Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1395 - Glenn Villeneuve
Uploaded: 2019-12-07T20:00:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1395 - Glenn Villeneuve' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1395 - Glenn Villeneuve' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-12-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1395 - Glenn Villeneuve

boom here we go what's up Glenn how are you man hey Joe nice to meet you in
person good to come
down here to meet you dude you you're one of my favorite characters on that
show it was uh it was
always weird watching you for people don't know where to life below zero it's
um this crazy show
where people live you know in this very rugged terrain and you you you're the
most interesting
life because you when you would live up at the cabin you would live by yourself
just you in a
very small room just uh hunting all your food and and hiking around you didn't
use any vehicles and
you just kind of had a rifle and a frying pan and a pot and a place to sleep
and you seem really happy
up there oh yeah I'm having a good time I just wanted to strip everything away
that I could dispense
with you know um I got the idea I wanted to go back to living like a hunter-gatherer
back in 97 I
just got this idea I was actually living in a tent in the woods down in Vermont
having such a good time
I thought where could I go with this what could I do with this kind of
lifestyle and I decided to move
to the Brooks Range of Alaska what was it like so you what made you go live in
a tent in the first
place I just always liked the outdoors I just love nature and you know I was
doing other things too but
there was this this one summer when I was in my 20s when I found this really
cool spot in the woods and
I thought hey I'll set up a teepee over there and I'll just hang out there this
summer as much as
I can and I just had a great time so I started thinking more about you know
instead of just
living in the woods kind of as a recreational thing I started thinking about
hey how could you
actually make a life living like this you know get up every morning with the
animals around the sky the
water I started thinking about I started reading anthropological stuff about
hunter-gatherers that
summer and I started getting ideas and it it took me seven years to make it to
the Brooks Range and
to get out to that lake that you've seen on TV and to actually start living
that way it took me a few
years just to organize my life enough to move up to Alaska and then once I got
to Alaska I was kind
of in Fairbanks for about four years before I could really spend long periods
of time in the wilderness
but once I got it all arranged I just drove up the hall road which is this
industrial road that
goes up to the North Slope oil fields it's very very unimproved in areas just
gravel road for
hundreds of miles I drove about 300 miles north of Fairbanks I parked my van
and I walked 60 miles
off of that road by myself out into the wilderness and started figuring out how
to live off the land
how did you know where to go oh I had found the spot a few years before I had
actually found that
lake flying around in a little bush plane because part of my plan originally
when I formulated this
idea back in Vermont I thought I'll become a bush pilot that'll be a thing I
can do in Alaska you know
um so I was thinking about starting an air taxi service I had been studying
flying for a few years
as soon as I got my private license I jumped in the plane and flew to Alaska
but then when I got up
there I was getting my commercial and all that and in the meantime as much as I
could I'd go out and
explore look around and I discovered this lake one day when I was flying across
part of the Brooks
Range and I set up a little tent camp there that summer 2000 but it took me
another four years before I
could actually walk out there and start living 60 miles walking yeah that's a
long way
hey I walked the length of Vermont when I was 13 years old I walked you know
did you really
Massachusetts to Canada but um the difference is when you're 13 yeah I actually
started when I was 12
gave up the next I was with my uncle we went for about a week and then the next
summer I convinced
my mom to drive me back down and drop me off alone where we had given up the
year before but uh that's
just just you by yourself yeah when I was 13 I was alone but that's a trail
that's called the long
trail and it's marked there's a little paint mark you know on the trees up
ahead of you telling you
where to go yeah but still you were 13 yeah that's a little kid yeah and your
mom's like go go ahead
it was amazing I was given a lot of freedom I guess so I mean I'd already quit
school by the time I was 13
you know really I went back a few times but uh yeah I mean I I never I never
finished the uh
fourth grade to tell you the truth but I went back I went to one year of high
school
eventually I was curious about what was going on over there did you ever get a
GED or any of that jazz
no I never needed a GED for anything I did but I went to ninth grade and uh you
know
I did my own thing after that but you seem like an educated guy do you self-educated
if I got any education it's self-educated yeah I mean I just I like to be
learning all the time
whatever I'm doing I like to learn but if I'm making a tv show I want to learn
everything I can
about it you know if I'm flying airplanes I want to learn a lot more than I
need to know to do what
I'm doing um and it's the same thing with uh going out there and living just
learning as much as I
could there's so much so much to learn out there now how long did it take you
when you're 13 and like
what did you do for food oh well that was easy buy it at the store and carry it
on your back I never
hunted when I was a kid oh okay I mean I remember going once or twice with some
uncles of mine we never
got anything I never I didn't have any real hunting experience until that
summer I walked out to the
lake really yeah so you really just had a rifle and didn't quite know what you
were doing I'd read a
lot about what to do the biggest thing Joe I got out there I had two months
food I left two months
worth of food at the lake okay to get me started and I walked out there in July
can I pause you for a
second when you say two months food like what did you bring oh I had left uh
basic stuff grains leg
you know some beans some rice stuff that you knew you could survive a jug of
oil you know basic some
flour was out there and I left that the year before when I had a plane it my
whole plan to become an air
taxi and and do the bush flying I at that time I realized this doesn't go
together with living off the
land in the wilderness so I actually sold that plane that summer and drove up
the road and walked out to
where I had left these supplies the year before and decided that's what I
really wanted to just go
live off the land I don't I don't need an airplane anymore I don't need to fly
so um when I got out
there I had there was a 55 gallon barrel and it had some food in it had a few
supplies I had a tent you
know it was insulated but it hadn't really become uh a cabin yet it's the same
place that you've seen but it
was just uh a little less a little less solid back then and the cabin as it
stands you built
yeah well I flew in the plywood and stuff and then when I got out there I put I
put I had a wall tent
originally I'd had a tent camp out there since 2000 I built a plywood cabin
under the wall tent basically
that's what I did but um when I got out there I had some food I had my rifle I
had fishing equipment
I started living I started improving that little cabin you know and by
September I ran out of food
like complete I had one bag of flour this little plastic bag of flour
it was all I had left when it got cold enough that I figured I could start moose
hunting so
that was my plan I got to get a moose why did you have to wait till it got cold
there's regulations
bugs you got to preserve the meat I've got no freezer I had you know I had to
wait until
like I still do when I hunt moose my moose hunting season starts the day I can
leave a piece
a scrap of meat out on the ground all afternoon and go look at it there's no
fly eggs on it
that makes sense wow that's crazy so you have to other than the rifle aspect of
it
you mean you're really living like a primitive hunter-gatherer I would have
used a bow and
arrow if I thought I could have survived there's your spot right there there it
is hey well if you
only want to gather meat the rifle is the way to go you know I was always
trying to just
let go of everything I could I could do without but I never got to the point
where I thought
I could make it with just a bow and arrow myself you know people used to
survive out there
before they even had archery they survived out there with spears but there were
groups of people
they would build a fence they would corral animals yeah they would put nooses
up between
trees to get a moose things like that there's also probably a lot more animals
I don't know that to
be the case maybe not Alaska Alaska probably not too much different but
throughout North America like
if you listen to or you read rather the uh tales of um um uh Boone and not Boone
and Crockett uh the
Lewis and Clark when they made their way across the country like they found a
lot of game there was a
lot of animals I mean it was just an abundance of animals and then of course if
they ran into buffalo
obviously there was millions and millions of buffalo unbelievable that's the
difference between Alaska
and down here down here we've modified everything yeah we've paved everything
over Alaska is still wild
northern Alaska is the most wild place left in this country that's why I went
there it's barely this
country too I mean it's not even attached yeah some people don't really think
of Alaska as the United
States it's not but it's not it's a frozen Puerto Rico it's way up there it's
it's not even connected to
us it's one of those weird ones but it it is wild and and you see actually that's
what drew me to it
the first time I ever saw the Brooks Range was years before I moved to Alaska I
was on a flight
I used to get jobs as a courier when I was in my 20s I was real interested in
traveling
and I found out this way I could travel all over the world as a courier so I
would go to New York
City I'd get these jobs as a freelance courier and take off to wherever they
need me to go and one
time I got this flight to Tokyo and I'm flying right across the whole length of
the Brooks Range great
circle route New York Tokyo takes you right across it 600 miles of mountains
from the Canadian border
over to the Chukchi Sea across from Siberia and there's one road across it in
600 miles and I was
just glued to the window the whole flight looking at that wow I thought someday
I'm gonna go check that
place out on the ground you know I mean it's incredible when you see those
mountains they're
big mountains they're up to 9 000 feet high and that one road is the hall road
yeah the hall road
also known as the Dalton Highway that was built in 1974 just to construct the
Alaska pipeline
to get to the oil up at Prudhoe Bay on the north slope the oil fields up there
they built that road
in one summer it's amazing story in itself wow yeah they started in April and
they had the whole thing
done in one summer from the Yukon River all the way up to the Arctic Ocean so
when you got down to one
bag of flour yeah was there a part in your head where you're like what what am
I doing here no I never
wondered what I was doing no no yeah oh it always felt right for you oh yeah
what I was doing there
was looking for a moose yeah and you already had that whole shed built yeah for
meat oh there's no
shed for me well what's that thing that you do you have everything like covered
up the sod house yeah
no that came that came like four years later oh yeah no no I didn't have that
yet I didn't even have
a meat pole really no I built the meat pole after I got the moose the same meat
pole that's still there
that you've seen is 20 feet high and I built that with a piece of parachute
cord and a a little block
and tackle that you can fit in the palm of your hand that just had parachute
cord around it and I
I had to get well that big it's I'm actually talking about that plat