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Steven Rinella is an outdoorsman, conservationist, writer, and host of "MeatEater." Look for his new audio original "MeatEater's American History: The Mountain Men (1806-1840)" on February 11, 2025. His new show "Hunting History With Steven Rinella" on HISTORY begins on January 28. www.themeateater.com
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9 years ago
vacation now with your family yeah we're going to lanai oh that'll be fun yeah
boom and we're live
speaking of vacations tell me about guyana yeah that's a good segue you've been
there a bunch
you know how many times now i thought it was three no i was in no i've been to
guyana twice but between there i went to bolivia oh and did like very similar
very similar kind of trip like like doing a river trip with amerindians are
those people
weirded out by americans because the jonestown massacre thing is it so funny
you bring up
jonestown because there's a couple things i've been surprised like uh the the
so the the main
group i was with in guyana um is the the makushi and i was surprised one day
when i was they make
a dish they make a dish with uh cassava which is a root like maniac um they
make a dish with that
they make a flower from it and make a dish and i was one day saying that hey
that's a
that looks like pizza right no like right no comprehension but like no thought
of what pizza
is and i remember thinking like wow man like something you take like such a you
know you just
consider such a part of everyday life is they didn't know what it was yeah and
they don't know
about georgetown whoa even though it's in their own country they don't know
about it at all no no it's
just not but yeah like we'll get into this we got to like realize sort of how
insular
you know and the amerindian communities are who live in the in the jungle in
guyana yeah did they
have communication on any yeah they do yeah more and more now and there's a lot
a lot changed the
two times i went there were through five or six years apart they discovered
sunglasses and i remember
the first time i was down there trying to turn them on because uh you know they
they they bow
hunt for fish right which one of the main ways they get fish is bow hunting for
fish and when you're
looking into the water polarized lenses are invaluable i feel lost without them
they're amazing fish
underwater and i kept saying man you got to get on board with polarized
sunglasses and i'd hand them to
you know he he didn't like it this guy rovin he didn't like anything about
having them on his face
he just like couldn't do it but then i go down there five years later and um
every one of those boys is
rocking polarized glasses so you see changes but yeah that's the thing with
like i've brought up
jonestown a number of times because in the u.s if you say hey i'm going to guyana
all anybody says is
don't drink the kool-aid right you know it wasn't really kool-aid it was some
like kool-aid no it was
a kool-aid type drink no no so when people look at when we had this
conversation because there's a
couple of things that are important here what the poison was right so we had a
conversation
all right let me back up the root i mentioned they make a cassava yeah so there's
a root cassava
and it's like the poisonous stuff yeah so it's the root that gives all life
they that's what they call
it no but i mean they eat fish and game okay river fish and wild game and then
that's like a staple
that they eat every day and the other thing they eat every day is a half dozen
things all produced
from cassava which is kind of like a yam and it's cultivated with slash and
burn agriculture
and and they cultivate these yams and from it they make a flour they make a
type of grain that's like
couscous they make a syrup that's used as a coloring agent and a flavoring
agent they make a non-alcoholic
drink they make a somewhat alcoholic drink that would be like an equivalent to
beer and then they make a
much more alcoholic drink which would be an equivalent to like fortified wine
wow they make all
stuff from this this root that they grow um in its raw form when you shred the
root and squeeze the
shredding so it'd be like imagine you took a yam and shredded a yam and then
squeeze the yam between
your hands and dripped out a liquid that liquid is deadly poisonous okay dogs
chickens people anything
that drinks that liquid dies jesus and it's cyanide so wow the jonestown
massacre uh it was a cocktail
of the best people think that it was kool-aid flavor aid valium and potassium
cyanide my question
coming home from ghana was like did they was the cyanide from the root were
they like doing homemade
cyanide but and so when i got home i looked into this and it's and it seems as
if that commune jonestown
commune had been ordering actual potassium cyanide which is used in a number of
mining practices and
other stuff so it's an available it's an available compound and that's what
they laced the kool-aid
with i'd heard about this cassava stuff and now what do they know what the
process is like did they
know like how people figured out how to make it non-poisonous and help wow it's
just been done so long
yeah and the same stuff with like different poisons they use to poison that
people use to poison fish
um what strikes me about it is how in the village like the village the the mikushi
village i was in
um is mostly mikushi but there's also like wapashana which is another tribe carib
is another tribe but
it's predominantly a mikushi village and there's about 300 people that live in
this village um
and how careless they are with the liquid like if you nowadays like picture
like you're like the type of
person that like you and me are married to and raise kids with right if you had
that type of mom
and you had a big bowl of a liquid that would kill you if you drank a bit
how that bowl would be monitored in your household jesus christ they'd be like
barbed wire around it
electrical fence and how do they do it just lays they just lay it out and i
said i was asking this
guy rovin i'm like hey man uh i kept returning to this there's certain things i
kept i would always
ask him just like things that he struggled to understand my fixation on it but
i kept saying
to this mikushi guy rovin who i should back up to i got on communication so guyana
is it's the only
english-speaking country in south america everyone's no no the the government
functions are english
so if you if you picture south america it's northeast corner opening out onto
the southern
caribbean that's guyana it's bordered on the east by suriname on the west by venezuela
to the south by
brazil it's 90 virgin rainforest and within that 90 of virgin rainforest is
only 10 of the population
so the coastal peoples are like creole cultures people mostly descended from
slave trade europeans
in the interior are the amerindian groups and um the government functions sort
of the power
in in guyana is that is the coastal peoples and there's not a ton of inner and
there used to be
barely any interplay between the amerindian communities and the government the
government's
english-speaking so in you'll find that there's a lot of english mixed in in
the amerindian communities
and some people like this guy rovin because he's sort of a upping he's like a
he has a leadership role
in his community and he's learned just standard english very well um he's had a
fascinating life
just how much stuff has changed for him uh so i you can just like converse okay
in a way that
you can converse in like in a type of the type of english we're talking right
now almost which creates
this weird tension between the things that you're discussing and how you're
discussing them like
for instance to have a guy just in conversational english talking about
problems they're having with
neighboring shamans and their own shaman putting curses on each other and it
like creates like there's
like a strange tension between like how it's being conveyed to you you know
like how so like okay
if you're talking conversational english i guess like a life it's almost like
you'd want it to be when he's
telling you this you'd almost want to be reading it in like closed caption and
he'd be saying it in the
indigenous language because it sounds weird to have to have an idea that's so
foreign to us
which would be like a battle of shamans battling over access to wild animals
okay um to have that
delivered in conversational english just struck me as unusual and because like
usually when you're
traveling you're getting all of your information like traveling in bolivia a
guy would tell a story
and he'd tell a story in um simshian no woman say not simshian chamane okay he'd
tell a story in chamane
to a person who spoke spanish the person who speaks spanish would tell it to a
person
no no no a chamane guy telling someone who speaks chamane in spanish
then that person telling it to a person who speaks spanish and english and then
that person giving you
the information whoa when you get it it through that it takes on a mystical
quality like you're crossing
some space time thing right you're seeing like these ideas discussed in their
ancestral tongue
okay yeah do you remember i sent you a video of a guy talking about killing a
jaguar yes right
the language you've never like when he's speaking you're like i've never in all
my travels i've
never heard a language that sounds anything like that is a video online can we
play yeah it's online
what do you know the title of it it's uh i think if you type in like um chamane
t-s-i
chamane um jaguar attack see if jamie you'll pull it up it's very cool the
language is
really amazing so it seems so ancient yes it's not like has nothing to do with
like the latin
languages it just sounds so it's not it's very unique so i guess what i'm
getting at is to hear
someone talking about something in conversational english that seems so far
removed from just our
understanding of things it takes on a weird quality but what's nice about it is
you can go to a place
where life is so vastly different than anything we understand and and just get
like the straight dope
right from the source right it's why i love it's kind of like what's so cool
about guyana because
you can go and converse with with people who are very much a hunter-gatherer
culture today but just
shoot the shit with them without ever feeling like you're missing something wow
it's it's like
everything's not lost in translation and all weird and garbled and and like
painstaking to wade through
but you can just ask like hey what's up with the local shaman i'll give you the
dope on the local
shaman and so they trade spells yeah well yeah we'll talk about that but i i
feel like i was laying
the groundwork for uh the jim jones poison did you find the video no i lost the
word that you were
spelling the t-s-i-m-a-n-e
t-s-i-m-a-n-e what does that mean chamani that's how they spell it i could be i
could be screwing up
you know how you spell a lot worse when you're not actually writing it out yeah
i'm terrible
i don't know how anybody wins a spelling bee ever
chumani is t-s-i yeah so if you type in chamani jaguar t-s-i-m-a-n-e jaguar
wow the whole thing is an amerindian hunter remembers his best dog lost to a
jaguar in the jungles of
bolivia right here we go let's play this because it's fucking awesome here we
go
following is an interview with a member of the chumani tribe of bolivia due to
their inherent
difficulties of translating the indigenous languages subtitles are at times
approximate
so he's explaining where he's from he's saying he hunts for food i always share
the meat i get
with my family i'm a good provider of meat cutting up the meat in this video i
also enjoy the adventure
i love trekking through the jungle once i was hunting with my favorite dog and
a couple other dogs
they ran ahead barking they were going after something
all of a sudden my favorite dog just went completely silent
they were about 50 meters ahead of me when i got there the other dogs had gone
ahead after something
saying my favorite dog was lying there dead there was a big hole in his right
side almost looked like
it had been arrowed first thing i did is pick up my dog and set him where the
ants wouldn't get to his body
that dog was the bravest one i had
i'm not going to translate you guys just watch the video if you're interested
but you get a sense of
how cool it is so did we cover did we fully cover the poison thing no not
really so i got home yeah
so it wasn't the same poison but jim jones uh he grew up in like a he was
involved in a pentecostal
church he's involved in the methodist church then he kind of became a healer
and started his own cult
it was funny i was reading about him when i was trying to figure out the poison
i was reading about
how he was kind of ahead of his time because the jim jones massacre was 1979 in
uh 78 or 79 and one
thing that got him sideways with with his church was that he wanted to have an
interracial service
wow and that caused friction in his church at the time earlier in his career
and he moved out to the
bay area and started this church and then he got like kind of paranoid and
thought that his
congregants shouldn't be engaging in sexual activities but he had he was siring
illegitimate
children left and right they go down to guyana go out to the jungle you know a
thousand of them down
there people in the u.s from the bay area are kind of like wondering what
happened to their loved ones
they send a congressman down there to try to figure out what's going on he
shows up with a bunch
of cameras the congressman says you know he's like i'm gonna help anyone who
wants to go back to
the bay area go back to the bay area he goes to the airstrip there's a shootout
the congress the
u.s congressman gets killed in the shootout and then they just all start
killing themselves
with the poison and firearms and other 270 some kids over 900 people yeah i
remember it's like the
defining thing but then yeah when you talk to these boys i'm like you know georgetown
like the jones town
or you know the jim jones jones town massacre never drink the kool-aid they're
like no
see i'd heard it was it was budget kool-aid no that's some of it was and i and
that's a debate
and in trying to find like i'm trying to like dig around and find the source of
the cyanide which
became very important to me to learn for some reason um no and i think kool-aid
even tried to
distance himself from it probably was kool-aid but they oh there's like some
archival stuff and i guess
in this archival stuff images like footage taken around and photographs around
people have found
out that they had both flavor aid and kool-aid on hand that's hilarious what it
was kool-aid propaganda
that's trying to pass the buck on the flavor aid so yeah no no thing there and
if you go so so if you go up
the main river that drains uh the main river that drains guyana is the essequibo
and if you go way up
the essequibo and um you'll get to in a stream that comes in from there called
the rupa nuni and you go
up the rupa nuni and then you get to the rewa and at the mouth of the rewa in rupa
nuni is rewa village
and in rewa village you're uh isolated enough where you don't know about 900
americans and some other
people from other areas not you know dying in a mass suicide wow that's around
the time you were born
that's fascinating that it's well it makes sense though but they're just so
removed from it yeah do
they um do they use agriculture like how are they getting this cassava they
grow peppers and then they
grow the cassava and the cassava like it's kind of amazing um you know we
always hear about slash and
burn agriculture so they'll they're going to do a slash and burn in the spot
out in the jungle um
but it's like it's like a recycled sort of slash and burn agriculture and i'll
break down what that
means so they'll go into an area and slash everything and burn it just to clear
the just so sunlight can
make it through to the ground so they chop the jungle down and burn everything
then the cassava
like i said looks like big yams when you grow it you just take a stalk of an
existing plant
and just bury that stalk in the ground and it'll sprout up a new crop and so
you know you're close
to the equator so you don't have seasons as much there's some seasonal
variation they do have times
they do have like their wet season and dry season but it's like you always get
about the same amount of
darkness as daylight and they don't have the wild fluctuations that we have in
the temperate zone
so they can grow year round and they stage it so you know you have a crop that's
coming in you have
a crop that'll be coming in three months you have a crop that'll be coming in
six months you have a
crop that'll be coming in nine months and once you get a certain number of
cycles i can't remember how
many cycles you get off a piece of ground you let the ground go feral give it a
few years and then
come in and burn it again also intermittently every time you plant cassava you
before you replant you
make a little fire and burn some debris in that same spot no irrigation you're
not watering it at all
and that's the only fertilizer you're giving it is you're burning some of the
surrounding
just detritus scraped up from the jungle floor that you burn there and grow it
and it is a staple
of life that and river fish and game it's just such a wild thing that it's such
a poisonous plant
i don't get it i don't get it there's other stuff that there's other poisons
that are extracted
um like people that people that people in south america in the jungles people
that use blow darts
so people to hunt with blow guns it's generally understood like even talking to
even talking to
the mikushi who hunt with bows and arrows i asked him like why don't you guys
hunt with blow darts
blow guns and he explained me we don't need to because we have arrow plant
which gives arrows
now if you were in this other area you know more up in the mountains and there's
no arrow plant then
you'd hunt with a blow dart so is arrow plant just a plant that makes like a
shaft like makes the arrow
what is it what is the it's a type it's like a cane well you know what it looks
it looks it looks like a
it looks like a palm and the palm leaf puts out these long pieces and when one
of those is ready you
you cut it green and then they can make an arrow in no time so you go out in
the jungle find this piece
and you know like like like you know like one of the theories on how we domesticated
plant species
would be that it was a very gradual unintentional domestication where you would
go out i'm gonna
just take something simple like let's say you eat a lot of raspberries okay you
go out and you gather
raspberries and you bring them home and you eat them near home and then people
are eating these seeds
and shitting these seeds out and pretty soon there's a lot more grass berries
growing around
your home village just for the simple fact that you're always bringing the
seeds home and discarding
them around and creating it so they have except for manioc which people don't
even really i don't think
it's really well understood what it came from it's been domesticated for a long
time all the plants
they use are widely available in the jungle but tend to also have some around
home too that they've brought
home and planted nearby or they just grow up there now because they've been
bringing the stuff into
their village for so long so arrow plant is readily available um they cut the
arrow shaft green and it
looks like just a green dowel but it has some curvature to it then they'll come
home and they start a fire
and they heat the green thing just by twirling it over the over the embers or
over the flame twirling it
and getting it hot and it'll let off a little steam and then you bend it and
then you twirl it and get
it hot and bend it and you'll eventually make it well arrow straight then the
they make four different
kinds of arrows depending on what they're hunting for so let's say you were
making a arrow to uh
it gets you more so let's say you're making a big game arrow all right um in
the big game they hunt
would be red brocket deer white lip peckery which is a favorite um collared peckery
which we call
javelina and sometimes tape here the the arrow they use for that so they would
take that so let's say
they're going to build one of those so they take that green shaft and
straighten it the next step is
they find a wood called bullet wood and they cut what would be like uh what's
going to form the base of
your tip the base of your spear and that bullet wood they fit into the end of
the green shaft which is
almost like a it's almost a picture of having the consistency of bamboo and
they shove that bullet
wood in there and it causes it forms like a base and to that they take an old
machete blade
that they cut out and file down to be about a four inch steel knife and that
goes in to the bullet
wood to that forms the junction between the arrow shaft and the steel piece
that's the only man-made
material they use in their arrows then they take a plant that looks like yucca
and they make their
own string and they got little bits of rubber from rubber trees that they wax
the string with and they
put a bullet wood knock in the part that that your that your bow string
actually pushes on and that
gets tied in to the arrow shaft and then they fletch the arrow with feathers
from guan or black curacao
or crestless curacao and that's what they fletch their arrows with because they
have they're very
water resistant so their broadheads are made out of machete blades yeah and
this is this a recent
innovation yeah they used to use wood and how long have they been doing it with
machete blades in his
lifetime it's always been they don't call machete they come cutlasses in roven's
lifetime roven's 32 he's
kind of my main friend down there that hung out with both times i was down
there in his lifetime
he remembers people using he remembers people using wood blades which is made
from like a bamboo like
material so it'd be like a convex spear point cut out of bamboo and sharpened
he remembers people using
those but he had always used cutlass blades wow now in bolivia you'd see people
who have who are just using the
the old form there are other arrows when they make arrows for hunting birds and
they make arrows for
hunting fish the only man-made material on those arrows is hog wire fencing so
basically wire fencing
they snip out the hunks of wire smash it down until it's flat and then they can
cut barbs in there
to hunt birds and hunt fish wow the bow is it's not a laminate bow so they make
a bow by just cutting
a tree single piece a single stem tree shaving it down to what they're after
and then take that same
yucca plant pull out the fibers out of the yucca strands and make bow strings
that goes very quickly
as well like we made a bow string one day wow yeah you just they they they you
take the strands and
twist it like imagine like you're rubbing your hands to warm them up you got
all those strands in
your hands and you roll them and it makes singles and it makes strands that are
comprised of you know a
dozen fibers then you start braiding up from there until you braid up a big
long bow string and that's
how you string your bow so when they're shooting their bow like what's a long
shot for them like
15 20 yards is a long shot long shot and the length of shot you're going to
take sort of depends on
um kind of depends on well they don't really think like
the idea like that you're going to wound it and it's going to get away doesn't
weigh on them very heavily
right like in our culture in our hunting culture here we've come to like really
uh
the wound loss is something we do a lot to avoid okay there's a lot of talk we're
always talking about
don't you know you shouldn't be surprised to get a good hit you should know
what's going to happen
don't take shots that are too far away right we really put a strong value on um
when you let the
arrow go or when you let the bullet go you damn sure know that you're going to
have a quick clean kill
well at least we put a lot of value on that in practice sometimes that stuff
goes out the window but
anyone would say that that's your goal um not on their mind you seem to take
some hail marys
right and they can shoot like if you're just if you're trying to shoot a bird
all they're trying
to do is get a wire point so one of those arrows i described fitted with a long
wire on the end cut
out of a piece of steel fence with a barb with a couple barbs filed into it and
that head
is joined by string to the arrow shaft so that once the head makes contact the
arrow shaft can fall
away but there's a string connecting the arrow head the wire barb to the arrow
shaft and that allows
it to tangle up up in the trees so when they shoot all they really need to do
is prick that thing with
that wire barb knowing that the bird or they hunt for a large aquatic rodents
knowing that the bird is going
to get tangled up in the trees overhead and that they can then climb up to go
get it
even then i think even shooting like that kind of thing where you're just
trying to prick the thing
30 yards would be very long shooting fish you're not shooting that i mean
shooting fish you're not
really like bow fishing which i've done a lot of in my life a 10 yard bow
fishing shot is very far
yeah you're right above them right yeah because you're shooting down into the
water now do they
have you have to judge when you're shooting into the water you have to judge
differently right way
diffraction unless that thing unless that fish is sunning um unless that fish
is sunning and it's
back is at the surface or breaking the surface uh you need to account for refraction
so you're aiming way
low now if you got a fish that's a fish two feet below the water surface is
extremely hard to hit
because it's so deep you're aiming like you're aiming at your boot like you
know what i mean
well i mean it feels like that you know you're aiming so low there's a there's
an equation it's always
low you're aiming way below the fish because refraction like anyone who's ever
taken a fishing
pole and stuck in the water right right you see the yeah yeah it hooks so that's
like that's like the
trick of bow fishing but where they bow fish for some of the stuff my favorite
thing to bow fish down there
um is also you're also dealing with current and they're again they're shooting
a hollow arrow that
doesn't weigh shit it doesn't cut through the water at all so they're holding
way low for refraction
and holding way upstream because their arrow is so buoyant oh wow now an
american bow fishing rig which
i shoot has a fiberglass arrow so the current isn't as much of an issue because
that arrow is so heavy
that it can cut through the water but refraction is the same so that's why uh a
point blank shot bow
fishing is still very difficult and then you got a factor that you still need
to hit the thing pretty
good in a place where the arrow is not going to pop out there's a fish they bow
hunt for that they
used to bow hunt for for salted fish called the arapaima and arapaima is the
biggest freshwater fish in the world
um they used to bigger than a sturgeon yeah the largest freshwater fish the
largest okay the largest
scaled yeah an arapaima is the largest scaled fresh water fish how big is it oh
i mean they'll get them
up into the hundreds of pounds i've never even heard of it it looks like it's
it's it's scale straight
a-r-a-p-a-i-m-a oh my god yeah that's an arapaima jesus christ that looks
completely prehistoric
they have a bizarre relationship with these fish in the makushi do in guyana so
that's amazing they used
to hunt them looking critter they used to hunt them to export the salted meat
they used to hunt
them to sell salted meat to markets okay now uh one of those is worth seven
thousand dollars to them
alive holy shit because that's how much that's how much a white guy will pay to
catch one and let it
go oh my god yeah oh so it's all a guy will pay more a guy will pay more the
makushi will make more
to take a guy out to catch an arapaima and let it go than what you'd pay to
hunt for elk in the u.s
on a guided trip holy shit they get seven grand to catch an arapaima and when
rovin was a kid
they would go on two week hunting trips where they're gone for two weeks with
their father
they would go for two weeks to hunt salt fish so they were they were operating
out of dugout canoes
that they would have to paddle and they would paddle they would make a dugout
canoe themselves
paddle the dugout canoe up river for a week to get to the good hunting and
fishing grounds then they would
hunt and fish for one week until they would get 100 pounds of salted fish then
you'd go back down river
which would take a day or two days and then get to the mouth of the rupa nuni
river and paddle up the
rupa nuni river for two days to another town and then they would haul the salt
fish including arapaima
flesh and sell that 100 pounds of salted fish for 75 us dollars so two weeks
plus work for a family
for 75 dollars and now they will not touch those fish because they make a
handful of people every
year go down and give them seven grand to catch one and let it go so seven
grand to them must be just
an enormous it's changed everything when i was talking about like that they
discovered sunglasses and
shit there's been a lot like they were already on to this arapaima thing the
first thing i went down
and it's it's changed everything about it's changed that village the arapaima
fishery the way they
used to hunt arapaima is they would hunt them out of trees they would so you're
familiar like when a
river you know a river flows in a s pattern like repeating s's now and then um
during high water a river
will jump one of the s's you picture i'm saying yes so the river jumps an s and
it abandons in the main
channel abandons the curves of the s okay those curves become what's called oxbow
lakes where during
high water during a flood those oxbow lakes are connected to the main river
system when the water
goes low the oxbow lakes become isolated arapaimas live in those oxbow lakes
and they feed on peacock
bass and other stuff so when the water got low and the arapaimas were all kind
of restricted to
very small little spots in the river they would climb up in trees overlooking
these places and wait for
the arapaima to come up near the surface and shoot it with an arrow that was a
detachable
basically the harpoon head arrow and shoot it with the arrow the harpoon head
would detach from the
arrow and the arrow would float on the surface connected by string to the arrow
shaft you would
then go take a hand line with a hook and follow that fish in your dugout canoe
until you could
cast your hook out and catch your arrow and then you're connected by your
fishing line
to your arrow and your arrow is connected by the tether to the harpoon head and
you would hand line
in and slaughter the arapaima jesus and then dry the arapaima with salt and
they still salt fish today
like when we're out fishing they're salt and fish all the time they would salt
that fish and then sell it
and then that became an indian like that became like a a very threatened
species under that thing
and the other thing that they would hunt for is they would hunt for giant river
turtles and sell the
meat and um greatly depleted because their whole lives occur on this one river
and once those market
influences came in and they had moved beyond subsistence hunting and fishing
and they moved into market
hunting and fishing they did with the same thing that we did to our own country
in the late 1800s and early 1900s
is they were on course to entirely deplete the resource through market demands
because their village gets
more and more people all the time it grew considerably in the five or six years
between my two visits
and um their environment just couldn't support that level of market hunting so
this arapaima thing
kind is giving gives them a way to make money to buy staples and run a school
and stuff like that it
gives them kind of out and it's funny because like uh
i'm a lot more interested like personally i'm a lot more interested in a guy
shooting fish out of a tree
and salting the meat than i am a dude like me going down to catch an arapaima
and let it go so in some
ways it's sad yeah it's sad just because like it's not sad it's great that they're
saving the fishery
but you see like just it's just sad to see change man and why did they let it
go why don't they give
it to the people that live there so they can use it for the meat they let it go
so they can catch it
again because they want to make sure that the population stays healthy so rovin
what here's the thing
that recently happened one of those oxbow lakes uh got lower and lower and
lower and someone real
one of their got one of these micushi guys realized there's 26 arapaima
stranded in an oxbow lake
and the arapaimas are running out of water and when the water goes down the arapaima
will excavate
he'll keep excavating in the bottom to even just save a little spot for himself
okay and a guy found him and they're all in there but there's not enough water
to to cover
them up they can sip air is the thing that makes them peculiar so you can
always find arapaima
because they come up to gulp air jesus yeah so they can breathe air and they
can also have a very
loud noise they make when they come up to gulp air so they can live in low
oxygen environments
like if you took most fish and threw them in a stagnant oxbow that's got six
inches of water in it
i mean they're dead as shit right right these arapaimas they can just keep
excavating a little spot
in the bottom and just wait praying or their equivalent of praying that the
water level comes
back up and liberates them from the oxbow they're stuck and these are huge fish
yeah giants so they
found 26 that were out of the water and their backs were all messed up from
birds and other
predators grabbing the air trying to grab the arapaimas wow and then they went
and spent four
days these are 26 arapaimas between 50 inches and upper 80s in length they
spent four days
moving these 26 arapaimas into the river in a canoe full of water jesus christ
that's how valuable
those fish are to them now wow in the old days they'd have been dead as shit
right you'd be in like
you just sold them yeah so they really just like a finite they have like on
their river the river
that they call home the river they kind of control there's like a finite
resource but the thing is
other groups so they're mostly mikushi and my friend rovin's mikushi um his
wife is wapashana
and there are other wapashanas in other places who will come down to hunt their
area and they have
very different like these other groups that come in have different hunting
practices like rovin was
telling me one time that he was going up so like the largest snake in the world's
a green anaconda
their river has the largest thing in the alligator family which is a black caiman
some people say oh
it's not a true alligator but the largest member of that how big familia black
caiman yeah they get big
you know they can they get bigger like american alligator big like oh yeah yeah
yeah they get giants
some black caimans do there used to be a market for those they used to market
hunt those for the hides
for bags boots and shit so they have the giant river otter which is a river otter
like way that you
know up you know river otters go to 100 pounds they have the biggest snake the
green anaconda they
had the largest aquatic rodent in the world the largest freshwater scaled fish
by some definitions the
largest eagle which is the harpy eagle the philippine eagle has a bigger wingspan
but something like when
you measure them by weight the harpy from there and then there's another harpy
that's a john like
the papuan the papua new guinea harpy the harpy is that one that eats sloths
and monkeys monkeys and
shit yeah that thing's fucking crazy some bad we saw one really so i'd been
down in harpy
country three times and finally saw my first harpy wow yeah just like it's
majestic just piercing
kind of unforgettable um just the face on it the male the male face you're
looking at it it just is like
uh so it reminded me the first time i saw lynx where you're just looking at it
and it's just so
freakishly different than anything you'd looked at like that harpy's face so
they have that um
oh so he's going up the river he's telling me this story how the wapashana will
come down and hunt
and they hunt different than the mikushi like the mikushi aren't that big on
killing tape ears but
the wapashana will come down in their area and he says they come down with
arrows that got 12 inch
steel tips on them he's like you know those boys are hunting tape ears but he
said one time he was
going up river and he sees a green anaconda and he goes to look and it's got a
arrowhead stuck into it
and he said and i told my companion the wapashana are here and they go up the
river a little bit of
course they come to a wapashana camp because the wapashana he said he's like
talking about this
particular there's wapashanas all over but he's like this particular group of wapashanas
that travel
ahead of christmas because he's they're they're like they have animist
you know mystical systems but they also it's also infused a certain level of
christianity
so ahead of christmas the wapashana will go on a couple month long hunting trip
to get food for
christmas celebrations whoa and they'll travel overland and by river to come
down and hunt the mikushi river
and when they come down they're there they're playing for keeps so they come
down they're hunting
arapaima which these which the rewa mikushi do not uh they're hunting anacondas
they hunt everything
they eat the anacondas yeah they dry all that shit and the fat they like to
render the fat down because
they feel that it is helpful for um they feel that it's helpful for arthritis
we pulled up on a on a
we pulled up on an anaconda one time that was 13 or 14 feet long just sitting
on the bank you can walk
up you can walk right up to it rovin was telling me um again a type of like
mysticism i mean we have
our own beliefs that would seem absurd right to an outside perspective but he
was telling me
if i were to touch that anaconda with my bow it would die a very painful death
if i just laid my bowl
limb on it and about how long he says he thought about something at about 45
minutes
just the belief they have if you touch it with a hunting bow it will die in 45
minutes but it's
painful how bizarre no i i asked about that a thousand times never got any more
clarity on it than that
i say can you touch it with a stick oh that doesn't matter go ahead touch it
with a bowl will die
so but yeah they don't eat it but he was telling me if you're really hard up
and have really bad
arthritis you can take the fat from an anaconda and help cure the arthritis how
much fat is an
anaconda i don't know i never cut it i never cut into one i've seen a rattlesnake
skinned
they seem like they don't have any fat you gotta understand how big these
things are though they're
so big i mean way bigger than your leg yeah it's 14 feet long 14 feet long it
probably weighs hundreds
of pounds right oh yeah no hundreds of pounds have you eaten rattlesnake yeah
it's not bad right
it's not bad look at the size of that sucker yeah there's there's a good one jesus
yeah that's a heavy
fucker look at those guys struggling four dudes struggling oh that's out of guyana
did you ever
see that movie with jennifer lopez nope anaconda it's a giant one like yeah so
that's the biggest snake
and uh they'll eat caymans anaconda as well yeah yeah and then caymans leak
them when they're younger
yeah you know it's a vicious amount of everything eating everything um so these
these gentlemen the
mikushi come down no the wapashana wapashana come down and have different
hunting practices and
different things that are acceptable to eat and they have and this is like a
group of wapashana
so is this where the shaman where the hunting and fishing sucks are going after
each other
no that was a different story okay now it's a different piss match with someone
else so um
so they're i don't want to do what's that their hunting area sucks the this
group of wapashana
that come down to rape and pillage on the rewa uh yeah rovan explained to me
their hunting area is
a piss poor hunting area so why do they stay there i don't know i don't know
why they stay there hmm
um and i asked him like does it got does it make you guys mad that they come
down because now the like
the people in rewa village the predominantly mikushi rewa village um is on to a
a a they're on like a
pretty progressive conservation program like they can just they through their
market hunting practices
they got a glimpse into the future and didn't like what they saw and they're on
a pretty aggressive
program about sustainability um their eyes toward the future the wapashana are
this group of wapashana are
not and when i asked them does it piss you off that the wapashana come down
here oh they also the
wapashana fish with poison the mikushi don't fish with poison do they use the
poison from the cassava
no they use a poison they use a uh there's a root and a leaf that are both poisons
the root
it's in the thing used here in the united states when they have to do a fish
kill like if you get a big
population of invasive fish in a waterway and you just need to like wipe the
whole thing clean
heads yeah like that when you're trying to do a fish kill we in the u.s use a
thing called rotenon
it's derived from a south american plant and then there's another plant called
bar boss well some
people some you know it's like different people in different areas in the
amazon drainage is a thing
they call barbosco and that is a leaf that you just pulp and it would look like
you're just like
taking if you just imagine if you took a bunch of thyme or rosemary and put it
in a mortar and pestle
and pulped it and then you take and spread that in the water that'll kill fish
both of the i think
they kind of they act in two separate ways there's two types of fish poison one
inhibits the fish's
ability to pull oxygen from the water so i watch them apply this poison and you
need to get area where
there's not much current because it'll just wash the poison away so you get
into one of these oxbow lakes
apply the poison kick back 20 minutes and pretty soon all the fish are up gulping
at the surface
and then you shoot them with bows and arrows wow and what's the other way of
doing it and rotenon
and i can't remember which category rotenon falls in but there's another one
that has some kind of
like it's some kind of neuro effect it has some kind of brain and it somehow
impairs some other
aspect of their body but these fish poisons are classed in two categories i'm
sorry i'm not more clear
on what the two are but i know that the the ones that just that prevent it from
being able to get
air and the other ones that poison them the ones that don't suffocate them does
that come up when
they eat it no but they were telling me that that um if that you need to watch
your if you're poisoning a
pond you need to watch it and make sure dogs or any livestock don't come down
it doesn't last long
and they were telling me usually the fish you don't shoot will recover if there's
some amount
of water flowing through it so they might go in and build a temporary dam to
block whatever inlet
let's just say it's a it's a isolated channel off to the side of a river they'll
go in and pretty
carefully with rocks and logs block the flow coming into it poison it and then
once they've gotten
whatever they want they unblock it and let the clean water come in and it'll
resuscitate the fish
whoa but yeah if if they said of livestock dogs people drink that water can
kill that it can kill
that how many do they lose people every year to that cassava water man in
talking to me you realize
they lose there's like a handful things that people get lost to um they had
mentioned people dying from
anacondas they'd mention people dying from black caimans um i know that
injuries from piranhas are common
snake bite that just snakes are everywhere like in one of these i remember we
were sitting in rovin's
friend's house his outdoor like a palapa kind of house you know with hammocks
strung in it
and they're just being a giant tarantula like a two and a half inch diameter
tarantula
and um not even doing anything to it well tarantulas they just hurt yeah they
hurt they
don't really fuck you up like a black widow or something along those lines yeah
before we found
a kid who'd been hit by a scorpion young kid and some scorpions can be fatal he
was vomiting he was
very sick but just a fact of life so when they get bit by snakes uh are they
getting bit by poisonous
snakes yeah there's one i think the most dead the deadliest snake in the
western hemisphere the coral
they have yeah um they have other ones he mentioned their chief getting hit by
a by a venomous snake
and them having to call a medevac which is not in the air for i think the air
force came in with a
helicopter oh wow and got him out of there and he was fine wow just a fact that
that's everywhere man
but they got an eye for it and you don't like like you're like you guys you
know the the non-local is
always the one getting stung and bit and shit yeah i can only imagine like the
first time i was down
there i got hit by an electric eel a couple times right that scared the out of
me but it's like you
don't even know what's happening you're in the water and all of a sudden you're
kind of getting like
electrocuted there's more in tune with all that stuff that's a strong blast
yeah it hurts we had
those on fear factor oh you did grab them it's like grabbing a bar it's like
grabbing a hot hot wire
it's amazing that an animal or a living thing can generate that kind of so you
just did it
voluntarily for a joke just to see what it's like yeah it's not fun no i was
shocked yeah i was like
it's probably just annoying but i reached it and grabbed it it's like whoa yeah
that's legit yeah
it's like it's like grabbing a hot wire fence yeah with cattle in it yeah i
watched um there was some
sort of a nature documentary where something tried to eat it and uh the
electrical eel zapped it and you see
this animal just lock up and fall over sideways oh really yeah repelled it yeah
just just completely
electrocuted it yeah you know got it to the point where it just couldn't stand
up have you i
know you like uh you'll pull up some stuff have you seen the video of the jaguar
killing the caiman
yes i've seen a bunch of that's solid right there amazing because you can sense
he's done
that a thousand times man there's a there's quite a few of them online uh and
here's what's what's
fascinating what is this a caiman with electric eel an alligator an electric
eel oh wow it starts just
frying yeah it's just cooking them yeah wow no that's not oh you asked about
eating snakes electric
eel meat is not good that's one of the many things that the that's one of the
many things the mikushi
like do not eat look at his body just twitching god that's amazing obviously
that's a little alligator
but still boy what a crazy animal yeah it's brutal i i never saw anything about
jaguars killing caimans
until about three or four years ago and then there's like a whole slew of these
videos coming out this
makes you wonder i guess maybe the advent of gopros and all these different
video cameras that people
take down there and finally started catching it on film yep we missed the sighting
bike we missed the
sighting you know narrowly missed the sighting when we're down there tracks are
everywhere so particularly
because the time i was just down there now um the giant river turtles are nesting
so they just like
how we have you know just how you picture sea turtles crawl up onto a sandy
beach and dig a hole that night
and lay their eggs and then retreat back into the ocean um giant river turtles
lay like that but so
the sandbars are covered in busted turtle shells and there are vultures so like
black vultures and king
vultures and caracaras are on the sandbars feeding on turtle eggs and jaguar
tracks all over because
the jaguars come down just wait for the turtles to come up wow so you're seeing
a lot of that and one
of the more surreal that's a perspective shot but i bet they're pretty big
right big but that's that's
the oceanic that's not a giant whoa look at that sucker so how old is that fucker
i have no idea god
those they live hundreds of years right yeah they're they're ancient that thing
might have been around
when columbus was around they you know the the are you from the site east
treaty so uh things that ban
international wildlife traffic they have there's a couple turtles that the mikushi
eat um they
traditionally ate giant river turtles and many people still do but they call
that one the site east
turtle oh wow because they now know they can't traffic in this turtle anymore
so they got like
the eating turtle and the sighties turtle but an image will be forever burned
in my uh mind there's
two things that'll that there's two like sites that'll ever forever be stuck in
my mind and one of
them is a a wapashana woman in a dk a dkny t-shirt up to her armpit in a riverbank
digging out 150 turtle
eggs giant river turtle turtle eggs putting them in a handmade woven basket wow
because you know like
clo like donated clothes like cast off clothes wind up you know getting bundled
so you see people with
like crazy american t-shirts and stuff on where like i have like a bob's pizza
santa cruz california
or whatever you know and it's just like something sent down there through goodwill
donation centers
whatever so they'll have like um like brands you know like like famous brands
that you see like
people you know in our in our culture wearing but they'll be like hunting
monkeys in them
and like the language thing it creates that kind of tension you know so do they
recognize the sitey's
like regulations do they did they not eat those turtles yeah so you gather that
it's kind of loose
um they don't traffic in them but they will eat them but they will eat them
yeah so they will collect
the eggs but they won't kill the turtles to sell so as they become more aware
of conservation like with
this giant fish what's the fish called again the arapaima as they become more
aware of conservation
do you see them like recognizing like hey there's some stuff that we have to
leave alone we got to
let it recover i mean they obviously they're aware of the cycle of life when it
comes to their slash
and burn agriculture and leaving spots alone like are they becoming more aware
of like what animals
they've kind of pushed to the brink of extinction yeah and it's like and i don't
even know how much is
coming from the younger generation because talking to guys talking to guys i'm
43 this guy just a couple
years older than i am and talking to him um and he was a market hunter he's
glad to see what's happened
because he in his own lifetime saw how much they had depleted everything so he
in his lifetime saw like
from market hunting not just from subsistence stuff but as that village grew
because the village was a
handful of families right then and now it's 305 people as that village grew he
watched um the giant
river otters they were hunting giant river otters to sell the hides into brazil
and um they would smoke
them out of their dens so he watched their numbers go down there's a hundred
pound otter yeah wow
freaking giants just as the name would let you know and very vocal a large
vocabulary of crazy
sounds the giant river otters make they get when they see you they're pissed
and they start making
crazy you see them oh yeah you see them all the time they're squawking at you
yeah like what does it
sound like it's like a like a wow but a lot better than that look at that
sucker oh there he is eating
some kind of snake or eel wow yeah they make they have an alarm noise and a
number of barks and
crazy sounds uh so he watched those get depleted from hide hunting giant river
turtles from hunting eggs
he said he could see that the arapaimas were disappearing and so he was really
glad
this guy was really glad that they'd gotten on to some other way to bring some
cash into the village
wow and the arapaima fishing how did they find out about this like people from
the united states or
like where are they coming from you know i'm not sure you know i i know that
there's been a number of
companies um costa you know the sunglasses company costa invested pretty
heavily through a conservation
program they have costa sunglasses invested pretty heavily in helping them
establish a guiding system
down there to take people out to fish arapaima so these people that come down
trained some of the
mccushi and how to just deal with westerners like for instance um in the time
and we were out this we
were out when i'm with them on the river we're out i'm with them
participating in the hunting and fishing activities that they do year round on
the
things that they identify to be sustainable resources because they still like
they still hunt several days a
week right rovin like they live off fishing game everyone in that village all
their protein is
hunting and fishing protein and some chickens that they raise but that's all
their protein so they're
engaged in a daily sense like rovin says he spends about two days a week
farming he spends two or three
days a week hunting and fishing and then he has other obligations he had to
take care of but he hunts and
fishes constantly year round and it just if he kills a white lip peccary he
says that's good for a week
did you bring your bow yeah i brought my bow fishing bow and i brought a
regular bow now when they saw
your bow were they like jesus can you get us some of these you know
surprisingly not that excited about
it because they i think that they know they would run up against sourcing
problems with the arrow rovin got
a at one point in time rovin had a recurve um but he lost it his house burnt
down and he lost his
recurve anyways so just for the simple fact that you can make them and make
arrows very quickly they
don't need to worry about how you never source parts right but they have all
this other stuff like
machete blades and all these different things it seems like they would i mean
if you get a good
compound bow jesus christ yeah i think if you brought one down and left it
there um i think if you brought one
down left there it would get a lot of use yeah well absolutely would it be too
effective like
would they run into problems with you know like they have kind of a
sustainability issue right i'll
i'll say yeah i think that if you went down um this is speculation i would
think if you went down
and gave if you went down with a dozen of these things and left them there um i
think that along that
river corridor you would see a diminishment of a handful of bird species for
sure yeah i would think
because the birds but here's the thing here's why it's a little bit tricky
because i think that you
would also be reducing demand because one of the things about the birds the guans
and curacao is that
they want them to fletch arrows but they're hard to get so they really want
them because they like to
they classify them under this broad category that you hear in other places
called poies and basically
it's like edible like a term some people say poies refers to a specific curacao
but some people use
poies like like a like turkey-like bird like a turkey meaning a good edible
bird so the birds that they
fletch arrows with are also coveted food items all right i would i feel that
yeah if you were to bring
conventional archery tackle in you would see that diminish now other people
will have shotguns but
the limiting factor there is how expensive the ammunition is so they'll have
like the shotgun
shell or they might have a handful of shotgun shells that would last them a
long time because they would
only use one absolutely necessary like the villa david they've been having a
jaguar problem
when we were there they had over the previous two months lost 24 dogs including
a dog while we were
there to a jaguar who comes in at night and kills dogs and chickens he was speculating
that at some
point in time they'll probably have to get rid of that jaguar and that it would
be a firearm issue they
would have to like figure out a solution for with a firearm so even people that
might have a firearm
have limited ammunition and it's sort of a a a league a tricky spot in a legal
situation for them to have
a firearm but bows i think that they would knock the shit out of curacao's and
guan's if they had good
bows but then might not hunt them as heavily because they didn't need the fletching
for fishing i think their tackle superior close to superior for bow fishing why
is that um
because the shots are so close just isn't really necessary like it's like it's
not it's just not
necessary to have that kind of investment and you just tend to lose arrows bow
fishing so it wouldn't
make sense to have very expensive fiberglass arrows when you can make an arrow
in 15 minutes 20 minutes
yeah that makes sense and then you're still limited to very close range shots
um the like when i was in bolivia where they hunt for a bigger variety of stuff
including monkeys
uh bows would be a game like like compound bows would be a real game changer on
monkey hunting
so they're not monkey hunting and uh they won't touch them really that here's
there's a couple
there's a couple things that are really hard to talk earlier i was saying like
you have this luxury of
being able to have like good conversations in english and get your answer your
questions answered right
some things you really uh you hit a wall okay now one of the things you hit a
wall on is if you say to
someone like how many days out of the year would you guess you do x it's just
like you never get
there you never get there do they not understand years no they do but it's just
like
because we speak in that way it's hard for me to understand why that's such a
hard question but you
it would be very hard to get satisfactory answers about how often do you do
something
another thing is if like how much do you like like do you like hunting or
fishing more isn't something
that's thought about because it'd be like i'd be like do you like to hunt more
or farm more you have to do both
so it's not like the luxury that we have but what do you like but i don't you
have to do both you can't
just do one but but he was telling you he hunts two days a week he farms two
days a week so yeah but
that was after me like asking the same question a thousand times and finally
kind of getting
finally kind of getting to a spot because they caught it because one time i
pushed him and pushed
him and pushed him how many days a year do you hunt and fish and we talked
about this for forever and
he came up with the figure maybe 200 or 250. then later i'm like how many days
a week do you hunt
and fish and i asked him that a thousand times and got two now if you do the
math one of those numbers
is wrong it's just not and also like what you like most do you like this most
like that most another
thing is why don't you eat x right but if i think about it if imagine someone
came from another country to
here and you're driving them around and every single thing they see that's
alive if they said to you
why don't you eat that right why don't you eat that spider right i don't know
bro we just don't eat
those spiders why don't you eat that cat that's a really complicated question
like uh we don't eat house cats
let me count the reasons why we don't eat house cats you know so when i'm like
why don't you eat
monkeys he's not like oh silly we don't eat monkeys because it's just like we
just don't eat monkeys
but they don't have any weird relationship with monkeys right no the more i
press them on it it
wound up being he would say because we have so many fish and they're so easy to
get uh but you hunt
white-lipped peccary now white-lipped peccary for folks who don't know and does
that look like a
javelina as well yeah so it's a little bit bigger than havelina the main
difference from from a human
a human perspective looking on the two what you would what what you would jump
at is the
gregarious nature of the white-lipped peccary so there's three peccaries there's
like the chocoan
i think a chocoan peccary which i've never laid eyes on white lips and in collared
and the collared
peccary a dozen is a giant group of collared peccary that's like a big ass
group of collared
peccary and that's what we have in that sucker yeah and that's what we have in
west texas arizona
parts new mexico right so it's essentially the same thing as a javelina the
collared peccary is the
javelina same exact thing the white-lipped peccary now remember i said like a
dozen is a bunch
of collareds javelina i've hunted those in the u.s and i've hunted those in mexico
white-lipped peccary
will run in a group of 100 to 200 whoa and white-lipped peccaries when i was
mentioning cassava
white-lipped peccaries are hell on cassava patches they eat them they come and
eat the stalks
not the root they'll destroy the cassava patch and they'll dig but they
particularly like to eat this
they'll come in and they like to eat the young shoots growing up now can they
eat the cassava the
root or is it poisonous to them as well i don't know i don't know huh um that's
a good question i
wish i would ask that that would if i had a week i would get a satisfactory
answer out of that so
the white-lipped peccaries will come into the village and raise holy hell
everyone run and
grabs their bows and then they start shooting and then they'll chase them into
the jungle and maybe
even track them for a day trying to whittle away at them because it's it's a
great meat it's like the
favorite game meat is white-lipped peccary they like it better than collared peccary
because they're
bigger but is it like a pork or something like that well yeah but they have
that scent gland so they're
very yeah looks like pork has a very strong off-putting the animal has a very
strong off-putting smell but
the meat doesn't no if you handle it properly and keep it clean it's never it
would never be regarded
like as as good as pork to the american palate but to the mikushi palate it's
the best
so their whole thing like we don't hunt all these animals various animals
because we have so many
fish flies out the window with white-lipped peccary but a lot of the white-lipped
peccary hunting
is also related to the protecting of crops now as long as roving can remember
rewa village has had a group of white-lipped peccaries that would come through
the area trying to raid
the gardens and when it came to the area raid in the gardens they would kill
some number of them
and then they would track them into the jungle and stick with them and kill a
handful and it was when
that happened was a very good thing they liked the peccaries there's been a
number of years where
no peccaries or something happened to this group of one or two hundred peccaries
they haven't for years
they have not been through the village it's not attrition because he was saying
at the most when
we get when they come through and get us he would say on average we would get
actually kill between
one and four when they come in and hit the crops if we stick with them and a
group of guys goes after
me might kill between one and four and there's 200 of them so it's like it's
not like they like slowly
whittled away at them right they just would never account for that but they
vanished roving never
wanted to explain to me why they vanished but event i kept pestering about it
eventually he told me here's
the deal since rewa village is now so wealthy and we have so much food other
groups and other villages
have grown very jealous of us and he told me that a shaman in another village
got so
insanely jealous of rewa's prosperity through fishing for arapaima and through
all the good hunting and
fishing that they have there that he got so jealous that he um locked up that
this shaman locked up their
peccaries he doesn't know where perhaps in the mountains they're locked up now
getting them out
is getting them unlocked is difficult because at the time that this shaman
locked up their peccaries
they happen to be without a good shaman in their village did they have a bad shaman
yeah they have
a shaman in training his his tr he is a young shaman in training and his powers
are slow to develop
so what happened to the old guy don't know this guy's powers have been slow to
develop
he's getting there and soon he will hopefully be in a position to unlock the peccaries
now what's a young
shaman is it like a young president i don't know i didn't like i didn't meet
him oh he doesn't really
like we brought up wanting to go talk to him um got the sense that that wasn't
the best idea to go visit
with him really yeah guys like 300 people in the village 305 wow got got and i
brought up a number
of times just got the sense that it wasn't the greatest idea to go talk to so
is there theatrics
involved this guy like living on the outskirts of town no i know he lives in
town but he just claims
mystery yeah so here's a handful of things that was said like rovin was telling
me and and and i
want to say man uh i do not like if i'm here okay if you told me something that
i thought was
outlandish i would jump on you right and i'd be like that's ridiculous right
now that desire to like
be right and to dispel uh wrongness like i don't have a lick of that when i'm
talking to these guys
right right i'm never like wow i don't buy that right it's just like it's so
inappropriate right
feeling right and it's so interesting to me and also gives such an interesting
glimpse into how
most cultures and societies were structured long time in pre-christian times
right that it's just
like it's just educational so i'm not in any way i'm never saying like well i
don't buy that i'm just
saying like oh okay right that's great thanks for sharing so magic yeah so i'm
not in any way i'm
never like but here's some things that were explained to me if you're having a
problem where
your your archery skills go downhill like you have a few misses the way to
correct that would be to go
up and take the hand that holds the bowstring and punch a beehive and then hold
your hand up to that
hive because they don't miss
and you will find you will they will demonstrate their accuracy when they
bombard you and rovin was
saying that most of them even know to hit you between your fingers where it
really hurts you will then
absorb that accuracy in your hand and you will do a lot better shooting huh and
the more you can do
this throughout your life the stronger it will make you it's also helpful just
even with kids and other
things it's also helpful to be hit by like a bullet ant for instance um i had
that happen to me before
and it's awful but to get hit by a bullet ant to absorb some of that ant
strength but this shaman that
fucked up their peccaries could also just be jealous of you and strip your
ability to shoot accurately
and what i want to point out that rovin has an email address
right wow yeah you can email i email with him wow and he's a firm in his
beliefs yeah but also also
yeah but he's also rational it's he seems fairly rational outside of this
listen it's like
i'm torn even talking about it because like i don't want to like i'm torn
talking about it because
because i have such a um a love for him as a person uh that i wouldn't want to
say that would make
that would like dispel that idea of like that that he that he's not like that
he's not perfectly
rational like i would go anywhere with this guy extremely capable but you're
talking about just like
some some long-held belief systems so it's their cultural belief systems are
just deeply ingrained
and there's probably some sort of a placebo effect attached to all this i'm
sure they've seen it in
effect yeah someone has cast what is a there's a some point in time those those
peccaries are going
to come back into town yeah and then what where will credit fall they'll
probably say the shaman is
relaxed like awesome or maybe the new shaman yeah or someone won't take credit
it's just a way of
explaining the volatility here's the other thing here's the other thing like
like you know you could
go well let me give you an example i'm gonna make a point about the way um to
sort of see a culture
in transition right because it's always so relative but uh there's a right
there's a staff writer at
the new yorker one of my favorite journalists of all time john lee anderson you
might be familiar
with this book che like he wrote sort of the definitive che Guevara book che um
he's a war
correspondent writes in troubled spots around the country around the world john
lee anderson he wrote
a piece not long ago in the new yorker about a group of people that had just
made that were were
making first contact with the outside world just recently 2015 uh they had been
they were regard they were
initially regarded as an uncontacted group that lived in the border between peru
and brazil in the jungle
and for whatever reason they started coming out to a main river where they were
having some contact with
other groups and they killed a couple people with bows so the government was in
a situation of when dealing
with a first contact group you can't go in and just start putting people on
trial and like it only leads
to more problems so they were trying to it's an article about the difficulties
of leading of introducing a
first contact peoples into sort of a constructive engagement with the outside
world um a trick there is
some people look and and they have some countries have a policy of isolation
for uncontacted people
and try to enforce isolation other theorists on this or other anthropologists
think that's completely
unfair that it's the most human of tendencies is to find other humans and swap
ideas with them
right it's like it's you it would be laughable that i would come to you and say
joe i'd like to prevent
you from meeting the french lest some aspect of frenchness rub off on you right
now they're worried
about other things too but they're worried about like disease and stuff but
also a tendency to the
the alcohol can be destructive being lured into prostitution all forms of
exploitation trying to
protect people from this then there's also the romance of running into these
uncontacted tribes
that's what i wanted to cherish that some people yeah so some people say those
photos that they took
from the helicopter where they see these people they're covered in war paint
they're pointing arrows
at the helicopter yeah it's amazing and that's the that i'm guilty of right
because even though
that's how i was going to lead up this thing where this battle i have in my own
mind right
that even though i mean they are far far away they're you know far far removed
from the first
contact people they're not even like i said the guy's got an email address i'm
not trying to
paint this as something it's not right but at the same time they make their
bows from raw material
out in the jungle and hunting fish for all their protein i love that so much
and i like laying in
bed even if you told me you can never go back i want to lay in bed thinking
about that occurring
right i want to lay in bed thinking about a guy having a problem with his shaman
because it's just so
refreshing and like like like mentally exhilarating to just know that that's
going on so you get caught
in this kind of uh you get caught in this kind of it's almost like the op it's
like the opposite of
colonialism or something where you get caught this thing of wanting to be like
oh these precious
cute people if i could just keep them like how i like them where they stir my
imagination
yeah you know i just want them to stay like how they are because that's how i
like them like when
i come down to visit i like to know that they're all doing the that's
interesting to me
but they're in no way are they perceiving their experience
in that way but you go down and see like in the handful of years as much they've
changed all the
time right in the handful of years to see that just like practices are
different
dress is different clothing very different so you're just seeing it happen you're
seeing in real
time it happened in a fast way now you might come up and be like oh i was in
the u.s in the pre-internet
days and i came to the u.s in the post-internet days and um and man is that
place different but
you're watching it like wherever you live you're also seeing that happen too so
you're living that
transition but to go to there and then come back five years later uh and see
things different it
really um yeah man it it fucking like as much as i hate to admit it and as
wrong as it is but just
be like absolutely up front like it kind of bummed me out so when you talk
about when you talk about
from a hunting perspective because i tend to view the world through a hunting
and fishing perspective
but when you talk about bringing bows down my first thought is oh that's no fun
they shouldn't do
that because i like watching them hunt with the homemade bows right no it's it's
totally rational
and it completely makes sense yeah it's just it's a longing for nostalgia and
then you find it you
you find it as it's changing you know as much as you know about the american
west as much as you told
me uh about the the history of american west and the native americans to see
these people that are
essentially like in some ways like the native americans before the colonial
people arrived yeah or like
uh i guess it would be this is a bold statement if there's an anthropologist or
a historian listening
they're going to pull their hair out but it would maybe would be like i'm so
hesitant to even throw
this out just it's extremely approximate and full of holes and full of contradictions
but some kind
of post-contact scenario and i don't know like let's say it was the 1890s or
something right here
the firearm was very much a part of stuff you know but yeah so it's like um but
you know it's it's
makes it's complicated in the internet age but at that time you definitely we
had definitely
established a form of tourism in the american west right there yeah by the you
know i mean well before
the francis parkman um so francis part was this figure he wrote the definitive
history of the french
and indian war but in 1842 he was a historian he had health problems in 1842 he
did a tourism trip
out on to the great plains he met some fur trappers some mountain men he
traveled with the oglala sioux
uh crazy horse who probably wasn't crazy horse yet he was his name curly as a
kid crazy horse he was
in crazy or like the three stooges yeah i think that i think that was like a
name from i don't even know
it and have no idea what it meant huh before he adopted the name crazy horse um
he would have been
13 years old and francis parkman traveled with them as a tourist and they went
into the black hills of
south dakota they went in there to get lodge poles because that was a time you
were going to fit out their
lodge poles for their teepees to replace broken lodge poles they went up in the
black hills killed some
big horn sheep by throwing rocks down on them off a cliff went shot a bunch of
buffalo and he was out
there like as a tourist okay so tourism in the american west now you gotta
remember the last the last
free roaming the last like non-confined plains indians didn't get rounded up
till
depending on your definition 1876 1877 so he was out there way before that
there were still
like what they described at the time as hostile wild indians were running
around and he was traveling
with them as a tourist so i i just bring that up to bring this idea that here's
this group of people
who are very much engaged in tourism like i was down there i was down there
because i wanted to go on a
river trip i want and it's something i've done a handful of times i wanted to
go on a river trip
and and and participate in their hunting and fishing and food gathering
activities as they engage in them
if the same way they might engage and if i wasn't there that's why we weren't
fishing that's why we
weren't catching aeropiomas and letting them go so there's that in the internet
era but it's like
there's that thing i always return to it's like you're still you're still
hunting and fishing all your
own food or growing it in your yard now when you guys went down there did you
participate in the
hunting and fishing or did you just observe no participate in it you
participated with their
traditional tackle or did you you use your own stuff i've done both i've hunted
fish with my own bow
and i've hunted fish with their bow and in the end i wound up the first time i
went down i hunted fish
the second time too i hunted four fish so bow fished with um their gear but
then it always felt like
somehow funny too because like there's a thing that happens when you're
watching like goofy uh
you know you watch like goofy survival shows and there's always the part where
the host you know
grapples with how difficult it is to master ancient technologies but
you're trying to just pick it up and do it from scratch okay rovin has been
shooting that bow at fish
for he's 32 years old he's been shooting that bow at fish for let's say 27
years it is not an unusual
thing to him all right so when you go pick it up you're like man you got to
give props to these guys
for being able to kill fish this bow it's like well kind of and kind of not
because if you spent 27
years doing something you're damn sure going to be good at it the same way is
if you took someone
like one of these first contact peoples from between peru and brazil and handed
them my laptop
and said hey pull up my gmail contacts from scratch he might be like man i
gotta give props to you guys
i had no idea right it's just like absurd yeah so that i was having this
conversation with someone
the other day where you know the first time daniel boone in 1760 daniel boone
went through the
cumberland gap for the first time and dropped down into what's now tennessee
and kentucky and he stayed
there hunting hides he was a hide hunter stayed there hunting hides for two
years ran out of gunpowder
made his own gunpowder and made it out of uh bat guano your own piss potash
right you can cook this
shit up right and make your own gunpowder wow and i always look at that as
being the epitome
of woodsmanship and the fact that he could do it makes him seem otherworldly
how do they what
kind of formula do they have for how much piss how much bat guano it's just
something they knew
do you know that bat guano used to be something that was so cherished people
would go to war for
it yeah for explosive incredible not just for explosive but also for fertilizer
oh no yeah that's the term
bat shit crazy like that people would people would fight for bat shit yeah they
would go nuts like
it was so valuable that's where all the buffalo bones went after the near
extermination of the buffalo
really yeah but the really good shit was bone china china tableware and
everything else is fertilizer
wow yeah but you could make the same some of the same characters that were
involved in the slaughter
involved in picking up the bones they're called bone pickers picked up
fertilizer but no i didn't know that about
back one i had no idea that bone china yeah there's still bone china no kidding
yeah i thought china
was always like some sort of ceramic there's a place in detroit on the on the
rogue river in detroit that uh
the rouge river rogue river depending on what dude michigan you're talking to
um there's a place there
called the detroit carbon works that used to so you know when you're watching
movies including the revenue
you know that giant pyramid pile of buffalo skulls that turns up in everywhere
every book every movie
that photo was taken at the detroit carbon works and what they were producing
was bone fertilizer
wow is there more than one of those photos whoa i mean it's everywhere wow you
can't escape that picture
that's an incredible picture that's that's taken to detroit michigan where i'll
point out was one of a
handful of states that never had buffalo in the history in the history there's
no buffalo michigan so
they're they were not extirpated out of michigan they just those were never
picked up those bones were
picked up in the american west shipped by rail to minneapolis chicago detroit
turned into bone
fertilizer and then shipped back out for people tilling up the great plains
that photo go back to that
photo again that photo is so disturbing dude it's wild how many skulls is that
in my book about buffalo
i'm describing that picture and i say that the man standing on top is like an
exclamation point at the
end of a long sentence about death and destruction
because i look at him it's like he somehow realizes the weirdness of what he's
involved in but that
was post extermination there's a crazy um podcast from dan carlin on the the
wrath of the khans on
genghis khan and they describe how the chrismian shah sends a a group to check
out jinn china and they
got there like about a year after uh genghis khan had killed everyone in the
entire city over a million
people and they thought what what they saw in the distance they thought was a
uh snow-capped mountain
as they got closer they realized it was a pile of human bones really yeah man
those guys were hardcore
yeah jonestown wouldn't even have been a blip it would have been nothing they'd
be like a minor it's
like it would be like a car crash he changed the carbon footprint of the human
race him during his time
they don't know how many people they'd have to depopulation through depopulation
cooking fires
they believe they killed more than 10 percent of the population like genghis khan
and his people
through his orders killed more than 10 percent of the population of the world
and wasn't he the number
one land conqueror but just never held on to anything well conquered more than
like yeah that
conquered more than napoleon conquered more than hitler but just didn't hold it
i'm not sure about
that i don't know about that but i know that they always lived in tents and
they despised people that
lived in homes they thought they were pussies they probably thought that after
their life they probably
thought they were vulnerable too yeah probably right yeah i mean just anybody
listening uh wrath of the
cons it's a five-part series and i think dan carlin he charges for them you can
buy it on itunes but
i think it's only a dollar per and it's the best dollar you ever and he's done
world war one yes
yeah and i'm not sure what else he's done he's done a lot of i mean his podcast
is just absolutely
amazing he's incredible and super humble guy won't call himself an historian
but meanwhile has the best
history educational series you can get yeah it's a buck a buck a piece and they're
like an hour and a
half long and they're incredible yeah he's uh he's a real treasure that guy
doesn't call himself in his
he doesn't use like primary source material or something just reads popular
works i don't know
why i mean i know he because who owns the name yeah who owns the definition he's
just really humble
you know i mean but his main focus of study his entire life has been history
you know and when he
does these things well it's like if he calls what he does a podcast i need to
change what i do
because i what i call a podcast is just so it pales in comparison because we're
just sitting here
talking right yeah what he does is he prepares for these things for months and
cites different sources
and references and then essentially does an educational entertainment piece
yeah yeah maybe
that's why he doesn't like the term historian is because he's not um he's not
contributing
he's not contributing to the body of knowledge he's interpreting the body of
knowledge right maybe yeah
that's a good point yeah maybe i think he's just super humble too he just
wouldn't wouldn't say that
no matter what but somehow it's i don't know why more disturbing to see a pile
of human bodies
than it is to see a pile of the buffalo bones yeah i think i told you um and i
talked about this a
thousand times what after the custer massacre the guys that that were following
the other soldiers
who were coming in after the custer massacre they didn't know what had happened
you know they hadn't got word yet that custer and his entire command had been
wiped out by the
sioux and northern cheyenne and they're riding up the valley and they're
looking off in the distance
and they're and they see all these sort of white bloody-ish things and all
these dark brown things
and one of the guys wrote that their initial impression looking at it was that
custer must have
caught the indians in the middle of a buffalo hunt and what they were seeing
was it was summertime
and they were seeing fatty buffalo carcasses that had been skinned and that the
brown things were the
buffalo hides laid out next to the carcass but when on closer inspection it was
the brown things were horses
cavalry horses and the white things were stripped and mutilated soldiers
it's a good image wasn't one of the guys one of the native americans that was
in the little big
horn you know whatever event wasn't he one of the guys who toured with wild
bill many of them so they
were they had killed american soldiers and then they went on this entertainment
tour yeah it would be as
though it would be like
this is a fucking risky comparison no i'm not even gonna do it you're gonna say
nazi no no no
i definitely wasn't gonna say that because it's way different it would be like
uh
shit
i'm not gonna say i don't want to make the comparison it'll come back to haunt
me um i'm
trying to think of something that would work it would be like a a people that
we now fought against
later became a media celebrity yeah oh i guess they're kind of dealing with it
right now
in columbia where the farc right now that columbia has struck a peace accord
with the
farc and the farc are entering into politics entering into media farc
commanders who spent their entire
life fighting against the columbia government many atrocities were traded back
and forth they now come on
the the columbia uh equivalent of 60 minutes to do interviews wow okay so it's
like where you have an
adversary that that hostilities end and the reconciliation is so complete and
so quick that
you can come you can become a media personality and this guy was a touring
media personality so gall
quite a giant guy right yeah gall who um the high spells name the the historian
evan s connell
jesus g-a-l-l and there's some photos of this guy right yeah there are photos
of him see if you can
find that evan s connell he was he was huge yeah and um the the novelist who
wrote sort of my favorite
custer history uh he says that uh gall went through custer's men like a wolf
through sheep and um
yeah so that's a hard looking man he someone asked him how long it took how
long that fight lasted he
said it lasted about as long as it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner wow
that is a hard looking
gentleman right there yeah that face man so he toured all over the country
people would pay to see him
pay to get their photos taken with him wow he did selfies selfies with people
wow what a crazy thing
that must have been isn't it i had some mock war that they would do yeah they
would come out and
reenact the battle wow yeah so you could go down and this would have been in
your own lifetime the the
people who the families of the men killed at the battle little bighorn could
have gone down and got
their photo taken with and paid to watch and interacted with the gentleman who
likely clovered their
father's head in with a tomahawk jesus christ we're not as like we always want
to think about how much
worse we are now right is that buffalo bill up there i don't know if that's hickok
yeah yeah that's him
but that's from his show wow i'm sorry what were you gonna say we're not that
far removed oh no i was
just saying like we now think we've gotten to such a weird spot but yeah you
want to point out that
people must have been a tad more forgiving at the time well there must have
been much more used to
death and murder yeah because it was so common and it's just it was so personal
because you know you're
doing it with hatchets and axes and guns that don't fire very well so you're
doing it close range you're
shooting people with muskets from and there was so much more violence then yeah
yeah so much more
death yeah the fact that you can grow up and be so old now and never see a dead
person is like just a
new idea it is pretty crazy you know i got people my age that never seen a dead
guy yeah
well it's a real eye-opener when you see one there's a lot of people that haven't
even seen a
dead animal dude i could sit and rattle off the dead people i've seen how many
burned in my mind
how many dead people have i seen yeah not ten
what have you seen dead people from i saw two people that were not just dead
but in bits after a
plane crash i saw oh where was that five not even a mile from my house i was a
little kid yeah and
then um and then uh commercial plane or like one of those little private so 57
year old man and a 13
year old kid i i tried i tried recently briefly to find to go back and find the
article but the way i
here's how the story went down is uh the way i remember a detail that i
remember very clearly is that
this guy it was his neighbor kid and they he had told this kid's parents they
were going down to wash
the airplane and look at the airplane and he decided to take the kid up for a
flight i don't
know if that's true or not i was trying to find that article to confirm that
aspect of it but
i lived on a lake called middle lake and everybody remembers for whatever
reason this guy buzzed our
lake a couple times really low there was a guy down on the east end of the lake
named mr rupert and i
remember what was unusual about mr rupert was he would eat fresh water clams
which we were forbidden
from doing by our dad but why is that you know it's just not as people don't
regard it as a good
practice at all to eat fresh water clams because of toxins i don't you know
that's another thing i
haven't looked into why that doesn't happen people just generally don't eat
fresh water clams but we
would go get them and clean them and i remember we cleaned a whole shitload
once my dad's like no
but mr rupert would eat these fresh water clams and um would he go raw or would
he cook them i'm sure
he would cook them he said man i saw that plane when it dove down over the lake
it went up but then
dove down again and never came back up uh and he even told some neighbors this
the next day when we wake up uh the sheriff's posse the mounted like our area
had a mounted
like a bunch of volunteers who had horses and they were like the mounted
sheriff's posse right like
deputized individuals during emergencies such as this they were all loading up
their horses
to head out into the woods to look for some plane and another detail that was
told to me that i wanted to
verify that would love i need to i just need to go back and go through the
microfiche where i grew up
and find the article because it was something like it had a signal on it and
the signal was picked up
by some other country even but they knew that a plane had gone down and that
was a matter of fact
everyone at this point knew that this plane had gone down um and we were riding
around on our bikes out
in the woods just kind of following these sheriff's posse guys as they were
sort of combing through the
woods and eventually a news helicopter was hovering over a spot like right at
where uh right where what
the end of white lake drive um and there was a news helicopter hovering over
there my two brothers
went directly there on their bikes and i was younger and for some reason i went
and got my mom
and then we drove over and we got to the end of white lake road we had to walk
into the woods
and there was a guy there that tried to block my mom and me from going in there
and i always remember
he said um uh if you could go in there you better have a strong stomach and she's
like well my kids
are in there and so we go in there and matt and danie are just standing at the
edge of the hole there
and they're trying to sort out they're trying to sort out who was who inside
this plane into bags i'm not
shitting you man like and and yeah i have like some visual details i remember
from that just like uh
yeah and then it's kind of macabre but yeah i like like and then that was you
know that and then
i remember we were at our neighbor mrs musselman um i remember we were at her
birthday party and the
caterer just fell over dead in front of everybody um so like stuff like that
very non-war related
things right that's what's what's interesting is we are just saying like but
you can you can see that
these are just like happen chance things but yeah you can go through life we
just have it sort of set
up now or you can be hidden from it but then you talk to previous generations
just like just it was
just a part of stuff yeah you know my old man talked about walking he grew up
in chicago he talked about
walking out of a party one time there's a dead guy at the bottom of the stairs
that had been beaten to
death just like day just like then went off to world war ii and saw who knows
what
so yeah i when people talk about how now we're so violent there's nothing to
support that nothing no
it's the safest time safest time to live ever you used to be able to hang
people from trees and not
get in trouble for it if they were the right color yeah not that long ago no
that's what's crazy about
this wild bill hickok we're talking about what 1870 1880 when was it and what's
funny is he was one of
the combatants so some of those guys like wild bill cody and wild bill hiccup hickok
actually had like
a dispute over who got to have the name you know bill buffalo bill cody wild
bill hickok there's
some other wild bills i guess and there was like it was like a popular name
right but they were combatants
too so they engaged in these wars and the fact that you would later get both
sides of the war
it'd be like if you went and got a bunch of germans who were defending the normandy
beach
omaha beach and you got a bunch of the um americans who were storming omaha
beach
and you had a traveling road show in which they would pretend to inflict mass
casualties on one another
for paying adoring crowds how bizarre who came up with the idea for that i don't
know that have been
done ever in history before i don't know my guess would be you know there's a
guy there's a thing
that i've told people a bunch of times no one ever believes me that it's true
but it's true it's true
there was a guy one time you know niagara falls right you've been to niagara
falls no big damn
waterfall uh you know the st law right st lawrence drains the great lakes and
on its way out to the
atlanta it was a big-ass waterfall nagger falls um a guy one time bought there
was like a zoo was
liquidating its holdings and a man bought the zoo and bought a barge and put
all of the zoo animals
on the barge and charged a dollar to watch him send his barge full of animals
over the falls
yeah wow so right yeah not that long ago now what happens if you know nowadays
nowadays nowadays they'll
put you in a cage yeah so it's just yeah we've traveled what is this jamie this
is like from when
the when the show started in the world's fair he got denied from uh doing the
the show outside of the
world's fair like 1893 while bill you're not talking about sorry wayme f cody
so i don't know which one
is which but uh he found a 14 acre swath of land where he set up stands for 18
000 people to watch each
show and over two million people saw it during like that whatever during the
world's fair that year
that's how which is like the first one and there weren't even uh there were
there were two million
saw but there were less well under probably way less than 75 million people in
the country wow
on what year was it in world war ii there were 150 million that's incredible 18
000 spectators 74 indians
from the pine ridge reservation of south dakota wow 18 000 spectators must have
been amazing back then
yeah now but here but think about the numbers at that battle that they
historians feel that at that
battle that was the largest gathering of plains indians to have ever occurred
an encampment of maybe 10 000
individuals and how many people were there from what's his face custer custer
he rode into one end of the
camp that's why it's not well understood like there were other engagements
going on at the same time
when said when you say like custer his command was annihilated there were other
prongs to the attack
that were repelled and beaten but it was only like one prong of the attack that
had custer in it that
was annihilated and how many people did custer he rode in with about 200 people
and ran into an encampment
of 10 000 individuals and later some of these individuals like gall and others
in interviews
said that even at the time our understanding is that these people were all
hopelessly drunk oh my god
because it did not make sense what they were doing wow they just didn't know it's
no one understood that's
that's that's why custer that's why there's still all these custer people who
just debate and argue and
is like uh some of his crow scouts okay he had some cree or re scouts and crow
scouts who came and told
him do not you cannot go down there in the morning they were playing was the
attack at daybreak and they
said you cannot do that that makes no sense he said we're going um they did
their death songs some of the
some of his scouts sang their death songs because they knew what they would be
dying in the morning
and um it's debated still today to what extent did he like did he believe what
his scouts were telling
him okay so was it suicidal or was it hubris no one thinks it was suicidal it
was either that he just
didn't really comprehend what they were telling him or he was so you know he
was a decorated civil war figure
and probably was a very ardent believer in the superiority like of his army and
they were trained
soldiers with discipline that there was just one prong of a three or you know
three prong attack or two
prong attack he was riding in the one end of the village but he just rode into
the village and they were
just killed right and in depict in popular depictions they always show cluster
like his the last guy standing
like there's a mountain of his dead guys around him you know and he's still
firing his revolver uh with
long hair when in fact he had short hair at the time but uh some people think
that when in looking at
it he probably yeah the great one is here fell custer a great image yeah like
jamie just pulled up a
crazy picture so here fell custer is that a contemporary picture did say what
no no that's
the old classic there's one that was on the anheuser to the time yeah here fell
custer was a little bit
later but then um the one that was the anheuser bush one was by a german guy i
think that was the one
you had pulled up that was like heiser bush had a cluster it was like their
poster oh my god that's
here fell custer wow which is is considered to be a very accurate which is
considered to be a pretty
accurate depiction of what was going on now the native american version custer
died custer died early
i think he died earlier in the skirmish he wasn't like the in movies he's got
the flowing blonde hair
everyone's dead and he's still firing away of course he was he was probably
killed earlier rather than
later in the skirmish it's so funny because see you're right there like he's
like you know in a
different position it's so funny that that we've done that you know that people
have taken what they
know most likely were historically inaccurate accounts and they pass them down
generation to
generation it makes you wonder like this is what we know now because this is
only a hundred and so
years ago yeah like what you know what are we getting when we're getting some
version of something
that happened a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago you know yeah how
distorted insanely yeah
but the problem we have as a culture i think is when someone goes to fix when
someone goes to
challenge our popular perceptions um it's it's branded as revisionist and
somehow like loses
right it becomes almost like uh its credentials are tarnished do you remember
the guy i can't remember
what politician jamie bill pulled up there's a politician who said um he
famously said you know
after we realized that paul revere the the the ride of paul revere was didn't
really happen
yeah like fabricated from whole cloth right right there's a politician said i
love paul revere whether
he wrote or not well i mean when we were kids we were taught columbus
discovered the united states yeah
i mean we didn't figure that out until it's it's still amazing that it wasn't
like the west indies
and yeah and to this day it's still amazing that they celebrate that guy when
you find out that he was
a fucking monster i mean the what was it uh i believe it was a um a minister or
someone who some religious
person who came with them at the time uh left a journal about the atrocities
committed directly by
columbus and his men uh when they you know hacked off arms for people couldn't
bring them back gold and
i mean just horrific shit smashed babies on rocks did it right in front of them
and this guy was a
first-hand account of what and we're supposed to believe i mean who knows how
much of what he's
saying is accurate but if any of it is accurate columbus was a monster yeah i
think that what it stems
from is that from the perspective in europe at the time he had
he had solidified and put some shit together that people had been kind of pecking
around the edges of
right whether this continent existed yeah and and yeah and just had it was like
a leap forward at the
time yeah how crazy is that but the fact that it becomes that right that he
like you know that in
some people's minds he like somehow established america yeah and that we take a
day off of school
because of it that's really crazy it's bizarre columbus day i mean we still to
this day it's 2017
kids get columbus day off don't they but now it's like here's the thing now
that no one
now that now that sort of the consensus right the popular consensus is that um
he was a
one of many players involved in sort of putting together what was here and sort
of outlining
where it was and how to get here um he's one of a bunch of players you know
almost certainly not the
first uh no one cares about that meaning what they mean is you're like saying
like i uphold the idea
of western civilizations annexation of the new world as being a good thing
so when someone says like when someone gets pissed at the revisionists for
questioning the legitimacy of
columbus they're not actually talking about what he specifically did it's
become it's become a proxy
for the cultural annexation of the new world and to say oh i hate columbus he's
an
they take it to mean you're saying that um that uh you're questioning our claim
on
the western hemisphere and that it was a bad thing i think that's why people
are annoyed by it
i don't think people are too much annoyed by it anymore because i think it's
pretty much been
established that columbus is a really bad but no one's gone in and undid it the
day have
have they is there any no they kind of change them around don't they well they
should probably come
up with another name for it you know uh happy uh no it's still a day right i
think so pretty sure
yeah it is kind of crazy though i'm not i'm not like here to defend the day but
i i do understand
like kind of how that came to be yeah i understand it it just seems pretty
incredible that just 500
years ago here it goes the war against columbus day in the washington post yes
it's waged by the
same people who are waging a war against christmas is it really that's crazy
indigenous people's day
in favor of indigenous people's yeah yeah makes sense yeah just give us a day
off we'll take it
i'm generally like like little movements like little cultural movements like
that i'm generally not uh
receptive i don't try no i don't try to read too much into them if i woke up
tomorrow and told me
that we had decided you know that uh people got together and decided against
columbus day i wouldn't
like do a lot of soul searching on that day no no i wouldn't either well you
know you don't work a
traditional job anyway or go to school where you take that day oh yeah i think
people that lost the
day they're like dude that's my day man yeah it's just hard to imagine i said i
hit walleyes with my
buddy doug every year yeah you'd be bummed it's just hard to imagine that you
know 500 plus years ago
they really didn't know in europe about the continental united states like that's
that's
amazing yeah that's that we're talking about you know earlier we're talking
about violence right
violent more violent then i think that we're so tripped up by the upheaval
caused by the digital age
right and everything like you know i just changed our sleep practices and just
everything you know
it's major upheaval yeah but picture that picture that in your lifetime they
all like you become aware
that the the earth that's that there are you know three times as many or
whatever as many
civilizations on earth as you thought there were yeah i mean that's a huge
thing to grapple with
a huge thing to grapple with people that had history people that had boats they
were seafaring
had more history than you yeah they're crazy or to think that one day and this
is not too long ago
you know some of our grandparents remember this to think that one day we had
devised a contraption
that was capable of ending life on earth and that these contraptions could be
initiated by the
distant actions of a handful of people that that's a change right yeah the
nuclear era here's the
craziest change in the nuclear era from the invention of an airplane to someone
dropping a nuclear bomb from
an airplane is less than 50 years yeah i think wright brothers 1903 right 1906
1903 early 1900s first sustained
flight with a heavier than air vehicle yeah and then in 1945 they dropped an
atomic bomb that's crazy
that's inside my life someone's like i knew this airplane was going to take off
but that is probably one of the biggest changes ever in terms of like the
amount of in 50 years in the
world to go from no air travel at all to dropping a nuclear bomb out of an
airplane in less than 50
years yeah and to then have it be that it's a staple of uh of of american life
not just where other people
like space travel you're like okay it's this flood of information but it's not
affecting me but with that it's like that's now how you get around yeah you
know that you like at a
time when you wanted to cross the country you would lose a large percentage of
your party to death
right you had to plan ahead it would take many many months to being just a
thing you just do on a whim
now i do believe like i accept that we are in a state of upheaval right now and
i think that we're
probably impacting ourselves in ways we don't fully understand how so digital
devices oh for sure yeah
just how you run your day yeah no doubt how you spend your time how you run
your day well ever go to
a restaurant and you see a whole group of people just staring at their phone
yeah yeah we're laughing
what's your day if you're staying at the baggage claim not looking at your
phone people are going
to think you're nuts that's true my friend just looking around trying to make
conversation with
people my friend rorke was talking about a conversation his wife was having
with someone
where someone said i was in starbucks drinking a coffee just sitting there
staring at the wall like
a fucking lunatic yeah you know if you're like what's wrong with that person
what was what are they up
to are they gonna start killing people they're not doing anything with their
phone
um it's a big thing but one of the helpful things i guess one of the helpful
just to
bring it full circle one of the helpful things um you know about traveling or
about like just reading
about history is you stop you lose some of that sense of specialness about
thinking that the life
you're living in the moment you're living it is this great test of humanity or
some like super peculiar
thing going on you realize that people have always been involved with and
struggle with cataclysmic
upheaval you know and then to go and then to go witness some other people in
some version of that
transition um is pretty healthy man maybe in the long term like just traveling
going to see how other
people do stuff it's unsettling but probably ultimately pretty good for you
yeah i think it's very good for
you just anything that enhances perspective it gives you like another layer
that you could consider when
you think about life on earth we're so used to our own environment our own ways
it's like you were
talking about talking to these people and asking them like why don't you eat
monkeys and now just don't
eat monkeys has he ever been to a supermarket that's a good question a couple
years ago when i was
mentioning that uh i'd mentioned to you that that the the that a couple
american companies who have a
that have like some conservation spending they do they were training some guys
from rewa village they
were training some of them to uh just how to interface with westerners and as
part of that he went up to he
might have even gone up to the bahamas to go for a couple days to a fly fishing
lodge
so i'm getting so yeah he flew on a commercial aircraft oh wow yeah um just
what we just love to see
but he's peculiar in that way now i've brought up to him i'm trying to talk him
into coming up and
going i want to take him on an ice fishing trip so i want to take him out to alaska
to fish to the ice
because what i want him to understand is um i'm so uncomfortable with him
physically uncomfortable
with the heat with everything biting me all the time just everything it's just
extremely
uncomfortable and to him it's standard yeah it's comfortable but he's never
like if he hadn't done
that trip or you know or just all of his siblings and most other people's
village they never experienced
you know they never experienced 50 degrees fahrenheit now what is it like to
them when it comes to bugs
do they have any sort of resistance to mosquitoes or anything along those lines
they don't care about it nearly as much as we care about it do they get the
same amount of bites
though do they get chewed up like we do yeah they complain about tick bites and
stuff but doesn't
generally it doesn't seem to bother me like we do because it's just a part of
everyday life
like you got to get used to you know and like hanging out in bolivia you get
bit by bees and wasps
at about the same rate that you'd get bit by mosquitoes if you were at like
some fourth of
july thing out at your uncle's pond you know shooting fireworks off at night on
the edge of a
cattail marsh it's like you're just getting bit you just like wake up and you
start getting bit by bees
and wasps so they just get just kind of used to it and then you'd say like i
remember when i got stung
by a bullet and asking like hey how many times been stung by bullet ants and a
lot of them would be
like i couldn't even begin to guess how many times i've been stung by bullet
ants but it's like but
they just suffer different so what i want to do is i want him to experience
suffering
while watching me not suffer so like i want him to look at me with awe okay and
so to do this
i want him to come up and ice fish wrong and take them up and i got a i got a
friend who likes to go
on he likes to get on snow machines in february or march out of fairbanks and
they go overnight
camping on snow machines fishing through the ice for burbot so what's a burbot
oh they call them
freshwaterlings or law you know why they call them lawyers is when you gut a
burbot his uh his heart's
way back next to his asshole so they call them lawyers or vent you know fish
have a like a like
a cloaca they have a uni hole you know we have like like a bird yeah we have a
couple outlets and they
have a single outlet for waste and sexual exchange um so yeah lawyer burbot
freshwater ling poor man's
lobster is another word for it it's a northern fish uh looks like if you
combined a snake and a bullfrog
kind of uh yeah i want to take them out to camp in a tent in 40 degree below
weather that's it right
there wow what a cool looking fish very good to eat yeah very good wow now are
they commonly caught
through the ice or did people catch them on the street that's a northern pike
that's a northy yeah
oh yeah no it's kind of a burbot or not but they're in the great lakes they're
they're all
over there in alaska yeah there's a burbot everywhere so does it taste like
lobster is that why um
they call it a poor no the reason they call it poor man's lobster doesn't
really taste like lobster
but it's suitable for boiling it and dipping it in butter and cocktail sauce
and eating really
yeah but you also make fish sandwiches with it huh they even sell that shit
commercially
burbot guys that have like guys that like uh native america like so in the
northern great
lakes you have ojibwa the ojibwa indians still carry on white lake they fish
for great lakes white
fish they trap net great lakes white fish they're able to sell uh bycatch of
burbot and they have
restaurants and like in the up i got some friends that do it and and they got
restaurants in the up that
they sell their burbot into and they make burbot sandwiches huh freshwater link
that's so i want to
take him on ice fishing trip and um but for him to leave like he doesn't go
into georgetown which is
the capital of his country he'd have to go into georgetown and start like
trying to figure out some
kind of uh visa situation and a passport does he have a birth certificate i don't
know what he has
i told him that i would try to help him with all that but he said it's like a
very daunting idea
that you would like go and leave the country wow or that you'd go in and stay
in georgetown but he
has been on a commercial flight he did that trip yeah yeah so he has done it
yep he has done it
did you just remember so he had to get a passport in order to do it his
passport didn't last long
and now he has no passport anymore is what he's telling me when i was asking
him about the feasibility
of this and then you don't need a visa for there but he needed a visa to come
here
but i'm gonna figure it out i want to have him up so bad wow him and his
brother dennis
one of the things that surprise like one of the things you get is um you know
you're from what
state were you born in new jersey yeah see it's like you've been all over the
place right yeah uh
imagine that imagine that you hunted and fished and farmed that's all you did
so you're always on the
land yeah and you've done it all within a 25 mile a 20 mile radius of your home
so you're outside
hunting and fishing or farming or gathering in the jungle every day and you're
in your 30s or 40s
and you've done it in a radius of 20 miles wow to what level you understand
your spot and without the
distractions of the digital shit and without the distractions of an occupation
oh he doesn't work
at all not i mean now he guides a little bit every year for the fish he guides
a little bit but
typically not like most days he's not engaged in that activity so the spatial
awareness is the thing that's
most striking to me in in spending time with with these individuals is um
everything i'm interested in what they notice and and uh what they never miss
it's like you realize that all of the bits of information that you're able to
contain in your
head that allow you to function and carry on right you're like a comedian and
you do
with mma and you have a very successful podcast and you have a family and you're
digitally very astute
and you have opinions about coffee right all the shit you're widely read all
right that's like all
you sort of fill up your brain with as much as it can hold but for them it's
like it seems to be from
my perspective it's like all of that breadth of knowledge but crammed into the
natural world
to where every plant every tree what are its uses what are the other things and
it's like they know
as much like they know as much as we know but it's just focused in a way that
our breadth of knowledge
which which would probably be astounding to them if they realized all the we
knew about but they're
all that all those bits of information are just applied in a different way down
to like a granular
understanding of the jungle it would probably be very bizarre for them to see
us like walk
like out to this parking lot these little patches of like plants we don't have
a
fucking clue as to what they are we pass through them like they they're just
peripheral there is no
like oh i don't know what that is yeah wow no they know everything and there's
toxicity how many
thousands and thousands of different varieties of plants you know at various
times there's 1500 species
of birds listen i like there was never a moment when i heard a bird call there
was uh i never said hey
what's that bird that everyone there didn't say what the bird was bird sounds
just from sounds
it's like you can't like and the shit that like yeah it defies it's almost just
something you have to go
see is um the ability to just like move through the jungle and notice
everything now are they like
the people in bolivia where they're barefoot most of the time yeah but you know
that's another bummer
is getting more into shoes man uh rovin still likes to take his shoes off when
he goes into the jungle like
we went into the jungle after some curacao and uh and he he pulled his shoes
off to be extra quiet
but yeah so he'll now and then put flip-flops on now and before there's no way
wow do they still have
the weird feet that are all just calloused and toes are spread out yeah it's
very strange the way their
feet look real strange i was in you know and i was in the philippines one time
in the highlands
where people are just hiking mountain trails like in you know severe topography
on rocky ground and
the feet there i've never seen anything like it barefoot yeah but just like it's
almost unrecognizable
as a human foot really from your perspective of a human foot what does it look
like have uh have
have your your man here their photos their feet type on uh luzon island hot uh
luzon island highlands
uh kalinga k-a-l-i-n-g-a feet i don't know try that
there's probably some high resolution national geographic oh you'll see some
people's feet
if this if he's any good at his job you will be seeing some crazy feet in a
moment you know another
thing i wanted to uh share with you i mentioned a sort of a surreal image is uh
you know watching a
woman in a dkny shirt like digging turtle eggs for food um there there's there's
flowers you know
everything's in bloom right um it was just the beginning of the rainy season so
there's some rain
like everything was in bloom and these flowers just all flowers of all variety
hang out over the river
and sometimes you'll pass through and it just has this like warm floral smell
that's just it's astounding
um it reminds me of you know in in the end of apocalypse now when kurtz when
captain willard
finally catches up with kurtz and kurtz asks him where he's from and he
mentions ohio
and kurtz tells him about a river trip he took with his father on the ohio
river when the gardenias
were in bloom you know he talks about the smell in the end of apocalypse now
but these flowers
would smell like that but when the rain would come what's going on i can't even
see what i got
you got some feet oh you'll find some feet yeah one i was trying to find
something better here's uh
so it would rain it would knock the all the flowers into the river oh wow and
you know like the way
yeah yeah that's what i'm talking about so from grasping wow they're like
almost like a gorilla's
feet yeah from grap like from wrapping your like wrapping your feet around
things rocks and stuff while
you climb that one in the middle yeah no no i saw i saw i saw like a number
like not yeah quite a few
people that had feet that resembled that from just from from from because like
you know down in the
amazon and other areas you're just walking on soft ground you know but imagine
if you're just like
walking on slippery rocks and you're using your feet in a way that's that's not
even uncommon so
what we're looking at for people that are just listening to this it's like at
the middle of their
foot especially that one foot in the middle to the right it's like he's it's
taking a turn like a
hard turn like a 15 degree plus turn why do those seem like disembodied feet
because they're just
photographing the feet i guess real well this is like a big article about some
people from the
philippines i think from the same area oh so we'll go back to it for a second
jamie because what we're
seeing in this is um this massive spacing between the big toe and then the
first toe to the point
where it's like an opposable it's an opposable toe yeah it's crazy seems like
almost like an opposable
toe yeah almost like a thumb now i'm sure what's at play there too really like
it makes you wonder
like at one point in time was it like that that that's that's the thing is you
wonder is and and i
don't know the answer to this but my guess would be that over time you know
that they're they're not
starting out with your foot like over time that that's been something that's
been selected for
right in a population of people like height or like yeah like just like this
guy's feet yeah
oh very common holy holy holy we're what we're looking at what looks like frog
but that's not even
that's not even praise you that's isn't that uh that's north america indigenous
people feet
h-u-a-o-r-a-n-i how do you pronounce that harani harani i'd have to check where
that is god it's
bizarre but it really does show you from fucking wearing shoes your whole life
yeah and given the
different environment like that that's insane like what we're looking at here
they literally look like
thumbs like they're sticking out of the side but it's the same structure as a
human foot meaning that
it's the same length of toes and and just you see that from using it that way
they've just developed
this incredible you know what's really crazy what is one of the hallmarks of
civilization that shows like
the really uh poor choice in footwear when your feet go the other way when they
go in an ineffective
direction they they get they get that hammer toe and they climb over each other
these is these people
have functional feet to the point where you know they could probably hold
something with their feet
yeah when i look at uh when i look at my wife's feet i feel like it's like she's
got a foot that seems
very much like shaped by a lifetime of office footwear oh it's awful especially
with women they get that
hammer toe that bunion thing where their their toes are kind of crossed over to
the side i know that
thing well it's so weird it's a weird choice that someone has decided that
women should shove their toes
into these pointy things but but uh just like with the that i saw the a group
of individuals lock on to
polarized sunglasses as being the shit um i if you went back in five years i'm
telling you
instead everybody being being barefoot everybody's gonna be wearing shoes what
if you got those women
high heel shoes and said this is what all the women in america stretch of
course i think it'd take a
while but you give oh that that's disgusting though that's foot binding it's
just up right there
that's just insane i can't tell what i'm looking at yeah that's her toes oh
that's from binding your
feet that's foot binding in china yeah well you know soft tissue it's very
flexible oh man go uh go to
cirque du soleil look what those people could do their bodies the human body is
pretty bizarre in its
ability to adapt but yeah you know those groups that used to bind their
children's head to that back
board yeah to flatten their head out well how about those people in um what
part of the world was it
where they have that incas the where they have those uh lines the nazca lines
you know and they've found
all these skulls from people back then where they had stretched their heads out
and almost made their
heads look like aliens yeah there you go but uh see if you find the inca uh inca
skulls it's so much
so that a lot of the really loony people said look they're trying to be like
the aliens that have come
down and given them knowledge and oh yeah yeah yeah have you ever been down to
um do you remember those
it they're they're they're held in salta argentina i went to see them one time
but those
children that they found they were entombed at the top of a mountain and they
were basically freeze-dried
no it's perfectly preserved children what what happened to them well they were
taken up and
given as the offering so first it seems based on the um stuff they had with
them that they were paraded
through the incan empire and people lavished them with gifts and when they look
at the isotopes in
their bodies it's like their diet their whole lives they had just had potatoes
but then you can see
that toward the end of their lives they were very well fed with meat and fish
and all kinds of stuff
and they had just innumerable treasures uh gold pieces carved pieces so they
were taken it seems
as though they were taken throughout the empire and what's really funny about
this speaking of
columbus earlier is it was like yeah so wow it's like it's best they haven't
dated it exactly but it
seems like i mean it seems like we're talking about you know columbus 1492 it's
like we're talking about
1491. wow so the the height of this empire at at the the height of the empire
butting up up against
its dramatic and sudden collapse with european contact but they took yeah i
went to see and um
she was not the only they made a deal with the indigenous people where they
only put one on
display at a time but she was on display when i was there and what do they have
their how do they
have her encapsulated so they took them well i'll tell you how they came to be
first so
they were finely dressed had a lot of ornaments and things with them had been
very well fed
and the the older and they took them up to the high peak i can't remember how
high they might have
been 14 or 15 000 feet above sea level and they built a little tomb for them
and sat them in the
tomb they were drunk they had a lot of rice wine in their bodies when they died
uh the oldest one
must have put up some kind of struggle because she was hit in the head with a
hammer or an axe
and they were just laid out sitting in this thing and then capped over with
rocks
and it's very stable environment so they froze and then you know we use now
like backpacking food
is freeze-dried food yeah they used to have they used to do a very similar
thing with by just taking
potatoes and storing them at high elevations where what freeze drying is is
your liquid it's like you
freeze something and then expel the liquid where the liquid goes from a gaseous
or goes from a solid
to a gas without passing through its liquid state so when you freeze dry food
you like freeze dry it you
put it in a freezer and get super cold and then you start then you start
putting it under a vacuum to a
point where all the water goes immediately to a gaseous state doesn't pass
through a liquid state so it
holds its form but all the water's gone if it goes to a liquid state then it
collapses but it just holds
its form and the non-water parts of the cells just stay bound in their natural
shape so they were in
this position and eventually just like expelled tons of water without ever thawing
out and when they found
them you can even see the that they had been chewing cocoa leaves because the
high elevation the kids
still have dried cocoa leaves on their lips dude it's wild yeah me my wife went
there to look at
them where is it now it's in salta argentina wow near the border very near the
border with bolivia
i wanted to ask you something totally unrelated but it came up because you
talked about freeze-dried foods
i know you cook a lot but have you ever i know now you eat those mountain house
things but have you
ever tried to make your own have you ever tried to dehydrate some of your wild
game oh yeah i've
dehydrated i mean you make jerky you're dehydrating right but have you ever
made like chili and things
like that where you could rehydrate it in the field i don't think i've ever
made dehydrated no i've assembled
a lot of dehydrated things but i've never d like at what point how many
ingredients need to be in
something before it becomes like a recipe just a couple yeah pemmican that's a
recipe what is it
pemmican that's got two things in it's pemmican pulverized meat uh with liquid
fat poured over the
top of it did you know what that is no people that up all the time what pemmican
is i've never heard
of it before i don't think yeah so i did i forgot it it's like the original
road food you dry meat
into jerky air dry meat into jerky then you pulverize it into what looks like
sawdust
and then you take and stir it in liquefied fat i made some from a buffalo i
killed when i wrote my
buffalo book i made pemmican from that and i was and i had it in my fridge just
as an experiment i
kept it for seven years survival food that can last 50 years but that's not pemmican
it's not it doesn't
look like it looks like jerky sticks because it's not pulverized people just
now started all of a
sudden calling like different i'm not saying everybody messed hardly everybody
messes up but
it's like a thing that gets messed up so um what was i getting at what were you
asking about no i was
asking about no i never dehydrate i never dehydrate a bunch of different things
and combine it into a
recipe that i then bring with me um the reason i like the reason i use dehydrated
food and a lot of
backpack hunters use dehydrated food is because um if you have a a a dish made
up of dehydrated
ingredients they have different hydration times okay so if you do beans like
like a piece of meat
is going to be digestible to you a piece of dehydrated meat that's then
hydrated is going
to be digestible to you a dehydrated bean might take 30 or 40 minutes before it's
going to be in
a condition that doesn't rip you apart like if you want to fuck yourself up eat
straight dried beans
what happens just it's just you're off yeah you don't know your stomach doesn't
know what to do with
it man well it knows what to do with it starts producing voluminous amounts of
uh gas right
it's awful it's horrible but with with if you cook if you take food and cook it
to a ready to eat state
and then freeze dry it it it uh you can rehydrate it kind of like
simultaneously if you do everything
right now it wouldn't work with like a hamburger right if you dehydrated a
hamburger and then you add
water to it you're going to wind up with a soggy ass bun so the trick is like
finding things that are
gonna in a hot water bath are gonna all come back to life kind of at the same
time but places that
make backpack food out of just dehydrated but not freeze-dried ingredients is a
recipe for disaster
really some people like that but for day in day out consumption um i'm a freeze-dry
man
and it's freeze-dried something you could do at home you'd have to buy a sublimation
chamber so no
what is a sublimation chamber what does that look it's a chamber in which sublimation
you know what
it looks like it looks like the looks like a submarine really a small but it's
very heavy duty
because what you're doing is you're taking you're taking food you take ready to
eat foods
and freeze it right and then you put it into a sublimation chamber and pull a
very strong vacuum on it
and the air pressure gets to a point where the liquid sublimates and goes
directly to a gas state
and you condense it on another surface inside the chamber but it's out of the
food then you take the
food out it's like glass you can shatter it that's freeze-dried food but it rehydrates
in a real nice
way i have heard we eat a lot of it because we do a lot of backcountry trips i've
heard everyone's
complaints about it but it's like it from my perspective which i will argue is
a well-informed
perspective it's like it's the lesser of two evils it's not that bad for day in
day out consumption
i think that the the companies that are do freeze-dry it's just better in my
opinion
now when i say that these children are freeze-dried i think some people you
know people are going to
challenge that because it's not technically freeze-dried but like a similar
thing going on where they're
keeping their form but shedding their water and be you know
shedding water keeping their form and being frozen and preserved for a long
time
so yeah it's a trip because i was reading a podcast or reading a podcast
listening to a podcast
rather where this guy was talking about how he's doing that with his own food
for backpacking trips
dehydrating it yeah sure man why not things like chili yeah things along those
lines is he cooking
chili and then dehydrating or just dehydrating the components i think dehydrating
the components i
think he was talking about dehydrating the meat and dehydrating pasta like like
something you know
like uh taking some meat with sauce yeah and putting it together with a pasta
now my brother one
time he's a very uh frugal man he that's not the right word he just hates uh to
see food go to
waste he one time had a bunch of roommates and they all moved out and left a
ton of rice and he got
sick of cooking rice because it'd take too long he cooked all the rice and then
spread it out on
sheets and dehydrated it in his dehydrator and and and and reverse engineered
instant rice
that's insane does it take that long what does rice take like 20 minutes it
seems like it takes
more time to do that yeah talk to him so this is the same guy is this the same
guy that found the
hobo's underwear and stole it yep and the same guy that um one time our our
dear late friend uh was
getting married and uh his bride his bride the wedding was at his bride-to-be's
house and a neighbor was away
on vacation and the neighbor that was away on vacation said you know since we're
out of town if you guys
want to use our home for some of your wedding guests go ahead and so all the
groomsmen were lodged up in
this house of this man we didn't know who was the neighbor of his wife's
parents and uh i don't know
why but my brother got to snooping around in this guy's freezer and found that
he had had he had a bull elk
in there that had been in there for seven years and he had like this crisis
this moral crisis where
he's trying to figure out is it morally worse to steal or morally worse to
allow this man to waste this
meat how long was a bull will bull stay good if you freeze it you're pushing it
at seven years seven
years like what is what is like commonly agreed upon it depends who you ask if
you ask me the way i trim
the way i cut trim and wrap i don't even blink at two years two years is fine
yeah the way i cut
trim and wrap but when you start seeing four years you get a little weird well
a thing that i don't let it
go i i've never even done it i would have to think it's going to start to go
because the texture the
texture will change the texture will change um seven years there's two things
going on one you're
borderline and two you're starting to get the idea that this guy isn't going to
eat that thing right
yeah so he weighed it out in his head and when he left he had a bunch of that
meat with him and took
him home and ate it because he just hated to see a elk go to waste how did it
taste seven years don't
remember we get to ask him wow but his standard of good is different than your
standard of good
his standard of good is acceptable in cases like that so that is a weird crisis
though makes sense
but he throughout his whole life he always is running into these situations
like where he just
like cannot um he cannot let food go to waste so he's if i talked to him right
now there's probably 10
more things like that that have happened to him since i talked to him last
where he's like when he found
like he found in his alleyway one time and he's living in montana and still is
in montana living
in bozeman found in his alleyway like a discarded a discarded cash
from a homeless man and ate all that guy's food and he was a phd candidate at
the university
you grew up with him yeah so i remember the first time the first time he here's
where he kind of like
where not where it came from but he drew a bear tag when we were in michigan
and it was hard to get
a bear tag at the time and he drew a bear tag and the only way to hunt bears in
the up is like
you know you're not you're not gonna spot and stalk on him because it's flat
ground and you can't see
shit right you know you're gonna use dogs or you use bait there's you never you're
not gonna see a
bear um so he started a bait pile the way he was feeding his bait pile ahead of
the season was just
dumpster diving so as he's dumpster diving it's like he's living off not only
is he baiting the
bear with the dumpster food but he's like living off the dumpster diving food
that he found too
because he like discovered his great richness i remember him he found i'm not
saying he found
this big box of boxes of expired bugles you know those little crackers yeah the
people like put
cheese whiz shoot cheese whiz into the open end of that bugle and i even got a
picture of him he just
walking the walk through the woods with boxes of bugles under his arm and get
out and he'd be like
dumping them out for the bear and then just eating the bugles too and then he
walked back with a
handful of bugles just hates to see wasted food his old girlfriend had a job
cooking like the brown food
and the albertson's you know like the display case where they fry all those
like burritos and
shit and um they were she was bringing all that home and they were living off
the the food that was
going to the garbage and they came to her and said you can't steal this food
and then she started
stealing it quietly wow he can't stand to see food go to waste well that's
probably noble you know what's
extra nice as he works for the usda so it's good to know that a person like
that is involved in um
you know is at least in the room with people who are thinking about food
systems
is it good because it seems like you'll fucking eat anything dude he will he's
on a different level
i mean on a different level of toughness and shit you know he's the guy who's
arms shrinking because
remember i was trying to hook you up with yes yeah he's got a yeah he's got
yeah did he do anything
about that nope oh jesus that's not good no once you get that atrophy it's uh
very tough to get it
back the way his nerves regenerate takes a long time it's like a half an inch a
year he chronicles
its decay by taking a he's got a 30 pound uh kettlebell and he was chronicling
his decay by watching how
many it's his tricep so counting how many tricep curls he could do with that
kettlebell with one arm
with the other and i think the last time we were talking to him it was 30 or
something like 30 on one
side and 10 on the other side oh jesus that's bad so uh that's a neck issue
then he's that's like a
c3 or c4 or something like that he's gone yeah i shouldn't say he's gone no he
hasn't i shouldn't
say he hasn't done anything about it he's probably if he listens to this he's
probably cringing because
he would feel that he has but um tell him if he's listening there's a couple
things you need to do if
it's it seems to me like it's a neck issue because uh when when you start
getting like elbows and things
where your arm starts uh atrophying usually it's a cervical disc which is
somewhere up in here
um what what he should do is get a neck decompression device they're very they're
inexpensive they hook
over a door you put it on with velcro you strap it and i have one uh it it
hangs on a thing it's like
you're hanging yourself by your chin making some room in there for all those
nerves exactly and well
same principles these toes spreading out and then other also toes smashing up
you can kind of soft
tissue stretch out your neck and decompress all those areas a lot of people
have it from bad
posture a lot of people have it from athletics i got it from jujitsu um from
all this you know getting
your neck yanked on see that thing right there that lady has yeah that's a
shitty one because that one's
working on a bag of water that doesn't work with a neck like mine you need you
need to be able to hang
you need to hang a rhino on the other end i had a i have a thing where i go
like this click click click
click click click click click and then i let myself hang from my neck and um
the more it's just like
that just like that see how that guy's just sitting there reading a magazine
yeah and you can adjust
that so there's a little uh cord it's tough to see in this photo but there's a
cord you pull sort of like
a plunger on one of those old school toilets you pull that click click click
click click click click
see how he's pulling it right there and then you just relax and you just got to
learn how to go with
it and sort of relax and it feels weird at first because there's a lot of
pressure but it's pulling
your neck literally pulling your neck you can feel sometimes when i'm really
relaxed i feel like pop
i feel like something pop little tissue separations in there does it have do
you feel that it's gotten
better long term oh yeah for sure and it feels like really relaxing like after
it's over i feel
like ah i feel like it just takes a weight off you no i think there's a
tremendous amount i think
sitting is terrible these these seats that we're in right now are exceptional
because they're ergonomic
chairs if you use them right if you use them right yeah i'm pretty cautious
about sitting up straight
but uh from back injuries i've been very very cautious about uh working out all
the muscles around my
back which i didn't really i just worked out and i figured those things take
care of themselves
now i treat them as like just like brushing my teeth like my spinal column and
all those supporting
muscles in the spine those are huge they need they need to be exercised and
especially if you do anything
like you guys pack out a lot of weight yeah that's a big one and um that's
where he feels that
a different what he had sciatica right that's lower that's a lump yeah that was
a different thing but he he
he he knows he like traces that uh to a specific animal that he's packing out
yeah makes sense
because sciatica is what sciatica is is a disc that's bulging meaning the disc
the soft tissue
in between the two hard bones is pushing out and it's pressing up against the
nerve and it causes pain
that shoots down your ass and your lower legs and a lot of people don't even
recognize it as a lower back
issue because maybe their back is not really that painful but the leg in the
ass is painful yeah what
the is going on here i had a similar issue with my neck where it was pushing on
my ulnar nerve and i was
getting this elbow pain and i was like this really hurts like down my arm and
in the back of my tricep
and then i started getting numbness in my fingers and that's when i started
figuring out what was going on
then i went to a doctor i went to a chiropractor first which is a giant mistake
i spent a year but
do you not believe in chiropractors i don't believe in chiropractors at all i
think it's 98
percent horseshit that's what i think and i'm i don't know but i think chiropractors
that are smart
they incorporate things that i think are beneficial cold laser massage a lot of
different things but i think
that manipulation that they do unless you have like some sort of significant scoliosis
or something
they're attempting to slowly put back into position i think most of the time it's
just popping your neck
and it just feels good but i just like in an immediate sense i went to a guy
that's a very nice
guy and he was trying to tell me that i didn't have a bulging disc because he
was pushing down on the top
my head and it didn't hurt i'm like okay so i was listening to him i listened
to this guy for like
a fucking year i had treatment with him and i still have these neck problems
and back problems then
finally i got an mri and they're like yeah you got a bulging disc and i
remember being angry i remember
being angry because i was angry that i was being treated by someone who was a
professional that really
didn't know what the they were talking about and they were treating something
that was a significant
issue that i was experiencing a real deterioration of my function uh pain i
wasn't able to do jujitsu
correctly there was a lot of a lot of problems that i was dealing with i was
like well what the
is this like how and then i started talking to doctors about it and when you
have a bulging disc man
they want to cut you open like like you're a pinata and you got gold inside
well that's a thing that my
bro's talking about is the proceed he's very nervous about a procedure that he
could or could not do
well for some people it's not a bad move depending on whether or not your
brother's willing to do all
the different things that can but he's got a lot of atrophy already which is a
real bad thing it's
noticeable yeah that's not good because that doesn't grow back yeah boss rutin
has it real bad uh boss
rutin former ufc heavyweight champion he his neck up and uh went through a
bunch of different treatments
and then eventually wound up getting it uh fused he's got a i believe two discs
and maybe more
in his neck fused together where he doesn't have any disc tissue they just
screw the bones in
together and remove the disc tissue and stabilize the area but his right arm is
significantly smaller
than his left arm to the point where he calls it baby arm and this is a former
ufc heavyweight champion
of the world and uh what's ironic is that some of it came from fighting but the
last thing came from
doing a stunt on sons of anarchy he was uh in some sort of a fight i believe of
sons of anarchy some sort of a fight
scene where they were you know doing something and some guy was supposed to
like throw him on the
ground he landed on his head so all that actual fight and then you get up
pretend fighting yeah
and it's bad man i mean he's it's slowly starting to come back but i've known
boss to have this issue
for uh we we worked together on a movie before my seven-year-old daughter was
born and he had the issue then
and so for seven years and still now does it still does yeah it's come back
slowly but what i'm talking
about is like i think there's some they're like the way that your nerves
regenerate is extremely
slow they can deteriorate quickly like the atrophy can happen pretty quick but
the way it regenerates
is extremely slow so they say once you have atrophy you're fucked like you got
to act on it right
away that's the thing they told me when i had lyme disease is that um a thing
that fucks you up is the
nerve damage yeah and then people people a lot of people go on to think that
they always have it but
they're like you had a thing it's treated it's gone but it'll live with you for
so long because of the
damage to your nerves it's just not that's so slow to recuperate i talked to a
doctor about lyme disease
and he said it's not just the lyme disease that you're dealing with he said lyme
disease is this
overall term he said you can get a tick that has a hundred pathogens in it when
you look at that
list of shit it gets scary it's scary as fuck and they connected it to morgellons
you know what
morgellons is no more challenge is a disease that a lot of times they think is
psychosomatic because
there's some sort of a neurotoxicity involved in lyme disease and all these
people that have
morgellons almost without a doubt have lyme disease as well and what morgellons
is is they have they
start itching at themselves and they think they have fibers growing out of
their body and they start
hallucinating well most most of the time it's treated as a psychosomatic
disorder like they'll
get carpet fibers in their body and they'll claim these carpet fibers are
coming out of their body and
growing out of their skin but i talked to this doctor who was the only lucid
person that sort of
explained it to me because he's a doctor and he has morgellons and he was
saying he also has lyme
disease and he says like to a person they all have lyme disease that he's
encountered at least but he
was saying that he was looking at himself in the mirror and he saw something
moving across the surface
of his eye and he knew it was a hallucination and he realized it was a hallucination
as a doctor as an
educated man of medicine and still was seeing it and was freaking out and then
that and then he realized
like oh there's some sort of an extreme neurotoxic effect that this stuff has
yeah and then he started
doing like some pretty deep investigation into what constitutes lyme disease
and he's like well
it's not like you know you know you have herpes you know no it's not like that
he's like you get bit
by something you got a bunch of in that cocktail of whatever that disgusting
tick is carrying around
and it's variable you know you might get it from one part of the east coast and
it has you know 50
things you might get it from another has 13 things yeah and but he's saying
with the people that have
morgellons what he believes is they're suffering from hallucinations brought on
by lyme disease
that's a thing about lyme that i found was um about medicine and about people
and about mysterious
diseases is like i quit doing it now but i would get in arguments with people
where like i was trying
to deal with it and finding out about it and people were telling me like here's
what's happening to me
i'm like well no i was told that's not how it works because there's so much uh
the same thing you
you bring up earlier about a doctor or chiropractor telling you the wrong thing
there's so much um
subject subjectivity in the medical world yeah that it's like on one hand all
these people are sort
of going through this uh this regimen this educational regimen which is you
know it's like there's like
government oversight there's certain criteria you need to meet right things
need to pass and you think
it would sort of like have this unifying effect but people come out on the
other end who've gone
through kind of the same educational system telling you wildly different shit
yeah wildly different
shit about the problems where one guy like you could walk in one guy's gonna
like do a surgery and the
next guy's like oh no way yeah who was it that's like it's just like in his
balls who was it wasn't steve-o
right who the was it that just said that uh santino i think andrew santino he
was telling me that he went
to he had a cyst in his balls and he thought he had ball cancer went to a
doctor and one doctor told
him that he has excess cum stored up in his balls that's sperm that's stored up
in his balls and that's
what's causing this knot he went home to his wife and said he went to another
doctor no he wasn't married
at the time he was a young man that he went to another doctor and the second
doctor said who the
is that doctor that guy should lose his ability to practice like you don't get
cum stored up in
your balls and it makes some sort of a knot like he's like that's insane who
told you this and a
real practicing doctor told him that yeah i used to go into it when i was
younger i'd go into him and
thinking it was like going to it was like going to get an oil change right like
you could have 20
people and they're all going to change your oil like the same way yeah well
what we do is we drain
it and put new shit in i'm like great now i realize that this is a fucking roll
of the dice man roll
the dice and here's the big thing you can try to change you can mitigate that
by doing some research
but it really is like i don't know if the guy's gonna tell me he's not gonna
tell me the same thing
the other guy's gonna tell me but big thing when it comes to health and this is
one of the things
that i have a big problem with when it comes to anything dealing with the back
is preventative
maintenance is like one of the most important things for back health we're
sitting in desks
all day and most people are not sitting up straight they're not sitting a good
thing is
like one of those balls those gym balls those big balance balls those are great
to sit on because
they force you to kind of stabilize yourself and use your core muscles or some
sort of an ergonomic
chair forcing you to stabilize but doctors are not telling you hey man you got
to take a yoga
class a couple days a week yeah you got to do something to straighten out your
posture you got
to do something to make sure that your spine is strong enough to be carrying
your butt you can't
slump forward because you're putting undue pressure on these different portions
of your back there's a
significant amount of doctors are just not fucking telling you that they're
like oh yeah your disc is
bulging we're gonna have to do a disectomy no worries it's outpatient it's outpatient
procedure
but they're not telling you they're chopping off of a chunk of this finite
material there's a small amount of
material that separates your discs and when they talk about oh i have disc
degenerative disorder
it's a disease my disc no stop it's not a disease what's going on is you're
compressing your body
through weight lifting through extreme exercise your body is slowly getting smooshed
down you're not
allowing it to recover you're not stretching it out you're not strengthening
all those core muscles
you're not giving it some time off you're probably engaging in the same
damaging activity over and over
again and toughing it out if there's one thing you should never fucking tough
out it's a back issue
anytime there's something going on with your back don't tough it out don't try
to work through it
just don't because you're going to fuck it up worse and then it's going to get
to a point where it just
does not recover and then you're going to have to get surgery yeah man this is
all this is making me
super self-conscious about how i sit i sit like larry king man so bad i had a
chair i do i used to much
more i do try to sit up as much as i can now but these chairs every time i've
been here i went away
for a couple days trying to sit straighter after staring at you sitting all
nice for three hours
i try man i didn't know he's used to be good at it i used to slump quite a bit
before i had back
issues yeah i gotta catch these chairs are called uh capisco chairs they're
from ergo depot um you
can go to ergodepot.com and get these fucking things they're the they're
comfortable enough to
sit in too i've been on some of them where your knees slide in and there's a
pad against your shin
yeah those are kind of gross these seem much more like an actual chair but they're
super comfortable
what's it called it's called a capisco sounds like a drink i know ergodepot.com
no they didn't pay me
to say that but uh these things are the shit but backs man backs are the one
thing like when people
have these heavy pack outs and everybody likes to pride themselves and i packed
out 150 pounds seven
miles yeah don't i'm done i'm prone to saying those kind of things i tell
everybody pack take 75 and do
it twice please and even that's a lot man i have this new thing that's a good
point why do people
why do they like to talk about because they want to be badasses yeah but you'd
never be like yeah
man i jumped out in front of truck and just jumped away right in time well
people love to tell their
friends too you know mike he packed out two elk quarters on his back dude dude's
a fucking savage
and i go mike's probably gonna have no legs like dude's a fucking dumb ass his
fucking legs are gonna stop working he's probably like got a massive bulge in
his back no i i i'm
guilty because i i uh i traffic in those stories and when i hear those stories
i'm like right on bro
what well you know how hard it is that's why when you've done a pack out a real
pack out you know
how hard it is i remember when we shot that mule deer right there in montana
and we only walked
like what was it two miles maybe yeah and we had the meat split up between like
three of us
so it was probably only like 50 pounds on everybody's back and i was like holy
shit once we finally got to camp two miles pretty pretty flat it wasn't that hilly
yeah if you're
not accustomed to it it's a lot exhausting yeah so if you're not accustomed to
getting bit by bees
six times a day it's overwhelming so i should tell people that uh the outdoorsman's
i know a company
that you you like their products as well they make a an atlas trainer now it's
a i saw you were messing
with that it's fucking great you got a weight you put on yeah it's like an olympic
late it slides in
like an olympic post and it clamps down i thought maybe you rigged that up
yourself no no they're
selling it now it's their thing i saw that yeah you had that i thought it was
like you said i thought
you'd like gone down to the hardware store i knew i knew the frame but i didn't
recognize the i know
guys do it but usually they use sandbags yeah they put sandbags in their
backpack and get used to it
makes a big difference and it's an incredible workout it doesn't shift it doesn't
shift at all and
you could really lock it so you're not gonna like you don't have the risk of
like tweaking right like
it's strength but it's not because when your shit's wiggling around then it
like i don't know it
doesn't really make you stronger just makes you more inclined to like something
up yeah to twist funny
yeah no i agree you know but i just say implore people just please just just
exercise your back
treat it like it's like brushing your teeth just take yoga you don't have to
take it ethan just get
some youtube videos they're free they're they're available everywhere just just
do something to
strengthen your back you will prevent most people don't want to listen to this
and they're not going
to do it because people are lazy as but you will prevent a host of issues that
people have
just by exercising your back simple stuff there there's the atlas trainer right
there yeah you
could do chin-ups on if you're a savage look at this guy it's an animal but um
yeah you could carry
up to 90 pounds that thing so it'll take two uh i bet it'll take 100 pound
plates too i just don't know
if the plate's designed for it if the pack rather is designed for it that's a
good idea to do pull-ups
that sumbitch on yeah i use a weight belt i put like a belt and i hang a kettlebell
in between my
legs i put a 50 pound kettlebell on a chain and i do chin-ups like that really
yeah huh it's hanging
where it's right between my legs like it's a big leather so where do the straps
fall across your legs
right in between the straps are on my back or on my hip like this and then
there's like a chain in
between my legs and the kettlebell hangs in between my legs but it's not
getting your scroll at all no
no no no no it's swinging low it's swing you got to make sure your legs are
separated so it's not
cracking against your knees but you know when you're doing chin-ups it's just
hanging there no yeah
they say that that's the best way to get more reps in with your chin-ups is not
to try like 19 20 the
absolute best way is do less but with heavy weights do like uh you know put a
weight vest on or hang a
you know 70 pound kettlebell between your legs yeah i've never done that three
or four yeah but again
you run the risk of injury because it's a you're maybe that's why i've never
done it hey yeah you're
putting a look you got to build yourself up to it you know that's what also one
of the big things that
happens to people when they start exercising they just try to go too hard to go
to full balls
it's yes i remember uh at various times not running for a long time then be
like yeah i'm gonna start
running and go on a five mile run i've been running now for just a little over
a month i got a friend
who's a runner and um like he he's wreck you know a hobbyist but runs marathons
and he never did before
but he was saying uh he was he wrote he's a writer so he's been writing about
that a little bit
and he was saying he just wrote a piece about um you don't run to get in shape
you got to get in
shape then start running yeah it's a good idea it's a smart way there's some
steps there's some if
you're just like a slob right there's some things you need to get taken care of
before you embark on
that smart there's ground there's groundwork that needs to be done yeah to get
ready for the run
i talked to i don't like to ever discourage people from doing jujitsu but i
talked to a buddy of mine
who just did jujitsu from he's 43 years of slovenly behavior no exercise
whatsoever other than the
occasional pickup basketball game for like seven years yeah and then he started
doing jujitsu and
immediately his body's falling apart i'm like okay i know this is going to be
hard for you to do but if
if you really want to do it you got to get in shape first yeah just just start
out with thumb wrestling
and gone into arm wrestling steve you know you got to get out of here it's 315
listen man you got one of
the best podcasts in the world it's awesome i love listening to it i'm so happy
you do it and i think
you got the best hunting show ever so i i owe the podcast all to you joe rogan
well listen man hanging
out with you look it's so easy for you you you have so many great stories and
you're such a good talker i was
like how the fuck does this guy not have a podcast i'm glad you steered me in
that direction thanks
for the plug i'm glad you're still doing it it's called the meat eater podcast
it's available everywhere
and uh meat eaters available on netflix and uh right now it's only how many
seasons five and six
seasons five and six yeah five six we'll have more we got more we got uh you
know a dozen episodes
that are new that we're going to be releasing so just stay tuned and then i you
know months ago back
in a couple months ago if you go to my instagram steven ranella you'll scroll
back and find a
bunch of pictures from you'll find a bunch of guyana photos yeah amazing stuff
from guyana yeah like
but we never even talked about oh we did talk about that yeah you'll find some
pictures good times
thanks for doing this man
all right
you