speaker 1: at it. I'll bring it in. I'll leave it on
Speaker 1: the table here for a while. Um, whether or not
Speaker 1: it's ever tasted blood, I have no idea that could
Speaker 1: be part of the analysis. All right, Tommy, ready, yep,
Speaker 1: I'm ready enjoying it. Okay, now I'm gonna give the background.
Speaker 1: How I know you because when I was a little boy,
Speaker 1: uh not too little, no, but you were like at
Speaker 1: the forefront of making videos. Um, you used to. I
Speaker 1: feel like, I don't know if I ever saw yet
Speaker 1: one of the Trapper's conventions, but I definitely like your series,
Speaker 1: particularly the Water Trapping VHS tape. Which this what what
Speaker 1: brought this whole thing out is I was just home
Speaker 1: busy with my mom or Thanksgiving, and she doesn't like
Speaker 1: to get rid of anything. Um, and she's got like
Speaker 1: a display she's got you know those old police monitors
Speaker 1: of course. Yeah, okay, that thing was on my entire
Speaker 1: growing up, the police monitor and it goes through all
Speaker 1: his flashing lights and it like picks up. Oh I
Speaker 1: turned it on, and like nothing's happening. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: they must have changed whatever they do. But pretty soon
Speaker 1: does a girl going into anaphylactic on my police monitor
Speaker 1: and like they still use those things. No one turned
Speaker 1: that thing on for for a million years regardless. Below
Speaker 1: it is all the old VHS tapes and in there
Speaker 1: I'm like, holy ship, my Tom Miranda water trapping VHS tape,
Speaker 1: which was probably the most like at the time. This
Speaker 1: might be a wild statement, at the time, it had
Speaker 1: to been one of the most probably the most like
Speaker 1: widely distributed pieces of trapping media in the country. I
Speaker 1: was pretty blessed back in those days. You know. It
Speaker 1: was the right place at the right time. A lot
Speaker 1: of big time trappers didn't like me though, because I
Speaker 1: was taking all these uh secrets of the trapper and
Speaker 1: putting them out there on video instead of bringing it
Speaker 1: to your grades. Yeah, instead of actually trying to sell it,
Speaker 1: uh through my catalog, I sold it to video rental stores,
Speaker 1: and so guys could go in and rent it for
Speaker 1: a dollar, and I sold pens of thousands. I won't
Speaker 1: say anymore about the sturgeon, but quite a few, quite
Speaker 1: a few of these videos, and uh, yeah, it was great.
Speaker 1: But I made trapping lures and wrote books and was
Speaker 1: an actual trapper. Tom put it like he was trapping trappers.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's exactly what it was. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: you find out after a while that the fur prices fluctuate.
Speaker 1: You know, one year, raccoons or ten dollars, next year
Speaker 1: their forty dollars, and so that the year they're ten dollars,
Speaker 1: you catch a hundred. In the year their forty dollars,
Speaker 1: you catch ten. So you really never really get ahead
Speaker 1: in the fur industry, you know what I mean. But
Speaker 1: in the trapping side of it. As far as for
Speaker 1: the other trappers, if you were a good trapper, and
Speaker 1: if you made good catches and you were legitimate, they
Speaker 1: would order your books, they would order your videos. And
Speaker 1: when people learned how to catch their first fox or
Speaker 1: their first raccoon or mink, they would think, wow, you know,
Speaker 1: this guy taught me how to do it, and so
Speaker 1: they would buy your products and it basically it's like
Speaker 1: how you gain fans on your meat eat or podcast.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, people like listening, so they come back.
Speaker 1: Same thing was that, you know back in the mid
Speaker 1: eighties when I did it, it was I thought it
Speaker 1: was like rev illustionary because I would look at all
Speaker 1: those books and I had all the books man um
Speaker 1: like Bob gils Vic had that famous hardcover book that
Speaker 1: everybody in the world had. National Trappers Association put out
Speaker 1: a book. But it would be that on your video
Speaker 1: is also to be there'd be like it seems like
Speaker 1: you just made it yourself right right there. You set
Speaker 1: up a camera, you have all equipment and you'd make
Speaker 1: Uh that was pretty much out to Yeah. I like,
Speaker 1: I like step by step, just emulated, emulated what I saw.
Speaker 1: That's good because it worked right. Yeah. I got the
Speaker 1: equipment like I'll tell you last night, using a tile spade,
Speaker 1: having big old squirt bottles for the lure, all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Man, I love that stuff. Well. In
Speaker 1: the longlining, principle was to cover as much ground as possible.
Speaker 1: It's as many sets and just keep adding new sets.
Speaker 1: At the end of the day you pull the sets
Speaker 1: at the beginning your trap sets that are unproductive, maybe
Speaker 1: you've already caught the animals in that area or the
Speaker 1: surplus is what we always go for. And then you
Speaker 1: move down the line and you just continue to repeat
Speaker 1: yourself to try to keep an average number of animals
Speaker 1: per day. And the whole premise so the videos was
Speaker 1: to cheat a quick, effective set that you could make
Speaker 1: that would handle especially the water trapping of water fluctuation,
Speaker 1: because when it rains, the creeks go up, and you
Speaker 1: want to keep the trap working as as long as
Speaker 1: possible so you have the maximum chance of of taking
Speaker 1: an animal in that one set. And if you set
Speaker 1: ten traps, if you can catch four animals out of
Speaker 1: those ten traps within two days, that's a pretty good average,
Speaker 1: especially if you're running two hundred traps or three traps,
Speaker 1: and a long line trapper would run traps. I mean
Speaker 1: at one time I had skinners that skinned my catch,
Speaker 1: so I just ran the traps all the time and
Speaker 1: then guys skinned them for mens. Yeah. Absolutely, that's how
Speaker 1: you make money. Really absolutely. Set used to be he's
Speaker 1: the skin for a fur buyer. Well, that's that's that's
Speaker 1: a hard way to make money. What was it? What
Speaker 1: was your deal you'd strike with your own skinners? Well,
Speaker 1: you paid them by the piece, you know, you paid
Speaker 1: them by the piece. But they had to do it
Speaker 1: to your specs though obviously. Well yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: know we had we would wash the pelts, we would
Speaker 1: skin them, we would dry them, and then then I'm
Speaker 1: in a tumble them and you know we basically they
Speaker 1: were the spotless, best pelts they could because you're always
Speaker 1: gonna get the best price for the more prime first,
Speaker 1: but the always the put up first. You know, there's
Speaker 1: some things you can control and some things you can't control.
Speaker 1: If you catch one that's half prime, you can't control that.
Speaker 1: But if you put it up right. You know, it's
Speaker 1: all about presentation. You know, I knew you, Um when
Speaker 1: I when I became aware you, I associated you very
Speaker 1: strongly with South Dakota Chamber. South Dakota. Absolutely. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: didn't realize the later. You were born in Columbus, Ohio?
Speaker 1: I was, Yeah, were you born in the good? Um?
Speaker 1: Like was it was your Were your parents into the
Speaker 1: outdoors and no, Um, my dad deer hunted once in
Speaker 1: a while, but he worked. He worked for Western Electric.
Speaker 1: My mom was a stay at home mom. I lived
Speaker 1: in the suburbs, but there was a there was a
Speaker 1: railroad track near my house and a river system that
Speaker 1: went by. It was called the Big one Nut Creek.
Speaker 1: And so, um, how I actually got into trapping isn't
Speaker 1: from any of my family. It was the next door neighbor.
Speaker 1: I saw him walking down. He was four or five
Speaker 1: years older than me. I saw him walking down the
Speaker 1: railroad tracks with a basket on his back, and I
Speaker 1: was a eleven years old. So I followed him, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, secretly to see what he was doing. And
Speaker 1: he was had the hip waiters on and he was
Speaker 1: going along the creek and he was setting muskrat and
Speaker 1: raccoon traips. Eventually, um, we talked and eventually I was
Speaker 1: carrying his pack basket and you know, doing the hard
Speaker 1: work for him and just learning. And uh, eventually he
Speaker 1: got a girlfriend and I got the trap line. Hmm.
Speaker 1: That's how it worked. Always make that fatal mistake at
Speaker 1: that time? Are you, um, what was your introduction to
Speaker 1: bow hunt? Well, I mean everybody was buying these recurve
Speaker 1: bows of Fred bear Back and you know, the late sixties,
Speaker 1: and you know, this was nineteen sixty nine when I
Speaker 1: started trapping, and of course I had to have one,
Speaker 1: you know, and shooting the backyard that was mostly archery.
Speaker 1: Was that kind of like was it was it then?
Speaker 1: With him and the outdoor rules that kind of like
Speaker 1: a hip thing. It was a hip thing, you know.
Speaker 1: It was a fad kind of a thing, you know
Speaker 1: back then, of course. Yeah, And he was promoting it
Speaker 1: and he was at the time, Bear was doing a
Speaker 1: lot of these videos or films that he did, and
Speaker 1: he would travel around to different gymnasiums and places where
Speaker 1: he'd play his films and talk about bow hunting. And
Speaker 1: that was the really the when when the Fred Bear
Speaker 1: company got really big and really bow hunting really took off.
Speaker 1: We're guys that were at that time when people were
Speaker 1: getting into archery, you know, it was new like like
Speaker 1: state last days didn't have dedicated archery seasons like they
Speaker 1: do now. Um was it? Were people into trick shooting?
Speaker 1: Were you like training to hunt big game? At the time.
Speaker 1: I was young, so I was just enjoying the sport,
Speaker 1: you know, the field of the bow, the flight of
Speaker 1: the arrow, you know, hitting at a target. You know,
Speaker 1: I didn't never really went bow hunting until I was
Speaker 1: in my early twenties, you know, I mean because I
Speaker 1: was a trapper and trapping season is a full time job.
Speaker 1: You know. You've got to run your traps every day,
Speaker 1: you gotta stand your catch, so you really don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of time to actually hunt. How did it want?
Speaker 1: How did it want? Know? You became so entrenched in uh,
Speaker 1: South Dakota and then with that tell people about becoming
Speaker 1: a government trapper and what that all meant. Yeah. Well, um,
Speaker 1: in the early eighties, I saw an ad in the
Speaker 1: Furfish Game magazine in the back of A guy's name
Speaker 1: was Oddan Core. He lived in Miller, South Dakota, and
Speaker 1: he gave trapping lessons. And at the time I was
Speaker 1: really thirsting for information on all the animals, on all
Speaker 1: the trapping. I had never been out west and trapped.
Speaker 1: As I was thinking South Dakota. There was a book
Speaker 1: out at the time by Gerald Wheeland called Longliner Fox Trapping,
Speaker 1: longlin Er Fox Trapping, too Longliner, Kyote trapping, longline or
Speaker 1: mink trapping. So this guy was yeah, absolutely remember the name,
Speaker 1: very very accomplished trapper. Well. I ended up taking lessons
Speaker 1: from Oddon Core and Miller South Dakota. I learned a lot.
Speaker 1: I mean I learned a real lot. And the main
Speaker 1: thing I learned was that there was no secret to it.
Speaker 1: It was just all hard work. It was just repeat.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like a xerox, you know, like a
Speaker 1: copy machine. Find whatever location works, whatever set works, and
Speaker 1: whatever area works, and repeat that over and over and
Speaker 1: over and over again. And that's how you're successful. That's
Speaker 1: what he taught me. Um. Over time, I realized though
Speaker 1: that there there was not It was not gonna be
Speaker 1: I was not going to really be able to make
Speaker 1: a full good living and be as successful as a
Speaker 1: person that I could be by just being a trapper.
Speaker 1: And so UM I had heard of a possible job
Speaker 1: as a government trapper in South Dakota, and I went
Speaker 1: there and applied and I got the job. But at
Speaker 1: the time, I was making my own trapping lures, and um,
Speaker 1: I hadn't started writing books yet or any of that.
Speaker 1: But UM, I was on the cusp of starting my
Speaker 1: entrepreneurship as a trapper. So what's the job description of
Speaker 1: a government trapper? And what was the job title? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I was an a d C specialist, so
Speaker 1: animal damage control specialist, for the state of South Dakota.
Speaker 1: I got a state pickup truck, I had an office,
Speaker 1: I had a secretary. They gave me a bunch of traps,
Speaker 1: and I had ten counties that I had trap in.
Speaker 1: And so anybody that called there's a skunk under your poor,
Speaker 1: to beaver dam and a culver to coyote killing your sheep,
Speaker 1: any of that, I had to go address and ten
Speaker 1: counties in South Dakota. And they're big counties like Montana,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, it's like a big, big area.
Speaker 1: And so I was driving ten twelve hours a day
Speaker 1: answering all these questions. And that's when I decided that
Speaker 1: I was gonna learn how to fly and do this
Speaker 1: from the air. In the eighties in that area, were
Speaker 1: you encountering any mountain lions or not? Yet? There were
Speaker 1: more out in the Black Hills, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: we had some on some of the drainages, but we weren't.
Speaker 1: I wasn't being called in on any of those types
Speaker 1: of calls. Not where I was at the Chamberlains on
Speaker 1: the east river of the Missouri River right at ninety so. Um,
Speaker 1: it's kind of in south central South Dakota and all
Speaker 1: my counties that I was responsible for East River. We
Speaker 1: talked about this a little bit last night. Um, someone
Speaker 1: the guy that raises sheep, he goes out and there's
Speaker 1: a dead one land there, and his mind right away
Speaker 1: is called Tom Miranda. He'll come and give me a receipt.
Speaker 1: So but literally, like your phone rings or your secretary's
Speaker 1: phone rings, that's right, And then it's up to you
Speaker 1: at some point in time over a ten county range,
Speaker 1: go out and see what's up. Absolutely yeah, go find
Speaker 1: out if it was really animal damage? You know, did
Speaker 1: it wasn't really a cowdy? Did this thing just die
Speaker 1: in a coudy or a fox eat on it later?
Speaker 1: So you know, you're looking for throat, you know, puncture
Speaker 1: wounds in the throat. You're looking for how this thing died?
Speaker 1: Was it drug? You know, while it was still alive,
Speaker 1: you know, et cetera. You know, what's the fence look
Speaker 1: like in the area. Does he guy have any guard dogs?
Speaker 1: You know what? What's the scenario? How many empty sweaters
Speaker 1: are in the pasture? You know, I mean you're looking
Speaker 1: for all those things. Empty sweaters is a d c
Speaker 1: lingo for dead sheep, Like a little pile of wool Tom,
Speaker 1: what would you do with the animals that you caught, Like,
Speaker 1: were you able to skin and sell them? Or um,
Speaker 1: when we took vacation, we were allowed to sell them.
Speaker 1: But I always caught and skinned my animals, and um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it made me a little bit of an enemy of
Speaker 1: some of the people that worked in the system with me,
Speaker 1: because I was I came from the fur trapping part
Speaker 1: of it when I got the job, and to me,
Speaker 1: it was a waste if I didn't even if they
Speaker 1: were you know, Mangie or whatever not Mangie August. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, just because that's what I did. You have
Speaker 1: a hard time to just throw them in a distion
Speaker 1: and you end up. But you know, I was ended
Speaker 1: up with, you know, quite a high number of animals
Speaker 1: that I was turning into the state, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the other trappers were just leaving them lay, you know,
Speaker 1: and they're like, you know, giving me a call and saying, hey, man,
Speaker 1: you know, like making us look bad. Let's just cool
Speaker 1: your jets on this stuff. Because I was a new guy,
Speaker 1: you know, I was a new and I was a
Speaker 1: new new guy in town. So anyways, I learned over
Speaker 1: a course of time that you know, there was a
Speaker 1: little bit of a protocol, you know, that you needed
Speaker 1: to do, and I just was trying to do my best,
Speaker 1: you know, like I tell everybody, you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: the best bow hunter, I'm not the best trapper, I'm
Speaker 1: not the best writer, I'm not the best anything. But
Speaker 1: I'll outwork anybody. And that was the whole key to it.
Speaker 1: I just worked until I was successful. There's a there's
Speaker 1: a great quote by a writer. His name was like Apple,
Speaker 1: rw Apple, remember him? Heah, he has a quote were said,
Speaker 1: I can write faster than anyone can write better. I
Speaker 1: can write faster than anyone who can write better in me,
Speaker 1: and I can write better than anyone who can write
Speaker 1: faster in me. That's true. That's good. That's a good
Speaker 1: way to make a full circle. I grew up two
Speaker 1: hours from Chamberlain, and I feel like a lot of
Speaker 1: the ranchers and farmers that I know in that area
Speaker 1: now in if they were contacting a wildlife damage specialists,
Speaker 1: it would be because of a bunch of geese um
Speaker 1: that are really causing havoc on their beans or corner
Speaker 1: or whatever. Did you deal with a lot of geese
Speaker 1: in your day? There I didn't. There was some concern
Speaker 1: mostly north of where I lived at the Trapper that
Speaker 1: was north in Gettysburg, North. Appear they had a little
Speaker 1: bit more of a goose problem than what we really
Speaker 1: did in my area. The as you get farther south,
Speaker 1: there's only four or five landowners that you know, really
Speaker 1: along lin side that controlled that land that was right
Speaker 1: along the Missouri River. And there's a lot of state
Speaker 1: land along there too that like you know, public hunting
Speaker 1: land and things like that that the state didn't want
Speaker 1: controlled in any of that anyway. So yeah, we didn't
Speaker 1: I didn't have that, But I mean we did blackbird stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, we did a little bit of everything.
Speaker 1: You know, the red wing blackbird stuff was always a
Speaker 1: hassling as a crop crop damage, Yeah yeah, yeah. We
Speaker 1: used cannons to scare of the blackbirds. Yeahs associate that
Speaker 1: with just hanging out and cattail mars is what would
Speaker 1: get them in trouble. Just too many of them around,
Speaker 1: you know, they'd all be you know, it'd be tens
Speaker 1: of thousands and flocks you know, flying around and stuff.
Speaker 1: So but doing what to what damaging what? Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: this just didn't want them around I guess, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean just in New Jersey this. I used to
Speaker 1: do some work for a sweet corn farmer and he
Speaker 1: had cannons and it was blackbirds were but red wings.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Some of these could have been starling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the ones he had brons with was was Starling's. But yeah,
Speaker 1: they just can't scare the ship out of you because
Speaker 1: you didn't. They just shoot them just to scare the birds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're like propane cannons. What were some of the oddball
Speaker 1: critters that you dealt with, Like, for example, the only
Speaker 1: save cat I've ever seen in my life was around Chamberlain.
Speaker 1: Did you encounter any really rare stuff like that? Lots
Speaker 1: of civic cat Yeah, they're um, like a spotted skunk,
Speaker 1: a little tiny thing, and yeah, they got everywhere in
Speaker 1: the addicts and under houses, and really it's a it's
Speaker 1: a unique skunk smell, you know. It's not the same
Speaker 1: as the striped skunk smell. It's unique. It's a little
Speaker 1: sweeter actually. Of course, when you're a trapper and you
Speaker 1: make trapp and sent you smelled like money to me,
Speaker 1: to the people that you know, to the people that
Speaker 1: that I that had a problem with them. It was,
Speaker 1: you know, and you had to be careful because you
Speaker 1: couldn't you know, if you scared them, they'd spray, and
Speaker 1: I mean it didn't the sound smell lasted for a
Speaker 1: long long time. So you have an unhappy customer. It's
Speaker 1: not a customer. But yeah, back in those days, i
Speaker 1: UM I used product called that was a Skunks Unlimited
Speaker 1: and basically it was it was a pole with a
Speaker 1: syringe on the end and we put acetone in the syringe.
Speaker 1: We would talk to the skunk and then press that
Speaker 1: needle into its side and inject it with acetone. It
Speaker 1: would just like an attic or something. Yeah, because you
Speaker 1: couldn't really throw it, you know, you try to throw
Speaker 1: a blanket over or something and then try to carry
Speaker 1: the live trap out with the animal. Wouldn't know, But
Speaker 1: skunks are just some of them are quick with the
Speaker 1: trigger finger, if you know what I mean. Yeah, for sure, Hey,
Speaker 1: what percentage of what when people calling they're like, KYO
Speaker 1: killed my sheep? What percentage were actually killed by coyotes?
Speaker 1: I'd say when I was there and I was working
Speaker 1: at I'd say under thirty percent. I'd say maybe even
Speaker 1: most of them died of something else. And now I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that they weren't run by coyotes, you know,
Speaker 1: but and run into a fence or whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: running them around, chasing them around, but actually throat marks
Speaker 1: killed and eating normally when when there was actual predation,
Speaker 1: it was mostly in the spring after the female it
Speaker 1: had the pups, and it was the females that we're
Speaker 1: doing the killing, not the males. Yeah, tell people about
Speaker 1: that little system you'd use with the putting the sheep
Speaker 1: and enclosure and playing a tape and yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, when when we had a bone, especially in
Speaker 1: the spring, when we had a bona fide kill, if
Speaker 1: kyo kill, we would I would try to get the
Speaker 1: landowner to bring his sheep as close to the barn
Speaker 1: as possible, yard him up, if you will, and then
Speaker 1: I would use a radio in the in the corral
Speaker 1: or whatever at night to keep the coyotes from coming
Speaker 1: in on the sheep. And then I would patrol the periphery,
Speaker 1: the outside edge, because that's what the coyotes would do,
Speaker 1: and that's where I would put all my traps and sets.
Speaker 1: It's very difficult to know if you've shot, if you've
Speaker 1: caught or shot the right kyote. You know, how how
Speaker 1: do you know which one is the kyote that actually
Speaker 1: did the damage? Um? So that's that's And so you
Speaker 1: might catch in some areas, you might catch ten or
Speaker 1: twelve coyotes on that outside of that fence, you know,
Speaker 1: and you're just you're just figuring that one of those
Speaker 1: was probably and you know normally when you check them,
Speaker 1: when you catch them, it's the female. You know, if
Speaker 1: you open up her stomach and you see some wool
Speaker 1: in there, who knows if she was raising pups in
Speaker 1: a den, she gets where she gets herself in trouble. Yeah, exactly. Uh,
Speaker 1: tell these guys the story of when you went to
Speaker 1: see Jimmy Houston for career advice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no
Speaker 1: doubt so. So yeah. Part of my claim to fame
Speaker 1: is having the TV show on ESPN for almost twenty years.
Speaker 1: And so how it basically started was I was a
Speaker 1: trapper at the time, and I was getting a lot
Speaker 1: of animal activist calls. People were calling calling me a killer,
Speaker 1: and the PETA group put me on the top ten
Speaker 1: list of evil people for Wildlife because I had sold
Speaker 1: so many of these how to trap videos. I mean,
Speaker 1: these VHS videos were just everywhere, and so I had
Speaker 1: decided that, you know, I'm gonna do a TV show
Speaker 1: on trapping. I mean that that's gotta be a way
Speaker 1: to get the word out that trappers are, you know,
Speaker 1: really conservation minded and really helping the all the nesting
Speaker 1: birds and all the thing things that we do. You know,
Speaker 1: there's there's really a specific purpose for a trapper. Uh
Speaker 1: So anyways, um, I decided to go see Jimmy Houston
Speaker 1: because he had a TV show on ESPN, and I thought,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get my word out. That's where I need
Speaker 1: to be. And so I went down to Oklahoma to
Speaker 1: a sports show, stood in line wait to get Jimmy
Speaker 1: Houston's autograph. Yeah, I'm twenty two years older. You were young.
Speaker 1: I was young. Yeah, anyways, I get I get Jimmy
Speaker 1: Houston real quick. How how old were you when he
Speaker 1: did the government Yeah, yeah, twenty four. I'm I meant
Speaker 1: to say, I meant to say thirty two, not twenty
Speaker 1: two two. So you were you were already like big
Speaker 1: time into the trapping. I was all through that. I
Speaker 1: was at the end of the trap and just about
Speaker 1: thirty two. So yeah, it was Yeah, So I get
Speaker 1: out and see Jimmy Houston get in line and I
Speaker 1: tell him and I finally get up there to sign
Speaker 1: my hat. I said, Jimmy, I said, um, I want
Speaker 1: to do a TV show on trap And what do
Speaker 1: you think? You know, you're so show so popular. He goes,
Speaker 1: who rolls his eyes because no, he's gonna watch. He was,
Speaker 1: You're never gonna get any sponsors for that. He goes,
Speaker 1: he will never get a network to take a trap
Speaker 1: and show. You know. He goes, that's barbaric, and all
Speaker 1: I said, no, no, no, that's the point. That's why
Speaker 1: I want to do it. It's not barbaric. You know,
Speaker 1: we used we used traps that have gaps between the jaws.
Speaker 1: We were conservationists. And he goes, you know, he goes,
Speaker 1: do you do anything else in the outdoors? And I said,
Speaker 1: I like bow hunting, you know, I like shooting bow
Speaker 1: because there you go, because that's what you need to do.
Speaker 1: And so that's when I decided to start, you know, actively,
Speaker 1: based off that, yeah, based off of that. In fact,
Speaker 1: that same year, I went bear hunting in Saskatchewan and
Speaker 1: made my very first uh hunting video. I was called
Speaker 1: Big Timber Bears, a Saskatchewan bow hunting adventures. Who did
Speaker 1: you hire to shoot it? To film it? A guy
Speaker 1: that worked for me just went up there and filmed
Speaker 1: it for me. Yeah, so you took your like your
Speaker 1: VHS instructional know how, and started producing what might be
Speaker 1: more Well, did you view that like that first bear
Speaker 1: hunting thing? Did you view it as entertainment or how
Speaker 1: too entertainment? So you like transition because the trap and
Speaker 1: stuff is Yeah, the travistuffs meant for an audience of
Speaker 1: people that are like, I want to learn how to
Speaker 1: do that? Yeah? Well, and I mean my TV shows
Speaker 1: now are based around how to you know, but I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's about an adventure. And that's what The
Speaker 1: Big Timber Bears was. I mean. And when I eventually
Speaker 1: did get on ESPN, and actually I was on Sports
Speaker 1: Channel America, And when I did get on ESPN and
Speaker 1: ninety two, the show was called Outdoor Adventure Magazine and
Speaker 1: was hunting, fishing, and adventure, so it was a magazine
Speaker 1: format show. And um, you know, ESPN called me the
Speaker 1: crazy bow Hunter to do anything once because I did
Speaker 1: bungee jumping, skydiving, rock climbing. I flew many different times
Speaker 1: of types of airplanes. Uh, but I also hunted with
Speaker 1: a bow and I also did fishing. So it was
Speaker 1: and we're very highly rated show for five or six years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: ESPN was like where you went in those years. ESPN
Speaker 1: was where you went for outdoor program. Absolutely. It was
Speaker 1: on Sundays right, Uh, Saturday mornings. Yeah, Saturday morning, and
Speaker 1: then eventually went to ESPN too, and that was on
Speaker 1: Saturdays and Sundays. Yeah. When you were doing ESPN, was
Speaker 1: it UM. Were you doing a commissioned show for them
Speaker 1: or did you have to go find all the financing
Speaker 1: on your own through sponsors. No, it was a UM
Speaker 1: financed by me totally. Yeah, we didn't do they didn't.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like the History Channel and some of that
Speaker 1: stuff that's done today. You know, we had to buy
Speaker 1: our air time. First, you had to get approved and
Speaker 1: you had to be approved producer. Then they had to
Speaker 1: have a time slot available, and then you had to
Speaker 1: tie that time slot up. And they were very very
Speaker 1: focused on ratings. Ratings were everything to them. That's how
Speaker 1: you kept your time, you know, otherwise you you were out.
Speaker 1: And there were so many other shows that wanted to
Speaker 1: be a part of that there was only eight shows
Speaker 1: on a Saturday morning. So even though it was time,
Speaker 1: even though you were buying the slot of time and
Speaker 1: had to and had to finance it through your own
Speaker 1: sponsorships and advertisers, it was competitive to hold it. Absolutely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not like it is today, you know, with the Outdoor
Speaker 1: Channel or Sportsman or whatever. You just buy a slot
Speaker 1: and you can put anything on there. I mean they
Speaker 1: had specific I mean we weren't even allowed to mention,
Speaker 1: you know, Real Tree or whatever sponsor we had that
Speaker 1: we could show logos and labels, but there was no
Speaker 1: gratuitous advertising, got it. So it was very very different landscape, man.
Speaker 1: And you know, those shows are some of the best
Speaker 1: outdoor shows that were ever done. If somebody ever really
Speaker 1: wanted to go back and look at, you know, what
Speaker 1: they had at the time. I mean, if you look
Speaker 1: at fly Fishing the World and and uh what Walker's
Speaker 1: k Chronicles and some of those other shows, you know,
Speaker 1: there was some really top end shows. I mean, they
Speaker 1: were really the eight best shows that they're that were
Speaker 1: produced at that in that era pretty much. And there
Speaker 1: were a few shows that cycled through. The Wayne Pearson
Speaker 1: shows cycled through, and there's a few other guys, Charlie West,
Speaker 1: and there's a few other shows that cycled through the
Speaker 1: where they were on for a season or two or three,
Speaker 1: then they were out and new shows came in. They
Speaker 1: always trying to get new blood, but there was a
Speaker 1: staple or stable of producers that they went to and used.
Speaker 1: And it was a very exciting time for me because
Speaker 1: it was real. It was I mean, I I say
Speaker 1: that I went from little league to big league, you know,
Speaker 1: because I basically wasn't a TV guy at all, and
Speaker 1: within two years I was on the number one place
Speaker 1: that you could ever be for outdoor show, you know.
Speaker 1: And you you learned to edit your own stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I edit my own stuff. Yeah, So it's a yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean a trapper. I mean I'm a trapper. So
Speaker 1: you do it all yourself, you know. You just learned that,
Speaker 1: and I knew that I would put the right about
Speaker 1: a work into it. Now. I hired guys to edit
Speaker 1: other shows, and I learned a lot of computer editing
Speaker 1: and things from them, the techniques of how to use
Speaker 1: the computers. I mean, I edited a b roll. All
Speaker 1: the ESPN stuff was pretty much a b roll till
Speaker 1: maybe the last three or four years when we went
Speaker 1: to the Avid's and the other types of nonlinear editing.
Speaker 1: Pretty much everything was you know, on the one inch
Speaker 1: tape or you know digital beta cam type of stuff.
Speaker 1: So we were shooting on tape, editing on tape. Did
Speaker 1: the ESPN show kill shots all the way until the
Speaker 1: end of two dozen tend They did till the end,
Speaker 1: but at the very beginning they didn't. In fact that
Speaker 1: we had to cut away from the kill shots um,
Speaker 1: which I complained about immediately after I got on there,
Speaker 1: which I had no credibility with them because I was
Speaker 1: new and I had no you know, I didn't have
Speaker 1: any poll whatsoever. But we fought it for a couple
Speaker 1: of years and finally they allowed me to use a
Speaker 1: bow and show the impact if the arrow would go
Speaker 1: all the way through the animal. And so I started
Speaker 1: shooting eighty five pound bow. I wanted. I had to,
Speaker 1: because I wanted vindication. Man, I mean, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like you can't take the kill shot away. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what everybody wants to say. I always remember that
Speaker 1: you shooting explaining in some of your videos, and I
Speaker 1: used to watch them that you're just shooting like super
Speaker 1: heavy bow. I actually got found out about you in
Speaker 1: my Christmas stocking. I got a DVD if your mom
Speaker 1: got which one wasn't yours? I think it was DVD, yeah,
Speaker 1: not VHS, No, it was. It was young people these days.
Speaker 1: I don't remember feeling like territories wild. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: said used to you still should be watching my DVD
Speaker 1: performed anymore to that point, Man, It's like super interesting
Speaker 1: how these like two groups of folks. Know you have
Speaker 1: like the folks that know you as you know, the
Speaker 1: trapping how to dude, and then you have folks like
Speaker 1: me and Chester who know you was like like a
Speaker 1: proto Remy Warren kind of like it like just the
Speaker 1: adventure bow Hunter you know, well I knew him as
Speaker 1: trapper too. Did you Did you do more trapping than
Speaker 1: I do? Man? You're better outdoors, more well rounded. The
Speaker 1: would do you like identify like at this point as
Speaker 1: like you know, a a trapper who did this bow
Speaker 1: hunting thing in order to make like his content more
Speaker 1: available for people, or do you find yourself identifying like
Speaker 1: a lot is like that bow Hunter? Now? Well, I
Speaker 1: mean I identify as both only because I guess I
Speaker 1: can um to me the reality the reality of it
Speaker 1: was when I was growing up as a kid. My
Speaker 1: parents allowed me a huge latitude. When I was eleven
Speaker 1: years old, I could go out at three thirty four
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning and run my trap line by
Speaker 1: myself with a pair of hip waiters down a river
Speaker 1: that might have been flooded out from rain or snow
Speaker 1: or whatever. And when I had homework, my mom would
Speaker 1: still let me skin my catch. You know, it wasn't
Speaker 1: the home that the school wasn't as important as what
Speaker 1: I was learning outdoors. My parents gave me this latitude
Speaker 1: that eventually allowed me after high school to go to Michigan.
Speaker 1: You know, like I tell everybody, I bought my first
Speaker 1: Jeep CJ with trapping money. I brought my first property
Speaker 1: with trapping money. I built my first cabin with trap
Speaker 1: of money. I bought my first airplane with trap of money.
Speaker 1: That's what I was enjoying and doing. But my dad,
Speaker 1: when he raised me, he talked to me about being
Speaker 1: always being the best. You know, you gotta make your
Speaker 1: bed every morning. You've got to be the best that
Speaker 1: you can be at what you're doing. And when I switched,
Speaker 1: it was very difficult. I was at the top of
Speaker 1: my game as a trapper. But when I really I
Speaker 1: realized that I needed to do something to keep trapping
Speaker 1: around and I was going to have a larger audience
Speaker 1: if I could get on TV and tell people about it.
Speaker 1: Even though I couldn't do a trapping show, I could
Speaker 1: do a bow hunting show, and I could I could
Speaker 1: promote that way for trapping and for for the industry
Speaker 1: as well as for wildlife and conservation. And so that's
Speaker 1: what I did, and I did it the best I could.
Speaker 1: You never felt like you were slumming it as a
Speaker 1: bow hunter, absolutely not, because I ran with the adventure thing.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like it's like the what I always
Speaker 1: say it to everybody. It's like, I want to go hunt,
Speaker 1: go somewhere I've never been and hunt an animal I've
Speaker 1: never seen, except I don't want to hunt that crazy
Speaker 1: antelope you're talking about. But yeah, so that's the you know.
Speaker 1: So that's what I did, and so that's how the
Speaker 1: Super Slam all came about because I just started, you know,
Speaker 1: one animal at a time. Of course, Chuck Adams, the
Speaker 1: first bow hunter to take then at the time, I'm
Speaker 1: North American Big Game Animals was a guest on my
Speaker 1: show TV show on ESPN for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: He had a sponsor that also sponsored my show, so
Speaker 1: he washould come on the show. He would come on
Speaker 1: the show, and he did tips on the show, and
Speaker 1: I got to know him, and I can remember interviewing
Speaker 1: him and talking with him about some of his hunts,
Speaker 1: and I was like, you know, I'll never do a
Speaker 1: grizzly bear, you know Adams articles. Yeah, absolutely so. But
Speaker 1: one thing led to another, and you know, you have
Speaker 1: you know, every year you've got a quota of shows
Speaker 1: you gotta do, and every year you'd get one, two
Speaker 1: or three more species. And there was just a point
Speaker 1: in time when I started looking back and thinking, wow,
Speaker 1: you know I got you know, I got twelve. You know,
Speaker 1: there's there's At the time when I started, there was
Speaker 1: only twenty to actually go for the Slam. There was
Speaker 1: still in twenty seven, and then there was twenty eight
Speaker 1: and then eventually twenty nine. Yeah, where do they add
Speaker 1: They added the Central Canadian Bearground cariboo first, And I'd
Speaker 1: be guessing at the date, but I think it was
Speaker 1: it might have been in the late nineties, so that
Speaker 1: might have been twenty eight when I started, but then
Speaker 1: then the last one was the Tuliel I think that
Speaker 1: was two thousand and eight when they added that one.
Speaker 1: Anymore anytime soon or do you think it's total dropping off? Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: because like the you can't hunt the Quebec Labrador cariboo,
Speaker 1: which is one of the five cariboo subspecies right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you know, cariboo is cyclic by nature. But
Speaker 1: you know, I can remember hunting in Alaska for the
Speaker 1: barren ground cariboo and and and hunting them. Will Chatting
Speaker 1: I heard there's four hundred thousand animals, and then will
Speaker 1: Chatten I heard, you know there's probably not even ten
Speaker 1: thousand animals in the will Chatten I heard. Now, I
Speaker 1: mean it's basically disappeared. So I mean these caribou are
Speaker 1: cyclic uh creatures, you know. And one of the things
Speaker 1: I would add to what we were talking about about
Speaker 1: the sites and sago horns and all that is, you know,
Speaker 1: I think a really good article would be about the
Speaker 1: political side of societies, because the reality is, um there's
Speaker 1: a lot of political influence. If you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people that are pseudo scientists or biologists that
Speaker 1: have more political motives about what animals are hunted and
Speaker 1: one animals aren't and maybe they have political motive that
Speaker 1: maybe no animals should be hunt And take the polar bear,
Speaker 1: for example, in North America, there on the threatened the
Speaker 1: lists of society. So we cannot import polar bears into
Speaker 1: North America to the United States, but we can hunt
Speaker 1: polar bears. You can go to Canada and polar bears,
Speaker 1: but that you can't import them into the United States.
Speaker 1: What's what that in like the in the like the Intuit,
Speaker 1: what's that called there? None of none of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they kind of have their own autonomous zone and
Speaker 1: they run wild on them. You can hunt them anywhere
Speaker 1: in Canada or other countries that border that have polar
Speaker 1: bear populations, I think except Alaska, but um, you can't
Speaker 1: import them into the US. Well, the US hunters are
Speaker 1: the most prolific hunters and traveling and hunting. And if
Speaker 1: you look at just the they were put on the
Speaker 1: polar bears are put on the threatened list because of
Speaker 1: the supposedly global warming was thinning out the ice sheet
Speaker 1: and they were having less habitat because they hunt seals
Speaker 1: on the ice Audiana. Yeah, speculative polar bear numbers are
Speaker 1: currently strong, but it's speculative that they'll they'll exactly, So
Speaker 1: there's somewhat of a political motive behind it. It's not science,
Speaker 1: you know. Now and now there's tax durmy shops that
Speaker 1: have come out with um with imitation polar bear amounts,
Speaker 1: you know, like a replica, so you can actually buy
Speaker 1: a replica polar bear amounts. You can go to Canada,
Speaker 1: shoot a polar bear and have a replica amount in
Speaker 1: your trophy room. Where do you leave? Where do you
Speaker 1: leave the bear? While you can't get it into the US, well,
Speaker 1: I can stay in Canada. So a lot of them
Speaker 1: get them Tanda's rugs and give them to people. Are
Speaker 1: a lot of them get them mounted anyway, and they
Speaker 1: put them in stores or places like that. And like
Speaker 1: someday I'm gonna come get my thing. But I don't
Speaker 1: think it'll ever happen. That's a problem, you know. I
Speaker 1: don't think you'll ever be able to bring them in
Speaker 1: if they were shot. The thing is is like when
Speaker 1: I shot my polar bear was the last year before
Speaker 1: the thing went on, and I shot mine in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, They with all my animals with the bow.
Speaker 1: So um, the thing was mine was one of the
Speaker 1: last ones back that I had, so I had the
Speaker 1: real polar bear and in my grophy room. But you know,
Speaker 1: it just suppresses the the amount of money that the
Speaker 1: Intuit people's can make. I mean this, polar bears, it
Speaker 1: costs well, the my polar bear hunt cost twenty seven
Speaker 1: five hundred. It cost six thousand for the flights to go,
Speaker 1: and then plus you're tipping your guide and you're spending
Speaker 1: money as you're there. I mean this, These Intuit communities
Speaker 1: are totally dependent on the Canadian government for money unless
Speaker 1: there's this influx of capital from these people that will
Speaker 1: come and hunt or fish or pus in that. So
Speaker 1: you know, they've lost a lot of income over the
Speaker 1: fact that you know, you can't bring them back. A
Speaker 1: lot of guys don't hunt. It's easy to get a
Speaker 1: polar bear. I was on a four year waiting list
Speaker 1: before I got to hunt mine. So there were people
Speaker 1: that wanted to go up there, but there still was
Speaker 1: limited amount of tags. Got it. I think, what are
Speaker 1: you talking about? The society is saying, I mean, you
Speaker 1: bring up valid point because you have these things like
Speaker 1: the Endangered Species Act, right, which I've completely support and
Speaker 1: it's done a lot of tremendous work. Sieties done a
Speaker 1: lot of great work. It's like inspired by like an
Speaker 1: honest knee. But I do find and we report on
Speaker 1: it all the time. Inevitably, you have cases, um, which
Speaker 1: in my mind weaken those structures because you have people
Speaker 1: who learned how to manipulate them politically. Um, they want
Speaker 1: one thing and they talk about another thing. And so
Speaker 1: like we've covered endlessly here is like grizzly bardy listing,
Speaker 1: wolf delisting right. Um, it's you had species go on
Speaker 1: the Endangered Species Act as threatened they hit recovery. But people,
Speaker 1: some people just cannot stomach the idea that someone would
Speaker 1: go hunt them. So they don't want to debate whether
Speaker 1: they've recovered. They want to debate these like obscure um
Speaker 1: legal issues right with And if you heard their private conversations,
Speaker 1: no doubt their private conversations are I just don't want this.
Speaker 1: I don't want anybody to hunt them. I don't care
Speaker 1: how many there are. And they'd be saying the same
Speaker 1: thing if there were a million of them. They're just
Speaker 1: never gonna like, they're not going to give up that point.
Speaker 1: They're never gonna say what they actually think, and they're
Speaker 1: always gonna say something that they don't think because it
Speaker 1: allows them to advance what they do. And then it
Speaker 1: creates all Then it creates people like me, people like
Speaker 1: you who then um wind up feeling like a little
Speaker 1: bit like you're being sold a bill of goods. Then
Speaker 1: he becomes suspicious about the who damn structure, which is
Speaker 1: like I always try to prevent myself from falling into
Speaker 1: the trap of being coming like suspicious of e s
Speaker 1: A specious suspicious of the act. I think the act
Speaker 1: was a needed thing. I don't like it when it
Speaker 1: gets manipulated. Absolutely, you know the thing is to me,
Speaker 1: it's There's another prime example of what happens that people
Speaker 1: don't realize is that the hiding behind the science things
Speaker 1: like in Africa, for example, I do a lot of
Speaker 1: hunting in Africa, have been many times to Africa. There
Speaker 1: there are groups and organizations that do scientific research, like
Speaker 1: on leopards, for example, which was very nocturnal and sneaky animal,
Speaker 1: not very rarely seen in the wild in the daylight.
Speaker 1: But they'll set up trail cameras in these areas that
Speaker 1: are flash cameras, and once the leopards got take got
Speaker 1: some picture taken once with a flash camera, he's never
Speaker 1: gonna walk by that camera ever, ever again. And so
Speaker 1: these people, over the course of so many months will say, well,
Speaker 1: we only got you know, there should be in this
Speaker 1: area fifty leopards, but we only have pictures of three,
Speaker 1: So the populations are really going down. We're in reality,
Speaker 1: these are some of the places where I hunt and
Speaker 1: where we hunt leopards, and we know, and we have
Speaker 1: pictures of hundreds of different leopards in the same area.
Speaker 1: But there's the science. The people, the hunters have an
Speaker 1: agenda to them. We have an agenda to these people.
Speaker 1: We have an agenda. We want to say there's more
Speaker 1: than enough to hunt, where they want to say there's
Speaker 1: less than enough. So what is the real number? It's
Speaker 1: probably fair to say you both have a substantial bias
Speaker 1: muscle manals coming uh walk me through, because like following
Speaker 1: your career is like following UM look at your history
Speaker 1: of career, it's like looking at the history of media,
Speaker 1: you know, particularly like a focus on outdoor media, but
Speaker 1: just like media in general. UM. Eventually ESPN moves on
Speaker 1: right because the ESPN we know today, which is intensively
Speaker 1: professional sports, right, absolutely, So what happened to you then?
Speaker 1: Like how did you continue just always adapt to be
Speaker 1: one step ahead? You know, when ESPN was purchased by
Speaker 1: the Walt Disney Company, they started to change their values
Speaker 1: and things, and they decided at a point in time,
Speaker 1: not that they were so much anti hunting. Maybe they were,
Speaker 1: maybe they weren't. I won't say either way. Um, they
Speaker 1: decided to go back to a sticking ball network, which
Speaker 1: is what they were founded on originally. So like you said,
Speaker 1: they went back to like a total sports network. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, for the guys, I mean I made it
Speaker 1: all the way to the very end. In fact, um,
Speaker 1: when they decided to break break up and take the
Speaker 1: Outdoors away, I had signed a five year contract and
Speaker 1: I still had two years left in my contract, so
Speaker 1: they couldn't actually get totally rid of the Outdoors. And
Speaker 1: there were there were three or four of us that
Speaker 1: had longer term agreements with the network, and they didn't
Speaker 1: just buy out. No, they let us run all the
Speaker 1: way to the end. And you know part of it too,
Speaker 1: was part of it too, that that that demise the
Speaker 1: ESPN model was the fact that soccer became more and
Speaker 1: more and more popular and at at seven o'clock in
Speaker 1: the morning in our country, it's six, or it's one
Speaker 1: o'clock in the afternoon in London. Are over in Europe
Speaker 1: when the soccer games are going on. So they could
Speaker 1: make a lot more money on a soccer game because
Speaker 1: of the tennis shoe sales and the commercials and all
Speaker 1: the things they could do than you know, So the
Speaker 1: soccer games would run in the mornings instead of the
Speaker 1: outdoor shows. And they were trying to watch that game negative. Man,
Speaker 1: that's a hard game to watch on man, except when
Speaker 1: they need to shrink that whole area way down. And
Speaker 1: the other problem with watching it is how many hail
Speaker 1: mary's they do, Like will just start getting interesting and
Speaker 1: one will kick the ball away they held down the
Speaker 1: other end. You don't have any idea who's gonna get it.
Speaker 1: It's like, man, they don't. It's just they just that's
Speaker 1: like it's like, oh it's getting too exciting, viewers are
Speaker 1: paying attention. They just like kick it way back down.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's great. So if anyone who works
Speaker 1: for the most popular sport in the world wants to
Speaker 1: take some tips from Steve Ronella. Hey, they do listen.
Speaker 1: I know. I can't think of specific examples I know
Speaker 1: where they have changed rules to make a better viewing experience.
Speaker 1: Can anybody back me up on this? There's there's I
Speaker 1: can't think of him, but I've heard of it. That's sports,
Speaker 1: like the NFL or whatever. Well, football has made some changes.
Speaker 1: Don't change the rule to make it better, to change
Speaker 1: like the length for the extra kick, and then the
Speaker 1: stuff like that soccer, they should make a rule. You
Speaker 1: can't just hail marry it down to their end of
Speaker 1: the field right when things are getting interesting. Either that
Speaker 1: or tie once on behind the back of the goalie.
Speaker 1: That would work, tie one arm behind the back of
Speaker 1: the goalie. Yeah, it's that's right. Uh yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: little side note. We'll leave that in phil um So
Speaker 1: when that collapsed, what but like at the same time
Speaker 1: that I don't want to say collapsed, but then like
Speaker 1: outdoor channel was like right like filled the filled the Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and at the time there was a network called Versus
Speaker 1: you know which which eventually changed this name to I
Speaker 1: don't even NBC Sports. I think it was there. That's
Speaker 1: what I didn't know that that's what Versus didn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but did you do anything there? Oh yeah, Well what
Speaker 1: happened was is I had sponsors that had longer term
Speaker 1: agreements than my my network agreement. So that creates a
Speaker 1: pickle for ye, especially when you know we're doing you know,
Speaker 1: well ESPN that I was almos a hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: million households, you know, so it's like, how do you
Speaker 1: replace those households with the outdoor channel? You don't, you know.
Speaker 1: So I ended up doing a deal with Versus UM,
Speaker 1: which preventually became the NBC Sports Network, but UM and
Speaker 1: and the Sportsman Channel what was just kind of fledger,
Speaker 1: and I went to all myself channel. So that's what
Speaker 1: I did. And and so I made a deal with
Speaker 1: Versus and a deal with the Sportsman's Channel, and I
Speaker 1: alternated shows. So basically, I would do all my full
Speaker 1: run of shows before the season, and I would start
Speaker 1: with show thirteen on one network and show one on
Speaker 1: the other network. And that's how I alternated through to
Speaker 1: air on two networks, because you know, that's almost taboo
Speaker 1: to have a show air on two networks at the
Speaker 1: same time, you know what I mean. Huh, That's how
Speaker 1: I did it really Yeah, And you've been at You've
Speaker 1: been distributing there for a long time, you know, I was,
Speaker 1: I was there, I was on versus I think we're
Speaker 1: three years and and then I switched from Sportsman to
Speaker 1: Outdoor and now I'm just on Outdoor. How many shows
Speaker 1: you make in a year, I'm down to eight right now.
Speaker 1: I'm the king of reruns on on on the on
Speaker 1: the network. I spend a lot of money producing my
Speaker 1: shows and places I go, you know, because I've done
Speaker 1: all the African Big Six with archery, tackle all that.
Speaker 1: I mean. IM I collect species. So I have over
Speaker 1: a hundred seventies some species right now with bow and
Speaker 1: arrow and so and all filmed and so. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: I'll go back a few years and pick up some
Speaker 1: of the older shows and maybe add a little bit
Speaker 1: more commentary tomb and then just rerun them and so that.
Speaker 1: So in first and second quarter, I'll rerun some of
Speaker 1: my older shows that are really cool, the better ones,
Speaker 1: the cream ones, and then I'll do the shows for
Speaker 1: the for the fall. Hundred and seventy how many years
Speaker 1: in your house? Uh? Over a hundred, you know. But
Speaker 1: I've quit mounting stuff today. I don't mount everything anymore.
Speaker 1: I've well, where are you gonna put them? What are
Speaker 1: you gonna do with them? You know, after you, after
Speaker 1: you die? Where they for dollar? It's it's not so
Speaker 1: much that I mean what I've been doing. It's something
Speaker 1: to going to waist anything. What I've been doing is
Speaker 1: a lot of the I've become popular enough and known
Speaker 1: enough that a lot of the outfitters are the places
Speaker 1: that I go hunt. Um, they would like to have them,
Speaker 1: and so they'll take a picture I mean with the
Speaker 1: animal like a hero shot, and then they'll have it
Speaker 1: mounted and put it in their in their lodge, and
Speaker 1: then they'll have my picture next there. There you go.
Speaker 1: It works out good. Yeah, box the new one. You
Speaker 1: guys are gonna get right land a jet in there
Speaker 1: with my my rooftop shooting range. I should keep quiet
Speaker 1: about that. We're gonna cut that one out. Do you
Speaker 1: when you're deal like, try to think how to do
Speaker 1: you have a lot of of the one? So you
Speaker 1: have a hundred animals and your thing? But do you
Speaker 1: have a lot that are that are tucked away here
Speaker 1: and there that you can't bring back home for legal reasons? No?
Speaker 1: Not really? Oh, I mean probably in South America. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of animals that you shoot down there
Speaker 1: that you just can't export, no matter what. You know,
Speaker 1: like copy borrow with different different types of species like that.
Speaker 1: You can't bring a copy borrow no, No, like a
Speaker 1: white lipped peckery. Can you bring a pocket home? No?
Speaker 1: I don't think I've hunted some of that. We're working
Speaker 1: on that stuff right now for the for this spring. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're going from We're gonna go hunt. We're gonna go
Speaker 1: hunt oscillated turkeys. Yeah. Yeah, I'll become a World Slam holders.
Speaker 1: Good for you? Does that make you jealous? Are you
Speaker 1: a World Slam turkey holder? I have five of the six,
Speaker 1: then I'm definitely not jealous. I'm gonna become a shotgun
Speaker 1: world Slam holder. Uh yeah. I want to bring home
Speaker 1: the tail fan. Oh yeah, I mean most people bring
Speaker 1: the whole damn thing home and get stuff that's a
Speaker 1: whout the tail fan. Probably the spurs probably just eat
Speaker 1: it right down there, probably eat it there. And then
Speaker 1: I want, how's it looking. You're you're looking into that
Speaker 1: bringing that tail fan home? Tail fans looking good? Some
Speaker 1: other complications with getting guns down there, though, well, because
Speaker 1: you didn't get on it quick enough. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's not definitely, that's not true. It's the it's money,
Speaker 1: it's expensive, different than going to hunt COO's dear in Sonora.
Speaker 1: From what I'm finding out, it's really hard to get
Speaker 1: information on it. Steve, I just had to use their
Speaker 1: shotguns down there. Yeah, because it's just a different anyways,
Speaker 1: it's a different area from where you guys go cuts
Speaker 1: back on the headaches just to use their shot Absolutely,
Speaker 1: when's the last time you killed a big game critter
Speaker 1: with a gun. Oh that's a great question. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I'm shot. I'm well, I'm trying. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: people wouldn't consider coyotes. Um, you know, because I did
Speaker 1: a lot of hunting for coyotes. But I used to
Speaker 1: host a show on ESPN called Cabella's Sportsman's Quest, and
Speaker 1: the first year that had air, Um, they wanted me
Speaker 1: that we had sponsors that wanted me to use a gun,
Speaker 1: and so I shot three species on that show. I
Speaker 1: think I thought I shot a elk, uh mule deer
Speaker 1: and uh pronghorn with a rifle. And then the next no,
Speaker 1: I told him I didn't want to do it. Anymore
Speaker 1: that I just like, just you know, it's not that
Speaker 1: I'm against gun hunting. I'm not. It was just not
Speaker 1: my wheelhouse, you know. I like the bow hunting. I
Speaker 1: like to be known as the bow hunter, and just
Speaker 1: it was too easy. I mean, you know, for lack
Speaker 1: of a better way of putting it, you know, it's
Speaker 1: that's not offensive to me. That's a good thing. I
Speaker 1: don't want to get kicked out before the things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we still got do we still got do the trivia episode.
Speaker 1: But so you just like it's just you like that
Speaker 1: like up close, difficult, heart pounding kind of. I think
Speaker 1: bow hunting is a conscious decision to make the hunt
Speaker 1: harder than it needs to be. You know, at two
Speaker 1: hundred yards, a guy can shoot the you know or farther.
Speaker 1: A lot of people have got these yard shots, but
Speaker 1: I mean a two hundred yards is when my stock begins,
Speaker 1: you know, and I need and I'm not the best,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not a Randy Homer or someone who
Speaker 1: can shoot a whole out of a life saver at
Speaker 1: hundred yards, you know, Cameron Haynes somebody like that. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm losing my eyesight as quick as you
Speaker 1: are from what I hear with with all that, with
Speaker 1: all that, like that, with that archery, the Super Slam. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what was your average shot distance? If you had to guess,
Speaker 1: you should have lost you just like you get in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't like what's loot is a long shot for me? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I and that's still a poke though, man, that's
Speaker 1: a poke. Yeah yeah yeah yeah, And the and that
Speaker 1: those are shot. You know, when I started doing more
Speaker 1: international hunting and more mountain hunting, you know, going after
Speaker 1: the sheep and goats and stuff like that, you've got
Speaker 1: to be able to make a longer shot or it's
Speaker 1: just you know, especially filming it. But you know, I
Speaker 1: mean the method to my madness was everything had to
Speaker 1: be on camera. I mean, that was the claim to
Speaker 1: fame for me. I mean, I'm the seventeenth archery Super slammer,
Speaker 1: So I'm the seventeenth guy to complete the archery Super
Speaker 1: Slam with a bow and arrow of course of its archery,
Speaker 1: but I'm the only guy to have all the kills
Speaker 1: on video. So I filmed all the hunts and so
Speaker 1: my my DVD set, the Super The Venture Bow Hunter
Speaker 1: SuperSlam has all twenty nine Arrow Impacts on it. It's
Speaker 1: a three DVD set that has all the stories behind
Speaker 1: all the twenty nine I had to go. Where do
Speaker 1: people find that? You can get it on my website
Speaker 1: at tom Randit dot com. But I mean it's sold
Speaker 1: at a lot of different stores as Cabell has sold
Speaker 1: it for ten years. I don't think they carry it now,
Speaker 1: but it's because it's an older it was made. I
Speaker 1: finished the Slam in two thousand and eleven and the
Speaker 1: the DVD came out soon after that. What's that one called.
Speaker 1: It's called Adventure bow Hunter SuperSlam tom My Quest of
Speaker 1: the Super Slam in Northern But it's all bundled together.
Speaker 1: It's all bundled together. Yeah, it's all three and one set.
Speaker 1: In fact, I have I also have Adventure bow Hunter
Speaker 1: Dark Continent, which is the African Slam thirty four species hunted,
Speaker 1: including the African Big Six which is elephant, hippo, ryano, cape, buffalo, lion,
Speaker 1: and leopard, plus all the other planes game. And then
Speaker 1: I have another one called World Hunts has forty four
Speaker 1: hunts on it, Narrow impacts of a lot of different
Speaker 1: kinds of sheep and species and whatnot. I need two
Speaker 1: more animals to finish scis conservation and hunting a war.
Speaker 1: It's the highest achievement that you can get in bow hunting.
Speaker 1: What are you missing? I believe it or not. I
Speaker 1: turned in all my animals thinking that I was going
Speaker 1: to get it um a year and a half two
Speaker 1: years ago, and the SCI came back to me and said,
Speaker 1: where's your introduced animals in North America category? And I'm like,
Speaker 1: introduced animals in North America? What are you kidding me?
Speaker 1: And if they go, you have to shoot eighteen species
Speaker 1: in the US that were introduced, and so I need to.
Speaker 1: I have two left to shoot, Like there's a whole
Speaker 1: list that you can shoot, and there's two I'm gonna shoot. Um,
Speaker 1: I think the last two. I think I'm gonna shoot
Speaker 1: a scimitar or X and maybe a Psycha deer. I
Speaker 1: think those would be two cool ones to have to
Speaker 1: be like the Maryland ones. Yeah, yeah, I got Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got a few of those with a muzzle loader.
Speaker 1: There you go, I missed them with my bow. Uh
Speaker 1: so you have you done like a like Neil guy?
Speaker 1: And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, That's what I've been doing.
Speaker 1: Those kind of huts, and I got many introduced big
Speaker 1: game animals they say are in the US. I think
Speaker 1: there's forty some on their list, but as a bow
Speaker 1: hunter only have to take eighteen. So yeah, ow man,
Speaker 1: the counting a lot of counting, well, and it's a
Speaker 1: lot of Yeah, it's a lot of chick in the
Speaker 1: boxes to do those things. I mean the s c
Speaker 1: I Award platform. When I finished my twenty nine, uh,
Speaker 1: the Super Slam, the North American ones, you wonder, well,
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do? Now? You know what what's
Speaker 1: the next on your agenda? And you know I had
Speaker 1: the SEI people. They called me and they said, um,
Speaker 1: we have four people that have completed the World Hunting
Speaker 1: Award ring with a bow. Um, we think you could
Speaker 1: be number five if we can come and measure your
Speaker 1: trophy room. Now I was a life member of s
Speaker 1: c I, but I had never scored. Anybody measure the
Speaker 1: trophy room. They want to come in and count my species,
Speaker 1: see what I got, you know, So they came. Two
Speaker 1: guys came from Tucson, spent two days in my trophy
Speaker 1: room on scaffolding, measuring animals that I had, looking at
Speaker 1: photos and we basically chronicled the animals I had, and
Speaker 1: they went back to Tucson and called me a few
Speaker 1: weeks later and said, you need thirty six speci. She
Speaker 1: used to finish the World Hunting Award Ring, and that
Speaker 1: was my next goal. It's like, okay, I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: for the World Hunting Award Ring. It took me, and
Speaker 1: it took me three years a little over three years
Speaker 1: to get it. In two thousand and sixteen, I got
Speaker 1: the World Hunting a Ward Ring. I'm the fifth guy
Speaker 1: to ever get it, and I have all my kills
Speaker 1: on video. Let's say you weren't. There's nothing left to chip, like,
Speaker 1: there's no sort of like outside validation stuff left right,
Speaker 1: there's no more lists or everyone on the planet dies whatever, Um,
Speaker 1: what would you want to hunt for? Then? Like like
Speaker 1: what like what do you like besides this sort of
Speaker 1: like getting a certification of some sort of like what
Speaker 1: what what is fun to you or what's worthwhile to you?
Speaker 1: I think once you've shot everything that you feel like
Speaker 1: you can you know that that that goal for me
Speaker 1: of you know, going somewhere I've never been and hunting
Speaker 1: an animal I've never seen. I think once I've completed
Speaker 1: that list, it's just gonna go back to the basics.
Speaker 1: So I'll be white tail hunting, you know. I mean
Speaker 1: that's in everybody's backyard. It's something to do, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's fun and white hole on. White tails are
Speaker 1: some way some of the harder animals to get. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can look at all the other species that they're
Speaker 1: out there, and a five and a half year old
Speaker 1: white tail is not an easy customer, you know, I
Speaker 1: mean even from a global respective perspectively. So true. Is
Speaker 1: there any kind of archery small game thing that you're
Speaker 1: into and there hasn't been because there hasn't really been
Speaker 1: any platform for it, you know, like going out and
Speaker 1: shooting rabbits or something. I mean, guys do a lot
Speaker 1: of that kind of stuff for fun, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different places. I mean, like if you go
Speaker 1: to New Zealand, for example, they have a list of
Speaker 1: about twenty different animals that you can hut down there,
Speaker 1: and they include a lot of the smaller stuff possums
Speaker 1: and you know, rabbits and stuff like that. Um. But
Speaker 1: for me, I it's it's been a business for me,
Speaker 1: you know. I think that's one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: my kids never really got involved, even though I took
Speaker 1: them on trips. I always had cameraman with me. We
Speaker 1: were always producing. Were always had to get the kill shot,
Speaker 1: you know, I had to get the hunting shot on videos.
Speaker 1: So it was more of a business for me. And
Speaker 1: so my hunting, especially my bow hunting, has never really
Speaker 1: been a sport that I took up and enjoyed and
Speaker 1: went out and hunted. It's always been a business. It's
Speaker 1: something that I had. I had to go out and
Speaker 1: I had to make a show about it. So you
Speaker 1: don't do like you don't you don't just go hunting. No,
Speaker 1: really that crazy. But I but I collect books. You
Speaker 1: know a lot of people think that's, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: this guy's a nerd, you know, but it's it's like hunting.
Speaker 1: Try to find some of these old pirate books in
Speaker 1: the castle in London, you know what I mean. So
Speaker 1: it's like hunting to find some of this stuff and
Speaker 1: it you know, and it's a it's another obsession, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, hunting for me, um has been in a
Speaker 1: bow hunting has been an obsession, you know, It's been
Speaker 1: an obsession to find a new species, find a new
Speaker 1: place to go, get it. A lot of people. If
Speaker 1: there's any people that really complain about, you know, Tom
Speaker 1: Rando this and Tom Rando that, it's the fact that
Speaker 1: I don't do a lot of self guided stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't do a lot of of you know that
Speaker 1: type of hunting. And it's like, well, he could never
Speaker 1: shoot anything if he didn't have a guide with him,
Speaker 1: and that all the time, that criticism staying at all
Speaker 1: or don't you care? Well, you know, it's what it
Speaker 1: stings for me because I'm a trapper, you know, and
Speaker 1: I know exactly how to do all of it. But
Speaker 1: when you're trying to make a show, how can I
Speaker 1: go to Oregon and hunt blacktail deer? Thinking I know
Speaker 1: it all? I live in Florida. Do I know everything
Speaker 1: about blacktail? No? But when I'm doing a TV show
Speaker 1: about it, if I've got a good guide, a good outfit,
Speaker 1: or who can talk to me, I can learn from
Speaker 1: him and my audience can learn from him. And so
Speaker 1: that's how my shows are set up. I traveled to
Speaker 1: this new place. I'm gonna hunt this black Columbia blacktail deer.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna learn all about them in video, as many
Speaker 1: of them as I can and get one with a
Speaker 1: bow on video. And that's the premise of my shows.
Speaker 1: And so that's the business side of it, and that's
Speaker 1: why the shows. That's and I spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time and effort putting those shows together so that when
Speaker 1: people will watch him again. I mean, look how many
Speaker 1: times Duck Dynasty reruns, you know. So a lot of
Speaker 1: my shows replay and um and my ratings stay great
Speaker 1: and then and the networks are happy. So and I
Speaker 1: enjoy doing it still, which is a good thing. I think.
Speaker 1: You know, I've made my money at the end of
Speaker 1: the day. If I just I didn't want to do
Speaker 1: it anymore. Like quit, do you feel like you're removed
Speaker 1: from the experience because you feel like it's the business
Speaker 1: of it. It comes back to my my father and
Speaker 1: what he taught me about work, you know, and that
Speaker 1: it's the work ethic side of it. I enjoy it
Speaker 1: for the work ethic part of it. You know, you'd
Speaker 1: like to work. I like to work. I mean a
Speaker 1: workaholic for sure, and that's why I take on way
Speaker 1: too much more work than That's why I edit my
Speaker 1: own show. I mean, for havin sakes, I could turn
Speaker 1: it over to somebody else to do it, but I don't.
Speaker 1: They might do a better technical job than I would,
Speaker 1: but they won't tell a better story. And my my
Speaker 1: job is to connect with the audience of the story.
Speaker 1: So that's why I do it myself. How the hell
Speaker 1: did you um uh like, why rare books? I got
Speaker 1: to realize you had some you know, I got to
Speaker 1: you know, I was doing the Outdoor Adventure magazine show.
Speaker 1: I got to dive, do some shipwreck diving and some
Speaker 1: different things. I did a lot of different scuba divings
Speaker 1: and tri mix and you know, all these different types
Speaker 1: of diving, and I got to dive some Spanish galleons
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, and so like got like really
Speaker 1: interested in this stuff, like these old ships and cannons
Speaker 1: on the bottom of the reef, and so I started
Speaker 1: looking for books about treasure salvage and treasure hunting, and like,
Speaker 1: you know, I live in Florida. You know, we've got
Speaker 1: the Treasure Coast, and you know, and pirates. You know,
Speaker 1: there's islands nearby where I live in Florida that we're
Speaker 1: thought to have been, you know, homes to pirates. And
Speaker 1: so there was one thing that led to another, and
Speaker 1: eventually I did get more and more and more into
Speaker 1: the pirate books, and then I started finding out that
Speaker 1: there were old manuscripts and old books about pirates from
Speaker 1: way back, and so I started looking for some of those.
Speaker 1: And when you find them, and an old book is
Speaker 1: super cool because you can smell, you can smell the
Speaker 1: dampness in the pages, you know, and you can see,
Speaker 1: you can see how you know, just how the cover
Speaker 1: is and the you know, the leather bindings of it,
Speaker 1: and it's just they're so neat to have and to
Speaker 1: hold that history, and especially today where people are burning
Speaker 1: books and banning books and going to digital books and things,
Speaker 1: you know, these pieces of history like I have. I
Speaker 1: have a surt Francis Drake book I bought. I paid
Speaker 1: quite a bit of money for it. It's a one
Speaker 1: in five copy. It was just one that was one
Speaker 1: in five known copies of this book and I have,
Speaker 1: man it's you know, the other four copies are in institutions,
Speaker 1: you know. And this one happened to get be for
Speaker 1: sale from at a castle in England that was um
Speaker 1: wanting to sell that the owners were just going to
Speaker 1: sell all the books. That happened to be one that
Speaker 1: they had that I bought, so, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. You know, some of them are so valuable.
Speaker 1: I don't even I hardly like look at them a
Speaker 1: little bit, Yeah, touch them and go through them. But no,
Speaker 1: I've read quite a few and I've I've learned a
Speaker 1: lot of history. And the more people find out that
Speaker 1: I have these books, the more people that contact me
Speaker 1: about you know, information that's in them or photos. A
Speaker 1: lot of these old pirate books and ship books, shipwrecks
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, voyages of discovery. They have a
Speaker 1: lot of really nice maps in them, old old maps,
Speaker 1: you know, from the fifteen six hundreds. They have a
Speaker 1: lot of different things in them that other people want,
Speaker 1: you know, other TV shows want so I can take
Speaker 1: and take photos and make copies of these things that
Speaker 1: they can use. So and um, a lot of times,
Speaker 1: you know, I buy some. You know, there's some old
Speaker 1: Kajars that have been out trying to find pirates and
Speaker 1: different things, and their family will contact me and I'll
Speaker 1: buy their old manuscripts where they've been out looking for
Speaker 1: the pirate and digging and finding graves of pirates and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So, I mean, I'm building some material
Speaker 1: to maybe someday have a really cool book about the
Speaker 1: whole era of it and about the collecting side of it.
Speaker 1: What's your most what's your most valuable book? Mm hmm
Speaker 1: And where is it located? Well? I have it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have. UM, I have a first edition Buccaneers of America.
Speaker 1: It's in Dutch and it was written in sixteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1: It's not nearly my oldest book, but it's very very
Speaker 1: difficult copy and it's in an original binding, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: it's um. What's something like that worth? Yeah, it's um,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll tell you it's more than a couple
Speaker 1: of three polar Bear huts. Let's just call it that.
Speaker 1: Do you read Dutch? No, But you know, part of
Speaker 1: being a U you know, that's part of the obsession,
Speaker 1: part of me, you know. So I have to have
Speaker 1: the first edition in Spanish. I have to have the
Speaker 1: first edition in French. I have to first have the
Speaker 1: first edition in English. I heard you say, masso manos
Speaker 1: speak Spanish. That's right. Uh. You've also um probably written, um,
Speaker 1: your Master Trappers book. It's probably the most exhaustive thing
Speaker 1: to read, No, the most exhaustive thing on trapping in America,
Speaker 1: but I know about Yeah. I mean it's from the
Speaker 1: Mountain Men to the modern day, like long liner dudes. Yeah, yeah, dude,
Speaker 1: I said, like I love that thing. I said, like
Speaker 1: when I when I'm going to bed at night, I'll
Speaker 1: lay there and put my my new spectacles on and
Speaker 1: I'll just start like I don't even read it front
Speaker 1: to back. I just skim through it and read all
Speaker 1: kinds of junk. Look for people I figured must be
Speaker 1: in there, and there they are, guys I grew up
Speaker 1: reading and stuff. It's it's it's like it's a I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's a huge book called Master Trappers, and
Speaker 1: it's profiles well, it's like profiles on eras Hudson Bay Company,
Speaker 1: the Mountain Man era. But as you progressed, it's profiles
Speaker 1: on just like every notable trapper, and then not everybody,
Speaker 1: many of the notable trappers, all elements of the business,
Speaker 1: animal damage control, government stuff, interspersed with Tom's like evolution,
Speaker 1: schoolboy trapper, professional trapper, airborne trapper, on into phasing out
Speaker 1: of that and into the hunting world. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a really interesting book, man. Yeah. Thanks. If I hadn't
Speaker 1: known you were reading it, at night in bed. I
Speaker 1: would have put a fold out map in it for you.
Speaker 1: It's solid and it's it's uh. I think it's a
Speaker 1: phenomenal book. I became aware of it because some of
Speaker 1: the equipment I buy all buy on Minnesota trapline products. Um,
Speaker 1: we've talked a bunch about like the MB you know,
Speaker 1: Minnesota brand traps and whatnot. You'd go on there. I didn't.
Speaker 1: And I had no idea that dude, Yeah he's chronicled
Speaker 1: down there as well. Yeah, that dude his history as
Speaker 1: a trapper absolutely and like wildland firefighter. But I had
Speaker 1: no idea that he was a like bound up in
Speaker 1: that whole thing. You know. The book was. It was
Speaker 1: a labor of love. I started it in two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: um actually because the Trapper Predator call our magazine called
Speaker 1: me and they said, would you consider writing a book
Speaker 1: about trapping a little bit of the trapping history for us?
Speaker 1: And I said, you know, that's a you know, that's
Speaker 1: a big that's a big thing. That's a lot of work.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that I want to do that. They go, well,
Speaker 1: we we would saw a bunch of him, and we
Speaker 1: think you would be the guy to do it for us.
Speaker 1: Your name on it would really make a make a
Speaker 1: point for us and anyway, so I agreed to do it.
Speaker 1: I did a contract with them, and then like a
Speaker 1: few months later, they said, now you know, we the
Speaker 1: trapping business is going down. We've decided that we don't
Speaker 1: want to do the project anymore. Why it started it
Speaker 1: and made the outlines and everything that's seriously happened and
Speaker 1: they and eventually eventually Trapper prettor Call magazine was sold
Speaker 1: out and was bought by other people. So it was
Speaker 1: like there, I think there was more to it than
Speaker 1: just the trapping business going down. But anyways, I shelved
Speaker 1: the idea until oh gosh, two thousand twenty and UM,
Speaker 1: I get this call. This phone rings like eight o'clock
Speaker 1: at night, and I look at it and I don't
Speaker 1: recognize the number, and normally I don't take it, but
Speaker 1: I'm like, I don't know who this is, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: take it. So I took the call and it was
Speaker 1: from some I can't remember the man's name, but he
Speaker 1: was from the National Trappers Association and he said, UM,
Speaker 1: I'd like to talk to you about if you can
Speaker 1: come to the Trappers convention this year in two thousand,
Speaker 1: two thousand twenty Trappers Convention, which was in July. Well,
Speaker 1: obviously it was, um, it was the COVID thing, you know,
Speaker 1: there was all the COVID thing, or maybe it was
Speaker 1: two thousand twenty one. No, it's two thousand twenty when
Speaker 1: the COVID hit in March at two thousand twenty. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I was like, in July was when the event was
Speaker 1: going to be, but it was it was eventually canceled.
Speaker 1: But anyway, he says, um, he goes. I said, man,
Speaker 1: I haven't been to a trap convention a long time,
Speaker 1: data DA And he's like, well, he goes, we voted
Speaker 1: you into the Hall of Fame, the Trappers Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1: I hadn't said a trap since nine, you know, and
Speaker 1: here I'm getting voted into the Trappers Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, why, you know, what's up with that?
Speaker 1: And they go, well, it's just all the years of
Speaker 1: you promoting trapping through your TV shows and the fact
Speaker 1: that you were one of the first guys to do
Speaker 1: the videos and everything. So anyway, I hang up the
Speaker 1: phone from him, like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: in the Trappers Hall of Fame. This is which was
Speaker 1: just this huge honor to me. I mean, that's as
Speaker 1: good as it gets. And I thought, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna bring that book out. I'm gonna bring that book
Speaker 1: out and look at my old notes of it from
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen. So I did. I brought that book
Speaker 1: out and I looked at it and I looked what
Speaker 1: I had going, and I thought, it's COVID. All my
Speaker 1: trips are canceled. Now I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do it. Did you have a team of people that
Speaker 1: you worked on it with? No. I did it totally
Speaker 1: by myself and was sitting in my trophy room. Seriously
Speaker 1: that seriously did that. You wrote all those profiles, everything
Speaker 1: start to finish, never hired anybody to help, you know.
Speaker 1: Damn dude likes working, you know, and I you know,
Speaker 1: it was good. But the thing is is the book
Speaker 1: is about you know that there's history in the book, um,
Speaker 1: but it's really it's the book is actually a tribute
Speaker 1: to all the people that I learned how to trap
Speaker 1: from from the earlier that that gave me interest in trapping.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there's a part in there about Jeremiah
Speaker 1: Johnson's movie you know that Jeremia Johnson. Yeah, there's parts
Speaker 1: in there. I think parts of it that people touch,
Speaker 1: all the trappers that you know that have the because
Speaker 1: there is a romance to trapping. There's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a romance to it for people who have done
Speaker 1: it before to look back. And because trapping every morning
Speaker 1: is like Christmas. You don't know what you're gonna catch.
Speaker 1: You know, is it gonna be an empty trapper? You're
Speaker 1: gonna have a silver fox in it? What are you
Speaker 1: gonna get? So it's kind of a The book is
Speaker 1: kind of a motivational book to take somebody who used
Speaker 1: to trap and to bring back all those memories. But
Speaker 1: it was a tribute to the guys I learned how
Speaker 1: to trap from the books I bought, the books I
Speaker 1: read the people that influenced to me. Man's a nostalgic enterprise. Man. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a hundred ways tell people where to find you know,
Speaker 1: how to find your book and and uh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: that's a long list of ways to find you, but
Speaker 1: hit people with like how'll track you down on social media?
Speaker 1: How to find your Adventure Bowl hunting book Master, trappers,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, mostly if I'm on social media, I
Speaker 1: have a I have a small Instagram thing. For some reason,
Speaker 1: I'm not that good on the phone, so I do
Speaker 1: a little laptop and on the laptop I do Facebook,
Speaker 1: and so my Facebook adventure bow Hunter. You can find
Speaker 1: my page there. I have lots of videos on there.
Speaker 1: Um or Tom Miranda dot com, which is where my
Speaker 1: store is. That's easy to find Tom Miranda dot com. UM.
Speaker 1: I have over five TV show os on my website
Speaker 1: that you can watch for free. Um. And then in
Speaker 1: my store, I had my books they and I have
Speaker 1: the Super Slam Book I wrote in two thousand and
Speaker 1: eleven when I finished. People can find your books on
Speaker 1: Amazon too, right like I think I can't remember. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some we've seen them on Minnesota Minnesota trap Line Products. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can get them from Tim Caban at Minnesota trap
Speaker 1: Line Products or direct or direct from me at Tom
Speaker 1: Randa dot com. And that the Trapping Book is there too.
Speaker 1: And I signed all the books that anybody that buys
Speaker 1: a book from me on my website, I signed for him.
Speaker 1: So I'm almost into my third printing, so it's sold
Speaker 1: to too. Full printings of those trapper books. That's great.
Speaker 1: It's been really really good, and lots of lots of
Speaker 1: people have really sent me some long heartfelt messages about
Speaker 1: how it really brought back the old days in the
Speaker 1: trapping to them. How cocky are you feeling about the
Speaker 1: trivia show we're going to record next. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'm going to be that cocky about it, but um,
Speaker 1: I might have an answer or two up my sleeve.
Speaker 1: What do you think, math, I'm expecting a strong performance, Spencer.
Speaker 1: I have to our most well traveled guests are most
Speaker 1: accomplished bow hunting guest. I think that sets him up. Well, Oh,
Speaker 1: you've seen a lot. We also recently upped our Now,
Speaker 1: let me teach you something here, Steve. We have a
Speaker 1: big announcement coming up on the Trivia episode that we
Speaker 1: will tell you about. Remember our conversation about over selling stuff.
Speaker 1: That's my job. A big announcement that Steve is not
Speaker 1: going to reveal right now. Alright, ladies, gentlemen, Tom random
Speaker 1: check the next We're not done with Tom. We're gonna
Speaker 1: do uh media to trivia game on Soccers. It'll serve
Speaker 1: up to you soon and it will I'm expecting just
Speaker 1: I'm expecting a dominating performance from Tom Random. I like it,
Speaker 1: Stay tuned,