Joe Rogan - He Lived with a Pack of Wolves!?

You know, you have, you know, northern lights at night if you're, if you're locking massive moose and caribou, like watching caribou migrate and grizzly bears eating blueberries. And, you know, I've been, I spent so much time with wolves up in these areas and really engaging with the wolves and stuff. And just, it's just always fed these experiences to me. And that's what really started to mean. That's what really mattered the most to me was being in these areas, taking a deep breath, being super present, being super aware. And seeing all of these different things that were filling my soul, right? True soul food while I was hunting a moose or while I was hunting a caribou. And then maybe being successful on a moose or a caribou and skinning it out and feeling the weight on my back because I'm getting it back to camp. And the northern lights are overhead or if they're not out, the stars are out. And I'm hearing wolves howling. And I, you know, I lived with a pack of wolves one summer in Alaska when I was up there doing research. And so like all of these- You lived with a pack of wolves? Mm-hmm. So how'd you do that? I was doing research for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and I ran a research camp, a genetics camp from June through September, May through September, whatever. I did it five years in a row and one year a pack of wolves moved into my research camp. Whoa. And oh, it was whoa. I mean, whoa. I went fly fishing one night and I was standing on the bank of a river casting and it was an eerie little river that I was on. It was pretty quiet, but it had a good flow and I was waiting for salmon to come up and I was fly fishing for grayling. And I just kind of had this eerie feeling. I was by myself and I just had this eerie feeling that I was being watched. And I happened to look behind me and there's a big alder thicket, right? These bushes that are probably 10 to 12 feet high have green leaves on them and these twisted gnarly, almost like a, you know, a Boo Radley type tree. Like gnarly branches and I was just staring in the alders and there's grizzly bears where I was. So I was just trying to mine my, and I'm, you know, I'm walking on wolf and grizzly bear tracks as I'm fishing. So I was just staring back in the alders and it was, it was like a movie. So my eyes were starting to truncate down on the leaves and then all of a sudden it came to this little opening. I could see a wolf's face staring at me through the alders and she was probably 10 yards away, something like that. And so I saw her and when I looked at her, she was just staring at me and I just looked back at her and I, and I just said, hey, you know, I just said, hey, I said, hey, mom, what's going on? And I just kept fishing because I wanted her to know that I knew and I turned my back on her and I kept fishing. Well, lo and behold, she comes out on the sandbar with me and she starts walking down behind me. And it was funny because if I didn't make eye contact, she was totally chill. But if I made eye contact, she would snarl at me. She raised her lips up and give a little deep seated growl. And so she was standing out. She's probably three feet behind me. What? Yeah. And so she's, she's right there. She's literally right there. And so I'm just like, hey, mom, what's going on? Just cast my flyer on and like when I'm not looking at her, she's kind of trying to check me out. She's doing the whole nose extension, getting a whiff. So she moves off. She moves off down the three feet. She moves off down. Do you have a gun on you? I did have a 12 gauge at that time. I had a 12 gauge slug gun. But I rarely took that thing with me, but I got in trouble actually from one of my bosses, because one of the other biologists told my boss, like, never, he never carries the gun. And we're supposed to carry a gun everywhere we go. And so I'm just like, whatever. But so she left. And... Were you worried that she was going to attack you? No. Why did she get so close? That seems weird. I don't know. Yeah. She was just checking me out. She's just checking me out. And that's, that's, that's, that's how I was reading into it anyway. So you think just by the way you were talking to her, that she realized that you weren't even interested in being a threat and she was confident that she can get the fuck away from you. That's a good question. Yeah. That's a good question. Three feet? Yeah. That's this. That's one, two, three. Yeah. Maybe even two and a half feet. Like she was right behind me. Fuck dude. That's like you could touch her. Oh, it gets much better. It gets much better. I ended up spending a whole summer with her and all the other animals in the, in the pack. So the next day I hear her howl down the river. So I'm just messing around. So I howl back to her. She howls back to me instantly. I howl back to her. All of a sudden I see her. She's now standing exactly where I was standing the night before. It's all true story. She's sitting on her butt, sitting upright like you would see a German Shepherd sitting, staring at me. So I give her just a little coy little. She lays down. She maintains eye contact with me and then she just sitting there staring at me and then she sits up again and I howl again. Just a little one. She lays down again. She's just maintaining eye contact. Then she leaves that night. So the area, the tundra that I was on is greatly impacted by even human foot traffic. So you have to be really careful where you step because, you know, your footprint will be there for a long time. So we'd walk on these little planks that we made out of two by fours that would sit up on logs that were, you know, that we placed and put in place. And I had a tent where I slapped and I had a genetics tent where I did all my stuff. Then I had a cook tent, things like that. And so, but right in front of my tent, I had this little platform where I would get dressed in the morning because I would literally live for five and a half months in a little two and a half person pup tent. And so I'd get out in the morning and get dressed on this little piece of wood and then I'd walk to breakfast or whatever or to the river. In the middle of the night, the alpha male was sitting on my little platform and he howled right outside my tent. And I sat up and I grabbed my gun and I was just sitting there and he woke me up from a dead sleep. I was just sitting there panting with my gun. I was looking all around and I didn't know what it was. And I heard something and I kind of peeked out and I saw that it was this big male. I was like, okay, it's just not just a wolf, but like, you know, he's not going to bother me at all. So I hung my gun back up and I just set my gun back down and I just laid back down. But those two instances just started each day. The next day I come out and I'm walking to the genetics tent and I see him. He's 20 yards away and he's paralleling me on this plank. And I go into the cook tent and then I'm kind of like peeking out the little corners, you know, like I want to... I don't know what they're doing. I don't want to walk out and get attacked. And I don't think that's... they have no body language of hunting whatsoever. And so... What is their body language of? Curiosity? Curiosity, yeah. And I hate to... Anthropomorphize? Yeah, but it was just like... it was just like that movie Never Cry Wolf. That's exactly how the wolves were engaged with me. What was that movie? It's just about a researcher, a book by Farley Mowat of a researcher that went up to the Canadian government. They were thinking that wolves were decimating these caribou herds. And so they sent this biologist up there to research the wolves to see how many caribou they were killing. And basically what the biologist found out was that the wolves weren't killing any caribou, zero caribou. They were killing redback voles and they were fishing and they were doing other ways. They were eating small animals, which is basically a very large part of what wolves do. They eat very small animals and occasionally kill caribou, occasionally kill moose, things like that in certain areas. They can be really hardcore predators in other areas. They eat a lot of mice. And so... but that's how these wolves are engaging with the actor in this movie. And, you know, they're kind of inquisitive. They're coming around. And so these wolves, they were just always present. Like, even I would go hiking just to get some exercise and literally three or four of them would go with me. And they'd hang back like 50, 60 yards behind me. But I'd hike for like 10 miles and they'd do the whole thing with me and return back to camp with me. And then it started to really grow because we have this research gear that's in the river so that we can count, speciate, and sample the salmon as they swim through to go spawn. But after the salmon spawn, they all die, right? And so they would spawn, die, and they'd come back and they'd wash up on my gear. And so I'd have all these... that's why the wolves were there. They wanted to eat the dead fish that were coming back down. And so as I started to toss fish off on the banks of the river, usually I would just toss them back into the river, but I'd toss them on the banks of the fresher fish. And the wolves started eating them. And then our relationship just kept growing and growing and growing and growing. And then I'm spending like three and a half months with them. Did you think while you were doing this that this is probably how human beings and wolves developed this relationship? 100%. 100%. 100%. And actually, I feel bad saying this and I hope I don't offend anybody, but I was working with two Inuit guys, two Eskimo guys, and they wanted to shoot all these wolves. I kind of lied to them and I just said, man, like, have you ever seen wolves behave like this? And they said, no. And I said, well, you know, some of your guys' beliefs, you know, fall that your ancestors move on into the animal kingdom, right? And they're like, yeah. And I said, well, is there a chance that some of these wolves could be some of your ancestors, you know? And I know that's not true. At least, I think I know that's not true, but they're like, yeah, yeah. So I just was trying to convince these guys because they wanted to blast these things. And so I just convinced them not to shoot the wolves. And I feel like an asshole saying it a lot. Why do you feel like an asshole saying that? I don't know. I just didn't want them to shoot the wolves. It's probably a good way to rationalize it. I steered them down a path of where their minds may have gone anyway. Yeah. And so, but I spent time with those wolves and I've had, you know, in the idea of management, like when we were in the short that Jamie was just playing who we are that we played, you can see some wolves in there. And a few years ago, I got surrounded by a pack of wolves in the Arctic with the crew and it filmed really beautifully. And it was one of the most remarkable engagements I've ever had in the wilderness. And they were definitely, their body language was definitely looking at us as though, are we food, right? So that was one of them, but we had like six or seven wolves come in behind us. So this wolf would be in front of us. Two or three others would be behind us. But you can see they're not attacking us. They're not even hunting us, but you can just see like they're wondering, you know, is there a play here, right? Is there is there a play here? And, and, and I mean this, I'm not being a tough guy. There wasn't an ounce that I didn't have a, not a fiber of my body was afraid at any point. And there's probably six, seven wolves around us within 10 yards all in their communicating. They're doing this little like, so they're talking to each other. And then they just moved off. And it turns out that the moose that I was stalking, I think they were stalking too. Cause there was a big bull that was bedded. And if they weren't stalking him, because I think they would have had their hands full with him. But if they weren't stalking him, then they were just moving in that general direction in a, they were for sure hunting. And I've just, I've always had a, you know, tremendous respect for them. And I've always spent, I've just, they've, I've always had time with them. I've always had time with them. I've always been, I've had wolf tags in my pocket before, you know, this kind of falls under the same idea of conservation. Like these wolves right here, right? I had a wolf tag in my pocket. I had my bow. I could have arrowed any of these wolves easily, multiples of them probably. But I didn't want to kill a wolf here because I, you know, they know when another wolf is gone, right? The pack knows. And so that, that weighs on me a little bit. That's me. It's also why, right? Like why kill them? Like what is there, are there too many of them? Unless it's a real issue. See, that was the thing for me is like, I didn't have, I didn't do my homework for this area. So I was just like, I don't know if there's a lot of wolves. I don't know, little wolves. I'm not going to kill a wolf. I have no interest in killing a wolf. I get a wolf tag with my stuff. Renella was telling me that there's one of the explorers that traveled the west during the Lewis and Clark days. His favorite meal was wolf. And that wolf was literally his favorite thing to eat. I've never eaten it. Yeah. I would have a real hard time. I just couldn't. They're too much like dogs. I think there's some sort of a genetic memory that we have of our relationship with wolves. I mean, they've become dogs and they've become our, you know, our companions and they've become a part of our community. Yeah. It just wasn't, you know, it wasn't for me. And when the pilot picked me up, he asked me that I'd seen any wolves. And I said, yeah, we saw a lot of wolves. And he's like, oh, they're now, you know, he's not, I'm not telling you he's running surveys here. He's like, yeah, there's a lot of wolves here. There's a lot of predation on moose here. So we're trying to, we're trying to really cut the wolves down here. And I saw a lot of wolves, but I also saw a ton of moose. And I saw a ton of cows and I saw lots of calves and lots of big bulls. So everything seemed to be functioning in that area. And I also saw a ton of redback voles, right? They look like mice with little short tails. And I know where there's a lot of redback voles. I know the wolves do extremely well eating them. And so you see these little tunnels, right? And the tundra and stuff. And I think wolves eat a lot smaller of prey than people think on average, right? We see sensational things of small dogs or wolves. And we filmed, I don't know if you, did you see the dingo hunt that we filmed in Australia? No. Oh my God. You guys went on a dingo hunt? No, we were hunting buffalo. And while we were hunting buffalo, dingoes just exploded from the bush. And the dingoes were pack hunting the Asiatic water buffaloes. Whoa! Nobody's ever seen it before. Nobody's ever filmed it before. We had the Dingo Institute call us immediately from Australia. We had... How big's a dingo? Small, tiny, dude. So we filmed all this in Australia. It's literally never been filmed before, to our knowledge. Everyone that we talked to, that is dingo researchers. They want to know exactly where this was because they've never seen this behavior. And see this behavior right here? That was them actually coming in to hunt us. But you can see the whole crew sat down. Everybody was totally committed. They're trying to kill that calf right there. And still that calf is monstrous, right? So there's four or five, six of them there. And then they chase, they stampede the whole herd directly right into us. That's what you're seeing right here. And the herd actually comes to like 15 feet before they split around us. We're all sitting on our butts. And then the dingoes actually turn their attention to us. And they come in around us. You can see us instantly looking at us as a were-a-meal. But like wolves, like grizzly bears, like black bears, very quickly they look at you and they go, yeah, this is not going to work out for me. Yeah. They don't want to die. You know what I mean? So like, yeah, nobody's ever seen this before. But they don't want to die. Why the fuck are they going after water buffalo? I don't know, dude. Those things are giant. Terrible idea. But obviously they're, I don't know if this group has done this before. Well, they must have, right? They must have been successful on the calf. And the idea is that they're going to chase them and wear them out. And that one of the calf's going to be separated and they're going to take it down. But they're like 35 pounds. That's so crazy. They're such a small animal. And these calves, even the calves are probably like 100 pounds, right? You see, uh, bigger, bigger. Yeah. Maybe even 200. That guy looks Australian as fuck. The other guy? Yeah. He's barefoot and everything. Hey, Mike. Hello? Yeah. Look at my hat.