Why Glenn Won’t Be on Life Below Zero Anymore | Joe Rogan

Is your family eating this weasel too at the time? Sylvia at the time was out there with me. She ate weasel? Yeah. What was the look on her face while she's eating weasel? She had a good attitude about it. She was a pretty amazing woman in terms of taking to the bush. I mean, she was an opera singer in Berlin before she met me. What? Yeah, she was a... Really? Wow. And my partner Tricia that I've been living with the last five years. She was an attorney in Boston. What? Yeah. Wow. Why get that? People are always telling me like, you're never gonna find a woman to live like that out there, but actually it's appealing to certain people. I think a lot of people, that's why people watch it on TV, people want to be free, right? Yeah. And people want to be alive. Yeah. And a lot of people don't feel it today. It's true. If you spend your whole life in an office or a courtroom, and before that you were in school, you've never really... Yeah, you just feel trapped. Yeah. And that grind, the grind of just keep showing up at the office every day and cases are piling up and next thing you know, she's living with Glenn. By the side of a lake, dodging wolves. I get it, man. The appeal of it is why those shows are so successful. Yeah. I mean, that show is really successful. I had Sue Aikens on a podcast before. She's a really fascinating human too. Really, really enjoyed talking to her. Like what a tough broad. I'm not on the show anymore, you know. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah. What happened with you and the show? Did you guys have a falling out? Good question. Yeah, we had a falling out. What was the falling out about? They never told me exactly. They just got rid of you? They renewed my contract. We went out and filmed one episode and I never heard from them again. Really? Yeah. I mean, not about working on the show anymore. Do you think they just decided you weren't a storyline that was as successful or as... I think I'm very popular with the fans, everybody that I talk to. I mean, the viewers... No, you were my favorite guy. I love it because people tell me that I really made a difference in their life. Like they learned something. They got inspired. They actually made changes in their life. And I hear this all the time. Like yesterday traveling, you know, I had four different people come talk to me about it. And, but I think I went about as far as I could go in this show. Because I was always pushing to tell stories or to share things that didn't fit into the concept they had. When you make a TV show, you got a concept before you find the people to put in it, right? And I mean, Life Blows Zero is a show about supposedly people living a subsistence lifestyle in the bush. And that's part of my life, but there's a lot more to it. And I'm always... I'm a person who's always trying to learn and grow and do new things and expand. So when they met me, I fit into their show like a hand in a glove. But I wanted to do more. And I wanted to share more. So I get bored. You know, I made... I think I'm in 85 episodes of Life Blows Zero. I made a lot of TV. I wasn't satisfied just to show people what it's like to search for your food and chop down a tree. You know, for your firewood. I wanted to do more. So I was always pushing to do stories that were a little bit out of the range or the scope of what they envisioned for me to do in the show. I wanted to fly on a little eight pound paraglider off the top of the mountain to get back to my camp. I've been dreaming about it for years. And, you know, I said, hey, I'm going to do this. I'm going to paraglide off this mountain. I got a lot of resistance from the producers about stories. I did it. I did it. And I was like, I want to film this and that, you know, hey, if you guys don't want to film it, they didn't want to film it. I'll get somebody else from it. I am going to film this and I'm going to do this because I was excited about it. They put it in the show, but I got a lot of, you know, resistance. And I wanted to teach people all the time about things. And that wasn't really the, maybe the best vehicle for it. I mean, I had a blast doing the show. I had an awesome time. I learned a ton of stuff about making TV, about all kinds of things. And I made awesome friends. A cameraman I worked with some of the best people I've ever met in my life. And overall had a great experience, but I was always pushing the limits of what they really wanted to do, I think, because I wanted to make a story, for example, about finding a site where Stone Age people had lived. That was very unpopular with the producers. But we did it. I mean, I was just- Why would that be unpopular? That's so interesting. They said, you look like you're just walking around. You look like you're just out there exploring, walking around. We want to see you finding something to eat. Go chop some, can you cut some more trees for us? I was like, no, I've cut enough trees on camera. I want to do something worthwhile. You know, I wanted to teach people things. There's all kinds of stuff out there, nature. I just wanted to climb the highest mountain anywhere around. I'd never been up there. I've been looking at it for years and years. Those were the kind of stories that I had to really twist people's arms to get on the show. The fans loved them, but the producers for some reason didn't. Now this Stone Age site, did you find it? Yeah. Yeah? Where was it? It was amazing. It was like- Do you have photos of that? Not that we can get to right now. It was like, we made a whole story on TV about it. It was amazing. I found the stumps. I heard about it from somebody that had been there in the 1970s. He said, there's a place where you can find stumps that were cut with stone axe. I was like, that's totally amazing. Now you got to understand, the Stone Ages in Alaska was we're talking like what, maybe 50 years ago? Maybe 100, 150. Not that long ago. Really? And everything's frozen eight months of the year. So stumps last a long time. These stumps were old. They were still standing and you could touch them and you could knock them over. They were right on the edge. They might not be there in 10 years. It was amazing. But yeah, this gentleman I know who grew up as a little kid out there with his dad, his dad was a hunting guide. They had been all over in this area. And he told me that there was this place where people had camped and they had found rings of stones where they had had their skin tents and they found these stumps that were cut with stone axes and whatnot. So we actually made a show. It was awesome. I went with two cameramen. We walked for a couple of days just to get there from my camp. Wow. And then just going by this verbal description that he had given me, I was able to locate. He told me about a game trail and it was still there. The animals are still following the same route. And he said, you get there, you turn this way, you're going up and the mountain's going to be there and off to the side, you're going to see these stumps. And sure enough, I found the stumps on camera. It was amazing. Wow. I got one of them in Fairbanks I brought down with me. That's so wild that it was just off of someone's description. Yeah. From the 1970s. Yeah. Jack Reekoff. He's an amazing man. He still lives in the Brooks Range in a small village called Wiseman. And he was somebody that I learned a lot from after I got to Alaska. Wiseman was on that show as well, wasn't it? Didn't they film some stuff from that part of there? Eric Salatin. That's right. Actually, the only person on the show that I knew prior to the show. You knew him? Eric and I had known each other for 10 years. I met him not long after he came to Alaska. He's another really interesting guy. He is. Yeah. Unfortunately, Eric and I were friends and I kind of replaced him on the show, is what happened. But he was on the show together at the same time. For a little while. There was a little overlap. First, Eric was on for a year before me. Then they found me. Then we overlapped for a little while and then they got rid of Eric. So they would just get rid of you if they decided they were bored with your storyline. There's other people living up there like that. They'd just find them and- Office politics, I think. Wasn't it? And also just differences in creative vision. I mean, I was not satisfied to just do the standard, I'm starving, I'm looking for firewood or whatever stories over and over. I was always trying to push it. I was doing paragliding. I was doing, you know, just exploring, showing people where Stone Age people lived, climbing mountains just for the joy of climbing them and sit up on top and philosophize about life. Those are the kind of stories I like to do. And that really wasn't the vision they had. I think that was a lot of it. But honestly, they didn't talk to me about it after they stopped working with me. I still haven't talked to them about it. So they just stopped. Yeah. They didn't call you up and say- They renewed my contract. They had an option to renew for one more year. We shot one episode, Radio Silence. After five months, I sent them an email and said, hey, what's up? You guys planning on filming something or what's going on? And I got about two lines back from it, said, sorry, the schedule's all full. We don't have any plans to film with you. Wow. Yeah. That must have been weird. No kidding. Seems like that's a lot of episodes to just sort of brush you off like that. Were you difficult to work with? The show producer told me a couple of years ago, he'd fire me if he could, but he couldn't. Really? The show runner. Why did he say that? First of all, I didn't work with producers in the field. After the first year and a half, I said, hey, I can produce myself in the field. I don't need to work with producers anymore. And they went along with that. So I'm responsible for my own stories. As far as I'm concerned, I'm the author of my own stories. It's me and a couple of cameramen. And we're out there and I'm making what I consider real TV. I'm sharing what I want to share. Nobody's feeding me lines. Nobody's telling me what I got to do. I'm producing myself. I'm working with awesome cameramen and we were doing incredible things. I made whole episodes of LBZ in the field with just one cameraman. And then we send all the footage back to LA and they work all their magic and edit it and everything and do what they want with it. But yeah, I've made several episodes with just me and one cameraman out there. But that's a lot of freedom that's not normally given to people on reality TV from what I'm told. And of course that caused some tensions. So they wanted to control you more? Oh yeah. So why did he say that he would fire you if he could? I guess he didn't like the kind of stories that I was creating out there. Is that what it was? Really? Because I don't remember the details of that conversation, but there was just a general tension a lot of times. I got a lot of negative feedback about what I was giving them. And it was weird because people were loving it. I mean, you know. Like people that you had contact with on social media. Man, yeah. Like I didn't even have the internet when I started this show. I didn't have a cell phone when I started this show. I just got all modern in the last years. But yeah, I got on Facebook and I got thousands of people giving me positive feedback. And when I travel anywhere or even go to Fairbanks, I was getting all this positive feedback. So it seemed to me like the viewers really liked what I was doing. But I did get a lot of negative feedback from certain particular people making the show that that wasn't what they really wanted. They have a formula, right? Right. The formula is survival. It's really the formula. Like subsistence survival, finding enough food to eat, chopping wood. It's really appealing. It's one of the more interesting things about those kind of shows. It's like, what is it that's tapping in? Or what is it tapping into? What part of your ancient memory where this is like really exciting to people? Because I think there's a lot of folks out there like your lawyer friend or your opera friend that they just, there's something about the idea of getting away from everything and just living a way more simple life. It seems like the antidote for them. So when you watch this on television and you see these people just chopping wood and living by the land and dealing with the dangers of living in the bush, it's like, there's something about it. It's like, make it tune in every week. Yeah. And I mean, it is, it's beautiful stuff to share. I think it's awesome. Just for me, I don't think it's the perfect vehicle to share exactly what I want to share because I want to go a little deeper. I want more than like a four second sound bite. And that's what I like about this show, Joe. When I discovered your show, I was like, wow, there are people that just sit down and have a normal conversation rather than everything being chopped up and edited into little sound bites. Yeah. And you get a chance to really talk about stuff. If you're sitting around just having a conversation with someone for three hours, you get to really expand on your ideas. And if you said something that you think maybe you didn't say it right, you get to say it better. Or what I was saying was this, you get to explain yourself, expand and really get a thought across. There's not a lot of places where you can do that in this world. No, no. And those reality TV shows, I mean, your situation sounded like it was pretty much you producing it, which would give you as much reality as they left in with editing. But a lot of reality shows, you know, as well as I do, they just set things up like, Hey, you're going to pretend like you lost your keys in that lake. Right. You know, like, fuck my keys. Where's my key? They see bad acting like, Oh my God. And I know, I know how it works. I've done those shows before. I know that there's someone who's always trying to set up these scenarios. They're scripted. It's like sort of non-scripted scripted, like they have a place to go to, they have it. And you see them on these shows. You can tell when people are acting, that's like a weird feeling that you get. Yeah. When you know this guy has opened up this storage shed before and he's opening up now, whoa, what do we got here? Like, come on, man. You're a terrible actor. This is awful. But there's something about these formulas that these people have created. Reality television is a very strange animal.