Remi Warren - Hunting Is Human

Full transcript: Remi Warren on London Real

4:02 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Remy Warren, the American hunter, outdoor guide, television presenter, and writer. You are one of the world’s foremost hunting advocates, spending an average of 300 days a year in the wild and having survived everything from bear attacks to being struck by lightning, even once saving your wife’s life in a search and rescue mission. You’ve hosted multiple shows on television, including Solo Hunters, Meat Eater, and Apex Predator, educating people about where our food comes from and how hunting contributes to wildlife conservation.

4:32 Remy, welcome to London Real. Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to have you here. First of all, what’s it like being in London and from the UK perspective, how’s our hunting game here compared to America? Yeah, I mean, I haven’t been here very long, but the best part’s been just walking around the little bit that I got to and just seeing so much history here and just really seeing how things are quite a bit different than where I come from.

4:59 You know, I grew up, I wouldn’t say in a rural setting, but not in a city setting either. Probably a lot stronger on the rural side than the city side. Is it weird being in like an urban apartment like this? It’s slightly uncomfortable just for me as, I spend most of my life out in the mountains or alone or in wild places. And so to just have people everywhere and I feel like it’s just a little bit of a stimulus overload in some ways, in a different way, because when I’m out there by myself, or maybe just a few people and we’re in nature, your senses are, you’re taking everything in, your senses, I feel, in some ways, become heightened, and then you get into a place where there’s a different kind of stimulus and it just seems like too much.

5:47 You feel too many things going on and it just makes you slightly nervous. Yeah, I mean, I’m guessing in the wild, you’re just, you’re trying to sense everything. Like you’re trying to see a movement over the ridge, or you’re trying to smell something, or notice tracks. I mean, I’m guessing you’re trying to pick up lots of little things. And here, you’re probably getting hit with too many big things.

6:08 Yeah, I think that’s it. As well as, you’re picking up little things, but taking in a surrounding that is almost quiet. But to hear the noises, you really have to listen. I think if you go hear the noises, just seems like one big noise when there’s a lot of people around. It’s hard to pick out the noises.

6:27 Almost if you think you go somewhere where it’s been loud and then you go somewhere quiet and you think there’s no sound and then you really listen. Or if you’ve ever taken the thing that always happens to people is they’ll be out there and they’ll take a video and then when they get home, they’ll hear birds and things in the background that they didn’t even notice when they were actually in that place. It’s one of those weird, because it appears to be quiet, but there is a lot going on, but you just have to listen different.

6:54 Yeah, and this country has a history with hunting, right? And so this is something we’ve been doing for a long time here. Not to mention the fox hunt, but also hunting game and surviving. I think one of the main parks here in London, St. James Park, was there so the king could hunt.

7:11 Now they don’t do that anymore. Yeah, it does. And I’m not really familiar with the history of hunting in London because I haven’t really hunted here or spent much time here. However, I did take a little field trip yesterday just to kind of familiarize myself a little bit more with the culture of it here. And yeah, it’s been around forever here, mostly for nobility on estates.

7:36 And most of the estates were set up so people could leave the city or leave where they lived and have a hunting area. A lot of the big open lands were all set aside for hunting. Many of them actually still are used in that respect for hunting for the family, whether it’s the duke or the queen or whoever, their guests. I visited a place that was, it was an estate owned by a duke and there’s a full-time gamekeeper there. They have gamekeepers for birds as well as mammals like the deer and they do the management on the land.

8:12 Partially because when you look at the countryside here, a lot of it’s deforested. There’s very little actual forest left based on my little experience of what I saw, but just a lot of farmed for growing, but a lot of people don’t realize for animals to survive, they need first a home, habitat. And so when you take that habitat away, a field is a great source of food for a certain amount of time. And then it just becomes a lot of dirt. They need that forest to survive.

8:46 So with that forest gone, the Gamekeeper’s job is to really understand the animals there, the carrying capacity of the land, and then manage it so the natural native forest doesn’t get eaten down to nothing because there are not only native species, but as well as some indigenous species here that kind of throw the balance of everything off. And so the Gamekeeper’s job is to manage that, as well as facilitate the hunting on those estates. Which is completely different than where I come from, where, as opposed to hunting is for nobility, where in America or other places that I’ve traveled, hunting’s for the common man.

9:25 It’s your access to public land, as well as food and other things. So it’s a very different scenario, but one thing I did learn here that was different is a lot of the meat that might be sold venison comes from these estates that were probably hunted. So if you go buy venison in a pub or somewhere here, a venison burger, it probably was something that was actually hunted. So I can probably get some pretty nice, clean, real, wild meat here because these estates have to harvest.

9:57 Yeah, and that was something that I didn’t realize, because that’s not everywhere that allows that. Okay, interesting. All right, good. Well, look, I wanna jump into all the questions around hunting, ethical things, what we wouldn’t know about you as a hunter, but let me just talk about my history. So I grew up in San Diego, but my grandpa had a ranch in Arizona.

10:18 And so we used to go out there and my cousins all had 22s and my uncle was a big gun guy. He was ex-Vietnam and he used to walk around with 44s on his hip and he used to carry a Mini-14 and he was into it, right? I remember one time they shot squirrels And I actually didn’t shoot one my brother and my cousin shot a squirrel and they cooked him up and I remember eating squirrel And that was like a like a weird thing. Yeah Also, my grandpa was a cattle rancher and I remember him giving us a half a cow once a year And we literally drive it home to San Diego and stick in our freezer and that was like our sustenance But I was still a city boy. So I never really got the connection blood still made me squirrely My grandpa used to take me fishing and I couldn’t gut the fish, you know typical Yeah city boy stuff and so that was like me and then I lived in cities, you know New York City and LA and I was totally separated from meat wildlife anything and I just bought meat in a store and in America It comes really beautifully packaged and it looks like it’s manufactured that way It comes in the clean film and USDA approved and it’s like it’s gorgeous and then Last year, I went a hundred percent plant-based on a challenge to do an Ironman race on a plant-based diet So I started eating only plants. I never done that in my life. I thought I might fail I ended up figuring it out. My wife was cooking for me But then when you start eating plants you start also kind of judging people about you know

11:37 It’s true if you just eat plants after about three or four months, you’re like why are you eating that? Why does animal have to die? Why then you look at factory farm stuff and sausages and you’re like, what’s going on here? And at the end of the year, I finally made a conscious decision to bring meat products back in my life But also hopefully a little more consciously maybe thinking about where they come from from or why I’m eating it as opposed to just shove it in my mouth and so obviously leaving that kind of vegan community they weren’t too happy about it there’s lots of questions and so look also part of me had heard about hunting and I was kind of curious about it you know because people say when you kill an animal you have this kind of spiritual relationship with it you kind of connect with it you kind of connect with nature which seems completely opposite to most people they’re like how can you love an animal and kill an animal at the same time How can you care about an animal and then kill it?

12:25 And so I thought I’d really want to talk to one of the top people, and that’s why you’re here. So I’d love it if you could just answer some of these questions for me, and I’m still curious about hunting. And it’s not like I want to kill an animal, but I feel like it’s an experience, and maybe it’s something carnal. Maybe it’s in my DNA, you know? And I’ve heard people like Tim Ferriss of the Four Hour Workweek when he did the Four Hour Chef movie.

12:46 He said that when he was, he went with Ronella, Steve Ronella, you know? Tim said, when he was cutting the animal open, he said something, it felt like deja vu. He felt like, I’ve done this before, which is weird. And that planted a seed in my head. And so, look, I don’t have plans to hunt yet, but I think in the next year or two, I’d love to go out and do it, to experience it.

13:08 But anyways, when I tell you all this stuff, what comes to your mind when you’re hearing the story? Yeah, it makes me think of, well, there’s a lot of things that hunters go through that isn’t easily explained. As like you’re saying, when it feels, we have something in our DNA. We got to this point right now. It’s only been a very small portion of human history that we didn’t need to hunt to survive.

13:36 And there still are many cultures that are a lot closer connected to that. But there’s something that we have in order to survive that made us hunters. And when you go through the process of it, you tap into something very primal. And I think that, unfortunately, with the media that’s out there, a lot of hunters actually get portrayed in a light that most hunters don’t identify with. I truly believe that.

14:08 Because the hunters that I know and the hunters that I talk to all have a shared experience of what it is almost tapping into this primal nature of, It’s a very hard thing to describe, but I think I recently took my wife on her first hunt. It was about a year ago now, maybe a little longer. And watching her go through the experience reminded me of when I first started hunting. Now, I grew up hunting as a kid. My dad took me out, his dad hunted.

14:43 But if you think about hunting is something that gets passed down. I one day was watching weasels in my backyard. The mom was taking the weasels into a rabbit hole and bringing them with babies and then bringing the weasels, or the weasels were bringing baby rabbits out. So the mother weasel was passing that down to her children, the hunting, because it’s something that is taught but it’s also something that’s instinctual. And the first time I took my wife out, she really wasn’t sure, When we’d met, she said, I could never kill an animal.

15:18 And I own 100% respect to that opinion. You know, you talked about being a vegan and eating a plant-based diet. And to be honest, even though I’m a hunter, I can respect that a lot more than somebody that isn’t a hunter, that is against hunting, yet eats meat. Because to me, that’s like an extreme hypocrisy. And we can get into that later as far as like the ethics and the meat and the food value of it, but.

15:48 Because someone else is doing the dirty work. Someone else is doing the dirty work. Right. And my wife loved to eat the game meat and would go out on trips, loves hiking and other things, but she just never thought I would ever hunt, or she would ever hunt. And then one day she just thought, you know, I’m eating these animals, I would like to know what it’s like to be a part of the process, just once.

16:13 Just to see what it was like. And she just all of a sudden decided this is something that she would like to try. She just thought, yeah, it makes no sense that I eat meat. And in which it isn’t for everyone. But she decided to give it a try.

16:29 And we went out there, we were hunting deer. And when she got her first deer, it was that same almost rush of adrenaline, a shaking, a nervousness, and then after the kill, a sadness. But she described it in a way of sad for the animal in one way, and then when we started cutting it into meat, she just felt a sense of relief, but she felt like the way she described it was, it was one of the most vivid memories and experiences like being so engulfed in that very second, that very moment.

17:08 You get very few moments like that in life. a very intimate process and I believe that that’s what comes back to our DNA, that primalness of it felt like Tim said, it felt like something she’d done before in a way even though she’d never done anything like that and remembered it in a way that had never had a memory like that and because of that you know that meat now is something that she valued even more than than any meat she’d ever had. Because you’re a part of the process now.

17:40 You took that life, you’re responsible for it, and so to go through the struggle of the challenge of actually getting it, and then the decision that, okay, I’m gonna take that life, and then to turn that into food, that food has so much value at that point that it’s unlike anything else you can eat because you feel responsible for it. And it’s a weird, it is in some ways a weird feeling, but because you feel responsible for it, it then lends value to the life of that animal. I think a lot of people mischaracterize hunters as people that are just out to kill.

18:20 That’s one of the smallest portions of hunting in the entire process of it. If you understand, well, especially where I hunt out west, it’s mountain hunting. There’s a lot of physical exertion. when you get the animal, you have to carry a lot of weight and everything back, it’s a process. And then once you get the meat home, to go through that, and then it’s on your plate, it’s not like something you just bought in the store.

18:48 Something you bought in the store is just, it almost feels like a product. Where, I mean, could you imagine if every steak you ate in your life, like you go to a restaurant, you buy a steak, and you now have a photo of that steak and a memory of that animal, wouldn’t you value that animal a little bit more? If somebody left a scrap on the plate, you’d be like, well, what are you doing? But an animal died for that. So you become very connected with your food in that way.

19:18 It really is unlike any other experience with, I definitely believe, with food as well. It, there’s a primal feeling, but there’s also a sense of responsibility and a sense of remembrance. and you immediately respect those animals in a way that you didn’t before. And you have to eat them, really, to do that. Correct, yeah.

19:41 Which is so kind of strange, isn’t it? Like, if you told this story to a four-year-old, they’d be like, what? It doesn’t make logical sense. Yeah. But when you explain it like that, it doesn’t, and for you, that whole process could take like a year, right, because you’re, maybe you’re learning how to shoot a gun or a bow and arrow.

19:58 I guess your wife had to learn how to shoot, and then you gotta plan the trip, and then you gotta go out there and hunt, which can take, I guess, days. And then once you do it, you have to make the decision to kill, and then you have to cut it up, and then haul it out, and then you freeze it, and then you cook it up, and you serve it to your family, and you consume it. I mean, that’s a long… It’s a long process. It’s kind of the gift that keeps on giving.

20:20 It is, yeah. And it, so it makes you kind of evolve, and become connected, and become, what, more human? Yeah. Is the idea. I think so.

20:29 I think, yeah, it’s, we’ve evolved ourselves to a place where we’ve made animals products in a way, and I think that hunting reminds you the opposite of that. Now it sounds strange because you go, well, you’re killing an animal. But if I identify as a hunter and there were no animals, I feel like I would cease to exist in some ways. A part of me would die. So it’s in my best interest that I wanna see the animals that I pursue flourish.

21:03 I don’t wanna see low populations of them. I wanna hunt in an animal that is in excess, not that it’s in decline. And because of that, I’m highly invested in their habitats, protecting their habitats in the animals and the species themselves. In order to successfully harvest an elk, say, in the mountains of Montana, you need to know everything there is to elk. You need to physically prepare for shooting as well as physical exertion to get to where they live.

21:35 You need to understand their habits, their habitat. You have to really think about elk 365 days a year in the hopes that you might get one. And you know that the odds are probably against you. For the normal person going out, it’s 10%. 10% get a kill. 10% yeah.

21:52 The rest just get an exerted trip out into the wild. And the people that really put the time in and understand the animals, they might get an elk nearly yearly, whereas the other people that don’t think about it don’t put the time and effort in. It’s a very hard task to accomplish. Okay, you know, I just had an experience. There’s a guy named Terrence McKenna who’s now gone and he talks about psychedelics and one of the things he talks about is mushrooms and, you know, kind of psychedelic mushrooms.

22:22 And he says, you should grow your own because he says when you grow it, it takes you maybe eight or 10 weeks and you learn about what it’s about and you cultivate it and some die and some don’t. And he said, only then are you ready to actually consume it. And it’s just, I don’t know, it kind of seems like a similar thing. Like there’s a lot more going on here than just a bite. Yeah.

22:42 Well, and the same with growing your own food or anything that takes time and labor, you know, you have to, you do value it in a different way than you value things that are almost not necessarily given to you, but easy to obtain. Okay, for your wife, the sadness when she has to pull the trigger, is that a natural thing? Do you still feel that anymore or do you not? And is that all part of that process? I think sadness is almost, it’s a weird word.

23:14 I just don’t think our language has a good word for the feeling because it’s one of the few times where you feel an emotion that is extreme excitement and a level of respect that’s different than the respect you show your peers or each other. It’s like almost, I wouldn’t say it’s not necessarily remorse, but like a different level of respect. Like it was a very serious act. So whatever happened was very serious. yet the primal, like, rush of adrenaline and the primal, I guess, feeling of the hunt, combined with those two things at the exact same time, both happy and sad, and it’s a very strange, you think, it’s just a very serious moment.

24:13 And I think, I mean, I’ve been hunting my entire life, and for me, the emotion is still there, but it’s changed, it becomes, you almost understand it better. It becomes like a friend as opposed to an enemy. Now, or not an enemy, but it’s a flood of emotions. I would not be surprised if the first time you shoot a deer, you cry. And like as a, it’s a very, you would be prepared for that.

24:44 You almost think, okay, what are the emotions that I’m gonna feel? It’s emotions that you really probably have never felt in your life, it’s a strange feeling, but it’s also that, I think that primal feeling allows you to kind of go past it. When it becomes food, you realize it feels natural in a strange way, it feels like there’s something in our DNA that allows us to do this. Because we used to have to do that to survive. Correct.

25:17 And it’s also nature. I mean, this happens in nature all the time. If it’s not us, I guess it’s wolves and things eating bugs and other things. I mean, it’s just a cycle, but nature doesn’t have funerals, right? It’s just the humans that project our emotions.

25:31 And is even the word death and kill sometimes the wrong word? I know people like Ted Nugent says he harvests the animals. How do you feel about those? Yeah, I mean, in one sense, I use the word harv, you think like you harvest vegetables, yes. Maybe it takes away from it a little bit.

25:47 But yes, it does, it is, in a sense, a harvest. Is that a better way of thinking of it as opposed to a death? Because then we kind of project humanity into these animals, which, is that the wrong thing to do? Or is it the right thing? You know, I think about it all the time is I had one experience where I was out in the mountains and I saw a old bear and the bear was blind.

26:17 And I’m watching this bear, and winter’s coming, and it’s skinny, and it’s walking, and it bumps into a tree, and then turns around and just starts walking in another direction. And I almost hurt for it. I’m so sad for this bear, because I know what it’s going to face. It’s gonna face a very painful, agonizing death. But I projected that onto it.

26:43 If I really thought, once I watched it, I realized that bear doesn’t feel sorry for itself. It’s a bear existing, and he doesn’t necessarily, it’s the natural course of what’s happening to that bear. It’s different because you immediately want to portray human feelings and emotions to something you see. And so to realize, that bear didn’t realize it was blind in a sense. It knew it couldn’t see anymore, but it was just still doing what it did.

27:17 Right. It’s a weird, it’s very weird. That is weird. And that happens in nature all the time. It does.

27:23 And, I mean, the other thing I’ve heard from hunters is that these animals die anyways and that people don’t think about that sometimes. They just think, oh, you’re shooting the animal, but in the course of the season, these animals are gonna die from lots of predator attacks, right? Well, yeah, as a hunter, the thing that we do, that other animals don’t do, is we project our humanity into the kill or the harvest because we want it to be as humane and painless and ethical as possible.

27:52 We don’t wanna watch things suffer. Watching something suffer is against our own humanity. There is no, I would never want to make a bad shot or have something go wrong and make an animal suffer because that would be against my humanity in so many ways. So you think about, we almost see other animals that are also predators as just savage. Like I’ve seen wolves kill elk many times, and it’s an agonizing, gruesome process that I think I wouldn’t want that death for anything, yet it’s just part of nature.

28:35 So when I go out, I hunt with my humanity as well. as well like if I am gonna kill something I want it to expire fast I want it to be humane I don’t want it to suffer in any way so when you go to take that shot there’s a lot of emotions but you’re also thinking I need to make this shot you need to perform yeah because if you miss it that thing could be out gone bleeding in pain yeah days or longer yeah and you might never find it right if you talk to any hunter any hunter that’s made a bad shot maybe it was an an accident or the animal moved it the wrong time. If, that’s a feeling that you would feel, you feel bad about for days.

29:20 Like your mood is changed. You never want that to happen. And you do everything in your power every time to ensure that that doesn’t happen. Have you made a bad shot before? I have before.

29:31 And it’s the worst feeling I’ve ever felt. Wow, what happened? What’s one, is it one you can talk about? Is it harder with a bow? Yeah, it is in some ways, but in other ways, it’s not.

29:47 It does happen, just, but not, I mean, it probably happens more in a slaughterhouse than it does for hunters in the field, to be honest. I don’t know exact statistics on it, but you can imagine, I’ve seen and heard some stories of things that go wrong, sometimes things go wrong. I’ve never really had an experience that has been where I didn’t find the animal or was not able to really recover it right away. But I have made a shot that I thought, okay, I need a follow-up shot.

30:21 And you just, those feelings of, okay, if I hit something poorly, that’s a terrible feeling. You do everything in your power to not make that mistake. And it does happen. And that’s the show, it can happen. Anything can go wrong.

30:40 Something could deflect off a branch that you couldn’t see, but you just have to do everything in your power and practice, and that’s why I say, for most hunters, it’s not, I mean, there are a lot of hunters that it’s just an activity they do every once in a while, but for myself, it’s a lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle of preparation and really thinking about and studying and trying to be the best that I can for a lot of reasons, but one of them is, especially just to show respect to the animals. Because, you know, I find those animals all animals, really.

31:13 I mean, I’m a hunter, I love animals. People that don’t eat meat, that doesn’t make any sense. He’s a hunter, but he loves animals. Oh yeah, he loves to kill animals. Well, if you said you could kill the last of the species, or there could be, you know, save the species, I would always choose save the species.

31:34 I love animals, but I also eat meat, and I like knowing where that meat came from. I like being a part of the process. I, in some ways, as a hunter, you do enjoy the primal feeling, like that feeling of, that feeling I was talking about, that hard to describe feeling. Right. You learn to almost like hone that feeling.

32:01 Right. I think of it like this. As humans, now if you’ve lived in a city your entire life, you’re like a house cat that really hasn’t been outside. Maybe you’re a second generation house cat, right? But the second someone hits a laser pointer on the floor, what’s that cat do?

32:17 It tries to kill it. I mean, it thinks, it triggers something in its brain that it chases the prey. And there is something like that, no matter how repressed it is, that’s in all of us, it’s in our DNA. It’s what got us to this point. Okay, now the vegans, we’d all disagree and say that our intestinal tract and our teeth were not meant for that, but then I guess the carnivores come back and say the opposite, but there’s something there.

32:45 And you’re saying so if you’re, and you’re just saying you’re being honest with yourself. If you’re going out there and there’s something thrilling about the kill, but also something saddening, there’s a respect and there’s no words for it. And it connects you with your food, and I’m guessing connects you with your life and your purpose as a human in the place that you have in the world and the ecosystem in nature as well, right? Wow, that’s pretty deep stuff.

33:11 And also, are you one of the people that says that hunting is the reason these animals are able to survive because of the money raised and all the different things with the permits? And that’s a whole system as well. Because there’s a history in America where we pretty much killed a lot of the animals, right? Some to extinction or some really close because there wasn’t any kind of controlled hunting, is that right? Yeah, and so I guess, yes I am one of those people, because I understand there’s a balance of nature.

33:42 Now people would argue, well animals did fine before we got here. But if you really think about it, what poor, before we got here, in what portion the animals that are on the planet now have not been hunted by humans? Which animals are around that haven’t been hunted by humans over our existence. There aren’t any. Humans have always been a part of the equation as a predator that has hunted the animals that are there now.

34:12 And when you think about it like that, okay, but then think about how if humans, you say like in America we, let’s use the American bison for an example, right? Where that is one of the species that almost got wiped out because they got essentially annihilated, shot by thrown on trains, shot for meat sales, and nearly wiped out. But if you look at today’s world, the reason bison aren’t in the same numbers they were before is not because they got shot out, but because they have nowhere to live now.

34:51 Because the world has changed. it is forever impacted by our advancements in technology. We can never coexist with the animals like we used to, in a way where we’re still hunters. Okay. Because if you just, the American model of conservation is based on managing, every population species is managed specifically for its area and the amount of habitat.

35:19 Not, you can’t just pick white-tailed deer, in North America and manage them all the same everywhere. You have to go based on every micro region that there is and those management objectives and regulations. Now in order to facilitate, say, habitat improvements or other things, you need money. Because land is not cheap, you know, habitat restoration is not cheap, replanting and receding is not cheap. As well as just having a biologist to say what the population is doing here, that needs some kind of funding.

35:56 And that’s where hunters come in to provide the funding, essentially, for that management plan. Okay, and is the model in America working well? It is, yeah. There’s some species. Now, the funny thing is, you go, well, the bison were hunted out.

36:13 Well, they weren’t hunted out. They were shot out by people selling it for meat. So mass killings. Mass killings. But hunters were the ones that created the regulations to stop it, to revive the species.

36:30 They were the ones like the Sheldon Antelope Refuge was created by an organization in North America that was to save the antelope. It was a group of hunters that said we enjoy hunting and this is getting out of hand, we need to regulate. And then hunters need to regulate themselves and we’re gonna base it off of conservation and we’re gonna set up this sanctuary and then we’re gonna repopulate and rebuild and there’s a lot of species that are at their highest levels they’ve ever been.

36:59 But you look at the American bison, it could never go back to those levels because it doesn’t have the plains anymore. It was the loss of habitat. In many instances, the loss of habitat causes more extinction than hunting ever could. Because of farming, basically. Farming, anything else.

37:16 And urbanized. In farming, you look at urbanization, but think about invasive plant species. How many plants here were never here when the supposed balance of the ecosystem was? Roads. You put in a logging road and deforest an area.

37:33 You’ve taken away habitat, so that concentrates animals on certain food sources and causes impacts on native plant species. And then you’ve got invasive species that can outgrow or out, I guess, the outlive native plant species. So they flourish, well then the native species might not have the same opportunity for food and other things. And then at the same time maybe predators can use those roads to their advantage, they can travel more to scent their game as opposed to having to exert as much more energy and their prey species might be concentrated on smaller food sources, so it’s easier for them to kill.

38:15 And so we’ve completely jacked the entire ecosystem, the entire world, the ecosystem has been messed up by us. So we should not ever think about going back there because we can’t. We can’t. We should just deal with the current reality and do it the best way we can. I mean, at what point, how could you go back?

38:31 And when you go back, you would have to also insert human hunters into the equation. So what, how is that, what are you going back to? That’s what I’ve never understood, and. Because we’ve always been hunting. Yeah.

38:45 All over the world. Where, I mean, what place can we think of? I haven’t, nobody’s really been able to tell me that. A place that doesn’t have a history of hunting. Yeah.

38:55 Yeah, I can’t name one. And so right now in America, you’ll pay for a tag, which is like hundreds of dollars, to have the right to shoot a deer or an elk or an animal, and that’s kind of how, what funds the protection of the habitat, or the understanding. That’s how it works in America, correct? Okay, and other places in the world? Yeah, it just depends.

39:18 Everywhere’s so different. That’s what I’m saying is you can’t, if you asked me about a place, I can maybe give you a generalization of how, say, a region manages, but you look at, say, Australia. Well, a lot of the animals that are there, the large mammals are non-native. So the government does a majority of the culling and those animals get shot and left on the ground. Whereas a hunter could take an animal and then turn it into food.

39:48 They have to manage populations completely different and left unchecked what would happen. Maybe species would probably go extinct as far as grass species, insect species that use that grass. By introducing animals, we’ve really messed everything up. Because there isn’t a real balance anymore. Okay, let me ask you a couple questions that I’m sure are on people’s minds.

40:12 Trophy hunters, there’s this, you know, I think this American woman that’s been famous on Instagram for shooting the giraffe and saying how tasty it was. What’s your read on something like that? Two things. First, I feel like there’s like people in, in every aspect of everything that you would consider almost on the fringe that you don’t associate with, right? And then they become the poster child for something and they don’t know how to explain it in a good way or they portray it in a bad light and then everybody gets cast as that.

40:55 I mean, to say, and I don’t necessarily know, I mean, I’m not really sure what exactly you’re talking about, but I can just, we’ll just call it like a generalization of something is, I don’t even know, some kind of photo that goes around. Yeah, our trophy hunters in Africa bringing home these exotic animals. Yeah, and I think what happens is somebody could see a photo and they’re gonna infer whatever they want about that photo, but that photo doesn’t tell the story.

41:25 And that’s the thing is in our world today, people have access to all kinds of photos that become public. And some of those photos might not portray hunters, how hunters see hunters. They just portray one aspect of whatever that person did, and it becomes a generalization of what everybody feels. And what you see in that photo is somebody smiling and standing over an animal, and it looks bad. And yeah, and if you don’t understand, maybe, no, I’m not, I’m just saying, I’ll take a photo with an animal, And when I look at that photo, I remember that animal.

42:08 It’s a way of, and to other hunters, they look at that animal and it’s a weird thing. For us, it’s more of a feeling of respect for that animal. You’re showing this animal. But you also have to understand, that animal’s completely used, it’s food. Now, I’ll take, say I shoot a deer that has antlers, and I’ll take the antlers, and I might have the antlers in my garage or whatever.

42:34 But because when that meat’s gone, I still wanna remember that animal. And it’s a weird, Is that why people put the heads of the animals on the wall, more of a remembrance? It’s a remembrance, it means something to them about that hunt and every time they look at it, imagine every day if you walked out of your room to go have breakfast and you saw an animal that you ate and you had to remember that animal every day. Maybe you would stop eating, or maybe you wouldn’t decide to eat meat, or maybe you just look at that animal and it brings back a memory of an experience that you had in the life of that animal.

43:13 Okay, so we’re making assumptions when we judge hunters on those pictures. But I also think that people do, there are people out there that do stupid stuff and they take really bad pictures that are not respectful to the animal. And my thing about that would be, I think that that’s bad for hunting as a whole. And I honestly encourage other hunters to self-police. Because hunting organizations originally, like in America, are conservation organizations.

43:47 And they have this code of ethics. Hunters, for me to hunt, The first thing I’m taught is essentially a hunter’s code of ethics, and that code of ethics is to always show respect to the animal, for a lot of reasons. One, because if you don’t show respect to the animal, the other hunters believe you shouldn’t even be out there doing it. There’s something wrong with you, like it should be about respect toward the animal. But it’s also, you need to be self policing as two other hunters that I would be talking to.

44:23 We’ve always been self policing. We create the regulations a lot of times and the rules and the code of ethics. You know, it’s a thing for hunters. If you’re driving down the road and a deer’s caught in the fence in your deer hunting, what do you think most hunters would do? Kill it, help it out.

44:41 You would let it go. Let it go. Because it’s not fair chase. Because that animal had no, it couldn’t get away from you. It couldn’t use its nose and its senses to escape.

44:52 So you would let it out. Okay. So this is interesting because the hunt itself is a test between a human and a deer, or in this case, or an elk. Even though you have a high-powered rifle, what do you say to people that it’s not fair? You have a high-powered rifle, but you also want to make a clean, ethical kill.

45:14 You need some means of…that goes into our humanity in a lot of ways. It’s still difficult. because they’re in their own habitat. They are. They have senses.

45:25 They can smell a thousand times better than you. If the wind turns the wrong direction, it’s gonna smell you and leave. Run. It can, they’re naturally adapted to survive. They have adaptations that help them avoid predators every day.

45:39 When a human hunter walks in the woods, well, most places, like in America, where it’s, where we have predators, large predators. When a human walks into the woods as a hunter, He’s one of many hunters. Those animals are hunted daily in most areas by mountain lions, bears, coyotes, whatever, other predators. And you go to somewhere else, like I say, every region’s different. You go to New Zealand where there’s introduced species and then there’s no predators.

46:08 Well, those populations go unchecked and they can actually have negative effects on the native wildlife. So I guess, you know, what would be the instance there If you wanted to go back to normal, you’d have to do a mass killing of all these animals, thousands of invasive species, millions of animals, would have to be killed if you wanted things to go back to the way it was. What was your most memorable hunt? Like, if you can think of one that meant the most to you.

46:36 And what’s that hunt like? Like, if you try to describe it to people, what’s it like to be out there? And what makes it interesting to you and fun and fascinating and, you know, drums up all of this DNA, carnal stuff, because hunters admit that they’re there for a bunch of reasons, but one of them also is to honor the hunt, right? Yeah, I think if I was to say my best hunt, one that always sticks out in my mind is actually a hunt where I never, one that I didn’t get anything.

47:10 It was a bow hunt, and I was, I had seen a deer that was like a very large deer. And I thought, I’m gonna try for that deer. And not that I, because for me, it’s not about the kill necessarily. I mean, that’s part of it. It’s part of the hunting is the food and the other things.

47:31 But there is this part where I would rather have a challenge that I may or may not get. For me, like if it’s too easy, Like if I were to just drive up and park and an animal walked out, I’ve got my pack ready to hike into the wilderness for five days. I’m not gonna shoot this one, because it’s just, I didn’t get the, almost the experience that I was wanting. Like I feel like I almost would cheat, like it would be cheating in some way. Okay.

48:04 And I also like to be out there for as long as I can. So I would rather get something on the last day than the first day. because of the entire experience of hunting, like being out there. And because of that, I’ve actually learned more that way through the failures and not getting animals, passing animals and having an opportunity and saying, no, it just doesn’t feel right. For me, I don’t know, my friends have like this saying of like your spirit hunter.

48:32 Like you feel, when it’s right, it’s right. And it doesn’t mean that maybe you just go out and you decide, now it just wasn’t right. I’m not gonna shoot that animal. So with this big deer that you saw, you stalked it for days? Over the course of two years, over different times, probably a hundred days worth invested in trying to find this deer.

48:56 I’d only seen him twice and pretty much never found him again. But so you saw him and you remember what he looks like because he was so big. Yeah, and just thought I would hunt after that deer. And so you ignore the other deers. Yeah, I would ignore the other deer.

49:13 And then I ran out of meat, and so I shot like a small deer later on. But I had a surplus of meat at the time and thought I would obviously take that extra meat and eat it. But I thought, well, I’ll just, I don’t know, for some reason I thought I wanna try to hunt for this one buck. But because of that I understood By the end of that experience, I knew more about mule deer and like the way that they, because I watched them day in and day out and just learned about them.

49:45 And so it was almost more of a way of also just giving myself a way to learn about these animals that I chase all the time, to really understand them, to just live in the dirt with them for weeks at a time and get to know them, to be like a predator in their environment and observe as well. With the, I guess, the intention of harvesting one, but a specific one, and because of that it took me, I never ended up finding that deer again. And who knows what happened, maybe a mountain lion got it or died of old age, don’t know.

50:23 But I just thought, that was almost like I say a challenge that I set for myself. Now, some people would say, well, you were a trophy hunter. Well, it wasn’t about that, it was about the experience of leading up to that point, the learning process, the making something that would probably be near impossible and then seeing what I learned along the way because as it’s harder, then you understand, you learn more about the environment and the things that are in there because you have to keep pushing, you have to keep, gives you a goal to get out there every day and hunt as hard as you can and not just take it easy.

50:59 And by doing that, you see so much more, you learn so much more. And I think that that was a major, one of the major learning points, or I would say one of the major teaching moments in my life of just pushing yourself in because you learn so much more. If you just take the easy road, then you don’t really learn anything, you never progress. And because of that, I feel like I gained a lot more respect for a lot of the animals that I hunted but also just a lot more skill as a hunter, like a better woodsman, a better in the mountains and understanding everything that was around me.

51:40 I mean, they say fighters, they learn more from a loss. Yeah. Even though they’d rather have the win. Is it still hard to go home without anything? It is, it is and it isn’t, because it’s part of it.

51:52 It happens. You think, well, the goal was to go out and be successful to harvest an animal. But the entire, like, when you shoot an animal, that’s one very small split second of an entire possibly week or more in the mountains. You know, you’re just gonna write off that entire week because you weren’t successful. I mean, that is the end goal.

52:17 But, you know, like I said, with certain species or places or whatever, it might be easier said than done. You might have more going home empty than going home with something. Right, and you’re trying to enjoy the whole process. Correct, yeah. Being in nature, the thrill of the hunt, pushing yourself.

52:33 Yeah. You said hunting hard. What does it look like when you’re hunting hard? Yeah, I mean everybody, there’s so many different types, forms of hunting. But for you.

52:41 For me, a hunt involves mountains and generally backpacking or hiking. A lot of vertical gain and a lot of going into areas that are physically hard to access, possibly wilderness areas or roadless areas, steep mountains, somewhere you have to carry everything you want, you gotta carry your food, your water, your tent or sleeping bag, your gear, and then you also, when you get something, have to carry that meat and that animal back out, and that is a process. And so for me, that’s what I enjoy.

53:17 If I’m gonna take an animal, then I feel like I want to work for it. I almost wanna feel some amount of physical pain in a way because I feel like it gives me that much more respect for that animal. Like I feel like I’m more invested and I feel like I’m more of a natural predator in a way that I’m more like the wolf that’s out there hunting and not every day is an easy day. There’s a lot of toil in between and then when you are successful, feels different in a way of, it just feels different.

53:51 And that’s part of what your show Apex is about, where you’re trying to model yourself after these predators, right? Yeah, that was one of the, it was just a really fun project that I got to do. I thought, humans, and look at the technology. I mean, you just walk out here, and all the things that we’ve devised, and yet there are some things in the natural world that we don’t really still understand or can replicate. But as a human hunter, there’s so many animals that I look at and say, okay, how do they do this?

54:27 What do I know that they know? And what can I replicate that they can replicate? So I wanna just look at something in the natural world and then learn from an animal, the way that they hunt or the way that they exist, and then apply that as humans. and there’s so many technologies that we have that come from the way animals hunt or the way, or a specialization that an animal has. And I came to a lot of realizations doing that project.

54:55 One of them, the whole thing that started that project was where I was, where I guide in Montana, I was following these ridges that I would normally take and I had a route where I would run into elk and it’s based on the way that the winds flow there and the orientation of the hill and a lot of things. But over the years, I’ve developed this route that I walk, and I would say it’s probably like 15 miles or so, almost like a route, and there’s a fresh dusting of snow on the ground that day, and I’m walking my route that I would hunt this area at, and it’s just big open wilderness mountains, you know, you could pick any canyon and whatever, and I cut a set of wolf tracks, and I follow, I’m not really following, I’m not paying attention to those tracks, I’m just taking my route.

55:46 And throughout the course of the day, I was intersecting those tracks nearly constantly. And it just lit off a light bulb in my head. I, through being out there, learned something of a way to be successful that that wolf knows as well. We’re doing the same exact thing. And it just was something that through years of success and going this certain way, I became, that just became accustomed to walking in these particular spots and in this particular direction.

56:22 And that animal that lives out there and has to do it daily did the same thing. For a very long period of time. It’s like that’s not a coincidence. There’s something in us that we all share a common bond as predators. Wow, what else did you learn from predators?

56:37 There’s so many, I think some of the things that I’ve learned from predators and then there’s just some interesting things that I’ve learned from other animals. One of the, just doing that project, I think one of the biggest aha moments in my life was looking at, we did an episode where we looked at otters and the way otters hunt underwater. I thought, well an otter’s a mammal, but they go underwater. So then I did a whole essentially like free diving course.

57:10 And up until that point, I don’t know how long I could hold my breath, but it didn’t seem like very long. And then I learned, I started looking into the mammalian dive reflex. You realize that humans have the same reflexes as otters, whales, dolphins, where your heart rate slows, your red blood vessels or your red blood cells like increase your oxygen absorption. Okay, this is a weird, this is a natural reaction. And by the end of the day, I was able to hold my breath for over four minutes.

57:45 And you go, it’s just, we just have big brains that tell us we can’t do it. But we have the same natural abilities as predators and mammals that live and hunt underwater. Everybody can hold their breath for that long. It’s this weird, it’s this weird dive reflex that kicks in, it’s just our brain say, you have to breathe, you have to breathe. And at some point, you do have to breathe.

58:09 But it was a, when I came up and took a breath after that, it was just this like, what, how did I do that? And it’s, you realize we have these innate abilities that a lot of other animals on the planet have, and we just don’t access them, we just shut them down in our brain somewhere, put them on the back burner, because we don’t need them. Right, but they’re there if we need them. And what else did you learn about wolves? What would we be surprised to learn about wolves?

58:42 And are they dangerous when you’re out there? No, I don’t find wolves dangerous. Because they don’t try to hunt you. No, not generally. I’ve never had a bad encounter with wolves.

58:58 The area that I hunt a lot, there weren’t any wolves for a very long time. And I remember, I was probably, I don’t know, my early 20s, and I was hiking and hunting, and a wolf popped up. And it was like one of the coolest experiences of my life. Just, I’d never at that point seen one, or even known that they were in that area. And they started moving in that area, and then the packs got larger and larger.

59:27 And because of that, I got to witness them hunting a lot. And they’re a persistence hunter. They chase the elk down. So a wolf will not attack an animal that’s not running. So they incite it to run.

59:42 Because they know that if the animal turns and fights, they have a good chance of being injured. So they have to get it running. And then they nip at the back legs or whatever and chase them into something because they’re so much faster. And they just use their endurance to wear a larger ungillant down to the point where then they can make their kill. And to watch that, I’ve witnessed it a few times, and it’s a pretty impressive feat.

1:00:08 I think one of the things that really got my mind working with that is you look at some cultures in Africa that were persistence hunters, and some still are. And yet we have the ability to sweat and cool down our bodies and to run ultra long distances. I mean, you’ve seen there’s ultra distance runners that are breaking 200, 300 miles. You know, how is this even possible? Yet we have some of those endurance capabilities ourselves.

1:00:40 It’s pretty interesting. Yeah, what was it like watching those wolves kill like an elk or something? You said it’s also not very pretty. Yeah, it’s not really pretty. It’s like death by a thousand bites.

1:00:51 It is, yeah, the ones that I’ve seen, One of, it was a, one that I thought was pretty interesting was a wolf that was by itself. And he got a spike elk, which is a male elk. It’s a fairly large, healthy animal. And he killed it by himself. But what he did was, he somehow got it running downhill in deadfall.

1:01:17 So he chased it into where the trees kind of fall and make a hard maze. And he was so fast, he was nearly running in between this elk’s legs chasing it, he could just outpace the elk, and then he ran him into a spot where the elk couldn’t run faster, and he got it by the intestines, and then those would get caught on the sticks and logs and other things, and then he finally got it by the neck and just held it until it died. Wow. And the elk’s… It was a lengthy, very gruesome process.

1:01:50 And you got to watch it. Yeah. Wow. And this elk is like 10 times bigger than the wolf. Yeah, quite a bit bigger.

1:01:56 And he cuts, he bites open the intestines and then he comes out. Yeah, somehow got it by the back leg. It was, there was a lot of blood on the back end. So somehow that’s where the elk’s power came from running. So it may have started, I would assume it did that while chasing it uphill if it got it going uphill.

1:02:11 Okay. In some way. When I saw it, they were already at the top and running down at that point. And then he chased him into a canyon where there was a, it was a burn and there was a bunch of dead fall in there. Wow.

1:02:24 The elk just was outmatched. Should people know that these animals die anyways? And like, is that part of an argument of a hunter? I don’t know if that is an, I mean, of course they die anyways. I know, but people don’t think that sometimes, like, oh, you’re killing animals, but like, they do die anyways, right?

1:02:43 Through predators and things. So, some hunters killing some more animals, like, is that always makes a big difference? Are they gonna die anyways? Yeah, I don’t know, yeah, they are gonna die anyways, I guess, but I don’t ever think of it like that. Like if I, I’ve never shot something and thought to myself, well, it was gonna die anyways.

1:03:06 It’s not really about that for me. Yeah, I’ve never thought, well, it’s gonna die anyways. I don’t know why. What about for people like that live in London or other parts in the world that like, they really can’t physically spend a week or two a year and harvest that elk and feed their family with it. Like, I know that would be an ideal scenario.

1:03:24 And yet they don’t wanna be a vegan or they don’t wanna be a supermarket cowboy or whatever that shames the hunters and that goes in there and buys the meat. Like, what’s practical? Because it’s not practical for all of us to hunt. There’s not even enough animals that’s there. Okay.

1:03:39 You know, it depends, I guess it depends on where you are. Some places, like I say, it just depends on where you live, what’s around you, where you go. You could go to a place where they’re calling thousands of animals, of non-native animals, that are, the governments are just killing them and leaving them on the ground. Okay, but to hunt, it’s not realistic for most of the world, 99% of the population. Yeah, and I think that that’s part of the problem, but also, there are a lot of people that probably know hunters.

1:04:12 And I think that that’s one of the things, is as a hunter, the hardest thing to part with is the meat, because you had to do all the work. I don’t really know the solution to it, you know, but if you have a friend that’s a hunter, I’ve had people that go, oh, I’d love some game meat. I go, okay, come over, we’ll butcher it. Oh, I don’t wanna do that. Because the work that’s involved, it’s a lot of work.

1:04:35 I just let them run the vacuum sealer, like seal the meat. But you want them involved in part of the process. They don’t have to be involved in part of the process. I love to share what I harvest. So if I have the opportunity, I know I have friends or whatever that don’t hunt, but would love to meet our family members.

1:04:50 And so, I mean, I share it with people that I would consider like my clan, my group of people, my friends and neighbors, people that ask, oh, I’d love to try that. And I feel, I enjoy being able to share wild game meat with somebody that wants it. You know, it’s something that I would obviously like just give freely to people that I know that would want it. And what about the rest of the people in this world that can’t hunt, that still wanna eat meat? Yeah, I think that that’s why there’s the huge push for things that say organic and free range.

1:05:32 Because really there is nothing more organic or free range than wild game. But if you really are conscious about what you’re eating, what you’re eating, there may be better alternatives for sure. Okay, and you don’t like eating things that aren’t wild, right? I don’t really. In my house, just like what I choose to put in my refrigerator and cook for myself in my freezer is wild game. If I go out somewhere, I generally choose fish or whatever because that’s often wild-caught.

1:06:06 But I will eat domestic animals as well. It’s just different for me. It’s a It’s a different thought process. It doesn’t taste as good to me as well. I don’t know if it’s just a mental thing or just a pride thing.

1:06:23 It just is never as good to me as wild. I like to know what’s in it, where it came from. A lot of the places I hunt, there isn’t even agriculture around, so I know that it’s a pretty, I know that when that animal’s shot, it was humane. I know that it’s not eating anything that isn’t natural, and I know that in the areas that I choose to hunt, I’m not hurting the species or the environment in the way that I hunt. As well as I like to know the meat that I’m eating, it co-exists with the landscape in a way that a lot of raised food doesn’t.

1:07:08 In order to feed people a lot of vegetables, if you don’t forage, you have to destroy habitat to grow big farms or things. So I really, and probably to my detriment, have a lot of thoughts when it comes to food and you see something and you have to think about all, I mean now even if you’re a vegan, you have to know that you harm animals. You’re destroying habitat in some way. Now it’s not as visceral, like I understand If you say, I don’t eat meat, yes, I know that there’s a negative cost to existing, but I just can’t be the one that harvests, say, a sentient being myself.

1:07:53 I understand that, I respect that. I think that maybe this conversation, I feel, there might be some people that think, oh, I eat meat, and hunters are evil. They’re terrible people. And my thought to them would be, I almost think it’s the exact opposite. Somebody that eats meat and doesn’t even think about it as an animal, that to me hurts me inside.

1:08:18 Thinking that a steak from the store is a packaged product, it’s just a product, it’s not an animal. So I think that when it comes to food, understanding and even just being conscious of what you’re buying and the impact that you’re having, your life has on everything else. It’s just, there’s a lot to think about there. And for vegans, whereas you respect the fact they’re not gonna kill a sentient being, in your opinion, they need to be honest with themselves that they are causing the killing of animals.

1:08:56 Yeah, correct. I mean, just by existing in some way, maybe you forage and you live off the land in some way, then that’s awesome, that’s great. But you would really have to just be real with yourself and say, yes, by existing, we do have a negative effect on everything around us. But so do other animals that exist, everything that exists. To sustain life, it takes life.

1:09:27 And that’s the circle of the world that we’re born into. And it’s a hard realization when you go, That’s a deep thought, but because you come into the world, that’s how the world works. And you have thoughts that are like, well, you just ignore that, it doesn’t mean that the world still doesn’t work like that. For life to exist, something has to die. And that’s being honest.

1:09:53 That’s being honest. And if you don’t admit that, you’re kind of a fantasy world. Right. And if you don’t admit that, it’s gonna be real hard for your ideals or your idea of the way the world should work to resonate with people different than you. Okay.

1:10:11 What do you make of the whole plant-based movement? The big, you know, vegan, it’s getting huge plant-based. We have the company Beyond Meat that’s worth over a billion dollars and all that. What do you make of that and what’s it like in America? You know, it’s, I mean, where I’m at, it’s not that prevalent.

1:10:28 But it is the city that has never been there. Yeah, I think so. Okay. And I mean, that’s, I’m all for people making their own choices. Now, you’re making, one thing that I don’t understand, I see it a lot of places, why are you constantly trying to make vegetables taste like meat?

1:10:46 That makes no sense to me. Why not just say, like these lentils are good as lentils. Why do they have to be something, like why does it have to be lentils made like burgers? Like, that I don’t really understand the concept of. Or maybe it’s just a way to get people that are used to eating meat to say, oh, here’s an alternative to what you’re, is that what it is?

1:11:04 I think they’re just trying to wean you off. Wean you off of. What you really like the taste of and you want because you no longer agree with ethics or maybe you think health reasons, you wanna choose some of these other foods. It still doesn’t make sense to you. Not a lot.

1:11:18 I would just say, like, I like vegetables as well. Like I eat vegetables and I just eat them as vegetables. I feel like you’re doing yourself a disservice as well to say you don’t want animals to die yet you’re trying to make everything taste like animals. Okay, you make a point. And what about health-wise?

1:11:37 I mean, I think you have a great story where you cooked a steak that someone else had bought and then you threw it on the fire and all of a sudden it was crackling and popping and you were like, oh, wait a second. This is a steak made from grain-fed and it’s actually nothing like I’m used to. It’s not meat as I know it, right? Yeah, because I do a lot of cooking. I think a lot of hunters do a lot of cooking because you have your own food, you make it yourself, and I’ve cooked for a long time and then someone brought some steaks over and I threw one on the barbecue and I cook meat every day and all of a sudden I walk and flames coming out of the grill and what is going on?

1:12:20 I know how to cook meat. And it just realized, it was like this weird realization that that’s not anything close to the meat that I eat. The meat that I eat’s red meat, but it’s leaner than chicken. It’s got less cholesterol. And here, this is this, it was like a slap in the face when I threw a steak on and thought, that’s not a steak to me.

1:12:43 Something with all that fat ingrained and marbled in. That’s something that we’ve created. It’s not the way that animals, protein that I enjoy or that I’m used to is. It was a weird thought because I didn’t really think of myself as outside of that. But you just get into your lifestyle and you realize, okay, and then I actually, that was quite a while ago and it caused me to just really look up the nutritional facts on wild game and how much different it is than say, farm raised, farm raised meat.

1:13:19 It’s high protein because they’re using their muscles to evade predators on a daily basis. They don’t store fat the same way that domestic animals do. Even if it’s a free range animal, it’s not running, it’s not surviving, it doesn’t have hard winners, it always has easy access to food. It doesn’t browse, it grazes, or depending on the species they, the makeup of it is completely different than the game meat that I eat. Right, it’s like this synthetic product that’s even created.

1:13:52 And it feels weird when you eat it. Right. If I go right now and go get a burger, I’m just gonna feel like garbage after I eat it. Yet if I have a burger that I make at home that has really no fat added to it and I might mix a little olive oil just to keep it from burning and it feels like you feel strength from it in a different way. Wow, interesting.

1:14:20 Maybe some of that meat’s killing us as well. Very well could be. Very well could be. Tell me a bit about bears, would you? Yeah, because first of all, to a hunter, what does a bear represent?

1:14:32 Is it something to look out for? Is it something people hunt? and you’ve had a couple run-ins with them, so. Yeah, I think really everybody loves to hear about bears because most people are not even in bear country. They may never see a wild bear.

1:14:47 And wild bears and bears that are portrayed in television or stories are completely different than you might run into while in the field. Was it last, not last year, but the year prior, We were doing a filming project for Meat Eaters, which is on Netflix. We’re on a fog knack island. It’s in Alaska. In Alaska, so it’s a small island off of the island of Kodiak, and it’s got some of the largest brown bears in the world, and we were hunting elk there, but these bears, there’s no inhabitants on the island.

1:15:26 Really, it’s pretty natural. Now the elk were actually released on this island, so they’re non-native, but the bears there are some of the largest bears in the world. Now they have a lot of access to fish and other things, so when they have food, they aren’t very aggressive, but when they don’t have food, really anything can become food. They’re omnivores. Yeah, they are.

1:15:51 You’ll see, depending on the time of year, when the berries are gone and the fish is gone, they predate heavily on the elk or the deer on the island, anything they can get their hands on, really, They’re extremely fast. They’re fast. Yeah. Okay. Something you don’t think a bear is fast.

1:16:11 No, they’re very fast. I would say at a short distance, now they’ll top out, their speeds top out, but I have seen a bear charging after something running downhill, and they use that momentum like a bus that just can’t be stopped, and that momentum gets going pretty fast. But they are extremely quick. It would surprise you how fast they are. So we were hunting in a fog neck and we’d taken an elk and we hung it up in a tree.

1:16:41 And because the weight of it was probably where we got the elk and where our camp was, we had to climb up the top of a mountain, down into a valley, and then miles out. It’s an all day trek to get to there and back. So we got the elk, so we took out a bunch of the meat, the first trip in our backpacks, climb back up to the top of the mountain down in the valley to camp. The next day, and then so we leave the meat hanging in a tree out of the reach of bears.

1:17:12 Because it cools the meat, it keeps it like a natural refrigeration. Because the whole point is to get all the meat back. So to move an animal that might be a thousand pounds on the hoof, just on your back, it takes a lot of trips. You’re moving the meat, And then there was a couple camera operators filming, and then myself and Steve who were hunting. I think there was five or six of us in total.

1:17:43 So we go back the next day and we walk up to the tree and do all the make noise, and hopefully we glassed the area with our binoculars, looked in there, made sure there was no bears, but it’s fairly thick terrain. a lot of willows and other thick brush. So we work up to the tree. I was actually lagging behind at that point. And you generally have bear deterrent in these situations because there is the potential that a bear could attack.

1:18:17 So I was hunting elk with a bow, but I had a pistol and a bear spray. Bear spray, okay, it works pretty well. Yes, but there’s a few exceptions. and I can get into that in a little bit. Okay.

1:18:31 Yeah, you would prefer to use the bear spray for a lot of reasons because to shoot a charging animal with a pistol is a difficult task. But in the bear spray, you can spray in a fan motion and it will run into the cloud. So it’s like a very large, it’s almost like a miniature fire extinguisher full of pepper spray. Okay. And so the thought is you spray it and then it can stick on the grass and other stuff and if the bear runs in, his senses are overloaded just like cops might use a bear spray on an assailant, somebody attacking them, it’s supposed to stop.

1:19:03 So the downside to the bear spray is with the winds blowing in your face you really can’t use it. You spray yourself. You spray yourself and you probably wouldn’t get it where it needs to go. So we get to the tree and we do our inspection. Steve got up to the tree first and it looked like There’s like this bear, there’s some like bear shit there and it looked like somebody had stepped in it.

1:19:32 But we thought, well, maybe it was us in our, it didn’t look fresh, it wasn’t fresh, but somebody had stepped in it and we thought, well, maybe it was one of us stepping in it last night in the dark when we hung the meat in the tree. So we’re gonna get ready to go and it had been all day, majority of the day we got up 4 a.m., started walking and then get to the spot. It’s about lunchtime or later, maybe, and we decide, okay, we’re all hungry. Before we trudge back with all this meat, we might as well just sit down and have a sandwich and make some coffee.

1:20:07 So we’d sat down in kind of a semi-circle almost. I set my pack down, and then we decided we were gonna fire up a jet boil, which is like a little propane canister that you can heat water in. And I’m gonna gather, I don’t wanna dump all my water in there, and everybody drink coffee from my bottle of water that I’ve been carrying all day, you know? So we’re gonna, if you want coffee, pour a little water in the pot, enough for a cup. So I’m going around gathering water and set the guy that has a jet boil, give him the little canister.

1:20:38 And then I had taken my pack off and my pistol and bear spray was attached to my pack. And then my plan was, generally when I took my pack off, I would swap the deterrence onto my waste belt. and I took my pack off and thought, well when I was sitting there, they were both right there. But when I came back, somebody had happened to just sit where I was sitting, so I just said, okay, so I sit here, there’s like a little bank cut out as well, so I’m sitting and you would be where my pack is.

1:21:07 And then there’s Janus off to my right here, and then Steve was where you are, and then I think Garrett was here, and then two other guys behind me. and we’re sitting there eating sandwiches and one of the guys was making the sandwiches and he passes Steve a sandwich. Like, man, there’s a lot more meat on that sandwich. So I was like, hey, we were just kind of joking around and he gets this look on his face. I was like, I hear something, like he heard something bare and I look out and I could see over the back where Steve was sitting there, I saw it coming in.

1:21:53 And it just, the memory of it seems like it was just slow motion, you just remember the hair shaking and thinking to yourself, this is it, I’m not gonna survive this one. How far out was he, and what does he look like? Probably 20 yards at this point, his eyes were fixed and he was a full charge, a dead run. As fast as I could. So how fast is he going, you reckon?

1:22:20 25 miles an hour maybe, maybe, yeah, like fast. So it’s seconds. Yeah, just imagine a car at 20 yards hitting the accelerator going, that’s about as long as it takes. I tried to go for the gun in the, just to try to grab something, the bear spray. So he actually charged with the wind and the wind was really strong that day.

1:22:45 It ended up being over gale force winds and he came with the wind so the bear spray wouldn’t have even made it. There was nothing, the bear spray wouldn’t have, so I was actually going for my pistol. And the time it took me to get up and go to my pack, he was already right there. I did almost what I consider a football juke move, like juke right, juke left, rolled this way, and then I turned and it was just kind of chaos. Everyone yelled, bear, bear, hey!

1:23:13 And then I see, as I turn around, my back was then to it, because I thought, oh, he’s gonna get me. And then he had wheeled around. I had no clue what happened. And then I see legs and the bear going down the mountain. Oh shit, he’s got someone.

1:23:28 So I grabbed the pistol and start going down like below where he disappeared to. And I yell like, who’s missing, count off. Everyone’s like one, one, just close their app. No, like who’s gone? I definitely saw someone and a bear gone.

1:23:49 Well. Is he making noise and roll around and stuff? Oh yeah, it’s like, what had happened was, imagine us sitting here having a conversation, a few other people, this little dog, a person, and people around, and then all of a sudden, a bear just comes in. And how big’s the bear, you reckon? Around a thousand pounds.

1:24:06 And like 11 feet tall. Yeah, it just, yeah, if he was standing on his legs, 11 feet probably, could look into a two-story building. Just a huge animal. Like a good sized cow type animal that has teeth and claws and is coming in to kill you. And when we exploded, it was just pandemonium and it was a lot of noise and he, instead of, I think he was running in and thought whatever was under that tree was one thing.

1:24:36 And he was gonna come in and kill that one thing. And when we exploded into six things, it just caused confusion. Instead of going for one person, and he was going for everyone at once. And he didn’t know one target to pick. Now, what ended up happening, Giannis, who was sitting right next to me, when I went forward, somehow I went forward, tried to go for the pistol, couldn’t make the pistol, turned to run, and then I think as I turned or whatever, he turned this way and grabbed his trekking pole and then hit the bear in the face with the trekking pole.

1:25:06 And that’s what got it to turn around. Then somehow when it turned around in the confusion, it must have hit, so the guy that was down, he’ll popped up, he was fine. Somehow he was like back to back with the bear, like the bear wheeled around and he was on the bear’s back. And so at the point of the one thing exploding into six, he’s trying to go for everyone at once, gets hit in the face, then somebody’s on his back, it just was the confusion. And that’s what saved us in that situation.

1:25:35 And he took off and the guy was on his back and then he fell off his back. Somehow, yes, yeah. Okay. It was just like massive chaos. And then the bear, so then we circle up.

1:25:46 Janus gets his pistol. I don’t know if anybody else grabbed bear. I was pretty fast, because the bear was still there, but we just couldn’t see him. So we circle around a tree, and then the bear, you could hear the bear circling around us. You know, whoof, whoof, whoof.

1:26:01 Wolfing, and then he would charge in briefly, but not to the point where we could see him, just hear sticks breaking. And then we’d leave, and then do that from a different angle. where you’re going, bear, hey, hey, throwing stuff into the bushes, just letting him know we’re aggressive, we’re here. Right. And.

1:26:19 You must have adrenaline flying through your body. Oh, yeah. How’s your hand not shaking at this point? At this point, you’re just thinking, if he comes out, I need to, we need to make a good shot, or you’re just thinking we need to stop this bear. So you’re gonna whistle out?

1:26:34 Yeah. Okay. And we had, I think at that point, somebody else had had the pepper spray, so when he got to the downwind side, Then the pepper spray would work. Which would be awesome. That’s great.

1:26:46 The last thing you want to do is spray yourself. Spray, yeah. With pepper. Correct. I mean that would just.

1:26:51 In that kind of wind, it just wouldn’t work. And then, so we, at that point, then we don’t hear the bear for a while, we get the meat out of the tree. We just kind of throw everything on our shoulders, make a formation, get to a clearing where at least we have eyes on the area. If something’s coming in, we’ll be a little more prepared. So you take the meat, you don’t leave the meat, bro?

1:27:11 No, we do not leave the meat. You’re like, we don’t leave the meat behind. I’d rather get taken by a bear than leave the meat behind. For the bear or leave it behind? No, I would personally rather get attacked by the bear than leave the meat behind.

1:27:23 Why? You just don’t do that. Okay. I mean, you killed that elk. It’s your responsibility to take that meat out.

1:27:30 That’s, I didn’t actually kill the elk, but it was our responsibility as a team. We weren’t gonna leave the meat there. That’s interesting. Leave the meat to rot in a tree. Like, I can never live with myself knowing that I did that.

1:27:45 Okay. What about leave it for the bear? No. Were you angry at the bear? No, the bear was just being the bear.

1:27:51 Okay. Yeah, I mean, he was just being a bear. Was it a scary experience? Heck yeah. I’ve been charged by bears before, but a lot of them have all been bluff charges.

1:28:02 That was an actual, you could see the intent in that bear’s eye. It was a very scary experience because you knew he wanted to kill you. and he was going in, and we just essentially survived based on a survival tactic of a lot of prey animals. So like a covey of quail when they jump out. All of them fly at once and the fox can’t figure out which one to jump at or a bunch of zebras running and confusing the cheetah or the lion.

1:28:31 So you should all be dead. Just mouse confusing. Yeah, if it was one person, I know for a fact if I was there by myself, I would not have survived. Or, yeah, I just couldn’t see how I would have survived that. Or any of the six of us, if we were there by ourselves.

1:28:45 And even if we were together in those other scenarios where he would have taken a few of you out. Yeah. And even once he takes a few of you out, it’s easy to take more of you out. I think if he had got one person, he would have stopped. Okay.

1:28:59 It would have been, yeah. I think if he would have latched onto one person, he probably would have attacked that one person until everybody could have got him off that person with either the bear spray or whatever. Okay, what’d your wife think of that story? She’s like, that’s not cool. I mean, it’s just one of those things where you’re in their territory.

1:29:21 Sooner or later, bear attacks happen quite often in that. And I think, well, bear attacks are pretty rare, but it’s pretty rare that people are even in the areas where they live. The odds go dramatically up when you’re in their turf, really. But I take a lot of precautions to avoid bears and have my deterrence and other things. It just so happened that the one time you get attacked is the time you aren’t prepared.

1:29:50 But then I think back after that moment of all the times that I was not prepared other times. So it just happens that we weren’t prepared and that’s when we got attacked. If you had your pistol on your hip, could you have made a clean shot and hit him you think in that time? I don’t know, I think I could have, yes. Because of the way that he was coming in straight.

1:30:12 But I also think that maybe it the first go, maybe a warning shot or something might have just snapped him out of it. Like boom, that loud noise of, or his adrenaline could have just, because I’ve been in other situations where might be a bluff charge and a shot into the ground just stops them and they just, but maybe they never had intentions of actually making a full charge either. It’s hard to just say. It’s a pretty good story, a pretty good bear story. Yeah, the funny part about that is after we got attacked by a bear, you don’t think you’re gonna get attacked by a bear until one attacks you, and then at that moment you immediately think you’re gonna continually get attacked by bears.

1:30:50 Like the entire trip out, oh there’s a bear, oh there’s a bear. You know, like the bears just happened. We hadn’t seen a bear the entire week, and yet that happened, and then we saw I think two bears after that. Then we climb up over the pass back to camp with all the meat. That wind, it just picked up probably close to 100 mile an hour winds, raining sideways.

1:31:12 We look, our camp was completely flattened by the weather. So now we’re in survival mode. We’ve just got attacked by a bear. Now we have to gather up all our stuff. I saw one guy sleeping bag and pad out in the big flat.

1:31:24 It’s getting soaking wet. So we ended up having to re-pitch the tents into a spruce tree. We had a bear fence around our camp, which is just like, almost like a thick, like, cord that’s like electric fence, like you’d put around for cattle or something, and it runs off D-cell batteries. You touch it and it barely does anything, but it’s like a mental thing that you think. It can make you feel better.

1:31:49 Yeah, you feel good about sleeping out there in that. Oh yeah, I saw the video you shot on your mobile phone afterwards. It did not look like a pleasant place to be. No. It was rainy and windy and pretty horrible.

1:32:00 Through horrible brush and hiking a lot of miles. It’s just a place that beats you up. But you guys like that to a certain extent. To a certain extent. It’s a weird kind of fun.

1:32:11 Like while the first time I went to that place, me and my brother thought, I’ll never go back here. And I’ve been back I think three or four times now. Because it’s just like some weird form of challenge and punishment of the elements there. It’s like if I’m gonna be hunting anyways, I might, there’s, you remember it. There’s like an element of it just sucking.

1:32:36 Just sucks. Everything about it sucks. You’re wet the entire time. You’re uncomfortable. It’s hard.

1:32:43 You shoot something and it’s so heavy. Now the meat’s some of the best meat I’ve ever had. Maybe it’s just because it’s the hardest you’ve ever worked. You don’t really know the equation, but it just works out like that. Why is it that the things we enjoy in the moment, a lot of times we don’t remember as being fun And then the things we hate in the moment, later we look back and say, that was great and we wanna do it again.

1:33:06 Exactly. It just triggers something. It makes it a memory that sticks. And we like to have memories that stick. Experiences that stick.

1:33:17 Otherwise you’re just going through life and this day to day thing and you look back and you go, what have I done? Everything’s been the same. Yeah, no. You become bored and. No adversity.

1:33:28 No adversity. surfing pleasure to pleasure to pleasure, which at the time might feel good, but. But later on, you’re just like, what do they do? Right. I don’t remember it.

1:33:36 And then looking back on those experiences that just really suck, you go, I do that again. Tell me about me and my first hunt. Like, I’m obviously asking a lot of questions. I’ve been thinking about this for years. You’re here now.

1:33:51 We’re having this really good conversation about it. If I wanna do this right, and I might actually document this as well. I don’t know if we’ll make a documentary about it or not, but what do you think would be the best way for me to experience this the first time and to maybe even tell a story to where I’m doing it in the right way and I’ll get the most out of it and maybe other people can learn from it too. Yeah, I think to really get the full experience, you have to choose a hunt that’s in that more wilderness type setting.

1:34:21 Because if you think about it, the whole primal aspect of it is you out there uncomfortable in that wild moment. Now, yeah, you could go just down the road here on your first hunt and to a state where they’re managing deer and shoot a deer. But you might not have the same experience as you do in that wild setting, in that natural, where you have to rely on a lot more. You have to rely on a few skills that you might not even have yet. And you realize, wow, you’re gonna feel really uncomfortable.

1:34:56 You’re gonna feel really out of place. But you’re also gonna, at some point, hopefully feel that sense of belonging as well. Not as a passive participant, but as like an active participant. When you’re looking around, you’re looking with intent. You’re looking for something, you have a purpose.

1:35:14 You’re trying to find something. The way you’re walking and the places that you’re going are gonna, you don’t just randomly start walking somewhere. You feel which way the wind’s going. you tap into a lot of things that are really important in the process of the hunt. You get that uncomfort and you get that struggle.

1:35:33 And then, hopefully, you get that success. And you’ll know what it felt like to be a predator in the wild, in my opinion. Okay, so I gotta plan this maybe, what, a year out? I gotta learn to shoot as well? Yeah, that’s big.

1:35:49 And I used to use rifle, not a bow, because a bow is a lot of practice. And yeah, I think the first time you should use a rifle, yeah, I love to bow hunt, but I also hunt with a rifle. And it depends on the situation, the type of hunt. There’s just already, the first time you go hunting, there’s already so much going on that it takes people years to be proficient with a bow. Yeah, okay.

1:36:16 It’s more of like a pursuit that you practice constantly. practice constantly, like it’s a life style. You have to, yeah, you have to dedicate to it. You don’t just, as well, at least the kind of hunting that I do, like spot, what we call spot and stock hunting, which is the type of hunting that I prefer, where you go out into the mountains and you have to sneak close enough to the animal. He has, even with a rifle, he has a lot of advantages that you don’t have, because you’re still only gonna be shooting within a certain range that is well inside of his range of senses.

1:36:52 Okay, right. And so it’s just, there’s already so much that goes crazy and it’s such a different experience that you’re better off giving yourself that slight advantage, not that it makes it easier, but just makes it where you know you can be proficient that first time because you don’t really know what you’re doing at that moment, at that point, if that makes sense. Yeah, makes sense. What animal should I go to hunt? And where should I do it, like be specific?

1:37:20 What do you think would be the good place? It’s North America, obviously. Yeah, I think, yeah, either an elk hunt in Idaho or Montana, or something in Alaska, like a caribou hunt, not a moose hunt person, that’s a lot of work. Okay, Alaska’s pretty hairy up there, right? It is, but it’s wilderness.

1:37:44 It’s wilderness, and it’s just, It has a sense of adventure and a sense of, when you get dropped off by a plane, you think, I’m not walking out of here. You’re too far in most cases, or you’re in a place that is so remote, there’s nothing else around, and it is true wilderness. But there’s a lot of places in the US, just out, especially out west, where you can access public land and you might have to day hike from the truck quite a few miles or whatever, but there’s places that you can go into that you can get away from people and you probably won’t even see any people anyways.

1:38:23 You can get remote. But it’s having that type of experience I think is a great first experience because you’re gonna learn a lot and you probably may not be successful, but you’re gonna really know what it means to try. Okay. Okay. So don’t do Alaska first.

1:38:40 Well, no, I mean Alaska, there’s, Alaska is a great place for that kind of first experience, because, I don’t know, do you have a lot of camping experience or any of that? I mean, my mom took me camping when I was a kid, so. Yeah, well, the only thing about that is when you get into that situation, there’s no just, you can’t say I’m coming home tomorrow. No, you’re there. It’s gonna suck, like there’s a lot of, you have to, it’s more, I would say that type of experience is more mental than it is physical.

1:39:11 Most people that, through guy, like, As a professional guy taking people into those situations, most people quit, not because they physically can’t do it, but because they just mentally aren’t strong enough. Because they miss people, they find it hard, they miss comforts, that kind of thing. Correct, yeah. Everything is, everything sucks. You’ve got a heavy pack on this, like you’re just, the docile nature of you gets beat out of you immediately.

1:39:39 You realize like nature is very harsh. You don’t, when you don’t have those comforts you realize, even with modern sleeping bags and tents and all that stuff, the comforts of home, the best comforts, it’s uncomfortable, it sucks. Okay. Yeah, it’s physically painful for a very long. Like a week.

1:39:59 Yeah, exactly. Okay, and you’re smiling. Yeah, but. But it’s also amazing and probably a very memorable experience. Yeah, especially because if you were to only, maybe that will be the, maybe you do that and you say, I will never do this again.

1:40:12 At least you had that experience. You kind of know, you would understand. I think that if you did it, and you were successful, I think that it would be one of those memories that you just would never forget. It would just be, it would be a different kind of memory. Yeah, I think you’re right.

1:40:32 Well, just going quickly back to like Africa hunting and people that go and shoot like lions and elephants and giraffes and all that stuff. What do you make of that? would you do that? Yeah, so there are certain animals that I just have no desire to hunt. And I always think about it in a lot of different ways because for me, when I talk about hunting, I want it to be based on the science of conservation.

1:41:01 So I’m not really interested in any hunting that has nothing to do with conservation, if that makes sense. So, I would like to say, you know, if there’s a deer population that needs to be managed, I think that we should hunt those deer. And if the powers it be, like if it truly, that species, if you go, now the science isn’t here, this, we need to close the season, close the season. But I always divert back to the science. So I don’t, I don’t want my, that’s the thing that is kind of detrimental to wildlife in a lot of ways, is we let our emotions, emotions dictate the wellbeing of animals.

1:41:45 Whereas we should let the science dictate the wellbeing. If we’re in a system that’s broken and needs balanced, we need to let the science manage the system, not our emotions. So look at the information, the statistics. Look at the information and the statistics. Now, Africa is one of these crazy places, having been there, that we like to think, you can’t have a lens of the world of the way your world is, you know?

1:42:17 It’s like in this air-conditioned room with power and I can get a cup of water right here. There’s people in this world that might have to walk miles for water daily that don’t know where their meals are coming from, that their government isn’t looking out for them, that their system is broken. They don’t live in the same conditions as we do. So how can we expect to manage things in those places the same way that we might be able to here or impose? So in a lot of ways, I’ve seen a lot of statistics of in some of these African countries hunting actually protecting some species.

1:43:00 By killing one, you’re saving more. And that’s a hard concept to grasp because it doesn’t make sense through the lens of our world right here. And you can never get it unless you possibly go and understand or really critically think about how is, you know, that, because what it is is an influx of money into a community that might not have an economy, like creating economies, even micro economies. Like the whole reason that we could say we don’t wanna eat meat is because we have an economy and a system that could support us that way.

1:43:45 It’s hard to do otherwise. It’s like a first world problem. It’s a first world problem. Or a first world benefit. Benefit, yeah.

1:43:52 Okay, that’s a good point. Don’t use our lens to judge what’s happening there. And then think about it, I mean, shooting a lion might save lions, right? Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen a lot of, I was just reading the other day actually, something that came out where some of the countries now, like the whole Cecil the lion thing, that was a big deal. That was like somebody shooting a pain, a lot of money to shoot a lion.

1:44:18 Right. And then he brought it home, and then that saved lions, right? Right, but yeah, so they closed the lion hunting down and then I was reading something the other day that was showing the number of lions that were killed after that dramatically increased. Okay, because there wasn’t regulation or there wasn’t people there to stop it. What the article was saying was that you have people, because if you live in that village and you have cattle and lions are killing your cattle, well, what are you gonna do?

1:44:51 You’re gonna kill the lion. You’re just trying to survive, you know? And what are you gonna do for habitat? Well, you’re gonna plant a field for those cattle and it’s not good growing conditions, so you’re gonna need to burn off huge amounts of habitat. And when lions come in for your cattle, then you’re gonna have to kill those lions.

1:45:10 Or, who knows? I mean, obviously like illegal hunting is a huge problem over there. There’s just so many problems there that are just specific to that place, that it’s really hard to find a system. Like if there was an American model of conservation or some system that worked, they would protect them all, that’d be great. Like if there was a miracle cure for that problem, but there isn’t.

1:45:34 Right, and there’s probably the cure for that problem is bringing up those communities and those countries to be like us. But then you’re imposing, you’re saying that you need to be like us. Humans have been doing that forever. Like saying, you need to be like us. And that’s where a lot of problems come in.

1:45:52 And then when they’re like you, then they’ve got your problems now too. So I don’t know, I don’t really know the solution. But I do know that in some of those instances, now getting back to your original question, me personally, there’s certain animals that I’m attached to that I have no desire to hunt because it’s the emotion. But I also, maybe I have an emotional attachment to big cats, which I’ve, when I was a kid, I always thought if I’m not gonna be a professional hunter, I want to be a tiger trainer.

1:46:23 If I was like a child and you asked me what I wanted to do, we have an emotional attachment to big cats. I don’t want to shoot a lion. Like, thought has never really crossed my mind. Probably even to watch it and like, oh, I don’t like that. But if somebody said, you know, we can save more lions by doing this, then I just accept if that’s the truth.

1:46:45 If that’s the science, if that’s the answer to somehow protecting species, then I’m for that. Okay, it’s funny too because a lot of these animals as Americans, we’ve never had contact with because there are these fairy tale animals from Africa. So then you have this weird disconnected relationship because they’re not in your backyard. And then you make all these assumptions, like elephants. You know, elephants, you’re like, oh, the elephant and it’s Dumbo and they can remember things and they are beautiful animals.

1:47:13 I rode some when I was in Botswana. But also to the local communities, They’re just real bastards sometimes. They could be pests, one group of elephants could destroy a crop and they would just prefer to kill those elephants. Then they wanna kill the elephant and then the Americans are like, what are you doing? And it’s like you said, until you know what their issues are.

1:47:30 Or a lot of problem too is just loss of habitat. You just have to constantly think about what humans do and where these animals can live once that habitat’s gone. If you look at, I saw some photos of a place in Africa where one was managed for hunting, it was like a fence, and then the other one was just on its own devices used for cattle and other things. Well, the area that’s managed for hunting, they’re making their money, they’re providing for themselves through hunting.

1:48:03 But in order to have good hunting, you have to have good habitat. So the forest was lush, the brush was tall, the native grasses were there, the animals were flourishing. And on the other side, they ran cattle and planted crops and it destroyed everything and there wasn’t a lot of water and that just looked, nothing could live there. Those animals that were on this side couldn’t live on this side. So in order to have the hunting, you need the habitat.

1:48:33 In order to have the habitat, you have to protect the habitat and you have to really protect the habitat to a point where it can produce more animals. Okay, so you have to always think about the ecosystem. The ecosystem. And in those countries that aren’t like ours, you have to think of the economy of the area. How can you provide what these people need or in exchange for saving that habitat?

1:49:03 Right. It’s hard to do. What do you think of when you hear, like I hear articles like the US is trying to expand, you know, shale oil and drilling and something in Minnesota recently where they’re going and it looks like all this protected federal land. I’m always wondering, does that bother you when you see things like that? Do you worry about the hunting?

1:49:23 And how does that come up with your politics? And yeah, what are your feelings? Yeah, I think a lot of, well, my politics are just based on what I love and that’s wild places. So I really just wanna protect wild areas. I want the habitats to flourish.

1:49:41 I want the animals to flourish. I want them to have a place to live. I don’t want to see those places go away or be destroyed. So for me, I’d rather I side with the animals. Are you then against all of that stuff because it’s usually gonna have a detrimental effect?

1:49:58 It’s one of those questions, like as a society, there’s people that aren’t me as well that need to survive and exist and we’ve created a system that requires certain things. Unfortunately, it sucks. It really does. But we don’t really have a great system right now that doesn’t require oil and we have to think about our economies and we haven’t put enough infrastructure into renewable resources and other things. But at some point, it has to change.

1:50:30 Now, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say, well, everyone needs to live like me. But I don’t know, I mean, me personally, I think that people should side on the longevity of this planet. I’m not really concerned about what I get out of this world, I just want people to enjoy this world when I’m gone. And so for me personally, I don’t wanna make an impact that’s gonna destroy things, leave places, the things that I love, I want people 100 years from now to be able to enjoy.

1:51:05 What if they wanna start drilling for oil in Idaho and Montana, where you hunt, what would you do? Oh, on like the federal lands that I go on? Yeah, I wouldn’t, I don’t know what I could do, but I would be against it, yeah. Okay, all right. So when you hear things like that, you’re probably thinking it’s not gonna help the environment.

1:51:23 Yeah. But you’re also thinking of the bigger picture too. Yeah, but it also, one of the things is, I guess you just have to break it down to that individual area and really understand what’s going on. Like every problem can’t have the same solution. Global warming, or the talk of.

1:51:41 Yeah. Do you think about it? Do you think about the environment? What’s your take on all that? And what do hunters generally think?

1:51:47 Yeah, I don’t know what hunters generally think. I think our planet changes. And like I said, as a hunter, knowing the environment, I see how firsthand we change things in bad ways. that are, including global warming, but other ways as well. We’ve done a lot of damage, and it’s really hard to fix.

1:52:13 Maybe some of it might not be fixed, but we have to adjust the way that we live in order to manage it in a better way, if that makes sense. I think that, you know, like I said, I go back to science. If science says one thing, then I’m on the side of science as far as managing our planet, managing wildlife and other things. So I just always really revert back to the science, because I use that as a defense of hunting, so I kind of have to accept it in all categories, no matter what it is.

1:52:46 And I think a lot of other hunters also feel that way. Is warmer temperatures affecting your hunts and things like that? Not particularly where I am. I haven’t actually seen, a lot of the places that I go are actually colder now, and that affects it with snowpack and other things. Harsier winters really affect animal populations and other things.

1:53:11 But we haven’t, it’s just one of those things where year to year, I don’t really notice, I just notice actually we’ve had a lot harsher winters here but it’s like a five year period and then we had a drought. The areas that I’m in a lot, they just see so much change all the time anyways. It’s hard to tell what’s changed coming from. What do you wanna do? Like 10 years from now, what do you wanna look back and be proud of that you did in your life?

1:53:37 Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, I think it’d be cool. I think it’s cool for me to have a platform where I can talk about what I love hunting and maybe get people thinking or maybe change someone’s mind, maybe not. Maybe I strengthen someone’s opinion against it, but at least it gets them thinking about the topic. I think that it’d be cool to be a person where hunting might get brought up and someone would say, well, you’re against it, but why, you eat meat, or what’s wrong with it?

1:54:14 And really start thinking of it in a different way. Because for a very long time, I feel like hunters have been vilified as something that many of them are not. You might be looking at a very small portion of hunters on the planet, Those are the ones that get the pulpit. Those are the ones that are portrayed in films and other things as reckless, drunk, hate animals, murderers, however you wanna portray it. But real hunters, I know hundreds of hunters.

1:54:45 I don’t know very many that are like that. Now they are out there. They’re probably the ones that everybody else sees on TV. I’m like, I don’t know a guy like that. But they do exist, obviously.

1:54:58 So, I think it’s cool to have a platform or just be able to share what I love and let people understand what hunting is to what I would consider a large majority of hunters. I think that that would be a cool thing to be able to look back on and say, I was a part of that thought change. Should everybody go hunting once? That’s a good question. I think that everyone should be open to the idea of it.

1:55:32 Maybe they decide it’s not for them, but I think that they should really think about it. They should sit down and say, why don’t I? Why would I not go hunting? Well, it’s killing an animal. Okay, but existing, you’re killing animals.

1:55:50 When you go to a restaurant or an order of burgers, there might be hundreds of animals in that one fast food burger. You’re killing lots of animals. If you eat meat, if you don’t eat meat, you’re still having an impact that kills animals. Your habitat’s lost. Think about it in a critical way.

1:56:05 Think, okay, for me to exist, something has to die. Could I be responsible for that directly? And what might I learn about myself and what my existence is if I had to see it? Like, at least think about it. Maybe you come to a conclusion, Yeah, I couldn’t do it, but it’s not that bad.

1:56:27 It’s probably better than a lot of systems that are out there as far as sustaining yourself. Just like, at least have the thought, could you do it? Yeah, yeah. If I were to ask a bunch of your friends what makes you a great hunter, what would they say it is? What makes you exceptional and what would you do?

1:56:46 Time in the field, just being out there, passion for it too, just not stopping, I guess. Not stopping in the way of, like if I’m out there, I like to be out there. I have not a ton of desire that I have to be somewhere else. I’m in that moment and because of that, I feel like I’ve learned a lot and that time, just like anything, you do something a million times, you’re gonna get pretty good at it. You’re gonna notice things that the person that does it casually will never notice or see.

1:57:19 And so I feel like that time in the field has really allowed me to see things in a way but very few people will ever see him, and I think when people go out with me or whatever, I get to impart a little bit of that knowledge to them. They can see something that is just like their brain might not ever pick up, but I’ve picked up over just the amount of time spent out in the wild. Does your wife hate the fact that you’re gone 300 days a year? Um, no, she supports me.

1:57:46 However, I have changed my lifestyle a little bit, and I don’t know, I probably am not gone that many days anymore, but I still am out quite a lot, and she’ll go with me as well, so that makes it nice, it’s fun. Okay, so she did the one hunt, is she gonna go out? Yeah, she’s been on other hunts since then, like she really took to it and really enjoys it, and especially even if she’s not the one hunting, just enjoys going out, being out there. In the wilderness? Yeah.

1:58:16 But it’s different than camping and different than hiking. Yeah. There’s a whole nother level to it. There is, for sure. Right, it sounds like a great way to connect with nature.

1:58:23 It is. You personally, just wondering, if you look back on your life, what was one of the best days, and what was one of the worst days of your life?

1:58:35 Yeah, it was the same day, actually. I don’t know, I’ve got a lot of best day, worst day things.

1:58:47 The day that I, that was a pick one. Probably the day that I found my wife was one of the best days and the worst days. We dated for a while and she actually moved to San Diego and I had my thing and we just kind of just drifted apart. And then a few years later, we were planning on reconnecting and I’d always thought I would marry her. That was awesome.

1:59:33 I had just got back from Alaska, actually. And I got back and we were planning on it. She had moved back to Nevada and we were gonna meet up. And I get, I literally am unpacking my stuff from a, I think it was probably like a two week trip in Alaska. unpacking my stuff and my phone rings and it’s her sister.

1:59:54 I hadn’t heard from her sister in a couple years and she says, have you heard about Danielle? No, what happened? Said, she’s missing. She went for a hike and no one can find her. At this point, I’m like, this isn’t good.

2:00:13 This is a high desert. It’s like how long she been gone. I think it was like two days at this point. So if you don’t know much about the high desert, it’s high elevation but dry. And so what you get is in the daytime, you get really super hot temperatures.

2:00:29 And then at night, it’s close to freezing. So it can be, it’s a pretty inhospitable place. So I called my brother and my friend, Joe, and I told him what happened. I said, I need to get out. I said, I’m going out there to see what I can do.

2:00:48 And they came over, I loaded up my pack like I was going hunting, spotting scope, tripod, binocular optics, some mountain house meals, a light sleeping bag, just loaded up my pack and drove out there, it was about two hours away, a pretty remote area, near a pretty rural town, not very many people, and we pull in, It’s just about evening time. We get up to the search and rescue kind of like base camp. And one of the guys had recognized me and was like normally they don’t let people into the kind of like, no one go up here because we’re doing a search and rescue effort.

2:01:33 The Black Hawk helicopter had been searching in this canyon for the day and had to return back to base. And so I was pretty much like, and she’s like, I’m gonna go and see what we can do. Because they were coming back for the evening to essentially take a break. And so I said, okay, well, you know, let me know, like, what was going on? So they took us up, they said the dogs had run up, followed a trail, like, scenting dogs, gone up to these, like, cliff base area, turned around, and come back.

2:02:10 And they’re asking, like, well, how far would she be, you know, a couple miles? and she trained for marathons in all her time hiking all over the world. We never once stayed on a trail. They were kind of in their mind, oh, she’ll be on a trail and she’ll be within a couple of miles. I said, she could be within 20 miles and probably no trail.

2:02:29 So the dogs had gone up and come back and then they did it again, gone up and come back. So they were under the assumption that she had walked up, walked back and then had possibly been taken. There was like a report of a vehicle, some vehicle leaving, someone had seen her on the trail with no gear, just no water, nothing, just running clothes or whatever. So, I just loaded up my pack, me and my brother and my friend, and we went with one of the search and rescue guys in his little vehicle.

2:03:03 And so, we drove up and he, they decided, hey, before it gets, his son was starting to go down at this point. He said, they were like, well, we’re gonna go work up where the dogs were, maybe the guys didn’t really work in the cliffs or anything, and so we’re gonna go up there and look in there. I said, okay, so then I, before, on the drive out there, I told myself, I said, I’m not gonna listen to anything anyone says. Because they haven’t found her. Whatever their assumption is, it’s wrong.

2:03:37 So I’m just gonna do what feels right to me. And so the guy is driving up and he’s like, okay, well this is where the road ends and it’s starting to get dark at this point and I see this basin up in the left and I think to myself, that’s where I would go. So I say, okay, just drop me here. And I said, I’m not coming back until I find her. And I meant it.

2:03:59 I was, yeah, I was leaving in the middle of the night. It was a moonless night. You aren’t gonna find anyone in the dark. But I thought, I’m just gonna hike as far as I can and I’m just gonna be ready in the morning, maybe, I don’t know. So I walk up the trail and I’m just going straight up the mountain.

2:04:24 And now at this point I’m walking, it’s dark and flashlighting around and it just feels hopeless. I mean, I honestly felt like, and then all the thoughts go in your mind. am I gonna never find her? Am I going to walk up on a dead body? I’m thinking to myself, how could I recover after that?

2:04:50 Or like, just so, so unknown and just like this horrible feeling. I’m literally in the middle of this mountain, just, it just felt hopeless. I’m literally just praying, like, give me a sign. Like, this just doesn’t feel like it could work. and I look down and I see what looks, it’s a track, but it’s steep and it’s just like a scuff.

2:05:15 And I think, God, it just didn’t feel right. There’s a lot of deer tracks in the area, but this track, it wasn’t a full track, it was just the way that the dirt was moved in my flashlight, looked wrong, followed it. And then it disappeared and it got up on this bench and I just had this weird feeling. and I saw a light at the top of the mountain and before I left, I’d asked for a flier, like to get a flier system there, infrared, because in the desert, it heats up the rocks and they get really hot, but as it cools down, you need to use it first thing in the morning while it’s still dark, because then once the temperature off the rocks is cool, you might be able to pick up some heat signatures or something.

2:06:00 I thought maybe some kind of heat, and this is big basins there There’s some pretty steep cliffs. I was thinking, did it just fall off a cliff? Who knows? But I thought, well, they saw a light a ways away. I thought, well, maybe they’d come up with a flier system.

2:06:18 So I radio my brother and I say, I’m gonna go check this light out. I get up there and it just happened to be some random people out there. They had no clue, someone was missing. I showed them a picture on my cell phone today. If you see anybody, you know, they’re like, Okay, cool, keep an eye out.

2:06:35 So, I radio my brother and friend and I’m like, man, this doesn’t, I was like, this just doesn’t feel promising. They’re like, I don’t know, we’ve been looking around. Maybe we just save our energy and time for the morning. We set up and we just use our optics and try to spot in the morning because it’s not real timbered, but it is in a broken country, maybe we can spot her. I think, okay, and I thought about it, I said, you know, I’m just gonna go back to this one spot that I, I just gotta go check it out one more time.

2:07:12 So I work back to that spot, and I get back in there and I’m just, it’s dark, and I’m just like, I owe it. Danielle, this is Remy, if you can hear me, I am not leaving till I find you. I’m sitting there, quiet, no moon, and in the dark I hear Remy, and it was so faint. I honest to God thought I was just my head playing tricks on me. And I take my radio out and I radio the other two guys and I say, I said I heard her.

2:07:46 Get a medical team up here now, I’m turning my radio off. Because if she yells out one more time and that’s all I get, I mean it’s just this big basin. You have no clue where that noise is coming from. And if she makes another noise and that radio’s going off, Like, I just, so I shut the radio off and I flicked my, they saw my light, or I had my light, I assumed they could’ve seen it if they got into a place where they could see me. And I yelled out again, nothing, nothing, nothing.

2:08:12 Well, I just kind of started taking off in a direction that I thought the noise was coming from, but I honestly thought it was way across in this canyon where before it got dark, I’d seen this band of cliffs. So I get to, like, run a little bit and I’m trying to essentially running quiet like I was stalking something, because I need to hear, but I need to move fast, just in case the sound goes off again. And I yell out again and I hear Remy and I flip my light on and she’s right below me on the same side of the hill as me, in the dark, just completely confused.

2:08:52 And I’m like, oh my gosh, no way. So I run up to her and I’m thinking like, Oh, hug, this is great. And she had a look on her face, like she had no clue where she was, who she was, just out of it. I was like, do you know who I am? I think so.

2:09:09 Do you know who you are? I don’t know. Like just, like scared and out of it. And so I turned the radio back on, I call my brother and Joe, and they, I’m like, I got her up here. At that point, somebody had called the EMS and search and rescue sheriff and what have you and they got a vehicle.

2:09:35 I think my buddy had actually ran down to the base camp where some of the guys were sleeping and said, Remy heard her, we gotta go. And the guy was like, yeah, somebody thought they heard something that could have been a mountain lion. We were just gonna save our energy for the morning search. And this little UTV, this is the best part of this story to me. So my buddy Joe goes, he’s just like had enough.

2:09:58 He goes, I’m commandeering your vehicle. And then he gets in the vehicle and rips down the road and meets the EMS guys and when the sheriff gets there, he goes, where’d you get that? He’s like, just follow me. They end up making it to the top of the mountain. And then there’s like a road on one of these ridges, like a pretty rough road, but they’re able to get that side by side up there.

2:10:19 And then my brother ran up from the bottom, met up with us and we just kind of, you know, tried to make her comfortable, tried to give her water, like she took a sip of water and spit it up, just like fire, like just not having any water for a long period of time. You know, it was a really weird experience because I had never seen someone in that state. You hear these stories all the time, like so many snowmobilers get lost and they’re dead naked in the cold, frozen to death.

2:10:51 And you just, your brain essentially shuts down at some point, doesn’t really, you know what to do, but you just can’t do it. Wow. But yeah, we got her back, got her to the hospital, we’re rehydrated, and now we’re married. I guess it’s hard to say no to the proposal. Yeah, exactly, I can always hold that overhead.

2:11:12 Remember that time I saved your life? And so where? You sure I have to take the trash out? I’m sure you still do. So she went off running and kinda got lost and then got dehydrated, and then?

2:11:22 Yeah, well she wasn’t, she hadn’t been feeling good. Thought, oh, I’ll go out for whatever, maybe that’ll make me feel better, but she hadn’t really slept or eaten before that. I think from what we can gather, what I can gather is went out, got probably heat stroke or some kind of whatever, woke up and had no clue which way to go, where she was. So she just said, okay, I’m just gonna stay here. She knew that much.

2:11:56 I think she said there was a little, some kind of like, she tried to drink something, but she just decided to stay where she was. She heard the helicopter fly over and was trying to flag it down, but they didn’t see her. And then, yeah, she, which is good, like if you are lost, generally the people that stay What are the people that survive? Unless you accidentally walk the right direction. Sometimes it is an accident.

2:12:24 If you have no clue which way to go, you’re picking one way out of a million options and hoping that that’s the right way. But. It wasn’t for you though, would she have made it? I don’t think so. She doesn’t think so.

2:12:38 That’s crazy. I don’t know though. You never know. So all of those skills that you learned out on the hunt made it happen that day. I mean, that’s needle in a haystack type stuff.

2:12:49 You can find her at night, I mean. You know, I think it’s one of those things where you, who knows? A lot of, I go out there and you do essentially that same thing, you get good at finding things that are really hard to find. And some of it, when you do it a lot, you might not really even know why you do certain things. It might feel like an instinct, and maybe it’s just a bunch of ones and zeros in your head, in your brain, being a super computer, saying I’ve experienced this, I’ve experienced this, I’ve experienced this, and taking it all in at once and processing something that you really can’t even, is faster than your thought could even think.

2:13:27 I think that that has a lot to do with it, and that is a lot of the instinct that you get, that time in the field, the primal instinct of how do I find something to survive and just being able to tap into that. Yeah, and you trust your instincts. I do. That’s so, so powerful. Yeah, because I think that by being out there enough, you get a sense of a feeling that I almost attribute to just your brain processing things that your mind, it’s just too fast for you to think it.

2:14:02 You just, you know it and just manifests as a feeling because you’ve been doing it for so long. And once I start, I just say like trust in my gut. Even before that bear attack happened, I had a bad feeling. And I think it was the bad feeling it makes sense. We did something stupid.

2:14:19 We stopped below a cache of meat that I would normally never do. Of course, that’s where the odds, now you have that feeling and then you go, no, let’s not eat here, let’s eat somewhere else, and then nothing happens. And you just think, well, whatever. You’re being paranoid or whatever. Because if you just keep going with that, you might rely on those instincts of survival, those instincts that you’ve gained over time spent in the field and you just let your brain do the processing for you and you don’t have to think about it.

2:14:51 So when you think about it, you talk yourself out of a lot of good things, a lot of good ideas. I think most people don’t trust their instincts. We always just try to logically figure it out or we have so many inputs that we’re like, oh, my mom said this or everybody says I should do this or the right thing to do is this that we don’t even know we have an instinct sometimes. It’s taken me a long time to trust them and still got a ways to go. That’s it, doing a show called Solo Hunter, I just go out and film myself.

2:15:19 So I spent a lot of time out there by myself. And that was the best way for me to really learn how to truly hunt and be in the outdoors. Because you’re just, you’re self-reliant. You have nobody, it’s instantaneous decision-making when you’re by yourself. And in today’s world, we’ve really lost the skill of instantaneous decision-making.

2:15:41 Making decisions for ourself. When we go, of course, getting input is a great thing, but I’ve learned so much more being by myself, having to rely on my skills, because I wasn’t using something else as a crutch. Nobody else was there, I just had to learn it. I had to be good at it. I had to get through that situation and know how to overcome it, and that was only gained through my own experience, not someone else’s experience, and because of that, I gained a lot of experience.

2:16:10 Yeah, yeah, it’s powerful stuff, it’s a powerful story. Remy, I always ask people a few questions at the end of the show, I’m gonna ask you, if you could pick up a phone and call up the 20-year-old Remy, and tell that young man some advice, stuff that you know now, what would you tell him?

2:16:30 I think I would just tell him, yeah, go for it, you know? I remember 20 years ago, kind of like looking in the mirror and thinking, trying to think into the future. and it’s right where I am today. And that’s a cool thing, I think. I’ve kind of been focused on stuff, and when I get something in my mind and I want it, then I just figure out a way to make it happen.

2:16:56 That’s, a lot of people want to do something, but they honestly give themselves backup plans and other things, and I just get something in my head, and that’s what I want to do, and I do it. And I don’t give myself a backup plan, because I’ll just go with the easier out otherwise. So if something’s what I want, I just go do it. I don’t really think about it, just do it. Just start doing it.

2:17:17 And that’s becoming a better hunter, television shows, pushing the limits on different ways of hunting. That’s something you always have done. Yeah. So you tell a 20-year-old to just do that. Just do you.

2:17:28 Yeah, just do it. Gotcha. On that same note, best advice you ever received? Could it come from a fellow hunter or your dad or just someone? Someone maybe in the television business, but just best advice?

2:17:40 It was actually that same advice, and it was from my dad. I think, I remember thinking, I wanna guide, and I thought, I wanna be a hunting guy. And I was like, how do you even become a hunting guy? I was like, I don’t know, just go, you can do it, go do it, just don’t think about it, just do it. You’ll figure it out.

2:18:06 You start doing it, you’ll figure it out. I was like, what’s that mean? I just loaded up my truck and went to Montana and started hunting and was like, I’m just out here in the wild just doing it. I’m gonna learn this area and then I ran into some other people that ended up being a guide and he’s like, hey, you’re out here a lot. Yeah, I got nothing else to do, I’m just doing it.

2:18:25 Oh yeah, instead of working against us, why don’t you work for us? Yeah, that sounds great, that’s exactly what I want. Just by going all in, doing it, figuring it out, not giving myself a real good backup option, just kind of doing it. I mean, it seems like a, how do you do that? If you’ve got something you wanna do, well, the filming for the TV, I wanted to do an outdoor TV show.

2:18:48 I just got my own camera and started filming a show that didn’t exist, learning photography and making a show for myself that no one would ever see. And it turned into a TV show. And it’s like, what, 10 seasons on Amazon? 10 seasons, yeah. That’s crazy.

2:19:02 Yeah, just by just doing it. Just doing it, yeah. Don’t wait for permission. I guess I was hoping I don’t have to pay Nike for that, but yeah, just do it, whatever it is you want to do. Figure it out.

2:19:14 Yeah, that’s good advice. Last piece of advice to that 20 year old that’s watching us right now, that’s listened to this conversation. Maybe they’re curious about hunting, but what advice do you give to them? The following success secrets are only available inside the London Real Tribe, where you get exclusive access and insights from our high performance guests on wealth creation, productivity, leadership, morning routines, health, and well-being. To join our tribe community, go to londonreal.tv forward slash tribe.

2:19:47 Now, let’s continue with the show. Remy, thanks so much for coming. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you having me. This is really good.

2:19:56 I think it was really powerful to hear the story, especially about your wife and then like that whole process and to kind of understand what’s going on in your head, why you hunt and what you get out of it And yeah, just the whole connection to the environment, I think, is a lot of stuff people think about. Just this whole theme that to live, almost by definition, you’re taking life. And it’s always been that way. And maybe it’s only recently that we start looking that through an ethical lens, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true.

2:20:23 And maybe that’s something we need to kind of accept. Maybe we’re over-intellectualizing a lot of stuff these days. But when you get out in nature, nature doesn’t intellectualize anything, does she? No. It’s all, it’s just a cycle of life, as we get out there.

2:20:37 And I guess the longer you spend in it, the more maybe you become in tune with it, so. This is really good stuff and I’m looking forward to doing this. I think next year I’m gonna go out for one of these adventures. Yeah, I’ll be, I’m really interested to hear your take on it and what you come away with. It’s cool especially because you’ve seen every side of it and to be interested in it, I think you’re asking the right questions And whether you decide, this isn’t for me, I think it’s just asking yourself the question.

2:21:11 It’s really a, it’s a powerful thing. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to what I have to say. Well, thank you. No, I appreciate it. I think I’m gonna try it.

2:21:20 So you might see me out in Idaho or Montana. Yeah. But yeah, I’m gonna do this and hopefully document it and let people know a lot of the questions that I’m asking and curiosity and just see how this all wraps up. but this feels like, you know, I almost wasn’t a father until three years ago. I almost, and one thing I realized when I had kids is that like, I can’t believe I almost didn’t take this ride.

2:21:42 It’s like walking around Disneyland and not going on the Matterhorn. It’s like, what are you crazy? And then when I had kids, I was like, wow, I understand this whole human existence so differently, even though I was terrified to do it, you know? And so, hunting feels like the same thing. It’s like, sure, there’s a bear to entry and I’m sure it’s gonna be saddening or scary or whatever, and I don’t want to take this life, but there could be a whole other set of connections and knowledge out there that I might leave this planet with whatever I’m experiencing, and that seems like a silly thing not to do, so.

2:22:15 So yeah, I’ll keep you posted on it. Yeah, go. And thanks for everything you do. We’re looking forward to your shows and watching more on the podcast and all that stuff. So people should look out for you on Amazon websites and the podcast is coming out soon as well, right?

2:22:29 Yep, yeah. Okay, all right. Social media or wherever people find things these days. You’re on Instagram and posts and all that stuff. Okay, good stuff.

2:22:37 Again, thanks so much for having me and maybe I’ll see you out in the wilderness one of these days. Yeah, awesome. All right, cool. Thanks, appreciate it.