[SPEAKER_03]: Hey everybody welcome back to the mastering rod building podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host Bill Faulkner and we have maybe one of the most important episodes in my mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've ever recorded today and I have a very very special guest and that is the founder of the
[SPEAKER_03]: three hours, but Andrew holds a JD and a master's of public health from the University of North Carolina.
[SPEAKER_03]: He is a partner at Arnold, Golden Gregory and B.C., which if you move in those circles is a very prestigious firm.
[SPEAKER_03]: And as I mentioned, he's the founder of the EKG Mate Federation.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what is EKG Mate?
[SPEAKER_03]: What does Shinkage Mate?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, we're going to dive into that today.
[SPEAKER_03]: He has done extensive work in partnership with not only the Ministry of Agriculture, forestry and fisheries with the Japanese embassy, but with the Japanese embassy as a whole in DC.
[SPEAKER_03]: In 2024, working in conjunction with the Rhode Island School of Economics, he had a project that
[SPEAKER_03]: They won the Salt and Tall Kennedy Grant 2024.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, I realize 99.9% of people listening may not know what that is.
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you look it up, it is literally the Nobel Peace Prize of Fisheries Grants and in this particular case.
[SPEAKER_03]: Andres work with the Rhode Island School Economics to improve the value of the commercial seafood industry in New England.
[SPEAKER_03]: One that's extremely prestigious grant.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is like a life's work.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's been featured in big game journal, Vox.
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... the yomi irish in boon which is the largest uh... it's kind of like out of the new york times of japan it's the largest uh... newspaper in circulation uh... he's an avid angler and slingshot enthusiast and most recently he was featured in giki magazine in article on this very topic and labeled the asian josh brolin which is it's great fun for all of his friends including me and he will never uh... live that down but please welcome
[SPEAKER_03]: my mentor and fishing buddy Andrew Choi.
[SPEAKER_03]: Andrew, how are you, man?
[SPEAKER_01]: Great to talk to you, Bill.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I appreciate that intro.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm humbled at the thought that I'm immense more because I, I would consider you one of my heroes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So feeling as much.
[SPEAKER_03]: We, we, you mentor me in slingshots and cooking in fish care.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I literally, this true story, I, uh,
[SPEAKER_03]: I, I was, I never had the stones to try my own whole fish crap until you should me how to do it, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And you, you've changed the way I travel when I'm fishing in terms of my little packets of stuff I bring with me.
[SPEAKER_03]: You change how I butcher my fish rather than just flame my fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: You changed how I care for my fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been transformational and much to my benefits.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm happy to sort of, you know, try to get you into the dark arts of slow pitch,
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm probably coming out on the positive side of the ledger with that trade but we'll bring it into balance over time so this is I'm still honored to have you here and I'm I think the work you're doing is.
[SPEAKER_03]: was amazing to me as someone who's been a fisherman, my entire life, someone who's eaten fish, my entire life.
[SPEAKER_03]: From the time I can remember, we not only fished for fun, but for protein, for food source.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I've been eating the fish we caught since I was a youngster in Texas.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't remember time we didn't.
[SPEAKER_03]: And yet, I'm enthusiastic about all different ways of cleaning fish, preserving fish, have vacuum sealers, and chamber sealers would have told you I was obsessive with my fish
[SPEAKER_03]: And man was I miss in the boat, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so tell us really quickly at a at a 30,000 foot level, what EKGMA and Shika Jimey and Shika Jimey is.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I'm going to tell, I'd love to tell a little story about what convinced me about the difference that it makes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I guess I'll begin by saying that EKGMA is really about food.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: As I think a lot of anglers make fishing, central to the skill of fishing, but EKG may sort of make food central to the skill of fishing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're fishing in the service of food.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess at a high level conceptually, I think about EKG may as, and shinkage may have any of these other fish care handling techniques as creating optionality.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the option is to be intentional and in the service of perfecting the food product.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not a,
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a requirement, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's basically this option to say to yourself, if I had going to keep, then here's what I will do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to maybe we'll get into that a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll try to address maybe the term EKG-may, a little bit more squarely.
[SPEAKER_01]: EKG-may, as translated from the Japanese,
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, literally means a live killing and one of the troublesome hearts of that transliteration is that it's taken somewhat out of context because it's so literal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the context in which it appears is food.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a lot of content is a live killing in the service of food.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we kind of prefer to describe EKGMA as a considered kill, right, considering the, you're considering the animal and therefore you're killing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think I like considered kill.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's a great way to describe it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, in service of food, I would almost put it to anglers this way.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're going fishing, and if part of the point of going fishing is like, I've gone fishing this week, and the point was to catch red snapper and to catch trigger fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: As long as I'm gonna do that, and my intent is to eat them, and I'm gonna take that animal's life, why would I not,
[SPEAKER_03]: do it not only in the most humane way possible but in the way that creates the highest quality product and so that's kind of what this is about right and so risk of like shorting the circuits no pun intended essentially what EKGMA is is brain spiking efficient killing it instantly right and then if we really follow the entire process the way we should we also then will bleed the fish
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we will run a wire down sort of the the spinal column to that we call a circuit breaker right this is the process of shrinkage you may to to disable rigor mortise and sort of go on offense and stop all the.
[SPEAKER_03]: all the various processes that cause a fish to break down in a bad way versus call, you know, dry age of fish, right, and care for it properly.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I would, I would tell you two things just as an angler.
[SPEAKER_03]: So hang with us, right, because I know this can sound a little technical from the jump.
[SPEAKER_03]: about three years ago, two things transformationally happened to me in the same year.
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess it's four years ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: I met you in the afko booth at iCast, and I said, okay, I've heard of this talk to me, and I don't know what I was expecting, but what I got from you was,
[SPEAKER_03]: Extreme education that made so much sense to me based on everything I know about fish and all my personal experiences eating fish and then shortly thereafter I was still in a place where I was like, oh, this is a little tedious is this practical on a boat, you know, like I'm really going to do this.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was out with Hooray Poe and of our George from Jig Pro who's a friend of ours.
[SPEAKER_03]: We both know George, you fished what we fish together, right, and we've been the benefactors or beneficiaries, I guess, of your your tremendous fish care and cooking skills when you're on our trip with us, you spoil us.
[SPEAKER_03]: But we went out of, you know, his home port of Palm Beach Gardens or West Palm Beach, and we literally caught two identical black men.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all we caught that afternoon.
[SPEAKER_03]: We, we hopped out for like an hour current was a ribbon and terrible.
[SPEAKER_03]: We caught two black men's and I went to go put mine in the box because I caught mine first.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, what are you doing, man?
[SPEAKER_03]: And I said, we're keeping it, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, no, no, no, we got a, we got a EKG main chinkage unit.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm like,
[SPEAKER_03]: are you doing that he's like oh yeah man he's so mean while he looks efficient so he's like you don't believe in this and I say why don't I don't not believe in it but I guess I've just never tried it so we took two identical black found I mean they were cookie cutter blackfin this is two o'clock in the afternoon and mine we just throw in the ice and it was actually a slurry not just ice it was water and ice right like it should be in the fish box and then with his he did the EKJ me and brain spiked it he
[SPEAKER_03]: in a bucket for a while right before he cooled it off.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then he cut at the tail ran the wire down and we literally ate those fish sushi sashimi and seared that night.
[SPEAKER_03]: And dude, I'm telling you and I will talk about this.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like that was actually what you would call QV.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was too soon.
[SPEAKER_03]: We would have gotten more benefit from aging that fish longer.
[SPEAKER_03]: But
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm telling you, you could see the difference.
[SPEAKER_03]: You could feel the difference with your hands or in your mouth, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: You could smell the difference.
[SPEAKER_03]: You could taste the difference.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, this was very fresh, tuna.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the difference that this proper fish here makes is transformational.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I guess the way I like to describe it to people is, it's funny, I'm so fortunate.
[SPEAKER_03]: I get to go to Japan a couple times a year by virtue of work and with Fuji.
[SPEAKER_03]: What a lot of people don't understand is a lot of that fish that they're serving in these high-end Tokyo Sushi restaurants and elsewhere comes from the States.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's our fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the same biological species out of the same body of water, the only difference in why it's so high quality.
[SPEAKER_03]: is because they are being considered in diligent in how they take care of it, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, so, so this is not some technical Japanese mumbo jumbo, a way to sell you equipment or try to, you know, over-complicate things or get excited about a small fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is literally a transformational way to improve the quality of your seafood, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so as long as you're already going to kill the fish,
[SPEAKER_03]: Why wouldn't you do it as he mainly as possible?
[SPEAKER_03]: And why wouldn't you transform it from fresh fish to best possible fish for that species?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that's sort of the layman's description, but
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think maybe we can polish the point that, you know, so why is the quality superior?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the simple answer is that we're talking about changing the biochemistry, a living animal during the post-mortem sequence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So all the things are going to die.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're all going to die.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the manner in which we die is going to determine a lot of like biochemical things that
[SPEAKER_01]: Personally, we may not know, but we can actually control it, you know, when it comes to live animals and food.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think at this point, or I know at this point, the science on this matter is actually unimpeachable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the science is that, you know, a swift immediate slaughter is just simply a biochemical precondition to superior quality food.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at this point, like to say anything otherwise is just counterfactual.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not about like what you believe or, you know, what kind of time you have available.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it's just true.
[SPEAKER_01]: So then I think the question is like, how do we appeal to people to actually take on that step?
[SPEAKER_03]: And maybe it's a way to improve your point.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this was a shock.
[SPEAKER_03]: I learned this from you and this shocked me.
[SPEAKER_03]: the FDA mandates that every every beef cow, every goat, every pig, every chicken, every turkey is killed in this fashion today by federal law as a matter of food safety because it reduces spoilage and bacteria and everything.
[SPEAKER_03]: But seafood is so for oddly defined that it's not regulated so whether you want to embrace this concept or not literally every piece of every bit of protein you're buying animal protein from any source you buy it in this country has already gone through essentially an EKG may process right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's make a couple of quick adjustments.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the USDA, it's the USDA, that's the USDA, I'm sorry, I said after you saw it, but the FDA is important because it's a critical counterpoint to what the role of the USDA is.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the USDA operates under a statute that permits federal agency to regulate the standards of livestock quality.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is indeed a federal federally overseen slaughter process, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The FDA, on the other hand, which is our federal agency that has jurisdiction over fish and seafood.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're mandate under that statute has to do with safety and effectiveness.
[SPEAKER_01]: So is the food safe?
[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, seafood need only be safe because there's actually no federal
[SPEAKER_01]: So seafood can is like whatever as long as it's safe and that's why to the extent you see FDA regulations or FDA oversight of seafood tends to it tends to deal with just harmful things like not getting people sick right like so temperature handling controls and then maybe parasite destruction, but that's that's about it the rest of it is just sort of the wild west.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a proponent necessarily of and I think sometimes people hear that hear me talk about that and they say, well, we don't need another federal agency like over-regulating.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would argue actually, I think that's true.
[SPEAKER_01]: And part of the reason it's difficult to to have a federal agency regulating something like seafood is because the biodiversity of seafood is entirely out of whack compared to the biodiversity on farms.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got like basically three
[SPEAKER_01]: four breeds of chickens, in the seafood context, we're talking about, I mean, at this point like limitless numbers of species.
[SPEAKER_02]: So fish is cartilage and this fish is, uh, by valves and mollus, uh, lockers and crabs, like, how do you define it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I do, but I do think that there is a role for states to play or regions to play and ensuring that their particular fisheries, which are, let's say, home to certain native or commercial species,
[SPEAKER_01]: are able to actually have that value improvement and they have a better line of sight into exactly what their commercial species are.
[SPEAKER_03]: So again, to sort of boil this, thank you for that clarification, because that's great, and I didn't mean to misstate, so thank you USDA, not FDA.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know, to give people to keep walking down this path.
[SPEAKER_03]: So what I have done, what I have seen done on charter boats all around this country and in other countries, the typical way we kill a fish, we bring it over the side.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've probably laughed at, we're holding it up for a picture, then it's going on into ice, we're essentially suffocates.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, I'm not trying to, I don't want to dwell on the, the, the, the death part of it per se, but if you suffocate me versus humanely you thin eyes me, I go through this entire dumping of endorphins adrenaline fighter flight, like my body as an organism is trying to survive and exhaust all the cellular energy and everything I have in that in that.
[SPEAKER_03]: cause to that end, the fish is the same way.
[SPEAKER_03]: When we let them slowly suffocate over time, not only is it obviously not the best way to go for the fish, it has a material biochemical impact on the quality of the product, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, and the safety of the product.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I mean, the fish is definitely suffocating.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so maybe we can, let me begin by saying,
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this is the taboo subject that Anglers are equipped to have because English are the ones that are there and maybe accountable to that death sequence and so 100% if you're an angler, I mean, this is the, it may be taboo for others, but not for people that are actually taking the responsibility of not only the life of the fish, but also maybe the responsibility of ensuring it's safety for someone else to eat civil road.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think the taboo conversation,
[SPEAKER_01]: is the perfect conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The suffocation is a component of that debt sequence, the way that we tend to describe it is stress.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's actually a lot of things that are going into the overall experience of stress for that animal.
[SPEAKER_01]: So suffocation is one for sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fish can not breathe out of water, absent.
[SPEAKER_01]: oxygenated water flowing over their gill arches, they will in fact suffocate to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: In addition to that, I think a lot of people forget that fish haven't really experienced gravity before, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So when they come out of water and they're placed on and they feel their own body weight on the deck of a hard boat, that's a new experience that's going to stress them out.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've also not really experienced unfiltered light before, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So they're almost blinded
[SPEAKER_01]: odd experience for the fish, plus the sense of not being able to breathe is going to immediately result in how I summarized three primary consequences.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the first is a hormonal consequences.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what you were alluding to as the adrenaline dump, right, cortisol in the blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second is a biochemical outcome, and that spikes in muscle acidity.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's from the increased thrashing and escape mechanisms.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the third is biophysical.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's an increased heart rate, but also spikes in core temperature.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the body of the fish is actually heating up.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you get all which is bad for seafood quality.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you've got exactly like a very adrenaline full low pH, which means very, very high acid.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and very hot fish and then be lack of a blood letting protocol and let's talk about blood for a second because it's different for fish than people, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, well, not entirely actually, but if this is like this is forensics, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, like, can actually determine cause of death, sometimes our time of death by how quickly the body is in bigger mortise, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: or whether the body is no longer in rigor mode is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but the blood thing is interesting because there's a lot of misinformation out there about the significance of bleeding a fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I hear a lot of, or read a lot of comments, they're like, oh, you just bleed it and throw it in the ice.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is true that that fish will eventually expire in the ice.
[SPEAKER_01]: It will expire whether you bleed it or not, frankly.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think one of the misconceptions that's really that gets popularized, especially online is this idea that the full light color changes because of the bloodlighting exercise.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is absolutely true.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the the resulting filet will be wider in the clearer more translucent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely true.
[SPEAKER_01]: The question though is, oh, if you cook it, then do you see any of that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Blood, any answer is no.
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot actually detect any of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then also, that actually has no flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's more of just like sort of window dressing issue.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, bloodlighting is critical.
[SPEAKER_01]: The question is why?
[SPEAKER_01]: And it has nothing to do with the visual eye clarity of the resulting flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: It has to do with
[SPEAKER_01]: What blood is?
[SPEAKER_01]: And blood is a nutrient-rich substrate for bacteria.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in the vascular system of a fish or ourselves, if you have blood coursing through the veins and capillaries, if that blood remains in the carcass, the fish will decompose from the outside in and from the inside out.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that that's a premature spoilage process and a bacterial spoilage because we'll come back to some some of the difference of this right in somatic versus The composition is different than and I'm out of contact.
[SPEAKER_03]: I would say bacterial is rot bacterial is stinky fish bacterial is no longer safe through it away right so.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then when we bleed it, we're also just removing the sort of the medium for for spoilage and also a lot of the fish the waste that's within the fish is System and any given time is in the blood before it goes to the kidneys, which most people will see as kind of like that bloodline along the spine or it varies by species, but right.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're getting rid of that gets rid of all the bad stuff that could lead to premature bacterial breakdown rot spoilage, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And I feel like to some degree people have taken it this far, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, I will talk to Spear fishermen who have learned to brain kill to fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: Although half the time they're saying they're doing it because they went in the struggle with the sharks around and they don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention.
[SPEAKER_03]: They think that stops the heart so the fish doesn't bleed from the wound as much.
[SPEAKER_03]: But there is absolutely totally, you've explained it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It makes sense, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA,
[SPEAKER_03]: benefit to the quality of the fish from doing that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you'll go to places like California like we'll go on the San Diego long range boats and it's very typical for these guys to brain spike a tuna and bleed it right because this stuff is well understood and whether it's that they're seeing the color or whatever the reason they're doing that it's like okay we're taking steps.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the shinkie gma step taking it further kind of like what you describe is going on offense right so we've got this fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've we've humanely killed it and turned off all these biochemical bad things that are going to happen as well as treated efficient the most humane fashion and and protected it from all of this stress whether for its feelings or for the quality of the food we've bled it.
[SPEAKER_03]: to kind of pre-empt spoilage and also get rid of all the waste and everything else which is going to let give us a product that has a longer shelf life if you will.
[SPEAKER_03]: But now Shinkai, this is where nobody seems to be getting this point and this is maybe the most critical step.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, just as significant as the other steps I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I guess maybe we'll like take a break in this in a sequence.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the first the brain spike in the bleeding.
[SPEAKER_01]: is you sort of playing off them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if I play defense against the no consequences.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're protecting the stress.
[SPEAKER_03]: Keep in the stress from being a factor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just playing defense.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you're right that the Schingej G made process is one of the most mysterious ones and the one and the step that I think a lot of people misrepresent and what its role is.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think it begins with a conversation about rigor mortise.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: So all animals will eventually go into rigor mortise.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you can control the on the time to onset of rigor mortise and you can control the intensity of rigor mortise and really rigor mortise I think you describe it this way is kind of like the so when this when the animal expires there is cellular energy stored up right and it's going to express right.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when we talk about rigor mortars at kind of this cellular level, help us because we all think about it as we've seen CSI, it's when the body goes stiff, right, but biologically, if you care about the quality of seafood or how it tastes, how it smells, how long you can age it and keep it in the fridge before it goes bad, it's talked to me about breakdown rigor mortars a little more in a way, an angler can understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, so you know, you can you can visually detect the animal.
[SPEAKER_01]: ceasing to move, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So you brain spike it, you believe it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Eventually it will just sort of stop moving and you're seeing no motion.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what you can detect with your naked eye is not actually what's detectable at a cellular level.
[SPEAKER_01]: So even though it's brain dead because there's so much residual electrochemical energy stored in the spinal cord.
[SPEAKER_01]: that energy will force the muscles to fire even at a cellular level until such time as all cellular energy is expended and exhausted.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the exhaustion period is the moment at which rigor mortis begins.
[SPEAKER_01]: So as the sooner the muscles are exhausted of their cellular energy,
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it's coming sooner and more intensely right yeah and it's just sort of left alone it's going to go through that cellular exhaustion much more quickly and that's a specially true for certain species like tuna or in a lot of the a lot of the Skombroid family fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: that, you know, they just kind of buzz like crazy.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're like chain saws, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though they're dead, they're just buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if you're seeing them stop, cellularly, like through microsoft, it isn't stop, but it's not stopped.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what the Shinkai Gmail process proposes is that you go on the offense against the rigor mortise cascade.
[SPEAKER_01]: So by rupturing the spinal cord, you're effectively breaking the communication circuit between the residual electrical signaling and the muscle tissue itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: In effect, you're paralyzing the animal.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're hacking its central nervous system.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that even though it's brain that connection is severed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what you're left with is a paralyzed piece of muscle tissue that doesn't get
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, or it will get it, but it will come on much, much more slowly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then if you submerge the carcass into an ice slurry, scientifically, we know that that will delay the onset of rigor and it will lessen the intensity of rigor.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's actually what's most important about rigor.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's actually not rigor itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the resolution of rigor.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is what you were
[SPEAKER_01]: So when an animal sees us up into rigor mortise, because it's dead, it can never actually relax again.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's no longer breathing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's no mechanism by which an animal can relax its muscles.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when the animal eventually becomes flexible again, that's because enzymes have allowed that muscle tissue to relax.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's literally broken down protein structures to let that
[SPEAKER_01]: It's critical to understand this because it was critical to the US DA to understand this for all of our livestock.
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot actually create a meat product that is soft enough to chew or flavorful enough to enjoy, unless it has resolved from rigor.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's exactly why, as a matter of law,
[SPEAKER_01]: beef cannot be fresher than two weeks.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's because rigor has to resolve.
[SPEAKER_01]: Otherwise, you're going to have very inconsistent product coming out of the United States that needs to go into a commodity international beef market.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what we tend to do with fish is because it's decomposing too quickly, and we're eating it defensively, we're scared.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's starting the smell, it's starting to rot.
[SPEAKER_01]: It actually doesn't have the opportunity to go into rigor and then resolve from rigor.
[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, it cannot improve in flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's talk about the flavor real quick, because that's interesting part when enzymes break down tissue that is stiffened into rigor, the byproduct of that enzymatic activity are amino acids.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a variety of amino acids that occur from that, those enzymes basically eating these stiff muscle tissue structures.
[SPEAKER_01]: So one of those byproducts is an amino acid called glutamic acid.
[SPEAKER_01]: Potemic acid is the amino acid that is responsible for the savory flavor in a lot of foods.
[SPEAKER_01]: So different foods have different levels naturally occurring of glutamic acid.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, tomatoes have a very high level of glutamic acid, scallops, cheese, wine, whiskey.
[SPEAKER_01]: That
[SPEAKER_01]: what the Japanese call to me, baby, umami flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, if you think about pizza, like pizza's interesting because it's like tomato, original, rich and glutamic acid, piled on top of with cheese, very high, glutamic acid, then you add sausage, more glutamic acid.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now you have a flavor bomb, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's just glutamic acid on glutamic acid on glutamic acid.
[SPEAKER_01]: you get glutamate, now we're just going into chemistry, glutamate.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then if you synthesize that whole compound, you get monosodium glutamate, which is a flavor enhancer, which is now you've got a Dorito, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the the Chinkage email process allows you to control this rigorous, it also then allows you to make sure that you're going to give it the benefit of time,
[SPEAKER_01]: to then go through that autolithic enzymatic process that will allow this flavor development in the fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, I see lots and lots of, you know, fishing bro photos of guys like, you know, tearing open that tuna on the boat, and they're like it's so fresh, it's so fresh, and they're dunking it and soy sauce, and they're eating it, and then they're just, I don't know, flexing.
[SPEAKER_01]: on the quote unquote freshness of this tuna, but I get promise you that that tuna has no flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: What they're tasting is soy sauce.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's the absence of fishiness, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly, there is no flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it's sort of aggressively bland, but then, you know, with adding the salt and the umami from fermented beans, that is now the substitute that they're sort of oozing over.
[SPEAKER_01]: The true sort of sushi experience is dependent on aged fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't mean like 60-day stakes, that's entirely different protein structure, but it does require some resolution of rigor mortist in order to get to that point where it's got that flavor development.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's it's a good point because I remember the first time you started talking to us about age fish and went on this trip.
[SPEAKER_03]: We would be appropriate to eat these fish we had just caught because it wasn't can I wasn't going to be perfect right it was like all this fish needs four days this fish and it deals a species deals with size right and how it's treated after after it's butcher right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we'll talk about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm using that term very specifically, not full aid, but butchered all this stuff makes a tremendous difference and before people just follow their chair and be like, wait, you're telling me to eat old fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: The nicer steakhouse you go to, starts with the best quality cared for the most pristinely from like a chain of custody standpoint and every single high in steakhouse I've been into recently has their dry age or out where you can see it on the floor, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So before we've all heard of the English hanging fesons.
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... by their feet in inappropriate temperatures you know until they basically fall off the wall now that that president is ready for the table right like so before people fall out of their chair and say well this is crazy it's unsafe why would i ever treat fish this way you got to remember you've treated it grammatically differently from the second it came over the rail and that's what enables this to happen and if you don't do these steps if you don't
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't do this, but if you do that, I think people might be shocked.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know I was shocked how old, especially a bigger fish, like a big blue fin or a big yellow fin, how long they might have been aged, carefully, and with some consideration and treatment, by the time you actually eat it at a sushi restaurant, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: We have this obsession with fresh, but in this case, fresh is not necessarily better or more delicious if you don't believe me.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, talk more about that because this is such a, it's, it's almost counterintuitive from most anglers who are like, hey, this fish is going to be better tonight than it is tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I told people, we'll come home from Venice and we'll eat the tuna and you can feel the freshness going away from it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that fish wasn't properly cared for in terms of going through this process.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the, well, the first thing I'll say is, um, you know, this, this concept of fresh is, is a concept that I believe haunts the American public.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is a concept that was is the product of literally public health outbreaks in the early part of the 20th century, the people died because certain fish weren't fresh enough, especially due to scumbroidosis.
[SPEAKER_01]: So certain scumbroids will actually develop if in the absence of an adequate handling protocol, a poison, a toxin.
[SPEAKER_01]: for which you will have an allergic reaction and you can die from scumbroidosis.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that was one of the reasons also that we started to pasteurize.
[SPEAKER_01]: tuna in order to make it safe and put it in a can.
[SPEAKER_03]: So here we talked about, we talked about the scumbroid.
[SPEAKER_03]: We mentioned that term a couple of times, and it's, you know, the family scumbroid air.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's basically macro and tuna type fishes from a biological standpoint, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Of a exact autonomy standpoint, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I would argue that there have been generations of Americans that have been traumatized by seafood.
[SPEAKER_01]: sort of forces us into this defensive eating position where we just really aren't comfortable with it unless it's aggressively bland and so sometimes when you see like marketing language for fish, it's like flaky and mild or and subtle and it's like.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do we are we after a baked potato we have to see food right and so the but I want to say that like the deepening and the richening of the flavor that we're talking about through this process of autolysis and aging does not enhance the
[SPEAKER_01]: What we're talking about is the deepening of the savory notes, the savory characteristics of that fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is removed from this off-putting smell, which again, that off-putting smell of decomposition and I would argue stress is, you should avoid it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you detect those types of smells, you're involved to actually avoid that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if it's age and it doesn't have a smell because it shouldn't, you're talking about something that has deepened in flavor, but not fishing us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I always help people that there's a lot of species, you know, people say, why I've eaten blue fish and I don't like blue fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: But have you, have you had blue fish before?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or have you really just had the product
[SPEAKER_01]: And you just do it because that's the way your granddaddy told you to do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can I jump in with a personal anecdote here because I have one and it hopefully will be relatable to people and you you open my eyes on this we were in Venice, Louisiana fish with Captain Eddie bird and fish finish charters and I think we had Rob Jenkins and and.
[SPEAKER_03]: George and Colby, Bill and my buddy, our buddy, Colby was there, like, through of guys, and we were out doing just kind of mixed, we're slow pitch jiggin for all kinds of stuff, right, and literally it was perfect for you because as a chef and as an educator for the technique, because we were able to bring so many species.
[SPEAKER_03]: multiple types of snapper multiple types of macro multiple types of tuna multiple types of grouper and eel cutless fish or ribbon fish right.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're bringing all this stuff over the side and you're able to show us like here's how you properly take care of it and then.
[SPEAKER_03]: how we, how not everything needs to be filayed and grilled or blackened, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like there's different ways, and this is a whole other, we're going to definitely have to cover more of this in detail, because there's a whole conservation and ethics side of this, there's a whole kitchen and food prep side of this, but the one that I'll give you, uh, vermillion snapper, what we call bee liners.
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... i think they're always open in the northern gulf where we fish i think they have to be ten inches every state i fish in the limit is either like twenty five a man or there is no limit so this is a fish if we're having it maybe we're targeting scamp maybe we're targeting red snapper maybe we don't find them you can always find these beeliners right and and for
[SPEAKER_03]: 30 years, I have taken B-liners.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have flayed them, boneless skinless flays, and we've usually made like fish tacos out of them, either sort of panseared or fried.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I would have told you, I know exactly what a B-liner tastes like.
[SPEAKER_03]: And frankly, I don't care for them that much.
[SPEAKER_03]: Our I thought I didn't.
[SPEAKER_03]: We go on this trip with you.
[SPEAKER_03]: We start catching, and like you want to do in Venice, we start catching some pretty big B-liners, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Which Eddie's got spots loaded with
[SPEAKER_03]: And, and we, one of the misconceptions is that this technique is only for giant blue fin tuna.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's only for big yellow fin.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's only for scombered note.
[SPEAKER_03]: The probably the most transformational fish I've had in this technique are the smaller snapper, light vermilions, and white trout, which both happened on this same trip.
[SPEAKER_03]: We catch these fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: humanely, you know, brain spike, I'm bleeding, do the shinkage email.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then as soon as we got back to the dock, we got and killed them and scaled them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we actually aged them for a couple of days.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we ate them.
[SPEAKER_03]: God, I don't know, you made them about three or four different ways from, uh, from sashini or, or, uh, ceviche to,
[SPEAKER_03]: raw to cook and I swear to you, I would have lost a million dollar bet.
[SPEAKER_03]: It would have taken me a hundred guesses to guess what that fish was because I had never experienced the full quality of what a B-liner is capable of because I was not butchering it, I was not aging it, I was not scaling it, I was eating it too soon, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, I'm telling you, I know it seems kind of like complicated and esoteric, but the results of these processes are not subtle.
[SPEAKER_03]: it is holy shit.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't believe this fish that I've been eating most months of most years of my life for the last few decades has this potential.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's transformational.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, like the blue fish, most people would say that's a gross, oily, stinky fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it can be, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But it can also be, boughtfully, you know, taking care of properly and prepared properly, and it'll blow your mind, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually, I'm glad you mentioned the blue fish because I've never done this on a podcast, but I'm going to only do it for you, Bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, here we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got a blue fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're taking a shirt off if you're not if you're watching it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I'm just going to blue fish.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, did you bring a blue fish?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: This blue fish was caught.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's today?
[SPEAKER_00]: Friday.
[SPEAKER_03]: As we sit here in Friday, the 15th of August.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sunday.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this was a blue fish that was caught Sunday out of the lower part of the Chesapeake Bay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's any listeners from the East.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is known as a tailor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Blue fish, I think, get a very, very, they're very stigmatized.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not unlike a catfish.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to try to hold this up to the camera is an EKG make quality blue fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you see this?
[SPEAKER_01]: OK.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I can.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can see a few things that I want to just sort of point out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're sorry.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just using it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And remember, a lot of people are just listening.
[SPEAKER_01]: So talk them through what you're looking at too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, so the first thing that you'll notice is the eye clarity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Look how clear the eye is, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're seeing also
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, fish pigment in their skin, they're called chromatophures.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you're going to notice a lot of the retention of those chromatophures.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you're going to see actually blue and gold and green on this fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, the same as when it comes out of the water.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it basically looks alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: For certain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: This fish is, it has basically no smell.
[SPEAKER_01]: It smells like the sea, I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just smells like salty.
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: A little briny.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then also the inner cavity of the fish has no smell, which is the gut cavity, which is the, actually it says less slowly to start, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right, right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this fish is still basically perfection.
[SPEAKER_01]: I bring this fish for a couple reasons.
[SPEAKER_01]: One is because, I mean, I just wish I had a more high definition of camera so you can see really how your descent the fish still is.
[SPEAKER_01]: I bring this because it's a great example of, I think, want and waste that occurs and sort of a lot of misinformation that creates a unnecessary stress on the ecosystem as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this fish is, it's so stigmatized because it really is not a straight mess.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not a grouper.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's in the courage and family.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not a scumbroid either.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the sort of most salient characteristics that people talk about is it's oily.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's oily fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, right, let's back up.
[SPEAKER_01]: The value of tuna is it's oiliness, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The more expensive cuts of the tuna are the most fatty so that Otoro, that is the oiliest part of the tuna.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which also means it's the most flavorful part.
[SPEAKER_01]: Correct.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what happens is that itself has no flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: So butter doesn't have a flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: But fat conducts flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you put the butter on the toast, it's amplifying the flavor of the toast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like salt butter.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Correct.
[SPEAKER_01]: You put butter on corn.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's amplifying the flavor of the corn.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the fat itself doesn't have a flavor.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you have a fish that smells and it's oily,
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to really, really be offensive.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that tends to be what happens with blue fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also true that they are bloody.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: All fish are bloody.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just blue fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: A little more fragile.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they bleed a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it just sort of makes for a kind of a crime scene of a cooler when people take them out so they see like a lot of a lot of blood and then they and there's a lot of slime and they think it smells because it does because there hasn't been a very considered process to to handle it and then the other thing about blue fish is that their flesh is a little bit softer when it's really fresh is actually quite soft and so it doesn't have the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: doesn't have the same mouth feel as a lot of fish, a lot of white fleshed fish do that you think of like sea bass or whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, red fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a very easy, there's a very easy fix for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just to salt the fillets just for a little bit that will pull out the water and tighten the muscle tissue.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're actually in search of something that's a little bit
[SPEAKER_01]: let it expel some water and it'll tighten up.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, and we tend to dry-brine high-quality stakes the same way, you know, somewhere between two to 24 hours before you're going to cook it, put some salt on it, but it in a cool air with circulation.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it, yeah, it draws out the moisture and brings the salt, which is ultimately like you're talking about with the butter, flavor amplifier, all the way in on a cellular level to the center of the state.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, don't blame the poor fish right yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's you.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is an amazing fish to eat.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's incredibly nutritionally dense.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in this world of, you know, highly over processed foods with really no nutritional value, the opportunity to eat an EKG
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I guess as far as to say, I'd be surprised if anyone listening has ever had what you're calling an EKG may quality fish right like the scamp we caught on Louisiana that you cared for an age and presented to the ambassador, you know, in in the Japanese embassy.
[SPEAKER_03]: and they had a special dinner to serve it with his personal chef, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like this is elite quality seafood.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think a blue fish is such a great example because that's a fish guilty.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything you're saying about them, we will catch them off the beach in the summertime here, some number one I hate to see them because normally I know they're there because I just lost a favorite lure or favorite fly because I got a bite and then cut off.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's either them or the Spanish dammit.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's not who I'm looking for for the same reasons, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But I've eaten both of these fish under your hand after this proper treatment.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't know how to describe it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Other than you've never had one until you've had it this way, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And keep going.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was just going to react to something that you were saying earlier because I think it's really
[SPEAKER_01]: and what you do in a slow pitch community.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think one of the interesting things about the American inclination towards seafood is the way that we prepare seafood because of this defensive approach.
[SPEAKER_01]: It tends to be very, very monolithic.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's fillet and then put it in a, under direct heat, like in a frying pan, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Add grease and seasonings from Walmart.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then start evaluating the merits of different species, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And to me, that's doing a great disservice to the animals themselves, and that's especially true for sensitive or endangered species.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if really that's the only modality, the cooking modality that you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: And that modalities informed by a defensive approach to eating fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, like a candied at raw, a candied at partially cooked, then we risk actually treating all fish as the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this opportunity with slow pitch is the opportunity to within a single trip, actually line up a diversity of species.
[SPEAKER_01]: and inspect not only what their flavor characteristics are, but also what their textural characteristics are under different and diverse modalities of cooking.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, maybe we don't do direct heat on all of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we're actually steaming some, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we're actually just applying a blow torch
[SPEAKER_01]: Correct.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we're not doing, maybe we're brazing them.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, all of these different, maybe we're doing a whole fish prep, not a full air broken down fish prep, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is an opportunity that I think is reserved one for the angler, but most importantly, to the slow pitch community, where they are pulling up a diversity of species.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not necessarily
[SPEAKER_01]: they don't have the luxury of being choosy when you're at a thousand feet of water.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you also do have the luxury of finally trying to tell the story of what is America's seafood inheritance.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not simply just a whole bunch of cat-farned catfish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if really all you if that single culinary modality of a frying pan and Walmart seasonings is really all you have,
[SPEAKER_01]: I would encourage you to just eat farm to catfish because there are a lot of endangered or vulnerable populations in the American fisheries that really, you know, if it doesn't matter, like then just eat farm stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: right and leave the ecosystem alone and we'll see this right like so you know when we go to Venice which is one of the richest fisheries in North America no question the title estuary of the Mississippi River as well as the closest access to the continental shelf drop and off in the deep water and we've got this huge essentially artificial re-system with all these rigs and platforms and you pump stations and stuff
[SPEAKER_03]: But like we go down there and that was one of the things you were struck by the first time you fish down there everyone's after swordfish and tuna and maybe some Wahoo and all these other species from and ensure they're after red fish speckle trout flounder but all these other species were just completely ignored it's almost like people don't fish for white meat and they have an incredible fishery every type of snapper you name it.
[SPEAKER_03]: every type of scumbroid you name it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Every type of, you know, uh, different fish in the in various parts of the water column along the rigs, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like,
[SPEAKER_03]: and I think the way you describe it that resonated with me is like think about valentines day everyone's trying to pick a dozen long stem red roses let's say that's the tuna or that's the swordfish well that leads to a ton of pressure on just those fish which can take the resource out of valence if we thought about picking a beautiful bouquet of wildflowers throughout the entirety of the water column of all different types of fish oily and not small and not large and not like
[SPEAKER_03]: It's such a, I have never looked at a speckle trout or a white trout slash sand trout or a lane or a vermillion snapper the same ever since right.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it you blew my mind with how delicious this fish was, but I just have to treat it differently than I've been treating it, and it benefits from being prepared in different ways, not just full aid and pride and put in a fish taco right or grilled in the pan with the same seasoning well, that's absolutely right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then maybe this like gets to the question of like,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it is true that EKG may take a little bit more effort than to just otherwise throw it into a cooler and some planning, right, and some preparation ahead of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I guess that's exactly to me, but so dramatically striking about the slow pitch community, you guys show up to that fishing experience, basically having choreographed everything in
[SPEAKER_01]: in a way that I think a lot of other types of fishermen are not.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yes, it is true that in Venice, the emphasis is on a lot of these large pelagics in the first maybe 200 foot of the water column.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as you all can demonstrate, there's a lot more to be mined there, especially if someone brings the care and the study and the sort of festidiousness of understanding
[SPEAKER_01]: is the skill of fishing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I always want to say, yeah, this is so interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry, I'm interrupting you.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you kind of made me think about this.
[SPEAKER_03]: As someone who's grown up fishing, some of my earliest memories are fishing, to 90, I'm going to paraphrase you, but I hope people hear this because it was shocking to me, and it's proven true.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you've grown up fishing, grown up around boats, grown up doing this, eating fish,
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just like, oh, that's what you do.
[SPEAKER_03]: You got your fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: But to 99 plus percent of the world population, the ability to get on a boat, disappear out of sight and come back with all these fish is almost like magic, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, people don't know how to do that, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so in so many ways, we as anglers have the opportunity to be sort of the tip of this spear to change the way people think about the quality of the seafood we have access to, change how thoughtful and quality-minded we are about this, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: We just thought, we're fishermen, we go do what we do, but to, you remember this point you're talking about, it was so fascinating to me that what we do is mysterious to so many people because they don't never done it and they don't understand how we do it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That is exactly right and I think if listeners like learn nothing from this conversation, I hope it's that it's that fishing isn't a hobby, you know, to say it's a hobby is it's a diminishing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: I work in downtown Washington, D.C.
[SPEAKER_01]: surrounded by a bunch of square lawyers all day and they think that like to the extent I'm out fishing I'm out fucking around with my hobby they think it's a hobby it is not a hobby it is a skill right and to do this skill at a level that you're doing it at and that listeners to this podcast are doing it at
[SPEAKER_01]: to call it a hobby is so utterly, it's dismissive really.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, it's like, wow, I want to just slap you in your face.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you're not cheap in this journey that the skilled angler has been on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oftentimes, his or her entire life, you cannot cheapen that and call it a hobby.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is really serious.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a very serious skill.
[SPEAKER_01]: it's beyond a life skill of just pulling up, you know, something out of an invisible body of water to be able to target species or to be able to dial in and sort of perfect depth current.
[SPEAKER_01]: Speed, all of these types of things, that is not a hobbyists exercise, that is a skilled individual's exercise that can be a dumbass to do and I hope that everyone that's listening
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not a throwaway idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a mystery to be able to close the body life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, to 99% of the population walking around on this planet, the idea that you can just extract a living animal out of an invisible body of water with some confidence.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a weird dirt, it's like magic, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, people are like, you do that, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the only thing that, you know, because they're driving me bonkers is like the number of people who are like, oh, yeah, I know a fish, not a fish, you're like, you can't fish on a system, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The actual skill, the person to bring that real man, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right, right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And not just anything wrong with that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a joy which you enjoy, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But don't underestimate the voice we as focused
[SPEAKER_03]: in driving the dialogue about seafood in this country and increasing the value of it and being advocates for its conservation and protection.
[SPEAKER_03]: A couple of things are so clear to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Number one, we have so much still to talk about.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no way we're going to have to get this in multiple episodes, because to me there is an entire
[SPEAKER_03]: conservation side of this that I think we should spend some time on and there's absolutely a sportsman's rights access regulatory side that people need to understand where we are in this country and they need to be terrified and they need to understand we are.
[SPEAKER_03]: wasting wasting wasting so much, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you're human me, I would love to have you back to talk about those things because it's it's been a shocking voyage of discovery that you've led me on down both of these paths.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I would have told you I knew a lot about this and I thought I was way more informed than the average person and the reality is I didn't know big.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's okay, but as sportsmen, we have a very important role to play in this.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm definitely going to have to have you back to talk in more detail about the conservation side of it and kind of like the legislative federal oversight side of this that we need to be focused on and concerned about as anglers.
[SPEAKER_03]: But for today's purposes,
[SPEAKER_03]: So we've talked about the value of this.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've talked about the biological and biochemical processes.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've talked about at least one guy's experience of seeing the difference in quality.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we've talked about the science behind that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is unimpetable.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is in arguable.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really just a matter of whether you are willing to be diligent and consider enough to
[SPEAKER_03]: reward yourself with the highest quality possible seafood or whether you want to keep pancerian or grill an oily blue fish, the day you caught it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, do your thing, but I'm telling you there's a whole world out there.
[SPEAKER_03]: The question that people are probably asking is like, well, wait a second, how hard is this?
[SPEAKER_03]: How complicated is this?
[SPEAKER_03]: So getting very tactical for a second here if someone's listening to this they fish all the time like you and I do and they've never tried this can we talk a little bit about the kit what do they need what what do they need to be thinking about what are the tools and where can they get them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And where can they learn more if they've heard enough today that they said you know what I'm going to I want to try this journey I want to go down this path right and and I would add one thing that I was looking for a place to throw in and I never did this isn't just about taking a fish you didn't think was high quality and turning into something you really are proud to serve and enjoy.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you take the fish you think about is really delicious right now and I'm thinking about flounder I'm thinking about grouper I'm thinking about tuna and you treat it right and agent right it is every bit is transformational right so breakdown for me is simply if you can like okay I'm listening to you guys I'm going fishing this weekend what do I need to get.
[SPEAKER_03]: And how do I go about doing this and how do I learn more so that I can develop some proficiency?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it is a little intimidating at first, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, let me begin by saying, I love this question because one of my favorite responses to me just sort of evangelizing EKGMA in the past has been, I don't want to do surgery on a boat, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, I understand, I understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe that's what we're going to try to address here.
[SPEAKER_01]: like most things, something that takes a little bit of practice, but as you become more proficient and adept, it'll just become a new habit that you don't even think about, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So anything sort of at the beginning may seem overwhelming or intimidating like driving stick, but then once you're driving a manual transmission, it's not even something that enters your mind, it's just a habit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think I think just trying to first get people over the psychological hump of even participating in a new habit is the hardest part.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And four fishermen, especially for craft rod builders.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't you may should not be an intimidating new habit, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, we are not deep on so many things to that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a rounding error.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is this is this is a this is the 100 level class.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the first the most important thing that I would just begin with is that people need to bring ice a lot more ice than you would assume you will ever need.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is one of the sort of big missteps is that the usual amount of ice that you or your charter boat captain will bring on to that boat is going to be sufficient, it will not be.
[SPEAKER_01]: You need to basically double if not triple the amount of ice that you're more accustomed to bringing.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's because also the ice will melt over time because you're using a slurry.
[SPEAKER_01]: The step number one is bringing a sufficient amount of ice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Step number two is bringing the tools.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's talk a little bit about the tools.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is true that you could use a lot of different implements.
[SPEAKER_01]: to effectively puncture the skull of a fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: People say, like, why can use a sharpened screwdriver and I can use this and that?
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is all true.
[SPEAKER_01]: The only thing that I would forewarn people about is just not using things that are not designed for the purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, like, get the right tool for the job and rusty tools.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's harder with a bait knife than it is with a proper spike.
[SPEAKER_03]: For example, like a test to this, so yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you don't want to put rusty implements in your food.
[SPEAKER_01]: So like we make a brand spike that I hope is just extremely accessible.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's designed specifically for this purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a ice pick, which I know a lot of people like to use.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's actually a brand spike.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when used properly, this exact tool can take everything from a small sunfish
[SPEAKER_01]: understand where the location of the brain is, no problem, but we make a brain spike.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's other people that make brain spikes, and I'm not going to say that ours is better or worse than anyone else's, but ours is very affordable.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's very affordable and very kind of commercial grade.
[SPEAKER_03]: I would, this is like to me, there's a close parallel between these brain spikes and venting tools, there's a lot of them out there that are a very cheap, almost like a single used tool, they're garbage.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's, and again, so just caveat into or like you want to, if you buy the right tool, you can have this tool for life, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we're not a serious grade tool that will get the job done.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't call our tools like, you know, the commercial grade series.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't actually have that luxury.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our tools are actually developed with commercial producers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's just what the sport fishing community gets.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, we just, we didn't, we didn't like dumb it down or cheapen it up for the sports community.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the other thing is to have an adequate
[SPEAKER_01]: or some sort, you know, even scissors do the job.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not something that's that's particularly specialized.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we don't, we don't make that, that's just, you can use, you can use your fingers frankly to bleed if you feel it's so inclined.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the wire.
[SPEAKER_03]: So let me if you let me let me I'm going to break down a couple of things you talked about there for a second if we can okay one is there's a ton of resources available right so Andrew has cooperated with Afko and has a whole how to EKG may of article and video series that you can find by literally just Google the complete guide to EKG may and it's it's a series of blogs on the Afko he's got tons of
[SPEAKER_03]: collateral.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you go to ekegmafederation.com and it's ike won't include all these links ikej imefederation.com and you go to there's all kinds of resources under the resources tab but just so we break this down relatively simply with most fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you follow the lateral line forward from the tail to the head and then you follow like the a perkylum or the gill plate or the second gill plate, most fish you're going to find a juncture there.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can often feel it as a soft spot that is the most direct access sort of behind the eyes and at the intersection of this a perkylum or the gill plate and this in this lateral line is often the spot.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the good news is, when you hit the spot, you know immediately because very often the fish will open their mouth and react, and some fish will immediately change color.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, if they're sort of crombo, I can't remember the term of where they kind of control their coloration or express coloration when they're excited or whatever right and so so there's tons of videos to show you on different species and different fish where you can hit them, but once you've done it a couple of times, you know and I know you're about to show me on this blue fish for those who may be watching on YouTube.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, just so happens that I've actually got a fish right here.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I might as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So so this is the Gil plate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also known as an a particular.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the pre-opercular line.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is sort of a false gill plate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's also about that you were talking about occurs right here at the top of this pre-opercular line.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is basically the base of the skull.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you when you when you place the brain spike, you want to go in right we want to go right in here at the top of the the top of the pre-opercular line, but that also to your point.
[SPEAKER_01]: intersex with the lateral line.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the lateral line is actually following the spinal cord.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's where, so that lateral line is is a lateral line is actually like hairs, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's their hairs that are coming out of the fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this right here is basically the intersection of the spinal cord and the brain stem.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if you can just puncture through this, I mean, and you can feel it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is a skull.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not like a different bonus structure.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the skull.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's hard.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you want to go inside the skull.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not unlike going through the temple of a human being.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think about this is the temple.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you could also enter.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, enter in through the top.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: No problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: You could go in the other temple as long as you hit the spot, it get it done.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, once you've seen it done and there's videos where you can watch what it looks like when you get it, what I would say with red snapper and things like that, immediate opening of the mouth and fish, fish, ceases to move at an outward sort of visible level, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And when it comes to you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, it'll season just stop and you know, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And then from a bleeding standpoint, different species, different things, but in simplest terms, we take our knife or our scissors, and I love the toyed scissors for this.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's what I've started using.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if we think about, if we had the fish on the deck,
[SPEAKER_03]: on its belly with its back up.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've already, so don't try to go bleeding it when it's flopping around with a knife or a pair of scissors in your hand.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can take a tip of finger off.
[SPEAKER_03]: But once you've completely immobilized this fish by humanely dispatching it with this considered kill, now time to bleed it.
[SPEAKER_03]: The best way, the easiest way on most fish is at a bottom.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you think about under your chin, where the gills attach to the body at the top,
[SPEAKER_03]: Gorsally in at the bottom kind of ventually towards the belly for me for most fish snipping the gills free on both sides at the bottom jaw of the fish kind of inside the gill plate sort of near the bottom jaw tends to be easiest and most effective.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that how you would advise people for the most part?
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think I want to take some of the mystery out of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're basically trying to introduce an incision into a major
[SPEAKER_01]: that doesn't get near edible meat again, because the blood leads to spoilage, it's got correct theory.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't want to create, introduce a puncture wound in the muscle tissue.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the, you know, the ugly, unvarnish truth is that you could bleed this fish pretty much anywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: The skill is to actually try to create incision points where it will not disturb
[SPEAKER_01]: the meat portions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, yes, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: How many people have had to throw away a portion of their fish from a poorly placed gaff shot, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: A fish that was gay, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's a great example.
[SPEAKER_03]: You see how gnarly that is, you see how that starts to smell and go red or whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, it's the same kind of concept.
[SPEAKER_03]: We could bleed it anywhere, bleed it in a efficient place that doesn't put any of your product you're trying to harvest in harm's way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so your point about taking it right at the, at the point this membrane here, that is absolutely a great place to, sorry, if you can see it to place the knife, other people will actually snip the it's miss here, okay,
[SPEAKER_01]: which runs underneath the spinal column and deleted out the tail.
[SPEAKER_01]: So again, it's species dependent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, and we can talk about this.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is going to hopefully this isn't, again, I think the unvarnished direct conversation is the best one, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're going to talk next about the Shink A.G.
[SPEAKER_03]: Me, which is where I think we people are with us so far.
[SPEAKER_03]: They understand the brain's biking, they understand the bleeding.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in some cases, people have been doing this with certain species of fish, but just never thought to do it with every species of fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you mentioned the sunfish, which I love, because my brother, Dr. Tray Falkner, my number one
[SPEAKER_03]: he has started doing it with the large mouth bass he's catching out upon's in Georgia and it's been noticeable and significant from there now in his defense he's not running the wire he's doing the brain and the bleedin and and putting them on the slurry and it's made a tremendous difference in the fish for him and he takes a lot to his practice and gives them to people and they even notice right so it's
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't think of a large mouth bass as being a particularly good fish to eat.
[SPEAKER_03]: His that he's treating this way are the best ones I've eaten.
[SPEAKER_03]: So again, it doesn't have to be a giant fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't have to be a salt water fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: Any table fair, any food product you're trying to harvest, large, small, fresh, salt, river lake.
[SPEAKER_03]: It works.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's biological.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's science.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not a wives tale.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not, you know, this seafood scare you have in the past.
[SPEAKER_03]: The fish you need to be worried about, it works biologically on everything.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, the tricky part here is the shink a gmail, what we call the circuit breaker.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you started to talk about this, the wires.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there are people, and I've seen him in Japan, and I've seen a few people posting on your account.
[SPEAKER_03]: The Ekejima Federation on Instagram.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm thinking of one woman in Florida.
[SPEAKER_03]: She's really good at this.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can do the brain spike from the front, and then you can actually run the wire from the front, and you sort of keep the whole fish intact.
[SPEAKER_03]: For me, by far the easiest way is to make an incision at the caudal fadunk also right you think about the place where the body ends and the tail starts where it gets real skinny there where you would grab a fish when you're tailing them and every fish has these to varying degrees how pronounced they are, but you can cut
[SPEAKER_03]: through the column, through the spinal column there, and snap it open, almost think peeling of an Anna, and then not only can you see what you're doing, but you have unfettered access to get the wire in, and you have a visual reference, and this is the only place it gets tricky.
[SPEAKER_03]: Generally speaking, you can guess about what wire size you're going to need to fit down this neural sheath.
[SPEAKER_03]: by the size of the fish, but not always.
[SPEAKER_03]: So some fish need larger, some fish need smaller, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So like for example, speckle trout needs a really small wire for house size, even if for an 18 inch fish, it's just the way that they're put together.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can use a fairly large size wire.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can usually use the same wire I'd use for a,
[SPEAKER_03]: 15 pound red snapper from my little beeline right so the physiology and biology decisions all a little bit different but and you have a ton of resources on this your logo is actually that cross section you get when you cut through right so but so I've I've brain he mainly brain killed this fish and turn off all those biochemical processes I've Bled it to get rid of all my source of spoilage right and waste and done so in a way that protects my the seafood I'm going to try to harvest
[SPEAKER_03]: Now this wire, I mean, for most people, I would advocate cutting the tail, breaking it open and now tell us what we're looking at and tell us how we run the wire.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, so it realizes difficult on a podcast, but well, so what you're talking about breaking is the spinal column.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, and that's represented here in this this big white top this is the EKG may locate a logo, which almost looks like a spider or something, but it's actually a cross section of fish physiology here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so so there's a hard bonus structure that is actually not the neural not where we're running now.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, we're running the wire through what's called the neural arch.
[SPEAKER_01]: The met a bonus structure that houses the soft spinal cord.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're going to, and that's on top of the spinal cord, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: On the dorsal side of the fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cords, it's actually just a little bit back, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and just below it is it's ventral side.
[SPEAKER_01]: On the ventral side, this is the caudal artery that you're talking about, Bill.
[SPEAKER_01]: But on the dorsal side of the spinal column is effectively a tunnel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a bony tunnel and that tunnel houses the spinal cord and the spinal cord is like a, you know, a long pieces to get it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you're going to insert that wire into the full length of that neural canal basically start reaming it out to rupture the entire length of that spinal cord and then after the and it will reanimate a fish that has been sitting there brain dead and blood.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even 20 minutes later, let me, let me say what you just said in a different way, you will know when you hit the right spot and hold on to the fish because they literally expand it, yeah, it is very notice when there's lots of videos you can watch, but when you get their wire in and you get it and when he's talking about the full link, he literally means from the head to the base of the brain, the full link to the fish, so you may need a different length wire, right, and a different diameter wire to fit in this little bone he can now.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the fish will build like a bucket block for just a couple of seconds.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, they will literally jump out of your hand.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you have them on the rail, it could jump into the water.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we normally propose doing this on the floor of the boat.
[SPEAKER_03]: The fish is already blood.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's not going to make a huge mess.
[SPEAKER_03]: And actually, severing the tail,
[SPEAKER_03]: during the bleeding process and exposing that caudal artery can accelerate how fast the fish can bleed out.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you think about, if you take a gallon jug of milk or water and you turn it upside down, it goes good.
[SPEAKER_03]: look, look, whereas if you put it a little bit sideways, it pours steadily.
[SPEAKER_03]: When you kind of remove the next pressure, you kind of open and vent that artery, it can rush out.
[SPEAKER_03]: The blood can rush out of the the touch you made in the gills very quickly, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And you're going to expose that to run the wire anyway.
[SPEAKER_03]: So hats off to the people who do it beautifully through the front of the head and I've seen people do it and their masters.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's hard for me and I never get it wrong when I
[SPEAKER_01]: As an anatomical or biophysical matter, there is zero difference between going through the head or going through the tail and, you know, that the, I think some of the reasons that you might go through the head have to do with what's the form factor of the fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's not always easy to go through the tail, especially for a lot of table fish, it is much much more easy and simple to go through the tail.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and the only complaint I've ever had with going through the tail is we do it on 150 pound elephant and then the mate like it's like that's how grab them get them out of the fish box like I can't grab it anymore because you could well I'm willing to sacrifice that we'll get that fish out of the box for the quality of seafood we're harvesting right like that's an easy trade up for me but there's there's no reason not to do it and it's visual you can see it it's very simple.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes and actually in a lot of cases especially in Japan in commercial
[SPEAKER_01]: industries for the the table fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're people actually want to see that tail cut.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they know it's gotten the care.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's it's actually like a, you know, an inescapable marker.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of of of not only the bleeding, but also that the shinkay process is occurred.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, you don't always know that if you've got a fish with only a basically a pilot hole,
[SPEAKER_01]: on the top of the tent.
[SPEAKER_03]: So also you also have to have pretty good understanding of the biology of these fish.
[SPEAKER_03]: I would say especially in salt water to know which size and by size I mean diameter wire you need because like I said some some species exhibit for their size a larger canal some exhibit smaller right and so you don't get a visual clue to that going from the head you do
[SPEAKER_01]: A great example is a black sea bass.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: They for some reason have very, very small neural canals, even though they can get quite large.
[SPEAKER_01]: So black sea bass is actually oddly small.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, not sure why.
[SPEAKER_03]: I say speckle trout and sand trout are too.
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, they're just, I mean, tiny compared to the size of the fish relatively.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, right, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whereas like a lot of the the pelagic species
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the need of and stuff, that's like a hot dog down a hallway.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very, very empty.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's just, yeah, it's very simple.
[SPEAKER_01]: And actually, I would encourage folks that want to learn and begin to practice on these smaller fish, because if you can sort of get competent with these smaller fish that are more plentiful, you're easy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, the big fish is is kind of a cakewalk.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, so I always encourage people to just start with these smaller species and just get dialed in and understand conceptually what you were doing and why you were doing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: You were mentioning your brother in saying that like, you know, he doesn't do the shink hair process, no problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, frankly, all of these, all of these different points along the handling process, none of them are required.
[SPEAKER_01]: The question is, do you have the skill if you want to create X?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So everything is an exercise and optionality.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you think you're going to be aging a very large pelagic species, I would strongly encourage you to engage in the process, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, run the wire, baby.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you're going to be eating that fish deep fried that night, hey, you might, you can absolutely omit
[SPEAKER_01]: I think what I want to make sure that American anglers understand is that if you have this skill set, you're sort of responsible I think to make sure that the right information is out there and that.
[SPEAKER_01]: the optionality is the emphasis, not the mandate.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if people need to do X, then it's sort of incumbent on you to make sure you're giving them the right information for X. But if all they want is Y, then maybe, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: This process for why is appropriate.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's a good point and you can make it as simple as complicated as you want, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And that because the sense that the food is first, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're going to the fishing experience after having already determined what you're going to be, how you want to eat it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_03]: Which is how we started, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all about the food.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all in service of the highest quality possible food product, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So we need a brain spike.
[SPEAKER_03]: We need a knife for a pair of scissors, which I don't know many people who don't have that in their kit or in their boat or whatever, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And and again, we're keep talking about boats.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is completely applicable to sure base fishing as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: actually it's a biological process.
[SPEAKER_03]: It makes a difference, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you need, if you're going to go the full fair, which I would encourage you to try it before you judge it, the wires.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the wires come in different lengths in different diameters.
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't need a hundred of them, but EKG made, and you can get these from a lot of sources.
[SPEAKER_03]: I personally would discourage you from buying any of the ones that are, and these are very common in Japan.
[SPEAKER_03]: and I have bought several of them to my demise and discredit, but anything that's like a twisted, stranded wire as the wire, what you want is, I don't even know what is it nickel boron, whatever this high quality wire you guys use is they're not expensive.
[SPEAKER_03]: You sell them as bundles, you can get an insure bundle, you can get a fresh water bundle or you can buy individual wires.
[SPEAKER_03]: their color coded with a kind of a tetrahedron shape.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know it's got a little dongle on it and you can just coil it up like a guitar string almost keeping your bag when it's time to use it, uncoil it, run it, rinse it off, put it back.
[SPEAKER_03]: They last one will last you for life if you don't lose it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Talk to me about the wires a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so the wires, as we were alluding to earlier, they are keyed, we keyed them to the American fishing experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the colors are not random, the colors are designed to basically clue you into different types different sort of classes of fish.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we talk about like the river and stream like small trout or or pan fish, we're using the blues.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're getting a little bit larger into let's say larger lakes or insure with looking at bite yellows, as you get longer, we're going to
[SPEAKER_01]: radiation, then we get to the, um, the, um, basically, launch a bit offshore, slash insure, but that chunky ones like black fin or maybe mutton snapper.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, that's a, that's a, that's a longer, but a thicker, a thicker diameter, um, wire, and then we have our big tuna ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: that are for 48 inches and I'm sorry, that one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, 48 inches and long.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you know, if I just to break it down for people, these come in different gauges of wire and they come in different lengths and the color coded, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And the detailed on the EKG mincederation website if you go to go to the pro shop, and I think it's like shop dot EKG mincederation.com.
[SPEAKER_03]: Remember with gauges, the larger the number, the smaller.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the smaller the number of the larger.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you think about a 20 gauge shot gun is smaller than a 12 gauge shot gun, a 22 gauge wire smaller than a 12 gauge wire, right, correct this inverse yeah inverse exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the word I'm looking for.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you're buying it based on the diameter size you need for the fish that you're trying to treat and the link you need based on how big deficiencies and they have all of these.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so for like folks that are doing like a lot of red drum fishing, you know, in that sort of.
[SPEAKER_01]: trio, the red drum, the speckled trout, and the flounder.
[SPEAKER_01]: Texas, Texas, in short, Florida, and short, that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would recommend, I actually don't think you need anything more than an orange wire.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just sort of right in your sweet spot.
[SPEAKER_01]: On gauge 24 inches.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: The orange, the orange, the orange wire.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're
[SPEAKER_01]: definitely need the light blue wires.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then if you're into sort of the big, big stuff, big pelagic, long, big donkey ages, you're going to need like the much, much longer and thicker diameter wires, or thicker gauge wires.
[SPEAKER_01]: The shape of the ball is so that they don't roll around.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's really just gross, it's still.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then these are the same wires that we developed with commercial industry.
[SPEAKER_01]: So again, we're not like we didn't make like us, you know, a diluted version for sports folks.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the exact same is the exact same inventory that we use for all of our commercial producers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, funny story about all of this, like we actually never.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were never set up to be retail.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was not something that we had shown to doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was education thing, not an equipment thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, these tools weren't here in the United States.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not available.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was hard for us to do the training and the certification for the commercial producers without actually having real commercial grade tools for them to use.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's how we started.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and it's also hopefully priced in a way that sensitive to what people's needs are like, this is not software, this is not AI, these are manual tools that that hopefully folks can learn a new habit with.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then have a adorable product to stay with you for a while.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's that's important.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, and I've been like I said, I what I tend to do when I get into something is like, I'll get my hands on everything I can to try it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you're my friend and I got yours and I try it, but it's just some of this stuff really is toyish.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not it's not it's not meant for sustained use.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I, you know, my wiresers that I got from you are as good today as they were when I got them three years ago, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So and I and frankly, my
[SPEAKER_03]: And fish you'd never think of, man, like we were out trigger fish in this week.
[SPEAKER_03]: Triggers are already delicious.
[SPEAKER_03]: Every people already know, man, this is a great piece of fish and all the throats are great, but buddy, you give them the treatment and an agent so much better.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just, it's a real thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, we have gone long on this one, but I'm going to ask you.
[SPEAKER_03]: So thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, obviously it's a fascinating topic.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't believe we're more than an hour and a half in and we barely scratched the surface.
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you'll indulge me, it would be a great pleasure to have you back for another episode where we could talk a little bit more about the conservation side of it and what people who care about our resources and care about legislative policy and how we should be thinking about this.
[SPEAKER_03]: We'd be great to talk about.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I also think it would be remiss if we didn't at least touch on
[SPEAKER_03]: sort of the commercial enterprise that becomes viable with this kind of treatment, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Imagine seafood stayed good fresh highest possible quality seafood stayed good for 30 days instead of three days or five days.
[SPEAKER_03]: How might that change the availability and quality of seafood in the US and oh by the way, they're already doing it in Japan and a lot of the rest of the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'd love to have you back to have that conversation if you'd indulge me.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'd love to have that conversation.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, well, I just want to have the t-shirt that says, Asian Josh Brolin is my boy.
[SPEAKER_03]: I fish with the Asian Josh Brolin.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't have many friends with a GQ magazine, bro.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, you're kind of a big deal to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was telling somebody the other day, like if I could choose the magazine I wanted to be in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: not general lens quarterly.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's just like it's not a fashion magazine.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is embarrassing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it should be.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's a very credible publication that maintains its relevance even in a like, I'm never getting that magazine, but that's what I'm proud to know somebody who did good for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, well, I'll say also that the writer, Brett Martin, and I don't know if anyone has read his books,
[SPEAKER_01]: He is a stupendous writer.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was surprised how deeply he understood what you were doing in the scope of it and everything.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, I was expecting not a puff piece, but I was expecting lighter weight.
[SPEAKER_03]: He got it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was impressed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I was actually surprised that it turned into more of a biopic of me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And not what I was hoping he was writing about, which is that you can g-me, but but to his credit,
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the honor of just having someone of his caliber, even mentioning and giving it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, is is I will say that that that is that is really special and and and I'm just honored to have been a subject matter that writers.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, Asian Josh Portland was an unfortunate reference that I thought he nailed it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think it's unfortunate.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, we should also tell people like I tell people all the time when I meet him.
[SPEAKER_03]: When I when I meet the family members, siblings, spouses of rod builders, I'm like a year rod builder and they say no and I say not yet and I tell him I said, I'm just going to be completely blunt with you.
[SPEAKER_03]: My goal is to corrupt you and make you a rod builder and I'm not going to even apologize for it.
[SPEAKER_03]: delivering to themselves and their family quality of seafood like they've never seen before.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's just because they've chosen not to pursue it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it can seem like a lot, it can seem inaccessible.
[SPEAKER_03]: If we just got one person who listened to this podcast to try it and have the aha moment, then it was absolutely worth our time.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm going to force you to come back and because I do think there's some broader conservation and legislative things that as sportsmen and anglers, we should care parents.
[SPEAKER_03]: perspective grandparents.
[SPEAKER_03]: We should care very deeply about and you're you are literally the most informed person I know you've done so much work with credible fisheries management people with the CCA, I mean, you know, just the salt and tall Kennedy grant like enough said right so.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much for being here Andrew it's always a pleasure I learned something every time I talk to you and I just the thing I would leave people with is If this wasn't dramatically transformational I would not be having a podcast episode about it I urge you
[SPEAKER_03]: to take the first step and try it and you're welcome on behalf of Andrew for the for how it's going to open your eyes to the quality of fish you didn't realize you had access to you don't have to be in New York or San Francisco or Tokyo and pay top dollar at a place you need a reservation a year out to get the best quality seafood you are among the 1% globally who has it within your power in your hands to deliver that to your own table and I get really excited about that and I just offer one
[SPEAKER_01]: partying thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's that the people who are the anglers, you will deserve it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've earned it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You deserve it more than anyone else.
[SPEAKER_01]: The rest of these, you know, one percentage that just get to go buy it and they're little fancy cities and missions to our restaurants, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And why wouldn't we treat ourselves, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I absolutely wouldn't we.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are.
[SPEAKER_03]: As always, you are as eloquent and informative as they come.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're you're class enough to join my appearance on this podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm deeply grateful.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to have you back.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to have to do a part two.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hell, we may have to do a part three, but there's so much more I wanted to cover.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_03]: I talked too much.
[SPEAKER_03]: I got excited and we have just so much to cover.
[SPEAKER_03]: But like we're going to post links to all this.
[SPEAKER_03]: Google EKGMay Federation, go look at the guide on the AFCO website.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can just Google the complete guide to EKGMay and your work and conjunction with them on that.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are countless credible videos on Instagram, on YouTube, on TikTok.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like there's a wealth of information out there.
[SPEAKER_03]: You just have to be aware that this is an option to you as an angler to improve the quality of your seafood.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Andrew, thank you so much for being here.
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to go fishing again soon, my friend.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been too long.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks.
[SPEAKER_00]: I tend to do this.
[SPEAKER_03]: You honor me to be here and all of our listeners honor us every time they listen to an episode.
[SPEAKER_03]: So thank you so much for tuning in and please remember to like, subscribe and download wherever you get your podcast content.
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll see you next time right here on the mastering rod building podcast.
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