00:00:00 Speaker 1: Oh hey, everybody. Episode one on one of the Hunting Collective. I know, probably very anticipated by you the listener, because you you might learn who wins stuff. You might also not learn who wins stuff, so you gotta hang them and listen to know. There's no way to know. Good show for you, man. We had Bryce Andrews, an author, wonderful writer, one of the best writers I've read, and sometime I really enjoyed reading his book Down for the Mountain about living with grizzly bears, the Life and Death of a certain Grizzly Bear. We talked about that. We talked about uh naming animals. We talked about moving from urban environments to the West. We talked about killing and how it makes you feel. You know us, that's what we do. Um And before that, Phil and I went through a bunch of stuff. You're gonna learn about the THHC Book Club, exactly what that's gonna be. We're gonna we're gonna make that a thing here. Pretty soon. Phil went to the Turkey, the n W t F Show, the Convention. That's true, that's true, you in you just you're just fired up, aren't you? Can't wait? He's gonna be a turkey on it pretty soon. It's gonna be great. And we talked about Joaquin Phoenix speech at the Oscars, and I realize that maybe I'm the Joaquin Phoenix of the hunting world. It's hard to take that in. It's hard to know. I when I started off we're recording this, I was really mad at Joaquin Phoenix. But then at the end I had some you'll clearly hear me criticizing myself at the end, Joaquin Phoenis is just a stand in for my inner dialogue. But if that speech change changes your life? What if I what have I become a vegan actor? It's based on self hate. Anyway, a very confusing time here at t HC for me, and so you'll enjoy that. But listen, before we get to that, we gotta what is just go sign up if you if you haven't done this already. Phil started to piss me off. Really, oh man, I'm upset. You're getting a little heated up here. I'm pissed because if you're listening to this and you haven't signed up for First Lights New Zealand Hunt giveaway with Ben O'Brien, then you're just you're you're you're a dummy, and you need to go and do it because it is literally you put your email in the first Light dot com slash t a h R hunt. You put your email in and hit a few buttons whatever click except on the legal stuff, and then you get to go on a tar hunt, possibly in New Zealand. You get a weather be rifle, you get a whole first Light kit, you get a benchmate knife, and all you have to do is type in your email. You can even make up an email just for this. Do it. We don't care. I want to win a hunt sixty at email dot com. Fine, there you go take it perfect that for free, thats free, and then do seventies seventy one. We don't care. Really, it's all about going to sign up for this thing, and if you don't, you have to have some reason why, Like what would be the reason that you wouldn't. I don't understand. You have a doctor's appointment, you're clearly those of you that have signed up are clearly. You're clearly if you've signed up. You're shaking your head, you're in your truck, you're at work, you're shaking. You're like, yeah, man, get them. Get them. You're probably mad too, or maybe you're not mad because you don't wan anybody else to sign up. But I'm mad because somebody out there is listening, has heard this message before and hasn't yet signed up. It's like doing your taxes, it's not like doing you get over there and signed up. Guy making me so mad? Hypothetical listener unbelief. Anyway, enjoy episode one on one. Go. Hey, everybody, welcome to episode one of one of the Hunting Collective. I've been O'Brien. We're basking in the glow of episode one hundred. Phil basking in the glow. Yeah, it was a big one. That's a big one. And behind your desk, what's behind your desk right now here at the mediator office, is Phil. I don't know what you're referring to. The desk where you sit, not not your actual Oh oh yes, not this desk. The desk there's behind you right now, but we're sit to edit these podcasts. Right outside the studio is my is my desk, And I showed up today and my wall was covered with drawings of of me. Phill the engineer filled the engineer, not Phil Taylor, No, there's two deaths. That's like your phill the engineer Clark Kent and Superman Clark Kent. Now you know that I don't drink coffee. I've been drinking this um. Well, what would you say? That says so I in my head before I found out how it was actually pronounced, I said, you're a mate. Yep, that's how I said. Well, I said you're a mate because I'm from Maryland and we were read next and they said, nope, that's her mate. I was like, well, I'm gonna keep drinking it, but I'm going to do it in protest because that sounds really douche to drink something called urba mate, but I'm doing it not a sponsor. How has that been treating you? Well? You know, I think I should start drinking coffee because I'm just having it for the caffeine. At this point, I listen, I didn't. I've never told you this before, but you're missing out on one of the great joys of life by not drinking it. Just have a black coffee. Now, I'm just having some real douchey type of drink for the same effective coffee hand more money. Yeah, yeah, it's organic though, that's good. Yeah, no, anyway, Um listen, man, you are just coming back. You're on the heels of what I would deem. I have not been there or talk to you about it at all as a life changing journey to the n WTF show. I was there, yep, Okay, I describe how your life was changed. Was it the greatest weekend ever? Or the best weekend ever? Is there there? Those are the only choices. Okay, I'm gonna go greatest then? It was? It was wild. I didn't I had no idea the the scope, the vastness that that I was lying to WTF conference. I couldn't believe how many people were there, the size of the resort. I'll call it a resort. It was like a Vegas hotel. Yeah, that's the Grand Gaylord Operland Resort. There's a river in it. There was like eight different buildings. It's like a it's like a replica of like like a new a new like Bourbon Street. Halfway through, it's like you're it's like you're in a theme park. So that was my favorite. You were into it, I was, yeah, it's like a theme park. How many people love love turkeys, love hunting turkeys, love eating turkeys. Um. Yeah, I went down to the show floor. Yea, I thought was already a massive sprawling room, and they're like, hey, turn this corner and there's a room that's three times the size of the massive sprawling room, all covered with people trying to sell their own turkey calls. That's right. I had no idea how many people made turkey calls. A lot of thousands, thousands, and that's just like the people that want to travel there to sell them at Yeah, yeah, and it was, it was. It was nuts. Um are you more excited now for your turkey hunt? Like like you could be joking? No, no, no no, I'm not serious. I honestly kind of. I think it's a great setup. It's a fantastic set because that's the people man you like you're saying. Colonel Tim Kelly was course there, he was there. Um a lots of our our friends. I missed missed this year obviously because I have pressing things at home. But I love that show man. I love going to the South, I love that community. I love it all. It's it's just a and then you start hunting turkeys and you you understand the fascination with the animal. Remove the hunting part of it, because I intend to like take my three year old out this year and just call turkeys in and let him see what's up without shooting them. That's gonna be tough, boy, It's gonna be tough. That's gonna be some next size interstrain for me. But I want to do it because I don't think he's ready to see a turkey's head get flopped off yet. And I just want him to be interested in the bird, learn about the bird, will eat a lot of the bird, as he's already done with elk and things like that. So you might want to do that with your kids. First turkeys shoot this year to bring it home, eat it. Oh and by the way, but I don't forget this. You know what you can make out of turkeys? What's that? Carrots? Please explain. I saw a video on the internet from Arby's and I'm way late to this game, this like maybe a year ago. But I don't care because it's glorious. It's glorious Arby's made meat carrots merits, that's what they call them. That sounds awful. I don't know, you know how. I think we talked about this on the fake Meat episode. You know how upset we get when they try to make plant that look and this is the video. If they can make meat, we can make veggies from meat. And this is just like a recipe using a turkey bread. Obviously there's like a farm turkey breast. Look at that. Look at that, Phil, I'm getting I'm getting nauseous looking at that. Like the turkey breast you're gonna get off your turkey that you kill, and we're gonna wrap it in cheese cloth and a plastic wrap and then they tie it off a little string and they cover. They put it in a soux vied to cook it temperature. They take it out of the cheese cloth, put dried carrot juice powder. Sounds that you're levering a fake carrot in parts of real carrot to make it look like a carrot. And then uh, they put like a little sprig of regular and slice it up and listen. I'm sorry. I'm an Arby's defender. I'm one of the few crowd. I love a good beef and cheddar, don't do wrong and the season Curly's but Armies, if you give you messed up, we're making that we're not. They do look awful, like like a nuclear hot. We took a bite of that plant sausage and he looked inside and it was like glowing yellow, and it was unnatural that the iron. No, we can't do that. No, weld be making We're hypocritical if we look at the meat carrot and we say that that looks like a good idea. All right, Well, anyway, I just wanted to take a detour of that. But anyway, you're excited to hunt turkeys, Yep, you're in yep. Okay, it's happening. Uh. And then we're gonna do lots of talking about it when you're done, because that's the job. So there's a lot of things before we get any further. Couple of things. Bryce Andrews coming up wrote a book called Down from the Mountain talking about ranchers living with grizzly bears in a very interesting part of Montana and a story of a particular grizzly bear. He came in the studio. I just want to say, Phil a fantastic human, and I felt like we had a can action. It's kind of like missconnection. Do you ever see the thing on the greigslist? I felt like we had it. He had to go to another event speaking event after we interviewed, and I felt I was like, we could be friends. You should have followed him stand outside his hotel room hotel room with a boombox and play something. I just felt. I felt like, Uh, we're gonna be bros. And I was gonna go out to his farm. We're gonna hang out. It's not too late, you don't think so, maybe I'll listen to this match out. I thought he was awesome, a great interview, So you're gonna we we talk a lot about grizzly bears and UM probably live in while they live and really just managing. Uh. Some of the charismatic megaphon are running around, some of the predators running around. He works um for an organization called Carnivores and people. I think that's what it is. Uh, And you'll hear all about that coming up. And also everybody wants to know about the giveaways. What's going on with the giveaways? When is he When are we gonna announced the winners. There's there's a small crowd forming out outside the studio right now. People are and I'm like, calm down, have a meat carrot and think about it. We're gonna announce him next week episode one or two. We're gonna announce the winners. We're gonna have a live panel in here to select the winner of the phil Drawling and a live panel of people. Were trying to pack the studio full of people with real good opinions. We're gonna select our favorites and then let let this panel help us pick the winner. Um. We'll also announce the winner of the Turkey Call. We got a lot of them, a lot of entries, and then the winner of the Rhyming Podcast Review, which again, fantastic job everyone, fantastic job. Um. I think here's what something happened that you shall all know about it. We had something backfire. You don't say yeah. I don't think anybody that listens to podcast looks at the rany Kings, but if you have a podcast like me, you look. I want to know where I'm ranked, and I thought we would play a trick on the rankings by haven't you guys subscribe and unsubscribed reuscribe and backfired. We are off the rankings completely for the first time in a long time. Like the algorithm saw this mass exodus happening. We got to get rid of the show. We're not even on the list until the sponsor's not even on the list anymore. So that was a backfire, um, because we were just so you know, we're like in the sports there's I heard Joe Rogan say the other day there's nine thousand podcasts in the country or whatever some stat where there's like almost a million podcasts, and there there's hundreds of thousands in the sports category, which is where we set and we're normally in like the fifty seventy range out of all sports, which is impressive out of all sports. Now, all the other podcasts in our network and right there with us. We're very happy about leading podcast networking such. Um, but we're off now. They took us off. So anybody listening here, anybody that works at iTunes, we're sorry. Please keep put us back on where we apologize. Uh really made your bed with that. Really we're off. Hopefully we get back on. And I don't know why we're off. Maybe I think it the the algorithm is like subscribers versus new subscribers versus reviews, and I think just like general listenership, all goes into this algorithm, so hopefully so that shouldn't affect if people actually did resubscribe, maybe we're going to number one. Hopefully the download people will still see this, the the download count will be similar that that shouldn't change anyway. Yeah, so please please iTunes, we need you to help us out. But uh, we're gonna announce all that stuff next week. So you have it's right now, Tuesday. You're listening to this. It's Tuesday, February. Really six more days. It's gotta be in Monday for to win. So go nuts. We've got a lot you got you know, really it's like to win a thing. This is a very low number of competition because if you were you know, for example, the first Light New Zealand giveaway, I'm assuming tens of thousands of people will have signed up for that. We gave away a thing with Steve and Mark Kenyon and it was hundreds of thousands of people signed up for that. Um in this case, you're you're there's a couple of hundred in each category and so you've got a good chance of winning. You just gotta do the work and be creative, So go do it all right, We've got more was a lot of mechanicals I've gotta get to before you get to Bryce Andrews. We've been talking about the THHC Book Club, right, Phil, that's right, be excited for this. Uh No, No, absolutely, I'd like you just say that every time I asked you a rhetorical question, lame is ship. No, I know, I actually, I mean, I actually am just I'm curious to see what what books you you you deem worthy I know I got for your audience. So we're gonna do We're gonna do twelve of them this year. And what's gonna happen with the t book up? Now? Everybody knows about Oprah's book Club. That's all fine and dandy. Good for you. At least Witherspoon has one. Now to trying to take the throne, Well, bring it from a Witherspoon and Oprah bring it. You are famous. So we're gonna pick some books. We're gonna get together here as a crew, pick some books. They obviously have to be of people that are living because we can't interview out of loophold or the likes. And we're gonna get those folks scheduled to be on the show. I'll let you know. A couple of weeks before that's going to happen, we're gonna ask you to read the book and then write a review. I will write my own little review of the book, and then write a review and then include a few questions for the author. The best and most creative review will be read to the author, along with a couple of questions you have for that author. We're all going to read this book together and if you we're gonna get a really cool prize for you. If you get chosen. We'll tell you what that is later as we get down the road. But that's what the TC Book Club is. We're gonna be talking about that going uh into time. But I think it's gonna be exciting because pretty much every damn person that comes on the show nowadays has a book, almost all of them. I didn't plan it that way. And we don't have like a We just have producer Korean that goes out and calls these people, and Ben's interested in talking to you. We don't have like some publicists don't call and say we want you to to do anything. We picked the people we like, we picked the books we like, and we say we I mean me um, and we go on. So it's cool to try to bring this all together. Let you guys get in on the fun. And if you have a book that you really like, right in and tell me what it is and will include it in the TC book. But we have actually two or three guests coming up in the next couple of months that I heard from from listeners, and so if you like somebody, let me know and we'll try to get him on the phone or try to get him in the studio. That's that? Is that all good? Phil? You could have said no. You could have said no, all right, We're gonna move to the next thing. TC Book Club. Write me at TC a commedia dot com when you're done making all your podcast entries. Right now, I heard I got and a listener to listeners rode into to bitch at me about not bitching about Joaquin Phoenix. You're a you're a cinophile, Phil. I just want to get this. I just want to say this right after bat Um. I love Oscar Season, not because I think it means anything. Uh. I think it's mostly a foolish political campaign run by Hollywood elite producers, and the best picture that wins is hardly ever. You know, they usually don't stay in the test of time except this year. Parasite is a great movie. I don't know if you've seen it towards um they got it right this time. But I just love I. I like movies. I like I like that there's weird categories that no one cares about, like short film, the animation and sound editing and cinematography. You're into it, yeah, like, let these people get on stage and and say hi, they're kids. But then you have people like Joaquin Phoenix. Let me just let me just who listen, great fantastic actor. Fantastic actor. I'm not seeing Joker. Have you see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? But he's not in that obviously. Have you seen The Master? No, Okay, I've seen like some movies that he's in, But I just always think of him as a crazy individual, like not, he's not nailed down, he's weird life. We don't know if you know about this, not somebody I would call up and be like, what do you think about the world? I would not share your He has had a very insular experience. So I'll start by saying this, Here's what I believe about looking up to people and listening to people, especially those that are athletes, are artists, whatever. And I'll tell when my kid ever asked me this, I'll tell them exactly this. Look up to their art, not the person. People are complicated, they're imperfect, a lot of them are assholes. Look up to their abilities and their art. Uh, strive to be that, don't strive to be them. Because any person that you idolize, you're gonna probably find that they're not exactly who you think they are. I've had many examples of that in my life. You get old enough, you start to understand that these are just people. They're imperfect, they suck, they're awesome, expired to their art, and not who they are. You agree with that, yeah, i'd say so, all right, good. You coulda no, you're a you're an idiot? Well no, I mean I think that never meet your heroes thing is uh, it's it's it's mostly true. I don't know if anybody you know is thinks waking Phoenix is a Waking Phoenix is a hero. But if you're if you're an aspiring young actor, he he is very method and into the craft. And I feel like actors and musicians specifically and and athletes as well. There's so many of them that are so good at what they do that you could turn this on. You know. Mel Gibson is a good example. I would not want to live Mel Gibson's life. I would not want to hang out with him or hang out with him. I would not want to hang out with Tom Cruise. I would not want to hang out with many of these folks. They seem like terrible and sufferable douche bags. But I'd like when I watched the film, I'm very much entertained by what Time Cruise has done. I don't want to get lectured about Zeno or anything like that. But I do love top Gun, so I'm can you not. I love John Travolta. He's been he's really gone downhill as Mel Gibson has in later years. But they've made some good cinematic and that's some good cinematic achievements over the year. So I think this is a good thing. But for who have no idea why we're talking about Jaquin Phoenix, let me just play. He won the OSCAR for what phil lead Best lead Actor. It says, yeah, lead lead lead performance, lead actor in a motion picture. I have not seen this, but I had a lot like multiple people right and say, you need to listen to this ship because you've been talking about animal rights in Hollywood. So and we did talk about So what happened at I think it was like the SAG Awards in the Golden Globes. The Highwood Foreign Press made this big announcement that the only meal available at the Golden Globes it was going to be a vegan meal. And that's what it was, right, and they and they like tweeted and instagrammed about celebrating that they've gone vegan. Everybody that went to a really fancy dinner ethical one Globes was gonna be served like vegan, only a vegan. I'm not like, you can have a vegan option if you'd like it. No, only vegan food would be served. Um, it's it's yeah. They they tweeted new this year, we're working towards a more sustainable going Glows by serving an all vegan menu. And then there's like a picture of some sort of orange nuclear soup that they served. Hundreds of millionaires took private jets and limousines to a building where they save the world by eating soup. It was probably a delicious carrot ginger. Probably. I mean that sounds good to me. He Look, Hollywood is a completely insular community where you have to be like to get work, and they all just have pretty much the same opinions. And anybody that seems like they don't share this very liberal, very progressive, very animal rights bullshit opinion seems you know, you could just get walked out of the room. So you're not gonna stand up there and say like, I love a nice steak because it's not good for your career because there's many producers and there's many um that would have been an incredible we'll we'll get to watch well, keeping in to speech later. But really funny if the guy after Joaquins comes up, he's like just eating a big fan. But you know, I love a good filet fan, I I I love a nice filet mignon with a little bit of milk, a big old cold glass of milk. Seveal just bring a little cow out and whacking on the head of the hammer right there on stage. So this is what Joaquin said, We'll try to play this out for and this this is like halfway through a speech. He seems like his demeanor. If you're not seeing this, you can of course google it. He's he's kind of a weird dude. He's a weird dude, very uncomfortable up on the stage, but he's trying to seize his moment. Phil and I have a disagreed about this. I feel like he has a false like modesty going here where he just like doesn't want to be there, but he's there anyway to say some really important ship that he doesn't want to have to say, but he's got to say it. He's reluctant to be up there, but he's got an important message. He doesn't really do well with this stuff, but he really wants to say something. I feel like that's horseshit. I feel like that's he's an actor. That's true. He's an actor. You thought that he would just was generally nervous. I mean you if you if you watch this guy from when he's he's been acting, acting since he was a kid. He's acting now in this speech. I'd say in some way probably and watching the first you know a little bit of an Earth, So here we go. I think that we've become very disconnected from the natural world and is egocentric worldview, the belief that we're the center of the universe. That's mostly true. Go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We're feeling entitled, artificially account who heartless. At first, you think he's talking about like maybe like fracking. Oh you know, like maybe we're taking advantage of the earth. Maybe is this a global warming thing? And then Arnold artificially inseminating cows. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna walked it back a little bit. I mean, because he's an egocentric actor talking about some ship no one cares about because he made a movie playing a clown like that. It is the most hypocritical bullshit. And they always get up there and they'll say, like I have earned my right to speak. That's absolutely earned your rights. This is why the oscars are fun to watch because like nine percent of the people get up there. You get like Laura Dern and Brad Pitt, and they're so charming and we love them and they're like, thanks to my kids and my mom, that's what you should. And then you get it. Then like everyone's like get a couple of people every year get up like Renee Zellweger got up after rocking Phoenix, and she didn't do any sort of like political messaging, but it was almost harder to watch because she just like went off the deep end. This it just is. It gets I don't want to like go on a ramp, but I will. It gets to the heart of this like disconnection. He's telling he's up there saying we're disconnected. You're the most disconnected Limo drive. This dude lives in a four thousand square foot mansion. He's doing the same surfacing shit that every other person does. Now, we got a guy coming on in a couple of weeks who actually went from vegan to try to live without eating any industrialized food for a year, And we talked a little bit about this kind of thing where people were like the vegan movement, the animal rights movement, and people like Joaquin Phoenix that hold these views are very good at the broad strokes, are very good at talking about what might solve the problem, but they're not good at all about acting. But let's listen to him talk about uh cows. Here see where he goes to artificially inseminated cow and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that's intended for a calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. He's got crazy eyes here, dude. He's acting. He's acting personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something to give something up. But human beings that are best are so inventive and creative and ingenious. And I think that when we yea his love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment. Now I've been to be a posit for a second. See, I just want to say that, like I feel like, I like, maybe I'm gonna get called out for this. I generally agree with his over all premise is that we are not doing things correctly, and there's probably a better way we could be doing them, and we should like try to work to do it. But his way, his thing is like he thinks the thing that's destroying the planet areas or I guess disconnecting us from nature is that we are drinking milk. Yeah, it's just delivery it's everything about the way he looks and the way he's speaking, and where he is and what he's wearing and how he got there that makes this bullshit. Like I don't I would have him on the podcast. We could sit here and have this conversation. We would probably agree on a lot of things. Oh man, if you wanted to, if you thought Barry Gilbert I have I haven't hat ready for walking right away as he walked in the room. I just I think that's what it's like, bullshit. I started when I'm agreeing with Ricky Gervais, who is just roasting these people. It's disconnected. This is it's just painful to watch and listen to. It just just is. And it's one of those things where your message. This happens to me a lot of times with Trump. I'm listening to what he's saying. I'm like, I don't disagree with this, but what are you doing? Like your delivery matters, where you are matters, who you are matters, All that stuff matters within the message. And doing a show like this where you learning along the way, like every person is learning as they take stuff in. And I mean, I'm certain, I'm sure there's something for me to learn from this, for everybody learned from this. But I don't think that what he said there's going to convince anyone. I mean, he's in it. He's literally in an echo chamber. I don't want to like make this about this show because it's about this guy's speech. But one of the things I I endeavored to do this year, let's have more people on that are actually doing stuff on the ground. And that's what um Bryce Andrews did. He he moved from the West Coast from this from an urban environment. We'll talk with this a lot, moved to Montana to become a rancher, to learn what it's like to be a rancher, to learn what it's like to live in this country, to have an educated opinion. They started writing books about the experience, and he does it very well. And we have other people coming on later in the weeks that are gonna be the same way that instead of just talking about it, being an intellectual about it, being a professor, which is nothing wrong with that, but these are people that have have taken up the mantle, cared about this stuff and going on. So it's not that these ideas even thinking about being an environmentalist. Um, in the modern sense, it's a bad thing, but it's just the way these animal rights views shape it. And so I don't think it will be controversial to say Walking Nix is an idiot in this case, but he is. And so there it is. If I haven't watched it, you can go google it. All right, Well, we're gonna get to Bryce Andrews. We talked about a lot of really cool stuff. But again, here's a guy who um, moved from an urban environment, wanted to become wanted to see what it's like to be a ranch or, wanted to live in the West. He idolize the West, came out here and uh did it? Started his own his own ranching company, his own cattle or company, then quit that, moved into a group called people in Carnivores where he's really talking about how to co exist, how to really coexist with with grizzly bears, wolves and a like. Um, not whether they should be there or not, but they're there. How do we manage it? How do we do better? Because I thought that it was really cool. Um, and so a guy who I want to be friends with him, this is Bryce Andrews. Enjoy Hey, Bryce, how's it going. It's going great. Thank you so much for having me in. Yeah, thanks for coming in. This is uh, your first time of metiator. You weren't really sure what the hell we even were. Well, I did need a little bit of reading in, but I think that's that is all down to the fact that I live on a farm kind of under a rock in the middle of nowhere. Um, but yeah, I apologize you could you won't hear in the background. Phil tells me you won't hear it in the background. But Steve and the flip Flop Pleasure out there filming a beaver Caster video which you'll see on somewhere or was I gonna go Phil social media? Probably? Um, so you may hear that in the background. But that's just our office, Brice, that's what That's who we are, That's right. Yeah, normal normal Monday, Monday Monday's. Um. So you're an author. I wanted to start out to make sure we covered this. We were just talking about it. Jonathan Todd Ross is this guy that reads your audiobook And when I hit play on it and I heard Jonathan Todd Ross come on, I've been calling him j t R because we're close and is beautiful. I love that dude's voice. I've listened. I think this is maybe the fifth book i've listened that he's done an audiobook. So if you know him, let reach out, because I think we're friends. I will. I'll let him know. I'll pass it along through the editors when he does a great job. When you spend thirty hours of someone forty hours so and you feel it's right, yeah, you get to that initial uh uses initials, that level of familiar like I'd liked him to come over and read to me a night, just whatever down in the back of the milk jug. I don't really care anything. I feel like I have a good relationship with him, feeling good. Um, so you're you're not a Montana boy, but you're living in Montana now, right, Yeah, I came out to Montana. Well, I mean I came as a kid, uh and worked on my godparents ranch outside of Billings from the time I was gosh like eight on. Um. But I grew up in Seattle, So I grew up far away from the place where I've made my life and living for the last uh more than a decade. And you wrote a book, Bad Luck Away that talks about this, and you talk about this in your other book, Down from the Mountain that we'll get to. Um, kind of like your why you came to Montana, not originally, but while you moved to Montana, while you were pursuing there. I feel like that that story is as interesting as anything that has to do with grizzly bears or whatever we'll talk about. So you were living in Washington, right, UM, I believe Walla, Walla or somewhere there, tell my research, and you decided that, like you just you can describe kind of how you decided to move to Montana, what those feelings were. You describe it well, and you're writing, but I think just here and straight from you, Yeah, I mean, I think really like the thing that struck me even as a kid, when I would come out here and my dad would take me out here fishing, and we'd go on these sort of epic Montana summer road trips. I would cross the Cascades and I would come out into eastern Washington and see the horizon spread out, and it was just like something inside me just kind of like relaxed and and you know, mellowed out and ran out to the horizon and Montana was always um like that, but just amplified. I just loved the place. I love the Austin charity of the landscape and the wildness, and I loved the places where there weren't people um and just drawn to it um. And I made my way toward it through the work for ranching. That was always the way that I knew this landscape best and the way I got to immerse myself in it. So I love that work and I love this place ever since I first encountered it. Yeah, I mean you said you grew up in this relatively urban environment. Very yeah, I mean describe like at that time, because I think the juxtaposition of where you are now where you were there is important during your city guide life. What did you think about large carnivores like grizzly bears and large landscapes like this when you were you know, less informed and kind of yeah, aspired to them, but they were abstract to me. I mean they were conceptually interesting, and I was like, I was that dorky kid that did a senior project on range management. It's like, like, no teacher and in my high school, what ever encountered the con accept or a curiosity in that direction. But um, you know, I think I understood so Like my my dad was an art director. He ran the University Washington's Contemporary Art Museum, and they did this show that was called The Myth of the West. And I think that happened when I was I don't know, maybe nine or ten years old, and the thing that I remember was seeing these images. You know, you'd see like these um you know, early watercolors of the West, the sketches of people who explore it out here. You see these traditional um depictions that are taken from the native tribes. You see all these different sort of records of the West, and so many of them featured large carnivores and these giant, rugged, empty landscapes, and I just, I don't know, I just got fascinated with it, but in a totally distanced way. You know, I couldn't, um, I couldn't imagine myself being part of that landscape, even though I deeply wanted to. And so, yeah, I grew up with the similar feelings, right, Like mine's a little bit more trite, maybe that I watched Lonesome Dove as a kid, and I'm like, oh, I did Texas to Montana, and they you start to think about what these landscapes mean and kind of what those horizons look like, and how the depth of a place like this in the life of it seems seems so much greater than where I grew up in the East coast of Maryland, and I have the same feelings you had. Yeah, I as a kid, I wanted to know about it. I want to understand it. I don't know if every kid, I certainly idolized cowboys, thought that life was something that ranch life was something I wanted to get to. But you actually did it like you didn't. I'm just a podcaster. I live in Montana, but I live in the suburbs like you did it, Like you really went from having those you know, childhood yearnings to to make in the Jump. And one of the most interesting things about your writing in both your books, I love it and I love it when artists, because I consider writers artists um take on so the things like ranching, things that are kind of rough scrabble that that you might write poetically about, but you're writing kind of gets down to the dirtiness of it and addresses the feelings in a way that you know, people that hadn't done it for as long as you have, uh could do. I mean it's it's it's great. I think that's a really nice way of saying. You know, you spend a lot of time describing building fans. Yeah, and that's the way it absolutely Yeah, And I mean it's interesting. It's interesting work to know well. And I keep I have this really strong conviction that the things that we do all the time, the things that seem mundane, are actually really good ways of getting to know the landscape deeply and understand what we're doing to the places that ultimately sustain us. So I often do choose to write about things that seem yeah simple or or gritty or dirty or or or whatever. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's that the manus I even wrote down here, I just wrote down minusha because it's like that's where the beauty and these things are, and that's what we often don't address or even celebrate, right, like we don't. So in and reading your books, I was like, I'm learning about this minution and that's where somebody with your ability can really walk people through what it's really like to be there. Yeah, I mean, all the you know, I'm fascinated with the beauty and the brutality of of this place and the work that I've done here. And um, I think that that like those qualities beauty and brutality are not just present in like the vast, sweeping landscape. There present in those details. And that's what constitutes the daily life of a ranch hand, or the daily life of you know, an outfitter or anybody who's really in this landscape all the time every day. It's it's these weird little details that have you know, some of them no consequences, some of them you know, life or death consequences. Um, but yeah, they reveal something about this place. I think, you know it will maybe get to this too. I think normally, Um, those experiences kind of harden your opinions. Right you you see it up firsthand, and you go one way or the other, right it right. Some people come protectionists, some people come, you know, become the opposite. They fall into things like you there's a beautiful pardon and down from the mountain where you talk about killing a heifer and feeling guilty about it, feeling sad about it, and dreaming about letting him out, like pulling on the side before you go to the butcher, like like, hey, just just go out there. But then you also realize that if you let them out there, somebody else would scoop them up and they would come to the same end. So like there's a weird sadness in that. I'm jumping forward because people got to know how you got there. But I'm excited to talk about that part um. I think that we need to say, like, when you get into Montana, what did you do and why did you want to do it? Because there's a lot that that informs. Yeah, I mean when I came here, I wanted to be as close as I possibly could do this landscape that was so attractive and interesting to me. And so what I did is I took ranch hand, uh, like a summer job at the upper end of the Madison Valley on a ranch called the Sun Ran. Beautiful place, incredible. Have you been to the sun driven by and saw its many winning elk and like, oh yeah, I had thousands. Tip. Yeah, I love when people come ilways driving by. My family comes around it east we trap by the sun Ranch. But like you want to see some milk, I'll take you where you can see some milk. I mean, it's a funny thing because I fell. I fell into that job. You know, I found it from a distance on the ms U like range sciences bulletin thing. And I didn't I didn't know anything except for these little bits I had learned um, you know, working for my godparents UM as a kid, and I UM, I basically fell into that opportunity. And you know, you probably have have seen and I think a lot of people in this landscape have seen how like in every in every valley, there's one ranch that's like it's like just right, you know, it sits on the land in this special way. It looks at the mountains and the right orientations, like the drainages are like yeah, I'll go here, right everything converges and the Sun Ranch is one of those places, like twenty acres push is right up to the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. UM, huge, huge wildlife populations, thousands of elk that come across you know, expedition pass um, all sorts of wild carnivores. And I ended up taking care of this really large herd, being one of a ranch crew of three taking care of this herd of yearling. At this point, what year was. I was twenty two and it was two thousand and six. Were you coming off of college? Had you? Yeah? I was coming off of college. UM, and I had taken this uh you know, like the classic uh Ill advised train trip around the country. There's a there's a deal at that time, that's what you want to do. Yeah, we've we've been there. I went to Ireland and towards the breweries. Yeah, that sounds was great. Actually I spent you know, a month sleeping on Amtrak trains. They was thinking about that when I was reading your book. I'm like, I wonder what this guy did to get into this because like prior to yeah, like I'm sure there was some like college experience that you that was wild enough to kind of like somehow push you in that direction. I don't you know, or maybe not. I just I made it up in my head. I feel like I just did normal college things and and so desired something that was kind of weird and different. UM, and that trip really was. You know. I ended up in UM in New Orleans post Katrina, you know, like you know, several years or I actually don't remember what year Hurricane Katrina was, but the damage remained. You know their water lines, crossed everything. I ended up in rural Mexico, hitchhiking up Baja and like it was just a It was one of those like you know, voyage of self discovery things. And I came home and I didn't know what I wanted to do. Um, but I did know how much I cared about this place out here. So from Seattle, yeah, I found my way here, and yeah, I never really looked back. I mean I worked on the Sun and then I went on to work on and manage other ranches. And um, now my wife and I have a farm uh on the Flathead Reservation north of Missoula. Yeah beautiful, Yeah, great spot man Um talked about in your book Down from the Mountain about those early days. I believe it was on the Sun Ranch where you would go out on patrol early in the morning, be on horseback, kind of learning the horse, learn in the environment, and at some point within telling a story of going out looking for stray cattle and poachers or whatever, you learn the landscape. But you also learned what it was like, what was really like to live around large carnivores like grizzly bears in this instance, or wolves or like the feeling of going from no danger, well the danger of like a street a car hitting you in the street, to this danger of there's a shadow, there's some rustling. I'm on a horse now I gotta deal with this. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the coolest things about ranching is that you're not just observing the landscape, you're participating in it. And hunting is like this too. You know, you have a position, you have an objective, and that's really really different than um, you know, wildlife watching in Yellowstone for instance, And I remember being on the Sun Ranch and had two different uh experiences that really kind of like book ended that feeling for me. One, I was running across one of the North End flats. There's big flat part of the ranch on the north end, and this antelope was coming out of the distance and I realized, you know, so we're on these parallel trajectories converging on this enormous flat expanse. There's like not a sage brush to hide behind for miles. And then I keep thinking like this antelope is going to turn, you know, like he's gonna see me, and he's gonna turn, and slowly as we both kind of kept trotting. It became apparent that like he did not see me for whatever reason. You know, he was looking up into the sunset, you know, the sun was behind me and he just couldn't really see. But we got really close, like twenty ft and for all the hunters are like, whoa, yeah the sunset. Yeah, great idea, you know, something like we're converging. And all of a sudden I realized like, if I don't do something about this, We're literally going to run into each other. I'm going to run into this antelope. And so, you know, being a city kid, I like looked at the antlope and was like hey, and and it did a double take and sprinted off to the horizon. And I had this moment of thinking like like, man, I can I can reach out and touch this world? That that was so abstract for me. And then I had a parallel experience where I was in the brush and had a grizzly really close to me, and I thought, oh shit, it can reach out and it can touch me too, you know. And and that kind of immersion, I think, is is what I like so much about this work. Yeah, and then you get to you get to a point where you have those first experiences where you realize this is reality, and then you talk a little bit about living in close proximity to these animals, because then it comes I don't know if it ever normalizes, but it becomes part of what you handle on a daily basis, kind of what you handle when you're outside, and like, just it has to change you a little bit. It has for me too, when I'm hunting my entire life, not worried about a thing, right, possibly a rattlesnake, possibly something else. I come here and I've got this orange canister strapped of my waist and a pistol on my polster, and it's just a whole different It alert you don't you can't really settle into it. It's such a weird thing that because like I went to UM, my wife and I went to Costa Rica and we're in the jungle. We're learning about different kinds of carnivore conflict and how people deal with it. So we were with jaguar researcher walking around in like one of the least developed corners of the Costa Rican rainforest, and I was just scared out of my mind the whole time because there are tiny little leaf colored snakes in all the leaves that bite you and you die. And yeah, no me either, and you know. And so it's just it's different kinds of risk though, because the guys who worked there, you know, that's part of their life, the same way that rattlesnakes and grizzlies are part of mine. It's a risk, and I understand it, but something, um, something in you becomes calmer or resigned to it or familiar with it over a time. Um. But it's funny how unimaginable it is. Like you go down there and I think, like, I could never get used to this. Yeah, and maybe I couldn't. I don't know. Maybe I'm somehow calibrated now for these animals, these risks in this landscape. But but and I'm sure you've thought about this, it requires some level of sacrifice. You have to sacrifice the feeling of like, I'm I can go around this corner and for no fall of the bear or my own. I can jump up a grizzly bear and it can kill me. So you're sacrificing some level of safety for the landscape that you choose. You know, if you choose to live there you're making a deal. Yeah, and and and I think people should be really upfront about that. Um, you know when we talk about when I talk about the importance of having grizzlies on the landscape, that risk is something I've accepted, and it's it's certainly a complicated thing because when things do go really badly, it's a horrible outcome. And Yeah, we've talked a lot about bear tax on here, and when you start to hear them, a lot of them have to have this like similar refrain of the bear is not hunting you. You're running up on the bear, or vice versa. Something happened that neither of you had predicted or or plan for, and then this clash occurs that then it doesn't end well ever when it goes down like that. But and that's like I said, you just make that deal, and you know, and the same thing. I laugh. I don't know how you feel about this. When I see the signs for Yellowstone like bison, don't don't get too close, yeah whatever that I can't even remember the number, but they're like, don't get this close to bison, Like, who did we negotiate that number with the bison? We won't get twelve feet away from you. You stay there, We'll stay here. And it's like you've actively made this choice. I've actually made this choice. We're going out in the landscape and making a choice. It feels like visitors to Yellostone maybe sometimes don't understand that they they're unconsciously making that choice because they want to get close. And like we spend so much time focusing on a few of the risks that exist in nature, like the grizzly one. We all think about it out here, but you know, I can think of times when I've been twice as scared of a moose, like an angry moose um or you know, or and you don't even and then there are all the other sort of more mundane ways to die in the natural world, you know, Like you know, you're out there traveling in the winter and you fall down a tree. Well, what a grim you know, what a grim way to go, and what a present risk that we just don't think about the way we you know. But yeah, we're here to talk about carnivores. I guess we're here to do like I said, it's conversation talk about let's talk about where it goes. But I do think that's that risk and living with it is something that you know, when you start to talk about your book in the Mission Valley and over in the Flathead, you know, it would be nice to describe what that valley looks like because it's the setting for your book, sure, but it's also the setting for this very real comparison to what we're talking about now. The risks. I mean, there's been pheasant hunters attacked by bears often, and in fact that you know flvps putting out alerts like hey, pheasant hunters. That's not something that that I think a lot of hunters or even outdoors been think of your peasant hunting, you might run to a grizzle bear that activity, those two activities don't often cross. But in the Mission Valley that happens. And so I think, because we'll talk about Millie the grizzly Baron and get into that like where I guess describe how you first got to the to the Mission Valley kind of what that looks like and scene for people. So I got to the Mission valued by, you know, through the work that I was doing for this small conservation group that's called People in Carnivores, which is a group that works to reconnect and restore populations of native carnivores um by reducing conflicts between those carnivores and human beings. Um, we should you know, there's so much it baked in all this, but we should want to address kind of like how you came to that. Yeah, because it is connected to an earlier thing I mentioned where you're when you're talking about you're working for a company called Oxbow. Or you're a co owner of a friend, so you started a ranching cattle operation with a friend. You're going through this. You have a regular routine. You have to get meat to the book, sure, to make money, to survive, to keep this company. And in one of these journeys, I'm telling your sitting there, No, this is great, just sit there, um. And as I'm reading this, like you're going through this story where you're hauling heifers into the butcher like I said earlier, and you get you get to thinking about the killing. Um, can you describe the story where you're you're whispering things to the cows and the butcher's Like what you say? Taking sure that little moment? I mean, I think what this all comes back down to, is is that the thing that allows you to sustain an agricultural life is balanced. And the way that we set up um initially set up our business, uh didn't really have it, you know. So what we were doing is we were finishing cattle that we got from other places. And from just a purely emotional standpoint, I always enjoyed the balance between life and death on a ranch. You know, for every for every one that you had to take to the butcher, you're also getting who enjoy a calf being born, and that kind of hope and that you know, open endedness. And so there was some sort of a thing where you know, there's there's a weight in killing, in being the person who creates the meat for other people. Um, and we should I always think we should look at that in the face, you know. And and I think this is the thing I've I've always wanted to say to hunters and rank, you know, people who produce meat one way or another, is you know, looking we don't lose anything by looking at this in the in the face. We should understand that that you know, killing does damage. Um, yeah, you know, like killing. If if we try to look at it as something without a darker side. We're kidding ourselves, and it will do damage to us. I really think it will. UM. But so I was taking these um animals that we had raised or you know, finished, for a period of months every week and I just kind of got to this point where UM, occasionally you would take and she would absolutely know what was going on because we you know, we worked really we worked with these animals in a really low stress way. And what that meant was we could get them to go on trailers, outer trailers really easily. You know, they lived a very happy life. UM. And the story you're mentioning is when I brought a trailer load of of heferets so older is kind of three year old cows that didn't breed back, brought in this this load and was pulled up to the back end of a local processing house. They just would not get out. I mean, you know, they smelled the blood, they saw. I mean, at least one of them knew exactly what was in the offing, and I had to use you know, force and and basically shout and slap them out of there, which was a thing that really stuck with me. UM. And I think It's also like you were talking about Lonesome Dove, and this is sort of like a modern version because there's like a couple of buddies decided to do this thing and and it was best case scenario and it still is. You know, Um, we're producing meat that was grass fed, grass finished, without hormones and antibiotics. This is after the sun ranch. To know, these large operations, you've kind of like graduated to something that you're comfortable with, right and so so like to bring it all back around, I mean, I was I felt like I was doing this the best way I possibly could, and yet I still felt this imbalance. And I also had had these experiences where you know, I had been had needed to kill large carnivores in the course of doing ranch work, and I always felt this strong attachment to the wild creatures, particularly difficult ones like wolves. Um, and I wanted to be on a slightly It's not that I wanted to be on a different side, you know, because we graze cattle on our place now. Um, It's just that I wanted to look at it from a slightly different perspective. So I found this opportunity to work um for this group called people in carnivores, and they looked at me as a good candidate because I had spent all this time ray itching in places that had lots of lions and wolves and grizzlies, and so I knew that perspective of how the two species could coexist and how they could collide. Yeah, I think that's a great set up for the rest of the story, because that's it's having not having not really lived in I live in this country, but I don't live in it the way that you have and do, and and very few people have had the experiences that you've had. Um through this whole story, right coming from the city, moving here and then immersing yourself in the way that you have. You haven't just kind of gotten a job and and found your way. You've kind of it seemed to me like you were kind of graduating to the next thing as you learned about how ranching works, and how cattle production works, and then how cattle in large carnivores work, and then graduate to the next part. So I enjoyed that part of learning about your experience because I think it's important. But now you get you find yourself working for people in carnivores trying to figure out a way. You know, I think if you tell me if I'm wrong with like coexistence is what. Yeah, that's the part of those folks are looking for. Yeah, the ideas being able to share share the landscape with fewer instances of conflict basically, And that's the perfect kind of Petri dish for that experiment. Is the mission valley totally and and the mission is it's a microcosm for you can look at the mission and you can see a lot of the stories that shape the American West UM and no discussion of the mission would be complete without saying that it's uh, it's the reservation of the Confederated Salation Coutiney tribes, and it's not the entirety of their uh native land. So you know, you have this, You have all the normal Western problems like neighbors fighting over water, increased crowding and subdivision, the function, the way that agriculture is shaping and changing the valley floor and how that impacts um, you know, the wild creatures. But then you also have superimposed on that um a history where Native people have been used very hard and unfairly and are recovering from that UM. So the Mission Valley just to give some like I guess, geographical context. Um, it's at the southern end of this enormous wild ecosystem. So like if you you know, in the book, I put it this way, if if you're a wolverine in the Yukon, you can head south and cross very few significant roads and you can end up looking out over the Mission Valley. Um, it's a it's connected to that huge ocean of wilderness that still remains to our north. Um. But the valley floor is extremely agricultural. I mean, it's like these sheer mountains that just dropped down, you know, it's like a wall of mountains and then a valley floor that might as well be. It kind of looks like the Midwest. It really. It's like I've never seen when I first laid eyes on that valley, I've never seen a lot of anything like it. I would it's like maybe in New Zealand, there's a lot like that when you really get this tectonic place going to work in a small area. But I've never I've never seen anything like like the gradation of all of a sudden. It's like boom, oh you're on a cliff and I'm like I think you described at some point is the hand maybe with fingers that are you know, almost straight up, and that's what it looks like. It's it's you have these these vast wilderness you know, these mountainous clift wildernesses that lead into cropland it's a crazy environment. Like you said, it's kind of like a it seems like a weird experimental version of cohabitation. Yeah. And what it is is it's a glacial landscape. So like that valley is the southern extreme of this enormous northern ice sheet, um. And you know that's what carved all this stuff, and that's what left the fertile soil down there. And you know, grizzlies and people, the tribes you know, have been part of that landscape, coexisting there for you know, basically since that last glaciation. So it's really interesting to look at everything that's happened in the last hundred years, you know, which is like all the roads, all the fences, all that stuff, and it's just this thin little scrim on top of this deeper history. Um. And what when when you first saw that place, you start, you know, you you dive kind of dive in I assume working on you know, was a grizzly bear as you worked on first. Yeah, So what I did is I went and talked to the tribal wildlife folks and said, what are the major conflict issues with your big carnivore species? And is there a place for me to be useful? And Stacy Corville, the biologist up there, um he said to me, He's like, it's corn and chicken. And I was And I didn't expect either of those two things because you know, when when I was working on the edge Yellowstone as a ranch hand or a ranch manager, I was always thinking like, you know, cat wolves, calves, um, you know, grizzlies getting into people's food in the back country, hunters running into grizzlies all that. But corn and chickens and and the Midwestern things. It's very Midwest. And that is the funny thing, is like you have the fertility of the Midwest, like the soils and the soils and the topography just like jammed up straight against the gnarliest mountains you've ever seen. And so he basically pointed me towards those two things, and in particular, m a family owned dairy where uh, grizzlies had learned to feed almost exclusively on corn and when the corn was right. The rancher's name is Greg, Greg Shock. Yeah, and Greg's a great guy and somebody I still have a good relationship with um and he tolerated all my experiments out there. But yeah, I mean this struck me in reading this book when you think about kind of how we even as hunters or biologists or so. While he's studying a landscape, you kind of run into these special situations and this is one of them where you you have this um, can you describe you know when I think when you first arrived there, you realize this corn issue, and then you kind of have to I had to kind of think of my mind, big fat grizzly bears alling down out of the hills, especially when they're hyper fagic, but which means eating a whole bunch um are coming down and just spending time in corn fields, rolling around taking naps. Yeah, I mean they're pretty happy in there. It's it's physiologically pretty damaging form. You know, their teeth kind of go to pot and um, they I mean they eat to excess. I mean they're basically in there. I really have trouble walking. These bears, griz gonna eat so much they can't walk. Yeah, well they can, they can walk, but they wattle and they struggle to run, and you know that it's interest, it's I mean, this is why all of these issues are so much more complex than they seem at a great distance, because, on the one hand, a Grizzlies like big goal in life is to get super fat in the fall, and this does accomplish that. Um on the other hand, choosing this food source means that they're not going to the peaks like they used They used to go all the way up to the top of the Mission range that's like Knife Edge, you know, giant mountain range we're just talking about. And they would eat army cut were moths and ladybugs that that came in colonies of millions and millions of insects, and that was their late season. Yeah, they got to work the burn calories, They got a dig to get that. It's a whole different experience, right, Yeah, it's very different than plucking that we're talking to food for bears here, I'm talking to drive through, drive through corn. That's what we're talking about. And it's an amazing thing to see what that looks like firsthand, because the corn You know, I didn't grow up around big corn fields, but when you're inside of a corn it's corn field. It's eerie. Yeah. That's kind of a pun too, I guess I can realize. Oh yeah, oh man, oh, you can use that and you're giving a talk later on. You're gonna write that down. That jokes. I'm getting good at that jokes late. Yeah. No, but it's it's a weird place to be. I mean, the light is all bizarre and green because it's coming through this canopy. You can stick your arm out and your arm disappears. Yeah. Just imagine if you were like, hey, listen, Grizzly Bear. You're gonna get into a place that feels very insulated from the outside world. And the ship is going to be full of food, right, and water because they're constantly irrigating it. And there you know, there's water in the pivot tracks. The soil doesn't soak up the water, so there's all this runoff and water sitting around. It's per for you. You go in there and you get fat, you come out, you're gonna be all screwed up. Like they so they get they get addicted to it basically, of course, like once they've had it, they come back, they try to find their way in again, and they stopped using natural food sources. And two things follow from that. One the farmer loses an unsustainable amount of corn. So Greg was losing like a quarter of his corn crop on a ninety acre field, um and so, and that was making it harder for him to do something that was already hard, which is maintain a family farm. UM. In the current agricultural climate, If these grizzly bears are eating twenty plus acres worth of corn plus acres of corn and and they are also um, it's bringing them into a place in their hungriest season where they're going to be in conflict with people. So you know, if you have bears that are coming and going from the low parts of the valley at that time of year, like you were talking about pheasant hunters, the fact that they're down there eating corn like that's the pheasant. Yeah, and crazy, but it makes a lot of sense right there. Hyper phagic during those time are getting fat for hibernation and and there's a lot of a lot of activity from humans, and you know, there are stories that illustrate how close people and particularly pheasant hunters are to grizzlies when they're down there. Like coller data is an amazing thing because we can see for some of these bears exactly where they went, you know, like when they paused, what they did. And Stacy tells me this story of of being on the edge of corn field tracking a sow that's in there, and have a bunch of pheasant hunters pull up and say we're gonna push this field, and he said that there's a grizzly bear in there, and they said, we don't care, and they wandered it. So he could see he could see the guys moving through this field, and he could see with the telemetry the bear basically walking a circle and staying out in front of them, staying away from them, waiting untill they were done with their hunt, and then continuing. Now, that is not Please don't take that as like it's not a strategy. That's not a strategy. That bear is not a blocker for your peasant, right. What it illustrates is how close these animals are living with and how good they are at avoiding conflict most of the time. Um and that's that's I think, as much as anything else, why we have such an obligation to do our part to limit that conflict and probably not to push that particular field at that particular time. That's a brave souls. Yeah, I had great, that's one word for stupid. Yeah, it would be another one. Yeahah, there's there. There's not a lot of meat on those pheasants. You really know, Yeah, you're really going for the experience. Yeah, I mean, I think again, this all the beauty and this is the kind of all illustrates what you do now for a living. And what I think is is I often in the past in these conversations have missed which is just like, stop talking about the debate in the in the g y e. Stop talking about the grated yellowstone talk. Stop talking about whether grizzly bears can interconnect their populations, which become like the points in a debate about a thing, and in this case about you know, grizzy beard hunting, and erase that for a moment and then look, just look, get how these two things can happen, how cohabitation can happen. Yeah, and you've kind of got a fish bowl of that you've a lot of time the yeah, great microcosm for some bigger things. And also, you know, I think I'm trying really hard in this book to draw people's attention to the stories of individual animals, because it is it's really tempting to step back and say, like, Okay, these bears are dots on the landscape, you know, their colored color data dots. But if you start looking at the life of anyone bear, if you start looking at you know, if you have that color data to see what they did, what they encountered, what challenges they faced, you start to appreciate them a lot more and you start to recognize that the stories that wildlife are living out, you know, whether it's a bear or you know, it's the skunk in the back pasture, like their heroic stories, they face these really difficult ways of getting by and when it goes wrong, it's tragic and so like that's as much as anything. That's what I want people to understand is that if you start because they crazy, so I was. I was sort of tracking on the story of this bear named Millie. Was the sal that had come for years and years to the crop, had raised all these different leaders of cub cubs. So she was a genetically significant bear and one that was living pretty darn well with people, and she came to a really rough end because of her proximity to us and because of the way we were, you know, because of the choices people who lived around there made. Um. I used to think that her story was exceptional and and I used to look at that and think, like, Wow, what a crazy like, what a crazy life that bear lived. But as you get closer to it, you realize they're all living lives like that. I mean, they're all they all have like near misses from big old semi trucks, and that's it. Like when you know, I don't get that. I don't like to get on the stump about hunting, like I said, I don't hunger the bears, but that I feel like that in hunting, I feel like I go scout, I find an animal. I watched that animal. I hope to find that animal again, at least at the very least. It's my job as a hunter to understand what that animals going through, where where it's gonna be, why it's going to be there, and then make that decision, much like you had to do with a heifer, make that decision to take to take that animal's life, and there's like the relationship there. It grows me and my empathy in a weird way. This is so hard to explain to someone. But then, but it makes sense if you've if you've known a corner of it, if you've seen it, you're seeing to me, like growing empathy through it. With tracking something and then killing it makes sense to you. I'm sure, even as a rancher makes sense. Um. But then you start to just get into separate the hunting for for a minute, because I'm sure when you're tracking Millie you weren't really too worried about hunters. There's no hunting, so you don't worried about it. Um. But but then you just have people trying to make a living. You know, Greg is a you know, I guess you could say a small dairy farmer. Um. His daughter is involved in a lot of this. She was earlier in your life. Yeah, And he's just a regular seems like a regular guy. I never met him, read about him, but it seems like a regular guy. And you start kind of the book and talk about Millie. Um when you collared her for the first time, correct, right. Um, So just when Stacy called Stacy, the biologists and Greg and yourself went out, um tranctor put a collar on it. Just kind of describe that moment, getting to see that play out, um, and and what it meant to you. I wasn't there for that. I was writing that based on interviews with Stacy and and Greg. Um. But you know what from what they were telling me about that, UM, you know she was actually I mean, this is again like it. You know, it's this thing that seems exceptional, but it's kind of an average day for those guys because they they stay. Stacy in particular, you know, snares and and tags a lot of bears. But um, yeah, that she was you know aggressive, you know against the snare and took a while to sedata. It is actually when of Stacy's first UM. He wasn't as experienced at it back then, and it was one of his first UM times. I think he was sort of taking the lead on the sedation of the bear, which is a really complicated thing because you're you're trying to I mean, obviously you have to knock that animal out pretty significantly, UM, but you're doing it by you know, like I have helped uh sedate a number of large carnivores, and it's always kind of iffy because you're you know, if you use a dart, you're wondering, like how well did the plunger on the dart inject this very powerful you know, Uh, I don't know if it's an opiate or narcotic or whatever it ketamine, Like how how how like how much of it did it get? And like how amped up is this animal that it will take more to knock it down? And then once you get it down, you have to be um, really careful that it doesn't die, you know. And and so it's a total balance and it's another one of these things that that builds empathy. Um. And I mean just to kind of hop back really quick to the you know, we were touching a little bit on on hunters and these big carnivores. Don't have you ever run across that book of Wolves and then by Barry Lopez? I have it, but I know Barry Lopez. Yeah, So that's a fantastic book, um, because it talks a lot about the ways in which we see ourselves and these big carnivores and particularly hunting societies um. You know, it's the more I know about big carnivores, and the more time I spend hunting in the fall, the more I realize how right tribes all over the world had it that like these, these are the animals we should look to for advice, you know, like that. I mean, if you look at the strategies. He has this great story about um then Nanomia people way way way North and the way they look at wolves as essentially like exemplars of different hunting behaviors. And they do that for really practical reasons. It's like, basically because wolves don't starve to death and nnami a hunters used to before they had rifles, and so UM, I don't know. I guess I just think because here in a space that's really devoted to hunting, I think we're kind of missing an opportunity as a community of people who hunt and think about wild places in that way, we should be looking more at these I think, you know, oftentimes people are really antagonistic with hunters. We look at it as like, you know, we were taking a thousand elok out of this herd, and now the wolves are taken this much, and that's a that's a loss, But having these animals on the landscape can actually show us a different way of going about something that's important to us. We can learn from them. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I love that perspective because, like I was telling you probably before we hear record, I've had a lot of people in here that have a lot I've had, you know, story biologists, people that have spent time and wild places for decades, sixty years in some cases come in it's like kill all the wolves, you know, and I'm like, listen, man, that doesn't that strikes me as as so holy false. But at the same time, I've had people come in here like don't ever kill a bear again, and I'm like, well, that's that goes against this model of conservation we've built. It goes against kind of the way that we would it be interacting with these animals. It kind of takes doesn't take into account the history of the interaction here. There's gotta be some way in the middle of all this. I'm never going to go out in my lifetime. I don't think and kill a grizzy, but I may come to that if it given the choice, I may come to a reason why I might, but there certainly is a lot of um information about myself and then all of hunters in going through what you just said, going through what is our relationship to this thing? What do they mean for ecosystem? What kind of service do they provide to the ecosystem? And I think because they're so storied within our culture and so charismatic in many ways, our connection to them is never going to go away, and we're not going to be able to just write them off. I mean, the only way it goes away is if they do. And that's the thing that we really have to be careful of because one thing that everybody should be aware of is that this landscape of this like beautiful gorge, just western landscape that we all I mean, people with every different stripe of beliefs, every kind of politics, everything, we love this place. You know, we care about it and and one group of people doesn't care about it more than another. You know, everyone cares about this, but it's filling up. I mean, that's the thing that we see. Um. You know, we we talk a lot about you know, long term outcomes for these species, and so much of it depends on connectivity and habitat and you know, like right now, for to take the grizzly bears an example, Um, we have the Northern Continental Divide population, so that's like surrounding Bob Marshall Glacier. We have the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem population which is down in this area and they're not well connected genetically or connected genetically. And then we have this massive chunk of habitat in the Selway, bitter Root and frank Church Wilderness that together that's the largest chunk of intact road this habitat left in the lower forty eight. We have this opportunity right now to connect those things. And it's not just for grizzlies, for every you know, for the flow of genetic material, for every wildlife species that we want to persist in this region. We need to make those connections because people will continue to come to this place. And if the past is anything to judge by, we are not great at showing collective restraint. Like that's that's I mean. Think about we have a history of eradication these animals, and we have a thing to struggle with. We should be struggling with that right now. We didn't come here the first time like, we get height, we figured it out. Here's what we're gonna do. Exist we didn't. We came here and said And a lot of that comes from UM. I mean, I think it's really cool to talk about this in the context of hunter gathering societies and hunters because so much of our approach to carnivores in the West comes from an agricultural mindset. Right Prior to the agricultural mindset, there is some degree of competition between you know, native hunters and big carnivores, but there's also this this correspondence, this this notion of um not necessarily collaboration, but learning from each other and being able to better use, better hunt the landscape because of the other one's presence. And there are a lot of historical precedents for that that I'm going to leave aside for right now. But like in the in the West, we have an agricultural mindset, and what that creates is this duality something's mine or it's not right, something's domestic or it's wild, it's with me or it's against me, and UM, I think that we really need to examine that now because we're in this really weird space of cognitive dissonance, where like, so much of what we love about this place is the part that's uncontrollable, that remains wild, and yet we have a mythology and an approach to it that's entirely unsuited to preserving that space. And when you start to see these conflicts, it becomes real. And like I was reading some stuff on people in carnivores and like the list of things that the prescriptions for dealing with gritty bears in the Mission Valley. There's a lot of things you can do, so many things. Yeah, none of them involved guns. I think it's it's it's like I made a list here because that's bare poles or food storage, car carcass composting, livestock, guardian dogs, fencing, garbage security, scared devices, bear spray, and range riders. Yeah, I'm sure that's just some of the things you can do. That's but that's a pretty good summary of like if if most of us were doing those things, we have a lot fewer problems. That was my question. It's like if if if every rancher, you know, maybe there's a subsidies or some way, like, hey, look, I know this costs more to for you to do it, but you're also losing something with your crops and with these encounters. Um, do all these things? What do you think? You know, Let's take just a standard ranch from the mission valley has got. Let's say, hey, Greg, Greg, you've got ninety acres? You do all these things? Got all these bears coming down? They're habituated to this. Do all these things? Then? What what do you feel like is the outcome or what have you seen? I guess it's probably a better way to put it. I mean, it's all a numbers and statistics game, right because like, as these animals move across the landscape, every time they encounter and a tractant, so like an attractant is anything they can get a carnivorre into trouble, you know, like a like a carcass hanging in a garage, and attractant unsecured garbage, chickens a corn field. All of those are things where they can cause a collision between humans and the animal. Every time the animals move through the landscape and and it encounters one of those, it basically rolls the dice, right, like it might get suckered into eating that garbage. And if it does it's going to get used to doing that, do it in the future, or it might go on by So basically the way we look at it is to whatever extent we can, we decrease the number and intensity of attractance on the landscape. And if and I mean the hard thing is, like you could do a lot of things right and things can still go sideways on you because animals are individuals, and animals carry with them the behaviors that they learn elsewhere. So like you know, to look at wolves as an example, if you have a wolf that's really dialed in on killing calves, it's going to want to keep killing calves. There's I mean, there's very we don't have. We have some tools that can make it harder for them to do that. We have UM livestock guardian dogs, which are phenomenally useful and effective. UM we have fencing solutions, both temporary and permanent. But like, it's very hard. You can't guarantee that things will work out well, but you can increase the likelihood of them going well and decrease the likelihood of like really predictable problems. Yeah, and I think, um, I was trying to pull up here because I just started to retail of the US fish and wildlife. They do some conflict studies and look at the six recovery regions that we're looking at for bears, in its totality, what do you think is the most common thing that they're looking at. I know, I was like, in terms of conflict, In terms of conflict, well, it's it's different for each of those. You know, you were talking about the you know, the main recovery regions. Um, you know, it's different in each one. I think, you know, crops that kind of conflict. Crops huge on the front, the East front as bears are moving out into the prairie. Um, small livestock is huge anywhere you have a significant density of people. Um, you know, anywhere you have like x urban subdivisions. Um. So it's it's going to be different everywhere. But the one thing that's that's true across the spectrum is that as more people enter the landscape, the number of potential conflicts rises. And wherever you look, we are by far the largest cause of grizzly mortality. That's yeah, that's the next thing exactly what I was gonna say. I'm like, if a lot of places it's habitat for fragmentation, a lot of things you might you might get to win or kill or predation. Be sure, for Uncle it's being a big problem. But in this case, one of the reasons why your book is interesting and why this conversation is even even more important, is because we we do this. We do this, we move into a place, right, we're doing what we do. Bears are doing what they do. Yeah, this is our jam move into a place. Put in like twice as many roads need to be there, um, string up the fences necessary to demarcate our place from the neighbor's place. And we often do that, like in the in the last half of the twenty century, we were able to do that but not see the consequences of it, because if you do that in some places you end up with these islands that wildlife have to move around. If you do it everywhere, you end up with the wildlife on islands, and that inversion, that's what's that's the point that we're at right now. That's a good point. Yeah, I'm a good point. There's a good way to describe it, like where is the wildlife and in comparison to us, how much of the landscape have we taken up? Yeah? And what do they get? What's the island, what's the ocean? Yeah? I mean we're I'm not into this like you know, we are what we are, you know, and we do what we do. We move across the land. We're not as much We're not a virus, but we could be like a bacteria. We just like roll across landscapes and kind of eat it up, turn it up in many different ways. Well, you know what, UM, one of the best analogies for it. So Jamie Junkele is the bara biologist out of Missoula. UM. He said, Uh, basically he said something pretty bleak, but I think it's worth are in here, you know. He we were sitting there talking about bears and and UM he spent his father was this renowned Chuck juncle renowned bear biologist. UM. And Jamie was saying, like he said, you know, in fifty years, you're not going to recognize this place. He said, you know, Missoula is going to fill its entire valley. It's gonna you know, he said. And what he said at the end, he said, we're like a big fucking glacier. He's like, we use all the good low country and we just leave the mountaintops for the bears. And he looked at that as a foregone conclusion. That's where he and I part ways though, because I don't I mean, I'm young enough that I am not willing to admit that that is going to be the outcome here. I don't think it can be. And what that means is we have to be the first generation to do something that's truly revolutionary in the West, which is to leave this place less settled and therefore more intact than we got it. Like he said, there's so much so that millions of acres of critical habitat for lots of species, and we're going to decide in the next couple of decades what we're gonna do with that. But the difficult things we're not going to decide all at once. Yeah, We're going to decide it like one, a little time at a time, right, Yeah. And I think part of the prescription to that is exactly how you live your life and how others that listen to this, that our hunters could live their lives as well as like learn about landscapes, learn about the ecosystem, play your part, and when you get a chance to step up and share what you've learned. Do it, but do it in a pragmatic way. Do it in a way, because a lot of times when we get we start about this conversation about Grizza Beers, I think a lot of people's mind flips to like the environmentalists in this case, anti environmentalists, like, well, we're humans, don't I'm not gonna hate myself. I I want to make money for my family. I want to have a job, I want to make a life. This is this is who I am, what I do. I'm just trying to do the best I can here. It isn't about whether you're gonna hate yourself or not. It's about what do we you know, it's a it's not about negatives, it's about a positive. It's about what are we going to do for this place that we love. Because anybody who gets out and sees what hunters see, what fisherman see, um, I think you'd have to be pretty damn blind not to come to love this place right like that, Because some of the best moments I've had in this landscape have been when like, you know, if I'm after elk and it takes me some weird little side drainage that nobody in their right mind would ever walk up because it's a like awful old side hill. And you get to places and you realize I have true solitude. I have a true understanding of this place that I've been looking at from my window for the last how many years? And it matters. So I guess I'm saying, like, for me, that's what this is about. It's like, ask yourself, really, what do you love about this place? And what I love about it is how it's intact still in some places, like we have all the creatures and the grizz you know, the high order carnivores are ecologically necessary for this place to be the way it is. Yeah, I mean, if if you'd like to hunt elk, I don't think elk really can be elk without wolves and grizzly bears and other things. Behaviorally in the Yellowstone example is I mean that whole thing with trophic cascade. And maybe this is something you guys talk about a lot. We do. We talk about a little bit, and I think there's some pushback on trophic cascade that I think conceptually it makes a ship ton of sense to me, But I just I think about if you just think about you know, animals are conditional, right, you know when you talk about grizzly bears conditioned can be conditioned to eat corn in a cornfield, and that's not something that you traditionally would see. They're they're can do, They're moving around a landscape, and they can be pushed and pulled in different directions based on what they want. Right. So you have this conditional nature of an animal, and then you remove one of the major conditions to its to his life and death, which is the predation of these large carnivores, it's going to change what it does, how comfortable it is, the stress of the mothers that are given, like when when they drop calves in a lot of cases, so um or fauns, so all of that. So if you, if you were to as we did, take wolves and bears out of the equation, push them out of these landscapes, move in and take their habitat up and shoot them if they mess this, there's just a bigger as you said, with those large carnivores. I think, as you said in your book, there's two types of mountains, one with these things and one without. And they feel different, and they feel different. They feel different. And that's where like, because I'm not a biologist, I lack I lack the training that would allow me to say, you know, exactly, like ecologically, what are these things doing all the time. There are people who know that I'm just not one of them, but I think, yeah, you can say it though in general, like this is this is a big because these they're large carnivores and they're praying on on unlits and other species, like they have a huge impact on everything from the top to the bottom. Whether you call it trophics, cascade, or you just say it like that. I'm not a biologist either. I just say kind of how I perceive things. And I think you're writing in your book and your perspective and interesting me for that reason because it's not stated from I'm a biologist. I studied this for years. It's like I've seen it. Here's a description of what I've seen. Draw your own conclusion, colusion, and and it's one of the things like I think my background, you know, spending as much time as I have in the agricultural world, raising calves, chipping them off, protecting herds from these same animals you can't go through that without developing this weird sort of contrasting sympathy. And that's something I try to preserve in my writing, is you know, I try not to pillary people. I try not to you know, hold somebody up as a straw man of evil. You know, you gotta keep I don't know, I mean, I I really feel like we have some major challenges coming our way in this landscape, and they come from they come from climate change, they come from crowding of the landscape, they come from just like the accumulated mass of what's going on so far. We're gonna have to solve these things. And I really think that, like we can only talk about them if we maintain sympathy for people with different viewpoints. Is I mean, were fantastic? We need to see that. That's a great way to say it, Like, hey, look, the only way this works is if we're if we're all share the value system for the place the animal lives on it and what that requires. That's like rule, have you ever heard of that thing? And that one of the best versions of that that somebody has ever told me is Jim Stone, who's a rancher at the Blackfoot was saying, like, it's like a barbed wire fence, Like a tight wire on a barbed wire fence where you're gonna grab it, Like you can choose to grab it on the barb and stick a barb through your hand, or you can grab it on the eight percent that doesn't have barbs. And that's what we need to do when we talk about these kinds of issues is figure out, like what can we agree on, how can we move forward in a way that improves outcomes for these species and lets us more safely inhabit and and inhabit this landscape without wreck and shop. Yeah, I mean, it's it's a there's like a prescription here that some people I've talked to and we've had people in here is like, just don't leave, Just leave and leave more room for the grizzly bears. You just get out of there. Leave the room for the grizzly bears. They need to munch habitat. We're gonna do this, We're gonna do that. And I was like, man, that's that might be a prescription, but it's gonna have side effects and you're not going to sell that to people. There's no pragmatism. Build into that idea. It's all this is like pine in the sky. I hate to say emotional, but there's some emotion. And then I'm sure you gotta like what I liked about your description of it. And then just reading a little bit about people in carnivores, it's like, hey, look this is where we're at, right We've got a bunch of large carnivores. We've got a bunch of agricultural land that that can be productive both monetarily and for a food source. Those two things are probably going to remain the same. That conflict is not going to, like at least at this current j actually not gonna shrink. It's probably gonna grow. So we gotta get on the ground and deal with that right now. Yeah, I mean, we basically have to make sure that those agricultural lands are permeable to wildlife that's not this is not just carnivores, this is you know, yeah, you have to have you know, ungulates, you have to have carnivores moving across the places that are still open enough. And we have to we have to be really honest about like what's the density at which these places don't work either for agg or for wildlife and we need to stop short of developing it that density. And I mean one of the things that's because like I think it's really easy to look at it is like you know, see, I'm so I am the millionth Montanon. Right after I moved here, there was a story on empty Boil. I don't know, not really, but like you'll take it. I'll take the cash. I get right, We'll let you in. Um No. But like after I moved here, there was this MTPR or Yellowstone Public Radio story about how Montana's population had passed a million. And they're like, and we can describe the newest Montana. He's you know, it's like it's a young man in his early tories. It's seriously, they're like, it's a young man, you know, he has a degree and something related to conservation. They're doing this demographic analysis which like fit me like a glove. And I had this kind of moment of crisis where I was like, I, you know, because I part of why I wanted to live here, because there were less than a million people here. My trading card now or but also like am I you know, am I ruining the thing I love by trying to get close to it, and for a long time I struggled with that, and I think it's something worth struggling with because you put enough people here and it will feel very different. And if you ask, you know families that have been here for many generations, it feels really different. Now you don't have to look far. Colorado was being exactly. It's created to death in a lot of ways. But but the thing is, like, we also we can stave that outcome off for quite a ways by being smarter about the way we build and use land. Because we just pit a little way. I mean, we we have functionally zero regulation, or have until the very recent future recent past, um have had very little regulation of how and where we developed the landscape. And what we have to do is have the guts as a community to develop that kind of regulation before it's too late. Yeah, that that can often happen on a local communal level. Right, A bunch of farmers in the in the mission, get together and this is how we're gonna do it, and let's all be accountable for this way of doing it. Um. Every every guy who's ever least a property for hunting, doesn't matter where or owns a property like your neighbors. The first thing you asked before you buy it, like, what are the neighbors Like? Yeah, always share my values. They share my values, They're cool with what I'm doing. They're planning to put in twenty unit conduct. That's an important thing. But so you there's something I've kind of gone back and forth on the idea of of what you do in this book, which is kind of following individual animal, and I like what you've already kind of swayed my kind of concerned with getting because I've been, like I was saying earlier, my three year old and I are watching a lot of like Planet Earth and watching a lot of Disney kind of like Follow the Cheetahs, and the cheating gets a name and the kids get a name, and then there's an evil Cheeta across the river, and I'm like, man, boy, that's tough. That's a tough way to approach naming something, giving it kind of human like characteristics and then and then telling its story in that way. That's tough for me. I like that it relates us to the animal in such a way that we can care about it, but that seems like could become unhealthy if we take it too far because of the emotional attachment component. Yeah, yeah, because we're you know, because we're really trying, really, you know, trying to anthropomorphize these animals in a way that makes us care, but maybe care in the wrong way, or at least care but relate to them in the wrong way. So that's my concern, Like when we name a bear and we follow it. But as I'm going through your book and as I'm hearing you talk, it's not what you're doing. But I just wanted to bring that up. I think that's a legitimate thing to talk about because I I think about that issue about anthropomorphizing animals a lot, because I write about animals, and I write about individual animals. I mean, I think one of the I think one of the mistakes that we make often is that we look at an animal when somebody describes it as an individual, and we think that's anthromorphizing, right, Like by ascribing to an animal, you know, a desire to be here on the landscape, you know, a story that involves making choices we that actually exposes something that we're mistaken about or that you know, we assume that we are the ones making those kind of choices and I I'm glad you mentioned that, because I obsess about it and I and I have to come to some sort of, I don't know, some sort of a conclusion about how I can talk about these animals in a way that will let people understand what's so profoundly interesting about them, which is that they are making these choices, and that that that two bearers based with the same thing will not make the same choice. And so you have to sort of walk that knife edge, um between doing that and presuming that you know more about their interior world than you do, right. I think that's a lot about context, right, Like what and what contexts are you telling that individual animal story individual animal? And then how do you how do you relate it to other things people? So I think your story rings true whether then had a name or not. So you're choosing what you said to to to present the story of something in its place and time, you know, as it happened. And there's the common Hollywood trope of you know, the dog with a name that talks. You know, Like I said, we were watching some Disney shows and there was cheetah that cheated had a name. The kids had a name. They were describing the cheetah emotions that they had interviewed it. You know, it's like that's where I draw the line. But what you're doing is is describing, like you said, the choices that that bear has to make kind of how it moves through the world. I hope it's different. It's different. I hope it's different than the cheetah thing, because it is really struggle hard to make sure it doesn't come out that way. Well, like you said, it's a fine line. It just is what it is. But you don't want to not tell this animal story. I mean I could write that same thing. It would just you know of an elk that I've you know, this six by six elk that I've been tracking all the year. I watched him, I picked up his sheds and me, we do it in the white tail world all the time, and so we're not So that's not so foreign. That kind of thing is not so foreign to a hunter. Right. Um, there's like a real fun line where it gets unhealthy. Because so I have a question about this though, because like, so, what exactly is wrong with naming it? Nothing? I mean, because I think that the thing that so, like, here's my deal is if you if you tracked an elk every day for a month before the seasons, you know, if you were if you were out there every day, you knew exactly where it day bed, and you knew like you know where it's rubbed trees, like the whole thing, which which I've done. You know, like we name them all the time. You name it. But that shouldn't change the outcome, but it can change your emotional attachment to the animal. But so I guess, so, like this is the thing that I I really try to I'm trying. I'm always trying to understand it, and I'm trying to communicate about it too. But it's okay for us to get attached to wild animals and to kill them, Like that's that is the thing that I really want understood. But I want people to feel the entire emotional load of that because I think it's pretty easy because our technology, you know, a scoped rifle for instance, puts you so far away from what you're doing and makes the act of killing so much easier than it used to be. It's it's easy to sanitize things, for sure, and I don't want that. Yeah, No, I think that's the perfect like really the perfect way to describe it, right, And so it's about I think it becomes about Even in the hunting circle, there's a debate about like little stickers, Like it was little stick I don't know that, like you might name a deer. So you encounter a deer when it's two years old and you call it little stickers and it's got a little stickers, and you're like, well, this looks like the age class of a deer that might when it's five, it might be big enough for me to want to kill. And the people call it harvesting, and let's lay off that you're killing it. And we get to a point where we have this relationship with it, with that that particularly dear for a reason, the intention is to kill it. Yeah, we wouldn't know. We don't name does. We just name bucks, and so that's like a strange We only have that named relationship with the thing we into to kill. We don't name birth of the dough and our fawns. So that you're right, I mean, even within our office we often chied the white tail hunters from the Midwest for naming stuff. Sure, I think in the West you don't have a chance. Often you don't really have a chance to be around those animals that long like you, you probably shouldn't And if you do, you got a nice honey hole you should tell me about. But so so there is just within honey But the way you describe it, right, it's intent and context. Right. If your intent is to help tell the story of the animal in a healthy way, kind of get people to have to to build some empty for what it has to go through, absolutely great. Um, I think the Disney version is a little less healthy. It's a little more like, I want you to relate to this animal story because it's like you, and it becomes like you, and it's hard to disassociate what it does whether it's a cheetah and it kills or yeah, it's a cheetah that some villager kills because it's it's eating as crops or whatever that happens over there. So that's like such a fun line for something like you to write a whole book about it. It just shows there's a little bravery in that that you can walk that line, you know, and and understand it. Yeah, I mean it's an it's a tough thing to understand. And but I think also like both the books I've written have had to do with the convert the collision of my own story, first as a ranch hand with bad luck way and and now you know, working with people in carnivores and down from the mountain, like one person's collision with one wild animal. And that's that has been endlessly fascinating for me, because if you think about it, it's like, were these little like sparks zooming around in this grand enormous landscape, and this the situation that brings two things together in that way is like so unlikely. It's just so unlikely that you'll end up, you know, like running into the antelope. Well, like, what you've done is what's I think? So great about what you've done? And I'm glad you're a writer and can articulate it too, So what's great a what you've done is something this podcast has kind of become about for me, which is trying to get rid of my opinions just my my, my pin drop, like the the opinions that I've formed based on only talking and not seeing. So having you in here reading your work is kind of by proxy doing what you did. I'm trying to to distract of what you learn from doing something I've not done. And I probably my wife wouldn't like it if I said we're moving to a ranch and I'm gonna I'm gonna remove the sun ranch and I'm gonna chase cattle and something I'll probably never be able to do. And so like, your work for me just helps me understand by proxy what it's like to not have, like you said, a very abstract understanding early in your life, to a very intense understanding and then then where that dropped you currently, Yeah, it's it's such a confusing place where it drops you too, because you have I have a like fundamentally equal respect for the wilderness that I love so much, in the wild animals that give it its soul, and for the people who make their living here. And so it's just like it's funny because it's spend all this time thinking about it, and I don't feel like I'm any closer to a solution, except to say that we somehow need to learn to exercise collective restraint, because if you look at all the things we love about this place, we can ruin them by breaking them up into enough pieces. And yeah, I think when you say, when you when you articulated like that with where where we started this conversation, I think it becomes something that has value to me because you've gone through the whole thing. I think a lot of times as a hunters somebody who it's kind of grown in this understanding of ecosystems and wildlife in the natural world through hunting. A lot of times I'll get people in here and we were talking about a previous guess I had that was just like, we're not gonna kill any of them anymore, and but never really had a hands on, day to day to day experience experience of not only just watching them through but poculars and seeing how great they were, but like seeing how the impacted the life of a rancher who was just trying to make money, just trying to cohabitate just one of the feed their kids, put their kids through college. Like I think that's that's an important perspective because I've I've talked a lot of biologists that just sit there and look through binos and say how beautiful these animals are. I agree, I think they're beautiful too, but there's there's some not so beautiful connections. It's messy. That's the whole thing. Like you get you get close to anything like this, and it becomes so messy. Like I thought I knew growing up in Seattle, UM, going to an undergrad getting a degree in environmental studies, I think I thought I knew exactly how people should relate to wolves. And then I went to the Sun Ranch and I ended up doing something that was basically unthinkable for me, which was as somebody who never never really hunted except for prairie dogs on my godparents place. Um. You know, I ended up killing a wolf that was killing cattle, and you know, doing it like with no context, like no under standing of the rifle that I was using. No. Um. I mean I understood very well, like why, I understood very well why it needed to be done in that context, but I didn't understand so much that I that I do now, And so like what I took from that because I felt horrible, you know, I felt like I had done something that was wrong and um, but I also felt like I had done something that needed to be done. And what it's like maybe we talked about more. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we talked about moral absolutism all the time here because I'm just interested in this idea. Outside in nature, there is no right or wrong. There's very very few times that I've run into where there's this moral absolute and like what you did was right or what you did is wrong. It just is this. Yeah, I think I think I actually so, I you know, thought about that obsessively, and I think that's actually what I wrote is that, you know, there's It's funny you can't remember your own book, but I'm pretty sure I wrote this people. I remember in that podcast when you said, I'm like, nope, no, no idea. It sounds like something I would have said. Yeah, you know, I think, you know, maybe it wasn't right or wrong, it was just necessary and and that kind of moral messiness, that kind of um lack of resolution is an important thing for people to be all right with, because that's that is the that's the substance out of which we can forge a working relationship with wild Land. Yeah. Now, on this show, like we we started off, I tried to I don't tell people this, but I try to make sure that we have like some lines of thought through each season. And we started out this, uh have to take some time off, came back with the idea um with an ethicis from Cornell called James Tantillo, Dr James Santill, and he started talking about this idea of tragic knowledge. Right as hunters, we acquired this knowledge of what we're talking about, right, this messiness, this this thing that you can't control. You're trying to do your best. We've set up a system of observation that kind of equals more bears and could equal more elk and has has kind of finished prescription to a problem. But even inside of that, your own personal decisions sometimes suck. You make mistakes and the arrow goes awry and the bullet goes awry, or like said, you become a cattle ranch and realize ship this sucks. Fairy in these things, these have halfers, these cows off to their death. This isn't it. I'm gonna go to the next thing. And it's that personal journey. I think. I just like to recognize that and others and in myself too, like where was I? Where am I going to be? Yeah? You know, when I was twelve years old, we just shot whatever dear came by. I don't do that anymore. Yeah, I mean, I think you know, there's you know the writer David James Duncan. Yeah, so David is a friend of mine. He lives near Missoula, and he always is going on about spirit threads. But David, you should everybody should read is the river Y Brothers KS fantastic writer. Um. But he he always talks about spear threads, which are like these enduring kind of themes that people follow in their lives. And he always I always think like, man, how is it the Dave David picked fishing and I was stupid enough to pick pick like fence, you know, senses yeah, and meat poles. Yeah, Like he picked something that people do for fun and I picked something that people do for work. And what does that say about? Yeah? Man, I've chosen something that people do for fun and made it work and then made it complicated. So yeah, but what do I do? Why am I doing it? But I think like, if you think about that thread, you know, whatever you whatever you're doing, is a way to continue to follow that. So like, weirdly, for me, this work with conservation and people in carnivores is a total continuation of ranching. It's like it's like orbiting, you know, orbiting something that you really want to understand and looking at it from different sides. Yeah, then you start to understand yourself a little bit more, I would imagine, because you you understand your initial desire to be here. Why why did I want to be here initially? And what about me? There's a lot of kids, you know, I've young children. I'm not sure if you do, but I have a couple running around and I see that in them. I see them like choosing lanes and never there's no way they could ever sit around like you know what I'm gonna do today? Like superheroes, dinosaurs, Like they just choose things and yet they're drawn. Yeah, they're drawn in these different ways. Who knows what that's going to manifest when they're thirteen or twenty three or thirty three. Um, But for you, and in a lot of ways for me, like those initial curiosities lead you to a place, and so your life kind of always is revolving around that idea. Yeah, I mean we're always trying to figure out what is interesting about this place that I mean, I think the best thing is if you live a life that you think is interesting in a place that you find interesting, and if you've got that, like that's most of it. Well, we deal like you know, we've been talking about this a lot too lately, Like you deal with activists a lot, people that are at like, I'm not a hunting activist. I just like it, and like talking about I'm not. I don't go up to people be like you've got a hunt. If you don't hunt, you're you're terrible person. But I think like people get so quickly now to being outspoken about something. Um and if anybody could you know, after what you've gone through in your life, could like come to a point where you wanted to be an activist, you could, but you haven't, right, Yeah, Like, yeah, I guess. I mean often you know. I was just in a like a writing class and you have m last week, and they were asking me, like, is is the book activism? We're not? And I was trying to think about because I don't. I don't think about it in those terms. It's clear you don't, but I mean it's in reading it. But for me, it's like I that term is less useful to me, and it's more useful to say, like I really want you to look at this, look at this interesting thing that I saw, and look at this and draw some conclusions from it and and look at it in an open eyed, unprejudiced way. That's yeah, that would be my hope. If I was a college you right now, I would desperately want someone to come and say that to me, because it was like, I'm in a world where that's just is, that's not the norm. People don't there's really position Yeah, like I'm I want you to work your way into this or work your way the hell out of it, instead of saying, like, here's what's happening, let's address it. Lets first let's learn about everything that surrounds And that's what I think this is. And as we were talking before he records, like what what kind of show is this? Or what are we gonna talk about? It's like, man, we're just gonna try to move through a very difficult, messy complex thing and learn and get it wrong and make assumptions and then learn they were wrong and you know, and move and move through that in this uncontrollable, very messy, weird way. Right. And bears, I love bears. I love watching them and I go the first time I saw one in Yellowstone, I think my jaw was on the floor. Yeah, and they moved through the world in a messy, uncontrollable way. So it's the right way to talk about them, you know, And I think it's great and so all those things. I mean, I know when you set out to write a book like this, you don't sit Maybe you do, you tell me, like sit down and think about all this stuff and then write your way into it. You just tell them the story. Yeah, it's a process of accretion, you know, like continental plates going under each other's scraping up a bunch of soil, just a bunch of stuff gets stuck on the dozer blade. Yeah. So when you think about this bear who spent so much time with and you told Millie's story and you kind of that's how you approached this book. Um, what do you come out with like regrets, things are very happy about, Like when just with how Millie's story played out, Well, I'm not happy with your story played out. But you don't want to give it away. Like were we were talking earlier, We're gonna start a little book club here. Everybody we haven't one has a book, I think, yeah, and so we're gonna start a little book club. So I don't want to give the the ending away. I mean, it's in the title she dies, Yeah, Life and Death of a Grizzly, but it's there. But like, yeah, what do I take away from what do you take away from? What I take away from it is that, like I said before, we've reached we've reached a crucial point in this landscape in terms of how we relate to animals like Millie, like grizzlies and so much of what they have to negotiate to survive, to thrive, to to you know, re enter places in the landscape where they've been absent for a while. It all comes down to us and some really mundane choices that we make, like as things as as low as as like low level, as are you going to have chickens because you like, do you okay, you live in this beautiful creek that comes out of the mountains, you know, this creek bed and you're in the ripe arian area? Like do you really need chickens in that context? And if so, like will you choose to do? Will you do your due diligence and put an electric fence around that chicken coop? So it's like I guess I'm left with this feeling of sometimes I'm really disappointed with the fact that we won't even take what seemed to me like very basic steps to live better with wild things. Um. But I'm also struck by the fact that, like, if we wanted a purpose as a generation in the West, we have a ready made purpose here, which is that like we're sitting at this crossroads where either we're going to change the way because for for the last hundred and fifty years, every generation has been leaving this place less ecologically intact, right if you look at it on the whole, I mean, there have been great things done. Grizzly recovery is great, but um, you know, we we have to make a choice, like are we gonna go are we going to continue in this direction which will likely, you know, continue to diminish some of the things that outdoors people really really value and that I live on um or are we going to make a different choice? And I think, you know, hurt Millie story really challenges us with the consequences of of not getting that right. And I think what what you've done is get your hands dirty and so many ways right, That's I think that's what's important. Like, if you care about a thing, go get your hands there and go find out what it's really like to be a rancher or be whatever you know, whatever you're into, go build a fence around the corn fields. Right about it. We never really mentioned that, but that's like, that's I spent an entire summer trying to fence these bears out of this corn field. And that's one of the craziest experiences I've ever had because you'll be you know, you'll know from telemetry that there's four or five bears inside of corn and there you are, working along the edge of this wall of it. So, yeah, you never you never had any like big attacks or anything like that. I've bushes with death. I've been really fortunate. Um, I've had brushes with bears. I've been terrified. Ah, I've never, I've never. I've put it this way. I've had my bears pray out, but I've never had to use it. That's that's a T shirt. I had my bear spray out, but I've never had to use it. And that I think that's probably maybe a good euphemism for what kind of what you want to have happened. Like, I want to know that they're there. I know that they're dangerous, but I want to limit the negative interaction that we have and what at least that negative interaction. Right, So, like I said, I coming into this, like I started reading a lot of the papers that people in carnivores put out a lot of that stuff. Um, not a biologist, not even a grizzly hunter, probably, like I probably wouldn't do it, but it's just rank true to me. Is like, hey, we're taking where we are, we're dealing with it, and then we're also saying like how can we get better while we deal with the current situation on the ground. Yeah, I like it. It's funny because like people think about it as controversial work, there's nothing controversial about with people in carnivores. It's like, let's just try to do this a little bit better. Yeah, Like let's let's try to find this middle ground that can benefit these these wildlife species and also benefit us. And like I said, before we say record, I mean I think that's it. Man, Like if we can find people like yourself who are willing to step into these messy things and go like let's just try to get it right. And I'm not coming into it to save everything. I'm not coming into damn everything. I'm coming into it to be in it, to be there and try to help with solutions. Yeah, and at the end of the day, I'm going to go home to a farm that looks a lot like a lot of the places at work and has the same issues. I mean, we ran we're walk and off our the corner that is right next to the Rattlesnake Wilderness ran into a lion at like twenty paces a couple of days ago, and it was crazy. And so you know, I do think that it's good for people who live in this landscape and think about it and know it intimately to undertake this work. Yeah, well you've if you folks listening, go read down from the Mountain, you'll get a good picture of all this stuff. And it's it's you're not gonna have to listen to all the existential ship we talked about. You're gonna get a good story about a really cool place both in time and in the landscape, and a really a great interaction with with an animal. That's what you're gonna get, all right, Thanks Bryce, Hey, thanks for having me appreciate you. Man. That's it. That is all I'm hyped up on. That year Umante. That's good stuff. Phil some cross over here, any and not a sponsor. Anyone who listens to the Meteor podcast knows that I love Mini green energy. Yeah you do. I'm not, but I've got a bunch on my desk. You got a fool into at least two o'clock when I need a little pick me up. But there's some yr bamte in in those Probably there is. That's like one of the the main one of the main ingredients in their proprietary blend. I know this is what people think. I'm hipster. I'm a woaking People have called me the woaking Phoenix of the hunting world. People are saying that. People are now saying it. They're hashtagging it. They're like, listen to this guy, he's crazy, man, And this is only aiding their view because I had to me when you're drinking like a Budweiser or something. But now listen you your best life. Don't don't listen to that chatter, that echo chamber. I'm into it, hate I'm into it. I'm now a fan of walking pace. I've turned Hey, never mind, I'm not turned on that. Just watch that clip. Dude looks like he's acting. He looks like he just looks like he's look at his eyes. There's there's something going on behind those eyes. If you want a good double feature of insane oscar clips and just just stay tuned for the renas lay you one that happened right after that. I don't really want to trip balls on crazy. Yeah, man, And I am now agreeing with a person that I hate as much as Walking Phoenix. Ricky Gervais. What a terrible human he is? Now, this funny guy is is a is a miserable, awful, awful human. But he went up on one of those Awards shows that I saw and just roasted Hollywood, And I'm like, I agree with you, but you're in it. You're also drinking theaigne, which is exactly what we got mad at what Keen phoenis about. What don't you're not an anti hero, Ricky Gervais, get outta here, son. He's also extremely he's extremely against hunting. He's an animal rights activist himself. It's so he did say, like, I agree with Joaquin Phoenix, but the way he said it and where he said it, which is kind of what I said. But I don't want to agree with Pricky Gervais, you know, because I don't agree with like pluralistic thinking or you know, like commonalities, or I don't believe in that anymore. I've switched. This podcast is now about having one opinion and sticking to it. I like it, and hearing no other opinion, hearing no other opinion, and giving no hats new best Year, best year ever. We know what we know and we don't want to hear it from anyone else about it. Okay, So that's what I want you guys to do. Go home and take that tech with your wives or your or your husband's see what two happens if you're not married. To take it with your cat or what's your cat's name, meat loaf kill to your cats. Speaking of that transition, dude, I'm hopped up. Can you hear it out there? That's the real deal, and that's the real deal. It's gonna be a way better podcast. I'll probably get fired in a couple of weeks. But actually, after after witnessing what's happening to you, um drinking this tea, I don't I don't know if you should drink coffee, I might get fired. So you're gonna be doing a lot of coming. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot more, a lot more editing. Anywait, next week I'm gonna be on the year with Mante. Next week is the big week. We're gonna go in here. We're gonna look at all the hundreds of photos of field that were drawn. I had to have to say a lot of you tried to photoshop. It's someone more hilarious, but we can't accept photoshops. Yeah, it's gotta be. So if you're listening to this and you did a photoshop and it was funny because there's dozens of them just drawing it, it was drawing. Can I just say I'm very I'm very worried about picking favorites. I'm just so flattered that people are just didn't do There's one, there's one that's so beautiful. It's like a drawing of filling mango, but it's really a drawing, this one that you're referring to. If you have to feel that you don't have a lot of artistic ability out there, beautiful to not let this deter you from entering this competition. It is stunning. It is Can I just say, if that picture wins there's gonna be a bunch of furious. It's in the lead. It's in the lead as we go into the clubhouse. So you guys got seven more days roughly to go and do this. Get him in, get him in as soon as possible. We've been we've been having fun at the office looking at these. They're behind Phil's desk, were keep adding to it. Um, you know everybody has to walk by to get to the podcast studio. Phil's desk and the mural of illustrations that you guys out there have done. So a sincere caffeine up. Thank you from me for participating, and you're gonna win stuff. So if you haven't go and do it right now. Next week on the show, we got a lot of really cool things. We have Ryan Holiday from the Daily stoic Um you know what that is? I don't know. He's like, he's like an obstacle is the way kind of guy. But he also that's actually the book you up. He's all about like a challenging yourself to get better. So I like that in general. And he also wrote a piece that I read that I was very enttained. I called why every millennial should try hunting and as a millennial. I'm obviously into it. So we we talked to Ryan. You're gonna try try, So we talked to Rian. We also got on the phone a newly engaged couple who got engaged based on my advice in part. So we're gonna hear about that, how that went down, what role that I played? Wow? You really really just blowing yourself up in this uh this show? Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is all about me. Yeah. Like I said, this is where we're pea. This is that we're flipping the whole of the show where we're like, let's be open mind edde Now we're flipping it. Now it's about me and what I think. Yes, you're gonna talk to this guy and be like, how did me How did I been O'Brien change your life? Change your life? Am I the biggest influencer in your life or the most influential person in your life? You tell me which one. And so that's that's coming up on episode one O two of the Ben O'Brien Experience, and you're really gonna love it. We'll see then by The Hunting Collective with Ben O'Brien is a part of the Meat Eater podcast Network. It is produced by Kringe Schneider and engineered by Phil Taylor. You can find it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, the meat eater dot com, or anywhere podcasts are downloadable. Wherever you listen, leave a five star review, and subscribe

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