Joe Rogan Experience #1955 - Cliff Gray

Cliff Gray tells Joe how he left a finance and trading career to buy a run-down Colorado outfitting permit and grow it into a 200-client wilderness elk operation, eventually staffed largely by Amish crew. Much of the conversation centers on Colorado's ballot-driven wolf reintroduction, which Cliff argues is irrational because the landscape is already heavily human-altered and the people voting for wolves won't bear the consequences. They dig into predator behavior, mountain lions, bears, moose, Bergmann's rule, and the economics of game management. The episode also covers hunting ethics, gear intimidation, archery, and why Cliff prefers real outdoor adventure over the 'metaverse.'

• Cliff quit finance, bought a run-down Colorado outfitting business, and grew it from ~12 clients to north of 200 clients a year.
  00:03:33
• By the time he sold his main outfitting business about 18 months earlier, the majority of his crew was Amish.
  00:15:37
• Colorado's wolf reintroduction was forced by a narrowly-passed ballot initiative that classified wolves as a non-game species, limiting management.
  00:34:21
• Cliff claims the viral 'How Wolves Change Rivers' video contains a 'bald-faced lie' about humans failing to control Yellowstone elk.
  00:48:23
• Derek Wolfe's mountain lion was 170+ lbs dressed; Joe describes 200-lb-class lions with arm-wrestler forearms.
  01:04:00
• Cliff estimates one wolf eating ~15 elk/year wipes out ~100 sellable tags, costing Colorado Parks and Wildlife roughly $30k per wolf annually.
  02:15:29
• California bans lion hunting yet pays 'mercenary' houndsmen to kill about the same number of lions each year.
  02:09:47

• Some Amish churches permit email and cell phones for business based on preserving 'pace of life,' creating apparent technology loopholes.
  00:16:08
• Bergmann's rule: animals in colder climates grow larger to conserve heat, named after 19th-century biologist Carl Bergmann (1847).
  00:54:36
• Yellowstone historically controlled elk by transplanting them to other states and by having rangers shoot them, not just via wolves.
  00:51:30
• In 1979 Colorado guide Ed Wiseman, mauled by a grizzly thought long extinct, killed the bear by hand with an arrow.
  01:00:21
• The collared P-22 cougar lived in LA's Hollywood Hills, surviving largely on pets because deer are scarce there.
  01:21:38
• A Bay Area study found roughly half of analyzed mountain lion stomach contents were domestic pets.
  02:11:51
• Maui Nui harvests invasive axis deer at night using thermals and a mobile USDA-approved field system, requiring instant skull-cap headshots.
  01:44:29
• Wolves were originally eradicated from the West partly via poisoning carcasses with strychnine.
  00:38:28
• Wolves leave 'tufts of hair everywhere' on kills and act as a constant cleanup crew, killing nearly every day.
  02:18:06