The Joe Rogan Experience - #2100 - Cameron Hanes & Steven Rinella

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Steven Rinella is an outdoorsman, conservationist, writer, and host of "MeatEater." Cameron Hanes is a master bowhunter, outdoorsman, elite athlete, author, and host of the podcast “Keep Hammering with Cameron Hanes.”  www.themeateater.com www.cameronhanes.com

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day we're good to go all right steve ranella cam haynes what's happening good to see you guys no thanks for having me out man my pleasure cam explain that ridiculous thing around your neck what are you talking about oh this that thing oh what what where am i what camera am i right there yeah so this is uh how badass is this solid gold mold of this is my first brown bear i killed with roy so they made a mold off this claw i had this just tanned hide laying around. I'm like, I got a, we got a, I don't know, what's it going to do? Just lay there. So I'm like, I got to have something.

And I took it to Ski's Jeweler, which has been in Eugene for 104 years. So it's kind of a cool little story. And they came up with this crazy necklace. So it's, oh, they wanted me to tell you it's uh it's re uh what is it it's not not newly mined gold it's reclaimed reclaimed yeah yeah so they're not ruining the planet to get it so they want me this is like reclaimed gold but it's solid and then there's six carats of rubies on there and black diamond so so the rubies if this is a ridiculous thing you're talking about yeah yeah okay that was it yeah so the rubies that's a lot of pawn shop wedding rings laid up in there man i know a lot of failed marriages yeah this is probably that's where that came from like gold wiring 50 failed marriages right here and the rubies look like blood so what they did was it's pretty fucking dope they made the rubies look like blood. So what they did was, it's pretty fucking dope.

They made the rubies, if you could hold it up for the camera so people could see it. The rubies look like it's dipped in blood. There's black diamonds too. Oh, nice. That's a lot, dude. You're balling out of control, son. I know. It's crazy.

So the last, I had that one from Scooby, the CH. He made me, never worn it since, but I wore it here. And the last time I had my son had an ivory from a bull I killed in Arizona. He just put it on a leather strap, and that was my last podcast adornment. Now, here we are. Cody Garbrandt gave me one that has my dog's face on one side. Yes, I saw that. And the other side, it has the JRE logo.

I'm like, either one of them is too weird for me carved into an ivory no no no it's solid gold oh solid gold i'll say that's some intricate carbon yeah it's it's so ridiculous hey no there's no limit now do you got any jewelry vanilla come on no nothing no tattoos no jewelry man they'll never if i ever dead in the lake, they won't be able to identify me. Do you have a rubber wedding ring? Do you wear one of those? Well, I went from regular to silicon to nothing. Yeah?

I don't wear one anymore. My wife doesn't wear one very often. Oh, yeah? Uh-uh. Don't wear one. I'd yell at my wife. Where the fuck are you going? Well, I know, but it's not like anyone comes and scams on me now. I'm a at my wife. Where the fuck are you going? Put that leash on.

It's not like anyone comes and scams on me now. I'm a little beyond that. I just smell like a married dude. I don't need that thing. I get it. I don't mind wearing it. And I love these silicone ones. These are great.

You can lift weights in them. I do everything in them. I had a couple accidents with snagging it and then arced it on a battery, the metal one. Yeah. And then I got on this thing, and people were sending us all these pictures, too, of what they call degloving. Sheathing. Yeah, where you pull it off. Man, we got just people sending horrible pictures, like guys catching them on a ladder rack on a truck, and then jumping down.

Endless. And that cured me forever, that metal one. I kept the metal one in a little baggie. I will wear the metal one if I go to dinner with my wife. Oh, really? Or if I'm doing the UFC, I'll wear the metal one if I have a nice watch on. But I never wear it other than that. Oh, that's cute that you put it on at dinner.

I'm going to do that sometime. We do date nights. You put your ring on. Yeah. I'm going to start doing that. Well, I always wear my rubber ring, the silicone ring, but the metal one I put out when going out. It's a nice one.

Dude, I'm going to take that little tip, man. It's a good tip. It's a good tip for date night. I had to use mine for this. My wedding ring. Your wife's like, where's your wedding ring? Wow. You know those necklaces necklace i got i still have it

it's just assumed its final form i wear it all the time i'm wearing it right now my buddy in alaska he had uh he had his wife kept all of her jewelry in this little box and her house burnt down and he later went and found all that stuff like it melted into a blob so she she took that blob and took it to a jeweler and had that blob turned into a big old necklace so it's just like this amorphous glob oh to the glob with no yeah like this amorphous glob of gold that she'll put on now and then it was like all of her like stuff in this little pile that oh yeah melted together it's been a fucking hell of a fire oh yeah oh no it was for sure and she didn't like wear it wear it but she would get out and be like oh here's all my all that lumped here's all my stuff yeah the jewelry thing is a weird thing people that get

really one of the things we're going to do for protect our parks we've been talking about doing this is get grills like the rappers wear. We're all going to wear grills during the podcast, so we're going to get fitted with diamond grills. They take a little diamond dust, and you smile like Paul Wall, and you have a full mouthful of diamonds. I think it'd look badass. That's my next move.

Just fangs I have a tooth that got knocked out and it's like one of those calves and one time we were drinking and I when I was younger we were drinking and I was trying to open up there used to be that company that made tequila that had like a sombrero

for a lid and I was opening one of these bottles and broke that fake tooth off and all night i'm going on about how i'm getting the gold because it's gone you know and all night i'm like making a plan talking all this and i woke up in the morning and looked in the mirror and i just wanted a white a regular white tooth back so bad yeah Those things. So you opened it up with your tooth? Yeah, I broke that tooth and then got fired up about getting a gold one.

No, never did it. That would have been the closest thing I had toward jewelry, my gold tooth, but chickened out. That would have looked sick. Yeah, I thought about a gold tooth for brief moments, generally while drinking. Getting one of them. They have those,

they just put a little diamond on it now yeah my old man told me that during the war guys would carry around uh dental picks and he fought world war ii he said during the war they would carry it around and you would they would go and get all the they would get the gold out of germans teeth and save it up in a bag and there were certain guys was just into it i remember as a kid asked him like hey would they ever get the gold out of Germans' teeth and save it up in a bag. And there were certain guys who were just into it. I remember as a kid, I asked them, like, hey, would they ever get it from an American? He goes, that'd be a good way to get shot. But they'd dig it out of there, which is a macabre business, man. Yeah.

Very macabre. People used to dig up graves to do that, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, the original fillings, the silver ones, were those lead? Don't know. Because they used to have fillings that were metal. And I remember people were saying, hey, those are fucking terrible for you.

They figured it out years later. It's like living your whole life with a fishing sinker in your mouth, man. Right. Have you seen, you saw Shane Gillis last night. Yeah. How funny is that dude? Oh my God, He's hilarious. He's so funny.

He had a bit about George Washington and it's one of the funniest bits I've ever seen in my life. And George, it's a whole bit about going to the George Washington museum because he's a real history buff. But one of the things was George Washington's teeth. Like George Washington's teeth. His wooden teeth? No, no, they weren't wooden.

They were set in lead. Oh, is that right? The fake thing that he had was set in lead the top was horse teeth and the bottom was slave teeth so they'd have teeth pulled from his slave to make yes yes and then that thing was set in lead with springs on it, and that was George Washington's teeth. I mean, how fucking crazy is that? But his whole bit is about how George Washington had lead poisoning. He was a fucking maniac because he was at the front of the line. Horse, donkey, cow.

Just fucking hack. You have to see the bit. It's very funny. Folklore notwithstanding, Washington's false teeth were not wooden. He obtained them instead from horses, donkeys, cows, and human beings. According to his account books, 1784, emulating some of his affluent friends, he bought nine teeth from unidentified Negroes, perhaps enslaved African Americans at his beloved Mount Vernon.

The price was 122 shillings. at his beloved Mount Vernon. The price was 122 shillings. Yeah. I mean, imagine eating with that fucking monstrosity of lead in your face. So he's got that in his mouth all the time. He's getting lead poisoning. That's pretty intense. Pretty intense.

Having another dude's teeth in your mouth, too, is wild. I had a cadaver bone in my jaw for a while, and you'd get little pieces of it, and you're always spitting out little pieces of some guy. Whoa. Some other dude. You had it for a while? They took it out? Well, no, it just heals up.

Oh. So they drill a hole in there, and they fill it full of cadaver bone. Whoa. And I asked who the dude was. You know, they can't figure out who he was. I have. You're like all over your office or whatever. You're like some little chunk of a guy.

You don't know. My right knee is a cadaver ACL tendon. But it's not anymore. What happens is your body proliferates itates it yeah so it just acts as a scaffolding and then your body just fills it in with its own tissue they ever give you info about the person no no i just don't get me a viking get me some fucking gigantic dude swinging a battle axe his whole life the uh they actually use the achilles tendon now because it's much thicker than the original ACL. It's like 150% stronger than an initial ACL.

I would do that operation again in a heartbeat. I've always told everybody I've had my knees done both ways. I had my left knee done with a patella tendon graft, which was the most painful and took forever to recover from. And then I had my right knee done with a cadaver graft. It was way easier. from and then i had my right knee done with a cadaver graft it was way easier i went to a party five days after the operation with no crutches no nothing i just put a brace on and walked and i was like this feels fine i mean it was obviously unstable i guess it was weaker so i put the brace on but uh i was i could walk around like it was was not that big a deal the first one i was in

fucking agony for months at least weeks because they they have to saw what they do is they take your patella tendon which is a very large thick tendon you don't need all of that and they take a strip of it and then they take it like peeling string cheese yeah exactly and then they take a chunk of your kneecap and a chunk of your shin. So they pull that out. And then they open you up like a fish. And then they screw it in on the top and screw it in the bottom. And that's your new ACL.

So it's a part of your body. So your body accepts it. It's not like another person's tissue, which could be an issue. Your body might reject it. And then it takes a long-ass time before you can even get on your knees again. It took like a year before it doesn't bother me to be on my knees, like if you're hammering something or something. I couldn't get on that knee. It was just so fucking painful because you've got a hole there and a hole in the kneecap.

But it all fills in eventually. Both of them are fine now. But if I had to tell people if they're going to get the operation, get the fucking cadaver. Get that dead dude. That's risky. Now, what if you get a vegan that's a vaccinated cadaver? Your knee's going to blow out.

It's just flimsy. Every day. Every day. Like flimsy string cheese. Like when your bowstring is getting frayed. You're like, damn, should I replace this? Like when you're D-loop. is fucking vegan screwed me on this ligament yeah poor vegans man boy you want to talk about people that have been sold bill of goods not very durable are they it's not just

that it's like there's so much propaganda that that is good for you. And there's so much evidence that it's not. And this mindset that these fucking people have where they're just like they believe the China study. They believe meat causes cancer. I've had conversations with people. We try to be rational with them. Like if meat really caused cancer, do you know that 95% of the people on earth eat meat? Like look at all the cancer. Yeah, but look at all the cancer but yeah but look at all the

other food they eat do you understand how epidemiology studies work like when they you know when they have these arguments no one ever takes it to this like rational conclusion like what would they do you know how they work the epidemiology studies no when they when they so like if they say there's been a correlation between high consumption of red meat and cancer oh people eat red meat five times a week or much more likely than people. What are they eating with it? They don't take that into effect because it's not a real study. It's bullshit.

What they're doing is just trying to come up with some biased interpretation of data that makes it seem more likely that meat is killing you. I was trying to explain correlation, causation, all that to my kid the other night. I was telling him about stuff like this, like education levels and divorce rates, right? I'm like, no one's going to untangle what it is, but you can look at these things and see that there's something going on, but no one knows exactly what, right? Yeah. So with this stuff like that, it's like, so did you eat a lot of meat? Uh-huh.

Yeah. It's like, okay, well, yeah. And what form? Where? What were you doing? It's not even what form. It's what else are you eating? Yeah.

If they're only looking for red meat, so they're asking you in these studies, like, how many days a week do you eat red meat? And then you say five. And they say, well, we've gathered up all the data. And the people that eat red meat five days a week are much more likely to have cancer. Yeah, but most people who eat red meat are eating burgers. And they're eating burgers from like Jack in the Box or whatever, where you get this bullshit bun.

You get these fries that are made in seed oil. You probably wash it down with a Coca-Cola. You're flooding your body with unnatural levels of sugar and these carbohydrates that are all processed with folic acid and bullshit and they're fucking terrible for you yeah and your gut is just inflamed and your whole body's freaked out and then do you smoke cigarettes and do you drink alcohol and do you live near a fucking power line like this like there's so many factors that lead you. If it was just, like, I want to see a study on people who eat wild game

or grass-fed beef and just fucking vegetables. Like, are those studies? Like, I bet those folks aren't getting, like, high instances of cancer. Cancer is, like, there's a lot of environmental factors. There's a lot of genetic factors. There's a lot of things that lead people to get cancer. It's not just what you eat. But when they say meat, like what else are you eating?

Why are you blaming meat? Well, what I used to do is go to McDonald's. So, yeah, I had red meat because in the burger, two plain hamburgers, large fry, apple pie, diet Coke, and a milkshake. Just think about all the bullshit in there. And they're like, do you eat a lot of meat? Yeah. Blame the meat. Right.

It was like, look, to your point, look at all that other shit, sugar and carbs. Exactly. That oil in that meal right there would probably kill you. And some people, it's the same people going through McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's every single day getting their go-to. Yeah. So those are the people that you're asking about. Do you eat red meat? Yeah.

And of course they are. But look at all. But yeah, I just got my blood test yesterday from my get it tested every once in a while. And my numbers are phenomenal. I eat meat five times a day yeah i mean i'm eating meat all day all wild game meat though i found that people also have i was talking this the other day with my buddy seth where people also have a tendency to um find that there's so much conflicting dietary information that people also will find something aligns with their aesthetic. Yeah. Right. Or that aligns with their political sensibility,

meaning someone, you know, if your general tendency is to be opposed to meat production certain agricultural practices and you see an article where it says you know high meat diet correlates with cancer they're going to read that with great enthusiasm yes yeah confirmation because they're going to be like oh this lines up with a bunch of shit I already think. Yeah, exactly. And so when we were talking about this, we were trying to – I was sort of teasing out, right? Like, I like to have a garden. I like to hunt. And I look with fondness upon data that suggests that eating, like, fresh veggies and meat is really good for you. And it definitely feels good.

But I'm sort of like, am I, you know what I mean? Do I make the same mistake that, that I tease other people for making? Like if I read some study that said, you know, eating mule deer is,

you know, the best thing you can possibly do. I'd be like, no, that's my kind of study. Yeah. But it, it just makes logical sense.

Yeah, it does. You understand the building blocks of human beings and what's necessary to promote all the things that you need that only come from animal tissue, B12, collagen. There's so much stuff that you can get from meat that you're just not going to get from anywhere else. So whenever I see an athlete that starts going on a vegan diet, I look at it the same way as like a snake handler. Like, okay, let's see how this plays out. Yeah, how it plays out. You're going to get bit.

It's going to take some time. Plays out the same every time. It's like I have a friend and he was like, my girlfriend's going to let me do threesomes. The moment I hear things like that, I have my kind of argument. The exact same feeling as someone coming up to me saying, hey man, I started making my own bombs. Like, this is not going to work out.

I know a guy that went through something like what you're talking about. And I remember when he broke it out for me about some deal he had arrived at in his marriage it looks good on paper I've never seen an example

I can't tell you how I know but I could just tell you that this is not a it never works yeah I mean if you just sketch it out right here it might look alright yeah it's not she's gonna kill you in your sleep bro this is not going to work. This is real.

Oh, my God. Get out now. Yeah, but, you know, the vegan diet thing, it's just so unfortunate that people have been – it's like it's such a – I get how you could come to this sort of idea where if you just eat vegetables, then you're not as responsible for killing. But one of the real problems is, first of all, there's the real problem of farming, especially industrial monocrop agriculture. Goddamn, they kill a lot of things to get that crop out.

They kill everything that's in the ground when they're using the combines. They use people to kill groundhogs. They're killing all the varmints and gophers and everything gets fucking killed right we all know that ground nesting birds fawns get chewed up there's a lot of things that happen but then on top of that there's emerging evidence that plants have intelligence that not only do they have intelligence, but they communicate through the mycelium in the ground. And that they share resources. Like they allocate resources towards plants that need it more. There's evidence that they communicate with each other. there's trees in Africa where when giraffes eat them,

if they're downwind, the other trees that are downwind will start producing a potent chemical that makes their leaves taste like shit so that they know that they're getting chewed on by, you know, oh my God, there's a giraffe in the neighborhood, start tasting like shit. And so they release chemicals. I mean, how insane is that yeah, they not only is it that? But they have now shown that they can play recordings of water of insects eating the leaves and if they play those recordings Next to the plant the plant will start producing those toxic chemicals

Mm-hmm that make them taste bad so i've read that about willows i never checked to see how like valid it is but that that a willow will send root tendrils in the direction of the sound of running water that makes sense no no it's cool sorry counting me to step over you man oh no no i was just saying so it's it's sound and also you said before you said it was downwind. Yeah, downwind too. It's scent and sound. It's a bunch of things that they don't understand because they don't have noses. They don't have ears.

How does the sound of caterpillars eating leaves change the chemical structure of these plants? How are they knowing, okay, time to let loose the poison? How are they getting it time to let loose the poison how are they how are they getting it because they're downwind but it gets so bad that animals some animals that try to eat them they wind up starving to death because they don't want to eat this stuff because it tastes that bad you're uh i can see where you're going with this is that sometime down the road there's going to be some tough decisions for people who are looking for general yeah well like uh not wanting to harm yeah creatures yeah and when you have to face the fact that here's

this like semi-sentient communicative plant that you're yanking it just can't move quick and it does move and if you watch high speed images of of plants growing you know and moving with the breeze you're like oh it's just a different kind of movement like it's it's clearly growing like it grows forever it's not even like another animal it's kind of more fantastic because it'll grow for a hundred fucking years and keep growing or if you go to like some of those crazy, in Northern California, those trees that have been around for a thousand years. It's wild shit, man. Yeah, I'll hunt all manner of stuff. And I used to work as a tree surgeon and with fell trees.

But at our place in Southeast Alaska, which is in the coastal rainforest, and we're in an area of old growth where our stuff's at um i'm not like in no way condemning people to do i would not be able to put a chainsaw on one of those trees yeah like you know i mean like we like everyone finds their sort of limits and when i'm looking at some tree that's whatever four or five hundred years old yeah i personally you know i could kill a bear without thinking about it. Not without thinking about it, but yeah, I can kill a bear and be real happy I did. Man, just I personally couldn't put a saw to one of those trees. So people, you know, you find these lines.

Well, there's also the renewable resource of bears. You know, if you're going to kill a bear and eat a bear, that bear is nine years old. Nine years is not that big a deal. Yeah, ain't 400. Yeah. I mean, there was a, I was in Scotland recently and they had this tree, like this is the oldest tree that, you know, is in Europe. And I was like, how old is this fucking tree? And they're like, it's like a 5,000 year old tree.

I'm like, how is that possible? Yeah, it's incredible. See if you can find that, like the oldest tree in scotland it was a crazy gnarled up looking fucked up tree i was like how i might be wrong with the age but it was crazy old and i was like whoa like how do you know how do you know how old this is when you go to europe scotland was amazing i took this trip with my wife and we went to visit these sites where they have these stone circles that are older than Stonehenge and they're like right in front of this dude's house. Like this dude

has a house and then there's a small street, like a two lane street, 5,000 years old. 5,000. A huge tree. Google says it's 2 to 3,000 years old. Okay, so the sign says 3,000. Well, back when they made that sign, what kind of fucking carbon dating did they have, you know? Some dude said, man, that tree must be 5,000 years old.

Put that on the sign. Look at the image of it. That's what it looked like. See the image of it to the right, Jamie? No, slightly to the left of that. Yeah, that's it. That's it. That's exactly what it looked like.

That one's a 1,000-year-old. North Downs in Surrey. So that's in England. Yeah, that's it. That's it. That's exactly what it looked like. That one's a thousand-year-old. North Downs in Surrey. So that's in England. Yeah, fuck that ugly tree. That tree looks dope. It looks dope. That's not the tree Steve was talking about. I think they look cool.

No, that tree looks old. That tree looks like a gnarly old man. Yeah, like some old dude. I'll tell you what it was like when we rode horses everywhere. Hey, so, Steve, I was thinking, like, so what's the difference between a person who you said you wouldn't like to cut that tree, or you wouldn't. Yeah, but like I said, I don't say that to condemn. I mean, I don't say that to cast judgment on a logger that does. I'm just saying that I personally.

No, I understand that. But then there's some people who take that to, I'm just trying to, I don't know, reason with myself. Because around here, we've had people chain themselves to trees. Sure. You know what I mean? So would you do that? No. So that's what I'm saying.

It's like, I mean. No, because the passion's not that right there's a look that the passion's there but it's not that deep right i yeah it's just it's weird thinking about i understand what you're saying i totally get that i would probably i think i've never cut down a tree i've never been a tree surgeon but i would probably feel the same about maybe four or five hundred year old i might be like you know, you know, man, Cam, you cut it down. When I was in Northern California. I don't want to have to deal with any repercussions. Right.

We were in the redwood forest and there's a tree that you drive a car through. Yeah. Yeah. Cut a hole in the tree. And I was like, why did they do that? But it was like 1920 or something when they did it. Yeah. They didn't care about anything.

They didn't give a fuck. But when you're around those trees they're so big it's it's so crazy how wide they are and when they're gone that's it you just chop down something that took thousands of years to grow so you can make what a fucking table yeah you know there's a lot of trees that are like 20 years old go kill those yeah it's it's a tough one man it's tough on looking at those trees but it does seem like uh you, some of those trees you look at, it's like you're looking at, it almost seems like some approximation of God, you know, and look at some of those old trees, man. Just astounding. Yeah.

Yeah. In Oregon, that was a big thing because we had the spotted owls in late 80s, basically. And spotted owls lived in old growth. late 80s basically and spotted owls lived in old growth so we had that that whatever timber activists or whoever those people are spike and trees yeah and or living in them they'd like well we live here or we chain ourselves to but they were up there and so the loggers would get there to cut you know do their cut and there's people living in the trees yeah that one gal spent her name was like joe's probably had her on the show it was like butterfly or something right but i mean i guess my point is it's like you got people whatever their passions are they will go to the

ends you know like yeah we defend hunting till the end right that's our passion that's what we love but yeah it's like all these different factions of people that man you'd have a hard time saying you're wrong and believing that because that's just what they believe that's their passion yeah so it's like finding that middle ground you know the one thing that i never really thought of until i started hunting was the spiritual aspect of hunting that's it's in it's a part of it that it's almost indisputable when you experience it like when you first experience it when you first start eating an animal that you like the first time you ever took me hunting when we were in montana and i remember when i was eating that mule deer we're sitting over the fire and i was like this is so different than any meal i've ever had in my life. It's so different. I feel so connected to

this animal. I know how difficult it was to do this. I know how insane their life is, that this is this wild creature that is 100% going to die soon, no matter what. If it's next year or the year after or the year after that, it doesn't have much time left. And if you can move in while, you know, dip your toe into the wild and extract that thing out, to me, that was like, oh, this is the best way to eat meat ever. This is 20, 30 times better than just getting a steak from a store. I remember when we were sitting around the fire and you're like, what do you think? I'm like, I'm doing this forever. Do you remember that?

What year was that? I don't remember that specific conversation. That was 12 years ago. Oh, was it really? I was going to say 10 years ago. 2012. Okay, and then you bow hunted in 2014. Yes. Okay, so did you kill... I have two people in this room that introduced me to hunting and that's our Montana mule deer right there.

That's him. Someone lost the nose bones. The ones out there? Yeah. Well, he's missing his, too. Yeah. You need to shake Jamie down. He might have a pocket full of those nose bones.

I think they boil it out too long, I think. Is that what it is? Yeah. I always glue them back in. But anyways, sorry. But that guy is very special to me. That guy is very special to me. First kill.

And I remember when we were eating him over the fire i was re-sorting my schedule i was like okay how many times a year can i hunt now okay how much how long is it going to take to after the first year first time right away eating it over the fire like right away i was like oh i'm doing this forever this is what i do now like right away i was like okay now i gotta really research like calibers and rifles and how to do this and i do that i gotta up my cardio i gotta start hiking hills i started thinking all these things like immediately yeah i started planning out okay every you gotta hunt every four months like what can you hunt i gotta get pigs because then you can hunt them all year

round immediately my brain starts spinning like okay this is what i do now i was like okay i found it i've taken quite a number of people on their first hunting trips i've never had i mean probably dozens maybe dozens either way i've never had any of them regret it like no one's ever said i wish i hadn't done that but i would say the majority definitely a good strong majority did not pursue it didn't regret it glad they did it but didn't make it part of life well it's difficult yeah it's difficult you know and that's the thing i think that is the impediment for a lot of people it's like time consuming if you don't have someone like you or someone like you to teach them like i have friends they're like hey i want you to take me hunting like oh christ i don't have the time i want to like you to teach them, like I have friends that are like, hey, I want you to take me hunting. I'm like, oh, Christ. I don't have the time.

I want to go bow hunting. I'm like, do you know what you're saying? Do you know what you're saying? Like, I just want you to come with me one day and watch what I do fucking every day. I'm going through that with my kid right now. I'm going through that with my kid where my older kid is very interested in bow hunting. kid where my older kids very interested in bow hunting but it's just i'm like man you have to appreciate the level of discipline dude that you got to shoot right like i'm perpetually rusty like you can't be like me right and and i actually pulled the plug on him this year where i i said

if you shoot every day like he'd been shooting throughout the summer i said if you shoot every day prior to this week we're gonna go bow hunt i said why don't you shoot every day, like he'd been shooting throughout the summer. I said, if you shoot every day prior to this week, we're going to go bow hunt. I said, I want you to shoot every day prior to the week. And he didn't do it. And I said, we're not going. And I'll see if next year that impacts him. But it's like the discipline. It's unfortunate, but I think, you know, there's no way to teach someone that.

There's no way to really like get it into their head how hard it is. Unless they're in the field and they're drawing on an animal and then they realize like unless there's some ways to mitigate that like you've had joel turner on which i you have you've had him on right no you never had joel turner on no shot iq guy no i'd like to but no oh i gotta connect you do you have his number do you know but i'm familiar with that he's been recommended by many people, and guys I work with are familiar, but I haven't had him on. He's absolutely got— And you've recommended him to me.

There's a thing that happens when you're in a high-pressure situation that I recognize from martial arts and from a lot of other things, where you do not have full control of your faculties and your body is operating on anxiety and an adrenaline. And when it's completely unique, like a bow hunting thing where you have hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of preparation and thinking about it for seconds of action. And it boils down to this one movement where you're like, yikes, if you don't have a strategy for managing your mental state while that's happening, the odds of you flinching or moving or doing something stupid are really, really, really high. And Joel Turner went through that for like fucking 15 years.

He like couldn't kill an elk. Struggled it with himself. He was always choking. Yeah. And then when he became a SWAT instructor when he was you know he's on a SWAT team so he he's literally like he was telling me this one story where he had to shoot this guy that was holding a young girl hostage and like I think it was with a weapon I forget a knife or something and so he has a headshot while this guy is holding on to a girl and He had to figure out like what are the what is the mental process?

That allows people to flinch and panic during these moments and he realized it's a difference between open loop systems and closed loop systems and the open loop system is something like Swing a baseball bat like once you start swinging, you're just swinging. You're just, you know, you're swinging. And unfortunately with a lot of people, that is the initial reaction. They just go. Yeah, I get it. Like the final thought you have is that you're going to swing the bat.

Yeah. I don't know if a professional, I don't know if a friend of mine's a real homer on hitter. I don't know if he would agree, but in my mind, yeah. It's like you've decided to swing and everything else is just nothing. Well, you're not going to stop it in the middle of the swing. Yeah, you're not thinking about, oh, I'm going to go a little higher, a little lower, right? It's like punching. Punching, when you're fighting, it's an automatic movement.

You slide back and you don't even realize what's happening. You're already punching and you're not going to stop that punch once you've launched your shoulder forward. And when you are using his system, he has you talking to yourself through every step of it. So you're always conscious. So it's always a closed loop system. You're in complete control. At any step, you could stop. And he's like, sometimes the best shot is a shot you don't take. When you realize you're shaking, you're holding too long, let down. That's the best decision you could ever make. If you get your mind to like, just shoot now, just go now, and you're, now.

I've seen people, there's so many videos online. Dude, I've been there. Yeah, everybody has. But there's so many videos online dude i've been there my yeah yeah everybody has but there's a way to mitigate that with this so it's not just the practice the practice is great you have to practice i practice constantly but you also should have a pre-shot routine and i actually used cam's pre-shot routine when i was in utah because i remember cam had this thing where he's saying, keep the pin on him, keep the pin on him. And you say that while you're shooting.

Keep the pin on him, keep the pin on him. I just know if I keep the pin there, the arrow's going to hit good. What happens is people drop their bow arm a lot. I mean, that's what happens a lot, is they drop that bow arm and they hit too low. So if you keep that pin there, the bow's going to do its job. Oh, you're telling yourself,

be conscious of keeping the pin on it through the shot. Yeah. Not moving. Because the moving thing is like, hope I hit it. Hope I hit it. Wah! And then things go left, right, fucking three, four feet. You're like, how?

You know where people realize that they have a problem? Is after they make a shitty shot. Yeah. And they're just like, why didn't I practice more? Why didn't I listen to Joel or Joe or whoever? Yeah. Because then it's real because we have a tendency of making things

work out in our head the way we want them to. And then when it doesn't work out like that because we haven't put in the time or we don't have a process down and maybe you hit the animal bad, maybe you miss, maybe, you know, just shit the bed. And then're just like god what is my what am i doing yeah but up until then you're like you're the baddest person ever you know yeah of course i'm gonna make a great

shot that's interesting thing between in talking to people that blow a shot with a rifle and talking to people to blow a shot with a bow people will blow a shot with a rifle and they'll assure you they did everything right guns on no one blows a shot with a bow it comes the way of saying i don't know what happened i did everything right because you fall into like you fall in like you're saying you fall into this like despair and guilt and you're trying to review in your head i've like i've accidentally landed on a thing. It's not fail safe, but somehow, when you're saying keep the pin on them, I've landed on this thing like,

remember your elbow, remember your elbow. And if I remember to like, because when I'm shooting, just practicing, there's always this thing of sort of consciously being aware of having my elbow raised. And that makes everything fall on the line. And so if I know I'm going to get a shot and I can think like, if you'll do the part the elbow if you do the part and then

that elbow goes up and then everything else sort of like takes care of itself you know and then i'll if i take a shot i might review in my mind like i never did that thing i never did the elbow deal yeah you know which drives all the other actions it imperfect, but it's similar to what you're talking about. There's something about staying in a conscious state and being able to maintain your composure during that high-pressure situation, maintaining a conscious state where you're talking yourself through it and not just being a reptile. People black out kind of.

They black out. They really do. They don't know what to do. They're like, kind of black out they really do they don't know what i don't know what happened i don't know what happened yeah i think you use it up maybe i felt that if anything um just a gradual dissipation with age and experience perhaps experience for sure i'd be curious if some if some dude started like if some dude at 60 years old, you know, some dude at 60 years old started bow hunting, are they going to wig out like a 20-year-old on their first shot? Depends on who they are. Or is there something that's like their brain's already chilled out?

I think there's a part of your brain that, like, there's a part of your brain that Andrew Huberman talks about. I forget what the exact section is. Yeah. That when you force yourself to do things you don't want to do, when you force yourself to get up in the morning and run in the cold and get in the cold plunge and all these different – it literally grows larger. This part of your brain that is able to do things that are uncomfortable that you don't want to do actually grows larger. don't want to do actually grows larger. And it seems to be that that's a muscle just like every other muscle, not a muscle, but a thing that is more robust with use. And if you're a 60 year old guy that just been working in an office and listening to the boss and driving home and, you know, there's no stress, no, no, like not stress, but no high-pressure, decision-making, in-the-moment choices that you have become accustomed to managing and dealing with and negotiating.

If you're a person who's, like, fucking gone to war, you know, maybe you've had, like, some crazy high-pressure job and you're 60, you probably got fucking ice water running through your veins by the time you're 60 years old. You're like, you've seen it all. It depends on the human. But for most people, there's a guy like Derek Wolf. You met Derek Wolf? You have him on your podcast? You're talking about a guy that has fucking played professional

football at the highest level and even he says it's the most exciting shit that he's ever done. I've told Cam so many times, dude, I've done a lot of shit. I've fought. I do stand-up comedy. I do so many live things that are like high pressure. Nothing is like elk hunting.

There's nothing like that moment when you're drawing and that thing is like in the field and it drops his head down at 50 yards and starts eating and you draw back. You're like, is this happening? Is this really going on right now? Ah! It's so pressure filled. It's such a novel and unique moment that unless you have a bunch of those moments. I'm at the point now, 10 years into bow hunting, where when I draw on an animal, I can keep my shit together.

And now to me, it's just like making sure I'm steady and the shot's good. There's nothing weird going on. There's no weird wind. And I just go through my process and I'm very confident now. But it's numbers. It's numbers. Like if you – I always tell people like the more things that you can shoot, the better. And you can shoot pigs.

You shoot things that people have to kill. If you can go to Lanai where you can get multiple shot opportunities on axis deer, that kind of situation. For me, the difference between how I feel in September during elk season and some years where I feel great and super confident it's always that I went on a couple other hunts yeah it's always like so you get that experience I used to feel fighting too like if I got like a couple times I got injured and I couldn't fight for like six months and then I'd fight but it almost like it was like brand new again like when I'd be in there like whoa this is crazy the first time you see people fight they're in a panic it's like you can't believe it's actually happening you're like are you ready and you're

like yes you know and they get out there and if you're an experienced person it's one of the reasons why like champions have such a massive advantage they have such a massive psychological advantage because they're the champion and they've been like you'd see guys when they would fight Mike Tyson, they had already lost by the time they got in there. They look at him like, oh, my God, what is happening? Is this real? Like their whole world was like that big. And they were just in a full panic, and they just couldn't fight.

You know, that's kind of similar to how people feel bow hunting elk for the first time. I mean, that bull's coming in. They lost. When that bull's coming in yeah there's they lost yeah when that bull's coming in and it's coming to 20 yards it's just like there's there's a chance but i remember the first time we had your first bow hunt we were in colorado the two bulls were coming in on this little tight creek we were in this little draw coming in at the same time and they were just bugling and it was insane not even big bulls but just coming in and closing down on us and you remember that moment yeah just like it was

unbelievable even though all the shit that you've done this high level crazy stuff that there was nothing that compared to that the screaming when you're there and they're like 30 yards doing that, the sound is so nuts. If you're not a person that's ever been around elk calling, when they do it, when they bugle, it sounds like Lord of the Rings, man. It's such a crazy sound. It's so crazy. It can be intimidating if you're not ready for it. There's a thing Derek Wolf told me when you're talking about uh the stress and competitive stress he told me a thing that had never occurred to me before about getting in

a ring to fight mike tyson or whatever is in his thing you're also there's a thing where you can get you're starstruck yeah like picture you're an incoming player okay and you're real young and all of a sudden you're like hold on i'm supposed to go tackle tom brady yeah who i've been watching right i've been watching through my whole like coming up through high school yeah coming through college and all of a sudden like wow that's him yeah there's the goat you gotta sort of put that out of your head right you're like you'll be like hey tight let me get his interview then i'll come let me get his interview. Let me get his autograph.

Then I'll come back and then I'll tackle him. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the goat. You've heard how he's the best to ever do it. And then all of a sudden, it's almost like, I'm a big fan. I'd like to meet you. Sorry for having to do this.

But isn't that also the case with bow hunters where you've been hunting your whole life hoping to see a two uh 200 inch buck and then one day you're in the mountains and this mule deer steps out you're like like this is it because you're imagining taking the photo smiling on instagram you're imagining you see this wide mule deer buck like this is crazy this is a real one i can make this happen you're like everything is just full panic clay newcomb just did a bear grease episode about a guy a poacher and he interviews the guy at length and this guy played softball on a army base they had like a athletic complex and a couple times he sees this giant buck and the people were aware of this giant. And he was trying to figure out if it was possible to kill it, as he calls it, kill it right or kill it legal.

And one day he just happens to have his bow in his car and sees it not anywhere he's supposed to hunt. And the way he describes it, he describes it like he was out of his body. And he shoots it. And the minute it falls over, he thinks thinks you'll never get away with this God but he looked not only was he not only lost I can't I think he's in Missouri a Missouri so was he in the wrong unit or is he on a military was on a military base where you're not even you can't hunt and not only like losing not only losing your mind as you're drawn back, he lost his mind in the whole thing. Getting his bow out of his thing and kills the buck.

And then the minute he kills it, it occurs to what he's done. So what did he do? It's two episodes about just horrible. Wow. I mean, you gotta walk a real fine line i mean he did like as he admits you know i mean he did he did a criminal act and it's not like sympathetic of the criminal act but it's a winds up being a story of the unraveling of someone's life about just a mistake but but being that that that sort of lust for that animal right i guess we should be

thankful that derrick wolf never saw tom brady out of pizza then you know what i mean i could just freaking light him up sack him yeah right i got him i got him imagine that he's in front of you a burger king he just fucking go for it i lost my mind it was tom brady i just fucking i don't know i've just been programmed to tackle him yeah no but that i i think i was thinking back to on you said when you're not ready for it my my first two years my first year bow hunting my first year rifle hunting i was 15 when i was rifle hunting we did this drive we used to do drives right oh hell yeah not really hitting pans but not far from it so you send the guys and hunting we did this drive we used to do drives right oh hell yeah i'll talk drives with you all yeah not really hitting pans but not far from it so you send the guys and then put the whoever the

shooters on the stand can i ask you real quick did you call them what were the names you use we have we debate this all the time what who was okay what were the terms you use pushers sitters yeah that was it okay use push use pushers and sitters. It's very regional. Or on the stand. Oh, on the stand? Yeah, you're on the stand, and then we're pushing to you. Okay, yeah.

So I was there, had this, let's see,.300 Savage, just old gun, but 15 years old, doing the push. Okay, go here. I didn't even know if I was in the right spot. I'm just like, God, I'm by myself. Just don't know anything. And then all of a sudden I look up and here's this buck. Boom. Giant mule deer.

I don't even know how big it was, but it looked. And I was just like, shot. No clue. I don't know. I never, probably never saw it in the scope. It was like, probably, it seemed like from me to you. And I was just like, had no idea what happened. Was I prepared to kill that buck?

Hell no. So I killed a spike buck like the next day, right? And that's how it works. You're not ready for a giant. Right. Then same thing with bow hunting. First day bow hunting, this giant bull comes out seven by six Roosevelt. First day, I'm like sit on kneeling

in this logging road felt like my arms were asleep they're tingling i'm like i didn't know if i could draw this bow back he's broadside head to the right but to the left and i shoot at he's like right at 40 yards and i miss behind his butt so i'm off like six feet at 40 yards and then end up killing a spike bull. So you're just not ready for the giant, you know. But that's where I think Joel Turner comes into play. I don't know if he could have helped me. I don't know if he could have helped me. At that time?

He'd have been like, give me that bow. Yeah, it probably wouldn't, you probably weren't totally ready for that at that moment. But if you have a certain level of proficiency and a certain amount of experience in mitigating high pressure situations, then I think you could get through it. Because I've been teaching a lot of people to shoot a bow for the first time on the lift, run, shoot show that I do. Joel Turner isn't going to tell them anything. I mean, it's like there's so many basics you have to get before that. But as you said, once you get that routine down

and you're kind of more seasoned, then I think that closed loop, open loop, then that would make more sense. It was so attractive to me. When I first started shooting a bow, I was like, God, there are so many. You get lost in this. Like there's so much going on just in your yard when you're shooting at a target.

There's so much mental and physical and there's so many things that have to align. Like I have a checklist that I have on my phone that before I go hunting, like when I'm on the plane flying to wherever I'm going, I look at my notes on my phone and I go over my checklist and I bounce it around my head. You process stuff. Yeah, I have a shot process. Not like boots, socks. No, no, no, no, no. I got all that. That I'm terrible with too. I just stuff everything in there I'm like I think I got it all in there. I really need to organize it like if I was gonna go on like one of those. You take way more than you need. A hundred percent. If was going to go on one of those backpacking mountain hunts where you're carrying your whole camp on your back and you're walking in for fucking 20 miles, I'd be the guy that

has the 80-pound pack because I threw in extra batteries and extra broadheads in case this happens. Hiding stuff in the bushes on your way up. Two knives just in case. Meanwhile, Adam Greenstreet has been doing it forever. That motherfucker saws his toothbrushes in half to cut weight. He's got it down to a science. You would do that one time.

One time. Yeah, exactly. That's how you learn that. Everybody's learned that. So my process for packing is just fucking shove it all in there and mostly like that. I always have two range finders and two binos in case I drop something. Remember that time we were hunting in Canada and I broke my rest? I did. My rest snapped.

I did. But I had a whisker biscuit. I was ready. I was like, ha! Oh, that's good. He was being obsessive out there with his rest, just like wrenching on it for hours and changing and doing all this and end up stripping something out because he's like got too crazy on the rest.

Well, it was fucking up on me. Yeah. It it was fucking up the rest wasn't dropping all the way and so like my arrow was catching it like the fletchings were catching i'm like what the fuck is going on and then i was like oh look at my rest it's like slightly up above the riser like god damn it so i'm fucking getting in here. And then, doink. Oh, no. Oh, no. But whisker biscuits, man, I know they take a couple of seconds away from your fee per cent, but boy, are those fucking easy to tune. Oh, yeah. It's a lot less little stuff to go wrong, for sure. I don't know if some fucking high-level hunters still use whisker biscuits just because they

don't want to fuck around with anything. It's like, for that hunt, it's perfect. You're going to be shooting at 10 or 20 yards. you know, or a whitetail hunter, they're shooting at 20 yards. So if you're going to be shooting long distance, a fletch going through with all that contact through the whisker, basically, that's going to impact long distance. Well, apparently really impacts it when you have helical. Yeah.

Right. So if you have straight, so helical for people that are listening, there's an angle that the fletchings are placed in that accentuates the spinning of the arrow, which makes it more accurate, and, you know, that's what you want, right? So some people don't use that. They just have straight up and down fletchings,

which is still good. You know, you can still shoot very accurately with straight up and down fletchings, but most, like, really good archers prefer a helical. Like, you have a helical. Yeah, give a little direction to that energy so the arrow won't plane. But that whisker biscuit accelerates that spin, makes it immediate. Well, it fucks up the fletchings because it's twisting as it's going through all those hairs. Yeah, yeah.

Whereas if you have a straight fletching, it's just going to pass through. It only takes a few feet. Tim Burnett still hunts with a whisker biscuit. I was watching one of his YouTube videos. I mean, that guy has fucking killed everything. He's been around forever. You know, Solar Hunter, you know, Remy's buddy. Yeah.

And, you know, he's a really good hunter. And he uses a whisker biscuit. And I was like, this is crazy. I mean, maybe he's only using it on this one video that I saw but i was like there's a lot of people that just go i want to cut just like a lot of people don't fuck with mechanicals like too many things you can go wrong i'm not gonna fuck around with it the last thing i did with mine is i put it on my fishbowl but it won't flow to fiberglass arrow i realized too heavy you know what i'm saying i was like man this is gonna be genius for fish hunting right But the arrow just goes, doo! Right through it.

That looks like a lot of fun, like bow hunting for fish. Oh, I love it, man. The problem is you just get limited to a fish. You get limited in the U.S. You get limited to a lot of fish species that are not as desirable. Right, like gar and carp and stuff like that. Down in South America, you're hunting like the best of the best fish. Yeah.

With a bow? Yeah. Oh. But I mean, you're hunting like the most coveted food fish, which is fun. Because I mean, how many carp do you want? We used to do it when we were kids, man. We'd shoot all kind of carp, but I just, you know. Isn't it wild that carp are, like, prized in Europe?

Yeah, I know. It doesn't make any sense. They, like, they go out of their way. I shouldn't say it doesn't make any sense that they didn't, but I don't know where we went. I don't know how we went so wrong. Yeah, it's weird, right? They put them all over thinking everybody's going to eat them all the time and just, like, did not take off. Well, they ruin lakes.

Yeah. Where I live on Lake Austin, there's a buddy of mine who's one of my neighbors who's a fisherman, and he said, man, you should have been here before they brought carp. He goes, there's all sorts of vegetation in here and the bass were everywhere, but now, he goes, if you can get a camera

and look at the bottom of this lake, it looks like the bottom of a swimming pool. There's fucking nothing there. It's terrible, man. But the fact that it was intentional. There's so many non-native, there's so many invasive species that were unintentional but the fact that for the for the most part the common carp was they were doing everybody a favor i think they thought they were doing a favor for rich people on lake austin because i think they wanted people to have less vegetation so they could take their boats out got it that's what i think and that's what he thinks, too.

I mean, I got this from him. He was like, I think they just wanted to clean up the vegetation because it was unsightly. And they fucked this place up. Because he was on a boat, and when I met him, he was casting under my dock. And I went out there, and I was like, what's going on, man? You weren't yelling at him? No. I've seen that on your show.

No, I like it. When I see those guys, they're always a little nervous nervous so i was like how you doing man oh man this guy's gonna yell at me i was telling this guy like the other day that there's like this four pound bass that lives underneath my dock i go hey man there's a pretty good bass that lives underneath stock and he's like really i go yeah go ahead fish it man i started talking to him but this is my friend alan shout out to alan who's my neighbor. He catches, all he catches is big bass. He goes, I don't even try for it.

He uses a big ass fucking Rapala. He has like one of those jointed Rapalas, and it's like fucking six inches long. He's like, I don't even fuck around. He goes, I just want big bass. Because there's like 15, 16 pound bass in that lake. And so he catches some big ones. He sends me some whoppers.

Defenders, the eight year effort to bring vegetation back to Lake Austin. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, they fucked it up. They fucked it up. There's still good bass there. Let me show you like what Alan catches. He's catching some big ass fucking bass. Catching some big ass fucking bass.

We're, we used to, me and Roy used to be addicted to carp hunting. Cause we'd go, they'd be spawning in the spring after we poured concrete. He had a construction company. We'd pour concrete. Then we'd go and go try to get carp for bear bait. So before they outlawed it in 94 in Oregon, we'd get carp, catch these giant carp, have a wheelbarrow, get them all back. Put them in a, like a 55 gallon drum, put put the lid on it and then we'd make stink so we'd call we needed some stink to get the bear bait going because if you got that rotten carp in a in a gunny sack and you put it way up a tree where

they couldn't get it that stink smell would go for five miles down the draw and then all the bear would come in right so i just remember this one time we had a bunch of carp and 55-gallon drum. After a while, that kind of builds pressure. We weren't really thinking about this. So we go to take that lid off, and it freaking explodes. And this shit smelled so—I mean, maggots, carpsten carp Exploded all over us Have you ever seen those videos Of when whales explode on beaches

Yeah Well I've seen them When they blow them up This is when Alan just caught this In front of my house the other day God dang that's giant Yeah he catches some big ass bass That's a real nice fish man

Yeah I think That'd get me interested in bass fishing Yeah he catches a lot Here's another one he just got And whenever he catches one he sends it to me. We're homies now. Those are a big fish. But yeah, the weird thing is the dock thing.

I encourage it. I'm happy when I see people. Look, I love all manner of outdoor activities. I would never want someone to not fish near my dock. That's so stupid. Yeah, I think it's a repulsive behavior. It's repulsive. Yeah, it's not.

It's a dock. Let people fish you should talk to them they're your friends they're like wouldn't you do it if you didn't have a dock and there was a dock and you knew the fish hang out under the dock wouldn't you fish there yeah so what the fuck is wrong with you yeah so it's or it's like well you're gonna have to move your dock because there's a fish under there that I'm not going to fish for. But this is the situation where that's where they go. They go where it's shade. They go where they can ambush. And they all go under docks and hanging trees and anything they can get because they fucked it up with carp.

Yeah. I was living in Seattle for a while, and we would fish smallmouth and perch and stuff in Lake Washington, which is like right downtown. And there's this, I was in this neighborhood where they have these apartment buildings that are on pilings. So there's just full on apartment buildings out over the water built on piers. And they would cast shadows and fish would collect there and you'd be in a boat, man. I mean, you're like, besides being out in some dude's front yard under their dock, you're fishing where you're right here almost looking into the window, you know, of someone eating breakfast.

But your cast right there, which felt much more intimate and kind of creepy. Yeah. That's weird that that felt weird way weirder than you know like i said where you got a house than a yard than a dock like that's not weird but you could get where you could basically like awkwardly wave at someone in their bathroom yeah yeah just don't make eye contact sitting there taking a shit looking out the window yeah the the the dock thing is a weird one man it's a weird one because i i get it if you're not a fisherman and you're just some asshole that just doesn't want anybody near your house what they're gonna tell you what they always tell you

is that some guy's gonna take a lead head jig and chip the paint chip the paint on the boat ding the dock like that's their claim. Okay. Is that they're going to whack your stuff with a lead head jig. I feel like that's the same as if you're driving off-road, like, and you're worried about pebbles. We've got to get these fucking pebbles out of here. Like, you're driving off-road. Yeah, be like, don't put your stuff out over the public water.

Yeah, and what are you doing is a boat's not a car man like it's a boat it's supposed to get scratched up a little you don't want your boat scratched up a little some people don't know what the fuck i don't get it you know i'm saying like yeah if you got like if you're on a ranch and you got those stripes on the down the side of your truck. Arizona pinstripes. That's kind of cool. You break it in. Yeah.

That's what you do when it's new. You kind of want that. I kind of want that. I like a car that's been fucking used, you know? Yeah. Well, you have 20 cars. I do. You know, I didn't.

I'm pretty sure that's how I think, you know? I was thinking about your shot. You know why I think that that helps when you do the elbow? Because when you get that elbow right, you're pulling hard against that back wall. A lot of people creep on their shot. They'll aim and everything's going good. They're pulling hard. And then as they're aiming, they're kind of relaxing.

Oh. And then that cam is kind of rolling over. It's called creeping. That'll throw off your shot. So I think when you think of that elbow consciously, it makes you think of pulling hard against that wall, which that's where the bow performs best. Kyle Douglas pulls so hard that he's made bows break. Yeah. He's broken bows.

Like pulling into the back wall. Uh-huh. I never even thought about what you're saying, but it makes good sense. I think that's why it helps you. Kyle Douglas, who's a fucking, he's like one of the best archers. Yeah, I changed my shot quite a bit when I started pulling really hard against the wall. Really hard. You know, I pull

fucking hard. I have that locked in. And it also changed when I stopped using a resistance attention release. Because Dudley had me on what's called a silverback, which is, I think, one of the best methods for learning how to shoot. Because you have a safety, you pull, and then it's all tension based. So when you have the safety on, you could pull it hard. And then when you release the safety, you just pull a little more and it

goes off. And you could set it to like two three pounds whatever the amount of difference like say if you have a 70 pound bow you set it to 72 or whatever it is at you know when you're at um you know a full draw whatever the you know the drop off is so they have this resistance setting where you can you tweak it in your yard at like you know five yards or you're right in front of the target and you get it to the point where it's at the back wall and then you just pull a little more and it snaps and breaks. And it makes for a perfect release. And I use that forever. But then when I really started pulling hard in the back wall, I was making it go off when I didn't want it to go off.

And then when I switched releases, then I'm like, oh, that's definitely the most. Because you're much more steady when you're like when I'm fucking locked out I'm locked out like I'm engaged in my back when I'm shooting at something I am everything is locked out you know and I find that to be way more stable is is your front elbow locked out my front elbow is locked out norm yeah I mean I used to bend it I used to bend it a little but then I was listening to this one guy and he said if you were going to lean against something and want to be totally stable, wouldn't you lock your arm out if you're leaning against a wall and you wanted to be completely rigid? I was like, oh, that makes total sense. No, that's – when you want strength, it's bent.

Like if you fall, you're not falling like this. You're falling. Right. Yeah, but when you're like benching, like when you have have strength like that it's not locked out though you're stronger yeah i think it's trying to push your right when your buddy's car gets stuck and you're trying to help and push you're not locked out right but that's strength i'm not looking for strength i'm looking for stability yeah i mean i have plenty of strength the strength is not the issue the thing is for me is if i'm locked out that's less movement i'm completely

locked but then never mind i mean i'm not saying you know it's so there's a very i'm anything but a i'm anything but a dudley doesn't competitive archer but yeah i've never heard that in my life dudley doesn't agree with it most like i i just i know this well i shoot with a bent we teach everybody to have it a little bit bent but wayne always references this poster of these premier hoyt shooters and they all have the exact same form and they're all slightly bent yeah oh man i find but i find myself better when i'm locked out hey listen the thing is if it works for you yeah who gives a fuck what anybody else says because everybody says i anchor wrong with my thumb behind my neck so it's like you know it whatever if that doesn't make any sense to me if the my neck. So it's like, you know, whatever.

That doesn't make any sense to me. If the arrow's going where it's supposed to. The problem with the thumb behind the neck makes no sense to me. That seems to me to be way better. Because if you're anchored behind your neck, that's one more part of contact, and that's one more thing that's locked in. You're like completely rigid. That thumb only has that much give and that's behind your neck i would do it if my neck wasn't so i keep needing to see what all this is yeah see that doesn't

seem crazy no no well you see cam do it cam he gets his fucking thumb behind his head and the reason why your thumb's looking for a little spot probably yeah kind of yeah now i just know where it's i don't even think about it but um how it used to be back in the day when we started, everybody like there was 30 inch bows, 29 inch bows, and that's about it. Draw length. So mine, 27 and a half. I just had like a bow that was way too long. So I'm just

like this, and that's where it started. Oh, you're just looking for something. I'm like, God, I'm trying to like just hold it. Why do you guys do that behind the neck? And they'll tell you not to do it. I do not understand the logic of don't do it. We started because the draw length thing, people weren't really fitting bows to the shooter at that time. Right. It was just like, here's the bow.

Here's what we got. Good luck. And that's what we do. It's like your brother's bow or whatever. Yeah. Somebody gave it to you. But it's funny, harkening back to the old days, I just had Waddell on the show. So me, Wayne, and Waddell were shooting at the bow rack.

And we all have still trigger releases. You know, nowadays the cool thing is the handheld, right? Right. But we're all old school, still shooting, you know, like my Spog. Index finger. Wise guy. Just a trigger release like that. And we were shooting pretty dang good.

We had a shooting contest all in the Xs. And I said, let's get a picture of these releases because it's kind of a novelty now. It's like just the old guys shoot those. Well, there's still real good competitive archers like Gillingham. Gillingham is one of the greatest of all time, and he uses a trigger. And he'll tell you, and the way he says it, he goes, this thing about target panic, he goes, it's all just a mental weakness. He's like, when you're looking at a target, I mean, obviously he's like one of the best of the best is a different animal.

But he's like, when you're looking at a target, like if you're practicing in your yard, you can do it right. You can hit it, not flinch. He's like, it's a mental weakness. That's all it is. And he's like, I prefer to command fire. He goes, I know when that pin is over that target and i can stay steady and let it go but he's got all kinds of wild wacky releases he has he he's always tinkering with shit so he has weird releases that are like six inches long

and then you like leaning forward and pull like he gets it in his head modern stuff yeah modern stuff but he he adjusts his stuff he's got got some weird ones, man, where you look at the extended releases. He's got a lot of wacky. I wouldn't want to emulate it unless you were him. He's also a fucking giant 6'6 dude, and he's got crazy long. He's shot so much, he has a crease in his nose. Swear to God, from the string. That's good.

I know guys that wore a groove and their teeth cut fish line, you know. Yeah, same. Same thing. He's got that, just where that string sits, it's like a crease.

Yeah. I shot a lot of arrows. That's great. I like a handheld because I've been doing handhelds for so long, but when I'm here, I practice with your release.

In my range, I have the wise guy. I think for hunting, I think it's an advantage. I think for just controlled situations where you got all day, I think the handheld's the way to go. In an animal, you have to do command sometimes. Oh, sometimes you do, yeah. You have to punch the fuck out of that trigger.

And I've killed a lot of animals doing it. Yeah, sometimes, if you can keep it together. There's moments where you're like, you got to shoot now. You can't wait for the hinge to break. Right. There's certain things. I remember taking one of those home and messing with it. And I had the same feeling I had when my nephew was trying to explain chess,

the game of chess to me, where I was like, that's pretty cool. Realistically, I'm not going to figure this out. I admire it. And I took that attention thing out in my yard. And after a couple minutes, I'm like, are you honestly going to figure this out? And I was like, at my age, as much as I shoot, I'm just not going to. And I went back,'t so i shoot a trigger and i'll shoot that trigger till i'm dead you shoot the same trigger he does you shoot the

wise guy yeah that's a good one too because it's hot yeah you're not yanking on it and pulling it and there's not a lot of like weird movement like when you touch that fucker it's going off yeah there's certain yeah that uh there's a type of trap called a MB750. That release, it just seems like really nice little mechanical contraptions. I just like it. It's like you pull it. It's so like, ding. It's so clean.

Well, I use a thumb trigger now. I've been using a thumb trigger the last few years. And I still use a hinge, too. I like a hinge, too. Because there's something about a hinge where i hear that click and i know okay here we go yeah and that keeps me in the moment so i hear that i pull i hear that click i'm like okay everything keep the shot process going and then it goes off but the problem with that is when it's windy like that one of the things that i

found especially like hunting at tohono you know how windy it gets up there in those canyons when you're trying to punch as it drifts over you can't do it yeah you gotta you have to have a trigger yeah you have to you have to be able to control fire occasionally but you all but it helps you to have that process of recognizing that a surprise shot is important at least an element of surprise where it's not like now, but it's like just go to the, I can, you know, with a thumb trigger, you can make it go off, but you can also have it surprise.

So to me, that's the best of both worlds. But that's a strange situation to be in when you're thinking the next time that pin blows over that target, I'm going to punch. Yeah. That's what happens to some people. The mind fuck of target panic is crazy. When you hear about people that can't get the pin on the target, they can hold like six inches under the target.

But once they rise up to the target, like, yeah, everything starts getting shaky. My body wants to put that pin. My body wants to put that pin just to the left. Oh, yeah. Well, that's. I don't know why, because I think i don't want to obstruct it yeah you want to see that yeah you're like you know like it's like i gotta when i bring it up like if i bring a crosshair on something the crosshair is going to go if i bring the pin up it's going

to want to sit just left so i can still look and then i got to go like now i'm going to bring it over where it belongs you know what's the greatest thing of all time it has some problems but it's the greatest thing of all time and i know they're going to eventually work this out is that garmin release do you saw that one that i was using last year the site i stopped using yeah garmin site excuse me i stopped using it because i've had some problems ranging things but damn it when it works it's a clear window with a just a led dot no just like a red dot with a pistol. It's fucking magic. It's magic. Because there's no obstruction.

You just put that pin right where it is. You can see through the pin because it's an LED. It's amazing. But it's just, there's some problems with ranging. Like when I'm in my yard and I'm at 74 yards, I know it's 74 yards. But I'll put that pin on. I hit the button. And then it'll say 67, 85, 73.

I'm like, what the fuck? And I'm like, I can't have this mind fuck. And so last year I stopped using it. And I went, oh, I stopped using it because when we went to Utah, they made it illegal. So I hunted a full day with that release and luckily didn't shoot anything. And then we went back and then Colton said, you know, I think that's illegal here now. And I'm like, what? I don't think you didn't hunt.

You just practiced. Well, I definitely didn't shoot anything. No. But I did go out with it. I didn't even go to full draw. But I didn't go out with it. Luckily, I found out. I was thinking, imagine if you killed something.

And you did a photo with that. And you didn't know. Because the year before, I you did a photo with that. And you didn't know. Because the year before, I had shot my elk with that. They changed it in April. Yeah. And it's just some little change in the law. Yeah, that I didn't know about. Yeah.

It's a dumb change because it only makes it more effective. And it's not easier. It's just you're more ethical. Yeah, but there's a, I mean. It's a range finder. Yeah, but the states are going to have, like, they have to try

to, like, play the technology game because they just have to. I agree to a certain extent. But if you're going to allow range finders, why do you allow range finders? Because you don't want people guessing.

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of guessing when you're gap pinning. There's a lot of guessing. When an animal, you range an animal at 50 yards and then he takes three or four steps, there's a lot of guessing. You know, and you're gap pinning. There's a lot of guessing. When you range an animal at 50 yards and then he takes three or four steps,

there's a lot of guessing. And you're just going to hold high or you're going to do something. With the Garmin, all you do is just press that button again and you get a new pin. And it's perfect. And the other thing about the Garmin

that's really fantastic is if you can't range, like say if you're at 20 or you're at 40 yards and you range him and then he walks out and you're pretty sure it's like 50 or 60, you can also press a button and you get a full range of pins. So you get 20, 30, you get five LED lights instead of just one. So there's an advantage of that too. So if you're in a situation like we were at when we were rattling and the bucks just come running in and you know that's 20 yards or 30 yards.

Like you just pull it up and you got your pins. Yeah. And you can do that. Or if you're at 60, like I shot the Neil guy, you can hold it and then you get a pin. That's what it looks like. It's the shit. But it just makes me nervous. They're just trying to protect.

What they'll say is the primitive integrity of archery. It's still pretty primitive. You're still using a range finder. It's just a range finder that's incorporated. But they're also trying to imagine where it's going. You'll see some level of herky-jerkiness as they bring in regulations, as they try to get a sense of what's coming. Because if you wait too long on certain technologies, you develop a user group, and then you develop a level of what's coming. Because if you wait too long on certain technologies, you develop a user group,

and then you develop a level of resistance. Think the second drones. The second drones became a thing. It was like 13 states. Nope. Yeah. And in the end, you kind of be like, well, why is it even on your mind?

In the end, if you look where it's gone in the end, they made the right call. Yeah. In open country, they made the right call. Yeah. Other things I think that you might look and try to like picture where it's headed and then maybe come back and correct. Like there was a time I remember the first time Montana came out with anything about two-way communications, it was no two-way communications in the field the first year. And people are like, hold on a minute, if I'm hunting with my 13-year-old

and my 80-year-old dad, I can't give them a radio so that if they have a problem, they can get a hold of me? And they're like, oh, yeah, I guess we didn't really mean that. And then the next year there's a modification, and the next year there's a modification as the next year's modification as they try to like gauge what's going on but i think that as technologies come in there's a tendency to to want to pump the brakes to ascertain what's going on like look how long some states waited on on trail cams yes Yes. Right? And when trail cams came out, no one imagined they would be cellular. Right. Or that you'd run 40 all cellular.

Or that every water hole would have 50 different dudes that have trail cams over that water. Transmitting immediate information. And so then you develop a big user group and you develop a big resistance and it just becomes a much different conversation. You develop a big user group and you develop a big resistance and it just becomes a much different conversation. So I think that in those cases where you see a sort of, you'll see a thing that doesn't entirely make too much sense. I think that's part of the gamble and struggle of getting it right. Another thing is, like, I think it's winning out is they used to say, well, you can't have dogs hunting deer, of course.

And then people have been like, but I want a recovery dog. Like, I don't, the dog doesn't do any good until I've already wounded the thing. And once I've wounded it, like, why would you do anything to impede me getting it back? Right. And they've kind of are settling in on a, yeah, you can't run deer with a dog in most states, but they're coming around to saying, but for recovery, you can track a wounded deer with a dog. And so you have, there's a sort of compromise gets struck. Right, or even a dead deer

where you can't find it, like heavy timber. Oh yeah, that's where it's put. Some states, you had to have it on a leash, but whatever. But coming around being like, yeah, we meant you can't hunt deer with a dog right we didn't mean you shouldn't be able to find a wounded or dead deer with a dog

and they make a gradual correction well that's also the first step they do to outlaw mountain line hunting right no mountain line hunting with dogs and as soon as you do that that's coming from a completely different right that's coming from a completely different agenda yes that's not trying to help hunters out that's trying to screw hunters i just don't know some of them i don't understand like lighted knocks that's to me is the dumbest one it's like look lighted knocks allow you to more clearly see your impact and find the arrow so you're not littering so instead of like an arrow just alone in the woods you see that green light in the distance and you could find it. That one doesn't make a ton of sense to me. I wonder if someone, if in defining the legislation, there's a little bit of a, well, what else is going to be on an arrow that's electronic?

I don't know. Well, they are doing something like that now where there's talk of like Bluetooth technology. They have that. Yeah. Is it utilized now yeah i mean that's been out for years so you could find the arrow with an app and so what they would say that if somebody's just going to shoot an animal excuse me in the ass just get an arrow stuck in it so you know where it is then they'll find it you know like so is it gonna is gonna perpetuate shitty unethical shots like if i can just get a piece of it i'm good right then i'll just track it yeah like a whale you know like you put a harpoon in a whale yeah oregon was oregon was very late on allowing mechanical heads and lighted knocks i mean it was just recently that's why i

was like fixed blade forever because at home i couldn't even shoot expandable so oregon idaho they were pretty late coming to the game on the electronics because they call a lighted not electronic and that was and i still don't think garmin sites are even legal in oregon there's like 10 states so i think they're illegal at least. Yeah. But Utah, it's interesting that they did it this year. Yeah. So, yeah, I know they changed, but it might be to what Steve was alluding to. It's like you try to course correct or they didn't want to get too far down the road before they tried to come back because that user group was established. Yeah.

And we'd been doing it and now they have this, you know, they fight back on that. Yeah. I just think all it does is allow you to make more ethical shots. That's all I think that a range-finding site does. I mean, but they could say that, well, rifle hunting is more ethical than bow hunting, so why do we need to bow hunt? You know what I mean? Right. Well, you could also outlaw traditional bow hunting then, because that's just all guesswork.

Yeah. then because that's just all guesswork yeah a large part of it cam already alluded to this a large part of it is protecting a desire to protect archery seasons as you know you can kind of hold them out as low harvest limited efficacy high opportunity hunts, right? And a state will run a bow season, and then they'll get, then the general firearm, and then everybody gets down to the real serious business of killing. And you can look at the archery harvest, and the archery harvest winds up in comparison being,

I don't want to say negligible, but in comparison, it's just, it's a blip in the harvest. negligible but in comparison it's just it's it's a blip in the harvest and so the desire to you know limit bringing in crossbows certain technologies to be like let's keep it simple traditional low efficacy low harvest and then allow for greater length of seasons and greater opportunity. And if you get to, and I know it seems impossible, but if you can use technology to get it up where your harvest rates really start to spike, you're going to have the same thing you run into in other areas where you start being like, hey, we've got to limit the opportunity pool because these guys are too good. If you look at like a general raw

number is is uh just generally an archery elk hunter what has a 10 chance of success yeah just it fluctuates but like right generally there's a 10 chance of success if that became 2030 you're gonna pay for it somehow right you know you're gonna pay for it somehow. Right. You know, you're going to pay for it somehow. That's what, you know, a lot of detractors of archery will say. And I don't want to say, I mentioned earlier that maybe you just eliminate bow hunting if you want to be, you know, more efficient with the killing, just make a rifle. I believe archery is just as deadly and just as ethical as rifle hunting. I believe that that's the way to go. Well, it certainly is for you. I believe that that's the way to go.

Well, it certainly is for you. I don't want to, but the success rate is lower, to Steve's point. And it's what the guys back home have said, the detractors of bow hunting, is that, and this could just be old boy talk, the bow hunters are killing all the big bulls because they're rutting. one they're rutting we can call them in right we're getting prime rut time right and so and it's you kind of get lulled into this trap especially with social media that you're thinking god is everybody killing a fucking giant bull but because that's what you see these long-range shooters man with a rifle you mean yeah these long-range rifle guys are taking 700, 800-yard shots, and they're really good at it.

You know what's crazy? I don't even rifle hunt. I mean, I haven't rifle hunted since 89. You're missing out. But I took Cat Bradley, I know we talked about it before, to get her first buck in Oregon. And so my buddy Kevin had this SIG gun. She was going to shoot, and it's all good. But this this other guy, he reminded me of God, remember Mark Wahlberg in that movie where he was like

this recluse lived up in the mounds and not boogie nights. No, not boogie nights. No, he didn't have. Oh, yeah. Damn it. Go on. Good movie. So they wanted there. Somebody was going to assassinate the president. They tried to get him because he was this ballistic expert. They want to get him to tell him where they'd kill him from. Anyway, they. Yeah. Right here.

Shooter. So anyway, this guy down there where we took Kat reminded me of Mark. No, not Mark. This old guy he went to talk to that knew the history of. Anyway, he had these guns set up in this in this uh steel out there at 990 yards and i can i can shoot but i never shoot i haven't done it in years and i was just like i go how far is that far one he's like 990 and i'm like what do you got here that'll shoot and so he had this fucking sweet setup right got up set up got there first

shot out of this gun um had the wind gauge up there and i'm like okay the wind's going here i'm gonna hold on the left side of the steel boom 990 yards first shot smacked it and i'm like i fucking never shoot right right i can hit this this steel this big at 990 yards. So to your point about this long range thing, that's changing the game too. Oh, yeah. People want to talk about archeries evolving and getting too far ahead of ourselves. God dang, these long range rifle guys. My kids can shoot steel at distances that we didn't know you,

that when I was a kid, you didn't know you could shoot. 300 yards was a long way when I was... The farthest shot you could take was across that cornfield. 300 yards. If the corn was down. You were like a great shooter if you could hit anything at 300. Yeah. Oh, that was the, yeah.

Well, now everybody has shooting sticks and, you know, bipods and all sorts of different things that they used to set up to make them more stable. What we had with. Oh, yeah. I mean, those. Yeah. A bipod wasn't even a thing when I started rifle hunting.

It was like you had a sling. You could put your arm in there a little bit. That might help a little bit. But you're offhand. Offhand still. Yeah. So, I mean, when we kill black tail, it's you if you get you don't want to be past 100 you imagine if they they said with rifle hunting no more prone shots

well no i don't think they would they would approach it a different way they wouldn't approach it that way well they would start with bipods right no someone wanted to no they would it would probably come see i hesitate to say anything so i don't want to give anyone anyone anyone ideas but if you were going to try to like i can't even think if you were going to try to regulate well i'll put it to you this way so we have muzzleloader seasons okay a lot of states have muzzleloader seasons and just very generally a state's big game hunt would go archery and then general firearm and you go into late season muzzleloader.

And states will regulate muzzleloaders down to whether you have powder, so loose powder pellets. They'll regulate it down to open sites or no open site they'll regulate it down to whether you have a projectile that's true to bore or in case in a in a little casing called a sabbat um what other kind of stuff do they throw at you meaning they really like nitpick your gear they're like in some cases they're like rifles ignitions they they'll regulate ignition systems in some cases they break it down to completely primitive muzzleloaders that's what i'm saying so like there's nothing like the whole deal so they do have the power and the not the power that's not the right word for it they do have the ability to come in and

really nitpick your gear right right down to weird stuff that you'd have to that you could have people not even know what the hell you're talking about when you say true to bore projectile but you just that hasn't come into that hasn't come into general firearm and in fact i can't use anything that projects light like a laser laser yeah yeah yeah so like projecting you see regulations around projecting light and i think there's some regulations about the scope can't have electronics in it meaning lighted reticles i think in some states you can't have lighted reticles but so far you haven't seen so far you haven't seen a real nitpicking of long-range rifle equipment. I don't even know where you'd start, man. That they would regulate the magnification.

That they would somehow regulate laser range finders. Imagine if they regulate distance. Just so you can't shoot over blank distance? Yeah. I don't know. It'd be a real puzzle if someone was tasked with figuring out how to rein in. I would pay a lot of attention to that because I guarantee whatever they come up with is shit I use. Well, in that case with shooting the 990, it reminded me of running.

You do all the calculations on your phone. I mean, and then you set the scope to whatever this says. Right. The scope has not just magnification, but also like you're changing the zero of it. So, but you're doing it based on the distance, based on the load, based on everything else that goes into the phone. The wind was not the greatest because you could check the wind at the gun, but when you're a thousand yards, so that's why you needed that flag out there. the wind at the gun but when you're a thousand yards so that's why you needed that flag out there but to to set the scope on to hold right on that's all done on the phone on a on an app or something so crazy let's go back to talk about bow hunters killing all the big stuff yeah i know it's a

bastard yeah i honestly haven't heard i've heard everything i haven't heard that so that's yeah i get it the rut and but again it's you social media, it makes it seem like for anybody that everyone's successful, everyone's killing bulls, and it's just not the case. Success rate is still 10% on bulls with a, well, not even just bulls, elk with a bow. Well, social media has just fucked up our perceptions of everything. You know, I was getting- Of people's bodies, of people's faces, filters. But in September, God, it does seem like everybody's getting a big mega bull, don't it?

Well, there's so many people with Instagram accounts. Yeah. And everybody can't wait to post those photos. Yeah. It's, you know, when I asked what year that was, I've seen some graphs on hunting. Oh, that, sorry. Yeah, that buck. And I see some graphs on hunting.

And, you know, we all get blamed for a lot of ills that probably we don't deserve in regard to hunting. But I saw this graph talking about the hunters, you know, 50 years ago there was this many hunters. about the hunters you know 50 years ago there's this many hunters and right around 2015 i mean it was plummeting the number of the on the graph i saw the number of hunters was plump just going straight down and then i was trying to like is that when you started coming in and we talk about hunting here and then now it's you know maybe there's a little bit of an up i know there's an uptick from where it was going but i was thinking i think it's a downtick now right now it's a down now after the covid now it's going back down but if you look at the graph that i saw before you started talking about hunting who knows where the hell would be if you follow that line down

to where it was going there'd be no hunters from 2015 to 2024 it's like it was i don't i don't know where this graph was but it's uh i don't know well it just makes sense i mean think about the amount of millions of people that have been exposed to talking about hunting now that were never exposed so it's not, yeah, hunting's in a more healthy spot because we do need hunters to champion our cause, right? But it's not just that, oh, that's good, but imagine without that where we'd be. I once saw a graph. It was not a graph.

It was a whatever the hell, a diagram or something. And it showed in Michigan average age of of fur trappers people that held a fur harvester license the average age every year of someone holding a fur harvester license actually went up one year no one knew it's like these same people and they're just, you know. I mean, how many new people are getting into trapping that have never trapped? Some. God, it's got to be small. Not like it is when fur prices shoot up. Right.

Yeah. Well, that's different, right? Yeah. But no, it's super small, man. No, it's super, super small. And then anytime, yeah, fur prices skyrocket, then it brings people in. If fur prices are low, it's just no one. One of the things

you told me once that blew me away was at one point in time the richest man in the country was a beaver trapper yeah well yeah beaver tradesman john jacob aster yeah that's crazy yeah that was the most precious commodity was beavers yeah i mean you talked about colorado man that's a it's a crazy time right now. Cause there, they are, there is that measure out there. I don't, I think it's about a measure, but it's, yeah, where they're trying to, they're calling, they want to label lion hunting as trophy hunting and luck. There's a, there's a guy there who's very passionate. He's been doing a lot of good work. His name's Dan Gates with Colorado for responsible wildlife management for people listening don't know we're talking we should

say mountain lion mountain lion yeah right well all good they say mountain lion bobcat and then links they throw in links which you can't hunt for anyways yeah it's not even to create this idea that yeah it's not even legal but they love putting this trophy hunting moniker out there because it's really easy to hate trophy hunting right which isn't even legal you can't even they make it i read this article from colorado sun or something like that where it's like they want to eliminate people who kill mountain lions and just go cut their head off and just take the it's like who fucking does that nobody does that but nobody does people who don't know think oh my god that's despicable let's outlaw this serve them some mountain lion well what the yeah what they what the aim here is that is the attempt to create a legal term

the the attempt to create trophy hunting as a legal term when you have a ballot measure both sides argue about the language like when voters going what are they going to read obviously you could write any ballot and if you could just write the ballot initiative how you wanted to you'd win every time but people got to debate the wording that's what they did with the wolf thing did you did you read the wolf thing i never actually read it i couldn't even i couldn't even tell what was for wolves and what wasn't. Oh, yeah. It's like, what the, I don't even know which one I'm against.

It was like forcing, it was should the state, does the state need to implement a reintroduction or discovery effort or something like that? And this is, they're trying to, the debate comes around to can you say trophy hunting yeah in a ballot measure because if they can if you can set the precedent if you can use that what a great tool because people are going to say oh i don't agree with that you know i don't agree with that kind of hunting right um uh, would have widespread implications because, um, as demonstrated here with this deer here, uh, there's a lot of parts of it that I don't throw away and I keep sitting around. Yeah.

So is this a trophy or is it an emblem or what the hell is it? Right. But if I kept it, does that mean that I'm now captured under your definition? Right. Right. Yeah. What is your definition? Right. Right. Yeah. What is trophy hunting? Yeah.

Yeah. And then the bringing in the wolves thing is pretty wild because there's no precedent. They really don't understand. Oh, there's precedent. Obviously with Montana. With Yellowstone. Idaho's Frank Church, Yellowstone. But long term?

I mean, we've only been since the 1990s. Yeah. Like, there's a reason why they eradicated wolves. I don't agree with it. But when you have ranchers and you have all these people that they're living is based entirely on the stock that they have and whether or not they make money enough to keep their farm running or not is depending upon how many animals they bring to market. And then you have wolves and you just bring in wolves. Yeah. Well, so there's a, if, if I got the tinfoil hat on, they want to eliminate hunting. I mean, they, they want to eliminate hunting and ranching. So they don't care about ranchers losing their animals. They would love

people just to be a hundred consumers, relying on the government so they can control them. They say, here's your food. Here's what you're getting. You're getting it from us. You're not out there hunting it for yourself. They hate hunters. If I was thinking about the governor of Colorado, which is Polis, his husband is anti-hunting. Yeah. He's an animal rights activist. That's where all this is coming from so but if you look at the bigger picture hunters they cannot stand hunters are usually capable um confident uh you know they have a skill set you can't control people like that they want people

government wants people they can control that'll be afraid when they're supposed to be afraid wear this mask when we tell you get this shot when we tell you here's you you get your food from the store here here it is and i think there's certainly an element of that hunters are the opposite of that yeah i think there's certainly an element of that but i think it really all boils down to people that love animals yeah i think there's i definitely detect that there's a complete disinterest in what hunters think about it and they think that that for someone to come in and argue um by doing this wildlife measure you're impacting like you would like this animal on the landscape for viewing pleasure um i like certain animals on the landscape for

hunting consumption eating whatever and there's a conflict here where by doing this you're going to lower by increasing your likelihood of having viewer pleasure you're having a potentially really negative impact on my use of natural resources. I think that they would look at you as though you don't have a, that you're ridiculous or evil or don't have a point in saying that you want to control, you want to limit predation on a resource you rely on. And they don't accept that as a reality. on a resource you rely on and they they don't accept that as a reality uh it's it i i haven't encountered a lot of like really really forceful wolf advocates that are

serious hunters there is a there's a trend there you know the thing that that that bothered me about the bothered me most about the colorado reintroduction is that while the ballot measure was going forward, wolves showed up on their own. I would have imagined if I was on and I'm not anti wolf, but when they showed up on their own. I don't know if it's legally possible. I would have halted that whole thing because the social friction is so much less if they walk in on their own. Yeah. Diane Boyd, who is the Montana wolf specialist for many years.

She even came to believe in hindsight that the, the Idaho Montana reintroductions ultimately would have been on this ultimately were unnecessary and that you would have gradually achieved the same thing with wolves walking in on their own and had a very different societal perception of what was going on. People would look at it as a natural dispersal, a natural occurrence, and not a government action. Yeah, but I think they wanted that pomp and circumstance like polis was there i think when they released the wolf oh yeah with a big stupid smile on his face yeah they they want everybody else all the biologists all had this like what are we doing and he was like yay yeah they wanted right they wanted that you know and if they knew the truth of how nature balances itself it doesn't really balance it over you know predators kill way too many prey animals because there is no tag limits

they're not like for example they talk about trophy hunting lions to mountain lions to hunt in colorado you have to take it's very regulated you take this test so you learn how to identify a tom and a female you learn how to age a little and a female. You learn how to age a little bit, you know, based on the coloring. You learned, you know, what size of track. So there's, you have to go through this before you hunt. And the whole quota system. The quota, like, yeah. So the quota where I was in the unit I was hunting was 34 lions.

Every night after five, you call in to see what the, where we're at. When I got there, it was at 31. I was there for six days. It was up to uh it was 34 was the limit is up to 33 so one more line could get killed and then it's done so it's not like what happens if like you kill at the same you're in the woods no signal yeah and someone else kills too until it hits 36 it could that's why you check there's a window after five yeah so Yeah. So I think actually- And it'll usually click in like a 24-hour clock. Maybe they might have been immediate.

I don't know. It was, you have 48 hours to turn it in there. But anyway, point is, you're not over-harvesting. You know, the estimate goes up to as high as 7,000 mountain lions in Colorado, probably maybe 5,000. But in the whole state, hunters are allowed to kill 450. And they've been doing this. And it's not like they're out there killing mountain lions, cutting their heads off, no regard for the numbers, wiping them out. It's so regulated. You know, you don't have to call and report your deer and elk, but lions are like a whole nother level

as far as control and think about that quota system if you have a horrific snowstorm that pushes all kinds of deer and elk out of high country and like everybody and his brother like a perfectly timed snowstorm and everybody his brother is just piling up deer and elk. They don't go, uh-oh, shut it down. Yeah. They sit back and they'll go like, wow. Yeah. Mother load. What a harvest.

Yeah. But with lions, they would come in and go, oh, done. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a perpetual motion machine where they've had a really healthy, stable population, minimum harvest. Yeah. That just goes on. It's under 10% harvest.

What's the thing that we should talk about when it comes to these reintroduction of predators? Which, listen, I fucking love wolves. I mean, if you look out here, I have all these photos of wolves. It's long distance photos of wolves. I'm happy that they exist. I think they're fucking amazing. I got're probably my favorite on my wall in my living room they're probably my favorite animal i just think they're the fucking coolest animal of all time i really do i just look in their eyes photos of them if i come across photos on my

instagram i'm always like holy shit look at that thing they're majestic um but their numbers have to be vanished and as uncomfortable as that sounds for people wildlife biologists they have an understanding of the carrying capacity and the resources of the land they understand how many hunters there are they understand how many that's how tags are allocated yeah it's not a guessing game yeah it's the way people need to understand this is like they've they've done this for a long time. These people have painstakingly researched these numbers. They know exactly what they're doing.

But when it comes to this game of reintroduction of animals, the first step is they say there's a carrying capacity for the amount of wolves. This is the number. When it gets to that, we will agree to open up a season on wolf hunting. But every time that happens, there's lawsuits. There's lawsuits to try to stop that hunt. And then the wolves get larger and larger. And then you have larger and larger populations. I was looking at a graph the other day where they showed reintroduction of wolves to the Yellowstone, the amount of elk that existed, and now the amount of wolves versus the amount of elk. And it's pretty shocking. It's a giant drop. And they're so good at hunting.

They're fucking amazing. But hunting wolves is insanely difficult. It's really hard to do. They're really fucking smart. They're really aware. Their senses are light years beyond what we can even physically imagine an animal to be capable of doing in our minds Like we we know that deer kids. I remember I was watching episode of your show where bear Winded you guys like fucking 500 yards. Yeah, like it's incredible their noses are fucking amazing Their senses are amazing. I don't think we really it's almost like looking at the size of the universe like you know it's 13 point whatever billion light years across you don't fucking that's yeah that's just going in your head you know the mat though the kind of power that the senses of a wolf have I

don't think we could even really fathom it so our thought is people are just gonna go in there and wipe out the wolves like they did before. That's just ignorance. The way they wiped out before was strict not. Well, at this point, you can go and say that it's just, that that's not the reality. Right. Because after the delisting in the Northern Rockies,

after the delisting, that didn't happen. Right. Right. Did they ever reach their quotas? Yeah, they reached quotas. Every night, not every night, many nights I'll check and y'all get notifications, like the other night I got a notification, whatever the hell, 313, whatever it was, unit had hit its quota, region five had hit its quota.

I'm talking about in Montana. Whatever region hit its quota. quota. I'm talking about in Montana. Whatever region hit its quota. At this point it's, at this point we've hit at, it is a stable, there is a stable population of wolves across a big chunk or range

that are managed as a renewable natural resources that are managed as a big game species. There is no problem. It still gets litigated all the time, but the whole idea that they're going to be pushed back onto the ESA, on the endangered species list, the state doesn't want that. That'd be the worst thing that could happen to the state.

They're not going to shoot them into oblivion. It's like we have wolves on the landscape, and you could have the extremes of people that want to live in a world where there aren't any. That's not realistic. You lost that fight. You have extremes where people want to live in a world where there's as many as possible

and there's no regulation on them, which isn't extreme because we could live in that landscape. But right now we're living in a landscape where there are wolves on the ground, there's a healthy population, there's hunting for them, there's a equilibrium emerging, and it's very livable. But in Colorado, it's like you got hunters that are if hunters saw that there was a pathway to finding the extent of it they would probably feel a lot

better but right now they're like we're gonna lose 50 of elk we're gonna lose 75 of elk this is gonna get litigated it could be a years from now. We could have 90 years of full recovery objective. There's still no regulated harvest on wolves. And they're apprehensive. And it's also for high population areas, which is the ones that vote the most. I mean, that's where the people are that are voting. These are generally urban areas that don't have any understanding of what they're even voting on. Yeah, they're hoping to see one.

generally urban areas that don't have any understanding of what they're even voting on. Yeah, they're hoping to see one. Like exactly what's going on in B.C. when they made it illegal to hunt grizzly bears. And the people that live up in B.C., like my friend Mike, who lives in northern B.C., is like, Jesus Christ. First of all, this is a way that a lot of people make a living is by having these bear hunts. This is a part of their lifestyle. They're guides. They guide people to hunt grizzlies. is by having these bear hunts. This is a part of their lifestyle. They're guides.

They guide people to hunt grizzlies. And it's important to maintain their population because if you don't, nothing is. And these people in these urban areas, they think of it as trophy hunting. But at least people know that you eat bear. Nobody's eaten wolves. So that is like one of the most difficult to defend. When you say say i'm going

to go wolf hunting like what a piece of shit you are yeah you're going to hunt wolves the fuck is wrong with you here's here's a you were mentioned you mentioned steve that it's it's kind of at a stable level with the wolves now you know you call and check in and and wolves are introduced they're still being hunted so that works works in Montana and Idaho, I think. Wyoming, Idaho, Montana. Right. So I sent this to you. I was just looking this up. And Alaska, of course.

Right. In Idaho low-low region, in 95, 12 wolves were introduced. In 2005, 512 wolves were present. In 2011, 800 wolves were present. So the elk from 95,'s 16 000 elk in this region in 2016 there was a thousand elk so it went from 16 000 to a thousand so that's what wolves can do so insane when you say and that's they can hunt them in id. In Colorado, when there is no wolf hunting, and now these wolves are back. And there won't be.

Not under this, their governor now. But, and that's what I say. It's like, once these prey animals get down, then they can say, well, we don't need hunters. There's nothing to hunt. Well, that's the objective in California. That is a thing to say. That's a regulated objective in California.ia right it's a state so objective and i've heard they want to turn colorado into a uh almost like a viewing state like you know how they do the safaris over in

africa where there's no hunting you're just out taking pictures that's what they want colorado to be so they want low numbers of elk and deer so there is no hunting so then they can say well we don't really need hunters. And by the way, do you guys need guns now? I don't know if you need guns because you said you needed them for hunting. So that's a big portion. Some people say, yeah, we want our everyday carry for protection. A lot of people say we want to hunt.

With no hunting, you don't need guns. So there's this big diabolical plan you could say, is this what's happening? But all I know is that where there's wolves, there's way less elk. It's openly stated on this wolf conservation website that that's their ultimate goal. Their ultimate goal is to remove firearms because you won't need them if you don't need them for hunting.

You wind up with this attitude about it that a lot of people that are just really and again I I'm stuttering here because that a lot of people that are just really, and again, I'm stuttering here because I'm not an anti-wolf person, right? I'm a pro, I'm like pro hitting a recovery objective and then having a managed resource. But you'll find that a lot of wolf advocates will really try to, in one breath,

tell you that they don't actually do that. They don't actually cause the decline of elk numbers. Like when elk numbers collapsed with the coming of the wolf in the northern Rockies, there's other factors that could have explained that. They don't actually do that. northern rockies there's other factors that could have explained that right they don't actually do that but at the same time they'll say oh but there would be a great tool for controlling wildlife diseases which populate among overpopulated ungulates so you wind up getting this cross talk on one hand oh they're not that it's not that catastrophic for big game herds, but it really lowers big game herds.

It helps the disease transmission. And it's part of that. That kind of stuff really frustrates people. Yeah. You're getting all this. They're like shit rainbows. Right. And it pisses people off.

Well, it's also, like we were saying, it's almost indefensible to someone who's an anti-hunter. You could say I hunt for food and people go, I don't agree with you, but I get it. Nobody gets wolf hunting. You know, like, do you want to go hunt a wolf? I don't want to hunt a wolf. I don't want to shoot a wolf. I love them. I think they're amazing.

I don't want to shoot a wolf. I love them. I think they're amazing. But I get- You can say I take the thing of I harvested an animal and took the thing of highest relevance and value to me. On a deer, I didn't keep the hide. I didn't retain the hide. But I kept the meat. On a wolf, I didn't keep the meat, but I retained the hide.

I took the thing of highest value to me. Why aren't there some trappers you were telling me that like wolf meat was their favorite meat? Oh, there's an Arctic explorer, Viljalmer Stefansson. And he had a book, My Life with the Eskimo. And he made first contact with a lot of Eskimo Inuit hunters in the Canadian High Arctic. And he always claimed that was his favorite game meat. Well why if people eat if they eat mountain lion and mountain lion

you told me it's delicious. Yeah. Why don't they eat wolves? It's weird man. I've never I mean I've never gotten a wolf. You ate a coyote once. Yeah. I've never gotten a wolf and I've never eaten a wolf but I know people that have eaten it but it's not a you know eating like lion hunters eating mountain lions is very common.

I don't believe that. I believe there's some people that eat some wolf meat because I've heard of it and seen it. I don't think it's widely practiced. Have you ever heard it? Do you ever talk to someone who's eaten wolf? Yeah. Who? I do know a couple of guys that have eaten wolf.

My friend Buck Bowden's eaten wolf. That's the guy that makes the bowls? Yep. He had eaten it. What did he say? I think, didn't Randy Newberg eat a wolf? He might have. Yeah, I think he ate a wolf.

What did Buck Bowden say it tastes like? There's a story about Buck Bowden where someone's talking to him and he's cleaning a wolverine skull okay when he was trapping wolverines he's cleaning a wolverine skull with a knife at a counter and someone's talking to him and as he's talking to him he's eating the hunks of meat that he scrapes off the skull

with this knife but I don't remember what he told me about it I remember him telling me the one thing he can't get that he's tried every which way is brown bears me the i remember him telling me the one thing he can't get that he's tried every which way is um brown bears eating salmon just always i remember him telling me that was the one food that he had a hard time with well you're telling that story about how you borrowed your friend's smoker yeah and coastal black bears yeah and you're like man you got to clean your smoker it smells like fish yeah he's like i've never cooked fish on that smoker yeah you know i didn't use that for that. And I was like, oh, that's my

bear. My bear ham did that to me. How did the bear taste? Oh, I don't mind. You know what's funny? You know Dirt, right? Dirt, I'm really liking that. He liked that bear that tastes like smoked salmon. Because he's like, well, I like smoked salmon. And I like

meat. And this is the full package. That's fusion. No, we ate enough. But I'll just eat stuff. I don't care. If I have it, I'll smoked salmon. Right. And I like meat. And this is the full package. Yeah. It's like a fusion. No, we ate enough. But I'll just eat stuff. You know, I don't care. If I have it, I'll eat it. Well, if you do it right. Like one of the things that we learned when we were hunting with Jesse last year, like

diver ducks, which people normally say they taste like shit because they eat the stuff on the bottom of the lakes. I want to eat cooks. Jesse Griffiths can cook some diver duck that makes it literally one of my favorite foods I've ever eaten in my life. You can figure anything out. You can figure anything out.

It just depends on how much work you want to put into it. Right. And obviously it doesn't hurt being an amazing chef. But he's got it down to a fucking science. Those diver ducks are sensational. But if you talk to the average duck hunter, they're like, If I got a wolf, I would definitely want to have a couple chews off it but uh i mean i could tell you that you'd never separate me from the hide off that thing

but i would you know i would i would go into it be like i'm gonna try it just because i want to see what it's all about yeah you know but it wouldn't be my primary objective in getting one some some of those animals just need to be killed. That's all. Like coyotes, wolves, they just need to be killed. You have to kill. And whether you eat them or not, I don't know. Their numbers need to be managed.

The wildest thing about coyotes is it doesn't work. It has the opposite effect. Well, depending on how good you are at it they're done in a very done in a very surgical fashion at the right time the right place with the right level of intensity they have found that that is effective but you got to bring in a fucking special ops unit no like you can there's man if you have imperiled populations of pronghorn or imperiled populations of mule deer, and you go in during calving season, in the right areas at the right time, you can move the needle on recruitment. Does you now and then, if you have a ranch and you now and then see a coyote and get it, are you doing like effective predator control? Probably not.

That does not mean that you cannot done in a timely fashion. Like I said, surgically, a timely fashion with the right approach at the right time. You can absolutely move the needle on wildlife recruitment. You see it in Alaska. You see it in Arizona. You see it all over the place. But the issue is statewide or locally, that might be the case. But they will then spread out.

Yeah. And now they're in every state. They're in every city in the country because of that, because people have hunted them. So I put this to someone the other day. You know how you don't do media? Yeah. You don't like doing interviews? Yeah.

I now and then get suckered into doing an interview. And I did an interview about a contentious issue. It was about states banning. I knew the minute the journalist called me and he's talking about banning wildlife killing contests. And I said, can we please say hunting contests at least? Do we have to say wildlife killing contest? And I'm like, you know, my buddy Doug has a doe derby where they're in an area where is explicitly trying to encourage dough harvest. Is he having a wildlife killing contest?

Or is he having a derby as a management tool? Anyways, I do this interview and shouldn't have done it because the quote they pulled from me was not the right quote. I'm so mad about that guy came here what point i was driving at uh you were gonna say that they tried to lump it in as a killing contest and uh oh the outlaw the contests of killing animals basically but i had some like broader ass point i can't remember now what it was apologies got so riled up about talking to that guy yeah yeah and so i do i do want to uh revisit one thing because i said like for me anytime i see coyote if i got a license

and it's legal i kill it every i killed one this year i'm i'm always trying to my personal thing is i kill so many prey animals a year whatever that is, I'm going to try to kill a number of predators also. I feel like that's doing my part to whatever. To balance it. To balance it. But I did want to say one thing about the mountain lion hunting. As I say that I will kill just a coyote just because I think it's to kill. I didn't kill a lion in Colorado because one of the biggest benefits to using dogs is identifying if that's the animal you want to kill. It's not what,

what happens now, like in Oregon, where they outlawed running lions with dogs is if you kill one, it's just one you saw. And you don't know, you don't know what it is. You don't know how old it is. You don't know, male, female, because you don't have time. Right. And, but that's the only way you can hunt them. So now they have, the season is open all year. It never closes in Oregon. There is no dog. So lion numbers are going way up. Deer numbers going way down.

That's kind of what happens. Where dogs are allowed or baiting for bears allowed or even hunting black bear with dogs is allowed. You're killing the animal that should be killed. The older male generally. And you're identifying it, you're taking out the right one. Without those measures in place, as hunting a dog is a tool, without those measures in place, it's not nearly as controlled. And it's not like people are just going out there just going to kill any lion up the tree, just like I didn't kill one because I

didn't see an old male lion. Houndsmen are the one that originally pushed for lion regulations yeah they were pushing for lion regulations when no one was paying any attention to lion lion uh conservation okay i finally remember my point okay am i allowed to go back yeah we were having this conversation where people say that that coyote hunting actually increases coyote numbers. And I see what you're talking about because it disrupts pack dynamics and can lead to animals shooting off in new directions and starting packs. It also leads to them having more offspring. But I said, well, if you're super pro-coyote, why would you not encourage that?

It's true. And I was just throwing it out there as a rhetorical question. Well, it is a rhetorical question but it actually does have merit you know dan flores's book uh coyote america which is an amazing book fucking incredible book when you realize how wild those things are and when they get killed they when they do their roll call and there's a coyote missing the female coyotes will produce more pups i mean that is just that's the reason why they're everywhere. Yeah. I'm friends with Dan.

I studied under Dan. I have massive respect for Dan. I have Dan on the show. There's certain little tidbits of this debate that Dan and I don't see eye to eye on. And this is one of them. Yeah. But love him. The effect is hard to argue they they literally have

gone from a hundred years ago yeah where they were primarily in the southwest and in the west to everywhere in new york city i mean they have coyotes in in fucking central park yeah and some of their and you got to realize too like wildlife dynamics can play out very slowly so in some ways it's possible they're still responding from the elimination of the wolf right right right like some of this stuff takes so long you just look at like why does just very gradually why do raccoons and possums keep going north and west it's just so weirdly gradual javelinas right move over time so you see these things that happen so slowly that you can't picture them playing out but with the coyote it seemed like there was a gradual movement and then just an explosion you know

i remember them coming into our area like i was a red fox trapper and we didn't have coyotes i remember the first coyote i ever saw and now it's like for the most part red fox are gone and coyotes are there um and that was part of the like not just the gradual increase that was like the explosion in the 90s where they just like i don't know they suddenly figured something out something clicked i don't know. They suddenly figured something out. Something clicked. I don't know what it was, man. I was in this conversation with some guy in the Hollywood Hills. People up there are terrified of losing their dogs. They lose their dogs all the time.

Dogs and cats get killed by coyotes constantly. And he was telling me about this. And it's like, fucking hate them. They're everywhere. I go, yeah, I get it. But you love rats? Because if it wasn't for coyotes, rats would be everywhere. They'd be everywhere. I go, yeah, I get it. But you love rats? Because if it wasn't for coyotes, rats would be everywhere. They'd be everywhere.

Like, they also keep the population of things down that you don't want. I mean, they're an essential part of the ecosystem. There's a reason why, like where I used to live in California, it's not infested with rats. Because it's got a lot of coyotes. They're fucking everywhere. And yeah, don't leave your dog out. Yeah. Don't let a kitten roam around your backyard and you're not looking because they'll get

it. They killed all my chickens, but they're also like they're a very important part of that system. Again, I don't dislike them. Yeah, I love them. I like them. Every year I flesh and stretch a few and send them to the tannery someday i'm gonna have a big giant bedspread out of kyle's how many do you have now what's that how many do you have i got saved up

now uh i mean i used to sell them now i got saved up maybe 10 of them how many do you need for a bedspread i haven't done the math yet. Maybe my buddy sent in, we had 50 beavers and we did two blankets, two big blankets out of 50 beavers. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Beautiful. I'll show you pictures sometime. The fur thing is a fascinating one too because there's people that are really anti-fur, but yet they're wearing leather. And they probably don't like the oil industry.

But they drive. They drive a car a car well that was my favorite i talked about that on stage last night the fucking stop oil people that block the highway with their fucking paint on their sign that's made with oil wearing shoes that are made with oil wearing clothes unless they're dressed in fur it's made up on antidepressants that were made from oil. You know, they use oil for everything. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, man. That's something that happened in the early 1900s. They figured out to use petroleum-based things to make medicine.

Yeah. They put oil. God, they got their fingers into everything, don't they? Everything. Not fur. Not fur. fur yeah everything but it's like the weird thing is like people don't like animal skins that have fur on it that's the crazy part like if you have fur boots people like oh you piece of shit yeah if you have leather boots like oh guys got boots on yeah it's almost over noticed but it always drives me crazy

like why has it become bad why is it so much better to take the fur off it's weird it's weird the skin itself is leather and that's fine but if you leave the fur on oh you fucking creep it's weird yeah that's that's one argument that i you know people like to lump kind of an aside but lump hunters into trophy hunters or me hunters which i think we would all agree you can be both. Yes. I mean, I take every ounce of the meat from the animals I kill. Every ounce is like, is more valuable than gold to me.

And I take all the antlers, the hide. I got, you know, claws. I mean, it's like all, that's all part of that memory of that hunt. And I'm honoring that memory and that harvest essentially. but I'm also sharing that meat. We eat the meat every night or every day. And it's like, we're both, we're not just, cause I meet people and they say, well, you're not, you're not a trophy hunter. Are you? I'm like,

yeah, yeah, I am. Yeah. I'd be like, I'm all kinds of hunters. Yeah. Well, you know, here's what's interesting. It's's like we're so separated from the idea of animals and just the wilderness itself being a resource in order to sustain you but during covid there was a bunch of people that reached out to me and wanted to start hunting because they had this thought because when like my friend duncan went to the supermarket he sent me a picture he's like dude there's no food right he sent me a photo of the the meat shelf and there was literally like a package of ground beef left there was nothing left because the supply chain got interrupted and people started thinking oh my god we could get to a part where I don't have any food like that's a real reality yeah people felt vulnerable they felt

vulnerable so two things started happening to me during that. People started reaching out, asking me about hunting. And then when the George Floyd riots kicked in, people wanted to borrow guns. People asked to borrow guns. How many guns do you have? Can I have one of your guns? I was like, that's not legal. Because in Texas, I could just give you one, which is wild.

Like in Texas, you don't even have to fill out paperwork like if you were a Texas resident and I was a Texas resident I'm like you like that gun you can have it oh yeah I should say most places but yeah that that's the norm that's the norm but in California it's like I can't do that it's absolutely illegal I could go to jail for giving you a gun like you have to go through the whole process and then the lines outside the gun stores were wild. Because what you can't do is you can't go down and buy, you can't go down to the FFL, the federal, you can't go down to a dealer and buy it and say it's for you

and then give it to someone else. But it's actually your buddy buying it. That you definitely can't do. Right, you can't do. Right. You can't do that. But in terms of you like legitimately went and bought it for yourself and then you decided that you did not want it, you can gift that.

Yeah. To a friend. What they're trying to prevent is your buddy saying, Hey, go down and buy it for me. I'm a felon and can't. Right. That makes sense.

That's your ass. So they don't, oddly, they don't really prosecute people for lying on FFL statements. Interesting. It's a real issue. Yeah, that could be definitely an issue if someone's a felon. I mean, but then there's also the-

They'll reject the purchase and not go after the person. But when they have those gun fucking conventions, when you can go and just, what do they call those things? Gun shows. Gun shows, where people just, that's a weird one, right? Yeah. They kind of can skirt around some regulations, and that was part of the things that people didn't like. When you hear in the gun control debate,

people talking about trying to close the gun hole loopholes or trying to put it that they should be subject to FFL transfers, but when my dad died and I got my dad's guns, um, we didn't do an FFL transfer. Right. How does any kid get it? Yeah.

Right. So you get it from your dad or your grandpa. Yeah. Like, here you go, son. Right. Like,

that's just how it works. It's wrapped up under the tree, man. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's, there's a lot of regulations that make sense and there's a lot of them that

don't. And most of the ones a lot of them that don't. And most of the ones that come out of California don't. I mean, the limiting magazines, that's a fucking insane one. Like down to 10 rounds or certain guns you can't even buy. They're trying to do, in Oregon, five rounds. Oh, my God, that's hilarious. Washington already did that, right? Maybe so.

Maybe that's what I'm— That is so crazy. So what do you do if you have a Glock 16? You don't? Yeah. I'm not sure. I mean, that's fucking insane'm that is so crazy yeah so what do you do if you have a glock 16 you don't yeah i'm not sure i mean that's fucking insane yeah it's i can't remember i shouldn't speak that but i know that there's a there's i don't know about on long guns there's a restriction a magazine restriction what's interesting is for for hunting waterfowl federally regulated migratory waterfowl, there's always been a magazine restriction

in the field. Three rounds. And then, as they're trying to lower snow geese numbers to protect Arctic habitats, they've gone in and undone. They've made an exception to allow unlimited capacity magazines to hunt snow geese.

So it's one of those weird areas where you see a real reversal of a time-honored tradition, which is three rounds and you're gone, to make it that people can kill more snow geese. That's an animal that I want to hunt with you one day, the ribeye in the sky. Oh, the cranes. Yeah, sandhill cranes. I've heard those were insanely delicious. It's great, yeah. It's crazy when you see a bird

that has like a dark red meat. It's like, what is this? This isn't a chicken. No. What the hell kind of bird is this? A friend of mine, he's right, where he said it's watching one of those come down out of the sky

is like watching a folding lawn chair hit the ground. It's just a wild bird to hunt. I bet. You know, I asked this question to Waddell the other day. watching a folding lawn chair hit the ground. It's just a wild bird to hunt. I bet. You know, I asked this question to Waddell the other day. What do you guys think would end hunting if anything does? Do you think it would be anti-hunters, politics, or fellow hunters causing division and infighting and whatever? Public referendums, politics. Politics.

Yeah. Urban centers. Urban centers where people vote and they don't have an understanding of what they're voting on. You don't got to wonder about it. It's happening. Yeah. It's not theoretical.

Well, why would you say hunters though? Like hunters, in what way do they stop hunting? Well, because I see fellow hunters hunters there's so much infighting whereas you look at the anti-hunters they're so aligned they're not like oh parsing out the this and that yeah this this guy is the number one anti-hunter in the united states no he's not he's a piece of shit that hunters love like yeah tearing each other He ain't a real anti-hunter. He's a fucking private land anti-hunter. He's ruining it for all of us anti-hunters.

He's a wolf in sheep's clothing. It doesn't happen. They are so aligned. Right. They get, you know, they have the lobbyists working for them. Meanwhile, hunters, fuck, we can't get out of our own way on half the shit. Yeah, but I have a long history

of being a public person and I understand it from a different dynamic because there's just a thing that happens with men where they become jealous of other men and hateful of other people's success and then they look at other people for whatever reason

as anytime they do something, it takes away from them or they look at someone getting attention anytime they do something, it takes away from them. Or they look at someone getting attention and somehow or another it takes away from them and they focus entirely on that person's success or who that person is and they try to find flaws with them. It's a natural thing with jealous, weak-minded men. Right. So we have that in hunting.

Yeah. You're going to have that in everything though. We have that in comedy. It's a real issue with stand-up comedy. We have that in fighting. But, you're going to have that in everything, though. We have that in comedy. It's a real issue with stand-up comedy. We have that in fighting. But nobody's trying to ban comedy. They are. You're wrong.

Yeah, there's shitty comics that try to tell people what they can and can't joke about. What jokes to make. Like woke comments. Yep, they all suck. There's one thing they have in common. They're all not funny. 100% of them. Every single one. There's not a they have in common. They're all not funny. 100% of them. Every single one.

There's not a single one that's exceptional. There's not a single one that is anti-comedy about controversial subjects that people are excited to go to see them that are real comedy fans. That are really good comics. There's not a single anti-controversial joke

comic that other comics seek out to go see. What's interesting is half your guests are your competitors. Yeah. Half your guests are comics. Yeah, but I don't think of comics ever as competitors. For sure. They're my tribe.

I try the best I can to get them more famous. I want them to be huge. My daughter had a book that described, she had a book about jealousy and it described jealousy as a hot prickly feeling i've heard it as a vessel that poisons the thing that carries it or i mean a substance that poisons the vessel that carries it you know that's the best way to look at it it doesn't do you any good but it can do the opposite the opposite. It can do the opposite. If you have a good mindset, if you have a good mindset and you see someone and you're envious, that can be fuel for your success. As long as you manage it in

your mind, like almost everything else, it's complicated. You have to manage it in your mind as like, this can fuel me and be a fantastic resource. When I see someone's success, I get inspired to work harder. I get inspired to do more. So I am happy that that person is successful. So if you saw a comet coming up and they were kind of in your wheelhouse and nipping on your heels, you'd be like, I'm going to have that son of a bitch on the show. 100%.

Every time. I do it all the time. I'm going to shine a spotlight on that individual. 100%. That's why I used to take Joey Diaz on the road with me because i couldn't follow him i was like he's so funny he was the funniest guy alive and people are like you take joey diaz on the road with you you're out of your fucking mind and i'm like yeah but but if i can ride that wave yourself up to be that one guy that wasn't as fun he's the other guy oh i would hear it all the time. People would say, you know, your opening act's funnier than you.

I'm like, yeah. He's the best. You have a unique mindset. That's all I worry about. Not all I worry about, but with hunters, we have a hard time giving other people credit, being supportive of each other, some of us.

And so with this disjointedness, that's what I get worried about. But you know how that changes? These conversations. Yeah. This gets out there in the zeitgeist. People hear it. They recognize their own failings, their own shortcomings,

and their own thought processes. And then they realize this is not admirable. Some people never will. We can't afford it. We can't afford it. We can't afford it. You know, so I'm thankful for outfits like dan gates is in colorado and then there's another one i wanted to mention called howell yeah and i think

is it john stallone man i know we had dan gates join us at a live show and he's we got him uh scheduled to come on the podcast as voting starts heating up on the as voting starts heat or you know as the we start nearing the date for the initiative in colorado right i'm familiar with howell i was introduced to howell by uh yet my colleague janice who's a supporter and um we've done some things to support them but man that name i probably met him but just right now i'm spacing it right if i am so apologies to him i believe it's john stallone but but, it's they are helping keep us organized there. You know, make it easy to send letters to legislators.

And it's just they're leading the fight. They're leading the fight on the on the hunting bands. Right. So and that and especially in that arena right there. That's a positive. That's a big one. They're still like in the grand scheme of things, small. Like if you look at numbers of followers or things like that, but they're still like in the grand scheme of things small like if you look

at numbers of followers or things like that but they're making an impact and so i've been trying to i want to support them and and um help where we can it's just you know this you know you're unique when you look at a comic hot comic coming up and you want to celebrate them i wish hunting could be more like that it can be it can It can be. These weak people have to understand that we know what they are. We see right through them. And you're not admirable. Not only are you not admirable, you're not respected by your peers. Everybody knows you're a bitch.

Nobody likes a bitch. And when you're a man and you can't recognize another man's success, or you see a man and you measure yourself up to him and you fall short and so you start shitting on that person, everybody knows what you're doing. Every man knows what you're doing, especially every exceptional man. They know 100% what you're doing. So you have to live with that. And that's how it's a poison that ruins the vessel that carries it. It's not good for anybody. And it's just a thing that people do. People have always been jealous of other human beings throughout time. But you got to understand for your own personal benefit, that feeling can

be changed inside of you to fuel and it will make you a better person. It'll make you better at what you do. It'll make you understand that competition is critical and vital in order for you to reach your full potential you don't reach your full potential if you're the king and everybody else is a pussy because then you're like well i'm the king everybody else is just a bitch i don't have to be any better but if you're a king around other kings you realize wow these guys are all fucking getting up earlier than me working harder than me thinking smarter than me being more effective recognizing their shortcomings fixing them talking about it with other people that do than me, working harder than me, thinking smarter than me, being more effective, recognizing their shortcomings, fixing them, talking about it with other people that do the same and

growing from each other. You know, we have like in the mothership, the comedy club that I own, when we get together in the green room during the shows, we're always breaking down bits. We're talking. We don't like hold secrets. We don't have like trade secrets. I don't want to tell anybody how I write. I tell everybody how I write. I tell everybody how I correct things. I'm like, this is a thing that I've noticed that helps me. Here's the thing that

I've added. I started listening to my recordings and doing this afterwards. When I get home, I always do. If you just do that one hour every night, just think over time. And then my other friends have said, I started doing that, dude. You're right. I just sat down for 10 minutes. I had a new bit. I wouldn't have come up with that bit if I didn't do that. Like, yes.

Yeah, now we all learn from each other. But if you see this one guy that's out there that's putting in all this extra work and succeeding, and you just start shitting on him, everybody knows what you're doing. You know what you're doing, motherfucker. You know, in your heart of hearts, you know you're being a bitch. And you can live with that if you like, but I can't. I'm allergic to that feeling in me.

I hate that feeling. I've experienced it. I know what it is. It'll still bubble up every now and then if someone's killing it. I'm like, wow, that guy's doing so good. Fuck him. That fuck him part of you is always there.

But you got to go, oh, you little bitch. I know what you are. You're a little bitch. But if you can do that. This is in the mirror. Yeah. It generally never gets the mirror. It's like I try to squash that fucker as soon as it comes up like a weed.

I pull it out right away. But if you don't do that, it's not good. It's not I try to squash that fucker as soon as it comes up like a weed. I pull it out right away. But if you don't do that, it's not good. It's not good for you. You never change people's opinions. If someone is doing exceptional work and doing an exceptional job of being very unusually successful, and then you start picking on all the little flaws in that person, and people are going to look at you. They're going to go, but you're kind of fat and lazy, and you fuck on all the little flaws in that person. And people are going to look at you. They're going to go, but you're kind of fat and lazy,

and you fuck up all the time, and you're always drunk, and you've got this problem and that problem. How come you're not looking at your own self with the same scrutiny that you look at this extremely successful person? It's because you're jealous. That's all it is. It's a natural human instinct. But that feeling can be repurposed.

That thought can benefit you. That feeling of comparing yourself and coming up short, what you're supposed to do is going, what do I need to do so I don't have this feeling anymore? Why do you work harder? I need to work smarter. I need to do some things that I'm not doing that maybe make me uncomfortable. And that's what I need to do to get better. Yeah. You know, to your point last night, I saw two of the funniest people I've ever seen Shane and Tony, both putting notes in their phone from comments that were made in the green room. Yeah. Oh, really? Oh, we always do that. Yeah. So they're like, just like, oh, that's okay. I'm going to put this down. So I don't forget it. Trying to grow. You know, that's exactly what you're talking about.

They're almost at the top of the game, still trying to get better based on feedback from other comics. We always do that. We workshop constantly. We're always in that green room. And I was trying to explain that to one of the managers. I was like, the reason why we have to, like, when comics get together, like, we're at the comics bar and we're all just talking shit. Like, if someone is sensitive and they get in that and they start complaining about jokes that are being told, hey, you've got to leave now. Because this is literally how we spar.

Like, this is what we do. If you're complaining that someone is making fun of this person or picking on that person, creating an unsafe work environment. Okay, well, you can't be here. It's like if you go to the gym and you're trying to be a boxer and you're like, everybody's trying to hit me. Like, that's what they do. This is how you get better. You hit each other. You don't like being hit?

You can't be here. You can't fucking be here. And this is like just the reality of what we do. And the only people that really truly know that are the practitioners. The ones who are doing this very difficult thing. Look, with stand-up comedy, there's a lot of hunters.

There's a thousand of us on Earth that are worth a fuck. It might be less. I'm being generous. It's probably 500. It might be 250 that I want to see.

On planet Earth, 250 comics that I would go out of my way to see.'s not a lot no like we gotta fucking stick together there's so few of us for you to be shitting on this guy because he's selling out arenas why do you think people like him what is it what's he doing well he's doing something fucking figure it out get better that i I'm curious. Does comedy have the same? In hunting, it was a big deal when the girls started coming in, right?

So a lot of guys would say, oh, she's just getting this because she's got her tits out or whatever. Right, which is true. But I could see comedy being the same. Because there are women comics. Did you guys look at women and be like, she shouldn't be up there. It's only she's only up there. Get to stage time because she's hot. Well, comedy is a meritocracy.

The thing about comedy is if you're not funny, we find out real quick. Nobody laughs at you just because your tits are out. Well, the thing about hunting, though, like there's there's gals that become very popular online that are just hot wearing camo. They've become very popular online that are just hot wearing camo. But how I looked at it is if I can't be more whatever, stand out more than this girl just because she's hot, I must not be that fucking good. I think of it in terms of effectiveness. Like if a girl is really hot and she's got big tits and camo butt, she's also a beast and she's out there really killing a lot of things. Okay, that's not very many.

Right. So what are you worried about? I'm not. I know. I know you're not, but some guys are. But like, what are you worried about? They're not effective. Like if there's a girl that's hot and she gets on stage and she's bombing all the time, no one's like, yeah, she's only up there because she's hot.

Like you don't care. Like if she's bombing, if someone's, if someone bombs all the time, you're like, get away from me. Like you don't want to be around them. They're like, it's like, it's bombing if someone's if someone bombs all the time you're like get away from me like you don't want to be around them they're like it's like it's contagious but if someone's good like whitney cummings right whitney cummings is hot but she's also really fucking funny yeah and so when whitney's just a real comic when we're around whitney no one thinks oh here's that hot chick that's like it's just like oh it's whitney. What's up? It's like she's one of us Yeah, but she also is hot. It's hard to be that person It's very fucking rare, but it's doable

Yeah But she had to go through all these ladders to get there because it is preconceived notions when you see a woman go on stage You like immediately a lot of men. I've been guilty of it. You know, what are the odds she's funny? She's too hot. It's like you almost immediately think. You can't have it all. Well, it's not so you think. Like, how did she ever. Like, Christopher Hitchens wrote a long piece for Vanity Fair once called Women Aren't Funny.

I remember that. It was brilliant. He was so fucking smart. Who wrote that? Christopher Hitchens. Okay. Because he could attack things from a level of intellectual introspection. Like, he has looked at this in a way, like, analyzed his own thoughts on funny, how he feels, how other people feel. He broke it down so clearly that, like, female comics really couldn't even say anything about it.

Because what he was saying was true. He was like, the ones that are funny are kind of dykey. They're kind of like, you know. And then he's like, no, I'll go back to attacking religion and other safe subjects. But there was, you know, it's that thing. It's like, why are men funny? Men are funny for a lot of reasons to impress women. That's how they learn to do it, to impress their friends.

Like it's a part of the natural banter that men have when they get together. Women don't necessarily have that same banter. Some do, but most don't. And women don't have to be funny to attract men. They just have to look good. So they think they're funny because guys are laughing at anything because they want to sleep with them. They're like, oh, you're so funny. I remember when we were young,

someone pointing out that for a girl to say a guy was nice is not good. They're like, dude, she said you're nice. They're like, if she says that he's funny, that's a real good sign. Yeah, it's true. It's true. Because you don't want

the nice thing. There's less funny women, but the women that are funny, I respect the shit out of them. Because it's so hard to do. Especially, first of all, your subject matter's limited because nobody wants to see a woman talking about politics on stage. Very few men want to see

a woman with very strong political opinions on stage. Shut the fuck up. They get mad. And and then if you talk about sex you talk about sex too much oh she's a slut like there's all these thoughts that that's always struck me as the unfair thing is how much guys get uncomfortable by that oh totally unfair yeah totally unfair guys get real like oh but it does create a situation for a woman comic that if a woman comic can navigate that they become undeniable if you can navigate all those preconceived ideas that people have about you before you go on stage but yet you still succeed at making them laugh that's black belt shit that's high level comedy that's what whitney do I've seen people look at her when she gets on stage and they're like

she's hot she's hot and then she starts killing and they're like god damn it she's fucking funny and then after a while you just give in you're like wow she's fucking great and then you're laughing you're just enjoying yourself but it's much more complex whereas a fat guy gets on stage, and he's already funny.

He's funny looking. Big, fat, stupid-looking guy, and he starts talking about himself being fat, and then you got a lot of leeway. I want to return for a minute. after comics being in the green room, workshopping, if in Colorado they lose this valid initiative about hunting bobcats and hunting mountain lions around this definition of trophy hunting and America's hunters get together in the green room and workshop what went wrong, I think they're going to determine that what went wrong is not um identifying with and fighting for people who are engaged in activity that that a specific segment of the activity that you're not engaged with right and needing to come into the awareness that like this as this plays out this will get around to

impacting you yes yeah but you have to have that ability to do that this is going to get around this is like the next thing that comes up is going to be something that is going to like strike at you near and dear it's going to be bow hunting is cruel unnecessarily cruel right yeah there are people that have that perspective that are hunters yeah and then they're gonna then you're gonna be like you're gonna freak out yeah yeah yeah when they start coming this is going too far yeah yeah then you'll then you'll be you'll be the one that you you ignored when other uh you'll be ignored when other traditional use practices were getting eliminated because it

didn't affect you and then now here it is on your doorstep there's also a thing about hunters where they're competitive in a different way than like say in comparison to stand-up comics because stand-up comics you have that audience to yourself it's not like they killed the audience the audience doesn't exist anymore like i had a great audience i'd you kill them all you fucking piece of shit yeah but if like you go to the mountains and you kill a 400 inch bull like that's a 400 inch bull that's gone now yeah i can't kill that bull now oh he fucking kills all the big bulls no bulls left audiences are always there and the more comics that are really funny the more it makes comedy grow. And you get more audiences.

You're not assassinating them. Yeah. But you could be competing with them on any given night, though. Yeah. You're both in Toledo on Monday. Sort of. But when it's your opportunity, it's your opportunity. And it's just your own shortcomings that are allowing you to fail in comparison to them.

It's not them doing something. It's not like they're yelling at you from the side of the stage trying to fuck up your routine. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. But it's like when you have your time, that's your time. And that's. Yeah. I think, you know, with a bull, there's more bulls, though.

You know, it's not like there's just one. There are, but there's not a lot of 400-inch bulls. No. And if you're a public land hunter and there's a specific unit and there's, you know, it's allocated 150 tags for the specific unit and everybody's in there hiking out. And one guy shoots this big-ass bull, that's a big-ass bull that you're not going to be able to kill. And so there's a different level of competition because even though it's a renewable resource, it's a limited resource, and there's also exceptional aspects of that resource,

like an enormous animal, a very unusual, rare outlier of an animal that if someone kills it, now you can't. So there's that competition. And then there's also the fucking dick-measuring thing where guys are taking grip and grins. You know, one of the things that's really disturbing to me is the numbers thing.

You know, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a guide and he was furious because this guy who is this well-known hunter shot a mule deer and it was a beautiful mule deer but it was only 189 inches he wanted a 190 he wanted 200 inch oh and he didn't think of it as like, he's like, it's just a buck. It's just a buck. And this guy was like, I would cut off my left nut to shoot that fucking buck. And this guy is this rich, famous hunter who goes in and he's complaining about it. He's not even appreciating this thing. It's a buck. Just a buck.

Just a buck. That's a giant buck. It's a giant old seven, eight-year-old deer. That's a giant deer. Yeah, but it's funny. I'll get something. I have a lot of stuff that I've never measured, never will. I got a really nice moose this year.

I don't even – no one measures – I shouldn't say no one. Pretty much no one measures moose. You talk about how wide they are and you leave it at that. But I will have stuff where now and then someone's around me that likes to do that. And I'll be like, dude, measure that thing. I'm just curious about it. Right. Yeah.

I mean, it's like I don't hate the- It's a point of reference. Yeah. I don't hate the number system. I get curious about it. I'm curious about all aspects of hunting and wildlife. And the boon and crockett system is of interest to me i don't live and die by it but you know at times i'm not curious what that is but

if someone shot a real stomper i might be like what does that do like what did it what did it that's what i that's what i do too i don't necessarily care about what if i kill something just because i just was there. Mature animal. I'm not thinking about, is this for a hunter? Is this anything? And I said this the other day in talking to Waddell. It's like, you know, people talk about that you get great opportunities to hunt. You know, I mean, that's just all there is to it.

But I said, Joe, I've never heard Joe talk about a score of something or he didn't want to kill it. Because I said, he doesn't care. There's been one antlered elk that he's like, he would kill it. Right? I've tried to. Yeah. And the guides pulled me off. I'm like, I don't care.

I'm going to eat that. Right. And he's a big bull. I think it's kind of cool when they have broken antlers. It doesn't bother me at all. People will take shots at you because you killed a giant bull and this and that and they've been hunting their whole lives it's like you don't give a fuck you just want to hunt you're hunting yeah and you don't care what it scores you're not after like the biggest bull on the mountain you just love hunting

and like that's the truth people can turn it into whatever they want yeah they're wrong i'm like daniel boone man i go to the best hunting place i can go yeah yeah you should like i don't know many people that yeah it's like i don't know many people if they said like hey man we're gonna go on family vacation and we found this sweet spot but then we got to thinking we should actually go to family vacation in the shitty spot yeah well it's also all the it's the same thing that we're talking about with jealousy if those people had the resources that i have and if you didn't do what I do, you're a moron. You don't go to the places where there's elk screaming all over the place and it's awesome. I'm always looking for good opportunities.

I mean, I'll take the shitty ones too, because I'm looking to get out all the time. So I'll take the shitty ones. I'll take the good ones. But I'm going to generally, like if I i get to a if i'm at a fork in the trail and one side is like good and one side's bad i'm going up the good one a hundred percent of the time yeah it's yeah it's just a resource thing you know like do you have the ability to do that if you don't you might criticize people to do oh ever since i was a little kid we went to the way i did the best thing you know i did i went to the best spot i could get my hands on the best fishing hole always whatever it's like yeah i mean you're right it's a resource thing because when i started where

i killed that spike bull that i talked about earlier that was warehouser timber company land anybody could go there Everybody could go there freaking hard hunting to kill a bull with a bow. So hard up there. That was as tough as it got. Right. So then I'm like, well, God, we could go to the wilderness. It's more open. It's on the east side of the state where I was hunting the west side of the state. The bulls are more vocal. It's the high country. That's better hunting. God, but that cost. We got to drive all the way eight hours across the state. We need gas money.

We need food when we're there. We're not just going home every night. But it was better hunting. So, yeah, Roy sold a gun. We got some money. We drove over there. Better hunting. Then it was like, shit, Oregon.

Oregon sucks hunting wise compared to other states. It like I wonder if I could hunt Wyoming put in for general tag in Wyoming drew it killed a six by six bull next time I drew it killed a seven by six I'm like god this is so much better than Oregon but it's eleven hundred dollars for this premium elk tag that I was putting in for got to work a little harder got to come up with some more resource you said it's it's a resource that you're allocating worked a little harder. Got to come up with some more resource. You said it's a resource that you're allocating. Worked a little harder. That was better hunting. It's just that process.

I started with the shittiest hunting you can get and the shittiest state to hunt. Maybe Washington's about as bad. No, my state was way shittier than your state. Yeah, exactly. But you keep working for these. Give me shitty state. Your shitty state stuff. Michigan?

Is that where? I'll tease it, but no. I had it quite good. I'm just joking with you. But that's how people think. No, it's true. You're right. But anyway, the point is, is like you keep working, you keep moving up the ladder to get to better hunting.

Yeah. Now, it crosses a line. better hunting. Yeah. Now it crosses the line. And I do understand when people are killing high fence animals in small properties and they're making it look like this is a wild animal. Yeah. There's a, there, there comes a line and that line gets crossed all the fucking time right here in Texas. Yeah. I don't, I know people that have, I know a guy who has a 200-acre high fence property. And I'm like, ooh. Yeah, that's rough. I don't think I'd go there. That's rough.

I can't go there. If you have a 15,000, 20,000-acre high fence property, I'm like, okay, what are the odds those animals, unless it's a mule deer, it's a migratory animal, what are the odds those animals would ever get out of that 15,000 acres in their normal natural life? odds those animals would ever get out of that 15,000 acres in their normal natural life. As long as you're not feeding them, if you're not like, I'm standing over a feeder waiting for them to show up at 5 p.m., as long as it's not that, it's just hunting. And when people start talking about private land versus public, I understand the appeal. And I understand that public land should be available to everybody. And I agree. And I think it's an amazing thing that we have here in America, where we have these resources where any person can go to a place where

you can get a general tag and go to public land and hunt. I think it's amazing. But you're also dealing with animals that are acting in a very unnatural way because they're highly pressured. So if you have a lot of hunters and a lot of pressured animals, you're dealing with an animal that's not acting like a wild animal. You're dealing with something that's being constantly harassed. And that to me is unnatural. Well, then you get into like a history debate because you're on landscapes that have been hunted. But I would agree that high pressure absolutely changes everything about how they conduct their business. You're also competing with other guys.

Like I've talked to guys that have had situations where they know that they are downwind or they're upwind rather. Their wind is going to come down on an animal, but they see someone stalking that animal and they try to get to it first. And they know they're going to bust it. they know it and they don't give a they would rather bust it than have the other guy kill it yeah they'd rather take a chance and there's so many morons that are doing it i think the best case scenario is human beings interacting with absolutely wild animals in a way where these animals aren't acting as natural as they would be as if human beings didn't exist. That's best case scenario. Yeah. And if you can get to the most remote places, that's where you can get that.

In the most wild places. I will say your example about you didn't want somebody else to kill it, so you're going to go down. I've probably done that before. It's like when I was, when I was hunting honey it's like every man for himself yeah i've raised people i mean i've also backed out of races yeah i felt it just felt too weird and i'm like i'm not gonna do this because i remember here's how much i wanted to protect my in that same logging country i would go out and the road would end. Maybe I don't want to drive out to the logging unit. Cause that's going to spook all the deer, especially in the headlights

before it's, you know, light and you're out there waiting. So I'd park like half a mile back and walk out there, but I didn't want anybody else driving out there. So I'd park in the middle of the road sideways, leave my truck there. It's like, I'm not saying you can't come out there, highways leave my truck there it's like i'm not saying you can't come out there but you're not driving people people lost their shit i mean yeah i would hear gunshots going off of my truck then i'm like fuck are they shooting my truck you know you don't or are they gonna shoot me when so i did a lot of this crazy stuff i mean i'm very competitive. I did want to also clarify one point because you said animals on 15,000 acres, you know, wouldn't react, be reacting. They wouldn't know they were in a fence type thing because I've seen people say crazy shit about our hunting. But the bulls you kill are not in a fence.

I've never been in a fence. Always been fair chase. Always been. I've even said, oh, these bulls are on beta blockers. Some crazy bullshit. Beta blockers? Beta blockers. On bulls? To limit their adrenaline spike?

I don't even know what the hell it'd do. Beta blockers, like athletes, can't use them. And there's certain sports. Yeah, it kills your adrenaline spike. People say crazy shit. I don't want them turning in that you were validating a big high-fenced area. No, I've never done that. No, so the bulls you're hunting are wild, fair chase.

There's predators around. There's lions. There's bears. There's, I mean, this is wild elk. So I just want to make that clear because people say, they say crazy shit. Maybe even 15,000 acres is not a good example. So let's say like the four six ranch that my friend Taylor Sheridan owns. It's 270,000 acres.

Wow. Yeah. Really? Yeah. He hasn't fenced that. No. God, that would be a lot of money. You know what I'm saying?

But even if he did, you know, that's like the fuck. Yeah. Like that's where they live you know you just put a fence to keep other people from going in you're really not you're not

that's like natural habitat yeah I mean the whole country's fenced in by oceans you could look at it that way I've never done it and I've never done it and I've had like

occasion to debate people about it but I still like like occasion to debate people about it but I still like maybe I used to be a little friskier about arguing about all the finer points but it's just I haven't done it

I just don't really think about it it's not the same thing you know like when I talk to guys who hunt out here and most of them are pretty honest about it the way they do it like the hunt over feeders these are not people that hunt a lot they don't practice a lot but when they get a chance it's essentially like a kind of harvesting animals it's almost like a type of farming because you're if you're hunting over a feeder and like they'll put you in a tree stand and say all right the feeder goes off at five o'clock and like what

no it's a collision of animal it's a collision of husbandry and animal husbandry. Yeah. Of hunting and animal husbandry where you're using the sort of harvest tactics of hunting, but you're employing a lot of the principles of animal husbandry. Yeah. It's not the same thing. It's not going into the mountains like we do. Like we're hunting in Utah or you're going to Colorado.

You're going in the mountains. Yeah. Well. These are wild animals. They're unfenced. And to that point, it's not guaranteed. Not at all. When we were there this last season, it's great property.

I mean, nobody could argue that it's incredible elk hunting. But there was hunters the week we were there who didn't kill. The week after we were there, seven guys did not kill. Well, the week we were were there seven guys did not kill well the week we were there only three did so only three guys people people make it sound like it's just shooting fish in a barrel and guaranteed 100 it's like how many hunters were there the week we were there uh i'm not sure there was i there had to be 30 i don't know it know. It's a big piece of property. And it's fucking hard, man. And you got to be in shape.

Yeah. You got to be in real... We put in miles. Miles. 10 miles a day. 10 miles a day through the mountains. At the end of the day, you're fucking exhausted

and you're eating everything you can get in your face. Yeah. You're so tired. And then you're getting up in the morning and you're doing it again. And the idea that somehow or another that's cheating.

You can think that if you like. But if you do it and you go morning and you're doing it again. And the idea that somehow or another that's cheating. You can think that if you like. But if you do it and you go there, you won't think that. If you go there, you're like, oh, this is just an amazing opportunity in a beautiful landscape where wild animals live unmolested. There's still lions there. Oh, the one that we saw. That was the first time I never saw a full-grown, big-ass in the wild it's like wow i got to watch one miss a deer down in mexico this year it was really cool oh wow you know watched him come in it was a doe she was traveling i watched him come in ahead of her and he kept looking down and trying to guess her trajectory and got and laid down and then missed her did he go after her and missed

her yeah like you couldn't i mean when it was like a ball of fur dude and she comes squirt well i'm saying i'm kind of simplifying it where there was a forky i didn't know about and she got up right next to this forky and then the lion blew out and kind of first tried to roll that forky and then sort of sprang out of that and tried to get the doe but it was like he was he was flock shooting oh he didn't have a target he probably if he asked him he probably had a target but man they ran like hell wow it was cool to see dude that was the second line i saw that night yeah that was a rarity yeah that when i was in colorado this year in the week that i was there i killed a bull buck and a bear in that week i saw four lions so many lions in that country that's a lifetime supply for seeing them without

dogs it's uh it was insane but it's uh yeah i was gonna that story reminds me of, you said the flock shooting. I remember this old guy who'd come back to hunting camp when I first started. He's like, you see anything? He's like, yeah, yeah. So I got on a good herd. I said, did you get a shot? He's like, yeah, yeah. What happened?

He's like, well, I shot over some and I shot under some. I just never forget i could just envision that there's a herd and try to get an arrow in one of them but uh yeah it's uh you imagine being a native american with a fucking handmade bow chasing after those things i bet shit didn't spook 200 yards away back then yeah that's true yeah we know that i the first, I'm trying to think, man. The first three or so deer I got, I got on when I was a kid. I killed the first deer when I was 13. The first three or so deer I got, I got all on private property.

And then I killed, I went into the White River, kind of the, we used to call it the White River Swamp, but down on National Forest land and killed a fawn one October with my bow. And you didn't hear people, like people didn't celebrate public land hunting then. It was like you were slumming it. So you were there because you couldn't get, no farmer was going to let, you didn't know any farmers. If you went out on public land in Michigan and you went to anybody that was on public land and said hey do you want to hunt like the farm over there no one is like out of principle by god i'm staying

here they would just they would go to the farm but when i did get that fawn deer which i killed over a bait pile in the white river swamp um it felt good man like you know i mean like i was aware of having did this thing that i would have yeah to haven't did this thing that i would have regarded as almost like semi-impossible right you know to pull that off i have a deep respect for people that can shoot mature animals on public sure man that is very hard to do and it's very i mean i and i get that you would have a deep respect for people that can shoot mature animals on public land. Sure, man. That is very hard to do. And I get that you would have a higher sense of pride. I totally get it.

I've gotten a handful. I've gotten, like, four big mule deer, nice mule deer. I've never killed a mule deer on private property. And I got four good mule deer on private property and i got four good mule deer on public property and like that like i can't deny that that sort of means a thing to me yeah you know not that i wouldn't like if someone tomorrow if i drew some tag in some area and some guy's like oh hunt my ranch i'd go hunt that ranch all day long but it just has sort of like happens that that's true and i don't look at it and think differently of it the same way all kinds of factors play into it you know i

but every year like i've gotten some big coos here and i've never all the coos here i've killed on big private ranches in mexico um except for arizona but gotten nice here on big private ranches in mexico and love the experience. I like all that. I'm into all that stuff, man. Yeah, I get why people would think a certain way because it's very similar in a lot of ways to bow hunting versus rifle hunting. Yeah, a little bit more proud. If you see someone

that kills a big bull with a rifle, you're like, yeah, that's a big bull, man. That's awesome. But if you see someone that kills a big bull with a bow, you're like, whoa, that's a bigger deal.'s just it feels way different as someone who shot bulls with rifles and shot bull with a bow and arrow you cannot compare in my feet the way it makes me feel when i make a perfect 52 yard shot and i watch that arrow go into the crease behind the shoulder and you watch that bull buck up and you know you got him.

You're like, whoo! It's like there's nothing like it. There's nothing like it. There's nothing. I was hunting with Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee this past October. We were both elk hunting at this ranch. And I shot this bull. And it was like on the fifth day of a six-day hunt.

It was a lot of huffing there's a lot of fucking missed opportunities a lot of getting winded a lot of a lot of shit went down but when i finally snuck in and it was a long ass stalk it was like it took me an hour and a half to cover about 40 or 50 yards because i was the the elk was bedded and I was barefoot. I was just in my socks and I was just slowly creeping, slowly creeping. And every time he'd move his head, I'd stop. And I was slowly creeping. When I finally released that arrow and it hit that bull and I heard that whack

and the bull literally ran 30, 40 yards and piled up, the woo that I let out, you could have heard it a fucking mile away. They heard it on the other side of the canyon. They were watching with binoculars and they heard, woo! Because it's so different. If I shot it with a

rifle, I'd still be pumped. It's a beautiful bull. It's meat. I'm psyched. I got all this food now. This is incredible. This is what I wanted. This is what I was working for. But it's harder. It's harder to do on public land. It's harder to I'm psyched. I got all this food now. This is incredible. This is what I wanted. This is what I was working for. But it's harder. It's harder to do on public land. It's harder to do with a bow. It's harder to do.

There's all these little factors that, like, any accomplishment, there's all these little factors that wind up, you know, an elevating experience or some other thing, you know? And then you get into like where i'm at now in life where for me the the high like the most elevated experience is to have to witness my kids do something right just take my kids hunting yeah well cam always talks about that like his favorite experiences and when he takes people for their first time like you were telling me that the time you took that woman yeah cat yeah she shot that deer and you guys are eating it like is it getting any better than this no you introduce something to she shot that deer and you guys are eating it like is it getting

any better than this no you introduce something to this thing that you love you have deep passion for they get to experience you see them get lit up i mean you've done that so many times i'm sure i want i wanted to take steve on that hunt i think i mentioned that yeah we did text about yeah that was i just so i missed out you missed it you're done that's it but uh no i just especially that one because that's oregon blacktail which I grew up hunting in western Oregon. So I really love sharing, you know, the small little logging community, the badass loggers there that are tough as hell. Just that little western Oregon vibe. I love sharing that. But then she also killed a big four by four buck with the eye guards, just this old, big, old buck.

And it was then we, you know, of course, packed it out as a steep logging unit. Then we cooked it up the next morning. It definitely the highlight. I killed quite a few animals this year. None better than that. That was the highlight. I didn't kill it. Yeah.

But it was just that experience. It's yeah, there's nothing, you know, and my kids, I took Truett the same. He killed a buck down there too this year. So, yeah, it's, you know, you get to where, and I said I was very competitive, very tunnel vision. It was all about me. And that, you know, with age, that changes. And then you're like, no, I want to share this with people. Yeah.

So it's. Well, if you don't do that, how are they going to find out? And one of the things that you've talked about so many times, Steve, is the barrier to entry for someone who's like they're thinking about hunting. Like I thought about it for years. My wife used to go crazy because I would be at home watching Spirit of the Wild. She's like, what the fuck are you watching? Why are you watching Ted Nugent? And I'm like like i want to

figure out how to do this someday and then i watch your show i gotta be here in case he plays fred bear yeah well when you lack master when i first saw your original show the while within right that was what it was when i first saw that show i was like oh i want to talk to that guy and that was before meat eater even started and then when you invited me to come hunting with you i was like oh finally now i can figure this out but if it wasn't for that having someone like you to show me how to do it and take me out and to have you be my guide like fuck what are the what are the odds i'll see people making like like young hunters or people just starting to hunt now i'll see them make this is like horrible decisions you know yeah we're like oh i think i'm going up there in the morning and on one hand i'll uh i want to feel like bad

i'll be like oh my god it's a horrible idea on the other hand i'm like dude yes like that's all the stuff that you like that i had to do when i was figuring anything out yeah like hats off to you dude yeah you're gonna get up and go like don't know it, but you're getting up early. You're going to go try something. I recognize that that's the dumbest thing you could possibly do, but, like, that's how you do it, man. That's how you learn. So that barrier to entry, like, some people have the mental fortitude where they're just going to take it on. Yeah.

And then some people are going to sit and be like, eh, I'm not, you know, I don't have it in me to really figure this hard-ass thing out. Well, until you've experienced success, it's very difficult to justify the work. And it seems insurmountable. And for a lot of people that don't have someone like you or someone like you taking them out, it's almost insurmountable because there's so many things you have to learn. It's not intuitive. It's something that you have to figure out through trial and error or you have to read a lot or watch a lot of videos and absorb all that information. Yeah. Mostly it's, you have to learn it yourself, you know, because you can read, reading helps, watching helps, talking helps. You just got, just as you said, that's

how they learn. They get out there, they do it themselves. And then they're like, God, well, that didn't work. Now what? And that's,'s that's how you learn that's what's hard about hunting with that barrier to entry is that experience accumulates slow for most people yeah like when i was hunting back home i would get a week for elk that's all so a week a year and that's it you know so i had to go out take photos try to be out there amongst them, learn body language, learn what they like to do. And that takes years. So when somebody comes in late, yeah, they can't shortcut that experience part. We were, we were lucky to grow up doing it and now we're in a position where we can share it, but it's, it's tough if you didn't grow up doing

it. Yeah. There's a few places people will teach you how to do it. You know, Jesse Griffiths has that school. What is it called? New School Style. What is it? What is it again? His school. But he has a literal, like, limited edition.

It's not the new school, but that's in it. Yeah, something. So he has, Jamie will pull it up, but he has a program where he'll take you, he'll teach you how to shoot, he'll teach you how to hunt, he'll teach you how to butcher, teach you how to cook. The whole thing. He'll take you through the whole process. That's so valuable. If there's something that you can do, and especially with a renewable resource like pigs, new school of traditional cooking. On a merit, it's like a somewhat contradictory new school of traditional cooking.

But that's so valuable where someone can take you through the whole process. And there's not a lot of that available, unfortunately. And even if it was available, it would be very difficult to screen applicants to make sure that it's even worth taking your time. Because if you've got a guy and he's 50, 60 pounds overweight and got a bad knee and you want to take him on a mule deer hunt in the mountains, we can't really do this yeah like you're gonna have to lose weight you're gonna have to get in shape you're gonna have to figure out a way to be able to get to where these animals get into something different this is not an easy task i think the true like there's an area i don't think everyone needs to get there there's an area of expertise or a level of expertise that i think is is admirable and it's you know you learn how to hunt some particular spot.

And that's great, right? You learn how to hunt some particular spot, and that's your hunting spot, and you get it really figured out, and that's a wonderful journey, and that's really good. I think that getting to the point where you get that place and thing that you're comfortable at, and then you go and be like, okay, I'm going to take whatever does I learn there and try to apply it to something totally different and figure that different thing out.

And get where you're good at these spots and these things, but you become good at like deciphering, figuring out, and being able to move into totally new things and carry that accumulative knowledge into these new spots, like that becomes pretty fun. Yeah. And that's a high – I regard that as being not better but a high level of expertise. Well, there's also variables that maybe some people that are successful in other disciplines don't recognize as they enter into this new world that there's different parameters like for instance if you got someone who's a successful

whitetail hunter that hunts out of a tree stand they're a really good archer but they're used to shooting a 65 pound bow with like a 350 grain arrow and they're used to shooting these animals that are fairly small and and then you take them on a elk hunt yeah and you're like hey that's set up with this three three blade mechanical with a 60 pound bow and you're shooting a fucking enormous animal with huge bones like you might not even get through the ribs with that thing you might center a rib and that's a wrap like you have to recognize you're dealing with a totally different thing and you're you're not you can't just be weak you have to recognize you're dealing with a totally different thing. And you can't just be weak. You have to be physically strong.

You have to be capable of making it to – you're not going to sit in a tree stand. You've got to change everything about the way you approach it. Yeah, you got very successful with this one aspect of this thing. But you've got a whole new thing now you have to apply it to. And if you don't, you're going to wound animals. You're going to have problems. Or you're going to just not be successful at all. I remember the first time I went out with a guy deep dropping for swordfish. So I watched the guy catch a couple swordfish in 1,300 feet of water.

And I realized I knew nothing about fishing. Do you know what I mean? That's so specific. Oh, my God, man. Like all the shit you think you know, then you go out there and you're like, you're not going. Oh my God, man. Like all the shit you think, you know, that you go out there and you're like, you're not going to catch a fish out here. You can't do that. But nowadays with fishing, you know, Steve, I sent you that thing the other day where the guy had, uh, he had a screen on his phone and there was some sort of a camera attached

to his line. Oh, that guy. Yeah, that was crazy. Wild. So this guy cast out, and he's looking at a screen with, like, a lid over it to shield the sun on his rod as he's reeling. He's seeing the fish coming towards his bait. Yeah, not like ice fishing with a camera, but he's like, he has a camera watch. He's casting and has a camera watch and fish interact with his bait while he does a retrieve. Yeah.

I didn't really get that. It was cool. I've never seen that before. I was like, this is great. But the things that I sent you, the ice fishing guys, that's nuts, man. They got fucking cameras down there and a fully heated shack where they're watching television. I was telling you, my kid don't want to ice fish without the camera. Well, it's an added element.

You see the fish. You're like, this is so cool. You can watch them sneak up to it. Yeah. You know? Yeah, it reminds me there's something new in hunting now, which I don't like, but it's that the heat-seeking binoculars. I think it's heat-seeking.

Oh, thermals. Thermals. Yeah, thermals. And to me, I don't— Yeah, but you can't use it for big game hunting. No, it's not. There's some states where it's not— Regulated?

It's not regulated. They don't even mention it. No, no, no. You can't. But yeah, you can't get outside illegal shooting hours. No, but to find it. Oh, I see what you're saying. Are there states where you're allowed to find game with thermal?

I think it's just not disallowed. Yeah, I got it. It's not addressed. Well, there's an issue now where they're banning drones that use thermal for recovery. But I don't- Because your scout, the argument is your scout. Of course, you could be if you're a piece of shit. But what guys could conceivably do, like in Oregon, as I'm talking about in western Oregon,

glassing those big, huge logging units and finding deer is an art. I mean, it is hard to pick those things up. But if you could just put and find the thermal register of it. Sure. Oh, it's right there. And that's like a big part of killing a buck. I don't like that. That needs to be regulated. Gianis was just hunting in latvia and in latvia they get out in a clear cut middle of the day whatever they're gonna get out in a clear cut and put a thermal up

and be like nope hop back in the car and roll out yeah i don't know and he's like i can't believe you guys could you know i can't believe you guys do that like I can't believe you don't do it. Yeah. Right. It works, stupid. Yeah. I don't know. When I was in Scotland, there's Stag where we were at. I was like, this is amazing. They had a hunting ranch out there. And they said, do you want to hunt? And I said, do you guys use rifles?

And he goes, yeah. I go, can you use a bow? Can I bring a bow? And they go, no, we don't allow it in the country. And I'm like, what? No. Like, you don't allow it in the country. And I'm like, what? Like, you don't allow it. Can you watch me shoot first? Can I talk to the governor?

Set up a target at 80 yards and show you. Like, this is, I know what I'm doing. Like, let me do this. You can't. Yeah, I think, was it South Africa? There was like quite a lobbying effort to allow archery equipment. Really? Wow.

Yeah, there's some countries over there that didn't have it. I think Ted Nugent was involved in something about having to show how lethal it was before they would allow it. Yeah, it was a lethality concern. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know what it was for. I don't know if it was for elephant or something like that. But isn't that always the case when people just don't know and you think of a bow and arrow,

you're like, well, that's not as effective. Use a gun, stupid. You know, it's so much more effective. You know, when I have that conversation with people that are non-hunters, and they're like, why do you use a bow and arrow? I go, it says you're more connected. It's quiet.

It's like there's so many things about it that are just, it's more difficult to do. It requires more discipline and concentration. It's more rewarding when you do it. Isn't a rifle better, though? Oh, yeah. Why don't, are you trying to get meat? Yes. Yeah.

Do you support spear hunting? Like, I have no, I have zero problem. Zero problem with spear hunting. I don't think it's going to be a thing that impacts game numbers. Impossible. I 100% support it with pigs. When I say support it, I mean like I feel that if you had a regulation, I feel that if someone wanted to say we'd like to open it up

that people could hunt with a spear, I would probably generally say, okay, because I don't think that this is going to be a thing that reduces opportunity. Well, you remember the thing that happened in Canada with Josh Bomar. They banned spear hunting because this one controversial moment where it was totally legal. Everything he did was totally legal. Just the thing no one realized. Because there's things that are legal, and they're legal because they're not was totally legal. Yeah. And they just the thing no one realized because there's things that are legal and they're legal because they're not illegal. Right. Right. That's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to hunt with a spear, but I get it, you know, but I always feel like it's a gimmick. Like when I see someone hide in a tree and they spear a pig, they're showing that it can be done. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't

done it. Um, I can't,'t i wouldn't can't picture getting into it by any stretch but i just don't think it uh i think it hits like traditional for sure and then i think it's not like i don't think it's gonna throw off um population levels and and lead to like decreased opportunity no i don't think anyone's gonna be like the spear guys got them all right they got all the big bulls because they can hide in trees yeah i mean even if they wouldn't have made it illegal who the hell was going to spear hunt a bear besides josh up there right it's less it was it was just it you need a real psycho it caused such a stir that they had to address it.

But yeah, it wasn't going to have an impact on the population. Well, it caused a stir because it was discussed publicly. It was a social media because they say that you're kind of like bastardizing this beautiful thing and you're making it just like showing things on Instagram. Just like all the other things that you show off on Instagram. Your private jet or your big house or your fucking yachts and shit. Like you're making, you'reening this this beautiful moment when i

was a kid you had to go down to the local sporting goods store and staple your picture up to the brag board man yeah on the community brag board and you had to go down there to see what all was happening well it's essentially just a limited version of what instagram is but it's a global brag board yeah but that's the thing too it. You're not getting people that come into that local sporting goods store that don't understand hunting. Yeah. No, I think that is a big deal because I think – and a big deal in that we need to think about how we're presenting things. Yes. You know, where – whatever.

If you're down at the local sporting – that's only hunters pretty much saying that. Just like when you'd write an article like when I wrote for Eastman's Journal or whatever, that was just hunters. Or if you're an outdoor channel, it's just hunters. Nobody besides hunters is watching that. Now, everybody's on social media. So I think we just need to be very cognizant of what we're putting up there. Well, you do a fantastic job of that. And you have a very specific protocol you follow.

You know, where you'll show photos of the hunt then you'll show the meat you know you'll show harvesting the meat cleaning the meat and then eventually you'll show a photo of the animal that you killed sometimes i don't even do that yeah sometimes i just show the whatever just because the grip and grins for some people and i have you know a lot of people that follow that don't hunt they have a hard time with those pictures yeah and i'm just like i get it whatever you haven't grown up around this i have to me and people like me this is part of it but i understand i've never had anybody get mad at me for cooking an elk steak exactly and it's just not gonna happen so it's just like do we need to put the the grip and grin up i mean is it necessary i don't i don't care if people do it i just not going to happen. So it's just like, do we need to put the grip and grin up? I mean,

is it necessary? I don't, I don't care if people do it. I just want them to think about what they're saying when they put it up, how they do it. To me, I lead up to it. I show the country, the animals, the journey. Like on this lion hunt, I actually also showed a lion killed a calf, this lion hunt i actually also showed a lion killed a cat um uh beef calf didn't eat any of it because if they killed it in the creek the lion wasn't big enough to drag it out of the creek so left it and went and killed an elk that's interesting followed the tracks for three miles and i would see the lion go and um was sitting behind a tree all the deer tracks were there so the lion was hunting. And I shared all that.

That's all part of the journey. That's all the cool stuff. People, so I say, share things like that. And you can share your kill shot. It's great. But also share what else stood out from the hunt. There's also a problem with hunting TV shows in that you're condensing something

that might be seven days of 10 hour days. 22 minutes. Yeah. And then you want to pick the interesting 22 minutes. Yeah. It's like you just, it's like you randomly pull out segments out of your a hundred hours of footage. Right.

Yeah. It's, I think it's, that's been a big benefit to tell more of the journey now that, you know, Steve's on YouTube, his videos on youtube have tons of views so he's able to explain why the hunt's important what stood out to you it's more intellectual approach to it whereas you didn't really have time on an outdoor channel show you didn't have time to get into that some of my favorite shows of yours on meteor you're unsuccessful and i love that you have those you know i remember that one where you're getting real introspective about your father yeah that's like one of my favorite episodes you ever did and it was just you unsuccessful hunting and it's like yeah that's

also a part of it like this is not easy and it's often unsuccessful and i was always you know and was always am always bummed to not get something too like I'm trying but we'd be you know back in the early days we were making 16 shows so you weren't gonna you know if you went and spent a week busting your ass and you didn't get something it wasn't the option wasn't there to

ditch it like we were gonna make something out of it and in the end it was great glad we did it but you know I've never gone in the end it was great glad we did it but uh you know i've never gone in the woods hoping to be unsuccessful right it definitely happens and uh you know but i always wished it was otherwise of course yeah but it's just the the editing it down to 22 minutes it gives people that are on the outside a completely different perspective. They think it's so easy.

Well, you just go. I mean, how many times have you heard that? If you're a real man, you'd go hunt it with a knife or something like that, something stupid. You're, oh, what a coward. You're shooting it from a distance with a rifle. And in that 22 minutes, too, there's also sponsor obligations when it's on TV. So it's not even 22 minutes of hunting. Right.

You have to have the, this tips and tactics brought to you by Rosler or whatever. So it's like, you get down to the hunt. You can't really say why the hunt is important to you. Almost. It's like, it doesn't give you time to develop that story. So we've, it's a big benefit to us. It was social media. Now we're not, we don't need approval by an editor we don't need the the channel to approve how long this thing is we put it on youtube and then we can tell the story of the hunt in a more honest and relatable fashion hopefully and explain why it's difficult and people understand it what kind of restrictions is youtube put on hunting videos now because i know you can

push it a little far and get dinged what is it pushing far the the kill shot is no it winds up being no like blood and and uh skinning shots any kind of graphic like uh you know we got the first ding you hit is you hit a demonetization thing right and then you can hit other levels of dings and there's like a little scorecard, but, um, oddly, uh, doing a knee, we had something like, um, just to get some examples of doing a knee cropsy on something just too graphic organs, things like that, disassembly, that'll get you dinged. You can get demonetization. I believe there's levels of demonetization you can get around certain firearms issues, but the primary thing is just like gore, right? But even put in terms of a necropsy, so I'm sure at some level it's like, I'm sure it begins as an AI thing, right? Scouring all this footage and find something that's like bloody and graphic.

And at some level it gets elevated. We've argued and gotten our stuff back. You know, if you can get someone's ear and you can get it tested by a person and gotten it back. But that is the primary thing is gore. There was talk of them eliminating kill shots. I haven't heard that. That could shots. I haven't heard that. That could be. I haven't heard that.

I remember. I think that got rescinded, but I think there were some issues. Uh, here it goes. You, you can turn on ads for this content, hunting content where there's no depiction of graphic animal injuries or

prolonged suffering hunting videos where the moment of kill or injury is indiscernible and no focal footage of how this dead animal is processed for trophy or food purposes boy that's pretty fucking limited yeah well like for for me i had i had one that was limited in age restriction so people 18 and under couldn't watch it was it a firearms infraction or no no one had been fired just archery. And I don't monetize any of my hunting videos because I just don't even want to deal with, oh, you're killing for fucking profit or whatever the hell. So I'm like, I don't make any money off these. You don't turn monetization on? No, not for hunting.

I do it for my lift, run, shoot and my podcast. Yeah. But for just the hunting, I'm not – That's a good way to – But I still got that age restriction because of they said the gore then there was an outfit that uh um what's his name jason i think sportsman's alliance maybe but anyway they wrote they appealed it for me they got it in whole uh in touch with youtube and appealed their decision and got it overturned.

So they, for people like me, or for like us creators, they will go to bat for us. Yeah, oftentimes I've seen cases, I remember our senator in Montana got dinged on one of the social media platforms

for having like a picture of him and his wife with a pronghorn yeah and his account got taken down and the minute humans became aware of this or like the right humans became aware of this they did like a very quick reversal yeah so the way the way we'll generally look at it with putting up video content is we'll try to avoid demonetization. Being demonetization meaning you cross some line, right? But the thing is I haven't found it to be like, it's not like an onerous process. I feel that it's pretty.

process i feel that it's pretty um if you if you compare it to other channels of distribution i have not found youtube to be like dramatically over restrictive especially compared to any kind of um especially compared to any kind of like network parameter right no they're not they're not they might be bad but they're not bad compared to anybody else. No. And that one, that was Jason Quick who helped me with that. I just remembered his last name. But that one I showed, I killed this bull on San Carlos, and I think I showed the lungs or where the arrow hit. Yeah. And that's what got it. And it wasn't, once I appealed it myself, they said, no, we're upholding the restriction.

And then they did get it overturned it took so it took a couple times but still is reasonable and they took they had age restrictions on other ones i didn't even know about but i didn't notice that the viewership was down and um and so that they lifted all those so it's kind of a weird situation where although there are many, many video platforms, YouTube essentially has an overwhelming majority of people into the point where it's almost a monopoly. You know, and if you have things like that that are very valuable to people, like I want to see where the arrow hits. where the arrow hits. I like when I see blood pouring out of an animal because I know that that's a lethal shot. That's what you want. It might be graphic to some people, but if I see a rage hit behind the shoulder on a deer and I see that blood squirting out as soon as the deer starts moving, I'm like, that guy got that deer. That's a dead deer. That's what you want. You know, it doesn't seem, it doesn't seem awful to me. It seems better because that's a lethal shot.

That's a successful hunt. That's what you're trying to do to pretend that's not what you're trying to do. Boy, that seems insane. And if you're doing it only to protect the ignorant, that seems insane too. It's like, you don't have to watch those videos. And if you're going to allow those videos on the platform, you should allow those videos to be a realistic depiction of what everybody's trying to do, which is a lethal shot on an animal. And if you hit a lethal shot on an animal and you hit it in the vitals and you use a strong arrow with a great broadhead, you're going to get blood squirting out of it because that's what you want. The last thing you want to see is an arrow hit an animal

and no blood comes out. Yeah. I mean, and that's okay? Well, and meanwhile, they show people getting killed, I think, on YouTube, don't they? I do not know. But they showed them being... They pull those, I think.

Being injured. Yeah, well, you see it on the war videos. You see it blocked out or obscured. Yeah. Some of the hunting networks used to have self-imposed restrictions that they felt were cleaning up hunting for the sake of non hunters looking in and it was counterproductive because they would have a restriction that they didn't want to see raw meat they didn't want to see bare bone and so it created this sense of uh like when i say counterproductive if you were looking in on it watching it there was no acknowledgement of what happens to it later,

which created the sense that maybe nothing. Right. You know, and then that eventually corrected itself. And they're like, oh, some level of gore, right? In parentheses, like some level of gore is helpful in explaining the process. But the instinct early on, the instinct was to not have any of that. And people would get dinged for raw meat.

They'd get dinged for like a bone sticking out of a backpack. One of the things that I really appreciated about your shows, particularly early on, is that you have a lot of segments where you cook the meat. And there's a lot of shows where they don't cook the meat. That was our trademark, dude. It's a big difference. Big difference. mean it's it's much more enjoyable like one of my favorite videos is you and you shot that black bear that the blueberries sure yeah and you you're watching like you're explaining like look how purple this fat is because this thing's just been gorging on blueberries then you're cooking it and eating it like that to me is like that's a full range of what the experience of hunting is about i wish more people would do that i find now looking back on those

days it's like i sometimes look back and be like it was just shocking that that wasn't it's shocking that that wasn't out there more yeah at the time you know it was like it's something like so simple and elemental and and it was just surprised people. It was almost non-existent. Yeah, surprised people. On those outdoor channel shows, you very, very rarely saw someone cooking the animal that they killed. I think it was kind of assumed just because of how we grew up. And in magazines, they never talked about that.

You never read an article where they talked about how they process the meat or ate it. They'd have a recipe, a finished, like a recipe with shit you take out of the freezer. But there was an ignored part. There was the old Fred Bear videos. You know, Fred Bear was making videos way before we ever started hunting. The meat was never shown. So it was just kind of like like that's just how we learned then steve a brilliant idea meat eater yeah i mean meat eater right there you got the fork you got

the forks on the freaking moose yeah so it's like that was the best decision ever because it addresses that part of it which was kind of like it's impressive that you foresaw what might be a a challenge for us you know explaining hunting so that was just like brilliant to come up with that but to to our defense that was never a thing we we just knew i mean i read this old article my first deer i killed that spike that i said when i was 15 i wrote this little thing for the school newspaper and said, I got 37 pounds of hamburger from it. And I, I don't know, I don't know why, because I don't know why I said that school newspaper entry. Yeah. Yeah. Cause nobody ever talked about it, but it was like, that's hilarious. Yeah. It was funny. I said something

like my mom was happy because you've got 37 pounds. It's probably all we got off that deer. Mom was happy because we got 37 pounds. It's probably all we got off that deer. It was pretty small. Yeah. But, yeah, so, I mean, it's, yeah, it has changed. It certainly opens people's eyes up that are non-hunters. And I think it's a very valuable addition to this whole video depiction of what hunting is all about. You know, and also, you're a really good cook.

So you'd get, like, get like really like involved and make some pretty cool recipes and you know you cook for your staff and you've got episodes like that where you cooked all these different preparations of different wild game it's cool yeah it adds to it no i think you appreciate it well listen let's wrap up. Let's bring this bad boy home. Meat eaters available. It's essentially only online now, right? Yep. Yeah. Well, we have, you know, like the fast channels.

But, yeah, you can find everything we do on YouTube. So I just want to say to me, huge honor. You guys are the voices of hunting. What? You're the voice of hunting, bitch. Shut the fuck up. No, you guys are so well versed in how to discuss and how to explain it. As are you.

It's like I am honored to be here and have a podcast with Steve. We've done a lot of podcasts, but to have all three of us here, it means a lot to me. So thank you. That's great. It means a lot to me. You two are the main reason why I got into hunting. 100%. And without you taking me out to shoot that one mule deer that sits proudly on that table,

it's changed my life. Thanks, man. Both of you did. Appreciate you. Love you too. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.

Bye, everybody.