Speaker 1: This is Me Eat podcast, Coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by first Light, Go farther, stay longer. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're joined today by Yah Yang. Yeah, yes, sir, I
Speaker 1: love that name, man. Thank you. The kids goof on
Speaker 1: your name a lot when you were a kid, Yeah Yang, yeah,
Speaker 1: a little bit, A little bit. I just tell him
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty Minnesotan. So I got My joke is
Speaker 1: that when you know, when we came to the country
Speaker 1: through the immigration, they couldn't pronounce my name and my
Speaker 1: my name and mung is actually jaque. Yeah, they couldn't
Speaker 1: put announced it. So whoever was there was just like,
Speaker 1: all right, let's just let's just do yeah hy a
Speaker 1: and be done with it. That's That's well, at least
Speaker 1: that's my story. I don't know if that's true or not,
Speaker 1: but I'm not I'm not striving for equivalency here, but
Speaker 1: I'll point out that there was in my family name.
Speaker 1: Did I talk about this recently? There was a split
Speaker 1: and how they spelled it the A and the I, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the A and the number of ends and everything, and
Speaker 1: I I have an article where I think I was
Speaker 1: talking about this where my dad's uncle hit a cop
Speaker 1: hit a cop cart. He was Italian and the I
Speaker 1: and in little really like in South side of Chicago.
Speaker 1: Italians and Irish guys didn't like each other. But I said,
Speaker 1: you simply could not go to the Irish neighborhood. They'd
Speaker 1: kill you. His uncle hits the Irish cop named Philip
Speaker 1: to me, who's off duty too. Me goes home and
Speaker 1: gets a gun. It comes back and kills my dad's uncle.
Speaker 1: I still have the newspaper clipping. Um, and my dad
Speaker 1: would show me the article, his point being how the
Speaker 1: ronella's spelled. So the ronella's who are family members in
Speaker 1: the articles have different spelled names. Oh, but he's like,
Speaker 1: but it's the same brothers, you know. I mean it's funny.
Speaker 1: Um so ja, yes, yeah, you said perfectly there. But
Speaker 1: when you but you don't do that? Does your family?
Speaker 1: What does your dad call your mom or dad? My
Speaker 1: my family caused me. I see, but you just make
Speaker 1: it easier to everybody else. Yes, yes, I do that.
Speaker 1: It's like Janis and yeah yeah, um current of course
Speaker 1: Phil's got a haircut scheduled night. That's right his um,
Speaker 1: it's getting down in his eyes. He had to do
Speaker 1: a little head flick. Yeah. Yeah. I was telling you
Speaker 1: before the podcast that I judge. I judge when I
Speaker 1: get my hair cut, like the timing of it based
Speaker 1: on when you start making fun of me. I know
Speaker 1: that that's about the right time. So I like to
Speaker 1: keep it high. I like to keep the hair high
Speaker 1: and tight. Here in the studio, it's really strict sets here. Uh,
Speaker 1: tell everybody. You don't need to tell where you went,
Speaker 1: but tell everybody about your big fishing trip stuff. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't call it big fish. This will interest yeah, this
Speaker 1: will interest yeah, because um, this would be These will
Speaker 1: be fish species he's familiar with as a Minnesotan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was. I was fishing body of water um in
Speaker 1: Montana this weekend that I fished before, and an impoundment
Speaker 1: on a large river. Yes, you typically do well in
Speaker 1: the spring. Was small mouth in there, but I hit
Speaker 1: it a little too late and they moved off their
Speaker 1: beds and deeper. And I just haven't figured him out
Speaker 1: this time of year yet. But you hit at the
Speaker 1: same time last year, No, earlier last year? Yeah, okay, um,
Speaker 1: But the soccers were spawning. The water was clear and
Speaker 1: I could see him. I'm not talking about that fishing trip.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the other big fishing trip. Oh that one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: four back. I'm not afraid to tell about that one. Everyone.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah, Memorial Day weekend. It's hundreds of
Speaker 1: miles long, more more shoreline than California. And and I think, no, seriously,
Speaker 1: look it up. You want to hear a good little
Speaker 1: fact like that. Um, Prince of Wales Island has half
Speaker 1: the land mass of the Big Island in Hawaii, but
Speaker 1: something like four times or as much shoreline really because
Speaker 1: all those fiords and jaggedy ass shorelines. Um, yeah, four
Speaker 1: pack amazing fishery. Walleye fishing was tough at first. Um,
Speaker 1: It's like we pick up one or two during the day,
Speaker 1: but we kind of figured out in the evenings they
Speaker 1: were sliding up on those hard breaks, sliding up there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just sliding right up there to feed. In the evenings,
Speaker 1: they're going up shallower, we would we would catch them
Speaker 1: pretty good. Um. And when you guys are doing that,
Speaker 1: what do you so you're camping out fishing, what do
Speaker 1: you guys doing with your with your filets? That's what
Speaker 1: they say in England, we just put them in the cooler,
Speaker 1: keeping keeping cool. Just gutted whole fish, or you're flaming fish.
Speaker 1: Now we're flying fish and then put them in a cooler. Um,
Speaker 1: and then just come home and then deal with them all.
Speaker 1: Come home, you guys frying fish while you're there? We No,
Speaker 1: we didn't, We didn't while we were there. What all
Speaker 1: the kind of species did you catch? Um? Drum? Catfish?
Speaker 1: You caught freshwater drum? Yeah, they're in there. Yeah, caught
Speaker 1: one that's a rubbery fish. I caught one last year.
Speaker 1: Do you ever flay one of those? Yeah? I did.
Speaker 1: I didn't this year. I did last year. You flame
Speaker 1: and you think you're in for a treat. They're beautiful.
Speaker 1: My dad used to cook them. But they're like gorgeous flames. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they look like they taste good. They're like a little springy.
Speaker 1: It's like they make that noise when you're chewing them.
Speaker 1: They make the noise of the cheese curtain, like you
Speaker 1: generally don't want your fish to go when you're chewing
Speaker 1: it squeaks on your teeth. Man, where I grew up
Speaker 1: that people were way more interested in the rock in
Speaker 1: their head than uh than eating them? Yeah, they have
Speaker 1: a blow. They have a large version. What's it called?
Speaker 1: It's that you're not the old? Yeah? Yeah, what the
Speaker 1: hell's that word? It's just a souped up version of old.
Speaker 1: You make little earrings on it for your wife and stuff.
Speaker 1: Have a good little thing for you to get into man,
Speaker 1: like make an animal part jewelry. You need to catch
Speaker 1: yourself a big drunk. I think I do. Are these
Speaker 1: like those kind of like uh, little parts that mimic
Speaker 1: like or a setted pasta like that, like a little
Speaker 1: thumb print. You find them washed up on the beach. Sometimes.
Speaker 1: My brother had some because yellow eye rock fish have
Speaker 1: some biggins. And my brother had some kind of jewelry
Speaker 1: made for his for his woman, his wife Juanita. One
Speaker 1: of the many fish called cheap head. Did you did
Speaker 1: you flay it out? No? I put that one back.
Speaker 1: M Um. We caught some pike. What did you do
Speaker 1: with those? Played them through some back? But I mean
Speaker 1: we caught a lot of pike. What do you guys
Speaker 1: do with all the wide bones on your pipe? Um?
Speaker 1: I actually didn't take any pipe place? Do you like?
Speaker 1: Rick cart and he Rick caught uh? I think his
Speaker 1: biggest was thirty five and quarter, big old fat gut
Speaker 1: on that thing. Does he does he make pickled pike? Um?
Speaker 1: He typically doesn't, but he I think he's gonna try
Speaker 1: to this year. He took it back a bunch. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You ever hear pickled pike? Yes, I've had that because
Speaker 1: it dissolves the bones out. That was one of the
Speaker 1: greatest discoveries I've ever made. Man, I did not that
Speaker 1: I made. I mean, you know what I'm saying, I
Speaker 1: ever learned about. Yeah, when I was a kid, my
Speaker 1: old man would buy pickled um, you know, for Christmas.
Speaker 1: I don't know why. I like, I don't know where
Speaker 1: this is the thing, pickled herring or whatever, ye creamed
Speaker 1: herring or something for Christmas Eastern European. I don't know
Speaker 1: how you got on that. But then he learned how
Speaker 1: to make up. He learned how to make it out
Speaker 1: a pike with the sour cream and ship or not,
Speaker 1: and he would make huge jars of that now and then.
Speaker 1: But you gotta get on it. You can't let it
Speaker 1: linger in your fridge for a long time. Soon as
Speaker 1: it started getting cloudy in there. How do you flay
Speaker 1: a pike? Well, you ever see miles machee do it? No? Okay,
Speaker 1: do you do like the five? Like the five flame?
Speaker 1: Meth no I have, I don't like it. So all
Speaker 1: through growing up, we would just flame like if flay it,
Speaker 1: take the flay off like normal, and then you cut
Speaker 1: it into like a three, and then you cut the
Speaker 1: how if it's a big pike, you cut it laterally,
Speaker 1: and then they got two big long strips. And then
Speaker 1: we would take a flame knife and cut about every
Speaker 1: cut through it almost all the way through it, every
Speaker 1: the same way like the cart way, the cart preparation.
Speaker 1: So you take a piece, it's like, let's say the
Speaker 1: size of like three of your fingers put together in
Speaker 1: your hand, like if you peel your pinky and your
Speaker 1: thumb away, I got big like banana fingers. But if
Speaker 1: you kill your pinking, your thumb away, that the three fingers,
Speaker 1: and then every quarter third of an inch or so
Speaker 1: you cut almost through it. The tailpieces bone free, so
Speaker 1: always like and then you fry that and the little
Speaker 1: bones kind of cook out. You know, now what I do,
Speaker 1: That's what we used to do. Now what I do
Speaker 1: is I take the flight off and I take the
Speaker 1: tailpiece off, and I'll freeze the tailpieces, just regular fish,
Speaker 1: and then I'll take the bone in pieces and make
Speaker 1: fish cakes or pickled pike. Um myles mache. He can
Speaker 1: very quickly. Um, if it's chilled, nice and easy to
Speaker 1: work with. He just deep bones at some bitch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could get that strip out pretty good. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like as John McPhee when John McFee was writing
Speaker 1: about cleaning American chad, he just he equated it to
Speaker 1: fixing someone's watch. It's like, um, it's like that kind
Speaker 1: of work to get that bone line. But that's my
Speaker 1: brother does. I'm not bad. Yeah. I was like watching
Speaker 1: videos on the five finger exploding Heart pipe trick. I
Speaker 1: don't know that all that. No, they say it's like
Speaker 1: the five You get the five boneless flats off of
Speaker 1: the pike and it's just oh yeah, you cut into
Speaker 1: the back, put on the back. But I did that
Speaker 1: and it just did like skinny strips. No. No, it's
Speaker 1: like you cut like laid on its belly and like
Speaker 1: going behind its head and come out you take the
Speaker 1: tailpiece off, the boneless tailpiece off this. I just lost
Speaker 1: a dollar bet to Spencer New Heart because we have
Speaker 1: the tailpiece of a common cart and I said, the
Speaker 1: tailpiece doesn't have white bones. He says, that's not true.
Speaker 1: They go all the way and I was like, no,
Speaker 1: they don't. And we took a tailor piece and cut
Speaker 1: into it six pen six bones, like he's got why
Speaker 1: bones to the bitter end, but on a pike they
Speaker 1: peter her out at the dorsal fin. Yeah. Anyhow, um,
Speaker 1: we went morrel hunt last night and me and me
Speaker 1: and my all my kids and brodying his kids and uh,
Speaker 1: we're stopped around for a while and we finally find something.
Speaker 1: My little six year old looks he ghost, he finds
Speaker 1: some rel. We find him real and he goes, I
Speaker 1: saw those earlier? And what did he say after that?
Speaker 1: I thought it was a bee. I was like, I
Speaker 1: got to see this. I'm not kidding. And earlier he
Speaker 1: had got tangled up in a little briar patch and
Speaker 1: he was winding and moaning about being stuck in a
Speaker 1: briar patch, And I said, was it before after he
Speaker 1: got stuck that briar patch? And he says, this was
Speaker 1: before that. I go back to that briar patch and
Speaker 1: start kind of backtracking where he came from, and there's
Speaker 1: a morels. I saw one of those earlier. That's hilarious.
Speaker 1: I was impressed you found it. Yeah, but we ended
Speaker 1: up really good. Yeah, a couple dozen, I'd say we
Speaker 1: had you know, um, well, my wife just came up
Speaker 1: with a new hashtag for him, which is keep tinkering
Speaker 1: but we are, which is uh. But we got back
Speaker 1: to the truck and there's like a place where if
Speaker 1: you parked and went looking, you wouldn't look because not
Speaker 1: given too much way to say, that's right by the dumpsters,
Speaker 1: like by the dumpsters. It's like it's just too obvious,
Speaker 1: like you would never look there, like you park and
Speaker 1: you'd never been. It's just like a weird little pocket.
Speaker 1: And we got done and then just kind of got
Speaker 1: checking around the dumpsters. Doubled our take in about ten minute,
Speaker 1: the old dumpster spot. But you know, what is there,
Speaker 1: like they're growing tight association, like what's what kind of
Speaker 1: matter is found right by this? Had no I had
Speaker 1: all the attributes they did. These morales weren't keen in
Speaker 1: on dumpsters. It had all the attributes. It was like
Speaker 1: like we're after the I don't know, I think this
Speaker 1: is more rigid than it is. But do you want morales, y'all. No,
Speaker 1: I don't do you want any kind of wild mushrooms?
Speaker 1: You know? Really? Um uh. We used to think it
Speaker 1: was like there's you know, these different species sort Morchella escalenta,
Speaker 1: which is like translates like delicious moral and there's like
Speaker 1: more cell E conicus not. And I think the world
Speaker 1: is very clean, and it's like, oh, that's this and
Speaker 1: that's that. I might be wrong, but my understanding now
Speaker 1: is that it's like you can't just run around declaring
Speaker 1: this morale that I just gonna ask you if I
Speaker 1: like the ones we're finding kind of a light tan, say,
Speaker 1: like in burn areas, do they look there? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: then you go to the burns sometimes sometimes you do
Speaker 1: get those those round toped, big yellow bastards and burns.
Speaker 1: But my understanding that could be wrong. It's just like
Speaker 1: it's like Morchella escalenta maybe is that big gass yellow
Speaker 1: river bottom morrell that associates with dead, dying, damaged, whacked
Speaker 1: out cotton woods. Um. And there's like you so kind
Speaker 1: of wet ground kind of right around now for here,
Speaker 1: it depends on your elevation and everything. My buddy in
Speaker 1: the San Juan Islands, he's picking Morrell's March, you know so,
Speaker 1: and Robert Abernathy in South Carolina gets him in March. Anyhow,
Speaker 1: big messed up cotton woods and then it kind of
Speaker 1: gets where the grass is what like, you know, it
Speaker 1: just starts to look Morelli man, that dap old sunlight,
Speaker 1: twelve inch high grass which made it. You could have
Speaker 1: been walking right by him without seeing them. And the
Speaker 1: last little dumpster cluster was at a stone dead cotton wood. Okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: stone dead. Um got a black bear there a night.
Speaker 1: It's been a while since you shot a bear in it, man,
Speaker 1: been a while. I've seen something get seen something get
Speaker 1: shot since then, but I haven't shot a bear in
Speaker 1: a long time. Ah. I saw post clay had hardly
Speaker 1: any fat on that bear. Well we yeah, like in
Speaker 1: the where you'd find it, it didn't have that much.
Speaker 1: But then I gave when we caught it up yesterday
Speaker 1: morning and package it all. I'm gonna bring you some crant.
Speaker 1: I got it all packaging. I cut off enough for
Speaker 1: but no, I cut off enough off of the off
Speaker 1: the high end quarters. I cut off enough to under
Speaker 1: a cup of oil. But no, not fatty, but like
Speaker 1: really nice hide on it, very stout, well muscled, just
Speaker 1: not a lot of fat on it. What do you
Speaker 1: do with the feet? Keep it? I'm gonna get a
Speaker 1: tan and rugged out. I had that. No, no no, no,
Speaker 1: just if you're right, if you're going to do a
Speaker 1: whole rug again with his claws and everything on him, yeah,
Speaker 1: I got a couple. I don't know. That's one of
Speaker 1: the problems, not a problem. Like one of the things
Speaker 1: about bears is how many bear hides do you need?
Speaker 1: And you're not gonna waste it? You know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's just like, but I'm back into it now. I mean,
Speaker 1: we used to hunt bears so heavily, like really would
Speaker 1: devote a lot of time to it, and then I
Speaker 1: just kind of for a while just got sick of
Speaker 1: those Southeast bears. It tastes like fish, Southeast Alaska bears.
Speaker 1: It tastes like fish. But no, we we had a
Speaker 1: great time. I don't even make like a like a
Speaker 1: coat cape kind of situation, or I don't know why
Speaker 1: I don't do that. It's hard to pull that off.
Speaker 1: You know. Ronnie Bain's ruled to never wear a hat
Speaker 1: that has more personality than you do. I don't know,
Speaker 1: what do you think about having a cape that has
Speaker 1: more personality? Majes Steve rowing in here with a bear
Speaker 1: cape workout pants. Actually see him starting the rocks. It
Speaker 1: was it was ninety degrees. Oh, that would be brutal.
Speaker 1: It was like you it was it felt barry till
Speaker 1: eight thirty in the morning, and then the day we
Speaker 1: got one. So we went up hiked in this area
Speaker 1: a couple of miles in hot Earnhill. Got there, it
Speaker 1: got cool, and then we're in a big burn that
Speaker 1: had like it was like a mosaic burn from a
Speaker 1: long time ago, and there's still nice little timber patches,
Speaker 1: just kind of glass in those timber patches. First night, boom,
Speaker 1: there's a bear. Put the moves on and he gave
Speaker 1: us the slip. Uh. In the morning, we're like set
Speaker 1: up to glasses this west facing exposure so that we're
Speaker 1: looking east and there's so much haze in the air,
Speaker 1: like kind of the morning was shot just like I
Speaker 1: was like looking into a blue smoke. Almost sat there
Speaker 1: for twelve hours in the blazing hot sun with these
Speaker 1: egg grow ants that were fired up about the heat.
Speaker 1: I think, yep, Oh, you try to take a nap
Speaker 1: and just feel ants all over you. It's misery. That's
Speaker 1: a long day. They set up a shade tent, gets
Speaker 1: me about eight thirty, starts feeling barring. There's at the
Speaker 1: damn Bear and we got that one. Yeah, sweet, it
Speaker 1: was good. It was good. Uh you're hanging in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm here. Don't go anywhere. We're gonna get into
Speaker 1: some We're gonna get into some hardcore history in a
Speaker 1: minute here man. Uh oh, their dad said krant a
Speaker 1: note I sent her attacks. I was reading an article
Speaker 1: about Prince Harry. The Prince Harry and Oprah are launching
Speaker 1: a TV show about mental health, and I said to Krinn,
Speaker 1: if I had something to the effect of if I
Speaker 1: had list every program ever made in the history of
Speaker 1: the planet in order in which I would watch it,
Speaker 1: I would start with that on the bottom, and then
Speaker 1: I would fill everything else in. It was like the
Speaker 1: weekend and I get a text from Steve and He's like,
Speaker 1: remind me to talk about how this is the thing
Speaker 1: I at least I'd be least likely to ever watch.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, okay, well this came on the heels
Speaker 1: like it's very un American to like the royal family.
Speaker 1: It's it's like, here, I'm breaking my own rule by
Speaker 1: talking about him. But it's super Unamerican. We had a
Speaker 1: whole war to get out from under the monarchy, but
Speaker 1: people still act like it's cool. I read an article
Speaker 1: at the Times where some guys like Ummett, what when
Speaker 1: his when his his his his wife? It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: they're mean, right the royal family. I read his article
Speaker 1: Times being like Holmett, you're surprised that there's a problem
Speaker 1: with a monarchy. This is a shocked everybody. Like globally,
Speaker 1: the whole world has moved away from monarchies because of
Speaker 1: the abuse, nepotism, anti democratic everything, like you get to
Speaker 1: lead because your dad, Like you're born into a certain
Speaker 1: family and you get to be in charge because of
Speaker 1: who your dad was or your mom. And then someone
Speaker 1: points out like, oh, they're mean. It's like, no, ship,
Speaker 1: I mean, isn't that the whole point? It's not like
Speaker 1: the world's going to monarchies. I don't. I don't know
Speaker 1: if we've been drifting from that for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: They're oh, I thought they were all super nice, really
Speaker 1: nice kings and queens, remember that stuff. God'll be like,
Speaker 1: but looks Steve. They're much nicer now because they don't
Speaker 1: exactly do off with their heads, so you know, now
Speaker 1: they ride. I was telling my kids they ride around
Speaker 1: little carriages and like, no, they don't. I'm like, listen,
Speaker 1: So I had to pull up pictures. I got my
Speaker 1: kids hating him out. Yeah, you gotta teach your kids
Speaker 1: love and everything, but I'd like, I try to be
Speaker 1: very precise and teach them certain hate, but I try
Speaker 1: to teach them to really despise the royal family. I'm
Speaker 1: getting I'm getting somewhere with her. Yeah, I was just like,
Speaker 1: holy cow, man um, holy cow. I usually try to
Speaker 1: not like burden listeners with opinions of mine have nothing
Speaker 1: to do with what we with our set of things
Speaker 1: that we like with our world, right like the world
Speaker 1: the brand promise of what it is we talked about. Well,
Speaker 1: I play kangaroos, that's all like in, that's all in,
Speaker 1: and Prince Harry is out. So I need to apologize
Speaker 1: for having brought up something that's out and I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna like, yeah, apologies. Just a quick weekend text to
Speaker 1: current I think most would agree. Here's some kind of
Speaker 1: interesting where there's a um this is reporting a handful
Speaker 1: places there's a bill there's so there's some folks pushing
Speaker 1: the band like they got a gripe with kangaroo hunting
Speaker 1: in Australia, which is like a very tightly regulated industry
Speaker 1: in Australia where they want to ban the import of
Speaker 1: any and all kangaroo products into the US. And it
Speaker 1: has a kind of a weird history. So I didn't
Speaker 1: realize this, but back in the seventies, kangaroo numbers were,
Speaker 1: kangaroos were down and hurting. I know, they go like wildly,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're wildly cyclical. And in seventy one
Speaker 1: California banded import of kangaroo parts, so just into that state,
Speaker 1: right um, and they have a there's a commercial kangaroo
Speaker 1: industry in Australia, so they have all kinds of there's
Speaker 1: all kinds of non native wildlife there that's that's less
Speaker 1: regulated there. Right now, they're trying to exterminate what how
Speaker 1: many cats? They're trying to feral cats, all of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they got a goal to shoot off two million cats
Speaker 1: or something in Australia. It was there's a lot of
Speaker 1: non native stuff that's more liberal and unregulated hunting, but
Speaker 1: they have a tightly regulated kangaroo industry where it's basically
Speaker 1: it's like they harvest it like you would imagine harvesting livestock,
Speaker 1: but it's a wild animal. So there's market set and
Speaker 1: people come in and established. You got to get you know,
Speaker 1: these commercial licenses, you have to pass tests to become
Speaker 1: a sharpshooter. UM and a long time ago California band
Speaker 1: parts and then the US Fishing Wilder Service followed suit
Speaker 1: and banned the import of three commercially shot kangaroo species
Speaker 1: because they're worried about declining row populations, even though many
Speaker 1: Australians felt that that was not a concern. UM. Eventually
Speaker 1: they were removed from the US List of Endangered and
Speaker 1: Threatened Wildlife, apparently deemed recovered to but the California band
Speaker 1: lingered until the mid two thousand's and people didn't pay
Speaker 1: much attention to it. And then a vegetarian activist group
Speaker 1: sued Adida's for selling soccer shoes that were using imported
Speaker 1: kangaroo skins. This got me think about when I was
Speaker 1: a little kid, I wanted to pair of shoes called
Speaker 1: ruse they had. I was wondering if they were made
Speaker 1: out of kangaroo hide, but they just had like a
Speaker 1: little zipper pocket. Uh yeah, but my mom wouldn't. I
Speaker 1: thought it was because we were poor, but my mom
Speaker 1: just wasn't dumb. My mom not being dumb made me
Speaker 1: think we were poor because she wouldn't let us have
Speaker 1: any name brand stuff. We couldn't get like you'd want
Speaker 1: like real Drido's, but you had to eat like store
Speaker 1: brand potato chips, you know, and you wanted it in
Speaker 1: a bag. So you go to school and be like
Speaker 1: a bag to said Doritos, but would be like a
Speaker 1: little sandwich bag you full of like store brand ones.
Speaker 1: Yeah and uh yeah. She never lets to have any
Speaker 1: cool we wanted, like Nike sneakers. You bring up Adidas.
Speaker 1: I'm a huge soccer fan, played soccer and growing up,
Speaker 1: and I think Adidas is most popular shoe. Is kangaroo
Speaker 1: leather still today? Is it? I wonder if it was
Speaker 1: the Sambas, remember that black and white. It's not Samba's,
Speaker 1: but it's the they call it the Copa moon dials.
Speaker 1: I had a pair, um played in them, you know,
Speaker 1: most most most of it grown up, So you kicked
Speaker 1: some goals and that does that? Does that ball bounce
Speaker 1: off that kangaroo leather? Nice? It's super the leather is
Speaker 1: super soft. So I mean, you know it was more um,
Speaker 1: I would say. I played in the midfield, so it
Speaker 1: was one of those like more like passing type of
Speaker 1: shoes I would say. So, yeah, very popular. Adida shoe
Speaker 1: didn't have like psychological ramifications where you felt real spring
Speaker 1: when you puts. I just knew that I needed to
Speaker 1: leather it up like you. You had to buy this
Speaker 1: oil with it like it, keep it to keep it
Speaker 1: like whether um waterproof's got a subject matter. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: they sued a Yeah this vegetarian activist groups sued Adidas
Speaker 1: for selling soccer shoes using imported kangaroo skins. Now they're
Speaker 1: trying to revive this whole thing. A bunch of international
Speaker 1: activist groups and a member of the U S House
Speaker 1: of Representatives and an Australian politician who is the loan
Speaker 1: elected representative of the Animal Justice Party. So if you
Speaker 1: want to get yourself some kangaroo chops, stock up on
Speaker 1: them sneakers. A smart thing to do, dude, right now,
Speaker 1: if you're a big Adidas man's buy a bunch of
Speaker 1: those shoes. I did take that money and buy a
Speaker 1: wallet boat and send pictures of that wallet boat to
Speaker 1: Chester and say suck at Chester. I say I was
Speaker 1: able to do with kangaroo shoes what you were never
Speaker 1: able to do with bitcoin. Uh. Here's a great here's
Speaker 1: a great thing. Now. And then a news story comes
Speaker 1: out in a million people, a million people texted to me,
Speaker 1: and a million people texting me this one, that there's
Speaker 1: an article in The Atlantic, um, which is like, oftentimes
Speaker 1: a reasonable publication, I feel, and it's not their fault,
Speaker 1: but someone just published this peace uh arguing that in
Speaker 1: in the in the Great Saga of wolves being magical,
Speaker 1: magical creatures. And again I'm not hacking up hold that
Speaker 1: like wolves. I like seeing them, hearing them, looking at
Speaker 1: him everything. Uh. But it's like, if you want to
Speaker 1: stop highway vehicle collisions, you need to get yourself a
Speaker 1: bunch of wolves. And it was pointing out that, uh,
Speaker 1: pointing out that in and I gotta look in it
Speaker 1: this more and it's like, there's like the whole issues
Speaker 1: of causation and what's that thing king causation is not Ye,
Speaker 1: there's the same correlation is not equal causation, arguing that
Speaker 1: in counties in Wisconsin, in counties in Wisconsin that had
Speaker 1: wolves come in, there is a reduction in highway vehicle
Speaker 1: collisions with deer with deer okay, saying that there wolves
Speaker 1: are saving us so much more money and avoiding car crashes,
Speaker 1: then they're costing people in livestock death, saying, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you wolves and all of a sudden, But see, wolves
Speaker 1: have been around for quite a long time in Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: so it's not like all of a sudden, there's like
Speaker 1: none and then you put some there, and then that's
Speaker 1: where the causation thing comes up, because there's been a
Speaker 1: reduction in deer car collisions in certain counties that have wolves.
Speaker 1: And I pointed out to kran I was saying, hey, uh,
Speaker 1: if you're good at math, we should figure out how
Speaker 1: many deer car collisions that hunters prevent, which is imperfect,
Speaker 1: but it brings up points, so you have just just
Speaker 1: for sake of just set the whole thing up. This
Speaker 1: is an incredible number. Nineteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: seven Wisconsin nights collide with deer every years, like many
Speaker 1: many a night. So let's say twenty thousand deer car
Speaker 1: collisions in Wisconsin every year equals this will surprised me
Speaker 1: to how few deaths. That leads to four seventy seven
Speaker 1: human injuries and only eight deaths and I think six
Speaker 1: of those are motorcyclists. So you imagine like the percentage
Speaker 1: of vehicles on the road compared to like you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, like what percentage of highway passengers are
Speaker 1: in a vehicle versus on a motorcycle, which is like
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly vehicle car um That makes it seem like, uh,
Speaker 1: I think we could pull those numbers two. But the
Speaker 1: fact that eight, that six of eight fatalities are dudes
Speaker 1: hitting my motorcycles is pretty crazy. That is crazy. It
Speaker 1: makes you think that, like that's another thing in your
Speaker 1: head when you ride a motorcycle. So if a wolf
Speaker 1: kills twenty deer per year, wolves and Wisconsin are probably
Speaker 1: killing about twenty four thousand, two hundred deer year hunters.
Speaker 1: And they're saying that these wolves can lead to a
Speaker 1: reduction in deer car collisions. And I brought it to
Speaker 1: Kroll how many how many deer car collisions to hunters prevent?
Speaker 1: Because wolves killing Wisconsin about twenty four thousand deer hunters
Speaker 1: kill a night eight thousand. Basically, round up hunters kill
Speaker 1: a hundred and eighty nine thousand deer in Wisconsin last year.
Speaker 1: That's a ton of dude. Wisconsin is killed a hundred
Speaker 1: eighty nine thousand deer. So that would be the real article.
Speaker 1: I was pointing out. The real article would be holy cow,
Speaker 1: do hunters prevent a lot of death? And then when
Speaker 1: you go hunting, people be like, why are you hunting?
Speaker 1: I'd be like, well, I mean saving lives, saving American lives.
Speaker 1: In that way, hunters should get a discount or car insurance. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But then Karin was like looking into this more and
Speaker 1: pointed out that pointed out to me that they were
Speaker 1: saying the effects of wolves on saving human lives on
Speaker 1: the highway is beyond the deer they actually killed. But
Speaker 1: it says that wolves, unlike people. I don't don't this
Speaker 1: might don't get Wolves create like a landscape of fear,
Speaker 1: which we had a podcast episode named Landscape of Fear.
Speaker 1: Wolves create a landscape of fear and move deer away
Speaker 1: from heavily trafficked areas. But if you look at a
Speaker 1: map of where deer car collisions occurred, to occur along
Speaker 1: the interstate system. So they're sort of saying the wolves
Speaker 1: like to hunt the interstate. Wolves are out on the
Speaker 1: on the interstate hunting deer and push them away from
Speaker 1: the interstate into the remote areas where the wolves don't
Speaker 1: want to go. Kind of maybe. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: it gets complicated. I went down a research hole, so
Speaker 1: I think we'll have to come back to this. But Steve,
Speaker 1: your your thought was that UM, that most of the
Speaker 1: deer car collisions happen in urban areas. Most of them
Speaker 1: are occurring, and that is absolutely like the leaders Dane
Speaker 1: County and UM and the top three are I mean,
Speaker 1: Dane is half a million people, uh Waukeisha if that's
Speaker 1: the way the right way to pronounce, about four hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: and then Washington County is a hundred and thirty six
Speaker 1: hundred thousand. And this is all data from nine so
Speaker 1: those are all urban counties and they have about seven
Speaker 1: to eight hundred deer crashes per year from but then
Speaker 1: number four and there are among the top ten counties,
Speaker 1: there are three, there are four rural counties UM, but
Speaker 1: number four with a population of about forty one people.
Speaker 1: Shawano County had seven hundred five deer car collisions. So
Speaker 1: there are a couple of data points in here that uh,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of poke holes are not poke holes.
Speaker 1: But um, it gets a little complicated here because there
Speaker 1: are some really low population rural areas crash with a
Speaker 1: lot of car crashes. What they're here. Here's the other
Speaker 1: thing is you've got to look at You could look
Speaker 1: at population, but that doesn't attest to highway traffic on
Speaker 1: interstate system. There's a lot too, and I want to
Speaker 1: do but I thought it'd be like when I first
Speaker 1: saw I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world.
Speaker 1: But that I I looked at I was like, oh, there's
Speaker 1: more to it. It can't be like easily. It's not
Speaker 1: easily torn apart. But there's some suggestions there, like the
Speaker 1: idea that wolves push deer from the areas that they
Speaker 1: hunt into areas they don't hunt, and would mean like
Speaker 1: they hunt highway systems, which I don't think that's accurate.
Speaker 1: But the primary point, and we should if they want
Speaker 1: to come out. I love that am. The primary point
Speaker 1: is I feel that they It's one of those kind
Speaker 1: of things you read and you get the sense that
Speaker 1: they knew what they wanted to show before they showed. Oh, definitely,
Speaker 1: there was a point someone from well, what's that school? Wellesleyan,
Speaker 1: Wesleyan at Hillary Clinton School. I don't think so. Maybe
Speaker 1: this list of counties also doesn't say where, like if
Speaker 1: there's wolves, they're not, which seems like, you know, inappropriate.
Speaker 1: Here's a direct quote from the she went to Wellesley
Speaker 1: the all women's college. Here's a direct quote from the
Speaker 1: from the person. Most of their influence arises through dread,
Speaker 1: not death. Their very presence creates a landscape of fear.
Speaker 1: Um that sweet that people want dear to be so afraid.
Speaker 1: They're very presence creates a landscape. It's like people want
Speaker 1: dear to be afraid, creates a landscape of fear, which
Speaker 1: pushes deer away from roads and other heavily prowled areas.
Speaker 1: This makes tremendous sense, Zanette said. Actually Zanette is a
Speaker 1: I think she's a biologist who was commenting article, but
Speaker 1: wasn't actually the person who uh conducted the study. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there was a fair amount of doubt or
Speaker 1: just wanting to see causation, wanting to see this study replicated,
Speaker 1: because right now the conclusions are you know, but when
Speaker 1: Creta I talked about this morning, we're talking about it's
Speaker 1: more about um, it's more about sociology within ecology, because
Speaker 1: it's more about like what we want to see. And
Speaker 1: if you have a heavily pro wolf bias, you'll be like,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, acting like you care about highway
Speaker 1: vehicle collisions. What I I mean if this was coming from
Speaker 1: if this article and I don't know enough about the person,
Speaker 1: if the article is coming from someone like let's say
Speaker 1: the government like task someone to be like, what can
Speaker 1: we do about highway uh, you know, vehicle dear collisions? Right,
Speaker 1: And this person is like, wow, we could advanced headlight
Speaker 1: technology right, which we've done a lot of headlight technology
Speaker 1: is very important. UM, better signage and high trafficked areas,
Speaker 1: we could do, wildlife crossings improved, you know, collision sensors,
Speaker 1: all of that collision sensors and increasing the when you
Speaker 1: cut brush away and cut trees away, some motors can
Speaker 1: see more with let's see you have a bigger window
Speaker 1: to see on the sides of the world. Won't be
Speaker 1: coming little tricks and little tricks and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Some things that really makes sense. So if this person
Speaker 1: had looked at everything. They said, you know what, man,
Speaker 1: the one thing you're missing. After examining, after really getting
Speaker 1: into this, man, after really getting this, I think here's
Speaker 1: the answer. We bring a bunch of wolves to Madison.
Speaker 1: Turn them loose. You'll see, we'll put an end to
Speaker 1: your car crashes. Like then, I'd be like, tell me more,
Speaker 1: but that's not where it's coming from. Ah, we'll return
Speaker 1: to this. You should ask someone I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: maybe someone so much should come on and explain it.
Speaker 1: Can you do that? I'll see if I can find
Speaker 1: the the lead researcher. Okay, I want top of one
Speaker 1: last thing. Then we're gonna get a hardcore and oh no,
Speaker 1: two quick last things. There's three. We can skip some
Speaker 1: of the things. Okay, h this is interesting though. So
Speaker 1: a California park ranger, he's out doing his patrols in
Speaker 1: the California's East Bay Municipal Utility District. He's in the
Speaker 1: Sierra Nevada foothills, starts noticing all kind of petrified trees
Speaker 1: no one knew about it, Finds a bunch of petrified trees,
Speaker 1: finds a much more petrified trees, and eventually realized this
Speaker 1: like this giant debris pile of stuff from what from
Speaker 1: what year? Eight million years? Eight million year old debris
Speaker 1: pile of trees. And in here they find, once they
Speaker 1: get to digging around, an eight million year old mastodon
Speaker 1: skull with both tossed and tax six foot skulls on
Speaker 1: this thing. A rhino skeleton from back when we had rhinoceroses.
Speaker 1: There's a giant tortoise. There's a horse. There's a tape here,
Speaker 1: here's a good one. The remains of an ancestral four
Speaker 1: h pounds sam with with sharp teeth. Ye don't leave
Speaker 1: that at A sharp tooth salmon, four hundred pounds salmon
Speaker 1: running out of the rivers, running out of the oceans.
Speaker 1: A gompa there, which I didn't know about. It was
Speaker 1: an ancient elephant. They had four tusks plus six hundred
Speaker 1: petrified trees. That is so neat one of the most
Speaker 1: significant fossil discoveries in California history. They suspect floods and
Speaker 1: volcanic debris flows carried all this jump to this spot.
Speaker 1: That is cool, And they won't tell anybody where it
Speaker 1: is because some guy like me, it'd be so hard
Speaker 1: and someone's like, oh, yeah, right up there, man, keep
Speaker 1: finding all this crazy ship that you wouldn't go we
Speaker 1: have a quick look up there. Do we know if
Speaker 1: this was like one event or is it lay years
Speaker 1: of i't I didn't read that much. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: everything they found there, Um, it's supposed to be a
Speaker 1: from the Miocene, which is twenty million to five point
Speaker 1: three million years ago, so there. I think they were
Speaker 1: kind of layers and stuff scattered across an entire er.
Speaker 1: And it's funny like the ranger found one, uh, petrified tree,
Speaker 1: and then kept walking around and found some others and
Speaker 1: then over I think it was a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: like kept going, kept sniffing around. Yeah, and then he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, I think I need to call someone. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That would have been like if I was that ranger,
Speaker 1: they'd be like, what do you see there? Nothing? Your
Speaker 1: next Instagram post there with a wheelbarrow. Your Instagram post
Speaker 1: might have some tusk in the back nothing. Why, Um no,
Speaker 1: that's great. Wouldn't do that, that's great. That that's that's
Speaker 1: a cool fine. You know, I think when you think
Speaker 1: about all the cool animals here a long time ago,
Speaker 1: I'd like to imagine like we're not gonna be round
Speaker 1: forever like just whatever. I mean when you get to
Speaker 1: talk about geologic time, right, a disease event whatever to help,
Speaker 1: we'll destroy ourselves. Like no species gets to be here
Speaker 1: forever except the cockroach cockroaches. If you could come here
Speaker 1: like fast instead of going back in time, like I'm like,
Speaker 1: I want to go back in time to see all
Speaker 1: that crazy stuff. If you could go in time and
Speaker 1: go back, I'm gonna come back to the Earth in
Speaker 1: a billion years, there'll be a bunch of crazy ship
Speaker 1: running around. Ye. And what do you think we look like?
Speaker 1: Dudes with four tusks. I don't know. I'll be interesting.
Speaker 1: This guy in um, this guy in Idaho, we we
Speaker 1: got to talk about ravens killing livestock and deer and stuff.
Speaker 1: This was reported. I'm surprised what this is reported was
Speaker 1: reported in the hill. Yeah right. And idahole farmer he's
Speaker 1: always had bald eagles nest on his property, says this
Speaker 1: year something weird happened. He thinks that because it was
Speaker 1: such a cool spring that these bald eagles came to nest.
Speaker 1: But the fisher he wasn't kicking ass yet. I don't know.
Speaker 1: He's got a lake or he's got a lake, and
Speaker 1: he said it took a while to warm up, and
Speaker 1: he's wondering if their normal food source and the lake
Speaker 1: wasn't available when they showed up to nest. Anyways, they
Speaker 1: killed fifty four lambs, twelve to eighty pound lambs. He
Speaker 1: watched one kill, he watched one eagle kill seven lambs,
Speaker 1: and one day reported in the hill. Last little note here, Uh,
Speaker 1: hunters in West Virginia are mourning the loss of one
Speaker 1: of their hunt spots. They rolled what's this place called
Speaker 1: New River Gorge National Park. Used to be New River
Speaker 1: Gorge whatever preserved preserve. They harked seven thousand acres of
Speaker 1: land out of the core of this thing to make
Speaker 1: a national park. So seven thousand acres in the heart
Speaker 1: of the gorge, which is very rough terrain, local stale
Speaker 1: is some of the area's best hunting grounds. Um, they
Speaker 1: rolled that out. There's still sixty five thousand acres that
Speaker 1: you can hunt. They removed seven thousand and then gave
Speaker 1: a little bonus where they added about three seventy acres
Speaker 1: of newly open hunting lands. But yeah, stole seventh park service.
Speaker 1: I want to say stole a strong language. I just
Speaker 1: hate to see, like, I hate to see that kind
Speaker 1: of thing happened. I mean, if it's already good and
Speaker 1: protected as scenic River Wilderness area, whatever, I hate to
Speaker 1: see it be that they lay in this like you
Speaker 1: can't hunt it, Like I like to see ground protected
Speaker 1: from industrial exploitation and development. But it's a bummer to
Speaker 1: see that to get it pulled. Has anyone ever been
Speaker 1: to that area? And I've been there, Yeah, yeah, I've
Speaker 1: ever got great small mouth fishing. Really yeah, And you
Speaker 1: know it's fairly close to a lot of pretty big
Speaker 1: metropol metropolitan areas, so you know, I'm sure visits at
Speaker 1: this place will be you know that there'll be a
Speaker 1: lot of people going. But yeah, it's a bumber that
Speaker 1: land got because because I believe they're promised that they
Speaker 1: could always part of the previous designation and then they
Speaker 1: changed their tune our newest national park. How how upen
Speaker 1: arms are people about it? But are like locals that hunted, Well,
Speaker 1: I'm not, I mean I can't. I mean I didn't
Speaker 1: live near their enough to know how set people are.
Speaker 1: But you gotta imagine that, you know, you get your hunting,
Speaker 1: your quote, your hunting spot taken away. You're not going
Speaker 1: to be too pleased. You know. When I was living
Speaker 1: New York, we used to float the Upper Delaware near Callicoon,
Speaker 1: and that had gone under Wild and Scenic River designation. Man,
Speaker 1: you saw a lot of signs up and down the river.
Speaker 1: People pissed about it because the regulations, like used regulations change, um,
Speaker 1: And this thing became under as a National river under
Speaker 1: Part Protection in seventy eight, and people were sure, you
Speaker 1: can hunt the entire property, but then it then it
Speaker 1: just lost ten percent prohibited. Yeah. I mean, I'd imagine
Speaker 1: some hunters are really kind of pissed about it, um,
Speaker 1: based on just some of the articles I've read. But
Speaker 1: you know, I guess some of the other locals are
Speaker 1: are uh, you know, excited about potential economic prosperity might
Speaker 1: bring to the area. I mean, it's I guess it'll
Speaker 1: put West Virginia on the map a bit more so.
Speaker 1: I guess it depends on what your priority is. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're like a running a canoe livery, you're probably
Speaker 1: sit us all get on all those non outdoors, you know,
Speaker 1: all those non true outdoors folks, bhikers and bikers, hikers
Speaker 1: and bikers are all fired up. Last little thing here
Speaker 1: we'll touch off on because I want to touch off
Speaker 1: and it's just because it's from my home state of Michigan.
Speaker 1: Like there's Galley. I need to know more to the story.
Speaker 1: So what what is written here? Is a in this?
Speaker 1: Come on, Krint a massive fish poaching Well, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Look at all those laid out they broke off, you know,
Speaker 1: bags of I need to hear more story. If you
Speaker 1: want to find a good guess, get this guy out.
Speaker 1: I'm guess he doesn't feel like talking about it. But
Speaker 1: Krin's massive fish poaching operations. I don't know what happened
Speaker 1: here on County two guys find eight thousand, five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars combined for quote poaching hundreds of walleye, pan fish
Speaker 1: and perch. My panthers are with bluegills because perch or
Speaker 1: like a panthers either way, bunch fish. This guy's freezer
Speaker 1: got raided and then a game ward. And this is
Speaker 1: a weird thing. Just a lot too do I don't
Speaker 1: understand they thought out all the guys fish and then
Speaker 1: they laid it out and laid it out on tarps.
Speaker 1: He as if it were like bricks of cocaine and
Speaker 1: like as though like in classic drug raid fashion, laid
Speaker 1: out hundreds of perch filets. Yeah, like a cocaine like
Speaker 1: when you line up with a bunch of a ks
Speaker 1: and bags of dope and stuff from some like cartel raid.
Speaker 1: Perch filet's hundreds of perch flays laid out on giant
Speaker 1: tarps and in all of his empty ziplock baggies. So
Speaker 1: his freezer got raided and conservation officer found eighty five
Speaker 1: bags of frozen walleye quote panfish. I'm not happy with
Speaker 1: that term, and perch place in his house. The guy
Speaker 1: was ordered to pay seven thousand, nine thirty bucks where
Speaker 1: the fines and his friend was fine six hundred for
Speaker 1: taking over the limited percha taking over the limited purchase
Speaker 1: one thing. But the reason I need to know more is, like,
Speaker 1: was this dude, I don't know, Maybe that they were
Speaker 1: on doing for something else and that led to this.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of people I know in
Speaker 1: Michigan that if at the end of a good fishing
Speaker 1: spell you went to their house and started throwing all
Speaker 1: their ship out, you'd find they had over their possession limit.
Speaker 1: What is including my old man back when he was alive,
Speaker 1: and even with following possession limit rules, if you've got
Speaker 1: say four or five people in your household, you can
Speaker 1: have a lot of damn perch in your freezer. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's say you're in because it varies because like the
Speaker 1: big leg, two different Let's say youre an area. Just
Speaker 1: for argument's sake, here, let's say where he's at, he's
Speaker 1: a lot of fifty perch per day, and the possession
Speaker 1: limit is two daily limits, so he can have in
Speaker 1: his home freezer two perch flays. But let's say you like,
Speaker 1: I'm just no one thinks about it. If you're tearing
Speaker 1: it up and you're like, I'm gonna have a big
Speaker 1: fish for I don't know, and you catch five six
Speaker 1: limits of perch because you're saving up for a big
Speaker 1: church fundraiser fish fry. He hasn't gotten on their radar Somewhere.
Speaker 1: No one's thinking about it after they go in the freezer.
Speaker 1: Like there, he's probably you know, I think about it
Speaker 1: with ducks. He's probably yeah, because that's federal like crazy,
Speaker 1: but someone must not maybe not, but I imagine he's
Speaker 1: like following like the daily limit. Well, they're saying this
Speaker 1: one guy got not. But here's there thing is, what
Speaker 1: are they gonna do with all those perch flays now
Speaker 1: they've got them thought out? Beat him into the bald eagles.
Speaker 1: Holy cow, I know eighty five bags of perch plays
Speaker 1: and they're nice scaled skin on, well put up. They
Speaker 1: took care It's not like they just caught him and
Speaker 1: didn't take care of him, like they took care of
Speaker 1: this this dude was. I don't know if he's selling
Speaker 1: them like what we found in the past and talking
Speaker 1: to conservation guys game wards and I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: hacking on this game ward. I don't know the story,
Speaker 1: but a lot of times like that stuff comes out
Speaker 1: of that they're onto you about something, like you've done something,
Speaker 1: they're onto you about it, and that leads it's neither
Speaker 1: just like going and banging on doors and digging through freeze.
Speaker 1: It's got to be something because yeah, I'm sure they
Speaker 1: weren't like hey, stuff stopping in see what this guys
Speaker 1: in this freezer, like something happened. Maybe so here's another
Speaker 1: article and I it doesn't point out kind of like
Speaker 1: the backstory. But the main guy with you know, those
Speaker 1: bags Ziplock freezer bags. Um, okay, that's why I get
Speaker 1: a barrel of corn meal and just started put in
Speaker 1: a put in a fertilizer spreader. Just drive that over
Speaker 1: that big sheet drama hot oil. Thirty five, Wally, the
Speaker 1: daily limit is eight in what is freezer? Yeah, among
Speaker 1: the you know within the five taken that day, eighty
Speaker 1: five bags taking that day thirty five, Wally, the daily
Speaker 1: limit is eight, and anglers may possess an additional two
Speaker 1: days limit of walley as long as their process with
Speaker 1: a total possession limit of that's a lot of Wally.
Speaker 1: You're allowed to have a lot of wall in your freezer. Uh.
Speaker 1: Two hundred and forty five. Pan fish, the daily limit
Speaker 1: is you saw about bluegills there, Okay, like blue It's
Speaker 1: like it'd be like bluegill pumpkin seed, you know, with
Speaker 1: a total possession limit of seventy five, and he was
Speaker 1: over uh by three hundred and in D three additional perch,
Speaker 1: the daily limit is twenty five, and you can possess
Speaker 1: an additional two days limit as long as they're processed
Speaker 1: with a total possession limit of seventy five. I just
Speaker 1: like we're talking about a lot of things here that
Speaker 1: we don't really know about. But my here, here's I
Speaker 1: just want to explain this. My instinct when I see
Speaker 1: all those perch plays is like I've known this guy
Speaker 1: all my life. I mean, maybe it's part of a
Speaker 1: sting operation, like dozens of your extended friends and families.
Speaker 1: My yeah, it's like my old man and the old
Speaker 1: man he hung out with. Like I'm just I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm staring into the freezer. Okay, folks are sixty
Speaker 1: eight and I gotta I gotta scroll. I gotta scroll. Okay,
Speaker 1: they might have had a side hustle going on selling
Speaker 1: these things. Do you remember that big sting we reported on?
Speaker 1: It was like we report us a long time ago. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hang tight, dude, Okay, we reported on this long time ago.
Speaker 1: It was a big sting operation. Even had a name
Speaker 1: like like north Star and you read this as a
Speaker 1: poaching ring and you read the all the charges on
Speaker 1: these guys like racketeering, wire fraud. But it was and
Speaker 1: I'm not excusing it, but I had these names where
Speaker 1: you look and you think like, oh, it's the mafia,
Speaker 1: like they broke up a mafia organization because racketeering and
Speaker 1: wire fraud. But the wire fraud was like you had
Speaker 1: to do a call in to register your dear. So
Speaker 1: a dude choose too dear, has his girlfriend uh claim
Speaker 1: one on her tag, so she calls in to report
Speaker 1: to to report the deer to the deer Harvest hotline.
Speaker 1: That's wire fraud, right, racketeering would be a guy goes
Speaker 1: to he brings a buck down to his taxidermist to
Speaker 1: get it stuffed and pays the taxi and Smokey's smoking
Speaker 1: like snack sticks I'm not joking, pays the tax of
Speaker 1: derbys and snack sticks. And then they had a deal
Speaker 1: worked out where they got like reduced tax to dermy too,
Speaker 1: then get extra snack sticks. And they had some guy
Speaker 1: who had a gift shop and he's selling snacks sticks
Speaker 1: that made off their deer Smokey's. And then another guy
Speaker 1: here's there, here's their thing in this big roll up.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a another fraud. There's a there's a
Speaker 1: Walleye derby. A guy goes ahead of the derby and
Speaker 1: goes and catches wall in a different state. Okay, puts
Speaker 1: them in his his live well and drives over and
Speaker 1: signs up for the derby at a gas station like
Speaker 1: the gas stations, hold the Walleye Derby and wins the
Speaker 1: prize with Wallye. He caught in another state and had
Speaker 1: him in his live well, and it winds up being
Speaker 1: like this like interstate fraud thing. So on paper, it's like,
Speaker 1: holy ship, what were these guys doing? And you look
Speaker 1: at just doing a bunch of like he'll billy bullshit,
Speaker 1: like a bunch of things you would probably would't like
Speaker 1: a lot of guys wouldn't think about. You know, you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want your Hunter bucks. Let me bring you some Smoky's.
Speaker 1: It's just yeah, all right, yeah, how do you want
Speaker 1: to start mong your Mong? Yes? Sure? H m O
Speaker 1: n G. Let's start from the beginning. Who are who
Speaker 1: are the mom? So where you're from? First? I'm I'm
Speaker 1: in the Twin Cities Minneapolis area. Um, I live in Blaine,
Speaker 1: which is um City right side right outside of Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: And your Hunter newly Hunter yeah? Yeah? And your mom yes?
Speaker 1: And you were born in I was born in laos Okay.
Speaker 1: Walk us through who the monk were and how how so?
Speaker 1: The Mong are an ethnic minority group originally from the
Speaker 1: southern parts of China, and they at some point we're
Speaker 1: fighting with the Chinese because the Chinese wanted them to
Speaker 1: basically become Chinese, and a lot of the Moong were like, no,
Speaker 1: where there are a nomadic tribe, they have their own language,
Speaker 1: they have their own religion. We did not want to
Speaker 1: be Chinese. And so they were driven south into the
Speaker 1: Southeast Asian area, so Vietnam, uh, Laos, Cambodia, and that's
Speaker 1: where if you as a person here in the US,
Speaker 1: if you meet among person there from Southeast Asia essentially,
Speaker 1: and a lot of us have the same story as
Speaker 1: we were here because um of our involvement in the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War, more specifically the Secret War in Laos, what
Speaker 1: I have probably the same level of exposure. Um. Two
Speaker 1: Mong culture is a lot of people that hunt where I.
Speaker 1: It's like, I just know I have always known very
Speaker 1: loosely that there's a lot of Moong in the US.
Speaker 1: Kind of had something to do with the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: and you like to hunt a lot, and that's about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh, but breakdown, like how how the monk got
Speaker 1: tangled up with the with the US, Like how they
Speaker 1: became on the U S radar. Yeah, so back in
Speaker 1: the fifties, and sixties when UM it was, it was
Speaker 1: around the spread of communism UM in in that area.
Speaker 1: So the the idea was we had to stop the
Speaker 1: spread of communism UM in that region. So you had
Speaker 1: UM North VIETM Vietnam, which UM was then UM UH
Speaker 1: trying to take over the country. You have the communist forces.
Speaker 1: So I'm not trying to talk about one particular group,
Speaker 1: but it was it was around the essentially stopping communism.
Speaker 1: And so the reason why it's called the secret War
Speaker 1: in Laos is like the you know, the US, we're
Speaker 1: not supposed to be be there, and they were there
Speaker 1: to be advisors UM in that region to use and
Speaker 1: UM advise the like the local governments there to fight
Speaker 1: against the spread of communism because didn't UM like portions
Speaker 1: of the Chiman Chiman Trail came through Laos, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically most of it did. It was That's what's essentially
Speaker 1: what it was. It was a supply line and it
Speaker 1: occupied the eastern parts of Laos. My former neighbor at
Speaker 1: our Fishack in Alaska was a door gunner on a
Speaker 1: helicopter Vietnam and he now talks about it freely, but
Speaker 1: for a long time to not he's he's he's spent
Speaker 1: his entire tour based in Vietnam. But he said all
Speaker 1: their stuff was in Laos, dropping people off, picking them up,
Speaker 1: hitting hitting transportation lines all in Laus. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: early in in in nine early sixties. It was they
Speaker 1: got the the authorization from at that time in GfK,
Speaker 1: who said, yes, look into working with some of the
Speaker 1: ethnic minority group in that area to help with like
Speaker 1: stopping the spread and really where among people came in,
Speaker 1: where they knew the terrain among people throughout history have Um,
Speaker 1: they were actually fighting even before the Vietnam War. They actually,
Speaker 1: oddly enough, they were fighting with the French, because you've
Speaker 1: been Vietnam and I don't know if you remember the
Speaker 1: kind of like the French colonization the influenced the influence there,
Speaker 1: and um, oddly enough, they'd always been fighting for their freedom. Um.
Speaker 1: If if if you look at some of the some
Speaker 1: of the his the publications, they they've always wanted to
Speaker 1: kind of be left alone. We we want to be
Speaker 1: our own people, and we were we were fighting against
Speaker 1: evil forces. Is kind of like what they would say
Speaker 1: is in their mind, the outside communist influence was more
Speaker 1: of a threat to them than anything else correct, So
Speaker 1: they're auto correct, right. So that's how they got involved,
Speaker 1: and they were essentially used to because they could just
Speaker 1: get places quicker, right you know. Um. The only thing
Speaker 1: that they didn't have were they didn't have firearms. Um
Speaker 1: you know, which which um eventually came from working with
Speaker 1: the CIA. What are the moons traditionally hunt with? They
Speaker 1: have like these crossbows, so it's like a wooden stock
Speaker 1: and then um, like the cross would be um like uh,
Speaker 1: it could be would or it was like it could
Speaker 1: be bamboo. Um. And then they use for the strings.
Speaker 1: They for for the strings, they use um like a
Speaker 1: material called hemp. I don't think you guys heard of that,
Speaker 1: but it's like a fabric um and they use hamp
Speaker 1: and like hemp, they use it for like clothing as well,
Speaker 1: and so you know that thing doesn't shoot really far
Speaker 1: right and so um it was like mostly for small
Speaker 1: game birds. My dad's so my grandfather owned one. If
Speaker 1: you had a blacksmith um in the village who could
Speaker 1: like forge parts, um, you built your own flint stock.
Speaker 1: I know you guys had an episode about flint stock
Speaker 1: up a while ago, and right, um, you know you
Speaker 1: it would be mad at the wood and then you
Speaker 1: had they had had different parts and then they cooked
Speaker 1: up their own ammunition. And I learned this recently too,
Speaker 1: is they went and got that done from the caves
Speaker 1: and use that to like reduce it to some liquid
Speaker 1: and then cooked it up with hamp as well. And
Speaker 1: my dad said, he doesn't know like the exact process gunpowder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've talked about here. We talked about the process about
Speaker 1: which Boone and other frontiers mean would make and they
Speaker 1: would say thing they'd go to caves for the guano
Speaker 1: and then somehow they would use uh, you had to
Speaker 1: have Yeah, they'd get saltpeter um ash. It took a
Speaker 1: willow ash your own piss. They went the thing down
Speaker 1: with piss and then they used um saltpeter baguano. I
Speaker 1: can't remember. Anyways, it seems like a way to wind
Speaker 1: up with a product that wasn't entirely consistent. And I knew.
Speaker 1: I knew that because we we had a very um
Speaker 1: prominent member in our clan who recently passed away, and
Speaker 1: I had learned that he had been badly burned because
Speaker 1: he was cooking up his own and then w uh
Speaker 1: we recently covered a story or discussed the story in
Speaker 1: Taiwan where the Taiwanese government is passing anti hunting regulations
Speaker 1: that are impacting indigenous Taiwanese. You talking about the indigenous
Speaker 1: taiwan He's still there hunting with homemade guns, and they
Speaker 1: want to switch to modern guns, and people don't want
Speaker 1: them to switch to modern guns. And they're pointing out
Speaker 1: the danger, the danger to them of hunting with homemade firearms.
Speaker 1: They want to have something safer, but they don't want
Speaker 1: they're they're afraid of the efficacy that would come from
Speaker 1: and so there's a desire to keep them hunting with
Speaker 1: with homemade weapons. But then the Americans give them like yeah,
Speaker 1: m my, my dad said his first his first gun
Speaker 1: was an M one car being so thirty is like
Speaker 1: a thirty cow um um. You know. I recently I
Speaker 1: just kind of really gotten into hunting, and so, you know,
Speaker 1: again I'm going back and kind of just learning about
Speaker 1: the first guns that they came They came across what
Speaker 1: you was your dad born fifty two? So was he
Speaker 1: did he does he have recollection like of the moon
Speaker 1: getting tangled up with the Americans? Yeah? Yeah? And and
Speaker 1: actually fast forward a little bit, the kind of like
Speaker 1: Montana connection and all this. It was a there was
Speaker 1: smoke jumper by name of Jerry Daniels right out of here,
Speaker 1: out of Missoula. I think he was born in California
Speaker 1: but lived in Missoula. That's why there's among people in
Speaker 1: Missoula farming and there's a community there. Fast forward battle
Speaker 1: bit and my dad was telling me the story that
Speaker 1: to come to America. Um, and this Jerry Daniels, Um
Speaker 1: guy was worked really closely with the moong and he
Speaker 1: was a guy that validated my dad's picture. Yes, you
Speaker 1: were in fact a soldier and you know because it
Speaker 1: was because he was a Special Forces soldier. Well yeah, so, um,
Speaker 1: what everybody was? I mean the guy that the guy,
Speaker 1: the guy that was instrumental in bringing to the you
Speaker 1: know when I lived in Missoula, for I lived there
Speaker 1: for quite a few years. Um, the farmers market there
Speaker 1: is just dominated by among truck farmers. You know. May
Speaker 1: day I was with my buddy, I was with my
Speaker 1: buddy Clay, and I was showing them around there and
Speaker 1: they still have like out in certain areas of Missoula
Speaker 1: irrigation diversions and stuff. And he sort of like semi
Speaker 1: urban suburban farms and where the traditional hats my my
Speaker 1: neighbor turns out um being Shang are from Missoula. His
Speaker 1: name b B and Shana there. Um they lived in
Speaker 1: Missoula pretty much most of their lives and they just
Speaker 1: moved into our neighborhood and we moved into the neighborhood
Speaker 1: at the same time. We we live in the kind
Speaker 1: of newer development. And um, we saw them at like
Speaker 1: our kids schools, and you know, you know, you can
Speaker 1: just kind of tell their mom, right, so you just say, hey,
Speaker 1: how's you going. Yeah, And so if you're a Mong
Speaker 1: dude and you see a mom dude you don't know,
Speaker 1: at a non Mong function, you just go high like
Speaker 1: talk like playing dinner or you just talk. You just wave, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's not it's cool. That's cool to go
Speaker 1: up there and say, hey, you know, you know you're
Speaker 1: I am among how you doing? You know, like you're
Speaker 1: just curious with that's how you do it? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so let's let me I'll get this straight. Let's say
Speaker 1: you come in and let's say, fills mom, you've never
Speaker 1: seen him, never heard of him. You walk in this
Speaker 1: room and fils. Mom. Yeah, you say, are you mom? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would, I would because you can kind of just
Speaker 1: not like it would be like a knowing nod. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like to just ask him what if he's not well.
Speaker 1: I mean I actually saw a family um on my
Speaker 1: flight here yesterday in Minneapolis, and they were like they
Speaker 1: were sitting there and you had a feeling, Yeah, why
Speaker 1: you knew because then they were you know, so I
Speaker 1: was just like, hey, how are you guys doing? And
Speaker 1: they were like, hey, you know what, why are you
Speaker 1: going to mind Town. It's like, oh, yeah, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna go meet some friends, you know. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean they were just so you felt obligated to go chat.
Speaker 1: Yeah well yeah, yeah right, that's cool. Yeah. Uh, Okay,
Speaker 1: I want to get back to Asia for a minute.
Speaker 1: Your famous, But then I want to we gotta move
Speaker 1: into um stereotypes about mong hunters, Okay, and I'll tell
Speaker 1: you whole bunch of them. Okay, the in hunting Land,
Speaker 1: in hunting World, there's two groups that everyone knows they're
Speaker 1: just the worst on the planet. They're so everything everybody
Speaker 1: in bottoms it's uh, the Amish and the month Are.
Speaker 1: You know, they look like US, but they like to hunt,
Speaker 1: which makes me not like them. Um, you hear about
Speaker 1: so I want to fast for a little bit. Through
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War, so Americans started to pull out, and
Speaker 1: you guys got a big old bulls on your back
Speaker 1: because we abandoned it. And people are like, it's those
Speaker 1: like they're after you now right, I mean the Communists
Speaker 1: come down hard exactly, yes, and lay out kind of
Speaker 1: like with your own family. Here's you what that one
Speaker 1: up looking like for you guys when the Americans left? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I was telling corindus. You know, in in the US,
Speaker 1: in some states they recognized like May fourteenth, that's among
Speaker 1: American Day, and that was like the last day that
Speaker 1: essentially all the key advisors and some of the key
Speaker 1: mong military personnel were evacuated out of Laos what year
Speaker 1: and so even even before and in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: they had already signed a ceasefire in Paris. So when
Speaker 1: they signed that ceasefire, it essentially turned Laos into a
Speaker 1: civil war country because you had the group or the
Speaker 1: military that's um I think supports the royal family, which
Speaker 1: you know, Laos was a monarchy at some point, and
Speaker 1: then you had the group that is supported by the communists,
Speaker 1: So essentially they're still fighting to take over the country
Speaker 1: at that point, and so everybody leaves, um and um
Speaker 1: essentially to your point, among people have a bull's eye
Speaker 1: on there, you know, on them. And my family, between
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five and nineteen seventy nine, we're essentially in
Speaker 1: the jungles of Laos, hiding, trying to go places where
Speaker 1: you may, where you can find relatives, family, um, food
Speaker 1: if you will, And there was still kind of groups
Speaker 1: that were hoping that those who were airlifted out would
Speaker 1: come back and take back the country is kind of
Speaker 1: what they say, right, So for four years my family
Speaker 1: were we're basically just running around in the jungle if
Speaker 1: you if you will, just like in hiding, living off
Speaker 1: the land, trying to avoid communists exactly exactly. Um. I
Speaker 1: get credit for being the oldest in our family, um,
Speaker 1: but actually, like I lost two siblings in that time
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, to tell how that happened, I had
Speaker 1: a six year old brother. And the way that it
Speaker 1: was explained to me was, um, again, they're walking you know. Uh,
Speaker 1: in this particular instance, they're walking through the night and
Speaker 1: they had come under heavy fire, and we we had
Speaker 1: some relatives with us. My mom takes him he's six,
Speaker 1: gives him to a relative who is a gentleman because
Speaker 1: he can actually carry him, right, And my mom had me,
Speaker 1: and then my mom had Grandma, and so she gives
Speaker 1: him to our relative and they make a dash for
Speaker 1: form the other side of this road. From from my understanding, well,
Speaker 1: my mom and I make it across with other people,
Speaker 1: and as this relative and my brother are coming through,
Speaker 1: he says that he thinks my brother gets gets shot.
Speaker 1: So when you when you carry somebody on your back
Speaker 1: like like a child, they probably have some sort of tension.
Speaker 1: They have a grip on you sort of right. Well,
Speaker 1: he says that. Um. He claims that as they were
Speaker 1: running through and they came under heavy fire, Um, at
Speaker 1: some point my brother let go. And so at that point,
Speaker 1: he said that he made the decision to essentially leave
Speaker 1: my brother where he was and kept running. So they
Speaker 1: get to the other side, and you know, my mom's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know where is you know, where's my brother? What
Speaker 1: was your brother's name? Tongue, And so our relatively goes, well,
Speaker 1: you know, he's been shot. Um, I left him in
Speaker 1: that general area. So my mom gives herself up. It's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, my mom's like, I'm a woman. They're not
Speaker 1: gonna do anything to me. They don't care. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna give myself up. I'm gonna go trying to find,
Speaker 1: you know, my brother. She gives herself up. She's captured.
Speaker 1: She comes around and first she says, she calls for him,
Speaker 1: and no answer, right, and she's like, well, maybe he
Speaker 1: really is is gone, because he would have answered at
Speaker 1: that point. Um. The other thing was she's like, I'm calling.
Speaker 1: I'm calling to ask if anybody knows if it perhaps
Speaker 1: maybe he's next to next to somebody who's still alive.
Speaker 1: If you would share, like where you were. Well, people
Speaker 1: don't want to give himself up, right because if you
Speaker 1: give yourself up, you know, then there's a chance you
Speaker 1: die as well. Right, So there's that. So that's how
Speaker 1: I lost my older brother. No resolution though, no resolution,
Speaker 1: no idea where he's buried, no idea, yep, exactly. And
Speaker 1: then you lost a sister. I lost a sister in
Speaker 1: the same time period, in the same time period, and
Speaker 1: so my my my sister was lost in kind of
Speaker 1: this weird situation where they again they were, um, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's related to hunting. You know. They get to
Speaker 1: this village and you know there's like they just they're starving,
Speaker 1: right and you're you're running around, Um, you're hiding and
Speaker 1: you don't really have much to eat and so um.
Speaker 1: The story is, my dad goes and traps this squirrel
Speaker 1: looking animal and he can't find the like the English
Speaker 1: equivalent or the American equivalent of it. I was able
Speaker 1: to find some YouTube, so I'll send it to you guys,
Speaker 1: if you guys are interested. But he's he finds this
Speaker 1: this type of squirrel. It like it burrows itself into
Speaker 1: next to chee stumps into the ground, you know. And
Speaker 1: when I was in Vietnam, I was with a guy
Speaker 1: that had killed at about that in your book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he had killed a squirrel like creature. There was some
Speaker 1: kind of like I think it was like an arboreal
Speaker 1: marsupial of some sort. But it looks like it look
Speaker 1: a lot like a squirrel and you killed it. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was showing me the tree where he got it, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe it was like I had never seen one in
Speaker 1: my life. I wish i'd I didn't see until he'd
Speaker 1: already burned the hair off it, but it was it
Speaker 1: was the equipment would be like a you know, like
Speaker 1: a squirrel sized. So the story is that he goes
Speaker 1: and gets traps one of those. They come back and
Speaker 1: they cook it, and she somehow got sick from that
Speaker 1: and like passed within um, like a half a day
Speaker 1: or something. So again I get credit for being the oldest,
Speaker 1: but I you know, I lost two siblings, um, and
Speaker 1: then essentially they were and you were alive at that point,
Speaker 1: just very little. Yeah, I mean you were months months old,
Speaker 1: months old? How much were the month pissed at the
Speaker 1: Americans for leaving? Um? I wouldn't say that, No, No,
Speaker 1: I mean I think from everybody that I've talked to,
Speaker 1: if anything, I think among people have more resentment against
Speaker 1: the monk who left, um, if anything, but more resentment
Speaker 1: against the monk who left earlier, who left like who
Speaker 1: left who left the country in general? Right, so they'd
Speaker 1: have resentment against Europe Oh yeah, yeah for splitting, for splitting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I'll be honest, I Laos probably isn't the first
Speaker 1: place I traveled to. You song, and laws would regard
Speaker 1: you guys as like traders. Yeah, you can say that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would, I would agree with that saying yeah exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: Like as a young person, I don't know the Laotian language.
Speaker 1: If I knew the language, I probably think about, hey,
Speaker 1: m one of my mom was it it's it's pretty country. Um.
Speaker 1: But like my wife and I don't think we have
Speaker 1: like louses in our you know, like the first place
Speaker 1: we'd visit, simply because I think they would have more
Speaker 1: resentment against like me versus Americans. There are people who
Speaker 1: didn't make it to refugee camps, who didn't make it
Speaker 1: out of the country eventually, and they kind of stayed
Speaker 1: behind and are still in the jungle all these years later,
Speaker 1: like living still, I'm still being you know, in essential,
Speaker 1: like like persecuted by by people there. It's funny because
Speaker 1: you hear um, I should say it's funny, But you're
Speaker 1: so often here in terms in relation to in China
Speaker 1: and recently in the race relation to Taiwan, other places
Speaker 1: where you hear about persecution of ethnic minorities, and it's
Speaker 1: I think it's hard for Americans to get like that
Speaker 1: kind of like geo political sense to understand that even
Speaker 1: in those places you had like indigenous people's right who
Speaker 1: had these distinct cultures and so that the same way
Speaker 1: you might have the sense of like like you might
Speaker 1: have this sense of in America, you have this r
Speaker 1: ro American culture. We all know it. Well if this
Speaker 1: Euro American culture that collaborated with ward with indigenous peoples
Speaker 1: and there's still like an indigenous you know, autonomy in places.
Speaker 1: But this is something that happens all around the world,
Speaker 1: like displaced indigenous individuals that in some way live you know,
Speaker 1: oftentimes especially there live much closer to the land than
Speaker 1: in our places. Are that ethnic minorities did not attain
Speaker 1: their own nation states, like the majority of China is
Speaker 1: Han Chinese. There are many many ethnic groups that just
Speaker 1: didn't get their own country that they're in power and
Speaker 1: specific to the Mong, it was really because as an
Speaker 1: ethnic minority, we occupied you know, in our case like Laos,
Speaker 1: the hillsides of Laos. You know, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: this happens everywhere too. Is like you just don't like,
Speaker 1: you know, ethnic minorities occupying that don't have a country
Speaker 1: occupying like your land. You know, so walk through how
Speaker 1: you what was the process but which you guys ended
Speaker 1: up in the US, and then why did you, why
Speaker 1: do somebody go to Minnesota? Um? Yeah, I get asked
Speaker 1: that all the time, you know, like it's that you
Speaker 1: guys like the cold or something. Yeah. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: if you think about it, if we occupy the hillsides,
Speaker 1: you know, the hill the altitude would higher, so we're
Speaker 1: you could say, we're used to the cold. The reason
Speaker 1: why we ended up in Minnesota was it was purely
Speaker 1: by chance. Um. So if you again, if you meet
Speaker 1: among persons here in the US, their story is fairly similar.
Speaker 1: You gotta target on you. When you know everybody pulls out.
Speaker 1: You essentially had to make your way to one of
Speaker 1: these refugee camps, the biggest one being in in Thailand.
Speaker 1: So also you have to get out of the country.
Speaker 1: You had to. You got to get on the country
Speaker 1: on foot through the jungles, you know, whatever it is
Speaker 1: that you took the men. Um. I get told this
Speaker 1: story all the time. The the you know, when people
Speaker 1: started pulling out, the men would like go and buy
Speaker 1: tubes for themselves, like like you know, inner tubes, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, you know, and crossing river, crossing
Speaker 1: the river, for crossing the maykong Um because they knew
Speaker 1: that at some point they would come to the river
Speaker 1: and they would need to cross it. And so you know,
Speaker 1: my parents get like separated. They get back together, to
Speaker 1: get separated through various reasons. Well they make it to
Speaker 1: the river together, thankfully, you know. And some people didn't
Speaker 1: make it to the river together. They were like separated
Speaker 1: the whole time, had to meet up back in Thailand.
Speaker 1: The mek F is the border between Laos and Yes
Speaker 1: and then flows into Vietnam. Yeah, so if you cross
Speaker 1: the river, you like you make it to Thailand. Essentially, Um,
Speaker 1: they gets it the river. My dad puts you know,
Speaker 1: my dad can't swim, puts in the tube. And but
Speaker 1: the way my mom explains it is like she basically
Speaker 1: thought he was gonna drown because can't swim. Only has
Speaker 1: only has a tube because they're up in the mountains. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the mountains. I mean I think they fish. But
Speaker 1: I mean there's really not from my understand there's not
Speaker 1: really not places for you go to like the swim
Speaker 1: or learn how to swim. I had a friend who
Speaker 1: grew up on a ranch at nine thousand feet in Wyoming,
Speaker 1: and she says nothing of us not Yeah, says nothing
Speaker 1: to slim and it's cold, so um so, yeah, he
Speaker 1: tosses in turns. I mean my my mom said that
Speaker 1: he's he's gone there. I mean there's you know a
Speaker 1: lot of people died a crossing that river for some reason.
Speaker 1: He makes it across, and you know the way he
Speaker 1: explains it, but what about the kids, Well, the kids
Speaker 1: stayed on the other side. I mean, you you The
Speaker 1: idea was, if he makes it across, he can maybe
Speaker 1: find tie officials or that can then come and just
Speaker 1: send one person across the exactly come back with the
Speaker 1: boat or whatever. Yeah, and so he goes by himself himself,
Speaker 1: not with your mom, No, not not with not with
Speaker 1: my mom, my grandma and whoever else, Um, my aunt.
Speaker 1: There's this whole slew of people there and you guys
Speaker 1: just like living off the land at this point. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And I'll get to this. But he he tosses and turns,
Speaker 1: gets across, and he like sits down to rest. And
Speaker 1: he the way he describes it is, this thing comes
Speaker 1: out of the water and he thinks it's like some
Speaker 1: you know, young people believe in like like water dragons
Speaker 1: or something something like that, right, like mystical like some
Speaker 1: mystical animal. Right, He's like, this thing comes out of
Speaker 1: the water. I'm like, he's like, I'm done for It's
Speaker 1: like it's it's probably some you know animal that's like
Speaker 1: coming to eat me, right, I guess, I guess it
Speaker 1: creates a wave or something. What turns out that it
Speaker 1: was a tie boat that saw him cross and came
Speaker 1: to get him, and a boat. Yeah, so he was
Speaker 1: kind of tripping from yeah. Yeah, he was in rough shape. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was. He didn't know what it was from his description,
Speaker 1: he thought it was some my dragon is like, oh boy,
Speaker 1: this is it, you know, this is it. I crossed
Speaker 1: the herver and this is it. Turns out it was UM,
Speaker 1: like two tie officials with their boat, and so they
Speaker 1: go they grab him, go to the other side and
Speaker 1: grab the rest of the family and and and berry
Speaker 1: them across. So that's how we make the Thailand. So
Speaker 1: there has been tension between Thailand and Laos well UM
Speaker 1: at that point because they're helping, they're like taking in
Speaker 1: and assisting in the escape of of people that they're
Speaker 1: trying to catch. Well at that point in kind of
Speaker 1: the history of this UM, you know, I think even
Speaker 1: the US government coined it, like the Domino theory, you know,
Speaker 1: could they They're like, basically, if one of these countries fall,
Speaker 1: the rest in that region is going to fall. And
Speaker 1: so um, at that point, you know, Thailand wasn't at
Speaker 1: war or didn't didn't have any idea. So um, and
Speaker 1: I get through what are political treaties that they had
Speaker 1: at that time, I supposed, you know, the Tie camp
Speaker 1: was the big refugee camp that everybody had to get to, right,
Speaker 1: So they go to the refugee camp and essentially he
Speaker 1: goes and meets up with his commanding officer. By chance,
Speaker 1: four days later, the guy, the guy that he served
Speaker 1: it with the commanding officer, I had heard that my
Speaker 1: dad was still in Louse, essentially running right, hiding running,
Speaker 1: and uh, four days after getting to the Regge refugee camp,
Speaker 1: he goes into the room the commanding officers there and
Speaker 1: the gentleman I mentioned earlier from Missoula, Jerry Daniels, is
Speaker 1: in the room. He says that, well, I knew who
Speaker 1: Jerry was, and um, you know, Jerry was one of
Speaker 1: those guys. He was like an advisor, but he was
Speaker 1: a guy who was like train everybody and guns or
Speaker 1: taught people, you know, like the type of guns. Like
Speaker 1: he would come and say, hey, you know what this
Speaker 1: M one is? You know what this M sixteen is?
Speaker 1: You know do you know these things? Um? He goes
Speaker 1: into the room, and by this time my dad was
Speaker 1: um the way he described it, he was so thin.
Speaker 1: Then neither of those guys recognized who my dad was,
Speaker 1: and they say, hey, what are you guys doing in here?
Speaker 1: And he, you know, my dad goes, my dad's name
Speaker 1: is Dua. So my dad goes, you know, I'm Dulah
Speaker 1: and I served under you, and like basically they have
Speaker 1: this big group hug right, and I think there was
Speaker 1: just like hey, we you know, we thought you were
Speaker 1: you were gone or you were still running around. Um,
Speaker 1: and so I know, I just arrived four days four
Speaker 1: days earlier. So essentially the journey to hear was so
Speaker 1: they get there, Jerry confirms, hey, you are a soldier,
Speaker 1: and that's when the process starts to come to America.
Speaker 1: My dad I wanted to go to California first because
Speaker 1: there had already been some people here in California, some relatives.
Speaker 1: And they gave him two choices, California or Minnesota. And
Speaker 1: my dad said, I'm gonna go to California. Well they
Speaker 1: did the paperwork, and it's like, well, the people in
Speaker 1: California that you say are you, they're only your clans people.
Speaker 1: It's not media immediate family. So there's like we're looking
Speaker 1: for immediate family. Well there, even though in the Mong culture,
Speaker 1: your clansmen are actually much more important than say, like
Speaker 1: your sister. Even your clansmen is really you know what
Speaker 1: what you know? We when you talk about among families,
Speaker 1: it's all about the clan. So I'm a part of
Speaker 1: a clan. Those guys aren't your they're your clan, but
Speaker 1: they're not like your first cousins or anything. They're not
Speaker 1: your brothers. So we can't send you to California. So
Speaker 1: they get stuck there for seven months. They're in the
Speaker 1: refugee camps for seven months. And then my mom had
Speaker 1: a brother, and we also had other clansmen end up
Speaker 1: in Minnesota around that time. The UM there's a couple
Speaker 1: of Christian organizations in UM groups and people in Rochester,
Speaker 1: Minnesota is that's it's actually where we ended up. It
Speaker 1: was in Rochester, Minnesota, and I we we still came
Speaker 1: in contact with those folks today and we hunt on
Speaker 1: their land, and I had a conversation with him a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago, and the story from them was, you know,
Speaker 1: it was just two couples, James and Verie and then
Speaker 1: Bill and Sandy, who they like, They were friends, and
Speaker 1: they got together and they say, hey, we want to
Speaker 1: do something. We want to sponsor a family. And their
Speaker 1: reason was it was just the right thing to do.
Speaker 1: You know, they knew that among people fought in the
Speaker 1: war alongside the US, and they just wanted to do
Speaker 1: something out of the kindness of their heart. So they
Speaker 1: talked to some folks and they get together with their
Speaker 1: respective churches and they say, well, we want to sponsor family.
Speaker 1: That family ended up being us. So we end up
Speaker 1: in Rochester, Minnesota, and we had an goal my mom's
Speaker 1: half brother as well as some other clans member up
Speaker 1: in the Twin Cities, and so we end up in
Speaker 1: Rochester for um two years, and then we moved up
Speaker 1: to the Twin Cities. Basically, what year, So what year
Speaker 1: did you land here? So you're uh, yeah, a ninety
Speaker 1: Well I was one and a half. My brother, um oh,
Speaker 1: I was counting from yeah, so uh so seventy five
Speaker 1: to seventy nine. I was born in seventy nine. We're
Speaker 1: you know, we make it to UM, we make it
Speaker 1: to the refugee camp in essentially a year passes and
Speaker 1: then we end up in Rochester. Tell everybody about the
Speaker 1: prohibition on eating animal hearts. Yeah, so yeah, you're gonna
Speaker 1: like this. Um so among people UM before the introduction
Speaker 1: to Christianity. So you know, we talked a little bit
Speaker 1: about earlier about UM French influence in Southeast Asia. UM
Speaker 1: the like some of the very first non among people
Speaker 1: that non Asians UM that among people came in contact
Speaker 1: with were like French missionaries priests that introduced UM among
Speaker 1: people to Christianity. I grew up Catholic, I was telling
Speaker 1: Corinna's and for the longest time I didn't know why,
Speaker 1: but I grew up Catholic. UM. So the traditional religion
Speaker 1: is UM. You know, they call it animists UM Shamanism,
Speaker 1: the belief in in ancestral spirits, right, and so if
Speaker 1: you were sick, we didn't believe that it was like
Speaker 1: physically you were sick, you know, we believe that there
Speaker 1: was your your spirit was sick. There was some sort
Speaker 1: of spiritual imbalance. So you would employ the the service
Speaker 1: of a shaman. He would come and you know he
Speaker 1: was He's somebody who can go into the spirit world
Speaker 1: and and you know, and and and fix your spirit
Speaker 1: or or you know, or battle the spirit or the
Speaker 1: evil spirits and warded off right, and that would make
Speaker 1: you better. Um. Well, the story around the heart is um, Uh,
Speaker 1: there was there's a curse that's laid on UM, very
Speaker 1: specific clan group and I'm a part of that group. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so your group is under a curse. Yeah. And and
Speaker 1: this is the legitimate This is a legitimate curse. So um,
Speaker 1: and the curse goes as follows. Uh. So the religion
Speaker 1: you know, animus Shamanism, Um. The story is that there
Speaker 1: was a long time ago there was there was a
Speaker 1: ceremony going on and so this was a traditional ceremony.
Speaker 1: In that ceremony, they were cooking up the stew, right,
Speaker 1: and the stew in there. There's different versions of this
Speaker 1: depending on who tells it. But there was a ox
Speaker 1: heart or or cow herd um and the shaman or
Speaker 1: the group of people there um had asked um a
Speaker 1: young man or a boy that was nearby to watch
Speaker 1: the stew make sure no messages, make sure nobody messes
Speaker 1: with it and the the The only significant details that
Speaker 1: I remember from what with this this this young man
Speaker 1: or young boy, was that, um, he had a mental disability.
Speaker 1: So it's so you know, to be not to be
Speaker 1: like politically incorrect, but he was. He was like, um
Speaker 1: they in the mong were they? He said, like he's
Speaker 1: he was slow, right, and so um, he's his task
Speaker 1: was to wash the stew. So these guys go off
Speaker 1: and do the thing, come back, and when they come
Speaker 1: back to grab the heart, it's nowhere to be found
Speaker 1: it and they can't find it in the stew at all.
Speaker 1: And so they talk it over and the conclusion that
Speaker 1: they came up with was, well, we need to use
Speaker 1: his heart. Um, yeah, we we need to use his
Speaker 1: because he can't like in a way I think he
Speaker 1: can't defend himself, like well the slow boys. So they're
Speaker 1: like not only that, but its like I think the
Speaker 1: idea was like what they were asking him, like where
Speaker 1: was it? He like he couldn't explain, right, So they
Speaker 1: looked all over, can't find the heart. He must eat it,
Speaker 1: so he must have eaten it. And so at this
Speaker 1: point if he's he must have eaten it then in
Speaker 1: order to to make things right, well, we had to
Speaker 1: use his and so what they ended up doing was
Speaker 1: they end up killing the boy using his heart. So
Speaker 1: they do that, and as the story goes, they find
Speaker 1: the boy, you know, dead and at the end of
Speaker 1: the ceremony and everybody's cleaning up, they come back and
Speaker 1: they're cleaning this pot. Well, hell, the heart was stuck
Speaker 1: at the bottom of this this pot, right, and so
Speaker 1: now they a big cover up in suits. It jumped wild. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they're you know, they're they're they're um conspiring amongst themselves,
Speaker 1: like we got to cover this, right, and there's a
Speaker 1: um And I don't know this. I don't know the
Speaker 1: significance of the lady. She might have been like a
Speaker 1: relative of the boy or the young man. While she
Speaker 1: overhears what they had done, so she lays the curse,
Speaker 1: which is a doozy, right, basically the curses from this
Speaker 1: day fourth none of the men in this clan. What
Speaker 1: is the name of your clan? Um, Well, my last
Speaker 1: name is Yang, so I'm a part of the Yang clan. Right.
Speaker 1: So in Mong culture there's eighteen clans. So if you
Speaker 1: if you're a Mong, you you belong in one of
Speaker 1: these eighteen. You recognized by the last names of the
Speaker 1: person the curses from this day. Fourth, anybody in this clan,
Speaker 1: any of the men in this clan. If you eat heart,
Speaker 1: you will go blind. And that's heart and I'm never
Speaker 1: eating heart now to be fair, you know there's eighteen clans,
Speaker 1: and then in those clans there's subclans, right, so we're
Speaker 1: not all related. Um, because you know, depending on where
Speaker 1: you're from in parts of the country. Even though I'm
Speaker 1: I'm part of the Yang clan, this curse doesn't actually
Speaker 1: affect all the Yangs. It only affects like certain subclans
Speaker 1: who observe it. Yeah, so as a Mong person you
Speaker 1: grow up, well one for sure, Um, you can't marry
Speaker 1: or date somebody of the same last name, and that
Speaker 1: applies to the entire like clan. So you have to
Speaker 1: go out of your clan. You have to go to
Speaker 1: your clan, did you Oh yeah, yeah, yes, yes, but
Speaker 1: your wife's mom, my wife's mom. Yeah, but out of clan,
Speaker 1: out of clan, she's a van. Yeah. And so does
Speaker 1: she hang onto that name? Oh yeah, she hangs onto it, Yes,
Speaker 1: my wife did. Yeah, are pretty good reason, a good
Speaker 1: reason like that, she said you didn't wanna have to
Speaker 1: like update all of her stuff. Yeah, you know, Um,
Speaker 1: mostly the Mong women hold on to their to their
Speaker 1: maiden names and that in that curse. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: that another clan that placed the curse on your clan
Speaker 1: or like who um the Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 1: I actually don't know. Again I mentioned I don't know
Speaker 1: the significance of the woman. Yeah, but it was so
Speaker 1: um the the so the woman laid the curse and
Speaker 1: it only affects them men of very specific subclans right.
Speaker 1: So um, going back to you learning the things you
Speaker 1: grew up with. Number one thing you learn as a
Speaker 1: young person, don't marry your client. Can't You can't marry
Speaker 1: because they're consider your sibling, the consider your brother or
Speaker 1: your sister. Um for me. Number two is you can
Speaker 1: never eat heart. And you haven't and I haven't any
Speaker 1: heart of any animal, no heart. We have these beef
Speaker 1: heart pills. I'm hoping, you know, I've never tried, but
Speaker 1: I'm hoping. I'm you know, I'm hoping that, you know,
Speaker 1: like if I were to eat it by accident, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm hoping, like the spirits are so you know, every
Speaker 1: time you eat heart on you know, wherever on this
Speaker 1: series or whatever. I like, dang, I can't do that.
Speaker 1: And you know my buddies are you know, they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, once we you know, if we we ever
Speaker 1: shoot a deer or whatever it is, we're just we're
Speaker 1: gonna eat a heart in front of you, and you
Speaker 1: there's nothing you can do but at it, you know.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, yeah, that's true. And then you know
Speaker 1: at family gatherings, you know, all the women would eat heart.
Speaker 1: Would your wife eat it? She would? Yeah? But um,
Speaker 1: all the like we go to gatherings and all the
Speaker 1: women be like just making fun of the men because
Speaker 1: they're just sitting there eating the heart and they're like,
Speaker 1: you guys can't touch it. Yeah. Let me tell you
Speaker 1: a story I heard. Let me tell you a story
Speaker 1: me and Johanni heard Missouri. Okay, okay, guys tellings. There's
Speaker 1: no squirrels around right now. You know where this is going. Okay,
Speaker 1: why the monk killed them all? Yeah, big roving bands
Speaker 1: of monk came down from Minnesota, conducted a massive squirrel drive,
Speaker 1: which I didn't know. It's the thing, I don't know
Speaker 1: if they got tree climbing gear what they conducted a
Speaker 1: massive squirrel drive. Okay, killed off all the squirrels in
Speaker 1: order to sell them. And I said, who do they
Speaker 1: sell them to the other monk? And I said, so
Speaker 1: hong it. So a bunch of mone came down from Minnesota,
Speaker 1: drove to Missouri, conducted a massive squirrel drive, killed all
Speaker 1: the squirrels, drove back to Minnesota, and sold them to
Speaker 1: other moms. Correct, I got it. Uh. Do you hear
Speaker 1: a lot of this kind of stuff? I I I
Speaker 1: certainly know of among loving squirrels. I mean, squirrels king
Speaker 1: among among people, right, even even more so than deer everything.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, uh jib read that article. There's an article
Speaker 1: in Harper's magazine decades ago called squirrel Hunting with the Monk.
Speaker 1: I might I might have heard of it, yes, Um,
Speaker 1: but I'm not gonna die among people love the squirrels,
Speaker 1: and because they you know, if you think about it, um,
Speaker 1: small game was really what they were able to hunt
Speaker 1: back in the mouse and so you know call it,
Speaker 1: you know, just having the the the love for the
Speaker 1: taste of squirrel. And my dad today, you know, he
Speaker 1: would him and I go squirrel hunting. The only hunting
Speaker 1: with him and I go together is squirrel hunting, and
Speaker 1: because that's just what they love to do. I think
Speaker 1: they like to chase. I'll be honest and say from
Speaker 1: a lot of people that I have talked about, talked to,
Speaker 1: they're they're like just somehow really good at hunting squirrels. Um.
Speaker 1: And I know there's like squirrel calls out there. You
Speaker 1: guys have ever heard that, Like they use um, lemon
Speaker 1: grass to to call him the squirrels. Yeah, yeah, you're
Speaker 1: here rubbing two quarters together and I'm not. But I've
Speaker 1: just been taught to like to blow on lemon grass
Speaker 1: early in the season, make a little distress. Yeah, basically
Speaker 1: you're creating the stress call of of of baby. When
Speaker 1: it works, when there's still young squirrels around, like in September,
Speaker 1: it brings them all out. One of what the hell's happening?
Speaker 1: Like a hawks got one of them or whatever. Now,
Speaker 1: I will say, I don't know, like I don't see
Speaker 1: people selling squirrels. I don't know. I've never been on
Speaker 1: you've never gone down to Missouri for Big Squirrel Drive? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the squirrel the Grave Missouri Squirrel round Up. Um. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they love squirrels. I don't know about the selling part.
Speaker 1: I mean in Minnesota. I if you told me where
Speaker 1: I go buy scores, I wouldn't. I couldn't tell you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like I should be clear about the point I
Speaker 1: was trying. Like the point I was getting at is
Speaker 1: this idea that um that it's like and you'll hear
Speaker 1: just often, you'll hear just frequently like I hear it frequently.
Speaker 1: Is that, um, they're these kind of like we hold
Speaker 1: like in areas where Euro American hunters and then they
Speaker 1: would use competing, not not like they're all hunters together,
Speaker 1: but like there's like you're you're like competing against this
Speaker 1: other entity, this other group you're competing against. The monk
Speaker 1: and the moong are kind of um, like these sort
Speaker 1: of supernaturally good hunters but also don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1: They get to be both things, Like they get to
Speaker 1: not know what they're doing, but also they're super they
Speaker 1: have like supernatural prowess, and they u zero regard for
Speaker 1: hunting rules, kill everything, eat it in weird ways, eat
Speaker 1: weird things. I mean, you just hear it all the time.
Speaker 1: And I heard it from a guy I don't want
Speaker 1: to say who was. I heard it from a guy
Speaker 1: I don't want to say, who was I heard it
Speaker 1: from a guy last year complaining about he doesn't hunt squirrels.
Speaker 1: He's a deer hunter, doesn't squirrels, complaining about how the
Speaker 1: monk killers squirls. But you don't hunt squirrels. We mean
Speaker 1: they kill all the squirrels. If he was hearing about
Speaker 1: a dude looked like m hunting squirrels, he'd be like
Speaker 1: that guys el squirrel hunting. But if it's a moment
Speaker 1: like the squirrels, do you know what I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just like a thing. Yeah, you mentioned the Amish earlier,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure Seth heard it. I heard it in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: And when we talk about this, we'll get flooded with
Speaker 1: the emails starting like the second this droughts and flow
Speaker 1: the emails be like, yeah, but seriously that uh that?
Speaker 1: What's that pump um Remington rifle? The seven sixty six
Speaker 1: Everyone growing up everyone called that the Amish machine guns
Speaker 1: exactly if it wasn't that it was a lever action. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: what how much do you have any insights into how
Speaker 1: I mean from your angle, do you have insights into
Speaker 1: how like where that that stereotype? Like why that's appealing
Speaker 1: to people. Are are you? Are you subject to that?
Speaker 1: Do people do like white dudes meet you out hunting
Speaker 1: and they know you've been up to no good? Jean?
Speaker 1: Is this like a thing you live with? Or Am
Speaker 1: I telling you things you've never heard before? No? No, no,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's that's new news. Um, it's not
Speaker 1: new news, you know, um And and in fact, you
Speaker 1: know a few weeks ago I talked to Um Liaison
Speaker 1: from the d n R who he was among Liaison
Speaker 1: a long time among the Aison retired now, but I
Speaker 1: mean he said those same things and so like he
Speaker 1: said the same things in what way and that you
Speaker 1: know among people would I mean they hunt in in
Speaker 1: in groups. Um, it's it's we just go together. That's
Speaker 1: one that's and that's that's something that we brought over
Speaker 1: from looses. And people don't like that. Well I guess it.
Speaker 1: I guess not. You know, instead of like one buddy,
Speaker 1: you go with more people. So having a hunting camp
Speaker 1: when you go to deer camp and here's sixteen people
Speaker 1: at deer camp, that's cool. Or a pheasant drive with
Speaker 1: thirty guys in South dudes, well there, yeah, there's that right,
Speaker 1: And then so that one being like groups of people, yeah, groups,
Speaker 1: And then we were talking about this is like among
Speaker 1: people go early man, we we okay, we're talking like
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's that whole public private land, you know,
Speaker 1: UM kind of conversation right um on public land. We
Speaker 1: I mean, I the Turkey season just wrapped up in
Speaker 1: Um on the thirty one to May, and my buddies
Speaker 1: and I went out at four in the morning, and
Speaker 1: so we were there and there was nobody around. UM.
Speaker 1: And to say, to answer your question around you know,
Speaker 1: being subject to it, well, I mean I've heard UM,
Speaker 1: and I'm full aware of it. And then I haven't
Speaker 1: been hunting long enough to like maybe experienced that. UM.
Speaker 1: But in talking to this liaison, you know, he says
Speaker 1: that uh moong relations with you know, in this case,
Speaker 1: we'll just say say, you know, the whites in Minnesota
Speaker 1: over the years have just have become a lot better,
Speaker 1: have become better, have become better. It's like he's like,
Speaker 1: it's it's ten times much better than you know. He's
Speaker 1: for he first started hunting in Minnesota in nineteen seven,
Speaker 1: so he was he was there very early early on,
Speaker 1: and he he had He's like Yeah, this w m
Speaker 1: A that we have in the Twin Cities used to
Speaker 1: be full of squirrels and now they're the squirrels are
Speaker 1: all gone because you know, he shared it with people
Speaker 1: and then you know, all the monks went and killed
Speaker 1: all the squirrels. Okay, I mean I'm looking tonight. We
Speaker 1: we love you guys, got onto it. You guys got
Speaker 1: the spots. Okay, all right, we're getting somewhere now. How
Speaker 1: so you knew Okay, did Gerald Man come here in
Speaker 1: automatically or did he not hunt when he came? Um?
Speaker 1: Well he not not right away. UM. You know I
Speaker 1: talked about um Bill and Sandy Sulivan who live in
Speaker 1: Rochester today. They have eighty acres UM. I think it's
Speaker 1: considered like the drift just drift list area of of
Speaker 1: the of Minnesota, Southeastern Minnesota. UM. And they actually introduced
Speaker 1: my dad to hunting UM in UM like eight one,
Speaker 1: I think is what he said. So shortly after they arrived.
Speaker 1: UM because among people were farmers as well, and she
Speaker 1: was she was telling me, Sandy was telling me that
Speaker 1: we got your mom uh plot of land so she
Speaker 1: could farm. And then UM, that's kind of what they
Speaker 1: did for a little bit before they came up to
Speaker 1: the cities. And then I remember my dad hanging um
Speaker 1: a buck in um in our basement after he shot it,
Speaker 1: like early eighties. So he didn't hunt right away until um,
Speaker 1: you know, like Bill and Sandy and and some of
Speaker 1: the people that we were um that brought us over
Speaker 1: here and and sponsored us, like took him hunting. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: And that's pretty hard to get used to. Like if
Speaker 1: you went from subsistence hunting in the in a like
Speaker 1: lawless civil war exactly region of kind of of a
Speaker 1: war torn Southeast Asia and all of sud it's like,
Speaker 1: oh no, you go down and you buy this permit
Speaker 1: and you follow these rules and you can't do this,
Speaker 1: you can't do that. A lot of this menu a day,
Speaker 1: it's probably huh yeah, yeah, there's a lot of that, right,
Speaker 1: And and and again in talking to you know that
Speaker 1: the ore the liaison, he said that there was a
Speaker 1: lot of that. There was, you know, among people came here,
Speaker 1: didn't know the language, right, had no concept of wildlife management.
Speaker 1: Um in Laos there there wasn't none. Like you hunted
Speaker 1: because you were hungry, and you know, you just you
Speaker 1: hunted anything that you could see. Um, so coming here,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, there's some for some for the for
Speaker 1: people coming over here. It was something that they you know,
Speaker 1: how to get used to. Um. You know. Some other
Speaker 1: issues he said early on, were just language barrier, right. Um.
Speaker 1: You know if and and you know, you meet somebody
Speaker 1: on the woods, if you don't understand language, sometimes there's issues. Um.
Speaker 1: But one thing he did tell me was earlier I
Speaker 1: mentioned about it getting way better. He said, the young
Speaker 1: hunters now understand the laws, understand public versus private, understand um,
Speaker 1: shooting light understand possession, limited understand um, all these They
Speaker 1: know the rules and regulations as well. And so it's
Speaker 1: almost like now that you know, we all understand each other,
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's it's almost like again it's gotten
Speaker 1: way better, like a generation removed from the lawlessness. Another
Speaker 1: thing occurs you about the situation you're describing that your
Speaker 1: family was in and all those years, is um, if
Speaker 1: you imagine just this concept of private and public, if
Speaker 1: you were a nation lists you're coming at, you're a
Speaker 1: nationalist person right moving across the landscape where you don't
Speaker 1: own property, you have no government, you know, like you
Speaker 1: spend your whole life or you're not supposed to be
Speaker 1: according to someone's definition. And I imagine it's probably also
Speaker 1: hard to show up and get like, oh, I see
Speaker 1: like that fence. They're right, don't you know, When your
Speaker 1: sort of whole existence has been going where you needed
Speaker 1: to go, people shot at you. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: And you know, he also wenttioned, you know, and this
Speaker 1: makes sense to me. Early on, we we didn't have anything,
Speaker 1: and so you know, you were too busy trying to
Speaker 1: acclimate to a new country. You were too busy establishing, um,
Speaker 1: maybe a career or going to school or or um,
Speaker 1: you know, just making a living here. And so we
Speaker 1: mostly hunted public lands, right, And he said, no money
Speaker 1: to buy land. Yeah, no money to buy land. Um.
Speaker 1: And he said as through the years, among people started
Speaker 1: buying boats, right, started buying land. And over the years,
Speaker 1: you know, at least what he's seen in Minnesota is
Speaker 1: that we've kind of just become a part of the
Speaker 1: hunting community. It's just like, yes, like mong people are
Speaker 1: just they're they're like us essentially. So it's got he says,
Speaker 1: It's just you know, through the years, it's just gotten
Speaker 1: way better. Especially he credits the young hunters for again,
Speaker 1: understanding the laws, the rules and and and and abiding
Speaker 1: by those. Uh you so you're interested, Like you got
Speaker 1: a gun you have you know, you bought a gun
Speaker 1: for personal protection before you bought a hunting gun. Yes,
Speaker 1: how did that go? Like how how did that come?
Speaker 1: Like A yeah, and you were brought up around guns
Speaker 1: or no I wasn't. I was. And so you know,
Speaker 1: going back to like my relationship with my dad, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know it's kind of like, you know, you want
Speaker 1: to call it like kind of like the Asian relationship
Speaker 1: is like it's respectable. Right, And again going back to
Speaker 1: growing up here, my dad spent a lot of his
Speaker 1: time just providing for us. He works second shift, so
Speaker 1: you didn't really have that interaction. Um so he never
Speaker 1: took us hunting. Um and so um it was going
Speaker 1: back to the whole gun thing. Like my my wife's
Speaker 1: actually a federal officer. She carries she she actually had
Speaker 1: issued one, but she just chooses not to to carry
Speaker 1: it with her. But um my, my, why I didn't
Speaker 1: get into hunting until like a year ago, right, was
Speaker 1: ignorance of I didn't I didn't want to handle a
Speaker 1: firearm because I equated hunting with firearms. Right. Two. I
Speaker 1: The other piece was, well, you need private land at
Speaker 1: least the way I was thinking was you need private
Speaker 1: land in in Minnesota to be able to hunt. So
Speaker 1: like it was like those two barriers to entry almost right. Um,
Speaker 1: So a year ago this week, um, some a buddy,
Speaker 1: some buddies, my cousin and a couple of buddies decided
Speaker 1: to go fishing in South Dakota. Um. You know, if
Speaker 1: you think about a year ago this week, Um, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of unrest in Minnesota. You had the murder
Speaker 1: of George Floyd behind four officers, You had the pandemic
Speaker 1: going on, you had Asian hate going on. And so
Speaker 1: here the four of us are like, hey, let's go
Speaker 1: fishing in South Dakota and and enjoy some time. And
Speaker 1: one of the very first questions that came out of
Speaker 1: that was which one of us has a gun for
Speaker 1: for personal protection? Now not that we would ever hopefully
Speaker 1: would never use it or need it, but like that,
Speaker 1: like that was something that came up for piece of money,
Speaker 1: for peace of mind. And so you know, it was
Speaker 1: a seven hour drive from where we were. You know,
Speaker 1: we went fishing in South Dakota. So we kind of
Speaker 1: like just talked about it. And the one guy who
Speaker 1: did have consumed carry, he you know, he basically gave
Speaker 1: us the low down, right, you know, seven hour drive
Speaker 1: you know. You of course talked about it, and he
Speaker 1: lived in an area where there was actually looting, like
Speaker 1: in his backyard. Right, He's like, I have this because legitimately,
Speaker 1: I we should be protecting ourselves because everything that's going on.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like this perfect storm of things.
Speaker 1: And so I came back and I was like, I
Speaker 1: was just like gung ho, and hey, you know, I
Speaker 1: need to go get myself. And I'm a leader. I'm
Speaker 1: a contributor to you know, the what are millions of
Speaker 1: people that bought sorry yeah yeah, I contribute to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. So um, and that was your first firearm purse?
Speaker 1: That was that was my first firearm purchase. Did you
Speaker 1: go get a concealed carry permit? Yes? I did so
Speaker 1: right away. It came back, I gotta permit to go
Speaker 1: purchase and then you know, took the class and got
Speaker 1: the license to carry. Um, and so I got that,
Speaker 1: so you know if you so I got it. So
Speaker 1: I'm like and then my brother is actually a state
Speaker 1: trooper in the state Minnesota. So he's been hunting for
Speaker 1: a long time. Heavy law enforcement. Yeah, you, um, is
Speaker 1: that unusual? Uh, there's a lot of Monge going to
Speaker 1: law enforcement. Are you kind of an anomaly that your
Speaker 1: wife and I don't? There's there's not many. There's some
Speaker 1: like I have a first cousin within law enforcement. So
Speaker 1: I mean I think I think there's there's there's some
Speaker 1: of that, but it's not like a no one. It's
Speaker 1: like a like an industry, y'all infant or no. And
Speaker 1: you know there's there's there's people who are involved with
Speaker 1: the community. Um. You know, we had like the first
Speaker 1: mung Um state senator a few years back. So I
Speaker 1: think Mong people are really into like serving. I think
Speaker 1: serving is the right word, is that we like to
Speaker 1: serve um. And so you know, my brother started like
Speaker 1: showing me how to use it. And then shortly like
Speaker 1: shortly after I got my nine milion, I buy an
Speaker 1: a R fifteen, right and so to two six and
Speaker 1: I'm not I like so so that was like my
Speaker 1: first deer rifle. Do you have you hunted deer? I
Speaker 1: have yet? So, um when when you in any case,
Speaker 1: why I got into a hunting. Um, so I'm shooting
Speaker 1: this nine millimeter. I'm like, at one point I realized,
Speaker 1: you know what, I hope I never get to use
Speaker 1: this or have to use this, right, but shooting is fun,
Speaker 1: like you know the act of shooting and going to
Speaker 1: the range for my brother him showing me how to
Speaker 1: you know, take it apart. This is kind of fun, right,
Speaker 1: I'd like to shoot more. And so that's kind of
Speaker 1: like what spurred the whole hunting Like itch, Um, now,
Speaker 1: did you put a scope on your a R or
Speaker 1: like a red dot on put a red dot on it? Yeah? So,
Speaker 1: um put a red out it. And then I wrote
Speaker 1: this in the email to you guys too. Is around
Speaker 1: the same time my buddy, Um, I bought forty acres
Speaker 1: up north, and he's like, you know, he he was
Speaker 1: he just bought it. Um, he said he bought it
Speaker 1: for hunting. So one got over the fear of firearms too. Hey,
Speaker 1: we have forty acres we can hunt on. And that's
Speaker 1: really what kind of like pushing me over the edge?
Speaker 1: Was it? What was it something since your dad did hunt,
Speaker 1: were you interested in it as a kid or and
Speaker 1: you just never had the opportunity. Yeah, it was. It
Speaker 1: was exactly that. It was. You know, my brother and
Speaker 1: my dad went all the time. I've just like never
Speaker 1: given it the time of day. But you were like
Speaker 1: you were philosophically opposed to owner in the firearm um
Speaker 1: or just didn't uh not a post to owning one.
Speaker 1: I just like I was just scared of like physically
Speaker 1: handling want to right, Well, once I got over that,
Speaker 1: and then um, hey there's forty acres of land we
Speaker 1: can hunt on, right, and so and these are more
Speaker 1: dudes you're hunting with. Oh yeah, yeah, my my best friends.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, and um so we were all just like
Speaker 1: kind of gotten to this, um like, hey, let's let's
Speaker 1: let's do this right and this this was like August
Speaker 1: dish right, So the rifle dear rifle season was November,
Speaker 1: and so we like we started buying all the year.
Speaker 1: Um and you know, uh, in Minnesota, there's a north
Speaker 1: in the South region. So in the south you can
Speaker 1: do shotgun only. Um, there's the northern region where you
Speaker 1: can do like rifle. So I like, I I was
Speaker 1: gonna go with my air fifteen two two three, and
Speaker 1: they were going to go with shotguns. And so we
Speaker 1: got all geared up and you know that's so you're
Speaker 1: in the rifle. Are the shotgun area. We're in the rifle.
Speaker 1: So you can do you can do, but you were
Speaker 1: in an area where you could do it. You could choose,
Speaker 1: but they already had shotguns. They were gonna use their
Speaker 1: shotguns and you were going to use your a r
Speaker 1: correct correct how to go? Didn't tag, didn't didn't. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: we did. Anybody get one? No, nobody got one. Nobody
Speaker 1: got we saw. Yes, Well here's the story we saw
Speaker 1: and so you know we saw, but they were so
Speaker 1: I mean two to three I think for me was
Speaker 1: I think semi five yards and under because it is
Speaker 1: kind of what you know through our research, right shotguns
Speaker 1: is like the same thing sixty yards and under close.
Speaker 1: You had to otherwise you know, again, we wouldn't shoot right. Well,
Speaker 1: we started seeing deer and they're like hundred fifty yards away,
Speaker 1: two hund yards away. So after the first week um
Speaker 1: of hunting, and after the after the week and a half,
Speaker 1: we saw a deer that was way too far away,
Speaker 1: right and um, we actually went on a separate property,
Speaker 1: private property that backed up to um Uh state land
Speaker 1: and so we were seeing deer like a hundred yards
Speaker 1: two yards away. Well, I'm sitting there like I never
Speaker 1: I don't have a shot. I don't I will never
Speaker 1: be able to shoot if I have. You know this
Speaker 1: a R and I'm not not gonna rs. But the
Speaker 1: next day I go and I buy six five cree
Speaker 1: more because I'm like, I gotta go. I mean, you
Speaker 1: need to go longer. Right, and so again I went
Speaker 1: from like no guns in June and last year and
Speaker 1: to semi and cartridges. I would have been like I
Speaker 1: got a two three and buy a big ballbuster. Man,
Speaker 1: I buy like a three hundred or I know that
Speaker 1: you're gonna choo. He said, how are you guys? Were
Speaker 1: you guys posted up and stands or how are you
Speaker 1: like all hunting together? Um? You know and experienced right?
Speaker 1: So um we were you guys trying to do a
Speaker 1: scroll drive day? No? No, and I sc drive. We
Speaker 1: we we be set up in blinds and so and
Speaker 1: then we had the one buddy who had who had
Speaker 1: a stand tree stand, and we didn't really after the
Speaker 1: few hundred the couple that we saw were like a
Speaker 1: few hundred yards away, we didn't see anything. And then
Speaker 1: and then the season ended and then my brother and
Speaker 1: I did go down to Rochester because they had some
Speaker 1: heavy c W d UM areas down there, so they
Speaker 1: were trying to get out rid of all the year.
Speaker 1: So him and I did go down Rochester a couple
Speaker 1: of days to see if we can find some. But
Speaker 1: we we didn't run across anything. If anything, I I
Speaker 1: spooked probably more dear than I could count. But you're
Speaker 1: this fall, you're going out, Oh yeah, this this this
Speaker 1: fall is is. Um, I'm doing our tree. Um, so
Speaker 1: I've started, you know, shooting bone arrow and then yeah,
Speaker 1: we're we're counting on the days of the rifle season. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So did you did you end that first season just
Speaker 1: like an addict? Uh? Pretty much much Yeah yeah, And
Speaker 1: and um, I was telling you guys, the turkey season
Speaker 1: just ended, and I'm totally hooked. We're totally hooked on.
Speaker 1: We didn't get a turkey. But here's the thing that's awesome, right,
Speaker 1: Like he you know, didn't do any of this. I
Speaker 1: mean that's why I kind of loved this story. Like
Speaker 1: you weren't doing any of this. And I know you've
Speaker 1: told me that, you know, you've gone back to reread
Speaker 1: Mediator articles on the website and gone back to rewatch
Speaker 1: seasons of the Netflix because people think if you didn't
Speaker 1: get anything, no, but I mean, like it's not. You know,
Speaker 1: these are a bunch of guys. They have it in
Speaker 1: their blood and it's probably a reawakening right now. But
Speaker 1: you're just like you keep on getting out there and
Speaker 1: you're trying to like they're teaching themselves and it's like
Speaker 1: Brody took me out last last season. You know, I've
Speaker 1: got everyone in this office to help show me the
Speaker 1: ropes in they're just going out on their own. I
Speaker 1: was telling you, you know, the Turkey season in Minnesota
Speaker 1: is um there's six seasons. So if you do archery,
Speaker 1: you can hunt the entire six weeks or the basically
Speaker 1: middle of April and in May. If you're doing shotgun,
Speaker 1: which was what I was doing, you had to pick one.
Speaker 1: So I picked season two, which is six days. If
Speaker 1: you don't tag, you can actually come back the last week,
Speaker 1: which is actually thirteen days and you can use your
Speaker 1: tag there. So I hunted um six plus essentially I
Speaker 1: think ten eleven days and the last in this the
Speaker 1: last season just just ended. I was going almost every
Speaker 1: day and I did like, um, you know, I get
Speaker 1: up at you know, we were talking about getting their
Speaker 1: damn early. So my buddy and as we get there
Speaker 1: at four because the we we kind of got it
Speaker 1: down to the gobbles will start around five nish and
Speaker 1: five o'clock to shooting light. Um you know, um five
Speaker 1: o'clock shooting lights. So around you knew that there was
Speaker 1: gonna be got But we we stumbled onto this like
Speaker 1: field by luck on on its w m A and
Speaker 1: you just knew that the gobbles were gonna be coming
Speaker 1: out of like five. Do you guys running any other
Speaker 1: hunters in there? No, we didn't, And I think there
Speaker 1: because well you know, well we get there at you know,
Speaker 1: i'd wait and you can ask my wife that I
Speaker 1: got up at three thirty, right, got ready drove to
Speaker 1: the spot by four. Um. So the spot, you know
Speaker 1: the field, you had the field and you have the
Speaker 1: parking lot and so, um, well I already have a
Speaker 1: car and then my buddy shows up. There's two cars there.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of one of my rules with
Speaker 1: you know, buddies for safety is that if you drive
Speaker 1: into somewhere and there's one or two cars, just go
Speaker 1: find in a different place. Right, So we were it,
Speaker 1: so we kind of like monopolized, personalized. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so so I did. So I'd wake up at four, hunt,
Speaker 1: you know, try to try to catch a gobbler until
Speaker 1: like eight, go to work, work all day, and then
Speaker 1: go to tennis. And then after tennis, i'd go you
Speaker 1: know there was you know, there were still light, I'd
Speaker 1: you know, I'd go back to ye And I did
Speaker 1: that for like ten days. Yeah. One of my friend
Speaker 1: Robert and Athy, he likes to get out there. I
Speaker 1: would sleep for an hour just waiting for the birds.
Speaker 1: A gobble. Yeah, I don't much, just sitting out to swamp.
Speaker 1: But I don't know why we're out. We're out here
Speaker 1: basically last night. But it feels like I was telling Korean,
Speaker 1: you know, I have so much more appreciating wildlife. But
Speaker 1: like for crows, you know, because you know, I I
Speaker 1: the crow call with me, but the crows like what
Speaker 1: just shot? Got? Yeah? And I'm like, man, this is
Speaker 1: this is so cool how they work off of each other.
Speaker 1: Do you crim mentioned this earlier, like like an awakening
Speaker 1: or whatever. Do you okay? As you learn to hunt
Speaker 1: in in America, do you feel that you're joining an
Speaker 1: American tradition or do you feel like you're joining among tradition.
Speaker 1: I'd have to say it's it's um a little bit
Speaker 1: of both. I think hunting is in my blood and
Speaker 1: you know, when I rode in, it's like I felt
Speaker 1: like it's always been a part of me. But I
Speaker 1: love everything about the American um, the American hunter and
Speaker 1: what we have here. I just needed something to kind
Speaker 1: of like like like uncover that. I felt like, ummic,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly, well yeah, well yeah, I blame a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff on the pandemic and racial tendemic. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: like that to get a guy out hunting, exactly exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, a year ago this time, I didn't own
Speaker 1: a truck, I didn't want a boat. I didn't hunt,
Speaker 1: and I didn't own a camper. And I have all
Speaker 1: those you know, I do all those things now, you
Speaker 1: know a lot of I mean, you're not lone like
Speaker 1: a lot of people. And I rediscovered the outdoors. What
Speaker 1: kind of boat? What kind of boat? You get? Oh?
Speaker 1: I got I got this. Um it's a seventeen foot
Speaker 1: they called like a bowl rider. So it's not like
Speaker 1: a fishing boating thing. It's really so I could pack
Speaker 1: a lot of people in there and we just go
Speaker 1: you know, pleasure boat. Yeah, you find on craigslist. Facebook,
Speaker 1: it was on craigsliste No, but they were they were
Speaker 1: being bought. They were being bought like like crazy. I
Speaker 1: mean I remember looking at this one, um like it
Speaker 1: came on in that minute. I say, I'll take it,
Speaker 1: but I want to see it first, and the guy
Speaker 1: just like sold like you know, but like they were gone.
Speaker 1: You know you mentioned um going on that fishing trip
Speaker 1: with your buddies. Had you always fished like from the
Speaker 1: time you were a kid? Um? Yeah, off and on. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, we take the kids. You know, I have
Speaker 1: three kids, um uh fourteen, ten and six. Oh of
Speaker 1: course my daughter Michaela. My daughter Michaela makes it like
Speaker 1: that one makes wanted to make sure that I said
Speaker 1: to you that she says, hi, yeah, because she's actually
Speaker 1: gonna be probably be my hunting buddy. She got she's
Speaker 1: already got um this a month ago. I bought her,
Speaker 1: um a youth a youth shotgun, and we went out
Speaker 1: once because the range where we live, we lived close
Speaker 1: to a range and it's free youth Tuesdays, and so
Speaker 1: her and I went out. She shot it once, probably
Speaker 1: my fault, but she couldn't take the requestion, Oh dude,
Speaker 1: here there's a trip. You probably know. It's like the
Speaker 1: first time daughter ever shot a turkey load was when
Speaker 1: she's shooting at a turkey, okay, I'd load okay, okay,
Speaker 1: target loads you know, like clay loads, and they just said, oh,
Speaker 1: it's not that bad, it's not that bad. And then
Speaker 1: when they're actually shooting is something they don't know. I
Speaker 1: just had her shoot and we're like, fake. I put
Speaker 1: a red dot on a break open four ten for
Speaker 1: it on turkeys with and we like, you know, sighted
Speaker 1: it in the red dot for on a turkey silhouette.
Speaker 1: And then I was like, oh, let me shoot a
Speaker 1: couple of times, and I put turkey loads in there
Speaker 1: and made sure we were good on the pattern, and
Speaker 1: it never had her shoot one. And as she shot
Speaker 1: at a turkey, never brought it up the fact that
Speaker 1: it's like the recalls like five times. That was that
Speaker 1: was my fault because I should have realized that low brass,
Speaker 1: get some low brass target loads, and she shot it once.
Speaker 1: She was like, Dad, I don't think I can do it.
Speaker 1: I don't think I can do it. This season so
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, okay, well you know, but so yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: people are gonna want to get up. People are gonna
Speaker 1: want to get ahold of you. A lot of people
Speaker 1: are just gonna want to get ahold of you. It's
Speaker 1: just a thing that happens with when guests come on.
Speaker 1: You can choose to like I don't want to hear
Speaker 1: about it, or you can tell everybody how they might
Speaker 1: drop your line or find you on social media and
Speaker 1: shoot your d M or whatever. You can ignore or not.
Speaker 1: I have a Facebook page and I have an email.
Speaker 1: People want to email me, they can send it to us,
Speaker 1: and we can send it to you. For people, it'll
Speaker 1: go like this to people will be like, people be like,
Speaker 1: he can hurt my place. I'm telling you, man, I'm
Speaker 1: telling you really, because I never get that. You won't
Speaker 1: you get that. But he'll get it. He'll get it
Speaker 1: because his story is touching. Yeah, he's like I was
Speaker 1: born in a very opulent country and had a lot
Speaker 1: of hunting opportunities and grew up hunting, and people like
Speaker 1: screw that guy. Bro's got boats coming out, boats coming
Speaker 1: out of his ears. He's got ye. But yeah, people
Speaker 1: are gonna want yea to hunt it. I'm telling you
Speaker 1: they're gonna let them. They're gonna tell no place, email
Speaker 1: us forward the info. I feel like you should come
Speaker 1: out on turkeys with us next spring though. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I you know, i'd love to. I think I'm like
Speaker 1: I said, I think I'm hooked. Um. Um, you know
Speaker 1: hearing that gobble every morning. Um, you know, my buddy
Speaker 1: and your blood. Yeah, it's it's it's addicting that springs.
Speaker 1: That's why I went in like ten days in a row, right,
Speaker 1: you know, you know when you're fishing and you got
Speaker 1: your and you got tension on your line and the
Speaker 1: wind blows and it makes that siren song. Their day.
Speaker 1: I was telling like we were it was a real
Speaker 1: winning you here you know on the wind. And I said, man,
Speaker 1: you hear that you'll never be able quit fishing. And
Speaker 1: he said, I hate that, So Steve, maybe we'll need
Speaker 1: you to do a squirrel drive with Yeah, you teach
Speaker 1: us how to do a big, big squirrel drive that's
Speaker 1: so effective. We kill every squirrel Missouri. And I will
Speaker 1: teach you how to Um, we'll teach you how to
Speaker 1: get turkeys. No, I'm serious, man, I'd like to have
Speaker 1: you should come out on turkeys with us. We have
Speaker 1: a good time. I'll take you up on that. I will.
Speaker 1: I will. Or you know what we could do too,
Speaker 1: is because because you're close sand Ways, we'll go hunt
Speaker 1: turkeys at doug Derns. How old your kid, she's tend.
Speaker 1: Here's what we're gonna do. Here's the plan. Do not
Speaker 1: make plans for Wisconsin's youth turkey season. Okay, do you
Speaker 1: understand what I'm saying? Yes, yes, don't tell Doug that
Speaker 1: I invite you were and are neighbors. You know, neighboring stays.
Speaker 1: We love each other. We're gonna hunt my so your
Speaker 1: daughter and my daughter and my boy are gonna because
Speaker 1: Duck's too damn old for the youth season. I'm too
Speaker 1: old for the youth season. We got his place locked
Speaker 1: up for youth season. Locked up. He knows not to
Speaker 1: let anybody hunt for youth season. But your daughter and
Speaker 1: my two kids are gonna hammer it for youth season.
Speaker 1: That sounds great. Yeah, yeah, we'll be there. It won't
Speaker 1: be squirrel season. We'll do a squirrel drive. Yeah. Thank
Speaker 1: you for coming on, man, I appreciate it. Thank you
Speaker 1: very much for having me. Yeah, it was a pleasure.
Speaker 1: It was a good history lesson. Thanks a lot