00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on x okay, uh, Mr Shard. On the drive over, I was asking you about how how I've heard your name pronounced so many ways over the years, and you laid it out for me. How would have been pronounced where you grew up? Yeah? Hell yeah, this is an audio project. Okay, my game is evil? Should we not? Because uh but but because I hear even just for normal regular American pronunciation, your avon Ivan? Yeah. Yeah. In fact, there's a route and you'll simity called Kunyard Kunyard kun Yard that sounds like a place down in Mississippi. Orsi. Yeah, that's so Avon, not ivon Avon Von. I don't know whatever you want. I feel like you get the call. You get to make the call to be in your name and everything. Well, if I was in Canada, be evon, but try von. Yeah, and uh, your mom you have the same We're you saying, were you saying that your that your mother has the same name, Well, it's HER's his y v O n n E, which is von m. Hmm. It's like a slightly more masculine version, right yeah. And um, you grew up, you grew up in a French speaking household, right, Oh yeah, I was. I was in Lisbon, Maine, and all French Canadians and everybody in that town spoke French. Is that still the case today? No, I don't think so. No. With television, everybody's speaking the same language now. So yeah, I mean I went to grammar school there and and it was it's all French speaking. You see, you went to grammar school. What do you mean, like elementary school? Yeah, elementary school, yeah, and uh you know it was run by nuns and stuff. And I was there till seven and then then we, uh we sold everything that we had and immigrated to Canada, to California, and uh so there was five of us in a car. Everything we owned and drove across the country. Is kind of like a groups of rafting and then we settling the washed houbs hanging off the side of the truck and well, you know, I mean my mother had put up canned vegetables and stuff to eat because we couldn't eat any restaurants and stuff. So because the money, yeah, we didn't have it. We didn't have any money and stuff. And um, I remember, I mean my first lesson about philanthropy. I remember how we were going by the Navajo or Hopie reservation on Root sixty six. This is on your your western immigration. Yeah, this is or something and World War two ripping away. I'm just done, yeah, yeah, just done. And maybe it's forty five. So anyway, Yeah, there was there was some Hopei or Navajo woman in her hogan on the side of the road, and my mother felt so sorry for her. She got out and gave her her canned corn that she had it up. Yeah from back in Maine. Yeah, back in Maine. Yeah. So I mean at seven years old, that kind of stuck to me. And you had you had quite a few. You had older siblings, right, Yeah, they were all much much older than me. My youngest sister was eight years older than me, and my another sister was like ten years older than I had a brother it was like twelve years older. Yeah, and you're eighty now, and your siblings are gone. Yeah, everybody's gone. Yeah. Uh. I've read somewhere that when you were a kid in Maine, maybe because the French Canadian. Well I'll let you tell me why. But you're a kid in Maine, you'd you had an aspiration to be a fur trapper? Was that because like the Courier du Bois, like the French Canadian for history years? Yeah, well it's in my dna, I mean, you know, French Canadian and even in California. I read all these books about fur trappers and stuff, and and I wanted to be a fur trapper. And I started out practicing on gophers. I got to be pretty good on gophers. Um. You know, there's a lot to it. It's it's you don't just stick a trap in a hole and expect to catch a golpher. You gotta be wildly you know. Have you ever heard with golphers? Um? Remember I don't know if this is true or not, but one of my mentors when I was a kid, kind of like a hunting effishent mentors, this guy Eugene Grots, And he insisted that all you need to do to get rid of golphers was take what's that gum. It's like Rigley's damn it man. No, no, not a big league too. But like remember when you were a kid, was like two kinds of stick gum, like the long there's a big red and then there was like, oh juicy fruit, remember that where they still make that? Anyway, he was insistent that you just stick a juicy a stick of juicy fruit down in there and that go for be dead. Oh I don't know. They couldn't. They couldn't resist juicy fruit and to come with somehow gum them all up and then they'd be going, well, yeah, the ultimate atomic bomb for go. First you take your settling torch and fill all up with a settling gas and that's next level. That's next level. Uh well, so if you want to do that, like you never made it, you never became a fur trapper. But what was the first line of um, what was the first kind of line of work you want up into? Because someone was telling me, one of the guys you work with, I was telling me that, uh, when you need to introduce yourself two people, I hope this is true. When you introduce yourself with people who don't know who you are, the often, uh say that you're a blacksmith. Well yeah, yeah, I mean I started that's my craft is blacksmith. And uh, you know, I was drafted into the army in nineteen sixty two, and I put down my occupation as blacksmith. So they sent me a Nike guided missile school. Can you imagine what am I supposed to do? Hand for missiles? You got you were drafted because you're drafted. Yeah, I was drafted into I tried everything to get out of there. Yeah, like with the intention that you'd go to Vietnam. Now there was no Vietnam, there was no Korea. Well the hell do you get drafted? They had a draft. Everybody had to go into military between Korean Vietnam. Yeah, yeah, because the Vietnam draft and kick into way later like sixty five or sixty six or something. That's right. Yeah, So you're drafted or not? Were and you're not? I had no idea. Yeah, And you know, I had just started my business making climbing gear and blacksmithing, you know, on and uh, and I felt pretty resentful about being drafted for two years, and so I tried everything to get out of the draft. And and uh, I heard that Japanese during World War Two got out of their draft by drinking soy sauce, a whole bunch of soy sauce, which elevates your hype, your blood pressure like crazy. And so the day I was supposed to report to the draft board, I drank a whole bunch of soy sauce. I had such a buzz on. And but because you didn't have like the way that like the way that politicians now get out of it. When you hear about how they got of it, they usually have the force of their father. You just had to buy soy sauce. I had to buy sauce, but I got but they put me on a train to fourd Ord and I got so sick on the train. I just picked it all up and I couldn't stand another bottle of sauce. So they say you have to South Korea. Yeah. They sent me to Korea for a year and that was um. Yeah. And my job in Korea was I caused so much trouble. You know, I wouldn't salute officers and I wouldn't wear a hat and and uh, finally, my company commanders, we have a inspection Saturday morning. Just get lost and uh, so I started climbing in Korea. At that time, you couldn't wear civilian clothes. You had to wear military clothes all the time. But I ran across some Korean climbers and uh, they kept some civilian clothes for me, and and we'd go off climbing, and uh, and I made a whole bunch of first cents in Korea. In fact, um, I guess I'm famous in Korea for first cents because climbing there hadn't taken off yet. Well, yeah, it had, but all the climbs had been done by the Japanese during the occupation, and and the Koreans were happy just to repeat climbs like we did one climb and I said, hey, how many times have you done this climb? Is it all about seventy five times? Seventy five times? Why don't you do new routes? Was why? Because it's just perfectly fine climb. Yeah. So, you know, I kind of introduced him to doing new things, and so we did some pretty serious claims and and uh, yeah, you know what a question you'd be able to be uniquely suited? The answer for me being that you grew up in Maine and you're a black smith, because that was in New Brunswick one time. Oh yeah, and the guy was telling me that larch, which so maybe they call tamarack out there, burned so hot that you can use it for forage work in the absence of coal. Really, I've never heard that. You never heard that. I've told a lot of people that and they're like, I don't know about that. But he said, like you burned you can warp the door around your stove. Really you don't know about this, So, uh, talk to me about how you got into cething making the climbing equipment and how that fell under, like how that was a blacksmith ing thing. Well, I mean it's just not made out of like forged iron anymore. Right, No, they don't use patons and stuff anymore. But in those days, well I learned to climb, you know, through falconry to you know, get hawks, iris and stuff like that. And uh, you gotta back up on that one. Yeah, falconry. Falconry. Yeah, well that was my first. When I was twelve to sixteen or so, I got into a falconry club and uh in California, in California, in fact, we started a club call Southern California Falconers Association, and I was secretary at twelve years old, and and uh yeah, so we used to climb the hawks, iris and stuff like that. We learned to repel, and slowly I learned to Yeah, what kind of birds were you after? Well? I was I wasn't interested in falcons. I was interested in short wing hawks like goss hawks and Cooper's hawks and stuff. And you know, and you guys are using the hunt for what, well, the goss hawk at at hunt on rabbits and uh, coots. We had some flooded alfalfa fields there in Sant Frando Valley and the coots had a hard time taken off in those fields. And so I'd get coots, eat them. They're actually pretty good. Yeah, they get a bad rap. They like a crow in the duckhead sex. Yeah, that's right. So yeah, from falcony, I got into climbing, and I got into some climbers from the Sierra Club in l A. And and started climbing that place called Takies Rock out of l A and then slowly and into Yosemite. And at that time all the gear was made in Europe, and as the Europeans had an attitude towards climbing where you conquer the mountains, you know, and you make them safer for the next for the next group. So they would take they would make these soft steel patons and leave them in place for the next party to make it easier. And uh, we didn't believe in that. We were brought up with John Muir and Emerson and Thorow and kind of do and so you know, we found make the throw connection. It seems like throw he would add our time climbing a ladder, it seems probably, but he had a good philosophy and and so you know, we didn't want to leave any trace behind, and so um we made. There was an old blacksmith who's the climbing in Yosemite is John Solosey. And he made Petton's out of model a Ford axles, which is a kind of a chromium chromium vanadium or something steel out of a Ford axle. Yeah, model a Ford axle, which is really good steel instead of iron. Because um and Yosemite, there's a lot of incipient cracks, are not clean cracks, and so if you try to pound in the iron pizzon, it just bends over, and so he made him out of steel. And so when I started, these things weren't available at all. He just made it for himself, and so I got myself a forage and an anvil, a book on blacksmithing, and went down to the junkyard and I got us a piece of harvester blade which happened to be chrome molybdoum steel. Made my first pietons, and it worked great. I could pound them into incipient cracks and I could take them out, or the soft steel ones you couldn't take out because he conformed to the shape. That conformed the shape, and you try to take them out and then the head would break off. He just quickly explained a pizzon, it's just a metal spike you pound into the rocks and then you clip into it for protection. Now got a loop on the end, and you put a clip of cabban here into it. And so I made a better peton, and so I made it for my so and when we were on the cutting edge of a big wall climbing in Yosemite in those days, and um, in fact the cutting edge of rock climbing worldwide really, and so we need the climbs that we were doing. You had to have these things. And so I made some for myself and friends, and then pretty soon friends of friends, and then I'll make it two an hour and I'm selling them for three bucks apiece. Yeah. What year was this, nineteen fifty seven? Huh? And that was Snard equipment, right, Yeah, So yeah, that's how I became a blacksmith. And that's how I got into business. Did she did Shernard equipment? Like? Gradually? Is it true that it became Black Diamond? Yeah? Eventually we I sold it to the employees who renamed it Black Diamond. And I was in the eighties, late eighties. Yeah, And at that time you were already you were back, you were already had Patagonia already, and I couldn't run two companies. And and also I saw climbing going in a direction I didn't like. What was the direction, Well, sport climbing. Um, when you didn't like sport climbing, I didn't like sport climbing. I didn't like because I don't really understand what that means. Well, sport climbing is indoor climbing. It's it's it's climbing where there's no risk involved. You you put in bolts and you know every fifteen feet and clip into him and and you know de faces the rock and it uh and you know everybody's using chalk. I've never used chalk in my life for you know, to keep your hands right. And when you use chalk, it leaves a mark. And so when you go do a climb that someone has used chalk, you know exactly where we put your hands and feet. Huh. So it answers all the questions. And I don't like, I don't like anybody tell me what to do, and I don't like to tell anybody else what to do, and it just pisces me off to have somebody's say, put your hand right here, and the the disappointment was enough that you didn't want to be in the business anymore. Yeah, but I can see that that that's not a sustainable philosophy because I'm sure that people wear your clothes to do ship you wouldn't want them to do. So you could be like, well, I don't like where jackets have gone anymore because evil people wear jackets when it's cold. Yeah, well, I gotta just disregard that. That's what I'm saying that push you out of a lot, that push you out of a lot of businesses. Yeah, no, that's okay, It's just I didn't want to. I thought it's just time to get out of the game. I mean, you can imagine with with any support, you know, is there a deterioration. I mean, it's just a matter of time now before you're gonna have glass fibers going down your fishing line so that you can sit there on your boat and watch your TV screen and watch the fish take your take your bait. Yeah, that's I'm not interested in that. Yeah, you're fishing methods that you I don't want to use the word regressed, but you try to constantly simplify, understand, you try to constantly simplify your fishing. Yeah, I mean I taught a class. I just came back from teaching the class with the crow Indian kids. But three years ago I taught a class and on Big Horn River and I cut a branch off a willow. I put a horse hair line on the end, and I mean the only synthetic thing was a leader. And I put a soft tackle flat on that horse hair line braided. Yeah, now I braided. It was twisted. It's eighteen strands a white stallion tale because you use white stallion because it's it's transparent, and you've got to use a male. You've got to use stallion because mayor is pissed on their tail and that weakens, weakens the fibers, the fiber. Yeah. So you started with eighteen strands and you taper down to three strands, and and so I put a fly on. I walked out and said, hey, kids, you don't have to pay six dollars a day like all these dudes going down with a guide. You can do this. And I walked out caught a fish. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean did you make that leader? No? I didn't. It was given to me by this old Italian guy who um who taught me. He just tin car fishing. He lives in a valley where they've been doing it since the sixte century. Isn't ten car fishing basically that you're you're just fishing to fly on a cane pole? Yeah? No, real, And it's just it's just where do you store the line? Because on the campole roster damn long that your line just goes down to the butt. If you got a ten foot canpole. You got ten foot line? No, I have a twenty ft line, But where's all that line live? If it's not on a real it's just I put two paper clips on the on the handle and wrap it and wrap it around and then you just off just offload line as you need it. Yeah, it's a really simple myths of the fishing. But what I spent a whole year fishing was basically one fly, and most of it was with this, this method of no reel. And what I discovered isn't that with a fly, what's the most important? Is it? The color? Is it? The size? Is that? The action? Is that? The style of the fly? You know what's the most important? And I I came to the conclusion that the most important thing is the action of the fly. I mean, Trout are predators. And if you if you take a if you take a toy mouse and draw it across the room in front of a cat, right and you slowly and the cat goes into his pranch. He's watching it, watching and watching, and you stop it and give it a twitch. That's when you pounces, right. I mean, just like grizzlies love it when you run right. So trout the same thing. You want to get that instant reaction from him, a non thinking reaction. And so the most vulnerable part of the insects life is when they're emerging, when they're going up to the surface. And see the most vulnerable part, Yeah, that they're vulnerable to trout because they're trying to bust out of their caracas and and you know, fly away, and sometimes you get trapped and they get one leg trapped in a you know, and uh, and that's what you're imitating with these simple flies. And and these ten car rods are really sensitive. Like in the old days, like in the fifteenth century or so, they would make a pole out of a certain wood and then they use a different kind of wood for the last foot and a half so that they could do that twist that they could give action to the fly, make the fly alive like a catis, you know, jumping around on the surface and stuff. And modern fly rods you can't do that. They're so stiff. They're meant to cast a hundred feet because it's you know, fly fishing is such a macho thing that everybody wants to cast a hundred feet, whereas the trout they're right in front of you under your boots, and uh, so I I find that I catch I catch way more fish with that style of fishing did I do with a regular rod. How do you reconcile I want to return to fishing with the crow kids, But how do you reconcile UM a loathing for technology with being a company that people would say as a technical apparel company? Right like you guys popularize, You popularize kaplein, You popularized UM like a lot of like fleece and synthetics. But then I feel like, why are you not in a position where you're proselytizing the attributes of buckskin and beaver wolf felt? Do you know what I mean? Like? And I want to say this because I'm not I don't mean this as a I don't mean this as a UM, I'm full of hypocrisies. I'm packed full of hypocrisies. So I'm not pointing this out as oh you're I'm not pointing out like to illustrate some way in which you've got something wrong, because I struggle with all my hypocrisies all the time. But I'm just curious, Um, you know how how you do view it? Because your company is if people gave a list of words, and people could pick words that they would have that they would draw a line between patagonia and words. If you put innovative on the list, people would be highly likely to connect patagonia to innovation. They would have connect it to advancement, they would connect it to technical, right, they wouldn't connect it to um uh anachronistic. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean I've got chemists from m I T working for me. And you know we made a commitment by to use no fossil fuels and which means are policy recycled No, yeah, well we'll use recycled either recycled stuff or we're working on making nylons and polyesters out of plants, so kind of reverse engineering. And I mean it's highly highly technical. In my own personal life, I lead a really simple life. Yeah, you tell me you don't like a phone. You don't have a phone. I don't know, I don't. And I mean I got to sing against electronics. And somebody's working on a computer or whatever or trying to show. I mean, I'll walk in the room the computer crashes. I got I got this. My old man was it was a tradesman he he could build a whole house himself. And and uh, he used to play tricks on me, like you'd be working on a car and say, hey, come on over here, come over and you grab my hand and grab a spark plug and just you know, ship myself and or a stick it's stick a screw writer in a white socket and grab my hand and yeah, no, I got this a version against electricity. No really, and and I just I have nothing to do with it. Zero. And so you know, it's kept my life real simple. But it's also it's getting hard. It's getting hard to travel if you don't have a cell phone. You know, they'll cancel a flight. How do you know they cancel a flight? You know? Right? Well, yeah. One of the first benefits I realized when cell phones came out was it wasn't so hard to find your friends when you're out drinking because you just had to pick a bar and everyone just had to stick to it. No matter what was going on, girls you couldn't find them. Then it also became you could go to another bar and didn't it didn't destroy the whole night. That was like, honestly the first minutem, like you know, these people might be onto something. When I got my first cell phone. Well, in Iceland, you can get an app. Or you're hitting up on a girl in a bar, and I'll tell you whether she's a customer or I recently had a guy right in. He we have people right in with a lot of questions, and I don't even see a fraction of them. But one guy rolled in and he said that if you could wave a magic wand, which is I like any question, it begins that way. He said, if you could wave a magic wand and make cell phones, not only make cell phones go away, but make it that they had never existed, would you do it? Yeah? And the well, yeah, that that part that you made it they never even existed. I would do it. The have just go away? Now it would be tough because then I'd be like, well it's hard to you know, find your friends. You become a martyr. Yeah, but had they never existed? Because I was I liked I just I feel like I did better in life when things are different. You know, when you had to go down to use the card catalog at the library. I used to be a really good researcher because I was better at libraries than people what's the library? You know, this place you're going on here to use the computer when you're out of town, you know. An I got another question for you, and then they're gonna get into the crow. Um what you do before we get too far, because I have a little follow up question ahead. I want to know what that single fly was. Yeah. Yeah, it's a fish and tail and partridge soft hackle and it's one of the oldest flies ever. I mean it's um is that the fly you can tie entirely with a pheasants tail almost except for the hackle, which is partridge. Oh, I got you. Yeah, And it's very simple. It imitates every mayfly, imitates every cats fly. And I've used it. Uh bone fits for bone fish and oh yeah, it's the best bone fish fly I've ever used. What size for a bone fish? Oh about eight or ten? It depends, you know, And I wait him a little bit. But you know with bone fish, Uh, what's what's happened bone fish? You know, they they learned from from mistakes as opposed to humans, you know, and now they've been hit up so much that any flash that they see they freak out. And so you know, you're throwing out a crazy Charlie or whatever, and it's got all this flash and the silver hook and everything, and you give it a strip and the bonefish just blow up and out of there. It's a flash. And so I tie these uh it's a brown fly, and I tie it on a brown hook, and I used longer hackles, and so the hackles kind of go in, you know, in and out like a like a jellyfish or so, and so it's really a track. They'll come from twenty ft away to hit that fly. And so you know, I spent a whole year with that fly on different sizes, and I caught Atlantic salmon, I caught steelhead, I caught bone fish, I caught California perch. I mean, I caught all kinds of stuff with that fly. And I at the end of the year, I had caught as many fish as I ever cut catch. Yeah, you didn't suffer around the fishing, and I had I learned deep knowledge about that fly. I mean it's kind of like by deep knowledge, I mean, you know these navigators that that can sail across, these Polynesian navigators to sail across the Pacific with no compass of sexton there electronics nothing. They've got to get a deep knowledge about what is going on. And if you ask them, well, how do you know that's going on? How do you know to turn here? They can't explain it to you. It's down deep and and I I learned some things about using the action of the fly that I can't even describe to you. Sometimes it's just an innate feeling when you hear about the Polynesian navigators and the things they know deep down. The thing I always wonder about is what the attrition was, Like, well, that's interesting. It had to have been overwhelming, man. You know what like the people that were you know, they're finding you know, when they were colonizing, like the Hawaiian Islands and other places where you're colonizing places that are thousand miles away? How many how many young like how many young groups took off? And not never nothing? It would be fascinating to know, man, But things in ways like the using birds and then like also I think like cloud formations to identify you know that you look at clouds and tell that they had broken up in a certain way or formed in a certain way passing over land. But man, the people that must have been lost at sea. Well you know that the ultimate is when it's it's cloudy, it's clouded over. They can't see the guy, there's nothing going on. They get there's no winds and they lower themselves off the side and try to feel the current with their testicles. Is there, right, minor kid, I guess technically mine are two man and yeah, Honty too, right? Yuh uh? You know talk about fishing with the crowl a bit. That's like a it's an educational thing you do, right, yeah, I mean did you do that as you? Is it as as your company? Or now are you and your company the same thing? No? No, I just do it personally. And I've been teaching the simple method of fishing to women and children. I won't teach guys because the guys just especially if they already know how to fish, they're hopeless. They won't listen at all. There's two kinds of guys. You tell them, okay, cast forty five degrees downstream, swing and give a little twitches and if you don't get anything, take two steps down. There's the guys that will stay in one place all day and expect you know, a different results sometimes, and then the other ones that take ten steps. They will not take two steps. And children take two steps. Women take two steps. But you don't like be un told what to do. I know, I know, but I I love teaching kids. And yeah, I can see that. Man. Kids, it's frustrating because they snag you and snag everything and lose all the stuff. Not if you keep it simple, not if you get rid of that real and uh, you know what I mean. Just yeah, And they have a twenty ft line and a simple fly and and as long as they get the line in the water and the lion straightens out and they give it a little twists, they catch a fish. Why the crow Oh, it's just because I have a friend there who works with the crow nation there. And uh, it's a really uh it's a tribe that has a lot of problems. And the kids, I mean the kids that we had on this last group the last couple of days. Um hadn't left the house. We asked him when was the last time we went outside. They just looked blank at us and said, I don't know. They just they live on you know this, you know, one of the best rivers in America. They have all this wild land. They just sit there and watch television and play their game boys, and they're all from broken families. And I mean the kids that you're instructing. I mean, there's some really really sad stories, really sad stories. Is that like the dissociation with wildlife or in dissociation with the nature that you see there. Oh, it's it's far more than your average white man in in New York City. Oh yeah, I mean there's Yeah. Do you feel that when you take people fishing? Do you feel like you when you when you go there and take kids fishing on the Crow Reservation, do you feel like it winds up being an isolated thing in their life or do you feel that that you have you ever have you had it where people were kind of like turned something on and um and you feel that they might go on to I've heard from their parents, the ones that had parents us or their grandmother or whatever whoever was raising him, that it did have a big effect on him. Yeah. Not that they become fisherman per se, because you know, they're not fisherman, they're buffalo hunters. You know, they never fished. They probably don't even like to eat fish. But you know, I like, let me give you example I had a eight year old boy. This is three years ago. Everybody caught fish, and for no reason whatsoever, he did not catch the fish. He was just having a bad day, you know. I have bad days like that where he just can't catch a fish. And so I took him under my wing and we walked over to another spot and bam, he catches a fifteen inch rainbow, beautiful on a tin car, I mean, and um, I said, what do you want to do with this? Oh, I'm gonna kill it. They eat it great, you know, they don't play with their fish like we do. They want to eat it. And so and then he catches the sixteen inch brown and we kill that. And then he catches his seventeen inch rainbow, I mean, huge rainbow. So now he's on fire. Yeah, as and he said, I don't want to kill this one. I said, well, how many is in your family? Said? Five? And you don't want to kill it? No, I want to release it. I said, oh my god, you're not only a great fisherman, you're a great conservationist. So we put his fish on a branch, you know, Tom Sawyer style, and walked back to the car and the cards that everybody was waiting there. At the end of the day, he shows up with the biggest fish of all and he had a grin from ear to ear, transform transform his life. Maybe, I don't know. Did you teach your own kids to fish? Yeah? Do you like to fish? Yeah? M hmm. Yeah, and my son hunts and my daughter doesn't hunt. But my son hunts, and he doesn't, you know, he's he was a bore on her for a while shooting boards with the arrows bow and arrow, and then he got too easy, so then he went to a spear. Then that got what he does. He drives him into the ocean, into the surf and then goes after him. So the spear got too easy, so then he went in just with a knife. And he couldn't find his hunting knife one day and he, yeah, got a kitchen sp what doesn't have a hilt on it, you know, And he went into to get this board. His hand pretty good. Yeah, he cut his tendons on his two small fingers. That was a big his back honting with a bowing Did so you live between Wyoming and California? Yeah, I love Yeah, it's been half the year in Wyoming, half year in California. Do you view those states as being, um, you know I vieme as being almost uh polar extremes. Oh. Absolutely, I mean Wyoming is the most regressive rednecks state in that country. I mean, don't even bother voting the earth unless because there's nothing, there's nothing nobody to vote for. You know, the conservative Republicans are gonna win every time. Yeah, but you know, I like the I thought Governor Mead would he did some good stuff. Man, I like that guy. No, he's a climate denier. Oh, he is total climate denier. He believes, you know, the future whelming and it's coal, and he's and you know, he's he's uh, he's lost in the last century. And um, I mean, you know, Wyoming, but you enjoy being there. Yeah. But the thing that pisces me off about Wyoming and Utah is that there's no stream access laws. The homeowner owns to the middle of the river and it forces you to float the rivers. You can't even put an anchor down. Yeah, I agree with you about this part of the Wyoming criticism. That's horrible. And you know, there's no catching release in Wyolming. It's a catching kill state. It's a What do you mean by that? You mean that there's no you mean, like where it's you mean there's no areas where it's illegal to retain a fish, like no designated catching release water. The stream access thing is a problem. Oh, that's that's the worst thing there is. I mean the idea that you know, the landowner owns all this rain that comes down off the out of the sky, and it's horrible. And nobody protests, especially the fishing guides have got a good deal going because because they got a drift boat. I'll spend the whole summer. I'll I will not fish out of the drift boat, and so I walk everywhere, and um, I won't see another guy walking. They're all paying six dollars a day to float down and and stare at a barber and with a nymph on the end. And I mean, it's a total deterioration of the art of fly fishing. It's awful. Why don't you just bop north a little bit and set up shop in Montana where we have fantastic stream access laws. That's where I spent most of my time. Yeah, I do. That's why he's on this road trip now, Dude, People burn the state down if you took away stream access laws here man. People are used to it. Well, people try, people try to his landowners. You know, it's just it's just the American thing where you you homestead a little piece of land and put a fence around it, not to keep anything in, but to keep everything out, keep everything out. I mean, you know, I mean, compare that with Sweden. We're you know, first of all, Sweden is there's no road within eight of the coastline, so you don't have a thing like going on in Malibu where you can't even see the ocean because of all the houses. And then you're allowed to go on any private property to pick berries or to hunt or whatever, as long as you're respectful and nobody objects to that. You know, Scotland they have almost it's almost the opposite of what we have because in Scotland they have right to rome. You can go anywhere you want, which there's you know, something pretty nice about that from the perspective of someone who doesn't own property. But what they really what they did to make it not um a utopia, is that the landowner owns the wildlife. So they have they have they're basically cock eye from what we are, you know, completely sideways from how we approach it. I always knew, you know, I always knew about your company. UM. And I became interested in you a little bit long, long time ago where I was in Patagonia, the region I can't remember who he was, was with some dude and he was from down there and had worked for your company at some point in time, and he was telling me that you like to hunt and growing up doing some hunting. And I remember thinking, like, that can't be true. UM. I don't know why I thought that, but to surprised me, He's like, no, man, he was insistent. UM. And then I a couple of years ago you came and you went to the back Country Hunters and Anglers Rendezvous, and uh, they have an event. I told a story at this about getting charged by a bear, and you got up and told some stories, and uh, and I realized that you know, when someone you can tell when someone's talking about wildlife and talking about hunting and talking about fishing, there's a way that you can tell that it's very real for them, and that it's you're not just drawing from isolated things that happened, but from a life of immersion. I don't know how you just tell. I can just tell. Most people can tell. And then there you told an interesting story. I don't uh what I would like if you re shared it. Where you're talking about, um, something happened with your daughter in a road killed deer. Well, it's not even a hunting story. It's just a kid's story. It's like a child raising story or whatever. Well. I raised my kids to, you know, respect life and like like in the sixty nine oil spill in California, there was all these birds on the beach curry and oil, and they were you know, they were going to die, and people are going around poking them with sticks and stuff. And I had me and my kids would go out and pull their heads off, you know, take them out of their misery. And there was a fore gone conclusion they were dead. Oh yeah, there's nothing you can do for him. And then, you know, like one of the biggest lessons I taught my kids. One day, my wife comes home and said, somebody just hit the sage grouse on the road and bad. I packed my kids in the car and off we went and got that sage grouse, brought it back. I showed him how to clean it, and we cooked it and ate it. And then I showed him how to tie a fly with the feathers, and then we went out and caught some fish with the feathers. And so they know not to waste anything and also to eat wild game. And so my daughter when she was a teenager, her and her uh, her brother and another girl, we're going to a party. And they were addressed to the nines and their party clothes and stuff, and and they they hit a deer and the thing was still alive. And so the first lesson is you don't put it out of its misery. So they're trying to break his neck. What's with their party clothes on? So using the bird strategy, Yeah and right, and so the thing finally dies. And so the next lesson is you don't waste to meet. So they're trying to stuff in their car. And then California's illegal to pick up road kill. You know it's not no in Montana. Yeah, I think California, just California, think, is my right? Johnnie? I don't know, check me there they are or did they're fixing two? Or did legalized road kill in California where they're losing their there. They're loosening restrictions Oregon. Also in Montana recently do we grew up eating road killed deer. It was like this, there's like a little system. You justly give you the permit. Yeah. So anyway, they they are trying to stuff in their car. Here comes the highway patrolman and he says, what are you guys doing. Well, this poor dear is is suffering and it's still alive, and we're trying to take it down to the Patagonia has a wildlife you know, we bring in injured raptors and stuff and and on your campus. Yeah, and and so the guy says, no, it's illegally, you have to leave it here. And so yeah, so I mean that's a that's another less I tell him that, you know why, I through your teeth. But we also have this this raptor center, and we have a lead little license to get roadkill. So when the highway patrol runs across the road kill, they they call us and we go and pick it up. And and then um, so that's what happened. And then in the end I end up with the backstraps. Anyway, you know what's interesting, I just found out the other day is I got a friend Mitch Petrie in uh. We're texting the air day. That's when you send a message on your phone. UM, and he was out fishing. He lies in Minnesota and he was out fishing, uh for bluegills for a for a rafter rehabilitation center where apparently they got some very finicky ospreys and the bald eagles. Well, they gotta feed him fish. They Yeah, you gotta go out and get him. He's like there there's particular girls are delicious. Yeah, he'll bring him, he'll bring Yeah, he goes out and get something. They like those fresh blue gables. Do you if passed uh SB would go into effect in do we gotta get hardcore behind that man? The last time we got No, we've gotten into two. We've gotten into two initiatives. When they're trying to ban um, they're trying to band trap and on public land in Montana. That was That was a bummer. And we need to get real vocal about legalizing road kill in California. I feel like we need to burn some political estimated twenty deer hit on California roadways annually a want of meat. Yeah, of course, you know the people to kill one, I wouldn't have no idea what to do with it. And no. Yeah, but you mosty the people to eat road kill aren't the people that hit it, the people that come in behind them. The story just ya just hit got a road kill moose and someone else hit You know what? The hell kind of person hits a moose and doesn't want it? You know? Craig Matthews and I stopped for every road killed bird for the for the feathers were we were with Dan O'Brien, you know, the buffalo rancher, and he called his goouls. Hey when you when you moved out to California, we're a young kid, um, you became a diver, Is this true? Yeah? I was just I was a spear fisherman, free diver. And in those days we made all our own stuff, you know, made a waist belt out of ammunition belt from sal from the army store, and melt down my own lead batteries and put weights in there then and make a little quick releas thing out of a door hinge, I mean to get your belt off and hurry. Yeah, And we made everything, and there was no wet suits or dry suits. There wasn't anything at that time, and so I'd go to the Army store and I bought a flight suit. And these flight suits are wool complete, you know soon and it has wires in it because you know, they plug it in. But that's okay. So I would wear wool to dive. And we we had fins and uh we had masks, but we had to make our own spear guns and stuff. And in those days, the lot of the limit on lobsters, I think was ten lobsters and five abalone. And I was diving around Malibu and every time would get our limits. We're doing just for personal use, they're commercially personally. I got a fourteen pound lobster one time. That's a big I mean, it took all my strength to hang onto it. I mean these things are strong, because I got no wrastling match with one one time out in the Channel Islands. I don't know how big it was, but I was astounded by how big it was. And it was like intimidating, like you feel the power of it when you grabbed, like you feel like it's pull when it was trying to work its tail. You know, I don't think it was fourteen pounds, but it was interesting. Um do you still do that now? No, I have too hold for it. And I mean, you know, I've had some I had a friend who had a shallow water blackout, had to pull his head out of the water. And and then I lost a friend, um who got tangled. He was a novice diver and he got tangled up in the kelp he drowned. And so I you know, and I know my limits and what I can do, what I can't do. And I gotta kind of irregular heartbeat thing, which worries me some. So I you know, I stopped, but I used to hold my breath from us three minutes. And I practice in high school in math class, nothing nothing else to do, that's for sure. I didn't let school getting away in my education. That's Mark Twain right. Um. When you I read did you ever read you know, you know the writer Nick palm Garden. Yeah, he profiled you, and there I never understood what he meant. He's talking about how you, Um, I currently tell me he was describing you as an isolationist. Isolationists he used that. I can't really tell it's just political isolation. I don't know about trade deals. And stuff. Yeah, explain that to me. Well, I'm I'm not for this globalism business, and I think I think we're gonna have to hunker down and work locally. Did this whole thing of globalizing the work. You know, I went to New Zealand forty nine years ago. I was guiding, doing some mountain guiding there and and I just went last year again, and you know what, they've totally lost their culture whatever culture they had, which is an English kind of English culture and stuff. Now it's subways everywhere. McDonald's, their grocery stores have all the same brands, the except for their accent and there you know, they're honesty and stuff. It's they're more likely to wear Romeo boots than Americans. Yeah. When I flew there, that's a long ass plane ride to get off and feel like you're like you drove down the road. I know. Yeah, it's like that. I was. Yeah, when I go that far, I want to get out. And someone's got fat is in their hair man, Yeah, exactly. The occasional Maori has you know, tattoo on their face. Yeah, but it was really a disappointed to see. You know, I've traveled all over the world and cultures are being lost everywhere, and so that's the part of isolated. That's the part when you say isolationism you don't mean, you don't mean in America first agenda, but you mean a way that you don't want the world to shrink so much. Yeah, it's it's a you know, nature loves diversity, nate and humans love control and centralization. We try to everything tries to pull to the center, which is wrong. Nature is always trying to make new species is flinging things all over the place and and it's dynamic, and we're trying to pull it all together and it's absolutely wrong. And it's I uh, you know, I told Nick that I thought it was the end of the American Empire. Um, well, how is that linked? Well, I think the country can't be governed. Oh, it can't be governed. And the best we can achieve now is compromised. Which compromised never solves a problem, you know, it's it's leaves both sides feeling cheated, and it doesn't solve the problem. It cuts the baby in half. And that's um. I mean, we have a constitution that's completely obsolete, where you have two centators from Rhode Island. I had the same power as the two centators from California, which is the sixth largest economy in the world. Now, California, should you know, should be its own country as far as I'm concerned, and um, I would vote for it. But Nick Paul Garden says, you also cry at Fourth of July parades? Yeah, I do. I don't cry at funerals. I've had enough near death experiences that it seems like natural, And I don't cry at funerals, but I cry Fourth of July praides. Do you cry a fourth of live praise because you have stirrings of stirrings of patriotism or because you feel like something in America has been lost? No? I see, I see the little girls out there twirling their batons and ship and I cry. I mean, I I just read this book by Wade Davis about the early attempts at Mount Everest in the twenties, I mean, brilliant book and it talks about it introduces each character in the book um as to what they did in World War One, and that war was so hideous. I'm thinking if I was in that war, I'd run away. Yeah, I mean, lining these people up wave after wave after wave, and keep and you can't break ranks. You can't. You gotta be on a straight line. And off you go, and you get mowed down by these German machine guns. You've got officers who believe in cavalry and swords going against machine guns. And one wave gets totally little mowed down. And then here he sent another way and another way. I'd be out of there so fast. I mean, that's an age thing I was having. I had this conversation yesterday. I was with my friend Mark, and he was He came to my bachelor party, which was up at We have a little shack in Alaska, and a neighbor up there wanted me to He had a tree that the was getting undercut by the tide and he was free as gonna crush the stuff when the treatment his big spruce went so he had me climb up and knocked the top out of it. You couldn't tip it, you had to knocked the top get down in chunks. And I used to do that professionally a bit in grad school. Oh, resident not not not for the timber industry. Residential. And I got away from it and became a writer. Um and climb back up in that tree, and the minute I got up there, I knew I didn't belong anymore in the tree. It was terrified. When I used to like it, I used to like when you knocked the top out of that tree and that things started bucking back and forth. I loved it. I was aware that you could die or whatever, or you can make mistakes and they had real consequences. I didn't care. It was just very enjoyable. But then I went up in that tree and knocked that top out, and when I got my feet down to the ground, my friend Mark was talking about it. He's like, I rememberhen you got down from that tree, you said like, I will never go up and do that ever again. Because whatever it was I liked about it, I don't. And that guy us talking about with soldiers and we were talking about the D Day in patience, but I was like, besides his physical fitness, the reason you like send eighteen and nineteen year olds up that beach is because they'll go Dudes like me, we'll be like, oh man, I don't know, let's let's head back. Let's head back. Yeah, you figure a better way. Yeah, But but those kids are like strong and they'll do it. Yes, all that two stuff wrong, and just like I think it's beyond that. It's just um, I mean, besides whatever like sacrifice issues god in country, it's just um like a kind of a little bit of an inability to uh, a little bit of an inability to run all the scenarios out to their conclusion. And I think about that because I know you used to like to climb. You have that you have to have. I mean, you have many friends that died on mountains, right, did that start to affect you? Um? Yeah, well not at the time. No, not really. I mean how did you like, how do you view it? You know? Well, well the last I mean, we're a really uh. I was in an avalanche and in tibet Um in my later years of the expedition climbing, and and I was I was with my friend Rick Ridgeway and some friends, and so we wrote out this avalanche and um, one of the guys was, kids, explain what that means to ride out an avalanche? I don't really know what that mean. Well, you just get caught in the avalanche and and get carried down. Wrote it out, like, not using any particular strategy, just being pushed by it. Yeah, about a thousand feet and and um, when one one of the guys was killed broke his neck and the other guy had broken back. Ridgeway had some some injuries. I had a concussion and and and at that time, you know, I had kids and stuff and that that basically did me and I had that ruined it for you. Did you have to retrieve your friend's body? No, we buried him right there. I mean, climbers are not the kind of people that I would call in helicopters and pay for a first class ticket to take the body back to you know, we just built a Karen and put him in. I mean, that's that's where he used today. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know, I can't remember. But you had children, Yeah, I had kids, So yeah, yeah, that got me thinking twice about it. Um, But as far as friends being killed before, it didn't slow me down at all. You know what I mean climbing is you can't take day jeer away from climbing. Otherwise it's not climbing, it's it's a you know, they're gonna have climbing in the Olympics. It's gonna be a no risk thing. You take the risk away from climbing. It's not climbing, it's it's uh, it's it belongs in the sport pages, whereas climbing doesn't belong in the sport pages. It's just a different thing. No, I understand that loses its soul, doesn't it. Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. And you do it. You do it to prove yourself. You do it too, better yourself. You know. I've been known to say, you know those it's gonna be on my gray stone that these guys going up to Everst, you know, paying you know, eight five dollars for a guide to be guided up Everest, and they have a you know, a shirpo in front of them with a three ft rope pulling and one behind pushing and carrying the actually oxygen. And then they get in this conger line of two people and yeah, and it's I mean, it's and I say, look, you know the purpose of climbing, like arras or something, is to affect some sort of personal and physical gain. But when you compromise the process away so badly that you know, you're an asshole when you start out, your asshole when you get back, that's gonna be on my crazy, but when you when you grow to love something. We had a guy on one time, um we got into He dedicated his life to wildlife and hunting and writing about hunting, and he talked about the pain of seeing people as you put it, pissing in the cathedral, meaning like you grow to like this, there's something you grow to like so much in it and it and it works, and when you see versions of it that you don't like, you could feel like the whole thing got destroyed or you or you struggle to create a new vocabulary, you know, like like I don't understand why and my person like this, this is my personal world with with sport climbing and climbing would be like canned hunts. Okay, I just would like to me it resembles uh agriculture. It resembles like the it resembles a form of livestock husbandry. And it pains me not so much that it goes on. Okay, it doesn't pay me that it goes on so much unless there's issues with disease and other things that can happen. But it pains me that it's disgusted as hunting and not livestock husbandry because I feel like it taints the thing I like. It doesn't make me not like it it to maybe not like what I like, right, it does maybe like I'm going to quit a version of it that means a great deal to me, because there's there are versions of it that are in abomination. You follow what I'm saying, so so that to lose. Like if there's something that you if you love something in a certain way, fly fishing, surfing, climbing, if you love in a way and it makes sense to you, Um, when you see versions of it that don't reflect your particular understanding, why does it make it? Why does that taint it in your head? Do you know what I mean? Like, because it's still like you still have what means something to you. Well, it would be like if you know, it would be like if I said I love my wife okay, and I really and I like the and I respect the institution of marriage. You've been married to the same person your whole damn life. So if I hear that most marriages and in divorce, I'm not like, we'll screw it now, I'm gonna go run around with my wife. Well, you know, every sport, every institution. Um, I think um deteriorates. You know when when basketball players are all seven and a half feet tall raised the basket. Yeah, you know, my, my, my, when my high school teach, I remember, like, uh, he would have been a college basketball player. And he says he can't watch a game when someone dunks, he has to turn it off. And he says he doesn't watch games very long. You have to purify the sport or whatever it has to be, you know. I mean in Jackson Hole, we've got this so called elk refuge. No, no, that the feeding grounds. Yeah, it's just it's just it's a feeding ground and it's a it's a stockyard. And the last manager of that thing said shut it down because we're gonna have wasting disease and and and there. You know, the animals are so close together, it's no different than the stock are. They're gonna be passing diseases among each other. Well, it's happening. We've got wasting disease in deer now. And one one came up in Grand Tea town, right, more than more than one and so and then you have you know the hunters are do they have some buffalo hunts in that refuge? And um you know, they drive around until they see a buffalo and the buffalo is just standing there. So it's a it's the kind of hunting that gives hunting a you know, a bad name. I think on that, um, you actually go with a ranger warden to do the animal selection. But I don't know if they view is hunting. I think it's just like a coal Yeah, but they they think it's hunting. Yeah, they use that, the use the language of it around there. Mcgwain was telling me about this guy he knows, uh, he actually wrote a book, this guy and he he used to be an elk hunter and he you know, he'd uh, he got too easy for him, so he decided to hunt elk with a spear is illegal a lot of states. Well that's what he does. And you know you read about the the Indians, um, the own no Indians who used to live in San Francisco Bay and they had a paradise. I mean it had all the oysters they could possibly eat. I mean the bay was just full of oysters. They had every waterfowl and they had deer everywhere. And the way they hunted they just put a deer cape on themselves and walk up to and put musk all over and then walk up to a deer, poke it, turn and then you know, shoot him with a short bow. Um. I think that's pretty cool. And that's that's the way in every sport. It's it should be going in simple direction rather than more and more complex. And and have you have you done much? Did you ever hunt big game much? I've shot deer, yeah, and I don't anymore because I've got friends like Craig Matthews. I've got two freezers jam practice. I don't eat you know, store about beef and stuff. I eat all game. But I like, like I I've done a lot of pheasant hunting, but I find pheasant really boring. It's just a carrier for some strong sauces and so and I'm not too interested in shooting another pheasant because I I hunt because I like to eat the eat the product, and and and plus I'm um, you know I eat all this stuff that my hunting friends don't eat, like to delivering the tongue, all that stuff. That's the part I really love more than anything else. When I saw you speak at the b H A deal, if I remember right, you were talking about a good way to learn how to wing shoot is to get a red rider because you can see the baby. Yeah, Lefty Craig taught me that, and that you learn how you learn about lead and stuff because when you're looking down, when you're looking down the barrel, over the top of the barrel, you wind up catching the glint of that. Yeah, you can see the baby, and you learn what those things when they come out of when they come out of a barrel. Yeah, I did that a few years ago. And because I was never taught, uh wing shooting, you know, I just learned on my own. And so left he told me about that. He used to be a Annie Oakley for Remington Arms and he had yeah, the fly caster. Yeah, so he was he was go to these circuses and stuff and he they would throw aspirin in the air and he would shoot an aspirin with the twenty two and then and then you know, show he's a real showman. So hey take a to take a washer and it throw a washer there and it shoots through the hole in the washer, and you know, of course people would say, wait a minute, how do we know you shot? They passed it with mask and tape. No, he put a one cent stamp when they had one cent stamps. Put a one cent stamp in there, throwing the air shoot right through the hole. I said, Jesus, Lefty, how how did you ever do that? He said, Oh, it's cheesy, says you want to be a good shot, get yourself a red writer, Be begun and and get to where the light is just right, and take two sights off and have somebody throw up some beer cans, and and uh, you'll see that you're shooting behind the can every time. And uh, and you know you can't aim. You know, it's got to be instinctive. And so I did. I got I used to have a red writer, but I went out to Stone Drugs and Jackson, Wyoming, and I bought another red writer, and I had my wife shooting, throwing up beer cans. When pretty soon I was getting two out of three beer cans. And that was it. I'm gonna go home this afternoon, throw some Lacroix cans around. Oh, Mike, Mike, he'll sit there for a long you know, he'll sit there an hour of time, lobbing babies into cans, you know, and you know he sees that, he sees that arc and learns how to aim high. I remember doing that a lot. Uh. You got locked up in Arizona one time, when thrown in jail for eighteen days just for wandering around wondering about aimlessly with no apparent means of support. That was a crime in those days. But how did the whole how did the whole exchange art? Uh? Like, how was it obvious that you were wandering around with no apparent means of support. Well, that's kind of what they get Rambo for in Rambo one, right, he's just walking down the road. They bring him the jail just for wandering around. Look where that got him. Well, I was a hitchhiking back from uh oh you from the East coast and U. It was a long story, but I I this friend of mine and I got on a freight train and uh it was in the winter. It was November as freezing colds and all the box cars were locked. But we got on on a gondola with with cars. They were transporting jeeps, jeep wagons. So we found one wagon that was it wasn't locked, so we crawled into the thing and uh and we ended up in uh Winslow, Arizona was a railroad with a flashlight in our eyes, and he yanked us out, and I said, how do you ever find us? So it's easy, I just look for foggy windows. So so we go in front of the judge, and you know, I was hanging. Judge. Thing is, well, you know, you're you're being charged with wondering about aimlessly with no parent means of support, and how do you plead? Said, well, wait a minute, if I plead innocent, what's gonna happen. Well, we're gonna lock you up and you're gonna have to get an attorney, and you know you're gonna be here for for a while till we have a trial. And you know what if we plead guilty, well, we're gonna check you out with the FBI and if you're clean, you know, I don't know, maybe a day or two and we'll let you go. Okay, guilty, okay. Eighteen days eighteen days. Oh, I couldn't believe it. But you know, the thought of ever calling our parents and or anything like that never entered our minds. I mean it was it was a different era than you know, how old were young teens was eighteen and no now it's close to twenty because yeah, and and then you know, we got thrown in another jail. We got thrown in grants to New Mexico for hitchhiking, and and uh, it's a long story. But we finally got home and my friend was drafted, got home to a draft notice, and then a few weeks later I got drafted too. It's kind of what when you spend so much time messing around but then simultaneously like old this big ass super valuable company. Um, do you feel that life's about work or do you feel that life's about play? I you know when I when I was a little kid, Um, I could play baseball, you know, as well as any kid. But when it came time to a game with people watching, I couldn't do anything. I'd clutch up. And I learned early on that that you invent your own games and then you can always be a winner. Like like my my kid went to a My son went to US school and in in uh near Jackson, little one room schoolhouse, and two days a week they'd bring in a X marine p instructor and his idea was, okay, kids line up on this line. Let's see who can run the fastest. Let's see who can jump to furthest and my kid, you know, he's like me, he's just going to gandhi. I mean what that does. It's the American way. It produces one winner and a bunch of losers. And and so like you know when when, uh so that led me to a life of nature and how was always I was living in Burbank, I was going down to the l A River gigging frogs and catching crawdads. And I was probably doing that in uh high school prom. You know, I didn't have any girlfriends, and uh so that led me to a whole life. I I've given talks it uh commencement things that universities and stuff where I get it. I got a whole bunch of of honorary degrees and stuff and it's I I tell kids, look, life is a lot easier if you break the rules. Then if you try to conform to them, it's it's a lot more fun and it's a lot easier. And that's the way I've always run my company. So I've never wanted to be a businessman, and so I decided to do it on my own terms in a way that I didn't have to go to work every day, and I didn't have to act like one of these business people that you know, these greaseball businessmen that I did not respect. And so it led to UM, a method of doing business that is different than anybody else. And I'm it's you know, are you surprised that it works? It works unbelievably well. And UM, did that surprise you? I means you have a feeling like no ship it worked. Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's exactly and over and over again. I see that reinforced every time. You know, like, for instance, a couple of years ago, UM, one of my employees, you know, I got like now, I got like three thousand employees. One of them just said, hey, on Black Friday, let's give all our revenue away. I said, okay, why not revenue? Yeah, the whole sales everything we like, not the profits, the whole revenue. So I said, okay, let's do it. And the year before we've done like two and a half million dollars on Black Friday. So we did it, and we advertise it on social media a few days before, and then UM, the word got out and by three in afternoon, somebody called me and said, hey, we're up to six million, I said, really, And then by six we're up to ten million. I said, whoa, holy sh I didn't expect that, but I don't care, you know, and um, but what happened is that six of our sales were two people who never bought from us before. And you in business, you can't believe how difficult it is to get a new customer. You know, you could spend five million dollars for twenty second add on the Super Bowl and you will not get the publicity that we got from this and or the new customers. It was unbelievable. And then I then we thought our sales are gonna go way down after Black Friends. Has everybody already bought their ship? Yeah, it just kept climbing and climbing and climbing. Has been climbing ever since. So you know, I believe in karma. I really do believe in it. And you're speaking to Yanni now, Man, Honey, honey, I'm right there with you. He's a calmer man. Um. Back to Nick Capalm Garden. He's a good writer. Yeah. I read a lot of his pieces. He writes stuff. He writes about a lot of stuff, man, but like great pieces about skiing and things. He said, Um, he said that you come across he's talking about not about business, but he's talking about just uh, your lifelong quest to keep wild places wild right, save wild places. He said that you seem quote deeply disheartened, perhaps even defeated. Is that did he hit it right or do you think he missed the mark there? Well? I think I've you know, I've done climbs on every content and footing Antarctica, and I've been all over the world, have been to Africa a bunch of time. I see nothing but deterioration everywhere in the world. Everywhere. I don't see where anything is getting better than what it used to be. And um, that's where I feel defeated, I think. And uh yeah, do you think it's Do you think it's a nonstoppable slide now? Nature is going to take care of it in the long long game. No, probably sooner than we think. I mean, I think these new diseases and stuff they're coming up. It's I mean, we're a peaci dish and we've exceeded our nutrients and and we're on our way out as a species. I think you know, if you think that, okay, we're a special species that you know, God made us in his own image and worse, we're better than anything in nature. And all of that stuff fine and good, but I don't believe that. I think that we're just a species, and that every species goes in and out of evolution and extinction, and and I think we're on our way out. I mean, imagine if we had a serious situation in the States right now, the way people are having to live in Syria, the bombed out towns, how many of us would survive that, How many of us could drink water out of this you know sewer practically, No, it would all be dead. We're devolving as a species pretty quickly. And uh, you know, I'm very pessimistic about that, but it doesn't bother me because I have this attitude that we're just here for a short time, shorter than would hope, probably, and that's just where it is. And I've had enough near death experiences where I've got I've gone over there the other side and come back and realize that, you know, it's not so bad out there. Um, I actually went. Yeah, you read about these near death where people actually die and then they come back, and then they resent coming back because it was so peaceful and nice over there, So I just accepted that. I think that there's a little bit of a risk with fatalism um because it becomes infectious for other people, younger people. I made the mistake of telling my kids that that the earth's having like a midlife crisis because in four billion years the sun will burnout, and some people say the earth has been solidified for four billion years. So I'm like, oh, we're halfway done. And months go by and my kid says, when the sun burns out and everyone's dead, who can drive us to the cemetery? And he's been talking to this in Maaster. Well, I realized that there's there's viewpoints. There are viewpoints and perspectives that are often just best kept within. Yeah. I saw a bumper sticker. I said, dude, what when the rapture happens, Can I have your car? No. I agree that they're too young to understand, but you know, you get to the just Gritta Cernbergs, you know from Sweden, who gets up fourteen years old in front of Parliament in London and just reason to riot act And she's not sitting around being depressed, she's kicking ass. Yeah, and that's what we gotta do. I mean, you know, there's there's no difference between somebody that says, oh, it's all over, don't bother and somebody that says, oh, everything's gonna be great, don't bother doing anything. Either way, nothing gets done. So, I mean, we have the biggest crisis human kind has ever had with this global climate change, and it's too overwhelming to grapple with. Most people don't know what to do well because you look and you like it's too overwhelming to grapple with because you're like, okay, no matter what, like whatever we do, there's still China, there's still India. Yeah, but so it's like, what do you you know? You know, I learned, you know, mountain climbing is is conquerors are the useless? Why why climate? There's nothing up there? I mean, and it's the same thing you want to be fighting for the same of fighting. We're not gonna win, but you gotta fight. And so I'm a happy person knowing that I'm doing everything I possibly can. I mean, I just changed this last year. I changed the mission statement of our company to where it simply says we're in business to save our home planet, and um, so we had to sit down and say, Okay, as a business or as one employee out of three thousand, what does that mean to me that my that the company I work for has made this commitment? So how does that affect my job? And so every one of us has to say the same thing. If you really believe that global warming is happening, you have to ask yourself what can I do? What should I be doing? Because it's World War three, It's like, you know, the Japanese just burned, just bomb Pearl Harbor. You've got to mobilize the whole country, the whole world and doing this. But yet people are just going around, Well, you know, I'm just one person. I don't know what to do. And so as a company, we sat down and said, okay, here's what it means. The best thing we can do, because we use a lot of natural resources, is work on changing agriculture, going back to a regentitive organic style of agriculture. So we're working on developing a new UH certification that goes beyond organic to where it captures agriculture captures carbon. And then you know the other thing we can do is save work on saving wild lands, that capture a lot of carbon, especially like swamps and um Like I'm working on a seven fifty acre park at the tip of South America that's all pete bogs and stuff like that, and it captures more carbon than anywhere. And then the other thing is to get rid of this evil government. We're this next election, we are going to be up front and center in fighting those assholes. And it's you know, all those climate deniers in the government, they know what's happening, but they're evil in that they're choosing not to do anything about it for the sake of profit and staying in power. That's evil. When you're doing something you know is wrong, that's evil. And so we're gonna be as a company with this new missions to that's what we're gonna be doing. And you know we've already started, like we've been growing cotton organically for years. In all our clothing, we only use organically grown cat. Well, that doesn't do the world any good. All it does is use up space that should be grown for food and stuff. And but and and every time they plow in between and it releases all the carbon that we've captured. So now we started a program in India where we're growing it regentatively and organically, started with a hundred and fifty farmers, small farmers, and we talked them into growing cotton um without tilling and using cover crops and composts, and they're using chickpeas and tumeric and and plus we give them an extra tem percent for their cotton. So they're making more money and they've ever made and it's they're small, They're like an acre and acre and a half and um. It's just really successful. They get rid of the bugs with lights at night and they go around squashing him. I guess I don't know. You know, you can do it on a small scale, which is cool because it employs people. One of the problems of the world is we need to employ people. Well, what are they gonna be doing? They all can't be working on computers all day long. So many people want to be small farmers, and yet they, you know, they have to compete with this agribusiness. So next year, we've got six hundred and fifty farmers growing our cotton regeneratively and we're gonna be making products out of that. So that's that's my answer to global warming, is you know that that's not that's not a defeated man. The answer, the solution to depression his action. It's really simple. As long as you're active, you know, then you don't get depressed. What do you got? You got the follower uppers. I'm with you. I feel like when you say I like that new mission statement, when you say the home planet, I feel like, really that segues right into saving because it's not really the planet. Like Steve said, I think in the long run, the planet will short of shake and shrug his shoulders and and it won't think twice about who's been here and what. But if we want a place to live as a species for a long time to come, we should probably we should be thinking about how to secure that. You know, well, that's why we added our home planet. Yeah we didn't just say the planet our home planet, man, But I think a lot of I guess my point is that a lot of people don't connect the two because I've been I feel like I've been saying that for a long times. Everybody's always talking about saving the planet. That doesn't mean anything to anybody. But when you stay at home planet and you and you connected to like you have to have a place to live. It kind of it hits a little harder. Well, I could tell you we're not gonna be colonizing Mars. In fact, we're wasting so much money and trying to go to Mars that we should be using to do some good here. You know. I want to start doing some T shirts making fun of just in fact, my daughter, who's got a write sense to you humor just like I do, says hey, let's do a T shirt that says fuck Mars. That's it. I love it, and I'm not like, like, you know, I understand. I understand the impulse to explore other planets, and I think that it's the same impulse that quickly after the African diaspora that quickly pushed our species to all six continents, right, just like curiosity, So it moves, and the fact that it's moved into the celestial space doesn't surprise me. And it's hard for me to condemn, but I love it when you do press people on um. So like you suppressed people on what do we really get out of planetary you know, exploration, space exploration. They'd always be like, you know, the teflon on your egg pan, And I was that man, I feel like we put all that money into eggs, we'd have a hell of a lot better pay some derivative, derivative outcomes anything else. You're honest, I'm asking man. You know you got every right, but I just know that you like Um, I don't know if you have any if you had any uh karma observations or anything. Oh no, I don't. He likes keep quiet about that. You know who doesn't believe in karmel? Do you read Cormack McCarthy. Yeah, you're a Cormack McCarthy. Ask person. He's pretty severe, dude, there's no KRM in those books. Man, Evil pays off, evil pays off. He's he's a depressing guy. Oh man, Yeah, I'd be real curious. If I could have a conversation with one person on this planet, it would be Cormy McCarthy. Yeah. He's kind of hermit. Yeah, yeah, I don't know if he You know? All right, Well, do you any was there anything you were dying to talk about that I didn't ask you about. I don't want to. I don't want to, like, I don't want to drag it out and where you to get back to meat eating? Go on? You know, I got part of a company called Patagonia Provisions, and and I owned forty nine percent of a bison ranch over and shout, Dakota along with Dan O'Brien. Yep, he wrote Buffalo for the Broken Heart and so um or no, what the hell is that book called? Yeah, that's one book. Yeah, he's he's written a several books, but um, that's the most famous one. And so he does it all naturally. Um, we just leave him alone and um harvest him in the field, shoot him with a copper bullet right in the brain and they dropped, and the other one's just continue grazing and then we butcher them right there in a tractor trailer. And so it's a really natural process. And those buffalo have a choice of eating three different um grasses and forbes and wild flowers and things like that, so they're getting a really very diet. So we wanted to test them as to the nutrient content of that meat compared to somebody who takes their bison and takes them to the stockyard in Colorado and feeds them on GMO corn soybeans. I don't think you can do that, can you? What? No, you can't. I think that isn't there a thing where you can't um They don't. It's not grain finished. Yeah, no, that's what a lot of ranchers do, the grain finish them. I thought there, okay, go on, I thought there was some I thought that the Growers Association had certain things where when you see meat labeled, when you see like bison sold, it carried with it certain parameters. Now you can feed them anything you want. And so we I'm really interested in in micronutrients and your gut biome and all that stuff. So we we did a test and ours is, uh, well, the one the one that are finished on grain have twelve fat, of which most of it omega six fat, which is the bad fat. You know, if you take a petri dish and you put omega you put cancer cells in there. You put omega six fat, it grows the cancer cells like crazy. And so it's twelve fat and omega six fat. Ours is three percent fat, mostly omega three fat. Omega three will shrink the tumors and um plus the potassium and calcium and the forty five minerals that are that they've identified the essential for your health are all in our buffalo and they're not in. You are what you eat, you know, and when you're eating a grass fed beef, you're getting way more nutrients than if you're eating a grain fit beef. And like we you know, I have a woman who works for me who used to work for Sunset magazine and and they is still around, still around, and they used to have chickens. They are feral, and they had you know, bright orange yolks and real firm and whites. And they decided, this is years ago, they decided to test the nutrients compared to organic eggs nine times more vitamin D. I mean it's just organic doesn't have that. I mean you can find anything. Organic doesn't mean ship, No, it doesn't mean anything. In fact, yeah, rattlesnake venoms organic. Yeah, I mean chickens are omnivores. Chickens are dinosaurs, little dinosaurs. If they were bigger, they would eat you if you stumbled and fell to chicken man, he knows, he knows this whole world. So they need to eat those stink bugs and worms and stuff uff like that. So if they do that, the nutrients so those eggs is off the chart. Because when you're feeding just grain, whether it's organic or not. They're not getting the proper diet. And so we've been working with a guy U. C. L A who wrote a book called The Mine Gut Connection, and our gut biom is so depleted compared to hunters and gatherers that it's only about of what it should be. You know, a hunter gatherers have heard there's one tribe in Africa that's still hundred gathers. They have between eighty and one thousand different things to eat, and they eat like this, you know, just picking this and that and and and when you sit down with a steak of baked potato and a sell, this guy says, you're starving yourself. You know, if you eat a spinach as opposed to kale, you're getting different nutrients. And it all comes from their starting to realize, like, look at grapes, Okay, wine wine grapes in Central Valley and California grow caberty Sono grapes and you get eight hundred dollars a ton, and it makes you know, plunk wine. Two hundred miles further north, you get up to thirty dollars a ton, same grape. So what's the difference. It's all about the longer growing season. The longer the great matures, the better wine. It makes a quick maturity, and a hot climate makes ship wine. All these polyphenols that make taste are missing. And um uh. I know a guy who's bought a farm in Italy and it had an eight year old olive trees in her and so he tested the olive oil from those trees and it's so full of polyphenols. And that's what's really good for your gut. That's what's so good about the Mediterranean diet is all these polyphenols and olive oil. It's off the chart compared to the younger and that's because the longer the roots, the more nutrients you get. And uh, you know, modern wheat has roots like eight inches deep, and we've been working with uh wheat called curns that's a perennial wheat. The roots go down fifteen feet and we tested the nutrients and that off the chart compared to normal wheat. I think I struggle with this and and like you're speaking to me because I eat like a highly varied diet and we actually have a gut biologists or there's a doctor that specializes and stuff that she wants some. It samples off me and Yanni because we need so much, We need so many weird things, need so much wild game. And I'm looking forward to getting that back. But then the thing I think about is now knowing now that I know so many families where they're real wealthy and their food obsessed, and everything they eat is so carefully selected, and their children aren't allowed to eat this and that processed, and they can't have sugar and ship and they never had a pop and all they eat is kale all day. I don't see them spinning off these amazing physical specimens. But then you have people who are coming out of like you have people who are coming out of inner city, broken homes who went up becoming uh professional athletes who are the most physically capable, powerful individuals you've ever seen. Or that you go to people like the Incan Empire where they ate potatoes and the accomplishments there and impoverished people planes Indian tribes eight three things. And when you talk when you read about the U. S. Cavalry discussing the way that like at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the way that those people moved through their ranks, like a wolf through sheep, Like I feel it and I hear it, and I'm like and I and I think about it. But then I just never see when you look at the population in general, I never see where you have uh, really wealthy people who have the luxury of food choice that they're like so much tougher and ship like. In fact, I often kind of see that they seem weak. Their kids are riddled with allergies, you know what I mean. So like I want to believe it, but when I look, I don't see it. It's it's puzzling to me. Like i'd love to say like, but I just like, I just like it's hard for me to grasp, you know you as military is it's really worried right now because they can't get anybody to sign up for the military who can pass the physical seven. That's not because that's not because of how deep the roots on we are. That's because of what they're doing. What they're doing, what they're doing physically, well, it's it's the number one cause they're rejecting seventy something percent of people who want to be in the military. This isn't a draft where you get every loser physical fitness well, number one is allergies. Number one causes allergies because these kids have never played in the dirt, you know, and they're they're allergic to all kinds of food. Allergy. You can't have that in the military. Numbers too cause of diabetes, which is you know, food based, food based number obesity, it's all based on food. And you know, they're going to spend two hundred fifty million dollars in the next couple of years trying to get people to join the military. But it's I talked to this professor U C. L. A. Henry Meyer Emeron Meyer, and I said, well, what can you do about building up your gut by them, because all these immune diseases that we're getting from Parkinson's, you know, a l S and everything, it's it's all in your gut. And he said, well, forget about probiotics. It's the best thing you can do is have as very diet as you possibly can. Be a graezer. And you know that's what I do when I walk by a wild rose bush, always, Papa, you know, one end, because I eat dandelion as I eat you know whatever. And I try to do that as much as I can and he said, that's the best thing to do, and then eat, um, you eat meat, but it's small amount. And uh, he says, well, you know, I don't know what else to say. But he did say ten years from now, we'll be looking back and say, I can't believe we used to prescribe antibiotics. Man, I've been pretty I've been pretty sick and laying in the hospital. You're gonna be making You're gonna be making a fortunate I hear ship pills. Yeah, maybe I don't want to give him one. I don't mean yeah, I don't mean to trivia, that's what you're saying. But it's just like I try so hard to make it make sense. But then I imagine, like if you went to you know, like if you went and got the kids out of the swankiest, the most philosophy riddled private school in l A and then went and got a bunch of hard farmers kids out of Nebraska. Those hard farmers kids kicked the ship out of those kids. So it's like, I just like, it always is puzzling to me, man, But but I do I think but von saying is that those hog farmer kids might be getting more of what he's saying, is good than those other kids held a lot more dirt. Yeah, they're getting more nutrients. You know what they're getting the exercise Stanford Universe. He did a study in two thousand thirteen. They studied organic vegetables and our organic vegetables. They just went to a supermarket and got organic carrots and non organic carrots. They found no difference in nutrients. That's the thing that people don't understand. Like, I think that there's a big misnomer around what the hell organic means. That's right. You could like you could do like you could have a hydroponics establishment and give a carrot only what it needs to become something that resembles the shape of a carrot and be organic. That's right. Hydroponics now can be organic. And all you're doing in between crops, as you're adding liquid fertilizer and you know, just a few soil moments, you're not replaced all those micronutrients that were only discovering how important they are. And whereas regenitive organic uses cover crops and composts, so in between crops, you're replacing that. And so if you go to a supermarket and you taste a carrot that's organic and one that's not organic, and they taste the same, they have the same nutrients. If one taste better than the other, the one that tastes better has way more nutrients. A wild strawberry that's you know, quarter inch across yesterday has more nutrients then just gigantic, hydroponic or organically grown strawberry. It's it's uh, there's a direct correlation between taste and total nutrients. Yeah. Man, when you grow your own carrots at home and um is not even the same thing. Man should come up with. Remember you're talking about like when you're doing a can hunt. As you come of a different word for it. There should be a different word from when you make it when you grow a carrot. Oh, you can say that for tomatoes. You can say that for cucumber's, strawberries, and the strawberries that we get in our garden. I mean they just they blow your mouth up, you know, and then you go to the store and they're hard and flavorless. Let me tell you what's wrong in the world. I'll say you from one anecdote, what's wrong in the world. When I was living in Seattle, I uh identified this little slope in my yard and put in, Uh, you should back up and say that you just transformed what you had, what what was there when you got there, because that's a part of it, right. But like your house was set up for like fancy urban landscaping. Yeah, and it was like it was kind of we had the kind of place where you get like a lot and they build the house. They over built a lot so bad, like the house took up so much the lot that they were invited the house would have been in violation of having too many non permeable surfaces, so they had to put in a permeable driveway in order to have it not exceed non permeable surface status because it's a hell of lot of rain. I don't if you've heard comes down to Seattle now and then um anyhow I put in, I start putting in the strawberries and whatever it is, I don't know, man about why. I mean, this is something it This thing was like you couldn't keep up with the strawberries in here, best strawberries you ever ate, tons of them, couldn't keep up with them. And they were just like yeah, I was like, man, these things are gonna wip cracking the foundation on this house. How these strawberries went. And we sold that house. We live there not too long sold it, and my neighbor it was like, man, those new people took out the strawberries, and I'm like, I just can't picture, you know, I mean, God bless him. Uh, I don't know the first thing about I'm sure the great people probably broken down inside the rold. They probably you know, jump out and help you. But um, yeah, it's hard to imagine, like the the view that like, oh, here's the thing you can eat and it's just growing here. I wish it wasn't there. Yea, I wish I wish there wasn't something there that made like a great thing to eat. That's what I like these things more than likely because who doesn't like a strawberry? But I would rather just go down to Whole Foods and buy the tasteless. The world would be better if those berries were not growing there. But yeah, we used to have a weeping willow. Man. Um, we had a weeping willow on our yard on our beach when I grew up, grew up as a kid, and muskrats a den under it because they had roots, structure and bullheads would like back into the muskrat dens and lay eggs and everything in the world. And remember the old man getting sick of raking the leaves and got rid of that weeping willow. And there's not on my lake where I grew up, which was ringed by weeping weeping willows. There's one. There's one weeping willow that I know about, and it sits in front of a kid when I was growing up who was named Justin Russell, and his phone number was six death A weeping willows left there all right, man, Um, thank you very much for coming on. I've been wanting to have you on for a long long time. Well anytime I'm I'm just down the road, and you know you got better fishing here, and well we can walk around on the stream. We can walk our streams. My kid's been probably walk one right now. Um, okay, thank you again. I appreciate it.