Hey folks, it's Dr. Sean Baker here. Let me tell you about crowd health. Crowd health is a better alternative to health insurance for people sick of paying high premiums and subsidizing the standard American diet. And now crowd health members can join the all new carnivore crowd, which is an exclusive crowd for verified metabolically healthy individuals, eating animal-based diets and funding each other's large healthcare expenses. To join the carnivore crowd, visit joincrowdhealth.com/carnivore and use the code BAKER at signup for your first three months at only $99 per month. A country where animals are thriving, absolutely thriving, but there are no natural predators there. So you end up with this overabundance, an overpopulation, if you will. So unfortunately, the result of that is generally the government comes in and they take the animals. And when that happens is a lot of them go to waste. 350 million pounds of deer meat consumed annually. So you're talking about a lot of meat consumed annually via hunting. And I think too many people, they just pull the meat out of the freezer or whatever, cook it. They don't really connect with where it came from because they didn't put the knife in it. They didn't put the arrow in it, the bullet in it. [MUSIC PLAYING] Here with Brian-- how do you say that, Brian? A call, like phone call. Brian call, like a phone call, yeah, Brian. And then we might have another guest joining in, Brian, if he can figure out the technology. So anyway, you said you're in the middle of the hotel room and you tell us somewhere because you're out hunting elk. I guess let's just start with your background. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're up to. I did-- I started-- I graduated from university, got a job with Arthur Anderson. There was the Enron Collapse indictment of Arthur Anderson from the federal government. I ended up working for Arthur just a short while before that happened. And then I ended up working for years as a governance compliance manager for some Fortune 500 companies. And after a decade of that, I just started-- I was always into hunting, backpacking, especially remote hunts, carry all your gear with you for seven to 10 days in places nobody will go and live out there and hunt elk and deer. There's always a passion of mine. And I was getting bored with, I guess, the corporate world. And I ended up reading 10 barris' four-hour work week. Ended up working in this situation where I could work from home most of the week and only going to the office once or twice a week. And I'd been doing that for a while and had all this spare time. And so I started filming my adventures in the backcountry. And after a year or so, that decided to do a podcast. There was no hunting podcasts out there to, I think, me and Eder, with Steven Ronella, he started his podcast two weeks or so around the time I started mine. There was three hunting podcasts for a good six months to a year. And I was one of those three. This is back in 2014-15. And I was just doing it for fun. And about a year in, it got pretty popular. There were a lot of people tuning into the podcast. And I had probably 60 shows recorded. And then I was at an event hanging out with Cameron Haines. He'd been on the podcast before. He's a pretty famous archery hunter and fitness guy, endurance racer. And so Cam was there with Joe Rogan. And Joe was like, hey, dude, I'm a fan of your podcast. And I said, I've got these headsets over here. You want to sit down and do a podcast with me? And Joe said, sure. So Joe sat down and we did a podcast. And this is in 2016. And it blew up overnight. I went for my 5,000, 7,000 downloads a show to 100,000 downloads a show. And the podcast threw legs real quick. And within two months, I had the option of it being a career. So I switched. I left the corporate world and just started to do a hunting and backpacking podcast. And I started really delving into film. Now it's been almost nine, 10 years. And the show and what I do just has been really into fitness. I did a lot of CrossFit. And Paleo was a big part of our journey. And I'm 49. I'll be 50 in a couple of months. Rampers is 50. And we do some pretty hardcore 10, 15-day backcountry hunts. We'll go 17, 20 miles a day with sometimes 80 pounds on our back. So we try to film those adventures. And then I produce those and put them on YouTube. And just been a-- that's a story. It's been a wild ride. Most of the hunting you're doing, is it basically North America? Do you stay on this continent? Or do you guys go over other places now? Because there's obviously different strategies and climates and different animals, obviously, that are there. So is it primarily US-based or North American-based? It's mostly public land, do it yourself, hunts. And it is mostly North America, although we have done a lot of Canada. We do a lot of Canada. We do a lot of Alaska. And New Zealand, another big, awesome place to go, because the opportunity is so affordable in the adventures. The Southern Alps and New Zealand are amazing. And so we have traveled to Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Alaska, which is still a US. But in the weird targeting, we do a ton of bear hunting. That sort of spring bear in Montana, Idaho, Arizona, just Alaska. And then in the fall, we do a lot of elk and deer and moose. And we haven't done a lot of Africa or super exotic stuff into that North American big game. What is the-- I don't know how you've been doing this for a number of years, obviously. But is the hunting population of US kind of stable? Is it declining? Is it increasing? Looks like Ryan has joined us there. So anyway, I was chatting, Brian was telling us about his background and getting into where he's hunting and stuff like that. Anyway, we'll just keep going. So anyway, I was just asking about hunting in the US. Is a population of hunters dwindling down? Is it staying the same? Is it increasing? What's the overall hunting climate like? I would say that hunting is becoming more and more popular. There's more demand for hunting than there's been in a long time. It's harder to get tags in a hunt than it has been in the past because of that popularity. At the same time, you're seeing a shrinking of opportunity in the form of access to land. If you look at the east coast, you don't really get to hunt unless you have some private property or you pay for a lease or you can get some access somehow. Out west, there's so much public land that all those guys back east and Midwest, they're making their way every fall to the west to hunt out here because there's so much opportunity. And so that has really increased the demand of hunting. And it's been on the rise. I think when Joe Rogan started to really get into hunting, meteor went onto Netflix, there was more education around hunting over the last four or five years or longer. There's just an influx of people very interested in doing it. So it's interesting because you'll read magazine articles and stuff where they'll say hunting is on the decline. It really depends. It's really misleading. It depends on the area you're in. If you're looking at, for example, at West, when you look at the demand, it's super high. But then if you look at some states on the east side of the United States, it's almost nobody hunts anymore. If you look at those stats, can you mislead me? Does that make sense? Yeah, I think it does. Places like they talk about like all these feral animals, like pigs down in Texas and do you feel, obviously, you have a role in conservation. Hunting has a role. And if we don't have, let me ask you this. If there's no hunters, what happens? What do you guys, what would you guys predict if we had no hunting? If somebody, so I think I believe in some countries, hunting might even be illegal, I think, or it's very difficult to do. What happens in the United States if we outlaw hunting? Great question. Ryan, you want me to go for that? Yeah, this could be a long answer. I think we see in other countries shown what happens, say, in areas where they've introduced animals. You look at a place like New Zealand, for example, where they don't have a predator. There's not something that's culling the animals. We are the predator here in the United States with our model. And what ends up happening is the governments usually end up coming in. And they end up having to take the population down anyway. Usually that's done by aerial helicopters coming in, poisons. They shoot them from choppers, things like that. So there has to be a way of managing the animals to keep them at a certain population. I talk about using them a lot because Brian and I happened to go there and we saw it firsthand in a country where animals are thriving, absolutely thriving, but there are no natural predators there. So you end up with this overabundance, an overpopulation, if you will. So unfortunately, the result of that is generally the government comes in and they take the animals. And the unfortunate part when that happens is a lot of them go to waste. Whereas in this country, we definitely don't allow that to happen. We've got want and waste rules. So nothing gets left in the field as far as meat goes. Very different model that we have here. North American model has just worked and worked really well. If you look at a lot of the animals, the game animals that we hunt, white-tailed deer, for example, even turkeys and ducks and all that stuff, where huge numbers of people are out there chasing them. Those are the numbers of those populations are thriving, absolutely thriving. White-tailed deer is the most hunted animal in the United States and the numbers are incredibly high. So it has the opposite effect of what a lot of folks out there might think is that hunters are taking all the animals away, quite the opposite. We're actually protecting them, managing them so that their numbers thrive. So let me just show it. There's a total of 350 million pounds of deer meat consumed annually in the United States. And that doesn't include all the moose elk in the other animals that are out there that hunters hunt bear all that meat. So you're talking about a lot of meat consumed annually via hunting. So if you were to remove that mechanism, that harvest, you would need to come up with somewhere, I don't know, 500 million pounds of meat to sustain the human population at the moment goes out and harvest it on their own. And then you got to ask yourself if you're going to replace 500 million pounds of venison because you outlaw hunting, let's say. You're going to need to backfill that with what cattle farming, some kind of agriculture, something to feed the population to fill that gap. Meantime, you're still going to have white till deer, just smashing people's crops, getting hit by cars, just growing wildly out of control. So the state will still pay for the killing of those animals, like California tends to do. And instead of human beings, like being able to go out by a tag through the wildlife system in each state, which then those dollars go into helping the state manage the wildlife, instead, like California, they banned so much hunting that they end up doing something like, they use taxpayer dollars to then pay to kill all the bears and the cougars and stuff that are encroaching and causing problems, and then to kill the problem deer in the cities. So instead of becoming a revenue stream for the state by letting hunters go in and hunt, they reversed it and turned it into a tax burden on the state. And then when they kill those animals, they don't eat those lions, they don't eat those bears, they don't eat those deer, they just kill them and let them waste. So it's a really, it's a really, if you were looking at it from a biological standpoint, from a resource standpoint, the current model we have in America, we call the North American, by the North American Conservation Model. And that's where all wildlife is managed via state agencies that have aims of biologists that are determining, okay, if we have 10,000 elk in this unit and we harvest a thousand out of that every year by hunters, we're basically going to keep that population at 10,000 between now and the end of time. Like we figured out, it's like your portfolio, your mutual fund, it's like you're just going off the interest every year and leaving the capital intact, it's like that with wildlife management. And what that has done is we've been able to, with the state agencies managing it, as long as it doesn't get political and they don't interfere with that management, we've been able to just have massive populations with maximum harvest rates, where we have an increased population of bear, deer, elk, more than we've had in decades. So it's a very, it's very sad and like it's political because people let their emotions decide whether hunting should be there or not. But those animals are going to get killed either way, the state just, I'll give you an example, Sean, I grew up in Washington state and I remember the year that like you're not, hound hunting was always a thing growing up, baiting used to be a thing. And I remember when they took those away on the western, on the coast of Washington, and in an area that's very thick, very difficult to actually harvest bears. And they took those away through the ballot box, it was labeled cruel and barbaric, right, to take animals, to take bears with the use of hounds. So they took that away from the public. So no longer was the public able to go out, purchase a tag, go out and fill a tag. What happened is about two years later, the state ended up having to hire houndsmen, all the houndsmen that used to run them. Now the state is just hiring them. So that's the black hole for the state, they're paying people to go out and now harvest those bears. The exact same way that they, the ballot box labeled as cruel and barbaric, they, you know, there's really only one way to harvest them over there in that real thick country, and that was the use of hounds. So now you've got high numbers of bears still getting harvested, but by the state. So they're not getting utilized. You guys like Brian and I are not able to go out there and hum and to fill the freezer. It's just a weird thing when it goes to the ballot box. It's pretty easy to take something away. But what the public doesn't realize or doesn't see is the state managers understand that those animals still need to be managed in a way. And they just pay for it and they don't see it. I live out in Westinville, Washington, and I'm a literally out of bears walking through my backyard from time to time, and particularly this time of year where they're out growing on all the little berries that are coming out. But what is there? Is there a goal to try to keep the predator prey ratio at a certain level? And is there some? Because obviously most people are associated hunting deer and elk and spray animals, but not as many people go after the predators, the mountain lions, the bear, the bear predators as well. How does that work differently? And what is more difficult for you guys to hunt? You guys obviously do a bunch of different stuff. What's the hardest animal to go after? Yeah, I think Brian and I both. Number one, we're going for it. When we do these hunts, we do it for multiple reasons. It's not just about the meat. I know a lot of people might blow smoke and say that's the reason, but it's a big part of it. But we also love the adventure of it, the experience, the stories that come with it. And we love chasing deer. High country meal deer, elk is some of our favorite type hunts. But there's this balance. We do that in the fall, and then we balance it with some predator stuff in the spring. It keeps the populations healthy. We're out there chasing bears in the springtime that are starting to key in on fawns and calves and calving areas from wintering areas for elk. And so Brian and I and a lot of others go out and we target those areas and try to keep the population in check. So we're allowing some of those elk calves to survive and fawns to survive. But I think we've realized that the predator aspect of it, I didn't used to hunt predators as much as I do now. I've had a really good life of hunting and taking a lot of elk and eating a lot of elk meat. And just a few years ago, probably a handful, five, six years ago, I've switched a little bit. And I'm really now into kind of keeping out balance and going out and really targeting some of these predators and most of that being bears. And not only is it keeping it somewhat balanced out there, but the meat is Brian and I would, my whole family would agree, bear meat is the first thing that comes out of the freezer when we go to the freezer for a couple of reasons. The taste number one, it's high fat. And it doesn't hold as long as some of the lean meat that we have. So the meat is a huge part. So most people might think of how you're just predator hunting, but the reason we're predator hunting a big part of it is also to fill the freezer with the meat. So mountain lion, for example, probably one of the best tasting meats you'll ever have, quite possibly, and bear is right there with it. And I think nowadays, people have finally woke up to the fact that bear meat is definitely not something you'd ever want to throw away. I know we don't go out there for the hides and heads. It's about the meat when it comes to bears. Yeah, I think I speak for Brian a little bit. Something to note, something to note is bear meat bears are an omnivore. So they taste like what they eat. If they're eating dead salmon in rivers or on coastlines, they taste like low tide. They taste like dead salmon. If they're eating blueberries at the top of the mountain in Washington, they taste like blueberries. Literally, they taste like what they eat. We're hunting these mountain bears that are up at the top of mountains. We occasionally do a coastal hunt. That meat, it's hard to eat. It doesn't taste the same. And so that's what we spend most of our time. It really is about the meat. Bear meat is the family's favorite. We can it. We have jars and jars of it. And it's usually what you kill two or three bears, sometimes four bears in one spring. My kids will eat all of it by Christmas. They're like a Richard Pot roast, like freshly cooked. It's incredible. But back to your question on the situation with predators. Let's say wolves, for example, back to that. It's just a resource issue, Sean. When you look at the amount of meat that hunters consume, like I said, at 10%, let's say, of the population every year they harvest as the wildlife managers are trying to manage that population. You've got 10,000 elk. Hunters take 1,000. When you bring wolves in or other predators and you let them go unchecked, that total population, 10,000, will reach an equilibrium. Eventually, the wolf population will grow to a point and the elk population will decline to a point to where you have these severe drops in prey population. And then the wolf population dies off and then the prey population comes back and then it dies off again and it goes into these big extremes. What wildlife managers are trying to do in each state is keep it more flat. So you don't have this major prey crash in predator decline. Keep it more flat. So if they grab these harvest rates that kind of allow that to happen, if we can kill enough wolves every year and enough elk at the same rate, we keep this sort of amount that resource at a good level. If you allow the predator population to go unchecked, yeah, eventually the elk and the deer and all that will even out. But what you've done is you've just fed that resource, that protein source, all that meat, you just decided, hey, we're just going to feed it to an unchecked wolf population. Again, you go back to that pragmatic approach to wildlife management. Okay, now instead of hunters being able to take a thousand elk out of this particular unit every year, we're going to need to now make it 300 elk for hunters every year. And that's just the decision asked, you may, now are those elk getting consumed? Yeah, just instead of by humans, they're getting consumed by wolves or bears or cats. So it's just a choice. It's a choice. We just have to decide as people, how are we going to manage that resource? And to me, it seems it seems like a poor use of the resource to just not hunt wolves for some emotional reason. And then human beings are still going to need a protein source. So instead of if you're going to limit that elk part of this so much, hunters now get it from cattle or some other place. And that's just the decision the population needs to make. Unfortunately, it's a difficult conversation to have because it's not a soundbite. What do you do, guys? And I'm not familiar. Are you guys hunting primarily through archery, through gun or is the mix of both? And how do you decide what which to use, which we want to use as a host? Yeah, we do a happy mix of both, Sean. We absolutely love archery hunting. Some of our fall hunts, especially for elk. One of the one of the upsides of archery hunting is it gives you states give you the opportunity to hunt in September, which is when the elk are bugling and the rut is going on. And you have these opportunities to have really cool interactions with bulls with the calling and all that. And then trying to keep in in contact with a big old herd bull is just an absolute blast with a bow. But I'm not a purist by any stretch. We also love some of these rifle hunts late fall season when the weather gets nasty and it brings us into some really cool, amazing, rough country. Really, honestly, it's just a good mix of both. I think we both really love to archery hunt and there's hunts dedicated for that. But then also, we got to get a good mix of some good rifle hunts. And honestly, I think a lot of folks that aren't really tuned in to hunting may say, oh, it's got to be so easy just going out there with a rifle and picking one off from 250 yards. And I could see why they would think that. But I got to say, when I look at some of my most difficult hunts and Brian and I talk about this all the time, rifle hunts tend to be the most difficult because of the places that we end up going, places that you may get a fraction of a percent chance of success with if you were in these places with a bow. We love to go to the real nasty stuff way back in the wilderness, real steep, real rugged, real tough country. And sometimes you're only getting one or two looks on a 10 day hunt. And that's where the the rifle shines. Honestly, as much as I love archery hunting, some of the rifle hunts are definitely my favorite just because of the country it takes you to physically probably the most physically challenging hunts that I do are with a rifle in my hand. There was a period of time when hunting was literally the only job that humans had prior to agriculture and civilization. I'm just wondering, like you said, because obviously when you go out and you draw a tag, you're limited to what you draw and there's a, but if you just had to say, hey, I'm just going to hunt and I got to feed myself. I don't care what it is. How successful, I don't know what the success rate of your guys, particular hunts are if you get something every time you go out or if it's 50 50. But if you could imagine going back and obviously the technology is doing to have rifles, you had rudimentary bow and arrow technology going back, maybe, I don't know, 80,000 years or something like that. How successful given that's the only thing people really did as a career, they had to get pretty damn good at it. But what do you, what are your thoughts on how reasonably you could have fed yourself hunting you many years ago? Is this like, I'm going to eat anything that moves? That's a tough one. As far as I can go back, I can go back to my dad's era. I can look back at the 70s and the 60s when a lot of people, even in those times where that's what they were doing, they were feeding them, their family with the food that they came up with, out hunting. And times were tougher back then, if I'm being honest, I think we let the numbers dwindle a little bit. We weren't as probably strict in our management practices. And it was tough. It was tougher back then in my dad's era. We love to think things are always better back in the day. But I feel like right now we're in this golden era. We've managed things pretty well. There's always room for improvement. But I take my daughter out. Haley, we go out and we've been hunting for the last few years. She took her first deer at 11 and she takes a buck every year. And it's a lot of fun. We were at that point where we're not seeing the first buck and shooting it because that kind of takes away from the adventure side of things. And that's not really the challenge we're going for. Honestly, if I had to say most hunts were probably at a 90-95% success rate on most hunts. That's not the case with everyone and everywhere. But I think we've got it pretty good. I live in the great state of Montana now. I used to be in Washington and it was the same in both states. Washington has some really good hunting over there. And those North Cascades are no joke. You can get away from folks and find good animals and a lot of bears. As much as we like to prove the current times and most folks love to have an excuse as to why they're not seeing everything they want to see, I feel like we're in this golden era where we have pretty good numbers of deer, elk, bear. Most of the critters that we're hunting. Sean, there's a conservationist named Shane Mahoney. And he said a quote that states what it means. He said, "hunting is man's oldest triad life." And his point was that we wouldn't be here today if human beings weren't hunters. Besides reproducing, getting food is the next thing, right? Getting the brains we got and so on comes from us hunting, killing, and eating these meats, these fatty meats, and that sort of food source. And that comes from our ability to kill. If you look at the native populations in the United States, you look at the Lakota Indians or various tribes, they defended their hunting grounds from other tribes. I think that their harvest rates were pretty easy. They go out for an afternoon and they can kill. I really think that they weren't struggling with game until the game got out, trapped and out hunted. Once that happened, then, yeah, hunting becomes hard because there's no owls there. But if there's animals there and there's a good balance, human beings can go out whether it's with an obsidian broadhead and an arrow, they're getting game every day. They're adept at feeding themselves pretty easily at a very easy harvest. And I think human beings are just in our DNA. We are, we have evolved to be hunters. And there is something about this adventure when Ryan and I say we go out to hunt. It's not just about the meat. There is something about tracking an animal, whether it's in the snow or in the dirt, which way the wind blows matters more. You're not thinking about when you're in bow range and you're making that stalk, there's nothing else entering your mind. Your emails, what's happening, it's almost like battle. It's similar. I think war, battle and hunting near each other in a way where all your senses are heightened in a way. They are not heightened in any other situation. And there's something that switches on in the DNA that's addictive about it. There's something that we're meant to do this. You just feel it. When you get within bow range, the animal and you're for seven hours, you're just sitting there waiting for it to stand up. And if you breathe wrong, it's going to hear you. It's the intensity of it. And then when you make that shot and there's a little bit, for me, there's a little bit of the sense of loss because I appreciate that animal. And I see it die and usually it's swift, but sometimes it's not. Then you walk up to that animal and then you cut it open and you break it down and you put it in your back and you hang the quarters and there's something catholic about that process of breaking it down. And all of a sudden that feeling was lost and I killed this animal, morphs into more of an appreciation for the animal and it heals the sense of what you did. Almost okay, there is a purpose in this. It does make sense. And then as you eat that meat throughout the year, you're constantly reminded of and appreciate the source it came from. And I think too many people, they just pull the meat out of the freezer or whatever, cook it. They don't really connect with where it came from because they didn't put the knife in it. They didn't put the arrow in it, the bullet in it. They didn't kill the animal. And Ryan and I, we sit down and we eat in our kids too. There's a constant reminder of we kill the eat. And I think it makes us more connected to life in a way that people who don't often do that or even a farmer knows that more rural person who kills a chicken, they're more connected to that circle of life. And I think it matters. Luther Standing Bear, the native Indian, he said, "Man's heart away from nature becomes hard." And I think there's some truth in that. So people getting outside keeps them balanced. There's something about it that is hard to explain, especially for someone who's never done it. I've had to get fortunate to have taken a lot of, I guess people call them adult onset hunters, right? Guys that are just looking at this thing that we do and they're curious about it, they have an interest in it. And so I've been able to take them out for their first time. And fascinating, I was very fortunate to grow up with a father who taught me all the things from a very young age. But then when I see these, these adults that have never done it, they just grew up in a different environment. And then they get out there and they're in the wild and they're able to either harvest an animal or see one harvested and then break it down and pack it out and do everything, all the things that goes into taking these animals and getting them back to the freezer. And there's something very primal about it and they feel it. They absolutely feel it. Like it's something they were meant to do. It's something we all, it's where we came from. And so generally, what I've noticed is it's not a one time deal for most folks. They come out, they see it, they see how we do it, and all of a sudden they're hooked. And they want to learn more and they, it's, like I said, it's hard to explain that there's something very primal about this thing that we do. How often do you ever, you feel like you're in danger out there? Obviously, there's wild predators running. They could easily, like an easily dispatching. Obviously, if it got close to you, it could take you out pretty easily. But that's what used to happen all the time. Humans got devoured by these predators when we're out there unprotected. Is that something that concerns you guys at all, or is it this kind of, is it such a clear, clear, current season? We spend maybe 100, 120 days a year in the mountains on these trips. And it honestly doesn't even enter my mind. There's never a place that I'm going to think that's a little bit too dangerous, maybe a few too many grays in that area that I'm not going to go there. Obviously, we take a lot of precautions. We're very smart in bear country, grizz bear, especially. And we backside arms on our chest and bear spray on our hip and take all the precautions, but it's not going to deter us. And honestly, as far as safety goes, we are so fortunate and blessed to have the gear that we have now. We live like kings out there. I don't feel any less comfortable on the mountain these days with these teepees and these titanium wood stoves and these water purification devices and these very lightweight backpacks and quality honey moots. We got all the things that are disposable, very lucky. There's really, it's a comfortable way of going out there these days. And when it comes to the wild animals, I think grizzly bears and mountain lions are probably the two that most people would fear the most. And yeah, we get here in Montana, we get folks nicked up every year in the spring as they're coming out, but it's so rare. It's so very rare. And definitely don't want to live my life in fear. So we go out and do it anyway. And hopefully, nothing will happen, but we do take a lot of precautions. Are there any animals that you have not obviously think about the worldwide selection of animals and a lot of people go to Africa to hunt these big game animals? Is there anything new that's like on y'all's list that you like, man, I'd really like to get such and such animals just for the adventure that is required to get it or the just the novel. There is one animal out there that I really respect because I see them all the time. And I have not been as lucky as Brian Call to get this tag. But I've hunted a lot of bears, a lot of mule deer and a lot of elk in my life. But mountain goat tag, I would absolutely love to go chase mountain goats at some point in my life. It's a very hard to get tag. I apply in multiple states every year. But man, the places they take you and just, yeah, you got a lot of respect for those animals. You just see them above where we hunt bears and above where we hunt these mule deer. And they're just wild out there. So that's probably the one animal I Africa as cool as it would be to go see Africa. And I do plan on doing that with my family. It really just doesn't interest me for whatever reason, as far as the hunting side of it goes. Yeah, there's goat. They're like insects, so how they can they can just get up those almost sheer cliffs. And it's like, how the hell do you get one of those things, guys, it's got to be got to be a challenge. So Brian, were you successful when you drew your tag and get the goat? The first known goat hunt I did was archery. And when I got there, I thought, I think Ryan mountain goat was number one on my list. My whole license, I was a little kid. I don't know why they just got me going. And so I went up to Northern Canada. And I thought with a bow and arrow and I thought, this is impossible. I don't, what was I thinking? And those cliffs are so daunting. And but finally, one was bedded in the right spot. I got above it. I was right above it, like 15, 20 yards to sit in there. It's huge goat, just unless you shot him with my bow. And then a few years later, I got to do another one on Kodiak Island, another goat hunt with my rifle. So for me, that was the pinnacle. But now that I've done the goat thing, now it's now I want a big horn sheep, big horn ram. But those hunts are somewhere between 50 and $80,000 now, or you just get lucky and draw. But that's like a one million chance. So it's tough. I love to do, I can't justify that Christ tags. And Ryan and I are very much into the blue collar stuff. We really want to do the every man hunt. There's a certain pleasure that comes from doing it. Just that's where we came from. And that's where our audience comes from too. And they want to see us buying some unicorn out there on the public land, do it yourself adventure and show them that it can be done. If you put in the sweat equity and the work. Is it with a tag system? Is it purely random? Or is there some sort of like priority to people that that demonstrated they can hook? Because if you give like a goat tag, some guys for his first hunt, it's probably this like a wasted tag. I mean, is there some sort of sense of that? Or is this a pure lottery? Every state is a little bit different in how they allocate tags. There's preference points, bonus points. There's this whole system in place. Now there are states where you could put in for your very first year for a very special mountain goat tag. And you have a slight chance of drawing it. And I know some of those lucky folks have put in for a couple of few years and they've actually drawn a mountain goat tag. But generally what most states do is they weight the system. So say you've applied for 10 years, you now have 10 points in the system. And some states will square those. So you got 100 names in the hat. And so it's weighted to give you a little bit better opportunity to draw it than the guy putting in for his first year. They don't necessarily go off of experience or skill. It's just how many years you've been applying. And a lot of these states, especially with moose sheep and go, you gotta be in the system for a while. I've got multiple states where I've been applying for 15 to 20 years. And I still haven't drawn a moose sheep or goat tag in those states. It's a crapshoot every year. I hope I'll get very lucky to get that one tag. But the odds are still extremely low, even with 20 years of applying, most of my opportunities are well under 1% to draw that tag. What is the disincentive for poaching? Obviously, in your out in a remote wilderness, I don't know how they catch you. Is other D more than is that good that they can monitor? It seems like there's there can't be enough wardens to cover anything, which is just is just honesty. Or what do you think? What do you think? Certainly, there very much is. And I think nowadays, with technology, a lot of these guys aren't caught necessarily in the field. Some are. There's people out there with spotting scopes and good glass that see for miles and someone out there doing something shady might just not know that there's a guy two miles away glassing up what he's doing. And so there's very there's that opportunity. And then social media is another avenue that these agents are using nowadays to catch guys, metadata on photos and all kinds of stuff. They're really seeking them out and doing a pretty good job at catching these guys breaking the law. What is yeah, go ahead. I had a question for you, if you don't mind, Ryan and I have embarked on this carnivore journey. I think it's been eight months, seven, eight months now. And in the past, we would backpack, we bring two about two pounds to two and a half pounds of food per day. So if two pounds is a general rule, like in a minimum, and we'd have our sort of paleo style eating, but there's plenty of carbs, especially in my backpack. And we would go hunt for 12 or 14 days, 10 days in row. And so you're looking at two pounds, 10 days, two pounds a day or 20 pounds of food. And since I've gone to the carnivore, there isn't this need to eat all the time, like I used to. In fact, I can fast essentially for 48 hours sometimes and still feel very productive. But we're working on backpacking meals now. And there's nothing on the market that's just carnivore for that. So we're doing our own freeze dried eggs. So we have quite a few free, they're great, free drying eggs, scrambled eggs. Anyway, you like it is pretty good. And then I thought, I'll eat his meat now. We're on a 10 day hunt and we can harvest something by day six. The last four days, we'll eat what we killed back there the whole time. In the past, when I have done that, we were a moose hunting last year, killed moose, really remote. We had no food for the full day going into get the moose, then no food that day either. So we fasted on those two days, killed moose, and then we ate it for about two more days. But I was not adapted to carnivore at all. And so without the carbs, I was feeling pretty crummy. But now I'm thinking to myself, I could bring half the food that I would normally bring, kill something and live on that the whole way out and be adapted for that energy system and save 10 pounds of weight or more in food. That's a gamble because it may not kill something. Then I might be fasting. The most I fasted is three days with no food in the backcountry. But I wasn't carnivore then. And that was a little rough because we were covering 10 miles a day, sometimes more, fasted. And it was just a grind. But I'm just thinking, I haven't figured out the meals for the backcountry. Do I just take a ribeye, cook it, slice it, freeze dry it, add water. Brian has been twang with it more than me. And maybe he has some ideas. But basically all I eat right now is New York strip. And then my own game eat with some tallow or pork fat. And that's an eggs and butter. Yeah, I think with freeze drying technology, you obviously, you can desiccate it. And that helps cut down on the weight. Obviously with the Native American, you see it as pamekin. I mean, pamekin is that's what they were sustained on trips. And it's so calorie dense. And it doesn't weigh that much. And so you can walk around and it keeps forever if you do it right. Those are some of the things pending. I think they would travel for months at a time and they would take whatever they would have, 30 pounds of pamekin with them. And that would last them quite a while. So there's some options out there to do that. Obviously, it's if you're able to get me through things like the Lewis and Clark expedition, where they're supposedly eating ridiculous amounts of game, or it was like, because they're so they were working, they were working so hard having to cut through all the make it trying to make trails and stuff like that. Whereas I get it depends on how much you guys are expanding and how, because I know it's physically daunting. I'm just imagining packing a grizzly bear out of there by particularly if you're maybe by yourself. How the hell do you do that? That's a lot of meat. I think pamekin is a really good use source. We used to, I think, the military for a while, even used it before we developed the K rations and all the MRE crap that they now feed us in the military. That might be a good one. There's some commercial companies that make pamekin make pamekin. It's not hard to do. You can make it your own. It's a little work. You just need to dehydrate up the meat, grind it up, mix it with fat. And there you go, you can flavor it. Some people put little berries in there if you want a little, whatever, change of taste. But I think that's, in my view, ideal food. I actually made some of that. I've got probably 20 bars pamekin bars at the ready. I just dehydrated meat, ground it up, pulverized it in the blender, and then mixed it with tallow. I've added some salt. But the freeze dryer technology now, like you mentioned, Sean, it's a game changer when it comes to these foods. And yeah, for being carnivore now, eight months, I've had opportunities to spend a lot of time on the mountain with this new diet, carb-free. And my meal of choice now is I lightly cook a ton of eggs, chicken eggs, with heavy amounts of butter in there. And then I cook up a lot of bacon and then a lot of the sauces, wild game sauces. And I mix it all together, a little salt in there. And it is an unbelievably good tasting, high-fat meal. So I'm eating that twice a day up there. And I just, after it's freeze dried, I vacuum seal it and it's good to go. And I'm not having to snack all day. It's great. I love it. I don't have to pull out my fruit snacks and my leathers and all the carb-rich snacks that I used to do all day long. Every time I stop to glass a mountain, I'm snacking. And I don't do that anymore. It's just those two meals a day. That's it. But when you think about, that is assuming you have these commercially prepared snacks. If you imagine before that was available, how would you do that? It's hard work to prepare a meal, particularly if you've got to cook something that's work. And I guess you guys can find water sources. You can purify the water so you can rehydrate yourself so you don't have to pour water. You can use it in an area that has a good water source. Definitely. Hey guys, unfortunately, man, I'm out of time. I appreciate it. Can you guys share where we can find more about you guys? Because this is interesting stuff. Yes, I guess. If you want to look at some of the work we've done, Brian Call has a YouTube channel. We've got a lot of films over there that kind of share our hunts and experiences and education. And that's on the gritty YouTube channel. And then myself, we've got, we started one where we show some of our family hunts with my daughters. And that's on the stealthy YouTube channel, which is STHEAL. So ST healthy. And then Instagram, do a lot of stuff on Instagram, and that's stealthy hunter, STHEA hunter. Yeah, gritty and stealthy. If you just Google gritty films or in the search on YouTube, a gritty archery film or a gritty deer hunt or something, you'll see some pop up there and we're pretty ubiquitous there. And I think you'll find some stuff you'll really enjoy. Yeah, I just pulled you guys up on YouTube, gritty deer and podcasts. Thanks, guys. I appreciate what you guys do. I think hunting is obviously a valuable thing for society in general. Thanks for doing what you're doing and teaching people. And maybe when I get some time one day, I have to get out there and do some of this stuff. But sounds awesome. Thanks, Sean. Thank you very much.
