The Joe Rogan Experience - #1013 - Cameron Hanes

Episode Date: September 22, 2017

Cameron Hanes is a bowhunting athlete, “training intensively each and every day to become the Ultimate Predator” and he also has a podcast called "Keep Hammering with Cameron Hanes."

What? Set a record for consecutive wins. Oh, they did. I know. 20-some? Yes! And we're live, Cam Haynes. Flip that sucker over so you don't get any distractions. Oh, sorry. See? That's what happens.

Jed already chimed in. This motherfucker's right in the other room. He's got to text you, make sure you say this, make sure you do that. We just got back from an epic elk hunt in the mountains of Utah. We did. We did. Epic is the right word.

You know, I think people throw around epic a little loosely. They do. Not this time. Not this time. No, no. God, man, it was amazing. Yeah. First of all, the place was incredible.

The mountains up there were just, the scenery was just stunning. Like, everywhere you look, your jaws drop. You're like, whoa. Yeah. It're like, whoa, it's amazing. Everything about it. I mean, but especially the scenery, just the mounds that they live in there, they're rugged, they're beautiful. And, you know, the quakies haven't even turned yet.

Normally, it seems like by this time, that's all yellow, like all those white trees. Yeah, the aspens. Yeah. Why do you call them quakies? Qu white trees. Yeah, the aspens. Yeah. Why do you call them quakies? Quaking aspens. Quaking aspens. Yeah.

I've never heard them called quakies until this past weekend. Call them quakies. Or this past week, rather. Everybody's calling them quakies. I'm like, what are you guys talking about? Yeah, that's a photo that I took from up there. Yeah. Fuck, man.

Everywhere we look, it was just like, there was too many moments with elk that I couldn't film because I was just so engrossed in the idea of getting it done and the hunting aspect of it that I didn't want to pull my phone out and be taking pictures every five minutes. No, be the tourist. Yeah, I took a few here and there, but there were so many moments that I'm so glad that Under Armour filmed this whole thing. Yeah. that Under Armour filmed this whole thing. So we're going to have a film of it that's going to be released online. So people are going to get a chance to check out how just incredible and epic and maybe just get a tiny sense of what we talk about

when we talk about how amazing it is to do this. Yeah, and we had the right guys filming it because there's all sorts of different levels of, especially hunting films. I mean, there's guys out there just with a handy cam, just trying to do the best they can to share their experience. And then there's guys like Mark Womack and his crew with sub seven that make films. I mean, you know, he's filmed me. There's an episode called Roy's buck, a whitetail hunt in Colorado. Did he do the time episode?

Time? Yeah. That one's amazing. The time. That's really good. Oregon Elkhunt. And so those are not just your typical what people might think of as a hunting film. Those are just, you know, or hunting video. These are true films.

Well, it's a short film, and it's really like almost like a mini documentary of how you're trying to balance your life and training and running and competing in these ultra marathons and then also working a full-time job and then also going out and bow hunting and it's it's a it's really well done yeah so those same guys filmed us yeah man do we got some epic footage just epic yeah and like you said hopefully gives a glimpse for people that that haven't experienced it or aren't hunters maybe, just to see everything that's involved in the hunt and how powerful it is and just the wild animals out there interacting with each other and then how we fit in that formula. It's crazy. It is.

It's one of those things that I really think our words, like people will be intrigued by the words, but I don't think we're ever going to be able to put it in their head what we experienced. Because there was one point in time where Jameson and Colton and I were together in the woods, and I just stopped, and as we were walking towards this elk that was screaming, and there's a screaming elk all around us, and you hear these cow elk that are making this meow, meow. And screaming is bugling. Yeah, screaming. We call it screaming, but it's part of the mating ritual, basically, of the male elk.

And they're just bugling, and we call it screaming because it's just like echoing. There's a couple higher notes in there. But yeah. Well, some of them are like, some of them have a growl too. Yeah. It starts deep. It goes high usually, comes back deep. And then the grunts.

We heard the one bull that I wound up killing that sounded like Jurassic Park. And it was a crazy scene because Jameson and Colton and I were tucked into, Jameson was the guy who was filming it, Colton was the guy and me, and we were tucked into this one small area, these trees that was at the edge of this creek. And we were watching these does. And we saw three does. So we knew. And there's a lesson in this.

I said does? Yeah, cows. Sorry. Wrong terminology. There's a lesson in this i said i said those yeah cows sorry wrong terminology um there's a lesson in this for regular people for life and this is the lesson in life because we saw these cows and we snuck in and we were like wow there's gotta be a bull here because there's like three cows and we saw three more time a year yeah there's not no cows unattended so there was 30 cows the cows kept filing in.

And we were like, where is this bull? Where is he? And all of a sudden, out of the creek bottom, steam coming out of his mouth. How far away? 60, 70 yards, something like that, through the trees. And the bugling is deafening, it feels like, at that distance. It's so close. So loud.

And he was just letting everybody know. Yeah. Back the fuck up. I'm here. Yeah. I mean, it's like a grand entrance. So this is the lesson. It gives you chills, doesn't it?

Oh, it did. Yeah. But this is the lesson. Okay. There was one cow. He had 30 cows. Yeah. And one cow was like, I don't want to be here.

I'm tired of being number 31. There's always one. Fuck this. And she takes off and he could not just be satisfied with his 30 cows oh I think he had more than 30 it was so hard to count they were everywhere yeah okay but he could not be satisfied no with the cows he had left he's like no no no no no where you going baby and he went chasing after her yeah and when he went chasing after her these other cows that were left behind started going,

meow, meow, meow. They make this noise like they want some dick. Yeah. And when that was happening, this other bull behind us was like, ah,

that bill. Yeah. I'm the man for you girls. Yeah. Well, fuck that dude. I'm right here. So he starts screaming and then the other bull starts screaming.

So he decided it's too much. And so he takes all of his cows and he moves them over the top of the hill. And when he moved them over the top of the hill, we went after him. And when we went after him, he turned around because he thought we were that other bull. He heard you. He heard us walking. Yeah. He's like, they can hear, I'm sure.

Yeah. No, he just thought it was the bull coming. Yeah. Heard their sticks breaking and footfalls and things like that. Yeah. And that's how he got them. Yeah. No, he just thought it was the bull coming. Yeah. Heard sticks breaking and footfalls and things like that. Yeah. And that's how he got him. Yeah. So if he had just let that girl go.

Yeah. Just get out of here, baby. So what's the lesson? The lesson is you got to let things go sometimes. Oh, is that it? You got 30 cows and one of them takes off. Or he might take an arrow in the chest. He might.

Yeah. Yeah. Let him go. I'm going to jot that down, actually. It's a very strong lesson it's a lesson for life like sometimes you can't be greedy he got greedy yeah and when he we probably got him anyway but he got greedy it's tough you know those things they only have one thing on their mind and that's breeding yeah you know so there is no uh 29 is good enough you know if we're

rough numbers but let that one go they're fighting for everything they got, you know, and it's, you know, we did see bulls fighting. You know, it's we see the bull, the the big herd bulls posturing, you know, so they're bugling. They get kind of swole up. Sometimes if they're, you know, if there's a subordinate bull, they'll kind of walk a little sideways to say, see how big I am. I mean, it's all this body language that goes on with these elk. But it's what they do. That's all they care about right now. When we were cutting the bull open, he had cuts and holes all over his rib cage and his ass, like everywhere.

He had stab marks from fighting. Like you cut below the skin you see all these like punctures yeah yeah their antlers are uh i mean and they're big and big solid muscle um eight nine hundred pound animals barely any fat living in the mountains that and you know how tough those mountains were to get around they're in there every day sleeping on dirt tough strong and fighting. Yeah, they get beat up. Yeah, I mean, what a crazy existence, too, that for one month out of the year,

everything goes haywire. Your friends are now your enemies. You're ready to fight to the death with guys you were just hanging out with a couple of weeks ago. All summer. All summer. Yeah, you weren't at the lake, but you were hanging out. You weren't at the lake, But you guys were eating grass.

Yeah. You were just looking out for wolves. Actually, they don't have wolves up there. Well, they had a wolf came through real recently, right? They have bears. A lot of bears. But they don't have a ton of predators, which is one reason why the elk are doing so well up there. It was incredible.

Yeah. I've never seen so many elk in one place. You had told me about it, but when you get there and you hear them all screaming, we heard a hundred different elks screaming in this one basin. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's unlike anything I've ever heard. And I've elk hunted a lot of different places. And that's the, you know, if you, and I said, if you're an elk hunter, I said one morning, I think it was in the morning that it was snowing and we were in on bulls, you know, crazy rut activity, amazing footage, cold, wet elk hunting.

And I'd said, told Mark and the guy said, if you're an elk hunter, this is as good as it gets. I mean, it's, you couldn't, it couldn't be any better. No, it was the terrain was beautiful. The weather was beautiful. There was one time where we had snuck up to this one bull, and he was younger. He was still a big bull, but he was. You wanted to shoot every bull. Yeah.

The ranch where we were at, they were really smart in how they managed the wildlife. Yeah. And one of the things they do is you're supposed to only kill an animal that's over eight years old, eight years or older. So that way they've had many, many, many years to breed. They're really like, they're in the later years of their life. Like how, how long does an elk live in the wild? If it's lucky. They thought that the bull I killed last year was 15. Whoa. But that's rare. That's crazy. I mean, a 10 year old bull was old. Yeah. So they figured at eight, then it starts going downhill. So it's, it's been past its prime.

That's past its prime and that's past its breeding prime. So that's when you want to take it out. Yeah. Colton said that mine was between eight and a half and nine and a half. Like he didn't, they're, you know, they're trying to get specific and i guess they have to take the jaw and send it to a biologist yeah teeth wear and things like that yeah so the estimate was eight and a half to nine and a half years old that's an old bull it's an old bull but yeah there's a tank this uh so that property it's about a quarter million acres 250,000 acres and they figure there's almost 3,000 elk you know, and that's actually a little bit more than optimum carrying capacity for that amount of property and that many elk. So they'd like to get that number down a little bit and it just increased the habitat and the elk herd health. Do they ever think about capturing

some of those? I know the Rocky Mountain Elk Federation does that. Is it a Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation? What is it foundation yeah they they capture them and then they'll release them to places like kentucky and they've sort of re-established like a real herd there now so for people for people that don't know at one point in time elk were essentially all over the united states but then europeans came and then market hunting came and of course we had rifles and it it's not we. We didn't do it. I wasn't there.

People that are like us did it. I would have had a bow. Yeah. But the market hunters essentially almost wiped out the elk. And at the turn of the century, there were very few elk, very few deer. And then they had established some protocols and some wildlife conservation ideas in place in order to try to revive them. They've done an amazing job since then. And now foundations like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, what they've done is move

elk into areas where they had been extirpated. So they had been driven out of the area, essentially extinct in this one particular region. And now they have healthy populations they're hunting yeah i mean they got enough to where they can manage them pennsylvania has a lot of elk now big bulls there yeah i've seen them on uh on the internet a lot of yeah no and it's you know we talk about this every time about hunters and conservation and the rock and mount elk foundation but those are the groups that have fought to protect elk and elk habitat, and that's why they're doing so well.

So I think, in fact, here's a gratuitous crotch shot. Can you see that? Oh, that's a Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation buckle. Step back a little bit. Step back a little bit so people can see the glory that is your belt buckle. That is my belt buckle. Yeah, so they've done an amazing job. And then obviously there's companies or other foundations that have done an amazing job for waterfowl, protecting wetlands.

Ducks are limited, yeah. Yeah, and then for whitetails. I mean, there's more whitetail deer in America today than there were when Columbus came. That's what most people hunt is whitetail too, because they're in Eastern Southern U.S., you know, where elk are mostly out West, but they are, you know, moving back East again. But yeah, most, most hunters are whitetail hunters and those, that animal's doing amazing. Yeah. I mean, so amazing.

So that they actually have to hire people to kill them in some places where they get too close to urban environments and they have a ton of car accidents. There's some states, God, I wish I could, I don't know every state in the bag limits, but I'm thinking Alabama or somewhere down in there where you can kill a deer a day. As many as you want. There's no predators. There's no winter. So these animals aren't dying on their own. So, I mean, we just don't have unlimited habitat because humans take up space. So down there, the bagging limit is a deer a day. Wow. And I don't know if it's Alabama, so don't, don't quote me on that, but it's one of those states. Yeah. Yeah. I think they have something like that similar in some parts of Pennsylvania and New

Jersey where they're in the suburban areas. I was watching a television show about it. I think it was one of those reality shows where they had hired people to come in, bow hunters, to hunt in suburban neighborhoods. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen something about that too. Shooting off back porches. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I saw an episode of a hunting show the other day where T-Bone was doing that. T-Bone Turner was shooting. I love T-Bone. He's a great guy yeah he's awesome shooting deer in uh this backyard in between an above ground swimming pool and a swing set he shot a deer yeah well if that was a swing movie no because he's a good shot yeah he's probably sure yeah he's time it yeah time it that'd be kind of fun two million car accidents happen every year just in north america

with deer yeah i'm sure and 150 people die every year in car accidents wasn't there a guy that died in your neighborhood yeah a deer went through a windshield of a van or something like that in uh right in eugene there yeah didn't it like hit the car in front of it hit it and then it flew into his windshield. Now I can't remember the details. I think that's what you told me. Yeah. But it happens a lot. Yeah, it does. I mean, it's, and that's the, there's always that balance of, uh, animal numbers and habitat and where we live and making it all work. Yeah. And that's where people get super emotional. People get very emotional about animals. I mean, what is this?

Whoa. Buck deer crashes through SUV windshield, driver hurt. Yeah, that's crazy. He didn't even die. That guy didn't die, apparently. He just got hurt. But look at that. Yeah.

God. That is crazy. That looks like a mule deer. It's a big, big deer. Yeah. Come flying through your windshield. Yeah. People get super emotional about this.

This is one of those subjects where whenever we're talking about hunting, like there's one way that we normally talk about it when it's just like you and I or maybe some other hunters where we talk about how great it is, how much we love it, how great the meat is. Yeah. And then there's a way that you talk about it in public where you have to sort of temper that knowing there's a bunch of people that are listening that are going to get very emotional that are maybe anti-hunters and some of them where it gets really weird also eat

meat yeah i god you know i i'm i'm a sucker i read the comments on social media and it's like you tell me don't read them but i think you do too but anyway and it's just some people it's like i saw one today and I think you mentioned that I was going to be on. Somebody said something like, Joe, for his whatever, I can't remember, intelligent or in tune or something you are. I can't believe you hunt, you know, or can't, whatever. It's just like.

Check that dude's Instagram for a cheeseburger. Yeah. I mean. Check to see if he's got a cat that he's feeding murdered animals to. To me, I think if you are, you know, in tune with actually how the world and nature and how we live and what we need, the more in tune you are, the more accepting you are of hunting. Not the more you slide it because it's how it works. It's how we survive. It's, you know know life eats life and it's

just like it seems weird for people to think that oh i'm i'm evolved past that and i'm smarter more intelligent and you're a neanderthal it's just it's opposite really well what they're trying to do and i understand it and i appreciate it what they're trying to do i don't is move past the idea that we have to be cruel and that we have to kill animals and that we have to live off the suffering of other living creatures in order to survive. So this is like the vegan idea, right? So what they want to do is live off only plants and not participate at all in any sort of slaughter of animals or any sort of cruelty. And in theory, it's a great idea. It's a great idea because nobody wants to be cruel.

Nobody wants to be vicious. I don't like to be cruel. I don't want, my goal isn't to be cruel. I don't like seeing animals suffer. Right. That's the worst thing in my life is to see an animal suffer. Which sounds very contradictory coming from a guy who's killed a lot of animals. true i mean i don't i don't enjoy it and if it animal suffers i feel bad right but if it's a clean kill it's better than anything that animal's going to get

in the wild in the wild that animal's going to die either by freezing to death or being torn apart by predators because it's old or it's going to get injured and it's going to get torn apart. Take an antler. I found a dead bull last year that took an antler in the neck from fighting, and who knows how long it took to bleed out. Maybe it broke its neck. Maybe it was paralyzed and it laid there, and it took days to die. But a hunter, and the term I like to use is being merciful.

a hunter and what I the term I like to use is being merciful I want to be ethical quick and merciful when I kill an animal because that's 100% the opposite of how nature works well this is one thing that you have said to me in private when we've talked about it you know we're saying that what you train for and what you strive for is so that in that moment you can make the most precise shot and kill that animal as quickly and as ethically and as efficiently as possible and that that's how that's on your mind every time you release an arrow every time yeah and yeah so i just think people i know it's hard to understand i get it if you haven't hunted and you haven't been in the mounds and you haven't seen how cruel nature can actually be, it's, it's hard to comprehend. Yeah, it is. And it's also the reason why human beings are today are here today. The reason why we survived is because of hunting. Does it mean that you, you can't be a vegetarian? You can't go vegan or no,

it doesn't. You can do whatever you want to do. But the reason why human beings have made it to the top of the food chain is because we consumed animals. It's one of the primary reasons that biologists believe that our brains evolved past that of lower primates, is that we figured out fire, we figured out how to cook meat, and the nutrients from that cooking meat, along with the complex problem-solving issues that come up in hunting are one of the reasons why we evolved because to be smarter and more clever than these animals that are faster than you smell better than you hear better than you see better than you stronger than you they have more endurance than you these elk run up that mountain like it's a joke i was huffing and puffing

i mean i've been running a lot since we did that Keep Hammering 5K last year. And I realized what a pussy I am. And then, you know, times that we've hunted together, too, I've just been really out of breath. And even though I work out doing other things, I realize, like, you have to run hills. There's no way around it. So it helped me a lot. That was very nice to see. It was very nice to see a big difference in my endurance now where

I can keep up. Yeah. Whereas before it was like a huge struggle because every day we were doing 10, 12 miles. Yeah. Yeah. But these elk go up there like nothing. Oh, I know. Like it's nothing. Yeah. So for a human at one point in our evolutionary past to figure out how to beat these things at their own game, trick them and get meat from them and survive and then develop strategies for that and then teach other people in their community these strategies. And this evolved. And this is the reason why you and I are talking today on microphones that are powered by electricity

that in this room, that shelter in this city, this complex series of buildings that we've built a lot to protect us from the environment and from other animals. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's been, I mean, quite a journey and the part of that. So yeah, we have evolved. Yes, we've got better and we are, that's why we're different than an elk and other animals. That's, and we take advantage of that superiority and we use it to kill them, to eat them to haul the meat home but for me if it was about the killing

just killing, I wouldn't bow hunt bow hunting is very hard I would rifle hunt if I just wanted to go out there and kill something that's usually the most efficient way to get a kill maybe 10 times easier I don't know but with a bow, I just know how difficult it is that's usually the most efficient way to get a kill is you rifle hunt. Maybe 10 times easier. I don't know.

But with a bow, I just know how difficult it is. And, you know, you talked about the improvements you've made. You've been bow hunting now for four years. And I just want to, I do want to touch on, it's been awesome to see the dedication you have to the craft of bow hunting. It is not easy. I mean, I know people who don't hunt, see it and say, Oh, you just enjoy killing animals out there. I just said, if I, if I just want to kill, I'd use a gun. It's, it is about the challenge and about the

experience and it's not easy. And the, the improvements you've made in four years, and it's basically through obsession. I mean, to be great at anything, you need to be slightly obsessed. And you have been. But that learning curve for hunting is so steep. It's like sometimes people, you know, because of how we've talked and, you know, the stories we've shared on social media, it looks intriguing. It looks, I don't know. I mean, it's just it's powerful. So people, they want a piece of that. They want to know what that feels like to be ingrained in that world and you know we get messages hey i want to get

started in bow hunting and part of me is going oh my god i want you to but it's a long journey it is hard yeah it's almost too much it's not too much i mean because i want don't want to discourage anybody but god it's tough i I mean, just to me. Well, just to get good enough. Listen, I've been doing this for almost 30 years now. 1989, I killed my first bull elk as a spike bull. And so since 1989, so this is 29 years of bow hunting, and I go into this season just like I go into every season, and I wonder, is this going to be the season where I have no success?

Because it could happen. It's that hard. Because I've killed before and had success for all these years, doesn't mean anything right now. Doesn't mean anything to an animal that I was pursuing in Utah, a big bull. That big bull could care less about, oh, you know, he's had a lot of success over the years. It means nothing, you know? And so I always wonder, is this going to be the year where I can't get it done? And it completely changes your relationship to your food because all your meat that you're getting in your house is coming from your success bow hunting. So when you are entering into a season and you're wondering whether or not you're going to get success, you're literally worrying whether or not you're going to be able to provide for your family the way you have been over the past. And it's not like we're starving. Right. But it's like, this is the way you've chosen to acquire meat though. And this ethical, humane, wild way. When my family goes to the freezer and opens it, there's always elk meat

in there. Always. That's what I do. I make sure we have, my family has meat to eat. So when they go to the freezer and open it and there's no elk meat, that's not good. I mean, yeah, we're not going to starve, but that's what we're used to. That's, that's, I've provided like that. My family, friends and family have called, Hey, you got any elk meat you could spare? Got any hamburger, you know, whatever. Always. Yeah. Oh yeah yeah. I'd love to. That's what I love to do. So I don't want to face a prospect of not having that. Right.

Yeah, I give away a lot of it. I'm constantly giving it to Brian Cowan. Yeah. Brian needs to get back on the horse. He hasn't had any success hunting in a couple of years, so he mooches off me. Did he? He's killed then. Yeah, he's got a few deer.

Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. He's killed then? Yeah, he's got a few deer. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. He's never shot a bow before, but he's rifle hunted. I figured that's why he was so ripped is from all that lean protein, because he is a beautiful man. He's beautiful. Yeah, he wants to get into bow hunting, but it's another one of those things.

He's like, yeah, you say you do, but do you really? You know, because if you do, it's going to take a lot of your time. You've got to get all in. All in. You can't go halfway. No. And there's the other thing that people love to say, you know, that meat is terrible for you and you're going to get cancer and heart attacks and diabetes. People who keep repeating that, stop saying it because it's not true.

You're wrong. who keep repeating that, stop saying it because it's not true. You're wrong. I know you like to say that because it sounds good and it sounds like a really good argument for people that eat meat. It's absolutely untrue. And if you go back and look at the real studies, the only thing that they've shown is there's a connection between cancer and processed food. There is a connection between preservatives, nitrites, and a lot of the things that we use to make processed meat. So if you're talking about things like hot dogs and processed meats and, you know, kind of like beef sticks that you might get at the gas station, yeah, eat enough of those and your body's going to revolt. It's not good for you. But wild game meat is some of the most

nutritious and healthy things that you can put in your body. And that's just a fact. And so people that keep putting these comments on Cam Haynes' Instagram page and occasionally on mine and all these different, they always want to say this, Cam, you're going to get cancer. Good luck with your heart attack. It's not true. And every study that has shown that it is true is bullshit. they've all been debunked by actual science if you look at the real people that are putting together these documentaries that show that meat causes diabetes they are fools and it's not true it's been widely debunked what they are is proselytizing vegans they're vegans who want everyone to become vegan so they're distorting

truth and making documentaries that have no basis in actual reality and science. And if you just Google, like, what was the most recent one those guys did? What the Health. Yeah, What the Health. Google What the Health debunked. And there's a ton of scientists that have no stake

in the game. They're not, like, from the meat industry. They're just people that have seen seen the doctors have reviewed it. There's people that have seen the actual facts and seen this documentary and go, this is nonsense. And so people regurgitate that stuff all the time. I just want to tell people like, just do some research, read some of the actual studies. Here's what's bad for you. A sedentary lifestyle. Sedentary lifestyle is terrible for you. Sitting in your office chair, sitting in your cubicle, eating too much, bad for you.

High carbohydrate diets, bad for you. Getting too fat, bad for you. Drinking a lot of alcohol, bad for you. Drinking sugary sodas, bad for you. All those things are way worse for you than an elk steak. Way worse. So if you're eating any of those things or doing any of those things, and you say, good luck with your heart attack, fuck off. Because you don worse so if you're eating any of those things or doing any of those things and you say good luck with your heart attack fuck off because you don't know what you're talking about yeah it's true and i uh since we're since we're talking about one thing that i get i think we have to be careful on is uh slamming i guess the uh the beef industry because i'm not we're not trying to do that. You know, people always say, you know, there's cattle ranchers out there that work hard, that do it right.

And, you know, there is factory farming, which people, I feel like almost, I've been guilty of it maybe, throwing around factory farming, almost like a vegan will throw around good luck with a heart attack. Right. And there's a lot of ranches that do it right that have the cattle out there free ranging and the only time that they're they're in a small enclosure is when they are brought to slaughter yeah brought to slaughter so i mean um you know i buy i buy steak still occasionally from my buddy at e3 uh there's plenty of places that have i don't know if you're going to look at ethical beef production there's plenty of places that have, I don't know, if you're going to look at ethical

beef production, there's a lot of places that do it. I agree. And the same thing can be said with chicken and same thing you'd say with poultry, with turkey. There's a lot of free range and there's more of an emphasis. I think that's one of the reasons why people become more and more interested in hunting today. They're more in tune.

People who do eat meat. Yeah. Well, but people are more concerned with the ethics behind how their food is raised. You know, there's a lot of farm-to-table restaurants that are opening up, which are really amazing. You can go and you can, you know, and there's a place near me. And you get these eggs and they're dark yolks, like a dark orange yolk at this restaurant. And they have, like have grass-fed beef that tastes healthy. It tastes really good. And that's the stuff we're supposed to be eating.

We've gotten into this crazy situation as human beings where we're getting food that is, in a lot of ways, tasteless because it's been engineered to last forever on a shelf. We've gotten this meat that's gotten super fat because they're pumping them up with antibiotics and feeding them grain until they just become these fat, unhealthy things that in no way resemble a wild creature. Well, we had a steak last night at the airport. Yeah. Taste-wise, I could barely taste it.

Yeah, there was not much to it yeah and but i think that was also probably the way it was cooked but what was really weird is the difference in the connection with that right like when you sit down and you cook an elk steak you remember where you were when you shot that you remember how hard it was to get to that elk you remember the stalk you remember maybe maybe several blown stalks where the wind shifted on you and the elk spooked and took off and how difficult it is and the intense success and that's another thing that people don't like the idea of the happiness that comes with success when you kill something but it's hard to understand i think yeah but it's yeah i mean it's an achievement's not like, oh, we're so we murdered something. So we're celebrating. But it's it's so hard. We talked about the difficulty. You achieve something of of great difficulty when that animal's dead and then you're skinning it you're cutting the meat off i mean you know i took out the

tenderloins of uh of the bull i killed you know and smelled it made sure the meat always just making sure because that that is the fruit of the labor right there is that meat so you just you're holding a big slab of steak and like you said remember everything, but mostly what I'm thinking of there is how clean it is, how pure it is. Does it smell good? Smells perfect. And that's just kind of the process. It goes in the meat bag. It goes on my back. It comes off the mountain. It goes in the cooler. It goes to the processor. It gets cut and frozen and wrapped. And then, then I cook it. That's a lot of i mean a lot of steps we go to the airport we say uh yeah can i get the sirloin that's it yeah that's it and that's how most people do it

yeah and that's a weird place that we've gotten into as human beings hunters are judged negatively for having just that whole emotional thing and all the meaning and the feeling and the connection to it. And we're judged negatively for that. But the person who sits down and says, I'll take the sirloin. That's good. Wow, good to go. It's like it should be opposite. It should.

But you know what it is, too? It's like the building is faceless, right? Okay, the restaurant is faceless. The supermarket is faceless. You have no idea who did the actual killing of the cow. When you go to the woods and you come out with

an elk steak and you kill it and you're wearing a Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation belt buckle and you're Cam Haines, people can look to you. Well, there, I found one right there. You are the connection to death. You're the connection to death. Meanwhile, if someone was outside protesting you, like they found out we're doing this podcast and you're like, you son of a bitch. We're, we're, we're the ones who put up the petition. We want to get you

banned from Under Armour. You're a terrible person. You're a trophy hunter. You're out there killing animals. All around them is dead animals. Every gas station is filled with beef sticks. Every restaurant is filled with dead animals. Every supermarket is filled with dead animals. Every gas station is filled with beef sticks. Every restaurant is filled with dead animals. Every supermarket is filled with dead animals. In this area where we're at, there are a hundred places that you can walk to inside of three minutes that have dead animals in them. Yeah. But they'd be protesting here. They'd be protesting here. You, because you're a face.

And meanwhile, that's what's so back ass words about it. It's because we're're doing the right way. You're doing not saying you have to do it that way. But if you wanted to have the most, this is a weird word, spiritual connection to your food. It's there's no it is. It's there's nothing else I've ever experienced. It's even remotely close. Right.

Yeah. I mean, and there's I guess to some people, some people are getting it. You know, there's some people that would protest out here. It wouldn't matter what justification you had. They were never going to see it. And that's fine because we're all different. You know, we all have different passions. So that group of people, whatever. But there's a people in the middle that we have, they have heard and they have thought about it and they have, you know, realized that does make, that actually makes sense. And those are the people that want to know what it'd be like to be a provider for themselves, to go into the mountains and to come loaded out with, you know, a pack full of meat. And so those are the people I guess we're talking to. We're never going to get the extreme people. No. I mean mean and that's always going to be the case with all arguments there's always going to be radical people on all sides you know and i think uh our job as human beings communicating to other human beings is to try to relay our own experiences as clear and as honest as possible and that's why i always try to look at it from the

other point of view. I always try to look at it from what people that I think are good people that become vegans because they're good people, because they want to have no cruelty. And I think they just have a perspective that I don't share. And that perspective is I've actually been involved in, I've gone through the ritual of the hunting, gone through the trials and tribulations of hiking many, many miles and trying to find these things and trying to figure out the wind. And it hasn't all been success. No, it's a lot of failure. It's a lot of failure. It's more success lately than ever, but that's just because I've worked harder than ever. And then it kept more and more dedication, more time being obsessed, more time practicing.

I practice every day. I'm shooting every day. It's, you know, people see the success. They see the pictures. If it's somebody they want to hate, it's me they hate. I'm sitting there with a dead elk. But hunting is such a roller coaster. It's like everything is

magnified the success is magnified because it's so hard the failure is magnified because it hurts so bad because you've worked so hard i mean i just i it took me i started like i said in 1989 it took me to 1996 to kill my first six-point bull elk in the wilderness and it would have been we wouldn't even have looked at it on this last time it would have been like ah there's a little bull I mean but when I when I got that six point bull elk I felt so proud I'd finally achieved I mean that's that's a bull on this buckle right here is a six point and I thought I finally did it but in between there had been so many disappointments and devastations and in the wilderness I remember one time I'd been in there by myself um I think like day eight I was in this dry creek bed and here comes these cows come across here comes this big

bull and I don't know how big he was he's pretty big for there you know 320 330 which is a scoring number um it would have been which is calculating the length of all the points of the antlers right so it would have been still slightly smaller than the bulls we just killed and he came across there and I'm on my knees and I shoot and uh I I hit if you hit him in the shoulder back then, the bows weren't as efficient as they are now, but if you hit him in the shoulder blade, it went in about, I would say an inch, inch and a half, arrow hit his shoulder blade, stopped and basically fell out. And he went running off and I went up and picked up my arrow and there's blood just on the broadhead and to them you know something like that is they might have a sore shoulder for a little while

they take antlers and the guts and neck and all the time so they heal up like they're they're amazing so that was nothing essentially nothing more than a flesh wound but i remember sitting there looking at my arrow looking at the little bit of blood on my broadhead. And I mean, eyes welling up with tears because eight days just there, but working all year towards that moment and having that opportunity at 43 yards and being inches off because inches further to the right back would have been double long, dead bull, biggest bull ever. All the hard work paid off to being devastated. So people see the success some 20 years later, whatever it's been. They don't, to be, to feel as disappointed as I was to, to wonder if all the work was worth it to hurt that bad. They don't see that, but that's why hunting is so powerful. That's why hunting has changed my life because it's so difficult. And because there's those ups and downs and, you know, we try to, we do a better job of sharing the complete journey now

than back in the day. You just, you know, it'd just be like, Hey, I killed this bull. That's it. You know, you'd go to the archery pro shop you put your picture up of the bull you killed and that was it now we're a little more in tune i see all sorts of people on social media now and they they they show the picture of their bull and they get down you read the caption it's about you know providing for their family and and pure protein in their freezer so we we're doing a better job of explaining it. But still, until you've been there, it's really hard to grasp what it all means. No, I don't think anybody's going to.

I don't think it's possible. It's also, it's something more. It's a discipline, but it's something more. Like sometimes people call bow hunting a sport. And I always kind of cringe. Yeah, I don't like that either. Because I think there's not a word for it. No, it bow hunting a sport and i always kind of cringe yeah i don't like that either because i think it's not a word for it no i don't think there's a i don't think it's a comparative word i think it's bow hunting i think it is what it is because i don't i think it's a lifestyle is what i say yeah you have to be immersed in the lifestyle to to really understand

it a sport makes it seem like you know keeping score well to me it's a lot like jiu-jitsu in that way too where if you talk to people who train in jiu-jitsu a lot they understand how difficult it is and they understand the struggle and they understand that in that struggle like all struggles every i think people need struggle i think it's very important yeah like you you get better not just at the jiu jujitsu or not just at the bow hunting. You get better at being a person. And I feel better today after this trip in Utah than I felt before I left. Not that I felt bad before I left.

I felt great. But I feel energized. Why? I feel energized because of the experience. I feel energized because of the experience. I feel energized because of the struggle. I feel energized because of how difficult it was to hike those mountains up and down and chasing those elk around and having things blow out. And getting back to the lodge and being so tired that you could just barely eat your food. And then I'm passing out almost like as I'm done eating.

And then I crash. And the alarm goes off at 5 o'clock in the morning. And then you're out there in the dark doing it again and then to have success. So to, to understand that you can push through things and you can get better and you can practice things and you can get better. And that applies to everything in life. It does. It's a discipline, but it's discipline like almost no other because it's not just a discipline it's a discipline that also sustains you and your family and it's a discipline that involves like real

critical moments of life and death like when i was drawing back on that bull and i'm looking at this bull through a very small window where i could shoot between these two trees, 32 yards away. And Colton, who was the guy, paused this bull. He made a cow sound, like, meow, like right where that bull needed to stop. Like the bull walked in. He cow called it. It stopped. And that critical moment where you have to make a perfect shot in a split second. And intensity is skyrocketing.

The intensity is insane. It's like nothing else. Yeah. intensity the intensity is insane yeah it's like nothing else yeah it's it's and to do it and to do it successfully and to have that elk die in seconds and have that elk wander off 20 yards like seeing it bleed out of both sides knowing this is it and this is probably no not probably definitely unless he falls off a cliff this is the cleanest fastest death this thing is ever going to have. Yeah. Yeah. No. And I'm going to eat it tonight.

Yeah. I don't know. There's so much reverence in the moment. What I like, and we talked about this film and capturing it and hopefully what the message we can convey with the film. with the film but you did a great job after that shot of really just uh i guess verbalizing how you felt then and and kind of everything you just said but more authentic because it was you were there it was not a recreation it was real and the bull was laying there dead and uh it's um i don't know it's intense i wish there was a way people could get it i think these kind of conversations help a little bit and i know for people listening there's some people that go oh you guys are redundant you're just defending hunting hunting

again so boring next anytime i see a guy with the baseball hat on so i almost didn't wear a hat today but why baseball hats they don't like baseball hats excuse me i got it i've been time I see a guy with a baseball hat on. So I almost didn't wear a hat today. Why? Baseball hats? They don't like baseball hats? I've been coughing forever. What about baseball hats? They don't like baseball hats. Where's this coming from? I saw it on your comments. You gotta stop reading those! I know.

I think mostly... What kind of hats do they like? Berets? I'm a painter. I love the arts. A t-shirt I wanted to make up. No, I'm not going to say it. I'm not going to say it. My t-shirt ideas sometimes aren't the greatest.

Or most positive. They're hilarious when no one's around. They can be funny. The one about rain gear is awesome. Oh, my God. So I try to be positive. I mean, yeah, anyway. Well, positive except when you're just being funny.

See, that's what I do for a living. Yeah. When people say, well, that's pretty negative. Well, it's not really because I don't mean it. Yeah. You know, like my friends will say some of the rudest shit about me, and I'll laugh my ass off. Yeah. Because I know they're just being funny. I mean it a little bit. You mean it a little bit, but that'll laugh my ass off. Yeah. Cause I know they're just being funny. I mean it a little bit.

You mean it a little bit, but that's what makes it funny. Yeah. If you didn't mean it at all, if there was no truth to it at all, there'd be no humor to it at all. Um, I,

I wanted to touch on this. Uh, you know, we talk about the struggle and the, uh, the hardship. Um, Adam Green Tree,

our friend, you know, he, he had, uh, you know, a lot of people here followed along on his journey and tell everybody what happened yeah and his journey will be so he hunted three different states over the course of about three weeks and uh by himself by himself solo in the back country with a tiny little tent yeah he hunted Colorado then he went to Montana then he ended up killing a bull in Idaho if you look on the surface of it if you didn't understand

you'd think oh he hunted three states and he killed a five-point bull wow that was you know that's a lot of effort for that but to him and to people who who struggle, it's not just a five-point bull died. That was a journey. And that was the end of the journey. And there was success. And there was tons of failure along the way. Well, the best part about it was that he documented the entire thing on Instagram. Yeah, he did.

He did it on his Instagram story. And I let people know. I put up a bunch of posts about it. And one of the posts that sent his followers skyrocketing was him holding a pistol and then in the distance he took a photo of this crazy bastard yeah in the moment there's a fucking giant grizzly standing on its hind legs looking at him from it looked like no more than 50 60 yards away yeah and he's holding up a pistol and I said that it's one of the most like you could see it there yeah that looks like it may be at the most probably a video so I think it stands oh is this his video yeah that look that

gun looks like it's 200 years old I don't think it's just out of focus oh it's kind of but yeah I mean that you know that's a phone video so I mean it's way closer

than it looks yeah he keeps standing up to try to figure out where he is yeah and what he's doing and in a moment like that they just keep standing up

I don't want to shoot her but I have no mind in life either In a moment like that, she keeps standing up. I don't want to shoot her, but I have no mind in life either, so fucking open that bitch's head up if she comes for me. One more time. I just can't imagine what it would be like there, being out there for 20 plus days by yourself. A moment like that is, you know, we're pretty used to being around people. I mean, if something happened here,

I know you'd do whatever you could. Jamie would do whatever he could to help, you know, if we needed help. And that, nobody's coming. You by a hundred percent he's by himself and that those type of experiences where else are you going to get that so he's in he's in the mountains there's a bear that the bear is just doing what bears do right and but that and he's immersed himself into that world and that's all part of this whole process and whole journey. But that's what intrigued everybody that was following along is because that's as real as it gets.

And he's surviving. And we talked about, you know, on our hunt, we got back tired. We were able to go to be dry and everything else. And that intent, you're getting in a tent. If you were wet when you got in the tent you're gonna be wet in the morning you know what i mean yeah i mean it's uh it's it's uncomfortable it's uncomfortable and i i don't you know that's what i grew up doing because i had no other option that was i mean i could hunt oregon for 25 on an elk tag and hunt public land. And that's all I did for decades because that was the only option I have.

And that is, that is difficult. And like I said, you question why you're doing it. And people would say, you know, I'd kill like a, if I saw a five point bull, like what Adam killed, I would kill it and be happy. And people say, you don't need to work that hard to kill an elk you know you could kill that bull off off a gravel road and you know a truck camp but to me that's not what it was about it was about the the whole journey in the wilderness and surviving and and navigating and problem solving and yeah maybe it wasn't the biggest bull in the world, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. Yeah, there is a difference between, and I have done this a few times, between camping and staying in a lodge. Staying in a lodge is way nicer. Oh, yeah. You know, we were in Utah.

We would go back to the lodge, and it was, you know, you and me and our buddy Ben O'Brien was there and was lots of laughs and we were having a good time. We'd all eat dinner together and just shoot the shit. When you're in the woods and you're camping, you're still in the woods. There's no, like the lodge is civilization. There's electricity. There's hot water. You can take a shower. When you're in the woods, you stay in the woods.

When you camp, you wake up, you're in the woods you stay in the woods when you camp you wake up you're in the woods you're it's a more immersive experience and then there's the next level which is what adam did yeah in the woods by himself for many many many many days before he had success and then there's video of him after he shot that elk video of him after he shot that elk 20 whatever days in when you know he's like it's finally over yeah it's finally over it's like that guy just went on a vision quest you know so much respect for that you know i mean he is so tough and he's um bow hunting means i don't know if you if you tried to explain tried to explain what how what does bow hunting mean to I don't know if you, if you tried to explain, tried to explain what, how, what does bow hunting mean to you? You couldn't do it with words for somebody like him, you know, and, and I, I would lump myself in there. It's like bow hunting defines who I am,

who he is. But, uh, you know, it's, it's, I know I've done seminars before and I've asked people, okay, if there's a 100 or 200 people there, how many people have stayed out in the woods in the mountains by themselves for one night? Never. Really? Hardly anybody. I mean, how many people do you know that have stayed out in the woods by themselves for a night? I just know a few because I know hunters like Remy and you and Green Tree and a few other folks.

Right. So most people, they don Tree and a few other folks. Right. So most people, they don't like to be by themselves. No, not in the woods. And they want to feel safe. Yeah. So for Adam to do that for three weeks, that says something because hardly anybody ever does it. Right. You know, and so he did that, loved it.

I think he loved it. His video said he loved it. Sorry to speak for him. Maybe he didn't always love it. I think he loved it. His video said he loved it. Sorry to speak for him. Maybe he didn't always love it, but no, I, I, I can't speak for him, but I can speak for myself and know that you don't always love it. Um, there's times where I, I would question, like I said, what am I doing? Is this worth it? But you'd fight through that. And then, and then you'd, you know, come out stronger and be ready for the next challenge. And hopefully it paid off. I think any experience in nature is good for people.

I think we spend entirely too much time in cities, entirely too much time indoors in buildings and artificial lighting and all that stuff. I think any experience in nature at all is good for you it's just good to be grounded and literally grounded like to feel the ground and to understand that this is this is the wild world this is the real world this other thing is this nerfed out thing that we've sort of concocted as human beings but the more time you spend in there the more it reveals itself to you yeah and there's a weird empty loneliness to true wilderness. Like when you're at the top of a mountain and you don't have any cell signal and you don't see a building anywhere as far as the eye can see, you don't see, there's no, we're nowhere near city when we're out there. When you sit up there and you look out and you

hear a coyote howl and you see an Eagle fly overhead and you know you hear an elk bugle you you just it's just there's nothing like it no it's the the real wild i mean these things they don't they don't know you're a real thing they don't care they're not they're they care if you get close to them they'll run away but what they're there to do is what they've been doing for thousands of years yeah and that's it's set it's so different you talk about how you know we got to lax last night and i'm just walking around going and i like i don't 100 feel this way but i'm like i told told you i'm like i hate people well it's just there was so many because i just we went from no people oh and that's it's so uh enriching and so i don't know

what yeah i keep saying powerful i don't know it's a good word i use it all the time but hashtag yeah powerful joe rogan um but in the mountains it's uh i don't know it's so simple life is so simple it's like it is and it isn't right because it's super complicated like to survive out there You have to have a lot of things work in your favor. Yeah, but it's simple because either you survive or you don't Yeah, but it's not that simple because it's like either you kill a bull or you don't or you eat berries Adam made a lot of berries. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean it's that's what I like. I like about that. It's simple. Yeah. There's no, you know, there's no different social classes of people. There's no. That's very important, right? Yeah. That's there's a there's a thing that happens out there where you're clearly defined by your ability to perform under pressure only. only like if you're if you go out there and you're some famous rock star or something like that here's some you know some guy who lives in a giant mansion and flies around a private jet and you own an island but you choke when you're going to shoot a bull and you shoot it in the dick yeah and

everybody knows you're a loser you're a loser yeah isn't that amazing yeah i mean it's a there's a leveling there's out there it's like the people who get respect, hunters get, I mean, if you, you know, if you can navigate, if you can see elk, if you can read blood, if you're blood trailing, you can, you got woodsmanship, you can unravel a blood trail, you can start a fire. You're here. Yeah. It doesn't matter about how much money you have or who you are.

If you can't do any of that stuff, well, you're lower. To me, it was incredibly important to be able to perform during crunch time. Yeah. Because I wanted the respect of the people that also do it. I wanted, and to get that is very important, to be able to, in that moment, and I spent so much time thinking about it, going over podcasts and all that Joel Turner stuff

about target panic and about closed loop and open loop mind systems and how your brain functions under pressure and thinking about all these different things. I put a lot of thought to it. This might sound ridiculous to somebody who hasn't shot a bow that like, what? No, you just pull back and shoot, right? No, no, no.

It's when you're looking at a 900 pound forest horse with spears growing out of its head and it's screaming and there's one shot you have one opportunity and by the way you only have one tag and if you wound an animal it's over yeah if you if you just shot it in the ankle and it starts bleeding guess what that your tag's over yeah the money you spent is done you failed and that thing lives to be you know lives to be an elk and lives another day another day and you uh you go back disappointed and you have to start from scratch and rebuild yourself. Yeah. And that's good too.

The failure and the feeling of failure is the real motivator. That's what makes you run more miles, shoot more arrows, work hard, think about it, think your way through this thing. And to me, that leveling of the social classes is very important. You know, it's something that I think jujitsu does as well. There's another parallel in that because and even comedy does that as well. Because if you're not funny, people don't laugh and they don't like you. Yeah. You know, like you have to be able to do the thing.

And sometimes the thing doesn't work out and then you feel like fucking terrible. Yeah. the thing that doesn't work out and then you feel like fucking terrible yeah you know and that leveling of the classes that happens in bow hunting is uh is it's hard as i mean i keep saying it's hard to describe because it really is i think anything that's very difficult to do you find out more about yourself and when you find out more about yourself, you have two options. Either you can go into denial or ignore it or, you know, fade back, or you could face it and struggle more and get better and really work at it. And that's where I think bow hunting shares a lot of, a lot of its aspects with other difficult, but yet important things in life. They become a vehicle for developing your human potential.

Yeah. And running is like that too. Well, look what it's done for you. I mean, your passion and obsession with elk hunting is what led you to being this crazy ultra marathon runner. I mean, that's really what started it all off. Yeah, I wanted to be better in the mountains. Yeah, better at... I never really understood until I hunted with you.

Because when you would run up the top of a fucking hill, when an elk would go over the top, and you'd run up the hill, and I would just be struggling to go a quarter of the way, and I'd have to take a break, and then I'd go a little further and take a break, and you were up there, and you weren't even out of breath and then I thought about it I'm like okay I get it I get this now like this there's a lot to this yeah yeah that and that's uh you know you talked

about it is it's it's crazy that bow hunting has done what it's done I've been on joe rogan nine times jamie is this the ninth time nine times and you know i i don't for me personally because i just feel like i'm okay about i'm decent at bow hunting and it's like just the fact that i was even here one time seems surreal but what i i just i want to think i don't know i was thinking about this earlier. It's because of bow hunting. I know people will say, because, again, I read the comments. Don't read the comments. They'll talk about that it must be nice for Joe to be able to hunt wherever. I mean, where we were was amazing.

It was like, where we elk hunted is where I feel like I've had to work my whole life to get to. To dream. To killing bulls on public land, to starting with a spike bull, to 30 years of this. And it's a dream. And it's like I will never take for granted what it means to hunt where we were hunting in Utah. But it seems crazy to think that you grew up in Massachusetts, right? Yeah. Right.

You had the whole different journey. You weren't some kid bow hunting, but you were a comedian and a fighter and whatever. But bow hunting brought us together and we shared this life-changing time in Utah from completely opposite paths. And so whether that's, you know, you, you took your path to get to the best elk hunting in the world. I took my path. It doesn't matter. We're hunters there sharing the mountain and taking on the challenge together. And that's what bow hunting does. It's like eliminates, you know, you're here in LA, it eliminates everything and we're the same. Yeah, all very difficult pursuits.

But we're the same there. Eliminate all the bullshit, yeah. And it's, there's not very many things that can do that. We named a few of them. Yeah. But it's just like, when you think about it like that, it seems unreal. It does seem unreal.

But that also sort of really clearly defines why this discipline is so important to you and i well and it's i don't know i think it's and hopefully we've opened the eyes of others to see that i don't know to to want that same type of experience you know you might not be the same it might not not everybody's going to get to where we hunted in utah because it's like great public land hunt i mean i was listening to brian barney's podcast the eastman elevated podcast where he took a couple of buddies uh when i was actually cutting up meat today i was listening to this took a couple buddies with him on a public land hunt in montana and they got into some elk and they seemed like they had an amazing time they got

rained down this is the same sort of thing. It's an amazing adventure. You know, it's available in a lot of different forms to a lot of people. Yeah. And there's a lot of people that go, oh, you know, this is bullshit. You know, Joe gets to do this and Joe's lucky and this and that. I think it's hashtag bullshit. Hashtag bullshit. Yeah.

Guess what? I'm lucky. I've always been lucky. I don't know what to do. You want me to be unlucky? I can't. I'm just lucky. I mean, maybe I'll be unlucky someday.

But you've worked your ass off. Yeah. That's also part of luck. Part of luck is you have to, it's, what is that phrase? Like, luck is when opportunity meets preparation. You know, that's what some people say. It's that, but it's also luck. You know, there's people that are luckier than you. And by the way, there's people that are way fucking luckier than me. You don't think Justin Bieber's luckier than me? That little cunt? He's never been poor in his life. He's worth 100 million bucks,

and he's like 20 years old. He probably has no cum in his body. He's probably every day just drained. He probably just has to eat raw eggs all day just to try to keep up. Yeah, stay hydrated, Justin. Stay hydrated, kid. Yeah yeah we're counting on you I mean that little fucker is way more lucky hammering there's always literally this there's always going to be people that are luckier than you yeah and some of it is luck and some of it is

courage some of it is putting your ass out there some of it is trying things one of the things that I always like to tell people that I think you should do is do shit that's difficult. It's very important to struggle. And it doesn't mean bowhunting. I like yoga class for the same reason. I go in there, it's me and a bunch of housewives, and they're kicking ass more than I am. I mean, I watch these ladies and I watch their mental strength and fortitude while they're grueling their way through this 104 degree temperature, holding these poses. I'm watching the sweat pour off their face and they're not complaining.

They're just in there grinding, you know, and that's, that's fucking so important in this life. This life doesn't have enough of that. There's not enough struggle. You don't get to know yourself without struggle. You don't get to know yourself without struggle You don't get to know your boundaries unless you push them You don't get to know who you are really unless you're tested and there's too many weak pussies out There's a lot of pussies out there

And so those are the people that drive me crazy because everything you just said is so true But there's so many people that would rather stand on sidelines and say oh Yeah, it must be nice. Must be bullshit. Yeah, must be nice to be able to blah, blah, blah. It's like, shut up. Yeah, it is nice. It's awesome. But guess what?

You worked your ass off. Come follow me, bitch. Yeah. Come do what I do. Good luck. Those are the people. When you were talking about running, you were involved and someone was behind you and they were running right on your, your, your tail.

And you're like, Oh, let's see how this works out for you. It's like, it's not, it's not even a cocky thing. It's like, there's no way a regular person is going to keep up with you in a race. It's just not going to happen. Let's see how this works out. But that's just because they're not getting up at five o'clock in the morning. I follow your Instagram. You're, you're fucking running before work.

You're running a marathon a day for people that don't know. You're literally preparing right now. Waikam is in the middle of bow hunting season. He takes a little bit of time off of this fucking insane preparation, which is good because it allows his body to heal. But he's going to compete in the Moab in October that is 238 fucking miles. It's a straight race. It's not 238 miles over the course of a month.

No, no, no. It's 238 miles from beginning, ready, go, to the race is over, 238 miles. It'll take, what, three days? I don't know. We don't know. 78 hours to do 205 right the big foot 200 that you did he ran 205 fucking miles in 78 hours so shut your mouth yeah you know if you think oh must be nice must be nice there's levels to this life there's levels to this this amount to dedication

to discipline to drive to focus to obsession there's levels to it and if you're sitting on the sideline going must be nice guess what pussy yeah you're not doing this this is my lab here god damn look at this horrendous fucking terrain yeah so they're running on a mountain jesus christ look look at this video For people who are listening only, I urge you to please go. Jamie, what is the video? It's the official trailer for the Moab 200. Moab 200. I love how they call it 200.

Meanwhile, it's 238. You're like, oh, I did it. No, you're not, pussy! You got another 38 miles. No! But the terrain is fucking insane. It's insane. So that's Moab. I've never run in Moab, which is the draw for me. I've been in the mountains a lot.

I haven't been. What's going to be tough about this race specifically is you see how there's no shade. So that's what we call that is it's exposed. You're exposed the whole time to the sun. And that looks like Candice right there, who's a race director. She's running in this trailer right here. So this is her brainchild, basically. She must be a savage.

She is. She's a total stud. God, look at this terrain. She's run a bunch of, done really well in 100-mile ultras. This terrain is fucking magnificent. Right. So being exposed like that that just sucks everything out of you the sun can just sap you and uh keeping your your skin covered um as well

as you can keeping hydrated keeping fueled up that's just uh the name of the game you know what shoes will you be running in um it'll be you know my under armor fat tires is what i'll be running in because that much pounding for that long um the cushion for my body is important and imperative basically and the fat tires the under armor fat tires how much different are they than the under armor fat tire hunting boots because i know they have those two uh the soles are similar similar yeah as much cushioning yeah okay so you get a good amount of cushioning and also a good amount of traction right because basically the fat tires the way they're the reason why they're named that way is because they essentially the bottoms of them are like a bmx road racing mountain bike tire they had a mountain bike tire called fat tire and i think michelin

made it so michelin makes these these same soles for the Under Armour shoes. And that's what I generally trained in because running a marathon a day, that's what I was trying to do before season. Season is kind of – hopefully it's going to pay off. Hunting season. Yeah, hunting season has interrupted my training. But I sort of had this game plan where this would be the time I'd recover. had this this game plan where this would be the time i'd recover so um my whole training slogan is uh train hard hunt easy meaning that i want my training to be harder than any hunt i could go on so the hunt seems like it's easier easier than my training and that's that's kind of what's been

going on i mean the utah country was tough it was high it was steep there's lots of walking but it was easier than running a marathon a day right so i felt i felt good there's the fat tires yep so those shoes also allow you to run over like sharp rocks and things and it'll absorb that so it'll give your feet some protection obviously this is an incredibly difficult pursuit that you're about to take. Yeah, there they are. That was a photo back home. But yeah, those shoes, they've worked well for me.

They're great. They've kept my body healthy with all the pounding. You know, people always ask about knees and hips and everything else. Yeah, you know, I've run a lot in those minimalist shoes. But I don't think you could. I mean, maybe you could. Does anybody run these fucking ultra marathons in minimalist shoes no you just can't right not that i've ever seen it just seems like it's too much but there's you know everybody's different right there there

probably is somebody who can because they're 20 some years old and they feel great and they're for whatever reason maybe they've been doing it in those shoes for a long time. Their body mechanics are different than mine. You know, they're lighter than me. So, yeah, maybe they could. So I never lump anybody in like, oh, you can't do this or you can't do that. They might be able to. I can't. That's another thing, too, about you is that you're lifting a lot of weights, too.

Because you need it for, you also need strength for hunting. You need strength to pull the bow back. You need strength to be able to pack out the meat. There's a lot of other aspects to, to like what you need out of your body. Right. That maybe the regular ultra marathon endurance runner doesn't. Yeah. It's, you know, I've tried to, I've tweaked my training over the years.

There was a time where all I was doing was running 20 miles a day, not lifting, hardly eating. And I was down to 150 some pounds. So now I try to, I, that didn't work that great for hunting because I'm trying to pack meat and the mounds and you guys felt tired. Yeah. I just didn't feel, I just didn't feel at my best. I could still kill. I could still get, get the job done, but I felt like I wasn't at my best.

So now I feel like what I do now, this is a small shirt so it's like don't don't be tricked by that i'm filling out the shirt too much that's size small size small how dare you that's because of jed fucking jed i know grateful dead shirt out yeah i'm like hey you got any you got any size mediums for me and he's like oh they're all gone so here i am i'm stuck with the small so i might look like i'm more jacked than I really am. You're pretty jacked, dude. I've worked out with you. Stop.

But it's just unusual for someone who's an endurance athlete who does these long 200-plus mile races to actually be packing on a lot of muscle. Yeah. It's one of the reasons why whenever someone would talk about UFC fighters not being able to make the weight or whatever complaints they have about not being able to make the weight or you know whatever you know complaints they have about not being able to make weight I'm like my friend

cam literally you make your body eat itself to drop down you were at 180 plus pounds before you started and then when you went to run the Bigfoot 200 you had what you were you were burning 3,000 calories and eating 2000, right? Yeah. A thousand calorie deficit. So if it was, if I was burning 483, so, or if I was burning 382, something like that. So I tried to, to, uh, be at a deficit of a thousand calories every day. And your body was just eating itself. Yeah. So when I went into that race, I was 160, what was I? 165. And I had been at 184, so I lost 19 pounds just at that calorie deficit.

The key with those is being light. The lighter you are, I mean, the best ultra runners are generally 140 pounds, maybe 6 foot. I mean, just light. And that's just, to be efficient, that works best. Is it longer legs

is more efficient? Is that why it's better to be six foot and really skinny? No, I'm just, I mean, maybe I'm just kind of generalizing, but that seems like those are good runners are about that size. Is that like Goggins, David Goggins? I think he's a little bigger. He, he's, he's more muscular than most. And he's, but he's a freak. He's a mental freak.

He's a freak. I i mean that guy's so inspiring you ever listen to him talk about all the time mental toughness all the time i listened to uh he did a podcast with uh rich roll oh there's another guy i love yeah and so i listened to him on that podcast i've listened to it like three times because anytime you think that oh you got a heart or you can't do this or you can't do that. Come on. There's levels. Come on.

There's levels. And that's another one. You can't lump everybody into the same category and say, well, if David Goggins did this. You can't do what David Goggins does because you're not David Goggins. If you want to become David Goggins, good fucking luck. I don't stop when I'm tired. I stop when I'm done. Yeah.

Yeah. He's intense. He has another saying that I think of all the time when I'm running, that most people quit at 40%. Yeah, I know. And that's 100% true. And I've found that, you know, there's lots of times where I want to quit and I think of... Click on that picture right there, Jamie, where he sees abs.

You just had your cursor. Yeah. That's a jacked dude for someone who runs hundreds of miles. And he, did you know he was over 300 pounds twice in his life? Yeah, fat and lethargic. He wanted to be a Navy SEAL. Yeah, look at him there. So he's over 300 there.

They said he had to lose something like 100 or 80 pounds in just a number of months, and he did. Yeah, and didn't he also break a world record in suffering is the true test of life? No, he broke the world record in pull-ups. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. How many pull-ups did he do? 4,030. In how many minutes? 17 hours.

24-hour pull-up. What in the fuck? But he did it in 17 hours. What do his shoulders look like? What's the fuck? But he did it in 17 hours. What do his shoulders look like? What's the inside? It's just all scar tissue holding that thing together? Let's see if they can find a video, Jamie. Because I've seen a video of him doing... David completed 2,588 pull-ups in 566 sets

for a total of 4.6 pull-ups per set, 1,000 pull-ups in 2 hours, 48 minutes, and 2,000 pull-ups in 3,034 minutes. But at 13.5 hours in, he felt something in his wrist snap and was not able to go on. An x-ray at 10.30 confirmed a partial tear in his forearm. Wow. So that's when he failed twice to break the record, and then he ended up getting it. Wow. So that's when he failed twice to break the record, and then he ended up getting it. Wow.

See if you can get to a video, because there's a video of him doing it, and it's just savage. He would do like sets of five. So he'd do five, then drop down, take a break for a sec, do five more he kept doing that is what I when I saw that well you know that's that Pavel Tatsu leans idea of strength training I think I've told you that yeah yeah he believes that you should only like if you can do sets of more than five that what you're doing is bodybuilding right and you should do five with very clean technique take a big break and then do another five and then just keep doing it for long periods of time. Like ideally, maybe some people don't have the time to do those kinds of workouts, but he believes you should do like with five to ten minute rest in between workout sets and just do a bunch of sets like that.

And I've been doing that for a while now. And I feel less sore, less fatigue. I can do it more often. And I just feel like you make better progress that way. Yeah. I think there's something to it. I think we have a lot of like meathead ideas in our head of what you're supposed to do as far as working out, as far as going to failure all the time with heavy weights.

That's the only way to get strong. I don't necessarily think that's true. No. But I will say everyone's different. Yeah. But here's the thing where I should have a caveat. If you're a power lifter, I should shut the fuck up because if you're, if all you're trying to do is like massive, you know, amounts of weight, like a lot of these guys do, well

then, you know, they're, they're going to push their body quite a bit more than I am. Yeah. I see guys all the time do things that most people would say you should never do. Yeah. And they have a lot of success. Yeah. I mean, nobody's going to say you should run a marathon every day. They're going to say that's a good way to get injured and that's too much in your body. You're not, you're not getting the most out of your body. Nobody's like when I lift, I try to do tons of reps, you know, at least 20 reps per set. But you're doing lighter weights.

Yeah. You're not trying to go to failure with heavy weights. Try to go to failure with everything. And sometimes if 20 doesn't get it, then I'll do 40, you know, so it's. But you're not trying to go to failure with like 305 for bench. No, no, no, no. Yeah. See, that's what I'm talking about.

And that's where people get hurt. No, but so people need to find what works for them, basically. I mean, there's a lot of schools of thought on like, okay, for the average person, do this. Right. And that works for most people. But it's not going to work for David Goggins. Right. It depends on your goals and your body and your ability.

And what you're trying to accomplish. And your dedication. And what is a standard routine for someone who's trying to run an ultra marathon? So if you're running a marathon a day, is that a normal thing? Like, what do they, do you guys communicate with each other? Because there's only a fucking handful of you. Yeah, I don't. Do you talk to those people or are you just doing what you think you should do?

Yeah, I've never talked to anybody about training. What? No. You don't talk to any of those people? So you just go out there and do your shit? Yeah. What a freak. No.

There's guys that train. I'm trying to think of. Oh, Jim Walmsley. And he's amazing. I mean, I have zero ability compared to this guy. I think he's about 26. He lives down in Arizona. And he's been trying to break the Western States 100 ultramarathon record for two years now.

Last year, he was on pace to break it. He was like at mile 90 and, I don't know, 20, 40-some minutes ahead of course record pace. Took the wrong turn because this is in the mountains. It starts at Squaw Valley and ends in Auburn. took the wrong turn because this is in the mountains it starts at squaw valley and ends in auburn took the wrong trail and went off course and ended up finishing 20th you know because he had to backtrack and way behind it's mentally broke him so he's going to come back this year better than ever and his training and he'd be like running you know 140 mile weeks so 20 miles a day uh 100 probably 150 mile weeks or some guys um that have that do more than that but anyway this year he came in and he

went again went ahead i was ahead of course record pace and an ultra marathon term or maybe a running term in general as he blew up at mile 76, I think, and had to drop. So he went too hard. Yep. Wow. So when he's doing- What's the record? What is he trying to break?

What's the actual record? The record for that is like 14 something, 14 hours. Now, there's a guy who just broke the ultra marathon record for a flat 100, not in the mountains like you do, but a flat one. And he's on an off, like a high fat diet, right? Isn't he on, Jamie, we talked about that guy recently. He's on a ketogenic diet and he broke the- He was on a track. It was a 24 hour record and he ran a hundred and I can't remember how many miles it was. Yeah, but you felt like maybe for the mountains, you might want to alter your diet.

Maybe that's not the... For me. Yeah. I mean... Have you ever tried a fat-based diet or a ketogenic diet? I don't know what you call it, but my buddies I lived with back home, Nick Hammond and Eric McCormick,. They both do bodybuilding competitions outlaw strength But right exactly outlaw strength. I love that guy and then dude and Nick the trainer dude

Yeah, and so to get lean for those shows Basically, you cut the carbs out right and as many proteins and greens as you want So you can have salad and steak so I've done that and I've got down to 6% body fat just to see what it was like. And that's essentially what that is. And do you feel like you perform any differently? Terrible. You felt terrible? Terrible. What felt terrible about it?

Oh, no strength, no endurance because no carbs. So zero carbs? No, no, no. Just vegetables for carbs? No. On a low-carb day, it'd be 50 to 75 grams of carbs. Did you ever get your blood sugar checked to see if you're ketogenic? No.

I don't do any of that. It's interesting because I feel like it's very important to talk about that everybody's body is different. Yeah. You know who's a great proponent of this is Rob Wolf. Everybody's body is different. You know who's a great proponent of this is Rob Wolf. And one of the really interesting things about Rob Wolf is a scientist and a very, very smart guy when it comes to nutrition and health. Writes a lot of books about paleo diets.

But one of the more interesting things that Rob does is he will eat the same thing as his wife. And they'll both test themselves, test their blood. And he'll do it on video. And his wife is consistently more adaptive than he is like They're eating the same thing like it should but but his body for whatever reason doesn't perform as well Processing carbohydrates as hers does I say and she can stay in a ketogenic State and eat far more carbs than he can okay? I'm gonna let you in on a little secret Oh, I don't even know what the hell ketogenic means. I've heard keto this, ketogenic that.

What is it? In a state of ketosis, your body burns off fat instead of carbohydrates. And you have to have an adaptation period where your body goes from carbohydrates to fats as a fuel source. And your brain uses ketones. And your body uses ketones for fuel instead of carbohydrates and glucose. Is there an advantage? Yes. And I would suggest that anybody who's interested in this go go to my podcast with dom de augustino

it was four months ago maybe or tim ferris's podcast with dom de augustino is also an excellent uh resource and there's advantages in terms of the uh your body's ability to fight off disease and cancer cognitive ability improves maybe you'd be smarter, bro. I doubt it. But could I bow hunt better? What's that? 994. Episode 994 of this podcast.

And yeah, you'd bow hunt awesome in it. Well, I just think you need a lot of fat, though. And maybe with your diet, you are not taking in enough fat. Like, you have to have a lot of fat. Yeah. Like animal fat, avocados. Yeah, that's one thing Nick told me the other day because I was just like, we lifted and I'm so weak. Weak because I was running so much, right?

And so we did just a few quick calculations. And if you run a marathon a day at my weight, it was, and then just living, because just living, you're going to burn 1700 marathon a day at my weight it was and then just living because just living you're going to burn 1700 calories a day for me then plus the 3300 or something that i'd burn when running a marathon so it was like 5000 calories and i was eating three so i was 2000 deficit um that's too much yeah so he said I needed to just ramp up the fats, you know, so it started hammering nuts, avocados, things like that. And, um, I actually did, I was feeling better. We lifted again and I felt better. So, yeah, I think that's the big part of the ketogenic

diet that people get wrong is that your ketogenic diet is primarily fats. And then you have an adequate amount of protein dependent upon how much activity you do, you obviously do a lot of activity. You would need more protein than most, and I think you would also probably need more actual carbohydrates than most. Yeah. And still stay in ketosis. I think that's probably one of the reasons why you were so tired and you felt weak. But also I think this thing that you're doing, most people are just not going to do. No. They're not going to burn three you're doing most people are just not going to do no i'm not gonna burn three and eat two they're just not there's no blueprint print for getting

ready for 200 mile race yeah so it's i'm trying to figure it out as i go so you don't talk to this is what freaks me out is you don't talk to other ultra marathon people i hate people but you like me i do no i like i like i like you like a lot of people man no i like um most people fall short of your expectations yeah i like winners i like strong people i like people who don't judge other people i like well you don't like me then i judge everybody no i judge you i judge jamie no fucking shirt he's wearing no i mean i just don't like complainers right and so there's not a there's not a lot of people who i'm i don't know i want to respect people well i think that with the level of output that you're putting out and the amount of focus and dedication to these things the amount of obsession to like performing at a 200 plus mile race any whiny bullshit that you hear is just so

much more magnified than what i hear yeah you know like if i hear whiny stuff from my seven-year-old it becomes funny because i start going oh are you gonna be okay are you gonna be okay and she's like stop it daddy i go what are you gonna do you're gonna Are you going to be okay? And she's like, stop it, daddy. And I go, what are you going to do? Are you going to beat me up? I go, come on, punk. And then she'll get off the couch and she'll kick me and then we'll have a little fun and play around together. Right.

But she's seven. Yeah. If I hear whiny stuff from a grown adult, I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ. We live in a world where if it's cold out, you press a button and it gets warm. Yeah. And we live in a world where water, the thing that keeps us alive that people struggle to find in most of the free world, comes out of a fucking, you have a lever. Yeah. In your sink, in every sink, in every bathroom where you can just drink fresh water.

Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug. It's like, what are you complaining about? The fuck are you complaining about? You're complaining about because Joe Rogan can go elk hunting here and you can't. Hashtag bullshit. Yeah. I mean, so that's the kind of stuff that- Must be nice.

I pretty much don't listen to anybody except people who I know share my mindset about not just on running or whatever, just about on life. But that's why I'm confused as to why you don't have a group of people that you're close to that are also ultra marathon runners that you can compare notes with. There's not a lot of people that do those. I mean, yeah. Ultra. My brother does ultras. My brother is a stud. Um, so how odd he, he, uh, some genetics in that family, huh? Wasn't your dad is a big time athlete too. Yeah. Yeah. Actually my dad, I have no talent compared to my dad. So my dad was an ultra, just not an ultra freak. He was just an athletic freak. But my brother, he does a lot of miles.

We don't really even, we just kind of do our own thing. We know what it takes. You got to pound out miles. Your dad was trying to compete in the Olympics, right? No, no, no. He, I think he had Olympic potential. So what happened is, uh, he was a high jumper and a long jumper. And, uh, you know, I, I just, I took, my daughter was doing pole vaulting last year and, uh, and they kind of hurt. My dad was a

awesome pole vaulter and at South Eugene high School. He was the first athlete inducted into their Hall of Fame. And they did that right before he died. Which Hall of Fame? In the South Eugene Hall of Fame, that high school there in Eugene. Anyway, so these coaches at where my daughter was doing pole vaulting, they said after a few different practices, they had heard about her and me and who her grandpa was. He comes up and he goes, was your dad Bob Haynes? I'm like, yeah.

He goes, yeah, he was a legend around here because they went to high school together and now they've been coaching. He just said that everybody knew Bob Haynes and he could do things nobody else could do and what his i think where he would had his success was in high jump and he could high jump six four and what he did at that time was called the western roll and so you just kind of roll over the bar and then he'd competed against Dick Fosbury and he invented the Fosbury flop so you'd go with your back to the bar and then kick your legs over and so they would compete and my dad got earned a scholarship at at Oregon for gymnastics and then Oregon State for track when they had track and um ended up dropping out of both of both schools and um they said that

he would he could high jump six four doing the western roll and they said well we're going to teach you the the fosbury flop and we should be able to add eight to twelve inches onto your jump so that would put him at seven feet and that would have been up there with Dick Fosbury. And so my dad ended up dropping out of school or whatever happened. And I was born and then my brother was born. You know how life gets in the way. And then meanwhile, Dick Fosbury went to the Olympics and won the gold medal. So it's just who knows what would have happened. But the fact is he was an amazing athlete.

You know, if you just want to say just in high school, that's fine. But he was a D1 athlete in two different sports. So I never had that. I don't have that potential. What I have is just a hard work ethic. And that's what I've translated. Without the athletic talents maybe that he has, I might have the work ethic that might match a talent. And that's what I've used to do ultras because basically that's just being tough. I mean, I think.

I think it's just grinding and putting in miles and training and then getting where everybody else wants to quit and pushing through in the races. So you don't have a few friends. Like, I know, what was the woman's name that runs? Candice. Candice Bird. You're friends with her. And you're friends with your brother, obviously, who also runs ultras. Do you have other friends that do this that you, like, email with or text message?

No one. No. Is that normal? I don't know. I mean, ultra runners in general are are uh fucking weirdos weirdos but um independent right you know you have to be you can't rely on anybody you know you can't who's going to tell me to go run a marathon every day right everybody's going to say that's too much you don't need to that. So it's like ultra runners are independent.

How long have they been doing ultra marathons? Well, the Western States 100 started in 1974. Whoa. And what were the old times? Like what was like a good time back then to do 100? What they started, see, the Western States started as a horse race and they still do it. With horses? Yep.

The Tevas cup. And so it's, it's the same course with the same goal is cover a hundred miles and under 24 hours. So if you do that, you get the buckle and it says 100 miles one day. And that's like the gold medal for, for an ultra runner. So they have that same thing for horses. And, um, So they have that same thing for horses. And Gordon Ainsley was, he was in the horse race. His horse came up lame and he said, well, I'm going to finish it on my own, on his feet. Jesus. And so he did that.

And that's where Western States Endurance Race or run began. Because it's like, well, let's just do this on our feet. What a fucking animal that guy was. Yeah. And he still competes in the western states right now he's old how old is he but he could he can't break 20 he can't even break 30 so you can get a buckle 100 miles one day if you break 24 if you break 30 you get a cookie no you get a buckle. It just says Western States Endurance Run. But if you don't break 30, you get nothing. So he's tried for, I think when I ran it in 2010, God, what was he? 60-some, probably. He, at the 30-mile cutoff, he was at like the 90-some mile cutoff the 30 hour cutoff yeah and so he was at the the 90 some mile at 30 hours so there was he was done right but anyway so he tries every year and he gets a

long way wow for being so he's almost 70 i think he's over 70 now wow yeah but anyway so he started that and i was in the 70s and then then nowadays there's more races. Every state, a lot of states out west have 100, you know, that's kind of the ultra scene is in the mountains out here. Does he do the ones in the mountains? Well, that Western States is in the mountains. It is in the mountains. That starts at Squaw Valley. So it's a lot of elevation. There's a lot of... That race has 41,000 feet of elevation change.

Wow. So you're gaining 18,000 and you're losing 21. Overall, the course goes from Squaw Valley down to Auburn. But in the course of that, it's up and down, up and down, up and down. And so you're gaining 18 over the course of the 100 miles and losing 21. Wow. Or something like that. It's 41,000 difference.

And even running down still difficult because you're decelerating you have to stop your momentum down so for a 70 plus year old guy to do that that's one thing about so you start at that race and they always say once you get into the the canyon there um don't bomb downhill too fast which is sort of early in the race it's before mile 50 but if you bomb downhill too fast in the canyons, you'll blow your quads out. You won't be finishing the race. So you pound your quads too much.

So you got to, even though you could go fast downhill, you got to take it easy because you got to preserve your quads. So your quads are getting used in the decelerating. Yep. Interesting. Yeah, they're getting pounded. So, and where we are now and candace burt with her she has um i think it's so she's got bigfoot tahoe moab yeah she's got three 200s so now

her thing is 200 200s of the or wait 200s of the new 100 or whatever. But anyway, the next level is 200 mile race. Well, yeah, she calls them 200s. I'm like, 238. Yeah, you got to say 238. That's not just rounding. I don't know. That's silly rounding. She should call it a 238.

The Moab 238 is what it should be called. Jesus, Candace. Hey, it's her race. Do you hate numbers? It's her race. There it is. Arctic. What?

Antarctic ice marathon? Jesus Christ. First of all, it's only 100K. Ken could do that on his hands. Yeah. 62 miles. That's Antarctica. Yeah, I know.

That'd be fun. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. That seems stupid. Yeah. Because you don't see anything but white, at least Moab. You're looking at epic landscape. It's a challenge, though.

So it's all about a new challenge. Now, how many people enter into Moab or Bigfoot 200? How many people? This year, when I did it last year, there was 74. I think this year there was over 100. And how many people finish? When I did it 40 some finished it's pretty impressive yeah most of people i mean if you sign up for 200 it's not like you're doing

that on a whim right i mean you're prepared you do a hundred mile on a whim recently yeah god that was terrible yeah but just the idea that you could do a hundred mile race on a whim it was the most painful pain i've painful pain is the most painful pain I've painful pain his most painful pain I've ever felt it was that why you started going to a marathon a day afterwards yeah I mean I just knew that was in that was Elijah Bristow 24-hour run and that was in June and I'm like I'm behind on my schedule on my training I got it just I got to grind out a big one so I'm like I'm gonna do it so you decided to grind out a big one just So I'm like, I'm going to do it. So you decided to grind out a big one just to boost your training,

just to get you over the hump? And beat myself up. How does that benefit you? Just mentally? Or does it do it physically as well? Don't ask me questions like that. It probably doesn't. But who are you thinking in the time?

Were you thinking, like, this will, like, get me over the hump, and it will get me in shape? Or were you just like, I'm just going to do it? Yeah, during that race, I was turning into i said i i most people are weak pussies you became a weak pussy definitely and so uh i was in that race and uh feeling miserable so i had i was like well okay maybe i'll quit at 30 miles 30 miles is still a good run. I hadn't run 30 miles by June. So I'm like, okay, I'm just going to say this is just a training day. Tomorrow I'll go home, rest up, and maybe I'll do another long run,

and that'll be good back-to-back. Because that's what you need for the 200-mile races is most of your running is you're beat to shit. So, I mean, you've got to be able to push through. So the back to back training days are key. So at 30 miles, I was about at six hours and I'm like, God, maybe I feel I feel awful, but maybe I'll quit at 50. So I got to 50 miles and I'm like, God, okay, maybe I'll run 12 hours. So at 12 hours, I was at 61 miles and I is a nine to nine. The race starts at nine in the morning, nine at night.

I was at 61 miles. I'm feeling awful, but I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to be such a pussy if I quit. Cause my, not because there's anything wrong with running a 12 hour race and getting 61 miles. That's awesome. That's hard, super hard. But for me, my goal was 24 hours. I signed up for the 24-hour race.

So 12 hours isn't 24. So I'm like, well, I got 12 hours to get 39 miles. I just did 61 miles in 12 hours. So I could just milk it out and still get my hundred, which was my goal, 24 hours, a hundred miles. So I thought, well, I got, I got 12 hours to get 39 miles. And, uh, it was the worst 12 hours of my life, but it, I barely got it. I mean, it was, so I did 61 and 12, and then it took me, took me 12 to get the 39, but I got a hundred miles done and it was, you know, wasn't trained up, wasn't ready, but, uh, had all

these reasons. And I was thinking, I was running, thinking of all these excuses I could say, and I could say that I cramped up and, you know, this is a good example of why you shouldn't what not, you know, push your body past its limit. And I could just get all these kudos for being smart. And everybody would just say, it's okay, you did great. But I would know. I would know that I pushed out. So I kept going.

And didn't you run 13 miles the next day? Yeah. Yeah. Because you have to. So my whole thing was- Look at this. Going 200 mile distance in an ultra marathon may be healthier than stopping at 100. Holy shit.

How does that make sense? Scroll up. The pacing is different for the people they studied that were going just 100. They were going slower, which led to lots of different- Interesting. Hold on. I wish I could do that. The reason 200-milers aren't as fatigued is the 100-mile group was due to pacing.

The Tour des Gants. How do you say that? G-E-A-N-T-S. Tour des Gants. Runners averaged 3.4 miles per hour during the course, while the 100-mile runners took a faster 4.5 miles per hour pace. Rich Roll was saying that when he runs ultra marathons, like when he was training, that one of the keys was never get his heart rate over 140 beats per minute.

Yeah. See, I wish I was smart, because if I was smart, I wouldn't go out. Because when Bigfoot, I'm like, I'm going to break the course record. Right. So I was killing it. I was ahead by hours really yeah hours but you fucked up at that one place we didn't have any water right right so died so if I could go out and be smart that's what I'm gonna try to do do you think you can win this mob I don't know. No, I doubt it. Come on, pussy. I know. No, I doubt. I mean, and it's why can't you? Um, well there's freaks out there. I mean, like Cameron Haynes. No, I don't think you're a freak. No, no, I don't. I just think, uh, I can push. I think

I'm good at pain management or ignoring pain. But I had a lot of confidence. When I was doing a marathon a day, my confidence was, I've never been able to do that. I mean, I could have done it. I just never did it, you know, because I just. But isn't seasons basically over now for you, except for doing a little black tail hunting in Oregon? Yeah. So when will you ramp back up to a marathon a day?

Well, now it's a time of should I do it or should I just think my training's in the bank and manage till the race? Because now I could hammer too hard and go into the race fatigued. What day is the race? I think it's the 13th of October. So what is that, four weeks, three weeks? What's today 13th of october so what is that four weeks three weeks what's today three three weeks 22nd so how will you know what's the right way to do and what's the wrong way to do it i don't know how would you know i don't know i

wouldn't know nobody knows but that's in their ways or people tell whether or not they're overtrained they monitor monitor heart rate. Here's what people say. If you run a marathon, you should not run another one for six months. So should I listen to them? So, yeah, there's really no, you know, because it's so hard on your body and so on and so forth. So how do you like when you built up to a marathon a day how long did it take you to build up to that after the 100 mile race which was in june is that what you said june yeah so that's not a lot of time july august we're in september so you're talking like during july and august you

managed to build yourself up to a marathon yeah and i did uh under armor had a marathon ultra at Mount Bachelor in July and I didn't like July 20 something so it was about a month after the 24 race and I didn't take a day I think I took one day off so I ran every day from the 24 hour trying to beat my body up and then I went into that ultra and I ran that I don't. I don't know. I didn't got took the wrong course for a couple miles. So I didn't think I got seven. I don't know what I got. But anyway, that was 100. No, that was a 50k. So that was 31 miles. The next day I ran the South Sister, which is, it was 16 miles with 5,000 feet of gain. So I got really good mountain back-to-back days there with no break after the 24-hour. And then took a little break, I think a day, and then started trying to get really at least a half marathon a day. But then I went on a run, I think of nine days where I did a marathon every day. And so if that time, if you had asked if I had a chance to win Moab, I would have said, yeah, I, cause my confidence was amazing. Uh, cause I've never been

able to do that. And maybe I'm, I'm not being realistic about it because there could be, you know, Jim Walmsley show up who, who knows what he could run it in. And, uh, and so maybe it's not realistic, but, but at that time I had confidence now after not running that much and being gone hunting, I don't know. So when will you decide, like when, or when we decide like how you're going to train, like, will you, you're going to start running tomorrow when you get back home? I'll do a marathon tomorrow. And then once you do a marathon tomorrow. I'll see how I feel. But my body feels awesome right now. Yeah.

Amazing. Rested up. Oh God. I feel, I feel as good as I felt in a long time right now. Well, that was the idea though, right? That you were going to train super hard, beat yourself up, and then take a few weeks off for hunting and then you would recover and recuperate. Yep.

Looked good on paper. Yeah. Well, so maybe when you, uh, maybe when you run that marathon tomorrow, you're going to Take a few weeks off for hunting and then you would recover and recuperate. Yep. Looked good on paper. Yeah. So maybe when you run that marathon tomorrow, you're going to feel like a fucking animal. Eating even better than before. Maybe I won't. Plus being invigorated. Well, come on.

What's with the negative self-doubt talk? No, it's not just how it is sometimes. Do you think there's any advantage to your diet that you eat all this wild game? I mean, yeah, there's gotta be like some sort of nutritional advantage. I don't have to back it up with anything. Do I can just say, yeah, to say science, but, but I think it's, it's obvious. Like I was cutting up some meat and my wife was looking at it. She goes, it almost looks like organ meat. Yeah, cuz it's it's so rich I mean, it's dark. Yeah, it's dark and rich it's like if

If you're not used to eating that type of meat it can affect your stomach because it's it's so It's rich protein. Yeah, and so it's definitely More I don't want it's more nutrient dense don't want to, potent? It's more nutrient dense. I want to say potent almost than like a steak you'd buy at a store. Right. Mike Dolce always likes to use that word, nutrient dense. I love it.

Sounds good. Sounds super smart. But if you look at the protein per ounce, like they do, there's a chart, Jamie, that they do, they compare beef, chicken, salmon and elk and moose and it's off the charts. It's like double. So you could get the same amount of protein that you get in a 16 ounce steak, I think in like an 8 ounce piece

of elk. So you need less and it's more potent and it just looks different. You know, I've shown it to friends that have never eaten elk before and they're like jesus yeah because it's just red yeah it just just dense yeah you know you're eating a super athlete you know that's what it's like no and that's what i feel like i feel like

when i'm eating you know those elk are amazing animals powerful strong endurance. Um, you know, everything I would like to be as far as, of taking on anything that happens. And, uh, you know, when you eat it, how, how could you not have confidence or feel better? I just think it's the best food for you. I really do. I mean, I feel fucking fantastic. I feel better now at 50 than I've ever felt like probably in my life. Right. I feel better at 50 than I did at felt, like, probably in my life. Right. Like, I feel better at 50 than I did at 40. Really? Yeah, for sure. Definitely.

Huh. Just for me. A lot of it is eating really healthy. Running. You know, really running. Managing my sleep. That's a big one. That's one that you don't do very good.

You don't really get a lot of sleep, do you? I don't have. It's that stupid job. I'm supposed to be at work right now. When are you going to quit that thing? It's Friday, right? But you make more money outside your stupid job than you do on that stupid job i'm supposed to be at work right now when are you gonna quit that thing it's friday but you make more money outside your stupid job than you do on your stupid job i know son i need to manage you yeah you need to listen to me yeah every time we talk about this i know we do we talk about it a lot well you're the opposite of me in that regard yeah because

because i'm like captain cut ties and burn the Bridge and fucking throw kerosene on the house, light it on fire, drive away. Woo! Yeah. And you're not. I know. You're the opposite. Yeah. And part of it is I've never, like I said, I've never felt special.

So I always feel like I should appreciate having a good job. And I'm loyal to where I work. And so I feel like all this opportunity and these things that I do and being on your show and all that could go away tomorrow. And then if I quit the job, I'd be like, oh, my God, I knew it. I'm a freaking loser, and I quit the best job I've ever had in my entire life. That's an interesting way of looking at it. But it's part of your strength is the fact that you can endure. Right.

And so I think you're enduring this job. Maybe I like being miserable. Yeah. But I'm not because I like the people I work with. Yeah. I know you do. But you would like it more if you didn't have to be miserable. Yeah. But I'm not, because I like the people I work with. Yeah. I know you do. Yeah. But you would like it more if you didn't have to be there.

Yeah. I would like just to check in with them every once in a while. Hey, how's everybody? Yeah. How's that place where I used to work for my whole life? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I miss the people when I'm not there.

I miss problem solving and helping people, you know, achieve goals. So I like being there for that. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've been trying to figure out what a solution is. But, you know, maybe we could talk to Hoyt about this or some, you know, some company about this, maybe an Under Armour. about this maybe you'd under armor but the idea of putting together like almost like camps where people could learn archery and maybe you could give seminars guys like dudley can show some archery techniques guys like remy warren can talk about things and putting together these almost like introductory camps yeah a lot of people don't know where to start i didn't know where to start yeah if't know where to start

yeah if it wasn't for steve ranella i would have never got started in hunting if it wasn't for you i would have never got started bowhunting it's just sometimes you need someone yeah and there's not a lot of resources out there but there's a lot of people that are listening and there's a lot of people that they're hearing all this and they're like wow this sounds crazy like i want to get involved in this yeah and again a lot of what we're talking about like i was talking about brian barney's podcast like he's hunting public land over-the-counter tags in montana you could go get them they don't cost that much you go you pay your license fee you buy a tag yeah and you can go out into the wilderness you just need a tent and a backpack and a bow and arrow and some guts and just go out there and you could you could handle it there's

there's there's a lot of opportunity like that and this country is amazing for that it's one of the and a bow and arrow and some guts. And just go out there and you could handle it. There's a lot of opportunity like that. And this country is amazing for that. It's one of the few countries in the world where we have literally millions of acres of public land that are all yours and mine. I mean, I was wearing that backcountry Hunters and Anglers t-shirt yesterday that says public landowner.

We're all public landowners. And it's a very, very important thing to support. And it's an amazing resource. So, yeah, like where we're at in Utah is super rare, and not a lot of people get to go there. But guess what? You could go to Idaho. You can go into the backcountry in Idaho and get amazing public land hunting. If you're willing to hike in and go deep and you go to Google earth and you could go

and look at all these basins and mountains and you could go online and ask people and there's ways to move around. There's ways to do this, but getting started is insanely difficult. And I've been thinking about this, that maybe we could do something like, you know how they have that total archery challenge that they did in Utah over there I was there is awesome amazing, right? So maybe there's like a gathering that we could put together like maybe once a year maybe during the offseason Just once a year where people can get maybe fitted for a bow You sign up for this in advance and maybe it it's a couple-day thing, like maybe one or two days where you go through an introductory course of archery, understanding it.

And then maybe someone can talk about shot placement. And maybe someone else, like someone who does a lot of soul hunting, like Remy or maybe even Adam, can talk about, like, woodsmanship and things that you can learn. And here's some books you can read, like your book, Backcountry. What was your book? Backcountry Bowhunting. And that's still in print, right? You can still buy that. Is it on Amazon?

No, it's on CameronHaines.com. Oh, powerful shout out to CameronHaines.com. But to have those kind of things like set out, like, hey, this is something you can do. This is something you could read. This is something you could read. This is something you can listen to. It would be awesome. I mean, we've done gatherings. You know, Wayne at the bow rack, we used to do this bow hunters.

I can't remember what we used to call it, but 600 or 700 people would show up at the bow rack in the parking lot, a big tent. And we'd do things. We could do it out where I practice out at his property, you know, and get together and have people in and it would just be, it would be amazing. Why don't we do that? The reason I know that there's so much interest in Pat, my book back country boning, I wrote in 2006 cases of that go out every day. I mean, before I left on this hunt, I sat at my kitchen table and signed books for

cases of books because those are all going to be gone when i get home do you have a time machine a time machine why where do you get the time i don't understand how the fuck you have time to run a marathon and then sign books and then practice bow hunting and do 100 reps of fucking this and then hang out with your family and then eat dinner and go to sleep and then work a full time job. And then he gets tough. But, uh, but that's how I know that, um, there's so much interest in that is that book is, you know, I think sold almost 40,000 of them and people have that dream i have two just you have two copies oh nice um and uh i just um a good example of people living that dream this guy at work two guys at my work they wanted to do the backcountry thing so we got maps in wyoming i said here's because roy went there one time i've killed a

couple bulls in the back country their public land it's a pretty easy tag to draw you can get uh you put in for the for the premium tag it costs a little more to put in but the odds of getting it are you can get it i got it almost every year a couple times and then or a year in between and so they put in for the tag they got the tag i sat down with them said showed them the drainages showed them i'd hunt here i'd camp here i'd do this and they went in there killed bull i mean public land never been there before um had a dream of doing it made made it happen. So it happens. Guys do it every year. It can be done.

Yeah, for sure. You can go from the beginning, from no knowledge of archery, to eventually doing it. Yep, you can. Andy Stump's done it. I know, I know. He texted me today. Andy's a fucking animal.

Yeah, I love it. Andy's awesome. And he got obsessed with bow hunting from listening to us talk about it, from listening to us talk about archery. He got a Hoyt. He got set up. Dudley gave him some, from listening to us talk about archery. Yeah. He got a Hoyt. He got set up. Dudley gave him some coaching. I know you hung out with him.

Yeah. And he went hunting with Dudley, and he got a giant fucking black bear, two of them. He got a bear. He killed, I think, a couple of deer. Yeah. Oh, excuse me. And then he went on a bad run.

He had a frustrating elk hunt. Something like five shots. But he did a podcast, I guess, about it today. He told me that today's podcast, I think, is about failure and about bow hunting and about failure. Cleared Hot is the name of his podcast. Yeah, Cleared Hot. But, man, I love that guy. I told him on the way home I was going to listen to his podcast today.

He said he talked about he mentions me or something like that. Andy, for people who don't know, he's been on the podcast before, and he's a retired Navy SEAL who has the world record in the distance of one of those fucking crazy flying squirrel suits. He's a maniac. He's a real maniac. And he's become completely obsessed with bow hunting in fact moved to montana yeah that's how savage that guy is he's like fuck this i'm out of california moves his family from san diego to montana and

he's doing you know over the counter but montana is one of the best places in the world where you can get over the counter tags for elk hunting. Yeah. And just the wilderness there. Like I told you when I went there last summer with my family, we had to stop the car and I brought binos and, uh, I was giving it to my kids. I'm like, look, look, look, look, look, there's a hundred elk out here in this field. And we were just sitting there staring for like shit. We pulled over for like a half an hour just looking out the window at a hundred elk just hanging out on this field. It was amazing. montana's awesome no no and andy he was

wasn't he seal for 17 years yeah i mean so just savage stud just uh a great guy too you know and just got a great mind for success and this is why he became obsessed with bow hunting as well it's like he he recognized the things that we were talking about and he decided to start it to start the process and see what it was like and then immediately became obsessed yeah and then as we talked about also hit i mean it's tough yeah he had a hard time yeah i mean he had some good success when dudley was coaching him is that his place there? Think of that. Many people have asked why we moved to Montana.

Any other questions? The only regret is not making the move sooner. God, look at that view. I know. That's insane. He's got his truck parked there. That looks awesome. Just this amazing, amazing view.

He said something. I think I saw a comment. Is that a lake? Yeah, it looks like it. Is that his yard? I don't know. Fucking A, man. Yeah.

That's amazing. I think he said something about, maybe it was on that cleared hot, that other post there, the second post. Yeah. About that maybe on his last shot he would have been better off throwing his bow. One week, two in one week, after talking about failure in episode 13, I had one of the best weeks I've ever had. I have in a long time, my mind kept drifting back to motivation and purpose, which in my opinion is the opposite side of the coin that failure sits on. Hopefully something in it clicks for you. So this is, um, he's talking about his episode of a cleared hottest podcast, which is an excellent podcast. You should go and check that shit out out he's just good at at verbalizing and yeah and i mean it's just so

easy to listen to he's a very smart dude so that's him out there with his bow yeah just uh and he says he's what did he say about humble pie that's bow hunting right there well it's fucking hard man anytime you think you're good. Yeah. I mean, something happens and you just feel like, I don't know. Well, you know, Dudley's talked about that. Like Dudley, who is a guy who literally gets flown out to Europe to coach international teams. He's coached Olympic teams. Yeah.

He was talking about like one time he went with an outfitter and he just hadn't been practicing enough. He felt like he was fine. And he's just fucking missing. Yeah. He was talking about like one time he went with an outfitter and he just hadn't been practicing enough. He felt like he was fine and he's just fucking missing. Yeah. And he's like, what is wrong? And he's like, he took a whole day and he goes, look, tomorrow we're not going out. And he goes, I'm just going to sit here and I'm going to put off a fucking block target and I'm going to practice. I'm going to get my mind right. Get back on.

And he got back on track and then the next day he killed. Really? Yeah. Next day he time shooting perfect but it's like he needed to have that wake-up call that even though he's john fucking dudley world-class professional archer if you don't practice yeah it doesn't matter the the the arrow doesn't care yeah the animals don't care if you think you're a bad motherfucker it doesn't you have to have 100% dedication, 100% focus all the time. And that was one of the things that I really loved about this week is that even though like there

was times that it was kind of, it was exhausting for sure. And there was times it can be kind of frustrating when you're on an animal. Like I didn't feel frustrated. Like I wanted to quit. Right. I felt frustrated. Like I wanted to press on and I wanted to quit right I felt frustrated like I wanted to press on and I wanted to get successful and being friends with guys like you guys like Remy Adam Green Tree this knowing these people that have done all this and gone through all this already it's just and and also for people that are listening having podcasts where people like you or like Remy or Steve Rinella can talk about the struggle. Yeah. It's so important.

Right. Because what gets attention is the success. Yeah. Like when you watch a TV show, what do you see? Guys shooting animals. Seems so easy. Yeah. Yeah, it does.

Because you get a TV show that's 21 minutes. You got some sponsors you got to mention you get a few minutes of hunting and oh here they killed something that's one of the things that i'm worried about with these films because these films are brilliant like your film that time film that under armor made they're brilliant but man it just seems like everything just kind of happened in that like all of a sudden there's the elk you passed up you're at full drop nah not that one too young and then there's a perfect one boom perfect shot he's down in seconds everybody's happy yeah but that's not that's not the thing the thing is the hours and

hours and hours of hiking and and the disappointment the fucking wind got us god damn it like we were in on this bull and the wind shifted and the cows go the cows bark for people don't know uh cow elk when they hear things or smell things or see things and they know something's wrong they go and and it reverberates through the woods and everybody knows what that sound is it sucks a fat dick everybody when when a cow when just one cow sees something or smells something barks everybody's like uh-oh i mean that was it yeah it's over there was a time where jameson and colton and i before i killed that bull we were standing there dead still for five minutes while cows were just staring at us yeah just staring and you're not moving like your feet are going numb your knee hurts because you're kind of like leaning on the side

Of a hill yeah, you can't move you just go to state and they're just looking right at you for them Look for me. It's a pursuit. It's a discipline. It's it's it's I don't want to say fun. It's exhilarating and intense It's amazing. It's it's a I'm attracted to it for them. It's life and death and they don't have a language. They don't have a brain that processes all these variables. They just know that's fucking danger. There might be danger. Is that, is that something that looks to eat me? They know they're delicious. Yeah. They must. Yeah. They must. Yeah. Um, one, one thing, you know, on that that hunt we had basically a lifetime worth of experience for a lot of guys yeah in a week you know up there and um because the boat the timing was perfect there's a few reasons why it was a perfect storm up there there's is the weather was a storm

obviously but a lot of snow was awesome yeah one day we got hammered with snow but the moon phase um the moon was basically non-existent the last few days and that's a big thing when the moon's full animals are out at night feeding most their feeding is done at night and a little bit during the day to um on this week the moon phase was down so they were feeding mostly out during the day so that was big the weather was good and then the time of year so that the bulls were running but uh i just remember one specific and i can't wait to show this on the film but we were there's a bull bugle and we heard it up there in the in the quakies and he was going crazy we wanted to try to get a good look at him so we're standing

there and mark womack um who sub sevens his company he was filming me and he looks over and he says he says cam there's a bull bedded right there and it was about i don't know a little over 100 yards away there was a six by six bedded and uh with the wind the way it was i'm like well i'm gonna go see how close I can get to him. So I snuck up there and got within 10 feet of this six by six bull. And I got so close. There was a tree blocking his eye where normally he'd be able to see me, but where he bedded, the tree was blocking that. So I used that tree and used the cover of the wind to get in close.

And that's on, like you said, a wild animal that only cares about staying alive essentially. And for the bull breeding, but that is, uh, that was an experience. I got so close that I was like, okay, if he, he's going to know I'm here eventually, what am I, how close am I going to get? What's he going to do? Because they're aggressive this time of year. Testosterone is skyrocketing because they're breeding, they're fighting, they're doing all this thing. What's he going to do when he sees me this close? So I didn't really know for sure, but I felt that wind shift a little bit,

and I felt it on the back of my neck. So I came to full draw. He's 10 feet away, and he stands stands up and he's like he right then I'm standing playing his day once he stood up and we got an image I'll post up here in a second of me at full draw at 10 feet on this big bull it's incredible but the footage is amazing that's gonna be cool to show now the footage is gonna be amazing and we also got footage of a bull that um we couldn't shoot because even though he was a huge bull, he was a younger bull. He was probably five or six years old.

And it was in the snow. And it was 40 yards away, broadside, screaming his lungs out. And we're just standing there going, wow. This is crazy. He's just standing there on top of the mountain going, where's my bitches? and going, where's my bitches? And to most people, like when you're on public land, like when I used to hunt, you know, the Eagle Cap Wilderness,

that bull's dead. Oh, yeah, for sure. I'm going to try to kill that bull. There's all sorts of things that can happen, you know, when you're shooting an arrow. But the reason why where we're hunting is so good is because it's so well managed because because normally so it's five or six years old that's a hell of a trophy for anybody on public land but when everybody could come together and say okay guys here's what we're going to do we're only going to kill the eight to ten year old bulls you let those bulls grow and then you get an amazing that's that's one reason why arizona's

so good um they they do they manage it for trophy animals and uh some places in new mexico new mexico is good um there's a place in oregon it's the winniha it's where i put in for and it's public land but it's a really hard tag to draw. I've been putting it in for 17 years now, but they only give, they were giving 10. I think now they give 20 tags a year and there's big bulls there. And it's just because it's managed. So there's a few different places that are managed for older animals. But if you're just going straight up public land, it's really hard to pass up a five or six year old bull. Now, how do they make that decision to only give 20 tags? Because it's probably, I would imagine thousands of people that are trying to draw these tags and only 20 people get an opportunity. How do they make that distinction just by the biologists pick the number

of animals? They just do some sort of a survey, find out how many of their animals are. And also some places manage for better genetics and higher potential of what they would call. There's a real problem with that word trophy because people think, oh, you just want to decorate your wall with an animal's body. That's not what it means. Now, are you a trophy hunter or do you eat them both? Yeah. Well, the trophy is an intense experience with a mature animal that has a lot of lifetime of of lifetime of surviving yeah like it's a way different animal like if when you're around a young bull they don't know anything they're like babies well they know a spike they barely know what's going on like who are you a spike's been alive for a

year and a half right so that's where the herd protects them elk are herd animals they look out for each other so when you have an eight to ten year old bull that has a protection of the herd but also has has been around for eight to ten hunting seasons that's a smart animal he's seen some shit he's seen some stuff it's a smart animal so um there's a guy in camp also that has hunted the San Carlos Indian Reservation. And he talked about this big bull there that knew he was being hunted, circled around them, came in from the backside of the hunters to look at him. Wow. Because that bull had been around and knew what was going on so much.

And so they were able to track him and see what he did. And he went around behind the hunters. And so these were able to track him and see what he did. And he went around behind the hunters. And so these animals, imagine, I mean, this is where they live every day for eight to 10 years. You see some stuff. You learn where humans as hunters like to go. And also, we are probably a minor threat in comparison to the mountain lions. Yeah, yeah. We're talking about how many cats are on this ranch.

Right. There's, there's light, but they know humans are danger. Sure. I mean, they know that. And then,

like I said, they know. So, so there's certain places where hunters, regardless of who's there, go to glass, go to call. And those elk know that,

okay, I see something there. That's where I've seen a human, whatever they think a human is, before I'm not going there. Right. You know, so it's once you get an age on an animal, it gets tough. It gets tough to get them killed. And I would imagine the mountain lion population, as high as it is,

like they have to be on point 24-7 with something that's faster than them. It kills them with its teeth. Yeah. Something that can leap up and literally grab a hold of its neck. Remember we were talking to Johnny in Colorado, and he was telling us about the footprints that he found. They found a bunch of cat footprints, and then they found a bunch of elk footprints. And then they only found the elk footprints. And then a couple hundred yards later,

they found a dead bull with a giant mountain lion clinging to its neck. Like, that's a hard life when a fucking 150-pound cat can bring down a 1,000-pound bull. Yeah, so the lion was on the bull's back. So that's why it's, prints were gone in the snow, because he was up on the bull's back. So that's why it's, it's, uh, some prints were gone in the snow because he was up on the bull trying to get it killed. The bull was taken off for a couple hundred yards. Finally, the new cat clamped down on probably its windpipe, got it killed. And that's happening outside of season.

That's not. That's happening every day. Every day. That's not. Every day. That's not hunting season. That's, that's just real life out there. And bears.

Yeah. Yeah, so it's, but we kind of, you started to talk about the trophy hunting aspect. Yeah. What people, you know, when they have that trophy hunting moniker that has negative connotation. And that's what, we talked about this a little bit last night on the way back from the airport, the grizzly hunting in British Columbia. You know, that they're stopping that in November. There'll be no more grizzly hunting. They were killing 250 bears a year out of 15,000.

So they're basically just managing the population. You know, you have to take a certain amount of animals out given the habitat and the carrying capacity of the land. Especially predators because they don't have predators. Right, right. Because what else is going to kill a certain amount of animals out given the habitat and the carrying capacity of the land. Especially predators because they don't have predators. Right, right. Because what else is going to kill a grizzly? Right. Nothing. Nothing.

And some people say, well, their numbers will drop down on their own. If they eat all the deer and all the moose, you're right. Their numbers will drop down. But it will take decades. Yeah. And if you're in that time, you're going to destroy two different things, right? You're going to destroy the ungulates. They're going to get devastated.

Yeah. And you're going to also destroy the economy that comes with hunting. Like the economy that comes with hunting those ungulates because they're going to get devastated by the overwhelming population of grizzly bears. And the economy that comes with hunting the grizzly bears. Right. In managing them, what they're going to have to probably do is what they've done with mountain lions in California. What people don't know, because mountain lion hunting is outlawed in California. So what they do is they hire hunters to kill mountain lions. And they've killed, I believe they killed almost a hundred last year. I think it was like 97. Most of them,

they find pets in their body they find like their primary food source more than 50% of dogs right and they just killing people's dogs so the Lions are still getting killed yeah but there's just not hunters doing it it's government basically shoot they can run dogs with them they can do all sorts of things to get them killed but it's a government paying somebody to do it as opposed to hunters paying for the opportunity to do it, to kill the same amount. So instead of money going to the state, the state's paying money.

And it's a lot of money, especially when you're talking about something like grizzly bears. Well, a grizzly bear, what they're saying up there, and I did some research on it just because I want to know how this works, because why it's being stopped is just public outcry. how this works because why it got why it's being stopped is just public outcry and the new government in british columbia said um in this day and age you know the public just can't stomach grizzly trophy hunting so the public what the hell does the public know the public doesn't even they're not even out there well they have a misconception and their their idea is all based on them being in these cities and the major population center of british columbia is vancouver right it's a big urban environment liberal yeah

a lot of different people there camera you don't have to be generalizing the fine probably if they could have voted for obama they would have so these people that live in Vancouver, they comprise the majority of the people that are voting in British Columbia. So they voted out the grizzly bear hunting. But these people that I know, like my friend Mike Hawkridge, who lives in BC. Mike's had a lot of experience with grizzly bears and wolves. Wolves up there are so plentiful, they don't have a bag limit on them. You can shoot as many wolves as you want they encourage you to shoot wolves there's even a bounty in some places on wolves well and

do you know it's so so i think this was a little different up there with the bears i don't think they voted it out per se i think the new government came in they took a poll and said who you know supports grizzly hunting and whatever. 71% or 74% said they were opposed. So the new government just said, okay, we're going to make the decision to stop it. Well, they didn't stop it. This is what they did. You can hunt the grizzlies for meat, but you can't keep the rug.

Or the skull. Or the skull. The hide or the skull. Which people consider trophies right but what the problem with that is that is also a resource you're you're eliminating a resource if you shoot a bear and you eat the bear why wouldn't you keep the rug like have a bear rug in your house to commemorate that experience yeah and also it's you know people have bear skin rugs it's it's always been i have about 50 of them but it's it's something that, you know, people have bearskin rugs. It's always been. I have about 50 of them.

But it's something that people, you know, like if you're eating the animal, that is also a part of the animal. Why would you be compelled to throw that away? Yeah. That seems incredibly wasteful. No, it's disrespectful. Right. It's also disrespectful to just shoot an animal just for its skin. If you're the type of person who wants

to shoot an elephant, just take the tusks and let the meat rot. A lot of people think that's disrespectful. That's where trophy hunting gets its bad moniker. So what they've done is the opposite of what makes sense. You've removed part of the value of that animal and you've also removed most of the economy of people hunting that animal so most people are not going to hunt them what they said was so they were killing 250 a year and they could get um like out of country or or whoever whatever hunters to pay 25 000 to hunt those bear so it's 25 000 times 250 it's like a lot we're both stupid over a thousand dollars

means we're both stupid but anyway so that money just like the lion just like the lion hunting god I should be able to figure that out what is it Jamie? how many tags they give? 250 times 25,000

what is that? Smart people already figured it out. Take a guess. I don't know. 50 million. You'd have to have a pen and paper. Say 50 million. 6,250,000.

6,250,000 whatever dollars. I was wrong. So think of that. Now think that's the money that's gone. That money is now no longer going into the economy. Now they're going to have what they call problem bears. Now problem bears are bears that attack people, which is very frequent. Bears that attack animals, livestock, bears that encroach upon people's established residences and communities and start eating garbage cans and killing pets and things along those lines.

Then they have to hire people to go out and kill these bears. And that's going to cost thousands of dollars a day. You're going to have to pay for equipment, dogs. They usually have to track them with dogs. These dogs have to be trained. You have to get specialists who know what you're doing. There has to be more than one because they need backup because you're dealing with a 1,000-pound animal. I don't know if you want dogs on a grizzly i think that's how they find them i don't know

i think that's black bear no one of the guys that was on um uh grizzly uh the gritty bowman podcast was talking about it yeah dogs the grizzly yeah that they use dogs seems like those dogs wouldn't last long well i don't think they engage the grizzly okay i think they find them you know and bark at them and and bay them up yeah and then you know they they locate them and then that's when the hunter comes in okay but that's another thing that you know people don't like that idea of using dogs to hunt animals but that's one of the more effective ways to find these animals it's one of the best ways they use in a lot of states to find mountain lions. Yeah. And people think it's fucked up and cruel. It's the only effective way to hunt mountain lions to be, to be honest. I mean, you can gamble. You might see one,

have a tag. I mean, I buy a tag in Oregon every year. I've seen about, I say, I think I've seen three mountain lions in 30 years. I have a tag. I mean, I've had a shot one time, didn't get it killed. But if you have dogs, then you can say, okay, we have 10,000 mountain lions. We need to take out, you know, 500 a year. So like a lot of states have once, because once you kill a lion, then you have to go to Game and Fish and get it checked in. They do measurements to do all these different things. And so once 500 lions have come in, the season stops.

Right. So they have a mortality threshold. Yeah. Once they reach that limit, they said, well, we have 10,000. We need to kill 500 a year. So once we kill 500, the season's over. And people, why would you want to kill the mountain lion? I don't understand.

Well, first of all, you've got to control, again, the population of predators because nothing else does. And two, you can eat mountain lions, and they're apparently delicious. Yeah. Have you had it? No, I never have. No. I know people that have. Rinella says it's absolutely delicious he shot a mountain

lion last year for the first time he's had it before but he's never had it his own he said it was sensational oh i definitely eat it i want i'd like to hunt lion i never have before and you know using the dogs the dogs are a tool they're a tool like a bow like like a rifle. It's just those dogs have been trained so well and love what they do. The owners love the dogs. And that's just, I mean, there's, I don't know, it's such a special bond between them. And then just being part of that is just another amazing hunting experience. It's just a different tool to use. Yeah. just another amazing hunting experience. It's just a different tool to use. Yeah, well, I think people think of dogs as being only pets,

and that's what they should be used as, and dogs shouldn't work. But, you know, that is, and I understand that because I have pets, and I wouldn't want Marshall to go out and get attacked. You know, Marshall would shit his pants if he even saw a bear. But there's different kinds of dogs that were bred for very specific purposes. That's what those dogs want to do. They do. That's one of the things that Aaron Schneider talked

about in the podcast where he was standing in the wrong place when they opened up the pen to let the grizzly dogs out and the dog just leaped and slammed him in the chest and just about knocked him unconscious. Which podcast was this? It's one of the Gritty Bowman podcasts.

Oh, okay. One of the more recent ones. Let me see if I can pull out the number because I was listening to it recently. Oh. Gritty Bowman is a very good podcast by these guys that are friends of ours. Brian Call and Aaron Snyder. And the number episode 282 and there was another one in there. But 282 is, I think, the big one.

It's about predator management with Bart Lancaster. And that's the one where they really talked about guys who live there in British Columbia who are talking about how when he's not home and he has to go somewhere he has to leave his dog with his wife if his wife goes riding a horse he has to bring the wife has to bring dogs with her because there's so many fucking grizzly bears out there they have to have something that's gonna protect him warn him and these these dogs are not just pets they're also a first line of defense to let them know that there's danger in the area let them know that there's danger

in the area let them know that bears are near and also keep the bears away because the bears hear dogs they don't want to fuck around no and the dogs they start barking that means people are going to know that means outcome the guns right right yeah yeah good deterrent for sure people in vancouver they don't understand this they there. They're just sitting there eating tofu and talking about spirituality. And then they pass these bans and they upset the entire balance of nature. They upset the economy. The economy of hunting, of conservation, all these things get all lopsided. And I understand where they're coming from.

I understand the sentiment. get all lopsided and it's i understand where they're coming from i understand the sentiment but it's a lot of it is entirely based on the images that people have seen in movies and disney films and the anthropomorphization of these animals where you attach human characteristics to these ultra predators these enormous monsters of nature which are amazing we don't like i can speak for myself but i know i'm speaking for you too we don't want bears to are amazing. We don't, like, I can speak for myself, but I know I'm speaking for you, too. We don't want bears to not be there. We don't want wolves to not be there. They're amazing.

Yeah. I'm glad that they exist. They're fucking awesome. Yeah. I mean, to be outside, I've never heard a wolf howl. Well, I did once. I did it with Hawk Ridge in BC, but they were, like, way in the distance. Yeah.

I've never heard wolves howl. But to see them and be there when it's happening. I saw a grizzly bear once in Alberta. And just to look at it, it's like, holy shit. Yeah. You see those things? It's amazing. I mean, it's magical.

But that doesn't mean that they don't need to be managed. Yeah. That's a weird word, right? And that's what people say is like, well, why are we interfering? They would figure figured out themselves. They have forever. And what people don't or fail to realize, I guess, is no man's always been involved. Yeah.

We've always hunted. Yeah. We've, you know, we've been involved in how many animals are, are sometimes we've been involved natively. I can, we almost wiped out the elk or the buffalo but lately we've been involved positively and we manage them and this is the other thing they talked about on the gritty bowman podcast where they really emphasize the difference between a biologist who's not in the field and these these all these different people whether it's the uh uh the the hunters themselves or

whether it's the guides or whether it's the people that are outfitters that are there 24-7, 365, they can give you more data. They understand the real numbers. It's very difficult when you're dealing with, especially something like British Columbia, intensely wooded area. Yeah. To get a real number. Number, yeah.

I mean, there's no like, you can't just pull up the social security numbers of the bears and find out how many of them are still alive and you can't you can't fly over and get a count like they do a lot of animals right like caribou or something well caribou and even elk where they winter so elk you know once once winter hits they get pushed down to where they can get feed in the winter that's where where they get the counts. So that's where they can get a pretty good number or idea of how many elk are in that area. Bear don't do that. You're never going to fly over. There's no wintering grounds for bear.

Well, that's another important thing that Adam found out. When Adam Greentree was on this crazy walkabout that he was doing for the last month, he found mountain grizzlies. What he believes, and he says, and I know that he's a very smart guy, he's been around a lot of animals, he believes there's 100% mountain grizzlies in Colorado. That's what he said, yeah. He took pictures of them, and he even put up photos. They're really hard to see pictures way off in the distance.

But he even put a photo up of online, he did online searches for that mountain range in Colorado, and they said that it's like people who see Bigfoot. They say they see grizzlies, but he's like, he spotted four of them. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that's a good example. I mean, if those were grizzly, then there's grizzly we didn't know about. How many people are going to do what Adam did and actually go out there 20-plus miles deep into the woods with a fucking tent and find these things? Yeah.

It's incredibly difficult to get real world numbers on these animals. Yep. And that's, so once you, once you take, um, once you take the science out of it and the, the people with boots on the ground actually weighing in on, Hey, here's how, here's how many animals there are. Here's how many we need to kill. Once you do like they did in BC and the government just decides that the public can't stomach it anymore because they did some poll at Starbucks.

They have Starbucks in BC, right? Yes. A poll at Starbucks, which is where I went today, by the way, but I still kill stuff. That's where we cause problems. We create issues. We use the wrong tools. We're still managing the animals, but not correctly. Well, it's also the decisions are based on emotions without real information

based on the actual environment that these animals live in. Like you could never imagine if you lived in vancouver and went to some of the best restaurants in the world and drove some of the nicest streets and i mean vancouver is an amazing city if you live there and you had this idea of what wildlife is but you never left vancouver if you did you oh we visited chicago yeah beautiful yeah like you don't know like you literally have to be there to just kind of get a sense of it And you wouldn't get a sense of it in one trip. You'd have to be there all the time You don't know you'd have to take multiple

Excursions into the forest to really understand what you're talking about what you're dealing with so to make those decisions Based on people who are completely ignorant about that situation. That's like It's crazy. I mean, it's a ridiculous way to handle it. So thankfully here in the United States, we do have a great system for wildlife management. And our government, except for here in California with the mountain lions, trust the professionals, the biologists, people out you know boots on the ground as I said and we we trust those people to allocate tags to to give us numbers to to help manage that the hunt seasons and and how many tags are for each area so thankfully that's continued to happen here but even here it's it gets

protested they get like the delisting of wolves an area where they're starting to desolate or devastate. Delisting of grizzlies. Yeah. And that's going to get pushed back, too. People are going to sue against it. But the idea is not to kill all these animals. The idea is not to satisfy the bloodthirsty urges, some fat redneck that people have in their mind as being the stereotypical hunter

that they see as a bad guy in a movie. Right. Like in a movie, it's always like, remember the scene in Wolverine where there's the bad guys who killed the bear and he goes and fucks those bad guys up. Did you shoot that bear with poison? Weren't they drunk or something like that? Yeah, of course. They're drinking.

God, so retarded. It's so stereotypical. It's like the idea that every beautiful woman has to be stupid. It's just as offensive. Right. And this is the stereotype that we've been fed because it's a classic cliche sort of a scenario. It's easy. It's easy.

You see it in the movie. Jocks are big, dumb, stupid guys. Right. Hot girls are bimbos. You know, the nerdy guy with glasses is always smart. Sometimes those nerdy guys with glasses are fucking idiots. Yeah. You know, it doesn't.

Sometimes a hot girl is smart. Sometimes a hot girl is way smarter than us. It's all possible. Sometimes hunters aren't. Most times. That's the thing that frustrates the shit out of me. My experience has been like what we experienced this past weekend. People like Lee and Tiffany, people like you and Ben, really good people. Really industry, yeah. Yeah, whether it's John Dudley or Remy or Steve Rinella. These are great people.

They're exceptional human beings. People with exceptional character and exceptional discipline. Right. It's not the fat redneck that wants to poison a grizzly bear that Wolverine has to beat up in a stupid movie. Right. But that's all you see. No. And I even did a call out on, it was like some triple x movie or xander's cage somebody

i don't know what it was but they had the girl on there said there's they showed these bow hunters getting ready to shoot did we talk about this one the last time getting ready to or maybe i just put on my facebook getting ready to shoot a lion with a bow. She's with a rifle with the rifle scope on his head. She shoots the hunter and she says, so, uh, Vin Diesel calls her on the phone about some mission they're going to do for this stupid movie. And he says, what are you up to? And she's like evening the odds. So she was shooting a hunter. And that's on a regular movie. That's so corny.

You talk to people in Africa, they want lions dead because lions kill their friends. Yeah. Like I know a woman who lived in South Africa who lost a friend to a lion. Yeah. And when you talk to her about lions she has that south african accent she's born and raised right and you know when she talks about lions she goes they just never been around lions no she goes you don't know what it's like there's a there was an article that was written by a guy from zimbabwe right after the whole season cease the lion thing that was in the

new york times yeah that it said in zimbabwe, we do not cry for lions. Right. Right. Yeah. And this was about people that have had to deal with these things. It's not saying that we want all lions dead. No. We don't. No. But you've got to hunt them so they're out of the, where people live.

Well, people don't understand. It's the same thing as with the grizzly bears. When they made lying hunting such a dangerous proposition for people to do it because you're going to get ostracized. People are going to show up at your house and protest like they did that dentist guy. They've had to call lions now. Now they have to hire hitmen to go in there and shoot all these lions and they make no money. So instead of making $50,000 per lion, which helps the community, helps fund their schools and gives them money. And there's been a lot of articles written about the lie of conservation when it comes to lying hunting and how little of it actually goes to the people of the community and how much of it actually goes to the outfitters.

But you know how much of it goes to the community if you don't have hunters? Yeah. Zero. Right. Zero. You know how much of it goes into the community if these people protest, the people that don't want lying? How much do they put in? Yeah. Zero. Right. Zero. You know how much of it goes into the community if these people protest? The people that don't want lying? How much do they put in? Zero.

Right. They don't help those people at all. Most of them just are, you know, hashtag activists or, you know, internet people that are just posting pictures up on Instagram and Facebook and getting people riled up and starting petitions. But how much are you actually doing there? Are they doing anything? No. You got to manage lions. Yeah.

Nobody likes to hear that. But if you want people to live in the same vicinity as lions, you have to make sure the lion population doesn't get too crazy. Right. And also they devastate the ungulate population. They devastate them. That's one of the reasons why they had to call them in Zimbabwe. You know, there's not like they have a bunch of stores with stock full of meat.

So they have cows. You know, that's kind of what they have. They have cows and their domestic animals that they use for food. Those lions come in and kill a bunch of those. So, I mean, to them, a $600 cow, that's huge. You know, a $600 cow is, could be, I'm not going to say life or death, but if that gets killed by a lion, drastically impacts their life. I think a lot of people have ideas about wildlife.

They're entirely shaped by movies and by television shows. And we have this, this unrealistic depiction. And this is not in support or against hunting this is just i think the reality of humans and our war our view of the wild world did you saw that woman last year in um she was a uh an editor for game of thrones and she was in the wild in africa oh yeah She got drug out? She decided to roll down her window to get a bit of photo, and the cat said, thank you, just reached in, grabbed her,

pulled her out of the car, and killed her in front of everybody. Yeah, drug her out. That's what a lion does. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a— The lion's not doing that because she was antagonizing it or because it was hungry. It's a killing machine.

It's nature's killing machine. It's the reason why we're not that you don't have to hack your way through a river of gazelles to get to your fucking car it's because those cat those cats exist well it's um i don't know i'm glad i'm glad um for this forum to talk about things like this because i know we've made an impact and because of you and and you reach so many people, and you're wearing an Under Armour Hunt shirt right now with a big bow on it and a Hoyt bow hunting hat. And it's just like I feel like there's been education happening for a few years now, and we're slowly turning the tide,

and people do care more about where their food comes from, kind of the process of how did this food get to my – not everybody's thinking that, but a lot of people are. And it just feels like also like bow hunting is just a cool thing to be involved. Shooting a bow is cool. Shooting a bow is awesome. It's fun. It's exciting. And I always tell people, even if you want to eat plants for the rest of your life, you never want to kill an animal ever, just try archery just for meditation.

It's an amazing, relaxing thing because to release a perfect arrow and have it hit that bullseye is so difficult and involves so many different things that you have to manage and control that in doing that, it sort of cleanses your mind. Yeah. I love it. Oh, nothing better. I mean, we were, I posted a video yesterday and we were, you know, we had success on our hunt. We tagged out. We tagged out. We both got elk.

So our hunt was done and we were still, you, me, and Jed were having a great time just shooting arrows and having fun. Yeah. Shooting at targets and just laughing and making little bets with each other and stuff and having a great time. Do you owe me? No, I owe you. No, we're even. you no we're even we're even we're even jed owed me 100 bucks but i let it slide because under armor paid for the hunt but it's just the the i think what's important about podcasts and it's not just for hunting i

think it's important for almost every really difficult, nuanced subject is you have to discuss all the aspects of it. And you can't do that on a regular television show. You can't, and you also have to remove a lot of the unrealistic programming that we have in our head because of anthropomorphization of animals, attaching human characteristics that we've seen in Disney movies and all of our lives. Animals have been our friends. We've had teddy bears that are our friends. Polar bears are selling us Klondike bars and Coca-Cola. We have all this in our head that these are these cute, awesome things, which they are awesome. They are beautiful, but we don't know what they really are. We have an unrealistic idea of what they really are we have an unrealistic idea what they really are we might see them in the zoo

Oh, there's the bear in the zoo. Hi bear. Yeah, this is not what they really are No, and unless you have real-world experience and where they really are Like I was saying to Tom the guy who owns the ranch Tom land I was saying you get this an amazing, and I think you should take people on guided tours that have no intention whatsoever of hunting. Yeah. Just show them the rut. Wild elk. Because it's so much greater than any experience you'll ever have at the zoo.

Yeah. With me and Colton and Jameson, we're out there covered in the bushes hiding and hearing, hearing these elk scream all around us. We were saying, this is amazing. How many people get to experience this? These elk had no idea we were there, and we got to creep in on them and watch them just be wild elk. And it was amazing.

I mean, it was thrilling. It was incredible. I mean, I'm looking at all these cows, and I'm thrilled. I have no desire to kill them. I was looking at elk that I knew I wasn't going to kill and I was still enjoying every second of it. Like if people could go and experience that and just be, I think you would get like one step closer to an understanding of that. This is this, this whole world is this wild collection of things that are interacting with each other.

Right. And if you know just one piece of it, you can't really judge all of it, you know? And so what should they do? Maybe they should trust people who've been there, who've done it, who understand, who aren't bloodthirsty killers, but actually have been out there and know how it all goes together. It's okay to trust people like that and not think that hunting's bad, hunters are bad.

So be like, maybe I just didn't get it. But I don't think the hunters had a voice before. Right. I think before podcasts came along, we relied on people like Ronella or yourself to write books. And then you have to read those books. Nobody wants to read a fucking book. No.

And you're reaching. So it's, what's that saying? You're preaching to the choir. Right. So whoever's buying the book. Exactly. Is already on your team. Exactly.

So this has allowed us to reach people who maybe aren't on the team. And that's what's, you know, we've been able to vet it and discuss and detail and go through it. So I don't know. I mean, I just wish people could have more of an open mind about it. It takes time. It does. It takes time, but I've got a lot of messages from people and I've talked to a lot of people in real life that have said to me that they've changed their thoughts on what hunting is by listening to me talk to Rinella, listen to me talk to you, listen to me talk to Remy and John Dudley and all these different people where you get a sense of like, oh, well, these are like really good people. These are really not. And these are people that are

experiencing this wild thing. And it gives them like this itch. Cause I can remember before I ever hunted for years, I had this weird itch about it where I had, I'd been fishing most of my life. You know, I don't, I always would go fishing, but I'd never been hunting until 2012. But before that, I always had these thoughts about it. Like I'd always sit around and I'd go, man, what was like, that's gotta be the best way to get meat, right? It's gotta be the healthiest for you. And I would buy, like, I would always order, like if they had venison in a restaurant, I'd order it or you know elk or you know bison or something like that I'm like wow it tastes different it tastes and that's farm-raised bullshit you know when you're buying venison in a store you're not getting a wild deer no you're getting some weird can't sell wild no

you're mostly getting it from New Zealand in fact yeah which is really weird You're getting a lot of New Zealand elk. So when I would think about it for the longest time, I was getting little fragments of information from these television shows. And a lot of them were terrible. I'd watch a lot of the hunting shows and they would be real redneck-y, lowbrow, really fucking yokel dum-dums. And I'd be like, well, I don't want to be involved in that yeah and then i found ranella show and that was the first thing that opened my eyes i went okay all right here's a guy who's really smart and well-read and cooks all these things and he cooks all these animals in this really delicious preparation i'm like okay now i'm intrigued And luckily I got to meet him, and luckily it started me on this journey. But for most people, they're stuck with that Wolverine movie.

They're stuck with that image. And being involved in this for so long, I can say, and I do a lot of different things. The ultra-running community is not a hunter's. I mean, those are pretty green people. And, uh, but I can say that for me, the best people I know, my closest friends, the people I can count on for anything, like I said, are hunters. And it's like hunters, I think just have a different perspective on life, death, struggle. And where that's driven home for me is the death threats I get. There's comments right now on a couple of my photos from people that said, somebody said they hope I get home and my family gets in a car crash.

And I get there just in enough time to where the flames are burning them and they're clawing at the windows they that's the kind of stuff people post on my photos today because I hunt hunters meanwhile is that person eating a cheeseburger right now I don't know there's yeah are they are they buying their cat canned chicken no but, but they're just weak people that don't understand how life works. Hunters understand the preciousness of life. We take life to sustain ourself. We accept that fact. So we appreciate life. We appreciate friendship.

We appreciate somebody who's there for you because you've been down. You've been up. You've killed animals. You know what goes into eating and surviving. Somebody like that puts on their blinders, judges people, wants my family to die. They don't even really. What they're doing is just trying to hurt your feelings and make you feel like shit. But that's what I'm saying.

Hunters won't do that. Hunters are, I don't know, they're doing is just trying to hurt your feelings and make you feel like shit. But that's what I'm saying. Hunters won't do that. Hunters are, I don't know, they're the best people. But I don't even think we can generalize because there's some hunters that are pieces of shit. The best people I know are hunters. But you know some of the best hunters. And I think when you get to the elite of anything, you get to people that have exceptional character, that have allowed them to get really, truly great at any pursuit. And now you're talking about guys like Lee Lekoski or Remy Warren, you're talking about the elite of the elite, right? If they were doing anything,

they would be amazing at it. And I think that when you're talking about the character of those people, those are people that have overcome incredible odds to become very good at something that's insanely difficult, which is bow hunting. And I think a lot of these people, the problem is, first of all, there's an anonymous communication on the internet. That's a problem. The problem is talking to people in person. You get social cues. If I say something mean to you and I see you are hurting your feelings, you feel it. Yeah. You're trying to like reach out and hurt someone. You're not even in the room. You're throwing a bomb. You're like closing your eyes and throwing a bomb over a bridge. You know, you're not even in the room. You're throwing a bomb. You're like closing your eyes and throwing a bomb over a bridge.

You're not seeing them. It's a bad form of communication for the human animal because unless you commit to only being nice and kind or friendly or funny online, unless you commit to doing that and never trying to reach out and attack someone and hurt someone, you're using this whole thing wrong because you're taking advantage of this weird little loophole that exists in communication where you can communicate with someone with no repercussions. Because if someone said that in front of your face. Oh, they never would though.

Exactly. Yeah. But if they did, you know, it would get fucking hot, right? Right. If someone said that to me in front of my face, it would be very hard for me to stop from assaulting them. hot, right? If someone said that to me in front of my face, it would be very hard for me to stop from assaulting them. It just seems weird that hunters don't go to a vegan. I don't even know if they have pages. I assume they have pages and just talk shit to vegans. Oh yeah, they have tons

of them. Yeah, but we won't do that. Well, it's not something, they're not doing anything that we oppose, right? I don't oppose people eating vegetables. I eat vegetables. They think in their mind that we are doing something that is immoral or that is unevolved. And I think that's just ignorance. They don't understand that we are here for a very temporary, short amount of time and the more we embrace the richness and complexity that is life and the the life eats life struggle and the less we finger point and more we try to look at our own footprint our carbon footprint and just the sustainability footprint that we live

that we leave on this world and in my eyes there's no more sustainable way of living than supporting conservation through buying tags and supporting it through buying outdoor equipment, which what is the number of percentage of taxes that go from when you buy hunting equipment that goes straight to conservation? It's like 11%, I think. Something like that, yeah. Which is millions and billions of dollars. Like Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has a great bunch of charts that show how much money each year hunters put into contributing to wildlife conservation. It's stunning. It's billions of dollars.

And it is number one in conservation by a fucking long shot. The second place is like a tiny fraction of what hunting contributes to conservation. Yeah, yeah. Most people don't know that. It takes these kind of conversations for people to find out. Hunters know that. Hunters do know that. Here it is.

Gun and ammo taxes result in $1.1 billion for wildlife and conservation each year. $1.1 billion. That's just gun and ammo taxes. Forget about bows and arrows and hunting equipment and clothing and all the different factors that play in different pieces that contribute to conservation. It's an amazing amount. And you're not getting that from people who are philanthropists. You're not getting that from people that just want to be nice

and contribute to animals. You get a tiny fraction of that. Yeah, that's true. And, you know, that whole thing, you know, Rocky Mountain Owl Foundation, they came up with the hunting as conservation. And it's like a little part of that, though, when I hunt, I don't think I'm going to go out here and conserve. You know, I think I want to kill a mature animal. I want to take me home to my family.

The byproduct of what we do is conservation. And that's where that money comes in. And that's where the hunters, you know, buying the hunting licenses and hunting tags. Because people have told me, well you you're taking credit for being a conservationist but would you do that if you didn't have to and i'm like it doesn't matter my money my money's there whether i i want i would do it or not well also here's an important thing hunters chose to to to vote to put that amount of money towards conservation. This is something that nobody fought. Right.

No, we've never fought, oh, that's too expensive. Right. No. 11%, I want all that money in my own pocket. We gladly do it. Yeah. But it's like, you know, I'm a hunter. First, I'm a conservationist because I'm a hunter.

But you're also a hunter because people before you were conservationists and they made sure that the hunting was protected. Right. And that you didn't have to be a conservationist first and then hope that your kids or their kids could be hunters because the world would be in more balance. Right. They tied them together and this model has worked so well. It's worked so well, but it's been represented so poorly. I think up until recently, people just haven't understood what I didn't understand what it was until I became involved in it. Right.

Yeah. So I'm very thankful for people like you and people of people listening, I think I have a responsibility to share what I've learned and to communicate about this. Even though people get mad at me. Stop killing animals. All caps. Yeah. They're really mad. Yeah.

Okay. Stop eating grain, you fuck. If you look, people don't understand. We've talked about this before yeah if you look at a grain field after it's been plowed what do you see vultures yeah flying over it's what yeah once that combine goes through and gets the wheat i mean there's all sorts of dead animals of vulture buzzards flying around and uh i mean even so you drink coffee how do you think that the coffee beans where those are grown there's no weeds there's no you know i

mean it's just there's animals dying for your coffee yeah there's animals dying for everything and i think the the closer we can get to a real true organic relationship with with life with all life plant life i mean i fucking hate the idea of pesticides you know i i hate the idea that we're spraying things on certain plants to kill them so that we can grow other plants yeah like large-scale agriculture when you look at a giant cornfield ladies and gentlemen that is one of the most unnatural things in all of life and it is one of the most the weirdest things we've just accepted as being natural it's not natural and that's one of the weirdest things we've just accepted as being natural. It's not natural. And that's one of the reasons why they have to dump nitrogen into the soil and all kinds of other shit and pesticides and use Roundup and use giant machines to grind up all this stuff.

And I'm not saying you shouldn't eat wheat. But I'm saying all of this is unnatural. Cities are unnatural. All this is unnatural. All of this is unnatural. Cities are unnatural. All this is unnatural. And the more we understand about the true nature of our interactions with this life that we are surrounded with, the better off we'll all be. And it doesn't mean finger-pointing or saying that you should watch your family die in a fire.

That's not helping anybody. They don't understand. It's just it's just digging in on both sides it's sort of the same thing that people do in politics you know the right hates the left and the left hates the right and nothing gets done because everybody's just digging in supporting their side and it's just we we all need to realize that this life that we're experiencing is far more nuanced and requires far more research and far more understanding of all the different pieces that are moving that was another great thing about that

hunting trip is i had no idea what what um people were attacking donald trump for for about a week or anybody yeah i was like we're gonna fight north korea yeah didn't know anything is awesome i was just hoping that no one got nuked in the time that we had no service for a week Whether or not we're going to fight North Korea. Yeah. Didn't know anything. It was awesome. I was just hoping that no one got nuked in the time that we had no service for a week. I was just hoping there wasn't a new attack or Kim Jong-un didn't shoot a rocket over Japan or whatever the fuck it was. I didn't know any of that, and everything worked out just fine. So that was a win-win. And we're here. Yeah.

Well, listen, brother. Let's wrap this up. Okay. We just did three hours. Amazing. Goes by like that, right? That was good. Yeah, thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you for getting me into bow hunting. Thanks for taking me on this epic trip. Thanks to Under Armour. Thanks to Tom, the owner of the ranch, and everybody else involved, and that's it. All right.

All right, fuckers. That's it. See you soon. right, fuckers. That's it. See you soon. Bye. Keep hammering. Keep hammering, bitches.