Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Coming up on the Warrior Kings podcast, hunting a bear with a knife sounds awesome. In theory.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: In theory.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: I don't think it would work out in your favor though.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Probably 9 out of 10 times not so good. They forget about the incredible awe and splendor and wonder of the natural world. And most importantly, being in an environment where there's a greater intelligence than human intelligence. The average hunter gatherer is eating like 1500 foods a year. So we're in like a nutritional bankruptcy because of the lack of diversity, diversity in our diet. We are so arrogant. We love to act like we have mastered nature and we can't even make food yet. To me, that's what the point of getting married is. And when you can do that, it's powerful. And she will become more beautiful and more sexy and more available, more open to you.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Welcome and welcome back to the Warrior Kings podcast. Today we have Daniel Vitalis, modern day hunter gatherer and host of the show Wild Fed on the Outdoor Channel. And today we're going to be talking about wild food and hunting and gathering and getting closer to nature and our natural human state. Stick around. Hello and welcome to the Warrior Kings podcast. I'm your host, Michael Riggs, here to assist you on your journey to living a fully optimized, leveled up life as a man. Awesome to have you here today, Daniel.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Thanks, Michael. Man, I appreciate you having me on and especially appreciate you putting me in front of your audience. Means a lot to me.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: So for those who might not know your work, tell us a little bit about what you do.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Well, what I do right now is make a TV show for outdoor channels. So I'm talking about that antiquated old model you may know as of as cable, which a lot of people have forgotten about. But I do have a TV show on there. It's my sixth season that I'm making right now. So we just premiered our fifth season, just aired, and onto our sixth year now, which is amazing. And we every episode we hunt or fish, a protein, an animal, and then we gather plants or mushrooms and then we take those ingredients and oftentimes I'll work with another hunter or another forager kind of do all that because we travel from place to place and then we'll take all those ingredients back to a kitchen, sometimes to a restaurant or a chef, sometimes to a home cook, sometimes just to me in my own kitchen. And then we'll produce a meal that's really the celebration of everything we did. And so we'll all kind of gather around everybody who is part of the episode will be there and we have that meal. And it's really a way of encouraging people to rekindle a relationship. You know, in the past I would often say things like with the natural world, but almost like at this point thinking more like a chance to rekindle a relationship with reality as we move like further away from it. So ultimately the big picture of that is really connecting people with the real world because I think we're entering a place where, as strange as it sounds like people are starting to spend time in what isn't the real world.
But, you know, I have a longer history than that. Of course.
I podcasted quite a lot with two different shows, one called Wildfed and one called Rewild Yourself. I was a public speaker teaching in the health world all around the U.S. canada and around the world. I have a nutritional supplement company called certhrival that's now 17 years old, operated out of here, out of Maine, here where I live. And so kind of do all that. I'm a husband athlete, like you said, a modern day hunter gatherer. And I love nothing more than to get to teach and share. So this is kind of, you know, podcasting, like this is something I do.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: A lot of awesome, beautiful. I love WildFit. It's an amazing show. I love the way everything is shot, you know, that it really shows the beauty of the ingredients, you know, and seeing the process of how everything is hunted and gathered.
It's been super awesome to watch it.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: You told me, I think by message that that's something you haven't really participated in much. Is that correct?
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Hunting and gathering or wild food? Yeah, I wouldn't know the first thing about it. I love, other than what I've seen from you, but I love the concept, especially getting back to our natural state as humans and we're all so detached from that. You know, I definitely have a huge interest in it, but I've never dove into it myself.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: I just. To me that's so cool because, you know, ultimately I don't think it's like something somebody has to do. I just think it's one of those inroads that can lead to something, but there's other ways to get there too. And it's interesting to me, the idea of people watching the show who that's not something that they do. So I think when. Well, that was ultimately kind of like a big goal for me, was hoping to make it interesting to people who's that wasn't their lifestyle. And so, you know, that's really Cool to me to hear that you like the show because, you know, they're seeing it. Seeing animals killed or seeing, you know, plant ingredients processed.
This isn't something that most people think they would find that interesting. I mean, it kind of, you know, for, for the killing component of it, which is this essential part of life, but, you know, easy to kind of push into the shadowy recesses of reality so we don't have to see it. It's like that can be off putting or even stimulates people's internal fear of, you know, mortality, I guess. And then, you know, I can't think of like what sounds more boring than watching plants get processed.
And yet, you know, it's cool to me that something that's exciting to people to watch. So thank you so much for your support.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And I've always loved culinary shows like chef's table, stuff like that. So it's like putting a new spin on a culinary show, you know, I think that's what caught my interest in the first place. And then I got interested in the entire wild food. Wild food process.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, when I have girls, I like cooking shows like that too. And very often you see these incredible meals come together with ingredients that all came from the supermarket. And you know, I kind of got to this by asking myself like, well, where this, where did this stuff come from before supermarkets? You know, and it seems almost kind of a little cliche to talk about that. But very few people will really follow a story to the source, you know, like. Yeah, most people don't want to drill down enough. Understandably. Life is really busy. But when you keep drilling down on food, boy, it just gets more and more fast fascinating as you get closer to what it actually is.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: And a lot of the processes of the hunting are fascinating to me. Like bears.
When I, when I think of hunting bears, I think of the revenant, you know, like coming face to face with a bear and battling. But seeing the process of how that was done, you know, it's awesome to watch.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Obviously I'm not looking to be disadvantaged. There's this kind of, there's this thing that you hear a lot from non hunters where they'll, you know, I mean, it's, it's again, it's just one of these like oft repeated things that you hear where it's like, well, it's not really fair. You have a gun and you know, it's like, you should do that with a knife. I've heard, I've had so many people, I, I couldn't count how many people have said to me, I should kill a bear with a knife. And it's like, yeah, like, who's ever. Whenever would that be a thing? It's like telling a cattle rancher like, oh, you should go kill your cow with a knife. Like, that doesn't make any sense at all.
Orally, people have fed themselves this way, and they're always looking for how do you do it in a way that doesn't. That creates the least risk for you as the hunter and then makes the likelihood of you getting those calories high. Because if we burn too many calories in the pursuit of calories, then it's kind of a net loss.
And so a bear is an incredibly valuable animal off, you know. Well, I'll first say a bear is an incredibly valuable animal just in and of itself. It doesn't need to be food for it to be a valuable animal. They're incredible as a living species, but, you know, also as a food, because like a cow, you know, they have all this beautiful red meat, but like a pig, they also have a tremendous amount of body fat that can be rendered into oil.
And so they become really incredibly important food resources for people in the northern tier of the world because there's not a lot of oil on the landscape. And so, you know, bear hunting is just one of those things that allows you to produce both oil and meat, and that's incredibly valuable.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: Hunting a bear with a knife sounds awesome. In theory.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: In theory.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: I don't think it would work out in your favor, though.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: Probably nine out of 10 times, not so good.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: And a lot of these processes go back probably hundreds, if not thousands of years. And there's. They. A lot of them look modern now, like the. The way you do them. But these things have been passed down for generations, right? These methods of hunting and gathering, right?
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I mean, this is. This is the origin of. And you know, it's kind of interesting. Like if you took the kind of, I guess, more current, classical evolutionary approach to how we got here, Then it says 300,000 years were hunting and gathering before we develop agriculture. If you take the sort of biblical perspective, we were hunter gatherers. And then the sort of like the fall of Eden happens. And then it says, by the sweat of your brow, will you earn your bread?
And the ground's going to bring forth thorns and thistles. So it's a reference to switching from hunting and gathering into agriculture, production of wheat. And so somewhere in our history, basically, like whichever way you kind of look at it, at Some point in our history we shifted over to agriculture in this thing that we now call the Neolithic revolution or you know, the agricultural revolution. It was very hard on our bodies. You know, agricultural food is lower in nutrition than wild food and the acquisition of it is more labor intensive. And so when you look at the output of energy from a farmer versus the output of energy from a hunter gatherer. So if you kind of were able to go around the world and you looked at hunter gatherers, you'd see that they're, they're not working that hard in the acquisition of their calories.
They work obviously, but it's, it's probably more like a part time gig. And then, you know, I know some farmers and they're up very early and they're done working very late and their bodies are quite broken by the process and they're able to produce surpluses of calories, which is amazing. But it's very hard on the body. And so it's not what we were initially evolved or designed for. We're definitely hunter gatherers still, even if we're not doing it anymore. So most of us aren't living as hunter gatherers, but biologically we're hunter gatherers. So it's like you could feed your cat a vegan diet and be like, my cat's a vegan, but it's like, no, your cat's actually a carnivore. You just, it's just eating like a vegan.
Similarly, like, you know, you can get all your food at Chipotle, that's will sustain you, but ultimately you're still a hunter gatherer even if you're not living as one. Like that's what we actually are. So you know, some animals are frugivore, some are grainivores, some are carnivores, some are herbivores.
We're omnivores that hunt and gather.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: The hunting and foraging. A lot of it looks strange to most people now, but it's actually what we're supposed to be doing. You know, I find that interesting.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like the reverse of what people think. So they would, they would look at it and think it's strange maybe, but what's actually strange is the way we're living. And so this is a completely new lifestyle really in the last 150 years.
You know, we've gotten to a point today where a lot of people have never seen the full grown creatures that they eat. And so it's like everybody eats lettuce, but they've never seen a mature lettuce or everybody eats, you know, these different animals that they've never really been around, or people don't even really know where their ingredients are. I shouldn't say where they come from, but even, like what they are sometimes.
And so, you know, very often I get to present to somebody a food they've eaten their whole life. They've never seen it in its living form.
That's. That's a completely new phenomenon. So people have never been this divorced from the natural world. So we're living. So I call this environment we're in right now artifact land.
And the reason is because of this, I think, very important word that people should really understand, which is the word artifact, which is where we get the word artificial. And it's also where we get the word art.
And so the analogy that I like to use is to say if you were walking around in the desert and you. You bent over and picked up a stone made of flint, and you also bent over and you picked up an arrowhead that you found that had been discarded by some hunter in the past. The stone arrow point, that was also made of flint.
Both the stone and the piece of flint would be made of the exact same material. So if we could look at them with like an electron micrograph, we'd see that they're exactly the same compositionally, but one of them is a natural stone.
The other one is an artifact. The word artifact means to be shaped by human hands or shaped by human will.
So when we are in nature, all the things around us weren't made by people.
But when we're in the urban environment, almost everything around us is shaped by people.
Almost nothing's left intact. So you could say, like, well, what about the, you know, the cats and the dogs here? It's like, well, those are domesticated, you know. What about the trees in the city park? It's like, well, those are all mostly domesticated horticultural varieties that have been planted by people that have been changed genetically through breeding. I mean, you look up at the sky and as you see as many contrails as you see clouds, even the sky's been altered.
So everything around us has been essentially been, not necessarily man made, but somehow shaped by human hands and human will. We're actually headed in artificial world. Artificial world. We're heading into artificial intelligence. That's intelligence shaped by human hands and human will. So, so we're living in kind of an artifact land. It's almost like an amusement park. You could think of our cities as like a kind of weird amusement park where everything is artificial. Now, if you live in that long enough, you start to forget what the natural world actually is, what a lot of. And then people start to think of it as a hostile environment, a foreign environment place with bugs and dirt and grime and gross. And they. They forget about the incredible awe and splendor and wonder of the natural world.
And most importantly, being in an environment where there's a greater intelligence than human intelligence. And that's, I think, the most important thing, because in artifact land, humans are the greatest intelligence. And you could start to think we're the greatest intelligence in the universe and. And that level of hubris leads to absolute catastrophe over and over again. And that's kind of where we're headed right now, which is like where we're loading the dominoes for catastrophe out of arrogance because we've forgotten that this isn't a man made world.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Some things look weird to me too. Honestly, I don't think I could eat cicadas.
I don't think I could do it.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: Yeah, you could.
You could. So you're referencing. Yeah, we did an episode about 17 year periodical cicadas.
What's neat about that? So those guys are underground for 17 years, feeding on roots.
And then after 17 years, they emerge out of the ground and go through shedding of an exoskeleton, emerge out of that and then go through a breeding cycle. Then they go back underground for 17 years.
So those. Well, they lay eggs, I should say, and those eggs hatch underground and those guys live 17 years. But it's neat to think of a bug that's 17 years old. First of all, pretty incredible, you know what I mean? Like, it's incredible.
A Turkey lives like three to five years, you know what I mean? A 17 year old insect is pretty incredible. To say you couldn't eat them is like really what you're saying is you're not that hungry? You know what I mean?
Yeah, it's like I often say, like if you were, if Bill Gates was thirsty enough, he'd give you his entire life fortune for a thimble full of water.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Right?
[00:16:12] Speaker B: I mean really, like I'm. It's not even hyperbole. It's like you get thirsty enough, doesn't matter, right? You get hungry enough, you'll eat cicadas. And actually they're. They're like pop.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: What does it taste like?
[00:16:23] Speaker B: So I wouldn't say so much taste because they'll taste like whatever you cook them in.
Most insects do that are edible. Their texture is like a.
You know, like cheetos Fritos. Is that what they're called? Fritos? Yeah, like crispy, kind of. I wouldn't say crunch, but like crisp and dry.
So I think what freaks people out is they imagine something like a cicada will be like jelly inside. Like a bug would be jelly inside.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: But I would imagine.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: No, no, no. They're dry like a chip. And then. And then you can spice and salt them. So this is called entomophagy, and that means the eating of insects, and that is as ancient as any human practice. I mean, this is just something that's been going on forever. Everywhere you go in the world, people eat insects at certain times of year.
And they're not considered like a.
A survival food. Like, oh, we have to do this because of a lack of food. They're actually considered usually delicacies. And this is still, like, you'll still see these on the menus for Oaxacan restaurants still that do, like, you know, grasshoppers are a common Mexican dish. You know, they'll sort of spice them and everything, and they can be really nice, so.
And obviously it's coming back in a big way too, I think, with, you know, cricket proteins and things like this, too.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Another one that got me was iguana.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Down there.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Those are in Florida, right? Yeah, yeah.
I don't know. Something about eating a lizard, but like you said, if I was hungry enough, I probably would. And tacos make sense because you can't go wrong with tacos. So.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: Yeah, you can't. I don't think you'd have a hard time eating an iguana, man. I mean, maybe you'd have a hard time looking it in the face, face and eating it like that. But once you prepare it, I mean, it's just a beautiful meat.
It's funny how picky we've become about food, because the thing about human beings that's so interesting is from a food perspective is really different than a lot of other animals on the planet. I mean, most animals have, like, a pretty specific diet, a species specific diet.
Some animals only eat, like, one thing, right? That's it. But we eat everything.
So we are, like the most, you know, kind of iconic omnivore in that if a thing in the environment can be rendered into food, human beings figure out how to do it. And this part of why we've been able to live everywhere in the world, from the Arctic to the equator. But that means that we've got to figure out how to turn everything in our environment into food.
Now, the average American, yourself included, is eating, like, about 30 foods a year.
And just so you have some context, eating 30 foods a year.
That'd be like if in your whole life, you only watched a couple of movies and you. You thought of yourself as like, yeah, yeah, I've seen a lot of movies and be like, no, you haven't.
It's like 30 foods. Like, the average hunter gatherer is eating, like 1500 foods a year.
So we're in, like, a nutritional bankruptcy because of the lack of diversity in our diet.
Now, when we were growing up, when I was growing up, I'll be 47 this year. When I was growing up, we had, you know, kind of like this idea of four food groups. That's like, not a very popular concept anymore. And then, you know, I've watched this change. So we go through. See, one thing that shouldn't change are dietary recommendations. That shouldn't change.
The fact that that's changing tells you it's like a fashion thing and tells you that there's financial and marketing kind of stuff going on. The human diet doesn't. Shouldn't change, like, as far as, like, what's good for you and what isn't. It doesn't make any sense. Like, how old are you?
[00:20:09] Speaker A: I'm 36 now.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: You're in 36 years. How many times have you been told eggs are good? And how many times you've been told eggs are bad?
[00:20:16] Speaker A: A lot and dozens, right? The best human diet, every year, a.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: New one just keeps changing, right? It's like, are eggs good or bad? I mean, they can't be good one year and bad the next year and good the next year. And then only the whites. And then wait, turns out just the yolks. And then wait, just turns out you want the whole thing. And then wait, no, we're back to the whites. Like, that's insane, right? It's either good for humans or it's not. We're not changing that fast. So the fact that diets keep changing is not a good thing. But I've watched in my lifetime, high protein diets be considered good. High protein diets be considered poisonous. High fat diets be considered poison. High fat diets be considered optimal. I've seen high carb be recommended currently. High carb, low carb is what's being recommended, right? This just keeps changing and changing and changing.
That's ridiculous. And it shouldn't be that way.
But ultimately, if it can be rendered into food, human beings turn it into food, and that's probably a good thing. And Our diet shouldn't be based on macronutrients, and it shouldn't be based on fashion.
It should be based on the species that we consume. And that's the biggest thing that everyone has forgotten, is that ultimately food is living creatures.
If you're a vegetarian, you're eating living creatures. If you're a vegan, you're eating living creatures. If you're an animal eater, you're eating living creatures. I mean, they're not living when you're eating them, but they were living. That's how they turned into food.
Right. Because one thing I love to point out to people is that if human beings could make synthetic food, we would do that.
So think about this for a moment. Think about all the things that we can make.
Plastics, for instance.
It's incredible from that, all the things that we can make.
We can make iPhones, and we can shoot rockets into space, but we can't make food out of something that isn't food.
So we have to currently get all our calories from living creatures.
That's just astonishing when you think about that.
So, you know, if there was a way to make us fake fat, you would have that in chips today. Or if you could make fake carbs, like, athletes would be eating it on, you know, or people being it on the space shuttle or whatever. You know what I'm saying? Like, we can't do that. We are so arrogant. We love to act like we have mastered nature and we can't even make food yet.
So when you see a highly, highly processed food, a candy bar, it still came from living creatures.
It came from cacao trees, it came from dairy, from cows. It came from sugar cane juice.
It came from all of these, you know, peanut plants. Like, all of those things have to live out a life cycle, produce their calories through their interaction with the ecosystem or the sun and photosynthetic efforts and things like that. And then we can refine it down into food. But humans can't eat synthetic things. And so our relationship to food is actually relationships to living things.
That's an important piece to remember, because ultimately it's not what you're eating, but it's like, who are you eating?
Historically, humans. Like I said, we ate about 1500 different creatures a year on average. Something like that could be 2000, could be a thousand, something like that. But it's not 30.
So you think about.
You're married. Do you ever watch, like, the Great British Baking Show? You ever seen that?
[00:23:48] Speaker A: My wife does. Okay, Yeah, I haven't tuned into that One yet.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: I'm a big fan. All right. So when you watch people bake, you could watch them bake something different every single day. And the end product will look different than everything else they've made. But it's always the same ingredients. It's wheat flour, eggs, milk, salt, yeast.
Right. They just keep shifting that into a gazillion different products that look different at the end. So you go through the supermarket, and it looks like you're buying all this different stuff, but you're buying wheat, corn, rice, a couple of different fruits, a couple of different nuts, a handful of animals. And so to wrap this, I'll bring this all the way full circle.
You see somebody eating an iguana, and it shocks the senses, but it's, again, it's reversed. What's actually shocking is a person only eats, like, four different animals their whole life. That's like, whoa. That's a major deficit deficiency. Okay, so remember before I said growing up, before food groups were popular, and then what we started learning more about was, like, macronutrients. So that was where we started really talking protein, fat, carbohydrate. Then we started to really understand micronutrients. So we started talking about, oh, man, there's more than just fat, protein, and carbs. It's like, we got to start thinking about vitamin A, all the B vitamins, vitamin C. We need zinc, we need molybdenum, we need calcium, all these micronutrients.
Now we're learning there's another nutritional component, and that's genetic.
So that's like rna, micro RNA from plants. And so we actually, because, like I said, food is actually living creatures, when we ingest them, we're ingesting their DNA and their rna. And so now we're learning about something called nutrigenomics. It turns out you are impacted by the genome of what you eat. Does that make sense? And so if you're only eating 30 foods a year, then it's like a massive information deficit, because the genome is information.
Just that word is so cool. Like, think about chaos. So let's say you have a hundred people, and they're just all milling about randomly. That's chaos. And then you line them all up, rank and file. Now they're in formation.
Information is when things are in a formation.
Right. And so the genome is information. It's a language or a code that we don't know who wrote. Exactly. Right. But it's a code, and that has an impact on you. And so if you're not getting a good Broad range of DNA in your diet.
That could be one of the factors leading to so much degeneration in the world. So what we want to be doing is generating and regenerating.
But what's actually happening, what's killing people today, they're literally called the diseases of degeneration, degenerative disease.
We are degenerating when you think about that. So we spend all this time talking about evolution and adaptation and biohacking and all this stuff. And in then reality, what's happening, we're degenerating.
So when I have this story that really stands out to me. I lifeguarded when I was in my 20s down at the beaches in Maine and my first year of lifeguarding on the beach. I remember the first day we had this lifeguard shack and on the walls were all these photographs of every lifeguard squad going back to the early 70s.
And if you went from the earliest ones and you walked forward, kind of looking at each one, you could see the degeneration year by year.
When you went back to the 70s, the way these people looked was incredible. All the men and women just like beautiful skin, beautiful tans and muscular, fit, athletic, beautiful dentition, just great bone structures. And then year by year it's just getting worse and worse. Until you got to our squad where we were just like, like ragtag, zitty, misfit, braces, glasses, like the whole kind of like broke down version.
We're degenerating fairly rapidly now and largely because we've removed ourselves from our natural environment. We no longer are getting those all important epigenetic inputs from the environment. And then our food is so corrupted as well. So all of that's leading to degeneration. So the takeaway from this is that eating a lot of different species isn't just a novelty shock factor thing. It's actually getting that variety that people know they need, but they think they're getting in the supermarket and they don't realize they're just eating the same 30 foods rearranged to look like a hundred and thousand different foods, but they're all the same stuff.
[00:28:41] Speaker A: And one of the things that was fascinating about watching Wild Fed was that there's just an abundance, abundance of food all around us. We just don't know what we're looking at. Like lilies, things like that.
Especially with foraging, I wouldn't know what I was looking at, but there's such diverse food all around us. But like you said, we just go to the grocery store and get this easy to buy stuff.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of times what will happen, too, is that there's foods in the supermarket that have a wild counterpart that grows around us, and people don't recognize the wild counterparts, so don't even.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: Know what it looks like.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: Yeah, we have a lot of wild carrot here where I live. Queen Anne's Lace, Very common plant. I mean, you'd find it growing up through the sidewalk cracks all over the place here. Abandoned lots, roadside. Most people would never know it was a carrot. It wouldn't know that's where carrots come from.
They just go buy these carrots. And. And most people don't know that carrots were not orange. I mean, carrots have been genetically.
I don't want to say it like we didn't use genetic engineering to do this. We used breeding to do this. So the same process that turns a gray wolf into a Chihuahua turned Queen Anne's Lace into this gigantic sugary orange carrot that we eat today. But carrots were purple until a couple hundred years ago, and we started breeding them, and they became more fashionable to be orange, and so now they're orange. But, like, that isn't the food in nature, you know, so there's. There's food in nature people don't recognize, and then there's foods that people eat that are under their own feet that they don't recognize too. And. And that just comes from a kind of illiteracy that we've developed through this degenerative relationship with nature. So today, most of us are nature illiterate, or even if we might be nature literate in one department. Like, for instance, I don't have a ton of skill in birding, so I have friends, even no little kids that could tell you every bird call they hear in the distance. I don't have that skill. I'm kind of bird language illiterate. So I have, like, one slice of the pie where I can add a lot of value because I've become a storehouse for knowledge in one area. But. But the full package of a human being in nature most of us don't have. If you want to develop all of those skills, you. You kind of have to go live in, like, a wiki up in the woods and kind of do the whole bushcraft primitive skills thing because it's very difficult to do it and still have a life in the regular world, too. So, you know, I think what's important is that we've picked skills that make sense to us. Food's been my principal interest, so I have a lot of expertise in that area. But most of us, even those of us who've become very nature literate, I think the more nature literate you become, the more aware you become of how much you actually don't know.
[00:31:22] Speaker A: And you started your wild foods journey as an adult, right?
[00:31:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I did. I mean, I, I'd say I, I've. I have memories of foraging certain foods as a young kid because I just figured it out. So I lived always in a kind of suburban or even more rural. I grew up in New England and so there's a handful of plants like I remember just. You just figure it out. As a kid, I just put things in my mouth. So I remember like discovering that you could eat the seeds of Shepherd's purse. It's a mustard family plant with a real spicy, mustardy flavor. I remember eating Japanese knotweed in my backyard because it tasted like rhubarb and we called it bamboo. When I was a kid, I didn't know what it really was, but it was a handful of things like that that I figured out as a kid.
But in my 20s, I got pretty into foraging and I actually didn't start hunting until my late 30s, so. Mid, late 30s.
So, you know, just to say I started in my, let's say my mid-30s and I'm in, yeah, my late 30s and now I have a, you know, in my 40s, have a TV show about it. And so just to say, you, you know, I use that as an illustration to say you can learn fairly quickly if you take a sophisticated adult learning approach.
I think, you know, not to veer too far off the topic, but learning how to learn is one of the most useful things a person can do. If you bumble through the learning process or you're haphazard about it, you can't really, you know, there's so many things I want to learn. Like, I'm so passionate about learning.
And so in order to do that, I have to be sophisticated in my approach to learning.
And so I need to be able to learn things quickly and get to the heart of matters rapidly. And so I took that approach of learning how to learn to hunting and was able to develop that skill more quickly than if I had because I didn't have the luxury of starting when I was 9 because my dad took me or my uncle took me. And you know, year by year you learn a little bit and you don't have to learn too much. It's just a, you know, like if you start as a kid, you could have like one hunt a year and Those, those add up and you develop lessons out of those that carry you through your life. But if you want to learn at 36 or something, you know, you, you got to put your nose to the grindstone if you want to pick it up quick. And so I'll just say that learning how to learn, learning how to immerse yourself in information, learning how to find mentors. And I think today, when I was growing up, it was still the era of libraries. You know, I grew up in an era where we didn't have computers.
That's crazy to think about.
You know, I'd go to the library and we, you know, you'd find books based on this. I probably don't remember, but this thing called a card catalog.
All the books were stored on little index cards, you know, and that's how you, that's how you found them. And they had a little pocket in the back of the book, and they would stamp that index card and put it in the back of your book, and that's how they would keep track. I mean, a totally different world. And so it used to be finding information was the challenge, but now we have a new challenge, which is sifting through all the information because there's so much. So when in my generation, early in, we needed a different skill set to find out things.
Today, a person needs to know how to discard 99% of the information coming at them to find the gems. And that means kind of have to have like an internal compass or a dowsing rod or something that like helps you go identify real information and learn how to discard the stuff that's not valuable.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: And getting started in this, you want mentors, right? Community, friendship, so that you can learn all of these different skills. Because sometimes I'll see guys loading up their boats or loading up their gear, and I'm like, should I go talk to them and start a conversation? You know? And has that been how you found a lot of friendships and mentors in what you do?
[00:35:16] Speaker B: Big part of it, yeah.
I take a multi pronged approach.
So when I'm interested in something, I read about it, I get books about it, I get magazines about it. Magazines are often written for people who are already interested in something.
So they're a place where you can figure out the language that gets used around a topic. So let's say you want to learn about flying kites and you go get like flight, you know, kite flyers, weekly magazine or whatever, and you start reading some of those articles, like in that you're going to start to Pick up, how do people in that world talk about that topic? And they'll be like language, that's industry specific language. And you can, the quicker you pick that up, the more easily you can have those conversations with people. You know what I'm saying? Like an educated conversation.
Books, again, really valuable videos, really valuable documentaries. If there's.
When I wanted to learn how to shoot firearms, one of the things I did early on, in addition to a lot of things, like go to school for it, all these kind of different things. But I watched this show on History Channel called Top Shot. They made a couple seasons of it. It was just like a show where they get shooters together and these shooters would have to shoot all kinds of different weapons and competition style reality show, man, I learned and improved so much from watching that show. So if I want to, you know, I find a show like mine, you know, or Meat Eater would be a great hunting show as well. Or, you know, there's a couple other shows out there kind of in this genre where you go and you just watch through that catalog. You're going to learn so much from that.
Like you said, approaching people, not being afraid to approach people. But also, you know, if you want to learn to hunt, let's say, you know, your state sells hunting licenses. And then they're more and more offering workshops. Some are online, some are in person. You go, you take those workshops, right? Or you go down to the outfitter, like let's say the Cabela's in your area or the Bass pro shop and you go see, are they running any workshops? Do they have any authors coming through or you know, people. They often have mentoring events, stuff like that. So you just kind of dialing in all that. And if you can kind of do all those things at once, you can go from like zero to pretty developed in six months at least. You know, cognitively, you're only going to really develop certain things by being out in the field and doing it. And that's where really having those relationships can be helpful.
But ultimately mentoring is a crucial component. But it's only one component. But back to your point, so I'll touch on that. I would do just what you said. I mean, I'd see people pulling their boat if they look to.
I don't just approach anybody or everybody, right? It's got to feel right. They got to have, you know, I'm not interested in hanging out with yahoos. Like, this is a world where you've got everything from like incredibly mature individuals who have a very balanced worldview to really reckless nutjobs who I don't want to try to even, you know, who are breaking the law basically and doing their own thing. So, you know, you got to be discerning and use the sort of discernment. But.
But if I see somebody who looks like they might be able to help, I'll just go talk to them. And the biggest thing is being alright.
The most uncool thing to me is somebody who's trying to act cool.
And it's like, guilty. Like, I've done this most of my life. Like, it took me a long time.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: Yeah, same. We all have.
[00:38:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So if you go up, like, acting cool like, you know something, I mean, it's just gonna be easy for them to spot that it's like super douchey. Nobody's interested in that.
But if you go with, like a genuine sense of, hey, I'm really sincerely interested in like learning about this, you know, can you point me in any directions? Is there, you know, people in that world want to share so much because the world of hunters is shrinking. There's. There's a bit of a boom happening right now. But generally speaking, the trend over decades has been shrinking. And so people want to pass this stuff on. You know how you said before, it's like, this has been passed on since the beginning, the dawn of time, the dawn of human cognition. This has been passed on patrilineally. So people want to pass it on. And if you seem sincere and you're not trying to act too cool or like, you know, anything, and if the other big one that people forget, it's like, you want to learn how to cook really good, offer to go wash the dishes in a restaurant, you know what I mean? Don't go, hey, can I come in as a line cook? Be like, I'll come wash the dishes. And it's like, man, that humility and humbleness, and you work that and you work your way up. That's how you kind of get your foot in a door, is you be willing to be useful to people.
So it could be like, hey, I'm willing to come out and untangle line or do whatever you guys need. You know, like when I wanted to learn how to work on, you know, how to catch lobsters, it was like, hey, I'll bait the traps. It's a disgusting job that most people are like, you want to do that? Sure, we'll show you how to do that. And then, you know, pretty quickly they realize you're competent, give you better jobs, and that's how you learn. So I really recommend that because this is a pretty hands on kind of thing to learn, especially when it comes to, like, you can use YouTube videos and books to try to learn how to gut a deer and field dress a deer and butcher one. I mean, you could, but I mean, with so many people potentially out there as mentors, why do it that way? Just, you know, learn from people who can show you hands on.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that's one of my reservations in diving into this is there's kind of a. I don't want to say fear, but reservation that if I spark up a conversation with someone, they'll be like, what do you mean?
[00:40:45] Speaker B: You.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: You don't know how to fish, you know, and I'll feel stupid or something. But like you said, many of these people want to pass these skills along.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And like, if they're the kind of person that's going to make you feel stupid about that, then they're probably not really that, you know, the, the right. I mean, getting laughed at here and there, you know, it's like very often my wife will hear the way my friends and I will tease each other and joke with each other and she'll be like, man, that's kind of harsh. And I'll be like, oh, no, you just don't understand. It's like we need that a little bit. Like, men do that to keep each other sharp and so we don't get too softened up and so that we, you know, we find each other's weaknesses and poke at them to help everybody toughen up. And I think there's something good in that. But then people take that way too far. Right. So if somebody is the type to belittle you, then it's like, that's not who you want to learn from anyone anyway. I'd also recommend the older the people are, the more they want a young guy in the hunting world is wanting to kill and just pile them up. You go through phases and that, you know, that is a legitimate phase. You just want to be successful. You're out there trying to get the bag limit every day. As guys start getting older, they care less about that. They're more there for the experience and the time. And then there becomes a phase where they're more invested in you getting success than in them succeeding.
The hunts that I go out and I take somebody out and I help them get their first animal are so much more rewarding than if I had shot the animal.
It's just, it's like a double high for me, you know, and I'm not at that phase yet fully. I'm. I still like to get out there and get my, you know, get my thing done. So. But when somebody's in their 60s, 70s, 80s, boy, they just want to pass this stuff on. So, you know, the bear hunter I first approached was at a gas station, and the guy was almost 70, and he took me right under his wing. You know, he eventually walked my wife down the aisle. You know what I mean? Like, that's.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: That's beautiful.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: That's kind of a cool relationship to develop. So that stuff's very possible. Go after older folks for real mentoring. They're going to know more.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Anyway, one thing that I wanted to talk about was the legal limits and things like that and the importance of that, because you might have some guys that might say, how do. How are they going to know If I took two or 10 or, you know, but this keeps the balance, right?
[00:43:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So hunting and fishing are very regulated legally. And this is not the case with foraging. It's a much more complicated world because, you know, a game warden has to learn the species in their environment that are hunted.
So let's say here in Maine, that's like a dozen species.
That's not hard for a warden. Most of the wardens here are already hunting their whole life anyway, and they're passionate about it. They already know these animals, but there's hundreds of plants here.
That's. These guys aren't botanists. You know what I mean? And then regulating plants, it's just a whole different, more complex thing. So that's still yet to be developed, but I think somewhere down the road that will be. But hunting right now, the way it works is you have a law enforcement wing, so that'd be your. Your Fish and Game department or whatever they call it in your state. And the wardens, who are like the. The police of that department and. Or on the ocean, it would be like your Department of Marine Resources.
But then you also have the science side, and that's the biologists. And the biologists are doing things like population dynamic studies. They're figuring out how many of these animals there are, and then they're issuing either tags or bag limits based on how many animals can be harvested to stay within something called compensatory mortality.
So compensatory mortality is something like this. Let's say that we have a hundred of a certain animal on the landscape in the state, and we know that every year 20 of them die, whether they die from starvation or coyotes or people shooting them, 20 die every year no matter what. That's called compensatory mortality.
Now, if we start killing an extra 10 and that puts us at 30, now we're in something called additive mortality. That's not good. We don't want to get into additive mortality where we're actually starting to draw down on the bank account.
So think about a bank account. It's like If I have $100 in the bank and every week 20 goes in, and every week 20 goes out. We always stay right at that beautiful spot. We always have the hundred in there. That's how they're trying to manage these animals. Unless they want to bring the population up or down, and then they'll adjust those numbers, right?
So typically, that's how that stuff's going to be regulated.
The biologists are making recommendations for the legislature that then enacts those laws that are then enforced by the wardens. And by the way, wardens are a tricky bunch, man. These guys are not idiots. You know what I mean? Like, when you're a warden, first of all, like here in my state, you're a warden, like, that job comes with a truck, a four wheeler, a boat, snow. Snow machine and a gun, you know what I mean? And they have incredible jurisdiction, the ability to, like, come in your house, look in your freezer. If you're poaching here in the state, if you poach and your truck's involved, they're taking your truck like they're taking your gun, like you're losing all that stuff, right? And these guys know how to. First of all, they're like cops. They're very good at, you know, they can tell when you're lying, right? Most of the time. But a lot of times they don't approach you until you've already been watched by them. So you're out there thinking, you're alone, I'm gonna take an extra fish or two. And you don't realize they've been watching you with binoculars. And they come up and ask you how many you have, and you lie, and they already know you're lying, right? So it's like, that's the kind of situation that said, I would say in the hunting world, there's always a little bit of a cops and robbers game. There's a little bit of a, like, oh, that rule's stupid. And you get like this kind of push and pull there. But generally speaking, the new crop of hunters in the world are pretty on board with the way it's regulated and pretty happy with the System overall, it's not perfect, but.
But the laws are there so that we can do this in perpetuity.
So I don't think anybody who's. Who. This feels like a very thoughtful podcast to me. I can't imagine that the people listening to this are the type. Most of them, who would be wanting to.
Who would be like, kind of approaching this from a selfish place. I think it's usually the opposite. A lot of times, people who've not hunted throughout their life come to it with almost an excessive amount of reverence.
You know what I mean? So as you do it, like, at.
[00:47:30] Speaker A: First, I feel like that's how I would be.
[00:47:32] Speaker B: Right. You kill your first deer and it's like a whole ceremony and you're crying and you're like, trying to come to terms with taking a life. And, you know, it's so overwhelming. I mean, all of that stuff. But over time, as you do it more and more and more, you get to where it's less of an intense experience.
And when you've grown up with it, it's more. People who've grown up with it, who didn't develop that reverence for it, are the type to take maybe more than they're supposed to. But usually new hunters who come from a thoughtful place are pretty careful because they almost feel a little guilty. It's interesting. People will feel guilty about taking a wild food out of the environment. They have no qualms about taking a food out of the supermarket.
And the impact of food out of the supermarket is so much more on the world. But people have, like, everything is backwards in people's heads, you know, so.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: Because just that's how detached we've become.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: Yeah, we're very domesticated.
[00:48:31] Speaker A: Natural way of living.
[00:48:32] Speaker B: Very domesticated. Yeah. And so it takes some time doing it to get that big picture overview of how the whole thing works. But just know if you're coming into hunting, there's a very established legal system in place that's been working for a really long time.
The whole world is not like that. So we have something here called the North American model of conservation, and it's the best system in the world for this. So a lot of the world, you can't hunt at all. Or, you know, if you do, it's an extremely limited sense.
And you have these bushmeat and. Or poaching things going on in much of the world. So, like, it's a huge problem in Africa is like, bush meats, people, animals are regulated, but poachers still go out and kill Them because people want to eat them. And that could be anything from elephants to gorillas, you know what I mean? Like, that stuff's all getting eaten. Bushmeat. That's an illegal black market trade. Here in North America we have a really good system. There's plenty of hunting opportunity for everybody to get involved in. Who wants to get involved. It's regulated in such a way that there's very little poaching comparatively. And yeah, there's just a lot of access and opportunity here. So we have.
The average American has no idea how much is in place for them to be able to participate in this. From public lands to how inexpensive a hunting license is to how many programs are in place to get you started. I mean there's, there's a lot of resources here. People just don't know this is something they've inherited through their citizenship or residency.
[00:50:08] Speaker A: Do you feel spiritual connection to hunting and gathering? Is there any spiritual element to it?
[00:50:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's one of the most spiritual things to me.
When you take a living creature and you build your body out of that creature.
I don't know what else to call that but spiritual. I mean, all, you know, again, cliche like life feeds on life. But wow. It's one thing to say it, it's another thing to see it happens.
And you know, you look at these animals like a lot of times like I rifle hunt mostly.
So, you know, you're looking through your scope into the, at this animal. I mean you, it's like you're killing, you know, and incidentally, I think that there's a, there's a lot of women in the hunting world right now. I'm not sure if this is still true, but for a while women were the fastest growing demographic in hunting.
But I don't think that that's going to be a necessarily a very long term trend because I think that, you know, we have these sort of what are considered today like these antiquated traditional gender roles. But obviously these things have been in place for so long because they actually are how nature shook it out.
And typically it's women who nurture life and men who take life.
So this is an important component for men listening.
Your traditional gender role requires you to kill. There's just no really way around that. I mean, the degree to which human beings need protein.
And by the way, you know, for anybody who, who wrestles with this and the idea of vegetarianism, it's important to understand that vegetarianism is not possible in a wild food world. There's no vegetarian society of just gatherers. The only time you have vegetarian societies is when you have a tremendous amount of domestication and it requires domesticated animals for two reasons. One, India is our best example of this, where we have a civilization of vegetarian people.
But you need manure for your crops, of plants that you're going to eat. So you can be like, I don't eat animals. I just raised them for their poop. And then typically you need dairy or eggs. And so long term, you know, this idea of veganism is.
It's just, you know, I was a vegan for 10 years. I speak with a tremendous amount of experience about this.
There's just no population study anywhere in the world of vegans who have children that are vegans, who have children that are vegans. It's never even had. Nobody's ever even done that. It's not really possible.
So you either have to raise animals for their milk and eggs or their manure at the very least. And so that means you're demet. That means you're putting animals in fences. Right? That makes sense. So it's like the idea you're gonna slink out of the ethical killing thing, it's just you don't get do that. So traditionally, men take life when I take a life. And this gets more complicated the more anthropomorphic the animal is. So you brought up bears when we first started, and probably there's not an animal that's as triggering to people who don't hunt.
Right? Why? It's like you skin a bear, it's like you're looking at a dude.
First time I saw a bear scun out, I was like, oh, that's just a bear. Muscular dude.
It's shocking. Shocking.
The more it's like a person, the more intelligent it is, the harder it is.
There's something that I have to do when I press the trigger that's sort of like steal your heart, you know, turn it to steel, lock it down.
Because unless you're a psychopath, it's not like I want to just go around taking lives. It's kind of the opposite.
I'm only doing it to sustain life.
But that's one of those incredible paradoxes of getting this opportunity to live on Earth is that one paradox is in order to sustain life, which is my primary directive, it's like, I want to take care of my family. I want to sustain life to do that. Now, look, we have surrogates now. So now maybe that's going to your job because somebody else is killing and you're earning the money and then you're buying that food that somebody else killed. And so there's all these steps in between, but it's still kind of the same thing. Somewhere something's dying for you to sustain life, but when you're the one doing it directly.
I shot a red squirrel the other day, just this little tiny rodent, you know, for the show. And I mean, I just, I'm looking at this cute little squirrel through my scope. It's not like I want to kill him, I want to be successful. I want the meat, all of that. Yeah, but it's like, yeah, if there was a, if there was a squirrel tree I could just go pick one from, I would do that instead, you know?
Yeah, but that process to me is so spiritual because I'm going to take that being, you know, Inside your heart, you have this small organ called the sinoatrial node. And that's the place in your heart where electricity is generated. That's the rhythmic kind of pulse that coordinates your, you know, your heartbeat. Like, where's that even coming? Where is the, where's the lightning bolt inside your heart come from? You know?
[00:55:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:20] Speaker B: What is that? It's like, I mean, we just, nobody can explain it, right? But we have.
From somewhere outside this dimension comes an energy into the heart that creates your life. In this dimension, when you go take that away from something and then you eat its body and you incorporate all its carbon, like, into you, and its life story is like, incorporated into your body. When I sit down to a meal and the skull of that animal is like, like in my living room looking at us while we eat that animal.
How do you not just feel humbled by the whole thing? You know, like, wow, this. What a life. Like, and then you think, like, wow, I'm covered in all this bacteria and yeast and the second I die, that stuff's eating me.
Like, maybe I'm not going to get eaten by jackals, but like I'm going to get decomposed by something else too. It's going to live off my body. And so it's like this whole meat suit you're wearing is like a temporary thing, temporary structure, and it's food for anything else that can get it. You know, you're basically spending your whole life trying to fight stuff off from eating you, even though it's not, you know, thylacines or saber toothed cats anymore.
Maybe today it's just bacteria and yeast, but we're all food here in this place. And we're here this is a temporary ride, right? No one gets out alive.
It's a roller coaster.
It has twists and turns. It's very exciting, but it has an end. And so when you're ending something's life prematurely, man, it's like maybe one of the most spiritual things that I take part in.
And when I feed it to people and I watch them have the experience of just eating it and enjoying it, but they don't know what happened. They don't know this. They weren't there in the field, like, when I saw that animal bleed out or breathe its last breath or looked in its eyes when it was dying. Like, they don't need to know that. But I know that. And to me, it's powerful, you know.
[00:57:18] Speaker A: So you get to experience that provider aspect of it.
[00:57:22] Speaker B: The provider aspect, the taker of life. That's another component, because that's a huge responsibility, ultimately. And then it's like this component of life that's so much realer than the gossip in the news and tabloids or whatever the Republicans or the Democrats are doing or, you know, all this nonsense that's, like, constantly got us feeling like it's really important. Have you ever seen, like, you see a news clip from the 1970s? This will happen to me sometimes I'll see some story that'll be like.
Like in a documentary or something, and it'll be the Congress, you know, all going off about some big story that was a big deal back then and is not a big deal anymore. And you realize, oh, these things that I think are a big deal now are like, that. Like, one day we'll look back and be like, oh, it didn't really matter that this politician did this or said that. I mean, it matters, but it's like, not that big of a deal.
That kind of stuff all comes and goes.
This thing we're talking about life and death. That's real. That's reality.
And I think people would be a lot humbler. Like, look, it's a lot harder to get mad at another driver in traffic when you're spending your time gutting animals that are bigger than that, dude, you know what I mean? And you start realizing, like, this is not that important. Like, I don't know why this guy's rushing so much, needs to be in front of me so bad, or, you know, is on my ass so hard, but, like, I don't care, man. Life and death, it's like, there's real things going on out there. This isn't one of them.
And so I think it Refocuses you on what's important.
And one of the biggest things, you know, there's a tremendous body of research on the fear of death and mortality. I mean, it's just incredible. I spent some part of my life looking into this, and the research is amazing.
You know, I don't know if you've looked at it at all, but there's this idea, like if you give somebody what's called a death reminder, so they do these studies where they would have somebody read something, and in it would be something that reminds them that they're gonna die one day, and then they put them in different situations. And people respond very differently when they've had a death reminder.
Because without that death reminder, we get really arrogant.
We tend to be filled with hubris.
So when you're gutting an animal, you cannot help it. It's a death reminder. You know what your blood looks like, and there's their blood. And you're like, man, it's the same stuff.
And you pull out a liver and a heart, and you're like, man, I got one right in here inside me. You know, you're, like, very intimate with it. I think having skulls around, this idea of memento mori, Remember, you two will die.
I like having skulls around. I got a photograph of my own skull that I got from my dentist. You know, like, they did this X ray on my head, and I was like, wait a second. Can I have a copy of that?
Because, you know, I got over on the wall over there, my life in weeks. It's like a chart. Every week, you fill in a black square, and it's like, I'm ticking it down, dude. I'm gonna be out of here soon. And it's like, if you're not coming face to face with that regularly, you can forget. This culture wants you to forget. You look at these. Look at these old, aging stars who are trying to stay young forever, right? It's like, so. It's almost grotesque. You know, I think everybody kind of saw Madonna a couple years ago at the. Some award thing, right? And her face looked like she'd been stung by all those bees and everything.
Just like it's grotesque when people can't come to terms with mortality.
So hunting helps you do that because you're around death a lot, and it creates an internal peace that's crucial for people in this very otherwise very confusing world we're in. Because, you know, I hear these things, oh, if you can just live 10 more years, you'll never die, because we're gonna have the technology to live forever. It's like, you're kidding, right? Like, you can't really think. It's like, how confused. Like, are you kidding? Like, how confused have you gotten that you think that? Like, that's very, very unlikely. Extremely unlikely. So maybe get outside and do something in nature to be reminded of how far away from reality you're getting when you start thinking of stuff like that.
[01:01:31] Speaker A: That's beautiful.
And I have one last question for you, but it's a curve ball.
[01:01:36] Speaker B: Throw it.
[01:01:37] Speaker A: What is your number one tip to having a happy, thriving marriage?
[01:01:41] Speaker B: Just one tip.
[01:01:44] Speaker A: You can say a few things. That's cool, too.
[01:01:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, first of all, I have to say I'm in a really outstanding marriage with an incredible woman. And I think if somebody's not married, guys get your head screwed on straight. I say this, like, as a guy who lucked into the right woman, but now I know kindness is way more important in a woman than all those traditional, like, hotness things that we have been sold on.
It's like the idea that when a woman is seductive, when she's hot, that's a thing she's doing. That's not a thing she is. It's a thing she's doing. It's like when a guy is charming, that's a verb, not a noun. He's not charming. He's being charming, right?
So if you don't want a seductress, you've been sold this idea that you want this woman who's. Who's like, you know, this super hot sex goddess thing. And it's like, man, you want a woman who's kind, first of all, and who's compassionate and who's nurturing and loving. I think that's really, really important.
So I feel really blessed because I pursued a lot of the wrong women for a long time. I mean, I had a very robust single life, and I am so lucky that I ended up with an incredible woman.
I think it's really crucial that you never stop dating your wife. I mean, like, you know, you think almost like you get the ring on her finger and all that. And then it's like, okay, now we're like, locked in. It's like, man, you need to be actively doing all things for me. I write a lot of notes, man. I mean, I go through post it notes constantly. I'm on the road a lot, too. So before I leave, I leave like a dozen notes. I'm hiding them in her purse. I'm putting them on the mirror. I'm tucking Them in the refrigerator, you know, all those kind of things. Like, romance is really important and it doesn't come naturally to men. Usually after they've acquired the woman.
It's like we're really good at being romantic when we want to acquire the woman and then we, once we have her, it's like we fall off. But that doesn't end for her. She wants that and she wants that to continue on.
And then, man, I could say a bunch of things like my wife's really big.
[01:04:04] Speaker A: Another episode topic almost.
[01:04:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot, a lot to it. But I think a big part is that as a man starts to age, it's important that he's accessing his heart.
And so learning how to use heart based cognition, not just this like brain based cognition, learning how to also be kind and to be generous with your love to people outside your family and to be generous with your love to your community makes your wife admire you, you know, and when you're an asshole, not just to her, but to other people, I mean, a good woman doesn't like that, you know. And it's taken me a long time to these patterns that, like, for me, all my patterns, particularly trauma based patterns that come from childhood and stuff like that, that stuff dies pretty hard.
So I mean, I'm just like, I'm a complete blockhead. I'm just constantly having to work on this.
But slowly, slowly I'm getting it that the things that allowed me to survive and build the first half of my life are not the tools that helped me to thrive in the second part of my life.
So now it's like she wants you to be more Eragon from Lord of the Rings than Conan the Barbarian, you know, and that's that mature, you know, kingly love and strength that has the ability to be strong when it needs to be, but also has compassion. I think that's very attractive to a woman. And so, you know, pursuing that not just for her, but pursuing it for you, it managed. Makes your woman love you and.
Yeah. And keep it romantic because they, they. It's easy to let that slip. Especially with all the, you know, challenges of life.
[01:05:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And all the distractions these days too. That's, that's awesome, man. Thank you for sharing.
[01:06:00] Speaker B: Can I have one more component?
Yeah, not necessarily. I don't know, maybe it's something you talk about or not, but. And it might not, not everybody was going to want to hear it, but like your wife should be the center of your sexual fantasies. I think the more like Pornography, even softcore pornography. Like, all the stuff on social media that, you know, I mean, it's crazy what social media has become, right? It's become so hypersexual.
It's so easy to get drawn into all of these other women, even AI Generated women, Just. Just endless stream of sex, right? There's a covenant of marriage, but then also there's like, the energy between you guys that you need to keep contained inside that. And when your energy is going out towards other women, especially if you're obviously cheating, even flirting, but even just spending too much time looking takes your energy away from your wife and out of that container. And if you knew she was doing that would probably hurt too, you know? Like, you wouldn't want her doing that.
Knowing how to, like, learning and practicing, it's a practice. Like, meditation is a practice, martial arts, a practice. Yoga is a practice. Like, this is a practice of learning how to keep your wife the center of all of your sexuality.
To me, that's what the point of getting married is. And when you can do that, it's powerful. And she will become more beautiful and more sexy and more available, more open to you. But the more you're. She doesn't have to necessarily know what's going on in your head to feel your energy pulled in other places. And that will affect your marriage in a negative way. And you got to be more careful than ever, because, again, like, growing up, for me, if I wanted to look at even close to naked women, it was like the Sears catalog brost section.
Now you're just getting rained on with porn everywhere you look. And so of all shapes and sizes. And so it's like, you got to be pretty. You got to be strong to avoid that, because you have a natural inclination to be drawn toward it, because that's male sexuality. And this porn is like. It's like dragging a worm in front of a trout.
The trout knows something's not right about that worm. The way it's moving, that little glint of the fishing line it sees that goes for it anyway. Man can't help itself. You can't do that. You got to be careful about that. So a big thing is, like, keep your wife at the center of your sexual life, and she'll be happy and you'll be happy.
[01:08:35] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, Daniel, it's been awesome having you on today. Thank you for taking the time and.
Yeah. Do you have anything else that you'd like to add?
[01:08:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I just want to reiterate, like, when you get out into the natural world, you're around things people didn't make. And I think that in the coming years, it might not seem like it now, but 10 years from now, that's going to be one of the most important. Nature is going to be one of the most important ways that we stay sane, because everything's going to be artificial.
So start developing a relationship with the natural world because we're headed for kind of mind prison if we don't.
[01:09:16] Speaker A: So again, a huge thank you to Daniel Vitalis for taking the time to come onto the show and teach to us today. It was just an incredible experience. I'm going to put some links in the description of this podcast episode or this video so you can find Daniel Vitalis online. Definitely get subscribed to the podcast and the YouTube channel if you're not subscribed yet. Next week we have on JD Emmons fit over 40 dad to talk about the journey to sobriety and how it has changed his life and his fitness journey. Really looking forward to that. Thank you so much for watching and listening today and I'll catch you on the next one. Thanks guys. Bye.
