00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bog bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X. All right, folks, we're here in Southern Colorado? Are you entroing the show? Yohnnie? I just messing around starting I could though. That's all I'm gonna say about it. Southern Colorado. Yeah, that's enough. Um. You know what I was thinking about recently, uh, that I wanted to I think I kind of told you about it already, but I thought you'd like it. As I saw a dude he had a shirt. You know, people will go to a um like the Super Bowl whatever, or someone will win the Super Bowl, yes, and people have a shirt they'll say, like the Bears, yeah, super Bowl champions. I saw a guy recently that had a shirt commemorating the fact that he watched that big Solary clips. It was like Solary Clips two eighteen or whatever. You know, I thought you'd appreciate you like that. I like it well, I thought you'd like it. I didn't give a shift. I thought you'd like it. Oh you didn't your ship. I mean I liked it, but like it as much as I thought you'd like it. Yeah, we should make something that just say, like Elk Season twenty nineteen. I would be a good idea. Um, Remember we're talking about me saying that you'll appreciate this seth the flip flop flasher, me saying that I gave up on flip flops because of someone saying, like, how are you going to rescue your family? Yeah, or defend your wife? Or defend your wife if you're wearing flip flops. I'd be curious to get your take on this, Rock Denver, I have mixed feelings. I definitely appreciate both sides of it. I lived in Hawaii for about a year before I joined the Navy, and flip flops is like general attire. I mean, that's that's what you wear, whether it's a formal event or you're on the beach or head of the beach, and your feet become like belt radial. So I'd say, because you get so much barefoot time over there as well, So if you had to rescue your family over there, They're probably prepped to go barefoot if need be. Yeah. So I felt like at a time I probably had that capacity for work, but now I live somewhere in between. I do like having the kit if things go wrong, I'm off the races, grabbing one kid, my brides grabbing the other kid, and we're surviving the zombie apocalypse. But I like a flip flop man, still flip flop. Yeah, I'm real torn on it. Man. Like I said, I quit for a while, but I'm thinking about getting back into it now because it's a wintertime now. Well, getting back into it weather improves. But I took a little break because my buddy Dave, um, my buddy Dave was telling I think I told the story right. My buddy Dave was telling a story where he was in He's from Montana, but he was in New York and he comes into a comedy club with his wife and he's got his flip flops on, and the comedian on stage brates him. It's like, where the hell are you from because he was like surprised to see a guy wearing flip flops in in the city. Yeah, I think I don't think you should wear flip flops in New York City because you're not prepared. We're not prepared. It's also dirty. Well, he didn't like it, and that made my buddy Dave's really questioned. And then I showed up and flip flops and Dave was like, you are the last guy that planet I thought would wear flip flops. What is going on? Then I quit. So after talking about his flipop thing, we got two pieces of feedback from people UM, one pro flip flop and one UH con flip flopper against flip flop against flip flop guys talking about how last December he UH comes home on his lunch break and sees that there's a car park in his driveway and his side gates open and the French doors in the back of his house are open. And he credits his leather boots with the fact that he had was emboldened to run into his house and confront the intruder. And he says that if he'd been wearing his flip flops, he would have been stuck out front calling nine on one. But he goes in. He's sure someone's in his house robbing his house. He barrels into the house yelling, who's at my house? And has met there by a dude who burglar who is brandishing the guy's own seven like the burglar ran in found his three fifty seven and is holding his three seven. They get into a scuffle and he knocks the glasses off of the guy and then Hall's ass out of his house and runs away, leaving the burglar in the house with the pistol. Later, when the cops come over, they find that that the glasses that the I knocked off during the scuffle, and they're able to pull a DNA sample off the glasses and catch a career burglar, and he credits his having not had his flip flops on. But another guy is talking about he takes his wife. This guy's in North Carolina. He takes his wife to some fancy resort and his wife goes into the bathroom and he's sitting there eating and sees that there's this rat scurring around and she's not happy about the rat. He tells the waitress about the situation. Eventually, the rat comes by and comes within seven feet and he's got those big you know, those big keen flip flops, like super heavy duty flip flops. He says he took that flip flop and Joe Joe killed the rat hucking a flip flop at it. So he said, in that case, it was his flip flops that enabled him to defend his wife from the rat from the big scary and they gave him a hunter daughter credit. Oh there you go at the resort. So you think he's gonna go back to that rat field resort. So point being it's inconclusive weather. Flip flops, Um, you know our appropriate attire. If we're making arguments on the toughness of flip flops, I will say when stationed on both coasts in the seal teams, the west coast of the seal teams in mass wears flip flops at a high, high level. So if you're just trying to like evaluate the the raw toughness of those people that wear flip flops, there's at least one subgroup that will live a large portion of their life in flip flops whose toughness is probably unquestioned, who are probably capable of defending their wives. Uh, you read that book black Hawk Down, you might be able to get some perspective on this. I know people that were there. Yeah. I read the book Black Hawk Down, and in it, the author Mark bowden Um talks about some developing tensions within the ranks of people in Somalia, and one point of contention was that certain guys on this base were allowed to wear flip flops while on guard duty military that they would maybe not allowed, but they were taking the liberty to stand there with a flak vest. What do you call a flag vest? Yeah, flat, flat jacket. I mean that's old altar body arm. They would have shorts, flip flops, a flak jacket while standing guard, and other people from other units weren't allowed to do this, and it was creating some tension. There would be some aesthetic of seeing somebody in that gear that would appeal to me, and I would probably be equally piste that they were in that outfit standing. So you'd look at it and be like, yeah, yeah, like I like what this guy believes in, and I would probably holler at him to go put some combat books. That's some pants um on the on the subject, on on the ongoing subject of what to do with your dead body when you die. This guy, he this guy writes in he was talking about this with his wife, and his wife proposed to him that she could take his ashes and integrate him into a salt mineral lick and then put like stir him into a mineral lick and put it out so that that, uh, that's how his ashes could go consumed by dear so that he could give something back after all that they had given to him. That I like it. Yeah, I like that too. Uh. Notthing I wanted to talk about is, yeah, like I was observing the air day an emerging trend. And this might not even resonate with people who don't live in sort of like posh mountain towns, But in posh mountain towns there's an emerging mom being one of yeah, but I mean catch them. Like all the posh mountain towns. There's an emerging trend of of having your pickup truck and and and instead of keeping your ship in your truck, you strap it to the outside of your truck. And I was observing this to you, and it seemed to agitate your honest that I even had the audacity to make the observation. You got pretty hot. You got pretty hot, just like and just that's that's the part that got me is that I couldn't believe that over such a thing, that you were affected so much personally on the inside, Like I don't really care if you like it or don't like it, but the fact that it sort of affected you and that you were like really worked up, that these people choose to do this, whether it's fashion or for whatever reason. Fashion, yeah, it's fashion, but it's just interesting to me to find that you like it affects you so much. Yeah, you like, there's no way that, Like where I grew up, where everybody, like you know, all the people hunt for ride up drive pickup trucks, there's no way that what you do if you like to hunt fish, you get a truck and you put a top around it and then you put your your stuff in there. But wasn't there a subset of that group that would have some ksey lights even though they really never really needed them, but they had freaking lights on their truck with some lights would not be out of the question, even though they really cruised around in fashion doing whatever you do with and we would weld up, uh, we would weld up uh bumper guards that were excessive, Like you'd start with aid inch sea channel and weld that to the frame, not like you start with aid inch sea channel, raft around and then just build from there and looking and at the time I didn't recognize it as such, but to be totally honest, looking back on it, there was a fashion element to who could have the craziest brush guard? Yeah, now it's just that who couldn't have the most overlake? What is it? It's it called overland. I don't know. Yeah, I mean I think it seems like yeah, yeah. The ear day, I was sitting there and the guy pulls up. I was looking out our office wind when the guy pulls up and he's yeah. He looked like you're Samity sam Um, like all this ship, gas cans, water cans, shovels, pick axes, but Jack all hooked it out and then like, what's the inside the truck? I don't know, room for the kayak or the stand up paddle. I just feel like at my like like, I don't know, man, at forty five years of age, I'm just hitting the age where I look at stuff and I don't like it. But I just look at the age where I just get like like things will catch my eye and irritate me a little bit that they shouldn't. And you're not there yet because you're less, you're younger. Yeah, Seth was saying for his rig. You know he's got a n f J, so it's a little bit. It is all your ship strapped to the outside of your truck. No, nobody wants you wish. I wish some ship was strapped to the outside though. How old are you look? Sweet? We had this conversation the other day in the car um and there was two things that I would put on the outside, one being fuel canisters because it smells. It smells, and the FJ has such a small tank that I'm always hauling, Like if I go hunting, I throw my hitch carrier in with a tank of gas on who makes that? Who makes the your I know your rig? But what what kind of rig is that? It's a Toyota f Jake cruiser. You think it's a hunting rig? Oh it is. It's just a little small That's why I need ships trapped on the outside. And you think it looks sweet? Oh yeah, I like it. Yeah, it's a badass, a little rake. No, I mean you think it'd be sweeter if you had like pots and pans and ship hanging off it. No, no, I don't need that ship. But it's older, what what years? It's two seven, you know, it's not like the old. It's not the old. Yeah. Um, I could use fuel canisters and I wouldn't I wouldn't mind having a pooie tent. Oh really, dude, tell me about the tent. Why do you Why do you want it? Because because he thinks it looks sweet. No, it's like you get one of those like, oh my god, No, I'm gonna head down now. I'm already to go down to the brew pub. No, dude. Most most of the time when I'm going hunting on the weekends, like I'll I like to hunt out in eastern Montana, bunch, So we go out there. We'll roll up at like you know, ten eleven o'clock at night. You sleep under your vehicle. When I was your age, we slept under our trucks. Now we do that sometimes or in them. But it would be nice for you if you slouch in the front seat and sleep. It would be nice. When you show up you're tired, You last thing you want to do is put up a tent. You just pop up the tapui and go to bed. You get under the vehicle and sleep down there. You know, we're coming from coming from a guy that's been looking at buying a camper young children. Okay, well camper though, scamp I'm signed yet maybe you look at had put it on from in the middle of this crazy But I have young children too, but I haven't gotten so soft as to consider the idea of a camper yet, taking putting it out there that, like, you know, there's just sort of different levels. You can't say just because you have kids all of a sudden, now it's like okay to have a camper. And because he's eight and wants a tapui tent makes him soft? Didn't sleep under his Okay, here's okay, I'm gonna put it the breath. Now I'm gonna put the rest. But here's the thing say about it's like this, Why and I bring this up. I brought us up a number of time, so we get some things. Why is it that that that, uh, left wing people tend to have more food allergies than right wing people, Like I don't know, gluten intolerance is a left wing ailment? Okay? Why do old people not like to puoi tense to tense appeal to people to to They appeal to people of a certain age bracket who live in a certain kind of town. Yeah, but I think I'm gonna argue that because because a guy that owns part of our where our office is, is an overlander and is at least ten years our senior, maybe fifteen, and he rocks it to Pouie. I mean, but you gotta have money to have one of these, and like that is that that's your hobby. You gotta have money, man, and you that, like, I mean, you can do it on the chief. Also, I think it's like the Instagram sort of thing, you know what I mean, And that's where the young people's element of it comes in. It's like it's an Instagram thing. Dude. I'm an instagram man too. I love Instagram at Steve Ronella, I love it. I love it. Yeah, you're right, you're right. Let's see, yeah we saw. Yeah. You know. It's like my wife she doesn't let me talking to waitresses and stuff anymore because I'm just too old, you know, to like have any kind of chit chat. She's like, at your age, if there's an attractive waitress, just shut up, just like, just order what you need, Just order what you need. You can't banter anymore. You're too old to banter with waitresses. And I think I just need to stop talking about this kind of stuff. But real quick, um, uh you wanna do you wanna try to sell your thing? Your car? Right now? Oh? Yeah, I got a I got a two thousand eighteen out back, sixteen thousand miles on it. It's got a topper. It's got a two leete upper. It's in Los Angeles. They're not called toppers. What do you what do you call it? Cargo toppers? Like bad car talk called topper. I used to call it a pot. It's I got the pod pot on top. Dude, you got a cargo carrier? Cargo carrier? Whatever is rocket box? Yeah, it's a rocket box. Uh yeah, it's in What do you need for it? It's in Los Angeles. Lazy jumpers, Chris gil Ridge Pounder. I'm trying to get twenty two for it. How the context is your Instagram? Do you have a lot of pictures of you adventuring, no overlanding. It's got stock tired and no overlanding. So how do they find you? They want to buy your rig at Christopher gil on Instagram. Send me a message, M Yeah, what else we got? Honest? I got one more? Yeah, we gotta get to No, no, I got one more, one more. I like to now and that like to catch up on feedback stuff. A guy wrote in this is good because this is a segue. Honnie. A guy wrote in he works, he's security. He's like a security guy Yelso National Park. And he gets uh complaint, He gets a complaint just he says, like just last night, I had to respond to a noise complaint from a guest. And the noise complaint was, can you please do something about that elk bugling near my hotel room? It's driving me crazy? Uh, And I thought that was pretty funny. And also at one point, as someone asked the guy, at what elevation do elk turn into moose um? But there's this thing. I think there's this thing that keeps happening to Yellowstone. Where it's a little bit confusing is where people there's been a lot in the news of people getting too close, like this year, like some guy got his little girl like super close to a bison in it threw up in the air and it keeps happening, and people keep and it seems like when it happens, there's sort of this thing where people are very quick to condemn the individual and how stupid the individual is for doing something so dangerous. Right, it's like the same story, like this guy in BC has got arrested or got a bunch of trouble because he got out I was trying to have it. He was trying to box with a grizzly bear. He's trying to taunt a grizzly into a fight, you know, and he got in trouble, and so in like Backpacker magazine is the big thing about what an idiot this guy is and how horrible it is, right, how dangerous it is. But then like when I think about this, and you'll talk about people being dangerous around animals, how can there be that? Like there's a movie about a guy that free solos l cap. It's exceedingly dangerous, the most dangerous thing you could do, right, But then he's like celebrated for being dangerous. Why is it that you can do that and be celebrated and they're going to give you an oscar and like you're the coolest thing on the planet and you can do all the talk shows, but if you want to box a grizzly, you're like any of the people. I think because the dude that climbed that mountain prepared over a lifetime to develop a skill set to then go do said exceptionally dangerous thing. Do you know that the guy that wanted the box the grizzly didn't I don't guess it wasn't Mike Tyson. Yeah, It's just like the thing that keeps happening. I think. I think, like, I'm like, is danger cool or not cool? Because if you want to if you want to go pet a buffalo, oh my fine, yeah, No, I'm for dangerous. It's not like you're wanting to stab it. If you want to just go up and see how close and see if it will gore you. I feel like, like, I mean, not with a kid that that that was egregious. No, that was like a bad call. And I don't know about the kid's parents, but I just don't think it's like that bad. If you if some person, like an adult makes a con just a decision to go and taunt an animal and then the animal gores him, I don't know. Man, I look at it, like, you know, I think people just set because you're fucking with an animal, you're not you don't pose any danger to it. Well I know, but it's like I think there's when you compare it to something like Alex Hanold, who's like that's like his he's like an athlete, that's like his thing, and there's like that acceptance of risk that he takes, you know, and the people that typically do that. I mean, sure, maybe the guy was preparing for his whole life to box at grizzly bear. But will you ever watch the movie Grizzly Project. No, but the guy that gets uh in a skirmish with the grizzly and then designs a suit that yeah wear and so that guy, Yeah, but then he couldn't get a barried to attack him when he had a suit on. That's a great movie. Yeah, his buddy runs him over to pick up just to test this. Yeah, yeah, I see that guy. But go on, I don't know, man, I think that. I think people just when they see people messing with animals, like taunting them to get attacked or something, or getting too close, I think they get more defensive for the animal and get angry at the person for being for like just leave it alone. You know this the best they could come up with in this article condemning the guy from wanting to box the grizzly bear. The best they could come up with it was that it was bad because the grizzly bear then might expect to box other individuals who weren't willing participants in the boxing. That's the best they could come up with, and why it's bad to go and like do they just mean mall yeah, but then I'm sure that he's not gonna box. It's just like you know, I you know, and I used to do it too, Like when someone would get injured by an animal, I'd be like, Oh, that idiot. But then I start thinking like, I don't know, I don't think it's safe to I don't think it's safe to feel that way anymore, you know, like if you get up close to if you want to go get up close to a moose and see what happens and the moose beats your ass, I think it should just be like, you know, I just feel like I'd be like, oh, that's that's a decision he came to. It's your decision, man, it's like bull riders. Yeah exactly. Yeah, they hop on a I don't know how two thousand pound bull that wants to kick their ass every time. Yeah, I haven't sorted it out in my head, but it just occurred to me only yesterday when we were walking around. It occurred to me only yesterday. Why does it bother me when I hear about someone doing something stupid in a park? And I started questioning myself. But I don't think bull right, Yeah, I didn't think about that example. But yeah, bull riders aren't. Um I think people could. I think there's a large group of people that can that make the argument that no offense any bull riders listening, that bull riders have a they're not, you know, playing with a whole. I don't say it's don't don't say this. I don't say this. I have like a lot of respect and admiration from advocate. I'm just playing Devil's advocate. I don't have any problem with bull riders. Yeah, I think that's like that is like what I would have liked to have done with my life. Man, about taunting of animals, yes, I mean that's some serious taunting. But I'm totally fine and I'm fine with going up if you want to go petal Buffalo and gets smashed like I just I'm done acting like, oh those stupid people, because I get caught in that trap. And the thing is, there's like this thing going on where a single hour people like oh and yeah, you know, and Yellowstone or whatever, and National parks. They're like people think they're like theme parks. They don't realize that the animals are wild animals. But the but the same people who are most likely to point that out, in the same institutions that create that thing, are actually fostering and developing that sense that wildlife is somehow a theme park, you know, coming from the same thing. It's like you're creating this thing and then condemning people for sort of going along with what it is. Like you create an environment wildlife it's totally habituated, but then you get mad at people who think that it's habituated. Mm hmm. It's a good point. Yeah, it's a hard it's a hard thing to um saws out man. We used to chase moose. I don't know why. That's not smart. No, we were younger. We would chase him. Yeah, if you saw him you chase them. See how close you get to him. Well, if you didn't know they were danging, I mean no, I knew, moose don't seem dangerous. We knew a lot of people don't know that. It was just like we'd it was like bull riding. It was like bull riding. Yeah, oh yeah, he kick us off more. We're supposed to talk about sometimes the bull chases you, though, doesn't it. Steve mhm um Colorado Conlo threw over one cut, threw out one more. Listener feedback on last one last, This is a good one. I was talking about my brother in law hitting the blue gill when he was barefoot skiing. A guy rolled in. He was at a ski tournament and um, he had a bad fall and broke a couple of vertebra and he doesn't ski anymore. But he was at a tournament on Pearl River in Louisiana one time and there was a guy doing some warm up runs and he ran over an alligator and it removed the right heel of his foot. Forty hit alligator, peeled his heel off. That's the last bit of listener for people. Man. I have to add that one of the greatest like seeds of fear that I feel like it was ever planning to me as a kid as I grew up in the Bay Area, California, and Tahoe's you know, up the hill in this SI areas. We go up there skiing and trout fishing and stuff like that. My dad shared a story with me. I don't know why it wouldn't be true, but that you know, the rattlesnakes up there, and the winner will find a den, you know, den up hundred whatever, couple hundred rattlesnakes in the den they stay warm through the winter. And that's somehow on Donner Lake. But they're cold blooded. Huh do rattlesnakes? But no, I know they Yeah, I might not, I might not have the right reason for them doing that, but they're done up. That's yeah, that's seen it. But I've heard enough about it that it's like they like to ball up, ball up, and that apparently Donner Lake, which is right you know, before you get to Taho Lake on the way up into the Sierras, some manner of the snowfall and runoff brought one of these balls of rattlesnakes into Donner Lake, and that maybe this is one of my dad that told me this. Now as I'm saying it, I don't feel like this is on my dad was saying, but that a water skier fell into that water skiing and the like fell into that and the snakes just started like lightening them up. The snakes have gone into the lake. It's definitely not my dad as I hear myself telling this story. But as a kid stuck in your mind, Oh my, I mean, I never, never when I think the rest of my life be up on a pair of water skis or up doing something on a lake where I have not at least committed a moment's thought to the idea of a ball of rattlesnakes floating out there. Horrible. So let's talk about time Matt trying to catch a snake out of a hole. No, he my brother was hunting and a snake. He sees a rattlesnake going into a hole, and he's never eating a rattlesnake. Always want to eat a rawls snakes. So he grabbed the back end of the rattlesnake and tries to get it back out of the hole, but the snake breaks and outcomes a couple of baby rattlesnakes. They attack him, Yeah, he says. They come out of there and instantly are coming at him, trying to out of the snake that broke in half. Yes, whoa trying to bite him? Wait, the snakes came out of the other snake. Yeah, he was trying to jack the snake up out of a hole. I couldn't get it out of the hole. Broke the snake out. Aime, some snakes who are then coming at him, and then he had the tail of the one he had the you know, and then it goes on from there, some nightmare stuff. I don't remember. He was he was reminiscent about this the other day. Yeah, I was. He was telling me that story the other day. Am I getting it right? Yeah, you're saying top out and they're ready to attack. Yes, that is some total recall. And if I'm um not mistake, I believe they say those are the ones you gotta watch out for, right because they can't control their their venom. I've heard that might be a misnomer, that that is well, that maybe they can't control the venom, but that is it is genuinely just builds up to the bigger the snake, the more venom is coming at it is being produced inside the body, which makes a lot of sense to me. But I've heard that many many times. Okay, introl the show. Intro the show. I'm here with Stephen Ronnella, No as, I'm dealon card. Just we like to do here Danny Schmidt's honest first ever meat Eater Shoot Cameraman, cameraman, give give us a quick run, give us quick career synatis oh man, Well, do a lot of wildlife work. I do a lot of wildlife work. I do a lot of science work, s coom sort of science communication stuff, although science comedy. Oh yeah, it's all funny. It's kind of like rom coms, s coom, SIcom, science communications, science communication. I went to school for documentary film first Scientists, so you have a lot of background in communicating about science and working outside and uh yeah, First Meat Eater went pretty well. You like thrashers Instagram page? Yeah? Could you like to look at cool skate videos? I watched skate videos pretty much all day. Um, I haven't worked in skateboarding film yet, but I think it'd be sweet. You know what. It didn't get a sense from as you've You've had a lot of through your work, You've had a lot of intersections with wildlife politics and whatnot. But then I haven't gotten a sense over the last few days of you being like outwardly opinionated about wildlife politics. Have you just been biting your tongue as we're always spouting off about how everything I ought to be with animals? No, I mean, have I said anything those deeply offensive? No? I haven't been offended yet. Uh. Well, I mean it's not black and white. I think we've talked a lot about elk and the feed grounds in Wyoming, and I think that's a super gray situation. And you worked on a project down here about wolf ree introduction. I did. I can't talk a whole lot about it. Sorry, Uh yeah, I don't like that. It doesn't matter what I think. Go ahead, Yeah, I worked on a project about wolf free introduction to the thought of wolf fore introduction in Colorado. Did you get into the pros and cons? Oh for sure? God, yeah. You do some feed out, some stuff about feeding out during the winter. Did a bit. My second year project in film school was about the elk feed grounds in Jackson, and I went into that like I think I had five thousand bucks to make this film. Totally like went in. I didn't know a whole lot about it except that they're these feed grounds existed. There's twenty five thousand elk being fed every year in Wyoming, and obviously that's going to present a lot of problems. But man, once I dug into it, it was there's a lot more to it than just stopping feeding elka. So well, it started out as as I'm sure you're well aware, tell us why it started out. Well, it started out because the city of Jackson Hole, the town of Jacksonal was trying to form. It was in the early nineteen hundreds and it was kind of one of the last places where wildlife could live bison and elk, and they it was the era of Teddy Roosevelt, and they wanted to keep these animals around. There was a conservation ethic that was developing, and uh, but they these farmers and ranchers also needed this great winter habitat to raise their cattle, and so they decided they could feed the elk over here and still maintain these herds and keep the elk out of their out of their winter range, and out of their hey, in order to decrease tensions. In order to decrease tensions, you have to keep them separate. And so a hundred years later, that situation still exists and there's less and less winter range for these elk ah And in that time, the people of Wyoming have gotten used to having a huge elk population. But every piece of alfalfa you put out there creates is essentially it's like making habitat that doesn't really exist, right, So, not to mention, the hunters in Wyoming love to have that massive hurt, and so to undo this hundred year policy of feeding elk all over the state is super super tough. But along the way these elk have I mean, they're they're perpetuating a lot of disease right, brusualosis and scabies and foot rot, and of course the big threat is chronic wasting disease makes it to one of these feed grounds, and that's like a time bomb. Like nobody knows what that would do, what it would look like. Is it going to kill all the elk? What's the prevalence rate in a herd like that? But wildlife disease experts will tell you, like concentrate any animal artificially with huge numbers in a place they can't hold them, and you're gonna get diseases are gonna pop off. So yeah, I made this film. It's on PBS. It's called Feeding the Problem. I got a hundred DVDs in a Boxer title man. Yeah, yeah, you know, you come right out punching with that title. So I tried to make a film that was that was pretty balanced. Interviewed a bunch of ranchers and outfitters and scientists and feed ground managers. But obviously I went into it thinking, you know, I come from a science background. I thought, this seems like a bad idea, doesn't seem natural. Obviously it's a it's entrenched politically, but there's gotta be some way to sort of back out of it and find some middle ground. So anyway, I made this movie, premiered it in Jackson Hall, and that premiere was such a trip because I had like the whole anti feed ground establishment come to this premiere. It was at the Wildlife Art Museum in Jackson and then I didn't know this who's gonna happen? But I had like the whole hunting, guiding, ranching community also show up there they were picked good. Yeah. I had somebody come up to me. We had a reception beforehand. These guys come up to me and they're like, you know, we've been talking about stringing you up for making this film. I'm like, holy shit. First of all, you can make your own film that says whatever you want, like everything anybody can make of film. And I wasn't throwing anybody under the bus. I gave everybody a chance to spout off about whatever they wanted, and uh man, it was a good lesson. It was a good like my first, my first foray in the documentary about a sticky controversial subject, and I think it moved the needle forward a little bit. I think it got the conversation going. They sell the DVDs in the National Refuge gift shop. Yeah, yeah, in the Elk Refuge gift shop. I mean because I interviewed like the Elk Refuge manager and like, you know, it was a kind of a big deal during the year that we were filming down there. So when you're out filming with us, now, uh, do you feel it's just like rinky dink fluff bs. You can't really You're not gonna be able to answer that. Honestly, I'm just throwing it out there. No, I don't think so. You know, I'm interested in any and everyone's interpretation of of experiencing nature. So or it's a burder or an elk hunter, or a scientist tagging buffalo or whatever it might be. Like, I think it's all interesting and part of the big picture of how humans and nature intersect. So, yeah, you just had a big argument about Doug Peacock Doug Pica. Right, let's not recap it. Yeah, okay, as a little deal in poker, Seth Morris, Howdy folks, flip flap flasher, Flash flip flop flasher. Seth was just talking about his favorite sound is the sound of a hard pulling his head out of a feed been music to my ears. Yeah, let's leave that one. If you need to know what, you can write him in. That's like dollars coins is dropping into if you know, if you know what, if you know what, you know it, I'll just I'll just say, give people a quick recap. You've been on the show before a long time ago. That was a very party when you were on, it was a very popular show for us. People liked it. I like that life is service. Explain your deal. Yeah, man, Uh, I feel like even though I'm not on the payroll for you know, family member of meat Eater, now I hope I'm on that ledger. I met you guys through uh some work you and I, you know, Steve and I have been doing with a knife company, and then we bumped our way into a show hunting bears up up in Alaska, and then have just stayed you know, connected and built friendship and relationships with the whole crew. And my my last life was a commander in the in the seal teams. So I spent twenty years thirteen active years, twenty total years with my time in the reserves, both running assault teams and then kind of running the training for the basic and Advanced course of seals and how they how they become seals and get to the battlefield and go do the nation's work. And I'm a writer, uh thinker savage gentleman tell the books. Damn Few is the first book making the modern Seal Warrior, which talks a little bit autobio autobiographical, but very much unlike well, I shouldn't I shouldn't say that I compared to other Seal books very much trying to hit the high points of what I learned philosophically and what I believed in and what I think seals believe in, and why they why they do do do what they do, what why we do what we do, how we feel about our families, how we feel about service the country, um, how we impact the world. So I talked a lot about that. And then the second book is called Worth Dying for a Navy Seals Called to a Nation, and that one is a little bit more outward looking as far as you know where the country is going and security throughout the world, talk talk about my experiences on the battlefield, talk about I have a whole chapter on killing, which is one of my favorite chapters, just kind of organically came up in the writing of it, and UM, I take that pretty seriously. So, yeah, those are the those are the reads. And now I do a lot of speaking in the kind of corporate space and trying to figure out what that next ridge line is. I I enjoy that. I'll keep doing that. If you if you call I'm coming, uh you know, if you're the right the right people to talk to you, but I'm I'm I feel like I'm at a transitional points to what's uh, what's the next adventure? Yeah, you know what do two things too? We talked about it before we do it again. Talk about the talk about the movie you guys had Do, which is funny, not funny, but like it's a funny story. Yeah, how it came about and the repercutions of it. And then and then talk about your speaking thing because people should know about that. Yeah, Active Valor was the movie two thousand twelve ish. A bunch of us were, you know, at the training compound running training for the seals. So you're in about as close to a nine to five job as you can get if you're a seal operator. You know, if you're at the team, you're just preparing for war, at war, coming back, unpacking your gear, cleaning and getting ready to go to war again. When you go to a training compound, you're kind of that spot where you're raising up the young lins and evaluating them and figuring out who's gonna make it through the program and get to uh um, get to the assault teams and so. But that job is you know, hard pointed there in San Diego, and you're not gonna you know, unless we go to war with North Korea or something, then probably everybody's going. You're there, so you have an opportunity to do other things. I guess if if you want to do that in your life. And so this film company had come in to do just help upgrade a website, you know, the Seals. This was all amongst This was pre the bin Lon raid, right in and around the time of Captain Phillips and all that stuff. So I mean, I think the Sealing the Seals stock or you know kind of notoriety was was becoming more there's more awareness of it, but still pretty much in the shadows. And then um, you know, the B line rate obviously blew it wide open. But our our organization was actually losing more people, are not getting enough new folks coming into the training program as we're kind of getting older and trailing off. So we were having a recruiting problem. We we just and then and there really wasn't enough about what Seals do on the battlefield or what we do as a community that would lend to someone know and know why I want to go do that for a living, and hopefully the right people are recruiting problem because what's the what's the pass rate of people who even enter the elimination about make it so about attrition through training over since the six you got to generate big numbers. It helps to have good numbers, the right numbers is probably the better way to put it. Like, can you get the right product to the front door, hoping you get more out the back door. We haven't figured out a way to skin that cat. It's it's kind of one of those things where we've we've had scientists and sports physiologists and which doctors in that place look at it. What's gonna get what's gonna get somebody through training? And nobody's I mean, everybody has their own opinion as to what it takes. And um, it's hard to kind of quantify because you have so many different personalities that come to that place, and so many different personalities come through there. There's obvious elements that you have to have grit, toughness, focus, no quit kind of in your d n A. But I mean people come with that from a lot of different places. And I came from a very healthy kind of growth and environment and parents and family, very very competitive athletically. But I mean I have buddies that you know, had parents that just beat on them and said you'd never be nothing, you'll never amount to nothing. And they're pretty too tough to beat in training too. So it's all over. I got an acquaintance you made it through and I was asking about what he felt that it was and he said it was because he liked to surf a lot. He said he just didn't mind sitting in cold water for a long time, and cold water for a long time, that's gonna give you a tremendous leg up that that's probably what gets rid of most people. But so anyway, this film come when he came in to kind of help build a website and a little bit of this is who we are, what we do, and you know, if you want to come do it, here's here's here's how to call this kind of thing. And then somehow that morphed into this idea of doing a bigger film. So the film company actually interviewed about thirty of us at the basic training compound, just to do background knowledge of of what makes seal seals. You know, where you came from, what you believe in, how you feel about your family, the country, so on and so forth. Not very much in the weeds on operational stuff, but it it drifted into that very casual like all of us went down the beach, you know, sitting in front of a camera, just like we did the past couple of days. Talked a little bit about but this is all starting. You're being asked to do, told to do, told told to do, told to do. Yeah, that was that. There was not not an invitation to go to go out on the beach and do that. But at that point it was just this is just it's never gonna be used for anything. They're gonna film it so they can kind of make sure they get it right when they go to make this movie. They were going to finish those interviews, go back up to l A and start trying to find the right Hollywood person to play us or play the guys. And when they got done with those interviews, went back to l A. L A did all the editing. The two directors like, I think it's gonna be easier to teach seals to act than actors would be seals, if we want to get this right, And so then they came and asked us to do it. Everybody, to a man said no, every single person that was in that film said absolutely not, it's not what we do. But then senior leadership put a little more pressure on, like it's gonna happen. And so one of my one of my teams that was in the movie, he made a really good comment. One more and we're getting coffee, he said, you know, he said, one of the problems I see that is gonna happen is I know who you are, sir, Like I know your background, I know the way the boys feel about you, I know the way I feel about you. I know your combat record, and and you know the teams you've been with, which you know are are pretty serious teams that have done good things on the battlefield. And everybody that they've asked are those guys. If we say no, like if if, if we don't do it, they're gonna get six seven guys to do it. It will be the worst people in the community that say yes, Like for sure, it'll be the guys that already have the Facebook page and an agent and want to go to Hollywood, and we'll use that as a launch pat And he's like, and that is going to be a train wreck. We'll have the worst people in our community representing the community and that that actually resonated. I had already gone back to grad school. I knew at that point I was kind of ready to go make my way. I want to be around my bride, my kids, and it was time for something new. I've done. I turned over every stone I wanted to turn over in my my my seal experience, you know, everything beyond that, which is not to say I wouldn't have learned a lot more and it would have been purposeful, good work. Beyond that, it was just time I didn't. I was ready to go, and so I didn't really think, oh, this movie will kick over tons of kick open tons of doors. I mean, we thought they were gonna make that movie and it was gonna go straight to like the bottom bin of a DVD like two buck you know, Walmart. I mean we're like, there's no way this thing. It ends up being the number one movie in America, you know, Major theatrical lease and whatever. So um so, yeah, we we participate in that. We tried to get you guys, did we talked about sports, But I think it's the funniest part of the things you didn't is all military pay. Oh yeah, man, we got we got military pay and three square meals a day. Man, you feel like this big movie, all these theaters, the lower place. Oh my god, man, your little not your little check. But there's no like, no, no, I mean I think, uh, I think, all well, I shouldn't speak for anybody else. I felt good about it because it felt like since we were put on orders, it felt like any other job that somebody would have adked that that they would have asked us to do in the military, and being based on you know, my job, like, hey, go do that. That's what we get paid to do, so we're gonna go do that. It happened to be making a movie, made a lot of other people a lot of money, and anyway, it was in that movie launch an acting career. Um. You know, I got a lot of I guess offers afterwards, our opportunity to go do it. It just didn't appeal to me. I mean, it wasn't something I like. Um, I mean, I like you're doing stuff like this, I like, you know, speaking and talking and um, you know, I've done a TV show since and if the right project came up, I'd do it again, acting like actual just acting as a as a UM, you know, character actor had no appeal to me whatsoever. I think, you know, a bunch of the bunch of the guys were extras and transformers, movies and all that kind of stuff, operators, not major roles, but in that stuff. But I don't think anybody parlayed it into an actual um career. I mean a bunch of the guys stayed, you know, I mean I stayed for I stayed for two years. After that. I thought I was gonna get out right away. I actually stayed two years longer. The people dog on you for doing it it, you know, the thing that was good about it is yes, of course, of course. The nice thing was in general, after the initial busting of balls and giving you a hard time, it kind of came back to what that buddy mine who's a mass chief now said, And they're like, well, I'll tell you what, man, if somebody's gonna do it, I'm glad you were rapping us as opposed to you know, somebody else. Um. I had some other question about that. Now I can't here what the hell it was about the fallout, not to fall up with just the repercussions of doing it. You know, they're they're they're they're good arguments across the board on both you know, doing it not doing it. I mean the back end of how many good young Lions now came to the program, because that's ask what was it regarded as a successful move for recruitment, Like overwhelmingly so I got a bunch of people into the door. Yeah, Like we had to start at the door. We had to start creating. Well, what it allowed us to do is instead of having a pool of candidates that we didn't really know who they were before once they entered the program as best we could evaluate them, we actually had to almost establish another program to weed and kind of pick the best hundred fifty or some odd guys to go to each class. And there's only seven classes I go through a year, and so we were able to actually select now what we thought would be the best candidates, so to try and get better people to the front board to get more to the back door. It moved the needle a little bit on graduation rates. But um, yeah, it worked. I mean it definitely works. That's interesting. Yea, as the deal in Poker Rich, I'm sulposed to introduce myself. Yeah, and you're kind of like done working for us now, man, come on, I'm glad I got the last one. Chris. Uh, he's got something. You can't tell us what he's going to do because he's got some endia. That's all right, there's like an India and disclosure agreement. Yeah, I can't talk about it, kind of like Danny can't talk about his Wolf project. Yeah yeah, signed it get in trouble if I start talking. So listeners that have grown accustomed to your presence are just gonna be deprived of you know. Yeah, they're just gonna have to try to buy my subar. All right, kick it off because it's got your project down here, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was my project. We've been trying to get his hunt done for a few years at least three right, yeah. Um, And we messed up because we didn't know. We didn't understand the Colorado dross is the well enough um because you're a nonresident Rooks, a resident of Colorado, and you guys are applying as a group, which what was happening in Colorado. There's a preference point system when you try to draw a tag that is, um a, uh, what's what I'm looking for? Limited? Yeah? Limited? Tag, right, So it was just more it's more demand than opportunity. And uh, there's preference points. So once you get preference points, if you have to and your buddy only has one, you're gonna draw it before they do. And so however many people put in with the most points, they're gonna get all the tags before the lower numbers. Well, when you guys put in as a group, um, you guys are taking like a double hit because Rourke was being put in as a nonresident, because you go sort of go to the lowest common denominator, so you were going he was getting put in as a nonresident because he was thrown in with a non resident and they didn't want to elevate. Conversely, you'd have to elevate the non residents resident status. Was just gonna piss people off totally. And you had like two or three or maybe four more points than Rourke to draw the tag. But because you guys were getting put in together, you guys are put getting put into the lowest amount of points. So whatever roor CAD is what you guys were putting the lowest lowest, Yeah, lowest, the lowest status and apply the lowest points. Yes, yeah, it was just the same same thing that was happening at Um. I didn't realize that, yeah, paralleling this, it was happening to me and my buddy Ethan, who now I'm going hunting with next month in Colorado, because we were doing the same thing, putting in as a group and every year, like man, we should be drawing, what is the problem. And then as soon as we didn't do it as a group, we drew, as did you and Rourke, So we weren't in as a team. And how many uh, how many? I can't remember how many points? I had? Four or five? Man, that's depressive to think about. You burned that many points. Man, The thing is in Colorado. I don't know if you would have gotten much better. There might have been an archery hunt that we could have done that would have been limited entry, and that would have actually limited people. But I think where I messed up and picking out this. I had a lookal a buddy that lives here. I wish he could have joined us today, but we had to head back to denver Um. But he hunts rifle seasons here, right, and he's had very good experiences hunting during the first rifle here, and so we just very well, heck, muzzleloaders should be even better basically to hunt with the rifles during the rut. Well, what we didn't factor in at all, and he couldn't really speak to it because he hasn't been in the woods that much this time of years in Colorado. We should point out it's it's not but you can't put a scope on your Muzzloder's your muzzleloader has to be true to caliber project out, which means you have a pretty you know, slower traveling slug and you got these open sites. Yeah, so you're not like licking ticks with the thing you're You're not um, but compared to the average archery hunter, you should be at least doubling your range, maybe tripling your range, and you don't need to draw your damn ball back is kind of thing standing there on high alert. You don't need to do a big elaborate movement. You can just get already. Yeah, it is a factor in is the archery pressure, because in Colorado it's over the counter archery in most units. I al would say that's gotta it's gonna change that. It has a change. It already did in some units, um like where I used to live up there in Eagle County. Um, some of the units, they're like if you I think you're gonna draw it, Like this year, if you applied, you probably drew it, but you couldn't hunt anywhere else. Like once you drew that tag, that like that's where it was good for you couldn't hunt the whole state anymore. So I think they're gonna start doing that more and more. Um So, yeah, it's gonna have to be limited opportunity. I feel like they gotta. Yeah, I think that they're gonna have to reckon with um they're curious about like hunter satisfaction. Yes, I think they're gonna have to. I would imagine if you were to pull people who hunted over the last week around this unit about hunter satisfaction, I think that you would find um, yeah, when you listen. I posted a picture of us and just said said that we were hunting in the uh San Juan Mountains on Instagram. And while we've been here, I got to um emails from friends of ours that were here earlier in the season, just archery, l cunning that had the exact same experience, just like tons of dudes everywhere and guys that were on mules ten miles into the back country and we're just like, holy sh it, can't believe how many people were running into I've never um, I've never seen anything like it. Now we've hunted some high pressure stuff. Um and again you know, not having me, although we did have some local knowledge, not having personal local knowledge of a spot, it's, uh, it's a huge advantage. You know, we all know that, you know. I mean I hunted heavily pressured Colorado stuff for fifteen years and had pretty high success. Yeah, once you get the known area is super good. You just make the pressure work for you. No. Um, but yeah, this was yeah, because I think we should sort of explain the like sort of paint the picture of the amount of pressure. But we're going to trailheads or not even trail heads, but but parking areas, the end of logging roads, four or five six vehicles, camps with multiple r VS, tents, um. Not only roads too, not like just like a normal force service road like rutted out. Yeah, and if it was like a better like an improved force service road. I mean seriously, we did one Like it was a first night that we were out and I mean, it was every possible turn off to where you're like, it's almost like going down a river where you're like looking, you can kind of see the next truck and you're like, yeah, that gives me like enough space to jump in the river, and I'm not gonna be like crowding this guy. That's how it was. It was like every half mile there'd be another truck, you know. The founder observed that when you're in Colorado always feels like you're in someone's backyard. Yeah, yeah, no, we've talked about it before. Man, it's ground zero, ground zero here for loving it to death. Mm hmmm um. And everybody, hopefully all the other Western states are gonna be able to see how color handles it and be able to you know, adjust and figure things out. It's a conunder man, because you got like the funding problem where the state they need to like hunters fund Colorado's wildlife program. Hunter's fund a lot of like public land stuff, habitat provement, disease research, enforcement, like all that stuff comes from a hunter funding. And the more hunters got coming through the door, the more funny you got, especially non resident hunters. And so you need the money and I'm sure there's this thing that like, man, we can open it up and have it be over the counter and have like and hit revenue objectives. Yeah, but at that point they can do it here too, because they still have you know, twice as many elk as the next state, closest state as far as elk population goes, Right, But they're good at hiding, yeah, And I think in rifle seasons it's worked. I mean, second season would be interesting to see this year because I think back in the day, like out of the two and sixty tho, I can't remember the number now, I think it was that we get a quarter million nonresident hunters or hunters in total here in Colorado for big game, and like sixty of them would all come during second rifle season. It's like a major chunk of that whole number all came for the same week, right. Really interesting to see this year if like that's got spread out a little bit over the archery season because we heard anecdotally that neighboring unit a guy from a tax jurmy shop or a license sales shop. Where was that story they got to this? My buddy the other day killed a bear and took his bear and to get checked. Yeah, it got the yak and with the the guy that checked the warden that checked his bear, and the warden told him. But I don't know what the point, what the baseline point was that the warden told him that archery tag sales were up seven X. But I don't know seven x from when. I don't. I don't even know what that means. There's no way they're up like seven x from last year. You know what I make, I'd have a hard time believe in it. I remember seven times more people from a year before. I don't know what that means. Remember what happened when Colorado dropped there? I mean, this is again just applications, right, but when they dropped the nonresident um requirement to send in a two thousand dollar check to apply for moose, goat and sheep, they did that for one year and it went like it wasn't seven x, it was like three hundred X. Do a better job explaining that. Do a better job explaining. So y'all needs a tag consultant. Not really, I'll do my best, though. You're tearing it up. Man, you had that one little thing you missed. You couldn't think of remember what could man, he's already getting d M s about that super He's like, you gotta got um. When I first started applying for Moose Sheep and got in Colorado, and and I was a resident, but non residents would have to send in a check for I think is roughly if you wanted to participate in the draw. And most of the time you just participating to get a preference point until you build up a certain amount of points, and then maybe when you send in the check, you're actually hoping that how many points you're sitting on right now might draw. The two I've kept up with I've got kind of quit doing go um the two have kept up with Moose and Sheep. I bet you I'm at close to ten. We're in there, so there's a chance at least with we won't get into that. But so anyways, you used to have to send in so if you wanted to do so. When I moved away to participate in Moose and Sheep, I had to yank out thirty for a couple of months, you know, And when that hits the bank account, your gals like, hi, what You're like, Oh, no, it's it's it's coming back, don't worry about it. But it's not like you could just stick it on a credit card. They didn't accept credit cards. You had to send in the money so that if you drew they had your money, they give you the tag because then they don't got to be like, hey, you won, and then the dudes like, oh, I actually have no possible means by which that's hold on. It's like I gotta sell my super and then um yeah. So that limited a lot of people from applying, especially non residents from applying and gaining points. So for whatever reason, I think that all probab it felt like they were limiting the amount and they wanted more people to be participating, and so they know you want to end up actually happening. Is that what it was costing Carr Parks and Wildlife to do the processing and then mail out all the refund checks with such a large sum of money that they're like, the system isn't working. There was their conspiracy theory. Rightly. It was funny because people would say, like, oh, the reason they do that is how much money they make an interest where for some two months or whatever, they're sitting on all these millions of dollars and then it comes out that it costs them an enormous amount of money to process all this stuff issue paper checks, like there's no money making going on, yeah, just the postage to you know, send everything back. So one year they drop it to like where it's just wide open. Everybody can apply for like and put it on their credit card. You saw to uh, you know, put up the money, but you can put on a credit card. And I think that, you know, the fee was only a few dollars, and it went up something like three the amount of applicants like it just like everybody just got in were like, sure, we can apply now and it won't cost me but a couple of bucks and and you know a little bit of interest on my credit card for a few months. And so I just fluttered him. So then the next year then they changed it again. And so I can't remember because now it's only been a year or two with the new system. But now I think that as a non resident, I'm paying I think maybe a hundred dollars per species, per year per to get a point to participate. And so they you know, they try to find a middle ground, like they're still getting money coming in but now as hope not as many people swamping the system. Like I said, I'm doing my best here. I'm sure that there's some dude a car Parks and Wildlife, I'm sure you know what I think people in Colorado Parks and Wildlife are thinking when they listen to this and and a bunch of them do. I think they're thinking like, yeah, man, it's like there's like something that needs to be sorted out. Yeah, yeah, yeah there's and there's and again it's just the amount of people and it's a great place to hunt, and you know, people want to come hunt here, but there's a whole thing that's called preference point creep here in the state where like and that's why we by saving too many points if you're starting out now in Colorado, doesn't do you much good because again, the amount of demand that's that's that's there every single year. If this unit this year was five points, let's just say for the muzzleloader hunt, next year it might jump up to six point minimum and then seven point minimum. So if you have three this year and next year you have four, but the cap is at seven, it just moves along ahead of you and you're never gonna catch up. And there's a lot of units in Colorado that that's happening in and it pushes people to the open units. Well sure, but they're just people are just like they're upset and they're frustrated because they're like, man, I have you know, some people have twenty years of applying and money put into it, and they're seeing the point creep happening, and they're like, there's no end in sight, and I'm never gonna draw a tag because there's and you can look at all the numbers and you have twenty one points. You can see that in whatever fancy unit you're applying for, how many people applied with more points ahead of you, and how many people how big that pool is. So there might have been five thousand people that apply with twenty three points. If those five thousand people keep applying for that same unit and there's only ten tags issue the year, it takes a lot of years until that that pool falls out, and you know, people are gonna die with thirty points in Colorado. You know, what do you think about that rich pounder you ever put in for a tag in your life? No, but you know what I do think about it? It sounds a lot like airline status and playing that game, man, and I play that game hard. Yeah, Like when you get like I could go into the Delta, the most crowded place in the Air Force. Delta allows dude, it's like, how's everybody? Everybody? Well, I got some fancy lounge now to through am X though, but Steve not always flying a priority pass or something. Yeah, but it's like, what are we gonna do, like landing the airport and he's gonna go to the delta a lounge and go to a different one. Usually if one of you has access to allounge and let you have a buddy, tyne bucks. What the delta. So if you're gonna go in there, if you know you're gonna go in there and have a meal and have a couple, wait, Delta charges you twenty nine bucks to bring a buddy, to bring your partner or your wife or your kids. Dude, I'm sticking like an alien. Probably it's ridiculous. That's a little off topic. So, yeah, a lot of pressure here, and uh that I was not expecting it. Man, we thought we were going to be into some because man, we thought we're gonna be in some rip roaring bugle fest man. Yeah, with muzzleloaders in hand. Nonetheless, um burned all my points. How many bugles? What's that? Yeah? Watched the bowl silently bugle. Yeah, that's cool to see. I think that that happens. It's been I mean, first time I saw it was probably close to twenty years ago. Do everything but make the noise. Yeah, And then we were the way I could tell because I couldn't figure out what I was looking at. And it was the night before season. I was just out with the client or two for just a walk, and we decided to sit in this place called the the Cafe. Everybody used to meet there for lunch midday, that's how it got that name. And uh, we're sitting there and of course, night before season, just the whole herd pops in the winds, swirl in every direction and they're like, yeah, we don't care, you know, just out in the middle for like an hour, and the temperature dropped just enough to where when he would make that posture, you could see the steam coming out of his mouth like he should be bugling that. You can see his pushing air out of his mouth, yet there was no sound. I think eventually He did that three or four, maybe a half dozen times, and eventually I could just hear like, yeah, there was some sound coming out. Because again, they have to bugle at those cows right as they're trying to accord them here him whatever they're doing, you know, push them around, trying to breed them. I think that if there's a certain without trying to anthropomorphize too much, but there's trying to show some respect to keep them around, to not run them off, you know. But really, yeah, but if you bugle real loud every other bull in the zone, it's like, oh, you got a bunch of ladies down there. I'll come check that out and try to steal them and mess with you. And you know, yeah, like if you're like a you know, if you're a young single guy and you go, like you just stumble into the bar at night and it's you and like twenty women, right, you could have then called your buddies and be like, hey, guess what, guess what's happening. If it was one, I might call one or two my best friends, but you'd be like, turn my phone off. Uh. Two interesting things about sand. Uh. We we can speak generally about the sand Juan's two good stories about the sand. Juan's um one is the and the grizzly bear story down here where um you know, grizzlies once upon a time, hundred fifty years ago, uh could be found all the way down into Sonora, Mexico. Right. They ran from northern Mexico all the way up through the western the Western States basically from the hundredth meridian and on the Great Plains around from the hundredth meridian west all the way to the Pacific coast up through the western Canadian provinces, all of Alaska. UM. And then they kind of got gradually in the lower forty eight whittled away to just a couple of little enclaves and and uh Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado had him until you know, they had him into the forties. And then starting in the fifties like wanted pop up now and then like like out of nowhere of grizzly to kill a sheep, and some old trapper go out and kill the grizzly. And it got to be nineteen fifty was it fifty three? I think in nineteen fifty three the state declared grizzlies extinct, gone and then in nineteen seventy nine does the dude by the last name of Wiseman oh bow hunting in the San Juans with a recurve. I think he had a recurve. Uh, some bitch doesn't. He gets most dudes probably gets mauled by a grizzly. There's always been rumors of some around gets mauled by a grizzly. Uh. There's some controversy around what exactly happened. But the bear winds up dead. His story is that he kind of accidentally cornered it on a ridgeline somehow, and it was a sow and she starts mauling him on the leg and then starts mauling him on the shoulder, and he sees his quiver laying there and like his arrows spilled out of his quiver, And according to his story, he takes an arrow and starts jabbing her with it, and she eventually stops mauling and walks off a few yards and lays down, bleeds out and dies. They don't keep the body. Somehow, like winds up that they skin it. Biologists were able to look and not only is like here's his female grizzly that suppose he's been like the species supposed been extinct from the state for twenty six years. But here she is, and she had like the color of her, the color of her that that she had like stretched out teats, and the coloration on him suggests that she had reproduced in her life. And that brought on this big search that ran all the way into the early nineties of people coming down. Um, the writer and uh, the writer and environmentalist David Peterson was involved with it. The writer Rick somehow it became like a literary thing. I guess the writer Rick Bass got involved with it. The contrarian Doug Peacock got involved with it, coming down and trying to establish the presence of grizzlies here, and kept added till the nineties. And I think now there are still a lot of believers that there are grizzlies in Colorado. Um, I know some of them personally, but they're new grizzlies, different grizzlies. Yeah, because that's the new resting point out because this is the Southern We're in the south of the States, so people are trying to establish this idea that there had always been something. Now there's a new idea that some and it's not unreasonable at all, and it will happen that some are gonna drift down from Wyoming and absolutely like in twenty years, if I had to make you know in twenty years there, I'll just come. Yeah, I'll just say in twenty years, if if trends continue, you will have grizzlies in Colorado in twenty years, wolves are shown up. It's just gonna happen. But the idea that they've been here and surviving this mountain range now despite some people that still believe because then some kid claims that have had one come out and falls charge him and basically like a dance around him and stomped the ground around him, and he got this whole elaborate story that happened to him in the san juans Um and so but it's kind of like a thing that people like to believe it. But back to this Wiseman dude story is that a lot of people felt that a more reasonable explanation would be the he stumbles upon the bear, sinks an arrow into it and then gets mauled, and then it mauls him and then dies from the wound. But the dude took a polygraph right, took a polygraph and passed the polygraph that he got mauled first, then jabbed it was an arrow and killed it. There was only one jab mark. I don't know how. No. I think he jabbed it a handful of times around its neck got you. I could see if there was one hole, it would be like, oh, maybe he did shoot it. I man again, like if someone said, uh, someone said, hey, I'm gonna ask you a question. If you get the answer right, you live. If you get the answer wrong, I'm gonna shoot you and kill you right, And he said did he shoot it and then get mauled or mauled it then get then stabbed it. If I had to like do that, I would probably go with I think he shot it then got mold mm hmm. I've never met the guy. It's a tough story to believe. Man. Well, the book talks about out they did an autopsy on this bear and one of the wounds they think the wound that probably did the most damage. The it showed the entry of an arrow is like creating a really round hole and puncture mark in the body was opposed to some jagged stabbing motion. Interesting, like it's just the last grizzly in Colorado happens too. But what does he think he's gonna do if he should? Like, I think he's creeping along with the woods. I mean again, someone's got a gun to my head. I gotta get right or else I die. Have he steaks right? I got children? Um, I don't know. He's creeping along and alvious. It's like holy shit, but his first inclination is to shoot it and then have to deal with the maybe thals a black bear? Like maybe? Yeah? What season? Was he hunting? Beart? Was he like walking around? Is that also black bear? Probably? I'm sure interesting? Well, if he felt it was a black bear, why wouldn't he just be like, I don't know a black bear? That's why? Because that because there haven't been any grizzlies in your state. For there haven't been any. They were declared extinct six years ago. It's not even on your mind. Look, if I knew some guy in Michigan that had a bear tag and he stumbled through the up no not, let's say not say mission because historically didn't have a guy in South Dakota. Okay, do they get a lot of black beards and help me, help me with a good state, Johnny, help me with bears. And there's a guy still creeping through the woods in California, California, creeping through the woods of California, got a bear tag, burn a hole in his pocket, and lo and behold there through the brushes a bear? Yeah? Is he is his responsibility to be Like, I wonder if somehow there's a remnant, surviving population of these bears that no one's known about for twenty six years, and maybe I better investigate quickly before loosing my arrow. Or is he gonna be like, holy shit, a bear. Shoot? No, he's gonna shoot. I think what I'm saying. I don't think that could be the story, because if that was the case, he would be like I thought, yeah, because you're so low, you're like that Jonah Hills. I can't see your cowboy I can't see your cowboy boots and your and your armpits around the resting on the table. But go ahead, well yeah, just the current situation here around the table. Um. No, I think if that was the case, he would just be like, I thought it was a black bear. I shot it and it mauled me. It turns out it was a grizzly unless he was trying to just sound like a badass, you know, and he wanted to have this story about you know, I don't. I don't know, dude. I know we're rehashed. We're rehashing someone that's been hashed. What's pretty wild about the story is the story of um, the surviving of like his night out. It's pretty wild. He was hunting with his guide, hunting with the client. Yeah, he was the guide. His sends his client out of the woods to go get help. And uh, I think as he retold the story, he's just thinking, like, well, if they go like they'll probably be back by like ten. Well ten pm comes the guy. The guide had collected a bunch of firewood for him, you know, and started the fire client the client. Yeah, wait, not to interrupt this, but to go back if there's another witness there. No, they were split up. Okay, what year was this? The dudes still life? Maybe it could be a good podcast. I hope, I mean, I love to m on. I don't know. Uh, you know, we're just talking about a bunch of stuff we have no idea about. That's to remind listeners that we have we're just I know, would be good to talk to the dude. Yeah, But anyways, he survives all night fire wood runs out, but he's incapacitated to the point where he can't go collect more wood, and so he basically shivers and bleeds, you know, and makes it to daylight until they get the ascue crew in there to get him out. Very easily could have just slipped off and that was the last Grizzly. You know what's crazy is this happened on September. Yeah, septem are kidding me forty years ago today. If you didn't believe in like ghosts and whatnot, I don't know what that tells you. I can't find anything that says he's still alive, that he's live in two Down fourteen. Oh it was Um. What was the other interesting thing about san Juan's. Oh, there's another thing I want to talk about about san Juan's. It kind of pertains to some things. But and some of the same characters are involved, because again the hunter and environmentalist David Peterson, Is you alive? When was that article today? Yeah's eighty six years old, dude, cal him ups kicking still in this photo of him, his hands are bigger than his head. We'll put kour In on it, you know. Yeah, I mean he's at that age you kind of you know, I don't know if you really need to. I mean, it's up to him. Yeah. Um, we'd love to hear we'd love to hear that story. And again, me talking about this whole thing about what happened, I have no idea what happened. I'm just talking about there's different perspectives on it. And if just looking at it from outside purely like outside looking in things there are I'm not the only guy to bring up like what what now? Uh. The interest thing this is also involves David Peterson because he's he's he's promoted this idea is that one of the things we're seeing here is that one of the things that of like that there's uh, this Elkert here's declining. And there's a lot of contention about why this Elkert is declining. The thing that they're finding is um one of these guys that was involved, it was very involved and wrote a lot about and commented about this search for the last grizzle in the San Juan's feels that Um. I think he makes the argument that increased hunting pressure in the San Juans is interrupting the rut and it's making that bulls don't bugle and cows aren't getting bread, and that there's also this edition of muzzle loader hunters in here, and that that is what's causing a decline in the elk kirts. Biologists don't on on whole biology don't agree with this assessment because pregnancy rates are not down and calving rates aren't down. But what's down is calf survivability, meaning calves are hitting the ground, but they're not reaching maturity. And some people look and say, you know what that means is that we have a predation problem, which flies in the face of people, which flies in the face of an individual like David Peterson, who would argue that we have been waging this hundreds year long war on predators and to now blame predators on declining elk numbers is to once again look away from the reality of our own impacts on the landscape. Well, just coincidentally this happens to I say that wrong. It just happens to coincide with the fact that Colorado's um fish and Wildlife has realized that they think that their bear population, that their numbers were off by it possibly as much as like, like they think it might be as twice as big as they as they thought it was just five years ago. But the exploding population of five bears to the point where there they've actually this year they dropped the non resident bear tag price from three fifty to a hundred dollars because they really want people out there hunting black bears and reducing the population for all sorts of sin. I mean, this being one of them that possibly might be affecting you know, elk heard size, but uh, you know, there's just black bears. I mean, you guys were last night in a small rural town here and and uh yeah, tell them about that. Yeah, we just we rolled into a town to fuel up, and we went to the gas station, fueled up, and we're coming back and like you couldn't be anymore downtown and there was a black bear stand there on the sidewalk downtown, crippled, crippled his his front right, Paul was he was like holding it. Got hit by a car or something, probably trying to get into a dumpster. Yep. It's one of those funny situations when you look at these these kind of like guys that have been talking about hunting for so long and talking about wildlife for so long. Um, like you know, people we keep mentioning, like David Peterson and Doug Peacock and everything. It's like you get into people get into this thing where you you have this set of ideas that you you become very invested in, you know, and then time marches on and your sets of ideas don't evolve with the new reality and you wind up um having like these like somewhat antiquated notions. But it's also this really interesting case study and how people's agenda can inform people's personal agenda or personal biases can inform an interpretation of science, which you which which we all would hope that science sits in this objective position where we can talk about like fact and not fact. But you could be like I've been hunting bow I've been bow hunting the San Juan Mountains my entire life. I used to have the place to myself. Elk hunting is going to ship. I love bears. What could be causing the problem. It's got to be other hunters and someone else who might be like invested in hunter participation or a guide or whatever. His things like, oh, that can't be it. I make my living off hunters. It's got to be the damn bears, you know. And and what we all like go out and run out and push whatever version sort of reinforces our reality. I share this seeing by brother dot long ago. I was talking about why, um did we talk about this, like why big scientific advancements have you are typically made by young people? Yeah? But Cameron FROMS on the podcast, so yeah, you definitely mentioned how better science is usually done by younger science. Yeah, I was just I was reading this book by the he's coming on the podcast. But this guy, Justin Schmidt, who's an entomologist, and he came up with this thing called the Schmidt pain Index, by which you can um index out how the severity of insect bites. And he just put like it's like one two, three, four four plus and he's been bit by everything. Every insight that constingua um and and ranks him and he studies toxins and insects, and as sort of an aside in his book, he's like talking about why young people make its scientific advancements, Like they make scientific advancements because they haven't yet entered that stage of their career where they're defending old ideas, where it's like, you put forth an idea and it's novel, and it gets a lot of attention, and then people start focusing on we'll look at this person's idea, and they start adding to it and questioning it and questioning its assumptions and challenging it. And then you either like, you know what, damn it, you're right, I need to evolve my feeling, or you become entrenched and you spend your career, you know, being like, yeah, but it sure was a good idea, you know, you spend your career like loving it. It's hard for a person in this position to be like, oh, you know, we need to stop this war on predators two then later be like, you know what, man, we gradually sort of did stop the war on predators, and now we've got a shipload of them. You're kind of right. It's tough. Well, Johnny Man, I was trying to come up with a good segue because I think one of the things that dominated our conversations for at least for the last couple of days was, um, we did some hunting on the continental Divide Trailer off the Continental Divide Trail that runs through the San Juan's And uh, it wasn't until like the third day up there that we ran into our first through Hiker. This is the world I didn't know existed exactly, which we've had we've had a lot of fun chatting about it. And we ran into another through Hiker, um Denali and Soda where their two trail names which I knew about trailingas I didn't know where they how they came about. We still don't know how they come about. No, yeah, we have understand Yeah we got we gotta grasp you guys some research. Yeah really, Yeah, you're with like a group of people on the trail and they just like give you the name. But in the caveat remember the thing that the little blurb but I found on Google was like if you respond to it only one time, you're stuck with it forever. Oh yeah, So if somebody calls you something and you and you like ignore it, If you ignore it, it doesn't count. You just keep saying no, my name is Steve. Oh so that's how you don't get stuck with the trail and you ignore it because one dude We met this trail named Soda because he likes to drinking pop how to call them pop? And then another trail name yet Donal. We don't know how she got it. Should ask a through hikers, someone who will uh do the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the Conte Divida Trail, and they do it top to bottom, Canada to Mexico and they're the elite trail hiker. Or Mexico to Canada. You don't have to take either way, or you can just nickel and diamond over time. We met a guy yesterday who's just nickeling and diamond. You know what, Actually it's funny to dude. Nickelin and Diamond had a health flat for to say then the dudes they were just doing it. Certainly the dude, the dude I spent time with doing the through hike, was the least bragging, most unassuming. He's like, yeah, held, he told us he was he was being lazy because he didn't have a fishing rod. I'm like, dude, you're walking the entire north to south of the whole United States and you're saying you're being lazy. A dude from a dude from London, the pair of Solomon sneakers, thirteen pounds of gear that was packed waiting with no food and waters. Thirteen pounds might have been less than that man. That thing was light. Yeah. He had like a Sawyer water purifying bottle, a bottle of Doctor, a half bottle of the like, a couple of licks of Dr Pepper, a zero degree bag, some kind of tent which I can't imagine fitting that pack, a booney hat, a pair of sneakers and pants, and some track and pulling. That some bitch was walking from Canada to Mexico. And it acted like he was if you'd run into him. His demeanor was as though he was walking down to get a beer. Yeah, Like it was just no fanfare whatsoever. Yeah, And I was like, I was expecting a bigger answer because you questioned his motive and he just and and and I liked his answer. He's from London and he's basically like, you guys have unbelievable wildlife and scenery and mountains here and I don't have anything like that where I came from, and it's just great to walk through it. And that was like kind of the that was it. And that's why I'm walking to Canada. Man. Yeah, and you kind of expect like, well, I got divorced and I'm down and out. I needed to clear my head to do something big, and here I am, you know, finding myself. But I just want to see the cool ship. Yeah, I just want to go see big mountains. He had. No he was like one of those dudes. There's dudes who are bad ass. You to know about it. Well, those dudes that aren't bad want you to to think this badass. There's badasses that want you to know they're badasses. Then there's like badasses that that no, o, they're badasses, but they intentionally underplay it as sort of a move. And then there's a dude who's a badass. He doesn't even know he's a badass. He fell in the It hasn't even occurred to him that he's a badass. Dude, I wish we had that kind of podcast. Man walking some of bit. He said. Some days he walks thirty miles, just plops down wherever he is, wakes up, keeps walking. The only parts he doesn't like was when there's no water, which is yeah, he had some nasty stories drinking out of stockponds, drinking out of stockponds and wyoming. How sick you get that manure flavored water. Yeah, he said, it's not fun when you have to force yourself to drink the water because it tastes so bad. It's all so bad. And he talked about interesting kind of hunger as he says, you get hungry to a point where hunger wakes you up in the middle of the night, which is an interesting kind of hunger. Yeah, I don't know if I've ever I don't think I've never woke up with the woke up and having to be like the thing that woke me up was hunger. And he was packing ramen, noodles and rice. He says freeze drives too expensive days. Have you ever been out of food long enough? You know? When I finished field train, they sent me to ranger school and Range Army Ranger schools kind of system for making you crazy uncomfortable is doing a lot of packing and humping through mountains and things like that, but it is starvation. They give you one m r E a day when you're operating at a very very high intensity level. I wouldn't say I woke up from hunger. We thought about food constantly the entire time you're in the field. There, you're probably thinking more about food than like the combat scenario that they're running. How many calories in an m R E. They're pretty calorie dens. I mean they're they're they're made to be, you know, rations for troops in the field. I I don't know what the numbers, but I mean one is not enough to what we're doing. And if you're on a patrol. You could be on a patrol at night, you'd have fifty people in your company, so spread out, you know, six yards apart. Somebody drops like a skittle that they'd squirreled away from their m R Like you could smell it from smell it, Like somebody is eating a skittle and somebody might have dropped skin and I and everybody knows. Everybody knows what's in the m R E. I got pneumonia during the course, and so they pulled me from from the block of trainers and they sent me the hospital. If I don't finish this course straight through, I won't start with my Advanced Seal Tactical Training Team to earn my tried and to like actually become a seal until like six months later. Like, if I got back from Rangers, go on time, I get to start with that class and become a Seal, Like real deal with the team. If I get bumped or rolled in this Ranger class and delayed that extra whatever three weeks, I would have to wait six My seal dream was now six eight months further away. So there's no way I wasn't making through this course. They take me this hospital, doctors checking, a bunch of troops coming to me. He's like, yeah, pneumonia, gotta pull you. I was like, sir, please, what's the worst that happens if you don't pull me. He's like, you know, you'll pass out. You'd be in big trouble. I was like, can we make that deal. I'll come back. You see me again. I'm willing to run the ridge. Like now I gotta pull. He walks out of the room. Nurse comes in and was like, well, the docks I set up good to go. She's like yeah. I was like yep. So she takes me out to the waiting room where the Ranger you know whatever folks would bring you back to the class. The whole time, I'm just praying I don't get made. She sits me in a little lounge area, and there were some bags of candy, like just little bags of candy, and there were peanut m and m's, which do not come in m R. E's, So I pocket one of those things. Dan takes me back to my company. I get back out and that night I'm back with my team and uh my squad, like my four little dudes in this gun nest in this patrol base of this triangle patrol base where you'd set up like it's old school tactics, where you'd set up three you know, the apex of the triangle. You'd have a big machine gun nests and everybody spread out in a triangle around it with defensive positions, leaderships in the middle, like making plans or whatever. I break out those peanut m and m's, you know, pass seven eight of them to each guy, and like the two dudes that weren't in our gun nests, they're like sitting there, can like smell the peanut m and ms. They're like looking up and they know for sure peanut m and ms don't come in an m R. E. And I'm looking over doing this to them, like if you say something to an instructor that like I brought these peanut and m m, it gets over for you. So if we're don't wrap me out, because like if you got if you got caught with something you were supposed to have, you get kicked out the program. But I made it through and got back to my team. But I was hungry, man. And the thing you want, the thing you want when you're that hungry as sugar. Sugar is the thing you want more, you know, you know what I what I want when I get super hungry is the ship that uh you're only going like a big gas station off the highway. You got those glass cases full of like all that brown food. When I get like hungry, I think about going in and smashing going over to the side of my truck where I keep my pick axe mounted to the outside of my truck, and coming in and smashing that glass case open and eating all that brown food out of the inside of that thing. Why don't you just open the door to the case. It's gotta be just I'm just that hungry. The drama. Yeah, you don't have time. I don't want shattered glass all over all over the food. Yeah, to get into one of them brown food cases, because sometimes they take those things. It's like that you make like a breedo and fill it full of a real low grade barbecue meat and then deep fry that thing and then put it in that case under that red glue lamp for a few days. Oh my god, those things look good. Maybe this is just for a personal deal with me, but I feel like it for me, it was much worse when I was younger, Like we went and did our honeymoon in New Zealand and backpacked around for like five or six weeks, and I feel like that's all I could think about as soon as I get on the trail, and we'd be out there just long enough to be away from, you know, restaurant food. I just be like, next meal, next meal, what's in the pack? I can't wait to eat that, this, that and the other. Now I feel like I haven't had those thoughts on the trail for I don't get on the trail. I get as soon as I stop hiking, you start thinking about food, smashing the gas station glass case and raiding the brown fisture. Well, I'm just saying in general, when you're out in the woods, like I just don't And maybe I'm just better at feeding myself. I don't know. The sugar thing is interesting because we got done with a pretty big hike the other morning. When we were sitting there, when we met Soda Pop and I think his name was Soda. Referred to him to his face has has old, but his real name was Soda Trail. His trail name Soda. Yeah, we met Soda. We had a giant bag of gummy bears and we bought when we went grocery shopping like we do before all these trips and those went fast. Man, like you notice this sort of uh you hand He tried to hand him a handful of pro bars and he wouldn't take him. Yeah, he didn't. He refused. I just saw offered him any just a snack because the restaurants were sitting around eating and I figured this guy hes been felt like he wanted it, but I wouldn't take it. He was wasn't he going into town? Yeah, he felt like he wanted he didn't take it. He was fixing to have a good meal in town. Dude, all we had to offer bars man for four months. I don't think he wants to look at another bar when he knows that there's want a bowl rice? Uh yeah, so we've been dogging on that. There's there's expectations. Oh, that's almost your day with this ecological principle. My brother just introduced me to um opt the optimal niche did. They teach about this in forestry optimal optimal niche and realized niche. As some people might say, where do you go with rour? You're good at Yeah, you're very good. One of the things. You're very very good at pronunciation and annunciation. I like that stuff is important to me. But I have a little bit of a like. I don't like when people use it's like the one word out of character that they use that whatever the standard variant of, they pick the one that's a little bit cooler, you know, Like, what's a good example our last president being like Pakistan. You know what you'd say it like, it's Pakistan man. We all say Pakistan. I know they might say it, that's not the way we say it. I got you, So for me, I say niche. My wife is leaning on me very heavily to stop saying Iran. She has a friend from there. She's like, please, it's not Iran. I'm like, I just think it is. Now, how do you pronounce it? You're wrong, I can't do it. You can't say chile. Yeah exactly, I feel the same chili. Sorry. Uh yeah. I don't walk around saying you guys should all call it a latvia. Uh. This has not to do with anybody. I think it's a really interesting idea. Is Um, we're hiking up elk Hunton back home, and we're looking at there's a lot of just shiploads of raspberries, and it just so happens that I've been clearing a place in my yard to start my own raspberry patch, and there's all these wild raspberries. And I was saying to my brother, who deals in plants, he's an a cologist. Um, I was saying, Hey, what do you think if I took this little ship in raspberries and brought them home? Would they be like, this is the greatest place on earth and grow into the giant raspberries that you grow in your yard where they always be little ship in mountain raspberries. And he said, I don't know the answer to that. I could see it going both ways. And he said, but there's this thing, there's uh optimal niche I think the optimal niche and realize niche, meaning there are probably many plant species that would like to be in a certain place, like ideally they would occupy this niche. But because it's suitable for a lot of plant species and it's very perfect for plants, there's a lot of pressure there, and plants have varying degrees of being able to deal with stress, and they have varying degrees of being able to combat other plants through the production of toxins and aggressive rhizome structures, and they don't do well in battles, so they wind up grow owing not where they should grow, but they grow where they can grow. And he was saying it maybe that this plant's stature is the result of it's not where it really I would love to be, it's just where it can be. It's a low pressure, low stress environment for to be. And if you had some little plot of ground and you plucked every freaking weed out of there and made it perfect and put him there, he might then realize his full potential of what he, like quote should look like, which is a thought was an interesting idea. Um I bring it up because we had come into this with high expectations you'll see that this is a horrible segment because its not the same ship, but it has to do with like the realized thing and you had observation last night. We're like, once I got over the of being in this unit L County, once I got over the disappointment of it not being what I realized what I wanted and aligned my expectations that wanted being okay, Like I want to be in an okay place to run run around. It just took five days to get over the man. Yeah, another truck, another guy. In the end, you're like, oh, it's pretty fun and I gotta be totally honest. Man. On day one, on day one of the hunt, we heard a bugle. Um wrote it off as being a mug. Kind of wrote it off as being a mug. Had to be a person got in there. Well, we might have heard the person. Oh it could be because we only heard one. The rest of the crew was listening to was sounding like a bugle. Battle. Day one, we do get into three young bulls and they were half spoot and so we're calling at three young bulls and then kind of see this other bull which want to be in one of the three young bulls. But anyways, moved and then bumped an elk that was like under our feet, and that could have been the high likelihood that was another bull. For sure there was coming up to check out, because we'd be year old and whatnot. Could have been in our bowl. He has never made any noise, and it could have been that we would have not moved up to see and he popped out, and it could have been right, we're in with a bowl. Then there was kind of a very like there's a sort of peculiarity of this place that these elk were, and it kind of made sense of like it was like like a little hidy hole. They had a lot of pressure blow him. It was sort of like a spot where you could picture they kind of found a little solace and watch this, watch this, uh full circle, not in they're optimal, not in their optimal niche, but they found some solace and they realized niche that was freaking cliff face now where he wanted to be. If it was out to him, he'd be laying out in the biggest, grassiest metal down in the valley bottom, but he couldn't because of pressure. He had to go to his realized niche, which was like a cliff face. Um, we went back in there and found a bowl and had like six days of hunting. This is this is in defense of this area. Six days of hunting. And if you said to someone you're gonna hunt out for six days and you're gonna have one like unbelievable encounter, what would most people say? I feel that they would say a deal, six days for one unbelievable encounter. Yeah, and then and then sprinkled other encounters, sprinkle, but one like Yes, the average hunter would say, deal, Yep, you're gonna hu You're gonna work your ass over six days. You're gonna have some days you don't see ship. You can have some days where you have like a half encounter, and then I'm gonna present you with one like great encounter. I feel a lot of guys be like, yeah, that's reasonable, I'll take it, and we have I mean, everybody knows that, you know, I think six sex rates with a gun. I don't know if the difference between rifle muzzleloader, but I want to say in Colorado hovers around, and so being that we had two hunters in camp and that you just almost killed one, you know, we almost beat the the yearly average, you know. Yeah, we went up with our baby stuff, our camp out stuff, and when up to um this little ridge stop that sits at the ridge stops eleven thousand, four feet mm hmye. And got there at four o'clock in the afternoon. Man, look down into this kind of like the same kind of there's a couple of miles away from where we ran into those three bulls, like the same feature, the same landscape feature, and same basic setup, and went down in there four o'clock in the afternoon. Here's a bull playing grab at or following a cow and a calf, and he might even put kicked up out of her bed, but he's following her along. So we gradually gradually get down in the zone and try calling here, and try calling there, and then we get to where we know, like the meadal we know they were in and start calling and right away a kyle pops up at eighty yards, looks, watches for a long time where the sounds coming from, goes back into the woods and comes up in parallels us very close, goes out of whatever happens to her. Then also there's a bull down there and he comes out the same gay happened, has to look around, and then pretty soon a bunch of appreciate another little ship and bull comes in alongside and sneaks in to get a look. Probably not legal. And then all these cows come out and a bull comes out, and we're calling at the bull. He's had a hundred I had said to myself, like we always talk, oh, like a hundred yards for a muzzleloader, which is far for open sites. He's hanging around a hundred twenty yards. We start bugling at him, and he's like raking mud up, raking hunks the grass up. Finally he comes over to chase a cow and comes into eight yards and I get my shot opportunity, and I pull off what everyone warned me, not what everyone multiple highly credentialed individuals warned me about with shooting muzzleloaders, meaning you honest Brody and Remy Warren all said, you have to hit that thing just right with a muzzleloader. Um, don't shoot him in the shoulders because if you hit them, you think Remy made a joke. Oh yeah, they go down to hard and get up and they're gone. And this thing came like I said it came to eight yards, turned broadside. I drew a beat on it, but it's not a percent. Like with open sites. I know the guys that shooting their whole life are very good with them, like they're great with them. But I didn't do In hindsight, I didn't do the practice I should have done. I mean, I grew up shooting open sites two open site twenty two is that squirrels and stuff. But as a long time ago, I've been like a scope dude forever. But you can't use the scope in Colorado. And I should have done way more practice. I leveled off. I felt good, pull the trigger. He goes down like like even down like insert favorite like hit by lightning, hit by a truck, hit by a train, sacrimotatus and back up and gone. And we like found some blood that night, a little bit of blood that night. Ran it down to like just a pin drop. And we'd only moved the trail. I mean, when we'd moved the trail hundred yards if not even a freaking drop. Came back early in the morning, early morning, came back at daybreak, after daybreak. Uh. I got down there seven thirty eight am maybe eight am. Come later I don't tell it was it's cold, got down there, started trailing again, and it was a cold night. So I was feeling like, if we could find this thing with the meats, gonna be fine because it's a chilly night. Um pick up from that last pinprick of blood and never find another pinprick of blood until probably a hundred fifty yards later, just by following every possible elk trail, every possible elk track, I finally find a pine branch, a bust it off pine branch sitting at shoulder height high shoulder height. They had a little blood wiped on it. And then we followed from there every elk track, every possible trail, back and forth, in and out, never no drop of blood. It's rough, man, It sounds like you hit the void. Yeah, it's crazy too, because like you like how hard he fell and hit the ground. It's like you think game over. Yeah, but Noah, if Rourke cocked back and punched me in the face, how hard do I hit the ground just like that? But would I be dead? It depends on depends on what kind of day lurks have, and I imagine it probably the depends on the angle that he hits yet. Do you know? Uh Rourke told me the story one time about you guys are doing something kind of raid and he sees a dude running out of the he catches a guy run and tell that story, my guy. I let my my junior officers run that raid. So myself and my my boss my task. You matter, good, buddy of mine. We're sitting outside the compound but inside the security blanket of our gun trucks were in a pretty good spot, but night vision on still in the tackle environment, and we had a squirter, which means a guy that got over the fence and was running. But he was on the target and he jumped over this fence and I was on night vision wash him unarmed. He didn't have a weapon on him, but he could have gone right, which would have served him well, because I do not believe with all my battle gear on, I would have ever caught him. But he hung a left and was not a jog running straight at me, and I stood up. He didn't hear me stand up, and took about a five to eight step Linebacker Lawrence Taylor esk run and put my shoulder into that dude to just knock him down. And his body exploded. Oh my god, I thought I killed him. I thought I killed him. I actually felt back. I didn't know, uh you know, I didn't know. He might might might have just been like the teenage son of the guy we're going after whatever. But I mean he I've never hit any by heart than any sport game. But I we know we picked him up and grabbed him, got him, got him off all right. But I don't think he'll ever forget that hit. But uh yeah, like again, man to go back to this thing, like someone's got a gun in your head and you had to get an answer, right and they said, is that that elk alive right now or dead right now? I would go along. I would probably like in that situation, I would I would. I think I said this the third day, I would say alive, but I would half expect to hear the gun go off. I just don't know. Um it was. It was confused enough. Where's the thing I like, I feel like I should start doing haven't typically done in the past by kind of like I'm interested in. The idea is if you get a wound, if you wound something where there's a good likelihood that you killed it, I'm interested in the idea and this there's some units where this is how it works. There's BlackBerry units in Alaska. Or if you if you wound an animal, you're not your tag. Um. So with that, I was like, you know what, man, I'm done. I'm done. Um. I have never done that in the past when I had something to get away. Uh, never done that past, But I'm and I don't know that I'll always do in the future. But in that moment, I was coming man because Rourke still had a tag. It was like, I'd rather put energy into having Roorke having equal opportunity rather than racking up to opportunite. Know what I mean. I don't know that. I don't know that that's like a rule for me, but that I just felt like, maybe some black bear is going to go into hibernation and extremely good shape because of that bear, because of that Elk carcass. I don't know. The thing I talked about too when we were making the show and I talked about this was I got a body. I don't wanted to say where it works, but I got a buddy that works for a big grocery store chain. One day sends me a picture you know those dumpsters, what do you call those dumpsters that you carry on a flatbed semi trailer? Like I don't know what a huge freaking dumpsters, you know what I mean? Like it's like a semi trailer, but it's a dumpster full of package pork because someone has screwed up taking a refrigerator truck and put it like in the wrong spot so it didn't get off loaded. And he was like they wouldn't even let him take it home, and it took all all this package pork was in this giant freaking dumpster going to a landfill, and you're like, what a waste of animal life? You know, Like what a waste of life to go to a landfill wrapped in plastic. And then this thing I always come to do, like if you hit something and lose it out in the environment, you know. My brother pointed out one time, it's like if you think it's wasteful, then you really don't believe in nutrient recycling because it's like they're in its place. It's sort of like eventually the animal is gonna die. Eventually that animal will die and will become food for other things. Um, and maybe that's what happened there and it died and it becomes food for other things. I'm not saying that this excuses it. I'm just saying like it's one of the many complicated things that rolls through your head where you're like, you feel like like one, you screwed up. You didn't aim carefully, you didn't prepare, you got excited, you did all this stupid stuff. Now you've caused this thing like pain, and there's no sort of human gain, like you know, you don't gain the resource like you screwed up. And then you go like, yeah, but maybe I'll feel better when I roll these ideas, this collection of ideas through my head about right, some bear is loving or not, or some elk or some elk is having a very very bad winter. Yeah, yeah, it sucks to think about the suffering they may or may not go through. That's a pretty big hole most likely because it went through I'm betting both sides, you know, through the top of the right I don't know. Yeah, how do you if it was a big hole? How there was like no blood, man, Because it's that's the void, man, that's the spot between the spine and the top of the bongs and it's just there. If I was able to just probably to take a knife, I think, and puncture your ribs, but not go into anything farther, you know, But like you're your ribs and your meat right there, you know, and unless you go inside and catch something internal, but just you're just your chunk or ribs. Because even made the comment of like you, I guess your your hand has a lot been a lot more blood if someone cut their fingers, but your hands are Yeah, you got a lot of stuff going on. Did my brother cut his finger in there day? We couldn't get it stop leaping. He's blood over damn. Imagine too, it's shaped, you know, barrel like and if it's up high, you know that blood has a chance to like one has to be pumped up and out of that all and then as it's coming down, you know, it's drying, coagulating. What happens. Yeah, and then you just didn't hit anything vital. I don't know anybody's ever quit hunting over it. But it's like, you know, if you're gonna go out in the woods, I guess you just gotta there's gotta be a certain amount of thing if you're gonna go out in the woods and shoot projectiles and stuff with the intent of killing it. You better you better be like real frank with yourself about the pallatability of that not working out. It's not binary. I was listening to this Galaza and a Day about his antelope punch she's been on. She talked about how she like, she's like, quote missed nine and then got one. I'm like, I I have to think that it wasn't binary that a couple of them got hit. I mean, do you really go nine misses but then all of a sudden you kill one? Yea? Or is there some gray in there? It's gotta be some gray. It's not binary. That's the thing. The first time I took my wife on, she never factored in. She thought I took her squirrel, and she thought either killed it or hit it. And she hit one in the ear m hmm, and it ran up a tree and kind of like mess with its ear for a minute, and it had like it looked like when a deer gets caught on barbed war. You can see it. I mean, we're in my mom's yard, I should point out, but you can see him up there and he's like totally fine. But she's like, it never occurred to me there would be anything other than one or the other. I thought. I was like, on off, I didn't know there's a middle switch. But what about like this is probably a little controversial, but please, well when you get into like we're gonna talk evential bid absolutely not hit me with the controversy. I don't know. After the after the couple of bow hunts we went on, which which would nothing bad happened, but just the hitting the elk and then finding it the next day. That was my first experience of that because every other meter I've done was rifle, and I mean, you're a good shot. So you hit it, the fucking animal drops and that's it and we go and clean it up and we start eating it. Yeah, and it's a whole. It's that's the binary thing. It's like that happened and now we're enjoying it, and now with muzzle loaders to like it happens where we shoot one and it goes away. So like I'm having a struggle accepting those as viable means of hunting, like ethically, like I know people can miss and you can do it with a rifle, but in my experience. Based on what I've seen, it's like if you are if you practice with the rife and you're a good shot, you like the animal is done and quick, and it just seems very clean and ethical and like how it should be. And when you introduced these like traditional things, it just seems more of like an ego thing that people are after, like, oh, I can get it with a stick. You know. It's like, well that's great for you, man, But now you just interrupted this thing, and you know, because well you know what, you know what helps it helps answer it? What the only there's more in the equation than animal suffering. There's efficacy because again, you're dealing with a finite resource, and the way to enable the way to enable a larger pool of people to have an opportunity to extract from a finite resource is to regulate efficacy. There was a movement some years ago, Yeahni probably, I'll remember when when all of a sudden, guys were discovering the efficacy of using fifty cal bmg ease is that the right word for it? And there was like YouTube channels, right, Yeah, I don't know if I qualified as a whole movement. There's like a thing, there's can can I say? Stirrings? There were some stirrings of guys realizing the incredible efficacy of the fifty cow round the elk um rigged up with big heavy, big heavy tag drivers with fifty cows and the fact that you could bowl an elk over nine yards or whatever. Right, so um, and some states came out and said, you can't do that. You can't use Uh, if a twelve gauge is effective on waterfall, imagine how effective a ten gage would be, or how effective an eight gauge. But you can't use eight gauges. You can't buy damn a gauge barely. So um, if it was just if if game management came down to what kills animals the cleanest, I think that we would welcome any in all technologies into the game. But the minute you enter any in all technologies into the game, efficacy goes up and participation will have to go down. If you have a population of let's say you got a population you got a hundred panda bears and someone's like, uh, no, koala bears. There's a hunter quala bears, And they're like, we can kill ten koala bears, and and then next year we'll have a hundred again because they'll reproduce, and you're only gonna really have a hunter because there's only so many eucalyptus trees. So we know that hunter koala bears is a great number. Every year we kill ten, next year magic we got a hundred. If we didn't kill any, we still have a hundred because that's just the carrying capacity of the landscape. And and if you had a way that a guy has a certainty of killing a koala bear, how many dudes get the hunt quali bears? One dude? No? Ten? Okay. Let's say let's say you say you can only use red riders and we find people shooting red riders only have about a ten percent success rate on koalas because they can soak up babies. Okay, how many dudes now get to go koala hunting? How many do you need? Is so that it's it's one right, one, They all get to go. But they're all out shooting red riders at koalas, and they're absorbing those babies and they're taking they're sucking up babies. That's wildlife management. That's a good point. That's a good note to end on. Yeah, that's good. I started doing everything as koala bears. I think that's what really worked was the koalas. Yeah you were um now you still lost, Chris. I was thinking about my concluding thought. In that case, please have you gotten through it? Yeah? In that case, please, Rich I would love to hear more than anything in the world, I would like to hear your concluding thought. It's not that deep, man, but I just liked I can't push your super again. No, No, that's that will get sold. I just like watching that out being out man. That was cool. There's a lot of people I know and hang out with it never ever get to see that. And that was cool see that thing getting all the yeah, kicking around, responding to the call, interacting. It was just really cool. Screwing it up will forever taint that. I almost wishing, you know now, like in hindsight, obviously, I wish you would just stayed at a hundred yards. Yeah, going about his business, caught our wind. I wish you had caught our wind. But the wind was in our face. Man, dude, it was a good wind day that whole We're going to run out of daylight. But yeah, Art, what's up. You have to come back. No, no, I have no, I have a I have a something to do before a concluder and then give you my thoughts on a concluderk. You a quick question, please? Why did your shirt say orange on it? I was a Syracuse orangeman. Huh tell you like the oranges? I do um first, thanks as always to uh take me out and get to run them up with you guys, I would say not to go into like my personal life. I have struggled a little bit post being in this league of extraordinary gentleman that was the military, to find folks not in the military and kind of beyond that part of my life that I really liked being around. And the media crew is that crew. You y'a need the rest of the rest of the gents here and everybody doing it. So I appreciate that greatly. Yeah. I even saw you get Ridge Pounder's phone number. Yeah, man, even though he's leaving correct, correct, So I appreciate that. The thing were the thing that I meant to get into, but we didn't. But we talked about it before and well, next time you come out, we'll talk about we're out of time now, is that? Uh, you're knowing the way you knew yourself and knowing that there would be a void. Yeah, being having like the self awareness to know that there would be less kind of void that was gonna get filled with something when you left the military, and that you sort of consciously, you know, and you grow outdoors and grow fishing, skiing, hiking, but you knew that. You're like, there's gonna be a void, and I'm gonna consciously fill that void with something that taps into some of that same stuff because I don't want it to be filled in the way that isn't under my control. And there's a whole lot of people filling voids with the wrong stuff from from our line of work. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, So it's good. So that's that's first. So thanks on concluders. There's almost nothing. Since I love literature probably more than anything. When it comes to stories, I love storytelling. Nothing makes me happier than a story well concluded, and almost nothing bothers me more than one that doesn't end well. You should meet our friend dirt myth. So it occurred to me when I've listened to your podcast, they get the concluders whenever next, I was gonna be hon it. This would be my answer, not like I prepped this and he made the way, but was that. I'm not going to give a concluder because I feel like this story is about these relationships, and I hope that story goes on for perpetuity. So I'm not going to close, even though I know that's a little esoteric, but I'm not. I'm not going to give a concluder because I don't want this story in. What makes a great concluder, is it it's well thought? Yeah, Seth, I love the sound of a pig ink in its head. That takes me back. It was. It was just cool hanging out with York hearing your stories. Man, that's awesome stories, good story the bummers, a lot of them. Can't leave the can't leave the woods. But I wish we had another week. Yep, that was fun. Yeah, this is Danny. I had a thoroughly entertaining, interesting week. I appreciate it. Thanks for bringing me onto this. If your footage turns out to be good, I hope you come back with us. Thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah, it's an interesting experience for sure. If the footage is no good, you'll never hear from us again. Sounds good. Second closer, I think it's more of a pro tip. The first half of my week, I would say it was fairly miserable because I came out here with the wrong foot wear. And every camera guy has like ten pairs of shoes that he travels with because you never know what, never need rubber boots or hiking boots, and so I brought a lot for it. And so the first one I tried for the first three days, put thirty miles on these things. Man, I thought my foot was gonna fall off, and it was a blister to look like a gunshot, really saying thing about it, because it didn't matter. I had to keep on walking. That earn you a lot of credit because not having never heard that the problem existed, and then seeing the problem and I was like the fact that he hasn't brought that up, Yeah, yeah, and pushed on my big tone ail one night when we were spiked out in a bunch of yellow pus came out of it. And then and that was aside from the blister on the back of my foot, the gun show, and so yeah, I guess to kind of book in it from the beginning of the conversation. I would have traded anything for a pair of flip flops that I was done the rest of the shooting flip flops, but I had a backup hair. So pro tip, don't go on to one of these things with a pair of boots so you haven't thoroughly walked in and bring your flips. Yeah, we've been playing to catch, so thank you for listening very much, and uh, we'll catch you next week.