The Joe Rogan Experience - #567 - Cameron Hanes

Episode Date: October 24, 2014

Cameron Hanes is a bowhunting athlete, "training intensively each and every day to become the Ultimate Predator."

the joe rogan experience trained by day joe rogan podcast by night all day pumped up with caffeine straight off the plane and in traffic cameron haynes ladies and gentlemen good to see you buddy what's up man? You fucking literally pushed through all night. Yeah. Yeah, it was a grind. And then the L.A. traffic. Oh, dude. There's something about L.A. traffic that's so frustrating.

More frustrating than even no sleep. Oh, yeah, no sleep is fine. I mean, that's gravy. I do that all the time. But even today, I want to get but even today trying to get i want to get here i want to get here on time i hate being late anywhere i'm a pretty punctual person and just the traffic you know i was honking to the guy ahead of me just to go 50 feet further because he was letting that get he's texting he's letting that gap get too big and i'm like

okay i'm not going to go anywhere but i'm'm gonna be 50 feet ahead of where we're at yeah this there's something going on here there's too many goddamn people it's i don't know what the fuck la is going to be like in 10 years i came here in 94 so i've been here for 20 years now and when i first came here was nothing like this nothing like this traffic sucked yeah but it didn't suck like to the point where you're like this is just doesn't this doesn't make sense this is just unmanageable. There's too many goddamn people. Yeah, it's tough. And you live in Oregon, which is way more relaxed.

You spend all this time in the woods shooting arrows at elk. Yeah. The way quieter, way less people, the good life. The good life. Now we're forcing you to get on that fucking goofy 101 and get jammed up in the boxes of metal and fucking breathe that carbon dioxide It's worth it. It's worth it to be here. Of course it is. Of course it is my friend Good to see you again, buddy. Great seeing you. So what are you doing? You hanging out with Luke Bryan? Listen to country music song this motherfucker got me hooked on some country music pop songs. Yeah

I know I told yeah We're bear hunting and watching music videos country music pop songs yeah i know i told yeah so we're we're bear hunting and watching music videos country music videos and you're like what are we watching well our friends uh john and jen should give them a plug yeah live in the dream uh what is their uh their website is it live in the dream probably live in the dream.com hold on I don't actually have to remember anything anymore I google everything I know right isn't that amazing liveinthedreamwithjohnandjen right

something like that yeah we'll find it but anyway liveinthedreamwithjohnandjen liveinthedreamproductions that's what it is liveinthedreamproductions.com and those are our friends in in canada up in

alberta and that's where we went bear hunting and these motherfuckers all they listen to is country music and all they watch is country music television that's all you need so every day there was me mocking it it's just some of is really good. I like a lot of country music. I really do. We had Sturgill Simpson on this week. I fucking love that guy. I don't know if you ever heard Sturgill Simpson. No.

I saw your plug, though, and I was thinking I'm going to check him out. Oh, he's good, man. He's real old school, like Merle Haggard style country music. He's legit. I'll play you some later. Okay. But you guys just won't let it go. There was no breakups.

It was just every day. It didn't like every now and then, let's watch Yo MTV Raps or whatever the fuck. It was just country music, television, over and over again, being surrounded by deer heads. You would think that you were in like Alabama somewhere, but no, we're two hours north of Edmonton. Yeah, but in what happened? What's the moral to the hours north of Edmonton. Yeah, but, and what happened? What's the moral to the story? Uh, I don't know. Oh, they got me.

They got me singing that fucking Luke Bryan song, man. Play it again. Shit. I was, I was somewhere, I forget where it was, and it started coming on, I knew the fucking words. Yeah. And I started humming it along, and I'm like, fucking Cam Haines, he got me. Yeah.

Son of a bitch. So we were listening to Luke Bryan's Skinning Out Your Bear, and that's just, I don't know, it works. It's etched in your memory. What is it about country music and outdoors people, though? Because I always associated country music with the South, but it's a big Canada thing, too, especially northern Canadaada i don't know i think it's just uh you know grassroots people hard-working people and uh they identify with country music

hard-working people can't like acdc no that's not true that doesn't make any sense that's for headbanging pot smokers oh my people i've got a bunch of my people in various walks of life my people are confused they don't know where to go you got a lot of yeah you appeal to a lot of a wide range now bow hunters yeah i'm mixing it up i always say that i'm the bridge between the meatheads and the potheads i'm the bridge i bring them all together i'm an island just bow hunters cam haynes island so uh you've had a bunch of hunts since i saw you you killed two elk one in colorado one in utah i saw the the pictures yeah and you did an africa hunt yeah tanzania but you did a real africa hunt not one of those pussy ass high fence hunting in a backyard

no scenarios you were out in the wilds of africa definitely the wilds of africa i was with a green leaf tanzania and it's uh you know planes don't even fly over there this this where we're hunting no rows no any no anything i mean to to bounce around in a jeep it'd take you eight hours to cross the i guess the piece of property we were hunting and it's very expansive wild and when you when you bow hunt in these areas how often are people bow hunting in these areas or is it mostly rifle hunting and you just come in and bow hunt right um where'd i where i had been there'd never been a bow hunter there so bow hunting in tanzania has only been legal i think for seven years and um so it's new uh and when people go there for seven years. And so it's new.

And when people go there, it's expensive to get there. It's time consuming. The animals are very tough, very tough to kill. So nobody really wants to screw around making it even harder with a bow. But that's where I come in. So I was our first bow hunter there ever. A lot of people know about the controversy that's going on right now. Steve Rinello wrote an excellent piece on this about what's going on in Africa with these high fence operations where people are.

A lot of it is people seeing a pretty girl with a dead animal and then freaking out and going off. The most recent one wasn't even Africa. Did you see this kid that shot an albino deer? Yeah. And he's getting death threats. Yeah. And it was a nice buck. Yeah.

It's a deer. It's a fucking deer. It happens to be white. Who wouldn't shoot it? Yeah. They're like, you can't let it go. You can't let it live. Yeah.

So it can become a wood fairy and cure cancer. A unicorn. And invent 6G cellular. It's just a deer. it's just a deer it's just a deer it's a deer that has a you know rare disorder one out of every 20 000 deer turn out to be albino i guarantee those coyotes or anything else i would like to kill and eat a deer could care less what color it was yeah and or it would have frozen to death or it would have starved i mean there's a lot of folks out there just have this idealistic view of what nature is they have this view of nature being this place of peace and harmony and

it's a fucking brutal horrible environment where no one gets out alive all those animals die and they die they don't live past like seven or eight years if they're really really lucky exactly and the idea that there's something wrong with someone stepping in there and killing one of them and getting the meat off of it as opposed to going to a supermarket and getting some corralled up penned up animal that's lived its life in hell it just shows you how goofy we are today yeah no i i know we're kind of we're talking about tansania now we're talking about me but i just the other day i put up a picture of me and you with your bear and just the comments i had from facebook and it's just

like one of them that just stuck out to me was why would you kill a bear i thought bears were endangered it's like they're definitely endangered in cities they're endangered if i'm around but but no it's there's how many bears are there where we were it's unbelievable how many bears are so so that but that's the that's kind of to your point people are just so lost they just don't get it i mean bear the bear numbers have never been higher than they are right now they need to be managed they need to be hunted and people still think they're endangered because i guess they don't see them down here at starbucks well there's also the anthropomorphizing you know that that that's that uh expression where you connect human

characteristics to animals like yogi bear and you know donald Duck and shit like that. These animals are so fucking ruthless. The idea that people love bears is so beyond crazy. While we were there, John's son, John, right? Yeah. John's son is John too, right? What's John's son's name? Yeah, Jonathan. Jonathan.

Jonathan, yeah. Jonathan watched a bear kill a cub, like attack this female, killed a cub, ate half of it, then took off. The female came back and finished off her own cub. She ate it. Right. Like, these are the animals you're talking about. The animals where when spring rolls around, the bears wake up and they go out looking

for cubs. That's what they do. They go out looking to eat cubs. I had Sue Aiken on the podcast yesterday from the Life Below Zero show. I don't know if you've ever seen that show. I haven't, no. She lives 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. And she was talking about just the bear population in her area and how she was attacked by a bear and like really fucked up bad dislocated her hips cracked her skull a young male bear attacked her and

basically grizzly yeah yeah basically wasn't it was she was like if it was older would have eaten me but it just basically kicked my ass and took my territory like decided it took her territory so she went back and shot it and killed it perfect yeah she's badass bitch she lives by herself in the middle of nowhere she's as gangster as they come yeah um but this idea that people have in their head about bears is that the bears these peaceful you know creatures of the forest they're like some of the most brutal predators and cannibals that we know of in nature and delicious yeah oh yeah they're very delicious that's the other thing that i got from our trip people like why would you eat bear

why would you bear bears are gross people don't even eat bear that's so not true yeah no there we had some amazing meals up there off the bear we killed yeah jen just cooked up i mean i remember sitting out there in that plastic table with all of us and just eating this food bite after bite thinking this is some of the best meat i've ever had it's really good yeah yeah people have this conception that that you can't eat bear or bear meat isn't good it's just like amazing well any meat if you don't prepare it right if you don't take care of it after you kill it you know i mean you can get cow meat that rots you know if you don't take care of it if you don't prep it if you don't properly uh cool it and put it on ice or whatever you have to do but jen knows how to cook it yeah she did a great job with it oh yeah it was good but um yeah like what

you're talking about with those boars they come out and they kill the cubs you know all a big male dominant boar cares about is his genetics being passed on so when he sees those those cubs out there that aren't his he's like well those aren't my genes so he wants to kill them so that female comes back and heat and then he can breed her and that's the whole thing and as you said once that cub even that that female's cub was dead it went from being her cub when it was dead then it was just okay it's just more food yeah that's that was a transition and it's just so there is no emotion involved in anything it's purely survival and purely passing on genes yeah that's it and the numbers are stunning when we were up there we saw so many bear we got to see a bear ufc bout remember those two bear that were going at it because the male kept coming

back in and the females trying to chase them off i mean cam and i were on the ground and we're probably like 20 yards from these bears duking it out yeah and they were going this one male bear kept sneaking back in yeah he. He kept wanting to get to where the bait was. And the female was trying to chase him off because her cubs were there. Her cubs ran up a tree.

She chased him off and he came back. And she chased him off and he came back. And then she took off and then she's like, fuck this. And she came back in again

and then they started duking it out. And when they're duking it out, they're like, rawr, rawr, rawr. Primal. Oh, it's so wild. Yeah. Because yeah because i mean this wasn't in a zoo i mean they could have just said you know what fuck this let's go eat those people they're right there and they just could have just made a mad run for us we

would have been fucked oh yeah well and you know you mentioned the bait there and that's another thing people don't really understand because baiting gets a black eye sometimes for hunting. But up there, it's really the only way to control those bear numbers. There's so many bear. They kill so many moose. The country is so thick. And if you're going to hunt them, you have to bring them to you somehow and be able to kill them. And if you didn't bait you would probably

never kill a bear up there the only time you would get one is maybe you'd get the fall bears that were eating the berries right on the hills where you could see them but the the thickness of the forest i i compare it to like a box of q-tips right it's like you're not seeing anything 30 40 yards in you're not seeing shit it's just all trees it's so dense and and another key to baiting and seeing those bear up close is identifying what you're killing because you want to take out those dominant males that have already bred that are older past their prime and that's what we're trying to kill up there we're not taking sows with cubs we're not taking young males that are haven't reached you know john and jen

what they like to they like to kill seven foot plus black bear so to do that you know people look at bear and all bear look the same to the uneducated eye well once when you can see them up close how we were hunting them on the ground you get a real good idea of what you're shooting what you're hunting what you're gonna pass up and that's that's a key too so it's just it's just um it's wildlife management at its best really yeah that's the best way to put it wildlife management and the the number of people that even hunt other animals are kind of a bit ignorant to it like there was folks that jen was telling us that some local moose hunters were giving her a hard time. And she was like, do you understand that the majority of these moose calves are getting killed by bears?

Right. Like the majority. Right. Like when they're out of their mother, like that bear smells that and starts looking for them. Yeah. It's like, I mean, and that's nature. That's what happens out there. You can't blame the bear.

No. Bears just being a bear. But you can't blame the bear no there's just being a bear but you can control their numbers and help the moose yeah i couldn't help think about grizzly man though when we were out there i'm like maybe timothy treadwell i'm like how fucking i'm making fun of this timothy treadwell guy like on a daily basis here i am on the ground standing next to his bow hunting maniac who only hunts on the ground he doesn't want to go up in tree stands because that's for pussies i you know i just like being i don't know i like that connection with the animal on the ground yeah it's a connection yeah i mean it it can be real and it can be very intense as you experienced but there's nothing like it for me it's very wild it's very

wild um it's a it's a totally different kind of hunting because just the sheer numbers you just really do see a lot of bear and john was saying that he thinks in his area where he hunts there is somewhere between three and eight bear per square mile which which is a lot. I mean, that is a lot of animals. Yeah. Yeah. Now, there's, you know, people are used to seeing quite a few deer, quite a few elk, maybe if they live in the right country. You know, whitetail deer especially, that's how there are back there.

It's just amazing. Yeah, it's a really wild place. Alberta's amazing. It's so beautiful. It's just so thick with wilderness and trees and it's just so much wildlife up there so much cool shit to see yeah and that's to me that's the big not not i mean that's one one more draw for hunting is when you're just driving through a country and you're just kind of in the cities and you're driving around maybe in a car

you don't get to experience what that country is. I mean, to be out there, to live it, to, you know, when I go to all these places, Tanzania, Alberta, Australia, and I live out there and sit on the ground and see the animals and hunt them one-on-one, that's when you really get to experience everything that country has to offer. And that's so valuable. I mean, people, that connection has made me who I am, whether I'm killing anything or not, just being there and just being part of the country. It's, I don't know, it's amazing.

Yeah, it's definitely something that we're completely disconnected to by standing in the 101 traffic over and over and over again and just grinding out every week the sort of the same way you start this becomes life it becomes life it becomes this is life life is you get up you your alarm clock goes off you got an hour commute and you really should be about a three minute commute but you're going to get stuck in traffic yeah Yeah. And when you go to a place like Alberta and you're out there in just this unbelievably beautiful, dense forest, and you're out there doing something that requires a tremendous amount of discipline, too. One of the things that I really enjoy about archery and about bow hunting is it's not as easy as set up. I'm not saying that rifle hunting is easy

because it's none of it is easy but it's not if you have a good rest for your rifle you know and the animals no more than you know 100 yards away is pretty good likelihood that you're going to shoot that animal 100 yards away with a bow and arrow good fucking luck just started yeah you're you're you know most likely you're not going to hit that thing. That's really fucking far. No, that's, you know, because I rifle hunted for three years before I started bow hunting. And I started rifle hunting. I loved it.

I loved the challenge. I still love going out on rifle hunts. I haven't rifle hunted for 26 years. But I just like the hunting atmosphere and environment and and working together but what i noticed when i transitioned from rifle hunting to bow hunting is where the rifle hunt ended like as you said 100 yards 200 yards where that where it ended it was over if you made the shot game over that's where the bow hunt really begins so you you're 100 yards or 200 yards and now you got to be on your a game you're now getting from there to the

red zone or bow range of an animal that's where it starts to get that's where it's difficult for you comfortable is like 60 yards in is that what's comfortable for you i like them at eight yards if i can but uh yeah i i mean i practice a lot um i'm very comfortable i can make the shot at 60 yeah it's just a different discipline archery is and one of the things that i've talked about with some of my friends that really gotten into archery is about how the world sort of goes away when you're focusing on that bullseye. It's a weird Zen state. And really, in that sense, the practice, for someone who has no interest in hunting, maybe you're a vegetarian, I totally respect that.

If that's what you want to do. But archery in and of itself is an amazing pursuit just for the meditative aspects of it. There's something about archery. I would go, I screwed my shoulder up, i shoot you too much shooting too much i was doing 100 150 arrows a day after the move after the bear hunt i got a little fucking crazy and i developed a little tendonitis a little crazy on the bear hunt i if you if you recall i don't know how many bow hunters we had we had maybe six bow hunters up there but you shot at least double more

than anybody else did i mean so you you like shooting the bow obviously but then you ramped it up after that yeah or i ramped it up hard i i liked i was doing more than anybody because first of all you know there was a i felt like a real obligation to make an accurate shot. And I wanted to be 100% prepared. And I'm a big stickler on preparation no matter what I do. If it's martial arts, if it's comedy, anything I do, I prepare the shit out of things. I'm obsessive compulsive in that way. So even like when we were all hanging, everybody was hanging around, laughing i was like i could be shooting more arrows so i would just go off and start

shooting arrows while everybody else was goofing off i just had to it's you know it's maybe people could even misconstrue it as being anti-social but i just had to do it i had to get those arrows in yeah i i the way i perceived it was that was it. That was your first ever bow hunt. And you just wanted to do everything you could to make, to really, we're trying to kill an animal ethically and quickly. And so I know you took and take a lot of responsibility in that and our role as a steward of the land and the animals. And so got to make that shot. You know, it happens so fast. Even if you're hunting bear in a controlled environment, it's with a bow that is still tough. It's still tough. So, I mean, I salute you for your commitment there and practicing. And you made a great shot on your bear.

Yeah, it was perfect. It died in seconds. And that's what I wanted. I wanted it to just be okay. And and also it's beautiful having a friend like you who could talk me through all that stuff who can talk me through the right way to prepare and all the right equipment having the right bow you know you get people give you a hard time because you shoot really powerful bows and like you don't need to shoot a bow that powerful you don't i'm just retarded why would i shoot that that's stupid well the idea being that the more powerful the bow the the more impact the arrow has and the more it can penetrate into an animal it just makes

sense yeah but not everybody has cam haynes guns that's what's up you know well you know that is a real pet i feel bad sometimes because sometimes you know i'll talk about my bow and then out of the blue somebody says why do you need to shoot 80 or 90 pounds and i've heard it for years probably thousands of times and i just feel like lashing out at that one person who maybe that was the first time they've ever even been on my facebook page or whatever that's what what's happened the other day. And I didn't, I didn't lash out because I don't, you know, I try to respect everybody. I don't, whatever. I don't, I've just tried to be respectful. And so all I said on, and to that guy was, uh, you know, he says he's killed all these animals and got pastors with 62 pounds. Okay. I said, all right, well, what, what about the guys who shoot 50 pounds?

They'd probably say to you, why do you shoot 62 pounds? I shoot 50 and kill my animals. So they would say you're doing too much. And my whole thing is I prove, I hope for the best prepare for the worst. And so, um, the worst is on a big bull elk you catch a shoulder blade or you drill a big heavy rib or if i'm hunting cape buffalo i hit a rib which is like a two by four so i'm preparing for the worst i hope for the best you know if you think almost any bow with a razor sharp broadhead if it's just hitting soft flesh between the ribs is going to kill it you could probably do that with 40 pounds maybe even 30 some pounds but you're hoping for the the very best situation it's not going to happen every time it's probably going to be rare so that's my whole thing prepare

for the worst hope for the best well what's interesting is that you've got a whole group of people that are sort of following your philosophy now. Like this whole, you know, your catchphrase, keep hammering. I see all this hashtag, keep hammering people in the gym, preparing for bow hunts. It's like people prepare for bow hunts now like they're preparing for an athletic event. I see these dudes doing all these rows and lifts and chin-ups and pulling their back muscles and getting everything in order and then running up hills and all following your lead and treating this as like an athletic endeavor. If you've ever seen it, actually, we didn't play your Under Armour commercial the first time, did we? Did we play it? The Wolf.

Did we play that commercial? See if we did. We probably did. I love that fucking commercial. But that commercial is the perfect, it's like it shows you preparing, you know, running up hills. And that's also part of this bow hunting thing is that you're preparing for an event. As much of an event as a marathon, as much of an event, and maybe even more so. Because it's this, you know, people don like the the term spiritual when it's connected to

hunting but there is something that's very spiritual about taking an animal respecting its life taking out that meat and then eating it and this feeling that you have of being connected to this cycle of life it's a very very different thing than anything I've ever done before. Anything I've ever done where, especially anything you've ever done where you've eaten meat. Yeah. I mean, have you ever eaten meat from a store or meat from a restaurant? There's a complete wall between you and the process. And the bow hunting part is like one more step closer yeah it's like there's the rifle thing

but then the bow hunting thing is one more step yeah this is this isn't the under armor one though no this is uh bradlyn shocky did this one this is but this that's that's the training part definitely a different one yeah there there is a different one there's an under armor commercial but that one's cool to watch too but you could you could see the amount of preparation that's involved in in this and so you know there's a lot of people out there that are like really into crossfit and they're really into like working out and you are and i am and like i had this dude who was on fear factor once him and his girlfriend nice folks they were crossfit people and i was like well what do you do like with all that

exercise you're just exercising for exercise you know like it's good to be in shape and everything like yeah why don't you take up jujitsu or something like that go put it to use like see progress in an athletic endeavor yeah well one of the best and ultimate ways is hunting because you you're putting that progress you're putting that athleticism and that training and all that hard work, you're putting it into this really primal situation where you're going uphill, especially like the elk hunting, which I can't wait to get a part of. Next year.

Next year. Yeah, we're going to go bow hunting for elk next year. That seems to me like probably the ultimate of those yeah the i think the thing with elk for me that's that's been we probably mentioned that before because if anybody who's going to talk to me about bow hunting is elk's going to come up um that was always the the biggest dream was killing a big bull elk with my bow and it's so hard it is so difficult and it you know I killed a bull elk my very first year bow hunting I think I was 19 and I killed a spike bull took a long time to do it but when I said okay I want to kill now a mature big bull six by six in the

wilderness by myself that took eight years to do eight years of bow hunting to ever i killed other bulls i killed some five points a few five points another spike um a six by five but it took me eight years to get that quote dream bull and to anybody to to i guess a seasoned i don't know uh trophy hunter it They probably wouldn't even have shot it. But it was a nice 6x6, scored about 275 inches, Pope and Young. And it was a wilderness on my own, and that took eight years. So it's a tough deal. When you have a wilderness hunt on your own and you shoot this animal,

you're miles away from civilization. Yeah. You just hike it back in steps one at a time. Well, with that bull at that time, I owned with my buddy Roy, um, four llamas. And so we would train these llamas and a llama isn't like a horse. Um, but they can pack 60 pounds. So four of them, you got 240 pounds of meat. You can haul out or gear or whatever else so on that hunt I had four llamas available the problem was I killed that bull opening day of the season we had just walked in with those llamas with me and these other guys I was by myself about 10 miles away because I liked

I didn't I like to be by myself I mean right now I just kind of tolerate the cameraman and, you know, if I'm with somebody. But really, what I'm drawn to is solo hunting on my own just because I just like the test of that. So anyway, I was by myself. I killed this bull. It was opening day. I skinned it out, got it hung up. And in that high country, I killed it is probably about over 7 000 feet so even though it was september and it was warm in the evenings at 7 000 feet or at night it gets cool

the air is dry so if you hang that meat up like in a north facing timber where the sun stays off of it and it stays cooler in there um and you get up off the ground where the wind can move uh you can get what what hunters called the meat would glaze over so it basically cools glazes over and i've had even in in um early season like that i could you could hang uh deer and elk for five days and the meat would be fine and so what i did with that is i broke that all down and i'm like, well, I'll go see how the llamas are doing. I packed all the way back llamas because we just came in the day before we're too tired. They're, they're only about 300 pounds. So it's not like they got a ton of muscle. They'd walked 12 miles in with gear and I knew they couldn't get that

bull out. So I waited for these other guys, um, who were hunting 10 miles away from me that night to come back to camp and i'm like guys i said i killed a bull if uh if you guys help me get it out you know we'll go down to legrand i'll get us a hotel room i'll buy us pizza do this whole thing i was like would do anything and so me and three other guys packed that whole bowl out 12 miles took it to the meat locker there and then packed back in 12 miles with how many how big was the bowl is that is that first six by six bowl i killed so we probably had i don't know there's probably 240 pounds of meat 250 pounds of meat you know split up so i mean is it yeah that's an enormous animal so we're talking about like 1200 pounds on the hoof something like that no that one was probably 800

800 what's like the biggest one you've ever seen the biggest bull i've ever killed was in 2010 it was a roosevelt bull in oregon i was with my buddy uh jody sear he called that or i think he no he was filming. Then Kevin Akers was calling. Just, we all grew up bow hunting there in Oregon. Just, you know, kind of bow hunting rednecks from, I guess, the bush of Oregon. And so we got this bull in and I ended up killing it. And it was, you know, we're thinking 1,100 pounds. It was just a giant six by six old 12- or 13-year-old bull,

and that's the biggest bodied bull I'd ever seen. Elk is interesting, too, because the old animals still taste delicious. Yeah, yeah, and I'm not sure why. Yeah, because like deer, you can get like a ruddy old buck that's like an 8-, 9-year-old buck, and it's like, whoa, we might need to throw this one in the steam cooker well you know that crock pot or something you know that was like those you know that water buffalo or a couple of my killed in australia they were they can get old um the cape buffalo i killed in tanzania dude that meat i mean in

tanzania with that cape buffalo we use that for lion bait i mean it's just not good meat because those bulls are so old and so tough and it's just you know if you had to eat it i guess you could i'm sure the natives there would definitely eat it yeah we just make carpaccio out of it and then chew it like jerky i guess yeah i don't know be like a cape buffalo steak good luck right yeah yeah that's a dense ass animal no but you know so i killed a kudu that was excellent meat uh sable they're beautiful meat um kudu is supposed to be one of the best right yeah i mean and sable too yeah just uh yeah there's a lot of those animals a lot of good eating animals are not just not buffalo the controversy about african animals is um i mean you get what i call facebook controversy which is very uh sort of

cursory controversy like it's not people that are really investigating it and trying to figure out what is going on here they just see a picture of a pretty girl from texas with with an animal on the ground and they go oh that bitch and ranella wrote this article which is really interesting where he was saying that a lot of what you're dealing with is just straight up sexism yeah you're dealing with people that don't want to see a pretty girl in that environment and for whatever reason they either decide it's not her place or especially because she's pretty they have some certain amount of resentment about her anyway because she carries around a certain amount of privilege and easy access to life because she's so pretty. The doors just open up for her, which is true, right?

Yeah. really sort of investigate what's going on in africa in that these people that live in these communities if it wasn't for these high fence hunting operations their resources would be severely diminished yeah they're making so much more money because the money that comes in from tags from hunters and there's an industry there now and it's kind of a fucked up thing to say to a lot of people like hey there's an industry in killing animals yeah but that industry has served two purposes one those animals are in gigantic healthy populations now where they're on the verge of extinction just a couple decades ago right yeah and it's uh yeah hunting there i mean especially you know the high fence thing that's that's a whole nother thing that's basically

i guess you could it's close to farming it is really close to farming animals um but it is industry there it is a way for locals to make money and be involved and and generate income for their families so i mean how do you who am i to judge that yeah i can't um in tania, there's even less. So most of the high fence hunting is in South Africa. In Tanzania, in the bush way back there, there is even less opportunity for those people. There's no food. I mean, there's limited food, but no power, no water, grass, shacks, or huts.

It's, you know. It's real poverty it's yeah poverty on an intense scale that i think us as americans we you know you dip your toes in you go visit for a little bit and you're still not really grasping the idea of being born there no with no opportunity to get out i don't see how you ever could. But what's weird, so I was wrestling with this whole time because when I go to these places, I love the culture. I love the people.

Even there, I was trying to learn Swahili with some of the trackers that were working with me. Rashidi, awesome guy, speaks only Swahili. So I really invest myself into the culture, and I just want to learn. I want to sort of get, I want to see things through their eyes. Well, I saw these grass shacks and all these people, and every grass shack had six little kids running around it. And it's just like, I'm'm thinking this is awful i mean it's

no hope for six kids at every grass shack that seems i don't know it just seemed very sad to me but we're we're there getting ready to cross this river in the truck and the river was high so we're kind of out uh ryan shalom is the he's he owns Greenleaf, Tanzania. And so we're there, and we're kind of seeing what's going on. And there was a village about a quarter mile away. And as we're looking at the river and trying to make a game plan, there was music and just people singing. And I'm like, is it happy hour over here?

What is going on? And that really just hit home. It's like I see them, and it happy hour over here? What is going on? And it just, that really just hit home. It's like, you know, I see them and I think there's no hope and they must be miserable, but they're laughing and singing and dancing. Maybe, maybe they're okay. I don't know. I mean, are they happy? They seemed happy to me.

So I don't really, it's so, it's weird. It's, you know, i don't really it's so it's weird it's you know i don't know i can i can look at it from the outside and judge and say oh you know you must be so depressed maybe they're not i don't know yeah i think people are incredibly adaptable and um when people grow up in an environment that's just what they're used to you get you used to it, and that's how you live. And if that's all you know, you don't know what it's like to stay at the Four Seasons and eat at the buffet in the morning and have the valet pull your car around. All the shit that some people think is the good life.

But those people that are living like that at the Four Seasons, checking their Rolex, where is this goddamn valet? Those people might be on fucking antidepressants. Yeah. And the people in Africa are singing and playing the bongo drums and having a great old time. You know what would cause the people at the Four Seasons the most heartache? What? If the freaking Wi-Fi wasn't working.

Yes. This goddamn Wi-Fi is bullshit. You know? Oh. I tried to get a kudu steak this morning. Yeah. We don't even have kudu. Yeah. We think that this have kudu. Yeah.

We think that this is the only way to live. I mean, look, life is about friendship, experience, having fun, and staying healthy. And whatever those people can do to make that happen and whatever is in their environment that they can take advantage of as far as like, you know, nutrition and, you know, being able to take care of their family. You know, they do what they can with what they've got. And that's also something where the hunters help out. And this is often being criticized as just like, oh, people are just using that as an excuse. And that a lot of the meat goes to these families in these villages. And it is a huge huge

benefit to them to get fresh protein like um like brian stevens that we were talking to when we're on that hunt yeah was talking to me about an elephant kill that they had yeah they killed an elephant and you talk about killing an elephant everybody goes oh my god you killed an elephant how the fuck could you kill an elephant i don't have any desire to kill an elephant but i wanted to listen to his perspective and see what he had to say about it one of the things that he was saying was that when you kill an elephant the village they all pile in to get a piece of that elephant like it's so welcome like there's these photos of these people with these just great baskets filled with elephant meat. And there's dozens and dozens of people taking this meat away.

And this is protein that they wouldn't ordinarily not have been able to get. Then you're dealing with the money that this guy had to pay to harvest this elephant, which is a substantial amount of money. I think it's like $30,000 or $50,000. Can be, yeah. And then you're dealing with the reality that in these certain circumstances in some of these places they have a population problem people don't want to think that they think that elephants are endangered they are in some places yeah but africa is fucking huge it is a huge huge huge continent so if they have an issue in one area where they don't have very many elephants it

doesn't mean the entire place is you know has a lack of animals no no and you know one thing i was i was fascinated with you know we we had to deal with poachers when i was back there in tanzania and and most of poachers we dealt with were simply what they they call is after protein all they're they're up there they're killing buffalo they're killing so i say we wouldn't want to eat a buffalo they will gladly take a buffalo but uh so they go up there and we ran across three poachers at one time usually there's a shooter and two packers and what they do is they kill an animal they live up there they they cut it up they dry it out and then all they're packing out

all this meat with is a burlap sack with like wire straps so wire through the burlap and then they load that up with this dried out meat which i don't know even know what it would weigh at that time but that's how they get it out and they're not selling that they might sell the the protein when they get out but it's just meat it's not like this high level poaching operation right whether selling ivory or something and they're willing to get that meat they're willing to shoot you and the game scout who were we were with is willing to shoot them a lot of times it's whoever can shoot first and that's that's that was a uh eye-opening experience i mean you know we have somebody you just don't do that here it's

just it's just difference to there it's just like whoever can shoot first and that one that the first guy that we saw didn't shoot at us because um he didn't have any ammo he had to basically load his gun like a muzzleloader. It was a rifle, but he had, I found their camp and we investigated everything they had in their camp. And so he had like ball bearings and pieces of lead and things he would shove down the barrel. And he had wadding and he had a firing pin, match heads to ignite it, gunpowder. And so basically he would get one shot and to get that one shot he had to be close so that's why he didn't shoot at us we were at about 100 and some yards he ended

up circling around getting to 50 yards and he's just standing there but he only knew he only had one shot so anyway the whole point is they're willing to risk their lives to get protein now we did find a dead out. There was an elephant skull there. And so just had me curious as to how that works. I said, so obviously somebody came in here and poached this elephant. How much are they getting for that ivory? And so we figured maybe a 20 or 30 year old elephant is, they say would 50 pounds of ivory just roughly could have more could have less um 50 pounds of ivory so for 50 pounds of ivory a poacher will get 250 dollars wow 250 dollars i was thinking maybe they're going to get thousands of dollars 250 dollars

whereas you know you you mentioned Brian Stevens and the elephant hunt that Americans would go on or, or, you know, a hunter that would pay for it and they're paying upward, maybe $50,000. So you're trading the life of an animal. If it's poached for 250, or if a hunter goes over there to hunt it and the meat is utilized by the whole village, $50,000. Now, what helps a community more? Yeah, well, it certainly helps a community more if a hunter pays. But the real question that people have is why does a hunter want to do that? Why would someone want to go over and shoot an elephant?

And I kind of see their point of view. Like what is it about an elephant? Why would you want to go over there and shoot this big, magnificent animal? Why couldn't you just go over there and enjoy looking at it right um good question you know i guess uh for me i can't relate to an elephant i've never i've never really thought about killing an elephant or even pursued the opportunity but i want to kill a lion i went over there to kill an afric with my bow. And people, same question, why? And to me, the reason why I do what I do every day is a test.

And I feel like if I'm going after the king of the jungle, so to speak, or Simba, with my my bow that's the ultimate test and i mean if you're not testing yourself or for me if i'm not testing myself what's the point but then okay so here's the argument people would be like you fucking asshole why do you want to go over there and shoot a lion lion's a beautiful majestic animal it's the king of the jungle why would you want to shoot it you're not even going to eat it but you are are going to eat it. Yeah. No. And you should see it's such, I don't know. There's a connection with the natives, the Tanzanians over there where we were. If any cat is killed, and when I whole village or all the guys that were there

working you basically stop in the jeep up on the hill they get the jeep all put brush all over it and they have this chant and they they sing this chant as you drive down they shoot the gun twice to announce to the hunting camp that we're coming in and we got a special animal. And, uh, you know, Ryan explained this whole thing to me. Um, but we got a special animal. And so it's either a cat or an elephant and they come in and it's just, it's the biggest celebration when Richard killed that leopard, they, all the, all the guys there, the, the Tanzanians there were singing this chant and it was just, it was so powerful.

And they had him, he sat in this chair and they lifted it up in this chair and were carrying them around the camp. And that was for, to honor the life of the leopard and for, and lions are even one step above for them. Simba is, they have so much reverence and respect for a lion. It's, you know, I couldn't even really understand it. Only they could probably explain it. But it's just, no, when that animal dies, it's not just, you're just killing an animal just to kill an animal. There's a lot, there's a connection animal just to kill an animal there's there's a lot there's a lot of there's a connection that goes into it uh the animal is valuable the animal is uh just

revered and uh and i assume they also have to keep the populations down yeah that's uh you know lion hunting is i mean a lot of people look at lions and judge the hunting forum saying what, and there might be a time when there is no more lion hunting just because of public outcry, basically. But as it is now, Ryan, uh, Shalom, where I was hunting with the green leaf, um, I had the opportunity. We could have killed, we had in at bait, four-year-old lions. Male, legal, big manes, by themselves, definitely could kill them. He wants to let those four-year-olds age to six or greater. He only wants to kill six-year-old lions or greater because then they're past their prime,

past their breeding prime. They've done their job for the population, so to to speak and that's when he'll take them out not before even though it's legal but um just to build that pride up and then another thing that they'll um he does is if a male lion is with a pride so meaning there's females there and there's cubs there that if he's there with them they're his cubs otherwise he'd kill him just like the bear same same type of deal but he would never kill a male lion that had a pride or is even close to a pride that um because what that would do if you killed a male even though it's legal um what that would do is another male would come in so the male you killed his dad another male would come in those wouldn't be his cubs so he would kill them so you'd have two generations of

lions gone and so part of his management practice there is um only old lions only old lone lions male lions and that's it so you're basically catching a lion at the end of his run. That's it. They're not breeding anymore. They've done their job. Basically, the only value they have now is for a hunter. The only value, but they're still a life. They're a life.

Yeah. They're a living creature, a majestic living creature. Oh, definitely. But that's where people have the issue, right? Yeah. Do you try to look at it from their point of view ever? Do you ever see like the anti-hunting people? Like anti-hunting people fall into a bunch of different categories.

There's people who don't think you should eat any meat at all. That's the super extreme. Then there's people who can respect you eating animals that were raised in an ethical way. Free range cows, free range chickens. That's the only way I would do it. That's some group. And then there's people that say, well, I really respect people who go out and hunt their own meat. But as you get deeper and deeper into the categories of people that have problems with hunting,

the categories of people that have problems with hunting, at the very top of that list, which is like the most hated, is people that hunt only for the trophy. Trophy, yeah. And that's what a lot of people think of when they think of elephant. A lot of people think of when they think of lion. And I have no desire to shoot anything I'm not going to eat. I never will.

I just, it's not, my goal with getting into hunting was to connect with the food that i eat to try to figure out i mean when i first hunted with ranella i was wondering i was like what if i shoot this deer and say fucking i'm a vegetarian now i'm never doing this again yeah it was the exact opposite right like i've i've felt like an immediate incredible connection to it's very exciting and thrilling and people don't want to hear you say that they want to hear it like a very somber moment yeah but i mean look there's hbo real sports aired it the other night there's this thing where uh they did this uh this whole piece on hunting and this whole uh eat what you kill movement what what they called it and they had the clip of me shooting my first deer and you know i kind of forgot like how like i was pretty emotional when it happened yeah so there's there's definitely a

sense of loss when something like that happens but it's not it's not sad you know that's that's an animal that i wanted to eat yeah you know but but there's a difference between that and just going after some animal just to shoot it you know just, just I need to get this on my list. Yeah. You know, and I have a fucking, I have a basketball court in my house filled with dead animals. Yeah. And, you know, this is my next one. Right.

Yeah. That's true. You know, and I guess what I'm thinking about it, we even got judged when you killed your bear because we had a picture of us smiling with the dead bear. And, you know, I have a hard time. The people on the fence who need to be convinced or could go either way, those are the people I can appeal to. And maybe make an argument that, you know, how hard I work and how much hunting means to me and how much I respect these animals. Those people, the extreme people, I don't think you're ever going to win that those guys over no I don't think so so whatever that's just a lost cause but the the other ones that's why you know and I've I've posted

this before when I when I have when I kill an animal I don't want a bunch of blood and hunters have said blood's part of it why are you worried about showing blood well because i don't want to offend the people who might be in the middle you know what i mean but when you get judged we got judged for smiling because with your dead bear yeah um the reason why i'm you know yeah when animals i guess it's not i don feel sad, but I respect when the animal dies. But the smiling part is I'm proud of everything that went in, how much work is involved and how much sacrifice, you know, when you killed yours, you made. And that's just, it's a celebration. You killed an animal.

We're going to eat it. All that months and months of work paid off that should feel good yeah there's nothing wrong with hey we're celebrating this moment it's such a special cherished moment let's smile well this is the weird the weirdness of modern civilization is that no one has a problem with you smiling when you're eating a cheeseburger if you look at any burger king ad any mcdonald's ad when someone's eating ah big smile on their face i mean you're eating a fucking animal that lived its life in torture right i mean there's very little possibility that that animal was a free-range animal that animal most likely was corralled up was fed an

unnatural diet to fatten it up was stuffed full of antibiotics to deal with the fact that it was fed this unnatural diet because it would otherwise get sick. All sorts of indigestion problems, stomach problems. And that's what you're eating with a big stupid smile on your face. And no one bats an eye. Right. I wrote a blog post that I still haven't put up yet because I dealt with so many fucking idiots getting mad at me after I shot that bear.

But one of them was this guy at the airport who had seen a picture of us. Oh, when you were arrogant? Remember that? Oh, yeah. That was a lady. This is a good story, actually. Cam and I were on the plane, and there was a gentleman who was the flight attendant that was a little bit light in the loafers. He was perhaps a gay man. Let's just say hundred percent he was a gay man a very nice gay man he was very friendly and he was really cool and we were having fun with the guy we were you know he was just he was just being a friendly guy but he kept complimenting cam's arms cam's a very

athletic and muscular man he works out a lot he's got a lot of veins in his arms and stuff and this guy kept calling him muscles and he's like you know how would he say it though he's like oh muscles he he was so flamboyant i mean he was a great guy he was just super super nice guy don't get me wrong so anyway he he just kept complimenting cam and what do you do what do you do he's like well you know workout stuff i bet you do i do you do? What do you do? He's like, well, you know, work out and stuff. I bet you do. I bet you do. I mean, it was fun.

It was fun. Totally lighthearted. So as we're leaving, I said to Cam, I go, if that guy doesn't at least smack you on the ass on the way out, I'm going to be very disappointed. That's all I said. And so we're waiting for our luggage, and this woman came up to me. He didn't, by the way. He didn't by the way didn't Really sad. I mean I think felt like you guys had a connection. I kind of tensed up when I walked by this I was getting ready

So just me and cam having fun and it wasn't mean-spirited at all We're talking we're sitting by each other. Mm-hmm talking to each other. Yeah and talking like at this level It wasn't like we're yelling out that guy don't slap you in the ass. I'm gonna be disappointed We were sitting by each other, talking to each other. Yeah. And talking like at this level. It wasn't like we were yelling out, Beck Adams, slap you in the ass. I'm going to be disappointed. I think he's gay. Big old queer.

It was us having a private conversation. Behind us happened to be a lesbian. I'm assuming a lesbian and her girlfriend. And when we're waiting for the luggage, the woman started giving me a hard time. She called me arrogant. You're so arrogant. I go, how am I arrogant? She goes, that man was a nice man.

I go, he's a very nice man. And she goes, I heard what you said about him slapping your friend in the ass. I go, he was flirting with my friend. I go, first of all, it's not arrogant. My friend is a handsome man. It was one way flirting. I don't want this. One way.

Absolutely one way. let's not i don't want this one way absolutely one way we weren't flirting you were being very very friendly to him in a an i am not gay way but let's be honest we look like we could be a couple like brutish gay guys i mean there's a lot of those if you go to west hollywood and i presume you don't when you're in town, but if you go down Santa Monica Boulevard, there's several clubs that have a lot of men that are built very similar to us. They also might have beards like we do. Is this about bow hunting? No, it's about gay sex.

So, you know, he could have gotten, you know, he was testing the waters. The guy that's, if you're gay, you never know. Look, you got to think, if you're gay you never know look you gotta think if you're gay what is it they say it's like 10 of people are gay but i don't even think it's that i think that's their wishful thinking i think it's probably like probably like one out of 20 let's say five percent whatever the number is that people like i keep looking at jamie i don't know why he's straight as fuck but whatever the number is you know how does a gay guy know whether another guy's gay you gotta ask him so if he says to you look at you muscles and you're like look at you

bam it's on you know you landed in edmonton the exchange numbers things get popping how's the guy find out he doesn't find out unless he talks to you right but there was nothing inappropriate the way he was communicating with you there was it was just fun there was nothing inappropriate the way he was communicating with you there was it was just fun there's nothing inappropriate the way we were joking around about it yeah i lightheartedly said if he doesn't smack you on the ass on the way out i'm gonna be very disappointed we were just laughing yeah and this woman read me the fucking riot act being arrogant yeah she was saying i was arrogant and i go how was that arrogant i go my friend's very good looking i look at him.

He's a handsome guy. And she goes, that flight attendant was very nice. He was very friendly. I go, he was very nice. I just think you're very arrogant. I go, how am I arrogant? I go, I just don't understand how that's arrogant. That I think my friend's good looking?

That I'm upset that the guy didn't hit on him? I don't understand. Neil, the whole fucking flight. The whole flight. He's flirting fucking flight. The whole flight. He's flirting with you. The whole flight. One way. Just one way flirting.

Thank you. It was just, the woman was upset that I made, like, that I was having fun. She wanted to make an issue, I think, in front of her partner. Exactly. I guess. Yeah. Just to put you in your place. It backfired horribly.

It did. Because I was mocking her i was smiling and mocking her i and i never got upset like i never said fuck off dummy you know which is we're getting close to fuck off dummy though because she kept saying arrogant i'm like look i'm probably the least homophobic person that looks like me you're ever gonna meet you know i'm just not i don't care i grew i lived in san francisco from the time i was 7 to 11 my neighbors were gay and that formative period of my life i just was around gay people all the time and then being in show business i know so many fucking gay people i have a lot of gay friends

just gay comedians i don't know that dude but if i'd be friends with him just to find out about scientology i really would. So, anyway. How did we take that hard turn into being arrogant? You're talking about somebody in the airport. Oh, yeah. So, this is a totally different time in the airport. When you posted that picture up on Facebook, I got this fucking barrage of people that were angry at me. First of all, you said, I think you put up a clip.

The first time I was up there with Luke Bryan and I shot this bear. Yes, that's right. Hunter Jobes filmed it and we had the arrow coming out. Amazing video. We should show that one. Yeah. Yeah. It's a crazy video, man.

It's a big fucking bear too. So anyway, this arrow comes out. You retweeted it or did something to it. Anyway, you got hammered. So you're like, he goes, so Joe, he's like, he goes, when we go on this bear hunt, he goes, I don't want any pictures. I don't want any video. He goes, I can't deal with this negativity. I just don't want to deal with it.

And this hate. He goes, that's all I've been dealing with for two or three days. And so then we kind of. I rethought it. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it and I was like, wait a minute. What do I believe?

Yeah. What do I believe? And am I, am I changing what I'm putting out there? And a lot of people do do that. You change what you put out there because you're worried about the negative impact of something that you actually believe in. And I thought about it and I was like, no, fuck that, man. I don't, I don't not believe in hunting.

I don't not believe that you should be killing this bear and eating it there's nothing wrong with it so fuck it so you put the picture up and then whoo the the tidal wave of of hate just came my way so i wrote this blog entry that i will eventually put up and i want to put it up to uh promote uh john and jen too because i think they're they're just awesome folks and i'd love to pump up their business but um this guy came up to me at the fucking airport fucking disgusting meatheads oh that was actually the one that was on the blaze yeah that was actually that was actually in support of me because i put up a whole series of tweets explaining my position they had that on there yeah that was very cool of them to do that and that had did you see that number there that had uh 16 16 000 shares yeah i mean that got our to me the whole thing

this whole thing gets the hunting message out yes you know the the right type of hunting message out there um and that's that's what i'm trying to do love it love it but anyway yeah the guy at the airport comes up to me and he goes hey um i can't believe you killed a bear that's just so beyond fucked up and i just look down i go dude you're wearing leather shoes you're wearing leather shoes and he goes a cow is not a bear i go yeah you're right when we were there a bear ate a cub and then the mother came by and finished the cub off i told that that story we talked about earlier yeah i go so i never heard of a cow doing that so yeah you're right cows and bears are different the fuck you talk this hierarchy of

animals that you're allowed to eat yeah i'm not saying you should eat your neighbor's fucking dog okay you know don't eat pets you know i love my cats i love my dogs i love animals it's not i'm not an animal hater but this idea that there's like an animal that is sacred you know like some magical phoenix beast that's what they're i always hear that's what they're raised for yeah that's so stupid that that argument is so stupid that's worse yeah it's worse that an animal is imprisoned its entire life right its only existence to be slaughtered to be slaughtered when you shoot a deer and that deer is wandering around eating acorns and then boom or for you with you yeah you know the the arrow hits him the his life is over in seconds and his life was a hundred percent wild until the moment it ended.

Right. That's a far better existence. Yeah. Far better. Yeah. The moment my arrow passed through that bear, that bear was dead inside of 30 seconds. Oh, yeah. We heard, because it's kind of creepy, bears do a death moan, especially when you shoot them through the lungs, right?

They do. They do. And so within 15 seconds, we heard, know john and you so that's it you got it it was perfect and it was done yeah within 30 seconds of that arrow hitting it that animal was dead yeah lived its entire life how many years it was alive and then one moment and it's dead and then then we're skinning it. And then we ate it that night. And the idea that someone can come up to you and be wearing leather shoes and in some way judge you for killing and eating an animal. And I'm having the hide tanned. I mean, or, you know, the skin is being treated.

So I'm going to have a rug made out of it. I'm still eating the animal i feed it to my family yeah i mean i'm taking advantage of every single aspect of this animal when you pass by a restaurant when you pass by a supermarket every road you drive down in america pretty much you when you go by a gas station and you see a fucking package of slim jims every animal that has been involved in making those products lived a life a horrifying existence that is of unimaginable suffering in comparison to an animal that you hunt yeah not not turkey jerky though that's they're they're that was painful they lived a perfect life, right? Turkey?

They don't even feel it when you kill them. They don't even know. Yeah. No. And then I guess on the polar opposite of that, or I don't even know, this whole trying to figure out what the heck these people think. I get people, when you killed your bear and I had that up there, people were posting messages on my facebook saying they were going to kill my daughter and put her head on the wall whoa is that how what how do people get there yeah they get there well there's a lot of people involved in what's called the animal liberation movement

and it's so intense that there are folks that break into restaurants and steal lobsters and let them loose back in the ocean. Oh, God. These motherfuckers don't understand that the reason why people are here today is because your ancestors ate animals. If we were all just eating grass and fucking berries, we would still be jumping out of trees because leopards are attacking us. We literally wouldn't be here. trees because leopards are attacking us we literally wouldn't be here right the human beings one of the main contributing factors to the growth and development of the human brain was the fact that we changed our diet from a plant-based diet to a meat-based diet so the human intestines changed our whole digestive process changed and it freed up resources

that allowed the brain to grow and develop this is like accepted scientific fact obviously i'm a fucking idiot so when i'm telling you this it's not based on anything i truly understand i'm basically repeating things that smart people have figured out but that is what they figured out i mean that's a main scientific point when it comes to the development of the human brain yeah so that's why we're here dummy you know we're not here for tofu all right and by the way they've also been proved been proving over the last decade or so that plants have much more understanding of their environment than we ever gave them credit for and just because they don't have the ability to communicate with us they don't scream when you pull them out of

the ground or they don't try to get away when you go reaching for a turnip doesn't mean that they're not a life form that reacts to its environment the same way an animal does when an animal you know turns its ears up and looks around because it thinks a predator it's coming that's a natural reaction plants have natural reactions to plants develop toxins in order to discourage predation they have literally things that they develop over time to keep things from eating them they don't want to be fucking eating okay when you're eating cauliflower i have to feel sorry for plants now you have to feel sorry for plants well they you know if plants could scream no one people couldn't be so self-righteous right that's true it's a really foolish notion that life eats life.

It's always eaten life. That's what happens. That's how humans get by. That's how plants get by. Everything eats some form of life. Has to. There's a cycle. And we, somehow or another, want to disconnect ourselves from that or disconnect ourselves

from the concept of things that are sentient things that are aware of their environment things they can see and hear they're similar to us but you know not everybody wants to be disconnected because after the last podcast i was on with you do you know how many new bow hunters wanted listen to what we talked about listen to the connection we talked about and never had thought about bow hunting never had shot a bow and all of a sudden they were at their pro shop or they wanted to learn more i mean i've had guys who said i just as i think it was yesterday this guy said he goes i hadn't heard of you before joe's podcast he goes and i sat one night and watched every one of your videos wow i mean so that's awesome so there's there's people there are people who are disconnected, but there are people who, I guess, have been inspired by talking about this and talking about the type of hunting and the connection we have and want that same thing.

Yeah. And want to have something to train for and want to have a purpose. Like you said, why are you in shape? Are you competing? you know like you said um why are you in shape you know are you competing or you well our my purpose is to be the ultimate predator to be the very best at what i do and other people are interested in that too and finding out what that's about yeah and i think that this disconnection that people have in society is a main cause of people just feeling like shit all the time they don't feel rewarded by life when your

day-to-day existence is just doing something that you don't enjoy and then coming home and resting getting ready to do it again it sucks when you have something that you enjoy whether it's bow hunting or any sort of hobby any any sort of existence and any sort of uh discipline or practice you work towards something and you get a reward for that work. Right. It feels good. Sacrifice, reward. And then there's another notch that is above that is this sacrifice, work for something, achieve the results, and you actually live off those results.

You're eating it. And that's a very primal thing, man. But it doesn't mean we're less evolved. This is what people have to get into their mind. Release all your preconceived notions of what a hunter is. These rednecks just out there torturing animals, these psychopaths. Release all those preconceived notions and take in the concept of wild, of what wild is. Take in the concept of wild, of what wild is.

Just to be out in nature and watch all these things run around, watch animals chase after each other, watch this natural process that gives zero fucks if you're there or not there. And then realize that this can be your source of sustenance. You can live in that world for brief moments in time, train for it, prepare for it, bring back that protein and live. And live a healthier life too. I think that fact right there, what you just explained, affects every minute of my life, every day.

I mean, because that's basically, I'm known as a bow hunter, the bow hunter, whoever, this guy who does whatever. So that's had such a powerful impact on me. That's all, I mean, it's not all I am, but it's a big part of what I am. And that's what I always say. I always say, well, bow hunting has changed my life. And I see these people who message me because of your podcast, and they want that same, could it impact my life that same way? Could it give my life that type of meaning?

And I do want to address one thing. People talk about hunters being rednecks or barbarians or heartless or this or that. My buddy Rick Carone is battling cancer right now. And when I do, when I'm going to sell something, like I've sold bows, highest bidder type thing, hunters are the most generous, heartfelt people. I mean, that's basically all my followers are hunters. felt people. I mean, that's basically all my followers are hunters and they are so giving and so caring and loving of somebody they've never met. They've just learned about maybe, you know, from my website or, or from whatever else. And I don't know, I just, I have a heart.

I mean, it's just amazing to me, just the heart hunters have, and people are so far, so wrong on, I guess, what moves us, what's important to us, because I see people giving thousands of dollars to help somebody they've never met. Well, the amount of negativity that you get from non-hunters in comparison to the amount of negativity and hate you get from hunters, it's hugely disproportionate. What you talked about, about being respectful, about how when you disagree with someone on Twitter, you don't say, fuck off, you fucking dummy, and you don't get involved in any of these negative exchanges. Because of that, you attract this very positive following. And I've been to your Facebook page,

and I've read the comments when you when you put something up on instagram and it's an incredibly positive group of people yeah incredibly positive and also people that recognize the rewards of this lifestyle and recognize the negative impact or the negative opinion that a lot of people don't understand it have and so they feel connected with each other in sort of solidarity against what they perceive to be these ignorant people that judge them yeah right no and it's uh i know and that's the thing so i do get negative every once in a while and all i do i block them and delete it just because i don't want that one person skewing one person can skew the whole comment train, basically,

and then it takes away from the whole point. So maybe I'm living or created this fantasy land of positivity by doing that, but that's fine because it helps me. I see other people at impacts, and I guess the closest thing to negativity that I've done lately is just this slogan I have on my new shirt. Nobody cares, work harder. Yeah, and that's how we say it because everything else is all positive.

The nobody cares is tough love. It's a little bit of tough love. It's like everybody has issues. Everybody has hurdles. Everybody has challenges. But at the end of the day, they'll listen to you. They don't really care that much. If you don't have what you want you need to work harder so that's that's all i've done um i'm not looking for sympathy on anything and and uh i just you know i just hope other people

take that from this you know i still love you and care about you guys we just need to work harder if we don't have what we want well that's you dude you're that guy every time we were in uh in camp you were out there running you went you went running basically every day in fucking alberta you you put in the work man and that's why you become successful what you do i like people that work hard and push through things because it inspires me to do the same thing so even that shirt would might be conceived as negative or perceived as negative i don't think it's negative it's it's inspirational it's like people need to hear that shit just get your fucking ass out of people love to find an excuse oh my fucking hangnails really bugging me man i can't lift yeah just just do just get out and do something and that's why that just do it campaign was so powerful for nike yeah

you know because just do it is really what you need to hear sometimes just shut the fuck up and go to work get it done i read the rocks tweets in his instagrams oh yeah because that guy will fly into somewhere at you know four o'clock in the morning and he's at the gym at five and he takes pictures and and he's fucking killing it every day it's done yeah that's why he looks that way yeah i mean you see him in that movie, Hercules? I haven't seen it. You don't get that way by taking the day off

because you have a hangnail. You get that, you get to look like that possibly because of some artificial enhanced supplements. I'm not saying it might be

a little something. But, there's also a lot of hard work involved. No doubt a fucking bout it. You could take all the steroids in the world,

your body doesn't grow like that. It grows like that from hard work, period. Ineligible steroids. And hard work is a magical ingredient. If you could apply that magical ingredient to almost everything in life. And hard work also comes with hard thinking. Hard work everybody likes to think of as being like oh you just grunt and put in the

effort no hard work is also preparation thought process understanding and that is a big part of hunting as well it's not just about you know oh it's really hard to get up that hill get to that 7 000 feet elevation where those elk are no you got to understand the wind you got to understand the behavior of these animals you got to understand what's what's going on in the rut what is this what is this bull elk attracted to are you going to attract a bull by pretending to be a cow which he wants to have sex with or are you going to be a bull which we want he wants to challenge and you got to know what to do what and what to do when i'm amazed at how much knowledge is involved in hunting and how much information like steve ranella is of a goddamn encyclopedia i need to get you two

together yeah i want to do he's a lot smarter than me well he's a very educated man i'm mostly just a bow hunter you guys would get along great though though. What we need to do is when we go next year, when we go bow hunting for elk, we should do it for his show. It might be a few extra people, though. It might be a pain in the ass. I know you like to roll solo. It would be a huge pain in the ass. But it might be worth it to get you two together. It would be really interesting.

I think you guys would get along great. But he's really opened my eyes to how much information is involved in hunting. Yeah. I mean, how much knowledge, how much you have to know, especially, you know, he's doing it all year round. So he's constantly aware of the cycles, the breeding, mating, food patterns, all the different things that you have to pay attention to about each individual animal. There's just a lot going on there, man. There is. It's a rich, world yeah no it's so it's so far removed from you know the like we probably

addressed it the last time but the the bubba hunting stereotype of driving around drinking beer shooting from the truck that's still out there right but that's out there with everything i mean i get that with the ufc you know people like oh yeah ufc great what are you doing man you're fucking hanging around with a bunch of assholes beating the shit out of each other look come to jujitsu class with me you'll meet some of the nicest friendliest people and a lot of them are nerds okay a lot of my friends from jujitsu if you looked at them you would say oh that guy's like a nerd he's like a nerdy guy a nerd will fucking strangle you with his legs you know like it's what it is is people that really get into something that is ultimately very rewarding and i think it's ultimately very

rewarding to accomplish something that's difficult to do and it's something that's missing from a lot of people's lives a lot of people are doing something that's easy to do and they're looking to take coffee breaks and they're looking to take a nice long lunch break and they're looking to take a newspaper into the john when they take a shit because nobody can say anything. Hey, I've got to go to the bathroom, man. What do you want? There's a lot of people that are looking.

A newspaper? People take newspapers in the bathroom. Yeah, true too, right? They fucking run out of batteries on the toilet. Nobody reads papers. That's true. Some people do, man. Brian Callen still reads the newspaper.

Every time I'm with that motherfucker, he's got the New York Times, especially if someone's looking. I like having a paper breakfast. I'll say that. Hey, so this is one thing I forgot to ask last time. So my kids are big, typical, regular sports fans, like NFL. Of course, I like MMA.

I like UFC. So they're like, Dad, do you think a UFC fighter, say somebody like Chad Mendez, who's fighting tomorrow for the title. Love Chad. He's a bow hunter, by the way. Killed his first elk this year. I know, I know.

He's a stud. So say Patrick Willis, who's this huge 240-pound linebacker, who would win in a fight? Chad. 100%. 100%. And so that's hard to explain because what people, or my kids anyway, see is this huge,

jacked, giant guy, NFL, and then Chad, who's what? What is he, 155? He walks around probably 160, fights at 14 145 okay so what why would he beat him well he definitely definitely doesn't have to win like it is possible that the nfl guy could pick him up and smash him just drop him on a rock or something like that because you're dealing with 100 extra pounds of alpha male testosterone and bone and aggression and mexican supplements but is that him right there that's the guy why am i looking at his dick bro what the fuck kind of gay porn shit that's the first one that comes up tell that dude to pull his pants up i don't

need to see those fuck muscles at the top of your hips listen to me boys if you're trying to attract the gals i understand it but when you're around other men pull pull your pants up so i don't see your fuck muscles. Those weird upper hip muscles, you know what I mean? That dudes try to be sexy. The V part? This shit. Yeah.

These things right in there. See it up there? No, I'm not going to show you. But I'm just standing up. So look at that. I'm seeing way too much dick. Anyway, that's Patrick Lewis. His only hope is, well, there's two possibilities.

If he has martial arts training, Chad's fucked. He probably doesn't. If he's like a brown belt in jiu-jitsu and he knows how to kickbox, Chad's fucked because he's just too big. Right. But if he's just a regular dude with no martial arts training at all, Chad's going to get his back. Okay. Choke him out. Yeah, he'll have to choke him out.

He might knock him out. Chad hits pretty fucking hard, but he's going to have to hit him him perfect you're dealing with a much larger skull than chad's right you know and you're dealing with chad's size hands compared to his hands which probably are as big as my fucking laptop you know right the size is very important though the idea that size doesn't mean anything that's ridiculous size means a lot it just doesn't mean as much as technique. Technique means the most. But there's a lot of factors involved in who would win in a fight. The most important factor is knowledge and technique. There was a dude that I used to roll with at 10th Planet.

He was a really nice guy who was a former football player. He was 250 pounds. And whenever I used to roll with him, I used to call it riding the bull. Because I'm like, all right, got to go ride the bull. Because every time I'd get on top of him, well, any time we'd scramble, I would have to initially let him get on top because he's just too goddamn big for me to take him down. So I'd let him get on top, and then I'd have to sweep him, and then I'd eventually ride him, and then I'd eventually catch him.

But it would take me a while. I'd have to wear his big ass out. But I was just better than him. I'd been doing jiu-jitsu for 15 years, and years and he had only been doing jujitsu for like six months so it was just a matter of riding the bull i would just hang on to him but god damn he was fucking strong as shit and i always think if this motherfucker knew half of what i knew i'd be doomed i'd just be there's a huge advantage of being bigger and stronger. It's just not as much of an advantage as being technical and understanding what's going on inside a fight. One thing I was going to ask, too, about, you know, I get a lot of questions on diet and putting on muscle and this and that. How many, I think, you said eating meat has evolved the brain, basically.

But I think eating meat is how I've been able to retain muscle and still run as much as I do, just all the protein I take. So I was wondering, of fighters, how many of those guys are vegan or vegetarian? There's no elite fighters that are vegan except for Jake Shields, who is a vegan. But he still eats eggs, I think. And he would eat game, he said. He would eat an animal that's hunted. But he just doesn't believe in factory farming.

He does it purely for ethical reasons. But Jake, although Jake is fairly elite elite he was cut from the ufc you know he's fighting in a small organization because he couldn't beat the best of the best guys you know he just lost recently to hector lombard who knows how much better jake would be if he existed on a diet of black bear and elk i mean i don't know man probably a lot better who knows so if you want to make the ufc you better eat meat i don't know jake is really fucking good he's a really really good grappler um but he's also just tough as nails yeah i i think that every edge counts there's a reason why people take vitamin supplements there's a reason why people take protein supplements amino acids all the things that are legal that people take they

take it because it gives you an edge it might be a small edge but that small edge could be the difference between escaping a submission and tapping out it could be the difference between cinching up a submission and and and the guy gets away it could be the difference between getting that final push to make a takedown and not and it's those small edges all add up massage therapy uh yoga every little edge meditation isolation tanks guys are doing everything to get every little edge and the idea that you would do all these different things but you wouldn't eat meat man it's the science is all there this idea that vegan athletes are superior is fucking preposterous. It's so difficult to get B12.

It's so difficult to get all of the amino acids. It's so difficult to get a full, complete, balanced protein without eating meat. It's really fucking hard. No, and that brings me back to bow hunting. You talk about all those little edges added up to give, or those little things added up to give you an edge. That's, that's bow hunting. Bow hunting, because people will say, well, you don't need to do this. You don't need to do that. That's overkill. That's too much. To me, I'm thinking, I'm just adding one more little positive edge to my arsenal. And then that's how, you you know killed 13 bulls in the last five years you know they all haven't been just perfect i've needed little edges to make it happen and so that to me fighting is a lot like something as difficult as bow hunting i think there's a lot of ego involved you know there's a lot of people that don't they don't want to think that they're not putting in as much work as you so they're like

you know all these guys meathead and you don't need to pull that much weight but what's that much weight to you and what's that much weight to me you know my question is okay how much weight do you lift when you like go to the gym if you can only like do do a curl with 25 pounds and I can do it with 100, how much stronger am I than you? And what is the difference between a 50-pound bow to you and an 80-pound bow to me? Exactly.

Because I fuck my shoulder up by pulling a 90-pound bow 100 times a day, 150 times. It's not bad. I actually am just finishing this Regenikine treatment. It's the tendons. The tendons are strained.

You're giving all those guys just repetitive ammunition now for why you shouldn't shoot a heavy bow well you know what if i worried about injuries i would have never done anything right and i've had three knee surgeries i had my nose fixed i'm i'm i'm full of fucking surgeries that's what guys say to me because you know i run basically i do the same thing every single day my training and they say you know what are you going to do in 40 years when you're still on a hunt, but you won't be able to hunt because you've been running every day and wearing out your joints? I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to be alive tomorrow, let alone 40 years from now. I'm going to worry about tomorrow, tomorrow, and today I'm going to give my best.

Well, people are always looking for some negative, man. They're always looking for something they could point at you that makes you less than them or makes you less than you think you are. People look to diminish. Look, I look to diminish. I'm a fucking comedian. That's what I do. I point holes at things. I look at shit.

I go, look at this stupid bitch. Don't do that right now, please. That's my thing. But that is what I do. So I understand the mindset, but it's a very disempowering mindset to instead not be inspired to not be inspired to just poke holes at things like you don't need 80 pounds how about you just be inspired to go how about you doing a little bit of exercise how about you not worry about a guy who's obviously far physically stronger than you who only pulls an extra 20 pounds of

weight that's it's really not that big of a goddamn deal right like yeah it's it's an ego thing i think a lot of guys the the crabs in a bucket was a good one of our most popular stories from the last time yeah but uh yeah so there's that's still i guess always going to be out there it is it's always going to be out there i'm fascinated by the technology involved in bow hunting, too. I mean, in the back here, we have one of those radar things. You shoot an arrow through it. The chronograph. The chronograph tells you the exact speed of the arrow.

Yeah. And that was another thing that I had to learn that I thought was really interesting. The spine of the arrow, how stiff the arrow is, how many grains the arrow weighs in relationship to the bow, in relationship to the speed of the arrow how stiff the arrow is how many grains the arrow weighs in relationship to the bow in relationship to the speed of the arrow then you have to calculate all that and put out a sight tape and that that's how you figure out well the the guys at the bow rack made me a sight tape for the carbon spider and it's fucking amazing yeah it's so dead on because mine was all goofy the last one that i printed up myself it's like a lot involved and you basically have to be a scientist to do that no no that's we do we do have to give a plug to the bow rack because we have such field oregon springfield oregon we have such an advantage

having bows set up by professionals guys who do it every single day. There's a lot of guys in small towns throughout everywhere that can buy the same bow, buy the same arrows, buy the same everything. The bow is not set up correctly. It's not tuned and it's just not going to perform. So we know when we go out, especially because I'm at the bow rack, I paper tune my bows. We put it in the hooter shooter, which is a machine that shoots your bow for you to tell you whether the bow's set up correctly or there's some human error involved. So basically at the end of the day, when we go hunting, we know the bow is at the top of its capability

and any error is us. So then if I can control my errors, arrow's going to go right where it's supposed to go and that's also with using you know hoyt bows yeah best bows out there as far as i'm concerned and you're right the technology is just fascinating yeah these hoyt bows are just incredible man the carbon spider spider turbo that we used when we were in Canada. You're talking about a bear. I mean, 250-plus pound animal. This arrow went straight through its body and went so deep into a log that I had to

break it off because I couldn't get the broadhead out. Right. And that arrow is sitting up on the wall in my office. Yeah. I mean, it passed clean through this animal like that. Like butter. Like butter. And there's a giant difference between that and what you think of

as a bow and arrow that like from the boy scout days you know when you would shoot those little those little shitty recurve bows like 20 pound pull or whatever it was they just don't have the kind of impact that these bows have with the cams and the technology and the way they they engineer these risers i mean these things are incredible pieces of work and engineering well and i let's see what did i just get i just got the brand new nitrum and actually i brought it sitting over there and you you just asked when i walked in you're like why'd you bring your bow i'm like because i take my bow everywhere why wouldn't i bring it i wouldn't i need to keep that thing in my sight so uh yeah bring that when you go on the road and you you set up targets places yeah go meet like

here people say no i'm going to be in., so they want to shoot and hang out. Where are you going to shoot today? Are you going to shoot somewhere today? Yeah, yeah. Where are you going to go? There's guys. Well, there's three people here who have places that they shoot. So I don't know if it's a range or if it's their house, but they've all invited me to meet up.

I'm going to meet up with at least one of them. Maybe they'll all be there, and we're going to shoot both. And one of them is going to be that flight attendant. He's going to be waiting for you. He's going to be wearing Velcro underwear. Japanese spa slippers. He probably is from here. Chances are he is from California somewhere.

Everyone's gay in California? How dare you? How dare you? That's cool, though, that you have this sort of connection with fans. I know you do a lot of those Cabela's openings or Bass Pro Shops, whatever it is. Which one is it? Both. Both of them?

You do both of them? Yeah, I do appearances at both. And when I go, I just, like I said, I like the positive atmosphere. I like the camaraderie. I like to see people working. So I'll say, hey, I went to Alaska, you know, and I said I did the Bass Pro Shop Grand Opening in Anchorage. And I said, let's go run some mountains up there. So I met up with a couple guys, did two different runs, and we hammered out some tough mountain runs.

And it just was soaking wet, freezing, and never felt more alive. That's so awesome. It's cool, too, that you connect with people like that because that's also what I saw when we were in camp in Alberta. All those guys had come into that camp that week because they knew that you were going to be there. They wanted to hunt up during that week. And what a positive group of people.

Oh, best guys ever. I'd never met any of them before. Yeah, they hadn't met each other before. That was what was crazy. When we got there, it was almost like they were all old buddies that were hanging out together. And then slowly I started piecing together. I'm like, when did you guys meet? Yesterday.

You guys don't even fucking know each other? This is like this grand party of really friendly guys. I thought it was just a bunch of old high school buddies yeah who got together but no just super positive super friendly and we had a great time yeah no i mean i i would i don't know what type of group of people you could bring together that that in that short of time and have that type of connection i don't know hunting just seems to do that to people i mean i don't know about you but when i'm somewhere i don't care where here uh where whatever town i'm in when i see somebody in camo i'm like looking at them wondering if you know hey do you want to talk about hunting do

you hunt why are you wearing camo but it's just like that brotherhood it's weird i had a hoyt hat on and i was at the airport and this old dude sat next to me and he just plopped down right next to me and he goes how long you've been bow hunting this old dude from texas he had a lone star belt buckle on and he started just telling me stories about hunting for elk and hunting for this and that and bow hunting he does all kinds of hunting but he does a lot of bow hunting too but it just that was the green light he just plopped down next to me and just started talking and we had like a half an hour conversation well it in nowadays you know that old school dude that's

awesome nowadays the young guys or the guys that seem i don't know i can't i'm in communication with they're so passionate about new bows and technology like you mentioned like the unveiling of a new bow like so if you have a hoyt people are like what year is it you know it's like right us 2014 oh yeah you don't so you don't have a 2015 nitrum turbo yet huh it's just like it's crazy these and so hoyt and you know all these other Botech, they have this, it's going to come out on the 15th and they'll give teasers and people are just on all these forums trying to guess what's going to be different, what the new technology is going to be. And it's just so fun and so people are so passionate about it. It's, I don't know. It's like the release of a new iPhone.

Oh, totally. It's really similar. Totally. It's really similar release of a new iphone oh totally it's really similar totally it's really similar and you find that oh look at this they got this new anti-torquing technology yeah what is the new anti-torquing technology what is that all about that's uh the cable roller it's it's supposed to how that's set up is it's going to help you tune your bow because there's no torque in that one normally when you when you pull your um string back and your that cable there's a lot of tension a lot of torque right there typically back in the old school days that would just kind of slide on a bar and now hoyt has come up with this system

the anti-torquing technology where there's no torque on that and and how they've designed the riser is it's like it's just helps the tuning issues, the performance of the bow. That's the anti-torquing is one part of it. The riser design is another part of it. All the little tweaks they make, it's just making a sweeter, smoother shooting bow that tunes up quicker. And what that does is you talked about your bear, how that arrow flew straight, blew right through there. For that to happen, excuse me, is that arrow has to be just flying perfect. And all that plays into that.

And that's how you get those clean, quick kills. And if you're shooting targets, that's how you get every arrow in the X. And so it's all those little things like people will say actually i shot the bow and uh you know speed wise it was a little bit slower than the carbon spider turbo is three feet per second slower but you look at the the brace height which is a big part of why a bow is fast and why it's not the brace height is the distance between the string and the actual riser. Right. So the taller that is, the quicker the arrow is off the string.

So that means you as a shooter have less impact on it being imperfect. The shorter it is, it's going to be on that string longer, longer, longer, and then it finally comes off right when it gets close to your hand and that riser there. And so because it's propelled for longer, it's going to be faster. But you also have more time to drop your bow arm or flinch or do whatever, wrist torque, this or that. And so it's generally a less accurate arrow. So my new bow is a little slower, but it's got a taller brace height.

So meaning it's more forgiving three feet is pretty nominal not that big a deal but it's so sweet shooting i mean i went down there and tuning a bow used to be this whole elongated process and it would take sometimes days to get that thing shooting through paper right and get that arrow flying right and it's like is the arrow underspined am i am i torquing my wrist is having my thumb behind my neck affecting all the stuff now i go down there it was like two shots perfect and you knew it was ready perfect well you're an expert archer so one of the things i've learned from watching your videos is i've seen your old spider turbo and then you went from that to the carbon spider turbo and see the difference in the

amount of feet per second how smooth it feels yeah dead and you could see in your own videos the progression of the technology which is really kind of cool yeah uh what I've noticed you know even those old bows those those kill, those would probably get the job done probably 90% of the time, but it's that those little things, it's that 10% that's going to make the difference. You know, is it going to be a lethal shot or is it going to be just a wound, a flesh wound? And so those little things. So yeah, before I've killed for 26 years and the bows that I started with are night and day different than the bows now, but still it's a primitive sport. Still, it's very difficult. Still, there's a lot of human influence on that arrow and whether it's

going to fly where it's supposed to. So you can still mess it up. One thing that I've noticed that I've, that's helped me more than anything is that long distance shooting i shoot out 100 yards all the time and we shot long distance up in alberta actually the guys want to do that because that's sort of what i'm known for and what that does is i'm not going to be out there shooting at animals at 140 yards or anything like that but man at that slam dunk range or what i would consider slam dunk 30 40 yards i'm gonna be able to make that shot because technique wise i know i'm dialed in i know my my hoyt's shooting money because it's tuned perfectly and so that's what's happened i

mean i killed you know those bulls this year one arrow they were down in seconds those those big 800 pound animals and it's just perfect and that's you know that's what it's all about and the discipline involved is so fascinating because it seems like such a straightforward thing your arm is out straight you pull the string back you aim through sight and you let the arrow go but meanwhile we're in camp there's fucking 10 dudes in camp all of them bow hunters you're consistently outperforming all of us consistently nailing bullseyes over and over again and everybody's perplexed and puzzled what the fuck am i doing wrong like what's the difference and the difference is just inches inches here left right yeah but it's just the amount of time you

put in and the focus and the discipline and just just the the knowledge that you've accumulated after all these years and that's one of the things that's so attractive about it is that it's not something that's easy i thought you're gonna say attractive about me and i was like oh god go right back to it it's the the fact that it's not easy is exciting you know the fact that man when you shoot a bullseye at 40 yards and it just sits right in there, it's so satisfying. Oh, it feels so good. Yeah, it's weird. It's like you would think.

I watch videos online now of archery competitions where guys are just shooting at a piece of paper 40 yards away. And when it goes in that bullseye, everybody cheers. And there's something really satisfying about it dude you watch so on my um youtube channel i don't know there's almost three million views on there which isn't that big a deal if i for katie perry for bow hunting it's quite a few views but so i have a hundred and i don't know maybe 50 videos so if you go on there and you say most viewed out of all those videos, and I've got some cool stuff on there. I've got bears dying, water buffalo dying, and elk dying, and sheep on cliffs. The most viewed are all shooting a bow.

Just targets. Standing there shooting a bow. Because people who bow hunt or even just people who do archery they want to see someone who's better at it than them doing it so they could go okay what's he doing here yeah what's going on maybe so yeah it's very i enjoy watching you shoot it this is ridiculous i have my own fucking bow but i like watching you do it because i go okay what's he doing right here yeah what's different well and i i get a lot i had to turn the comments off a lot a lot of the videos because so many stupid comments that drove me crazy so i'm like i'll turn just turn off the

comments but on the comments that i've left on with the equipment it's people just they watch everything i do and they're like what side is that what rest is that why is he moving his hand like that well i mean it's just like you said, studying and studying and studying. And it's just, to me, it's just awesome that people care that much. Yeah. And this is like, we go back to, this is what archery can do. It can impact people. It can give them something to think about and not obsess about weird negative stuff.

They're thinking it in their minds minds working about bow hunting and archery and how they can be better and that's i like that and again there is some sort of a zen meditative aspect to just shooting a bow into a target and i recommend it really highly to people that have zero desire to hunt just find an archery range and if you can take a lesson take a lesson you know and get a bow figure out how to set it up maybe you know if there's a pro shop near you that's really good someone could help you man just a fun fun way to spend time i have my kids do it man yeah i got a six-year-old and a four-year-old to shoot bows and arrows yeah no kids love my daughter we'll go out there and here's here's what's funny about

shooting far you know like the popular ones are like me shooting 140 or i think i shot a balloon at like 227 yards or something like that but we i take my daughter out there she's tan she's got this little hoyt recurve and so she's shooting we had this she's shooting at 20 yards this big bag and she's like dad how far is that bear i'm like i don't know it's like 70 yards she's shooting. We had this. She's shooting at 20 yards. It's a big bag. And she's like, Dad, how far is that bear? I'm like, I don't know. It's like 70 yards. She's like, could I shoot at it? I mean, she wants to shoot far too.

Right. That's just, you just want to know if you can hit it. Right. And that's just, she's not thinking about hunting or doing anything. She's thinking about, she wants to see if that arrow will hit that where she wants it to. Well, people who shoot a free throw want to know if they could shoot a three-pointer yeah you know you want to know you want to back up a little all right let's try it from back here can you hit it back here you know that's what people are all about i mean that's part of what's wrong with us yeah we constantly

constantly push the boundaries more more is better yeah um what are your thoughts on crossbows what do you think about crossbows um to me i mean i've never even shot a crossbow but what i know about them is you don't need to practice at all basically once you get once it's sighted in it's like a rifle um i don't like crossbows during bow season uh i don't if people want to use a crossbow, that's fine. I have nothing against crossbows. I don't think they should be allowed in bow season because it's different. We talked about the discipline and the commitment and everything you need to be proficient with a bow.

You don't need that with a crossbow. Walking Dead's got everybody crossbow happy. Yeah. That dude on The Walking Dead fucks everything up with that crossbow. Dude, Darybow dude daryl daryl imagine what he'd do with a hoyt i mean are you kidding he shoots that crossbow and it goes six inches in some rotten zombie right a hoyt would go through 10 rotten zombies well do they have a lighter arrow is that what it is yeah yeah because it's it's shorter the arrow the shaft is

similar but it's half the length or i don't know what it is but it's that's lighter so it's not uh carrying that energy that momentum so they have a problem with like pass-throughs and stuff like that with uh like passing through an animal is it more difficult with a crossbow because it's a lighter well the lighter yeah i mean you get okay the whole thing with an arrow the lighter the arrow the less kinetic energy you're going to have so and people will talk about well that's not momentum but usually a higher uh kinetic energy your arrow possesses the more penetration it's going to get to increase kinetic energy all you do is add weight so your bow could be slower but if the arrow is heavier more kinetic energy so it's a heavier arrow going slower but

there's more behind it right so it's almost more important to have weight than it is to have but there's a point of diminishing returns right yeah that's what that's way up at like 800 and some grains oh really which is a very i've never even shot an arrow that heavy. What I used for the water buffalo in Australia was a 650 grain arrow, and that's heavy. You know, what we use for bear is 450. Yeah. So the diminishing return point is over 800 grains. And at 450 grains, still shooting 288 feet a second.

Yeah. Which is, for folks who don't know what that looks like, you don't even barely see the arrow. Yeah. So kinetic energy, that's probably, I think, I know I did it. It's like 80 some foot pounds of kinetic energy. And that doesn't mean anything to anybody other than it hits hard. Shit's lethal. It's very lethal.

Especially you put a Montech, you know, the heads we use were Montech broadheads, razor sharp heads. Yeah, it's going to blow through there. And like I said, we went through the animal and then so deep into a log that I couldn't get it out. I had to break off the tip. You know what was shooting a bow like we talked about just the fascination behind it is when I was in Tanzania, those guys, you know, the natives, they had, who knows what type of bows they've seen. So we're setting up a lion bait there and had like half a buffalo hanging. And I'd put a little yellow leaf there and I'd get back 40 yards.

I want to see, you know, if, if, if a lion was here, where would my arrow hit? So they'd be standing there. I'd be standing back. We'd have the bait there with the leaf on it. And I'd stand and everybody ready. Yeah. Everybody's ready. So I'd draw back, shoot, you know, hit the leaf. And they would just be like big smiles on their face, just watching that arrow. Just like, couldn't believe that arrow just whack and it just it was they just wanted to look at it and i'd give them the arrow and the bow and they'd just be holding it thinking like it was some like witchcraft it was so awesome did they have traditional bows did they make their own bows i'd they may i didn't see any but you know they hunt themselves or did they what did they do for food um yeah they've

you know uh see let me think well you're talking about the one guy the poacher that had really made his own sort of muzzle loader yeah yeah a regular rifle yeah those guys obviously hunt uh the guys in camp you know they would eat what what the hunters killed basically and then uh but they've all hunted some of them are like rashidi who i mentioned he's a what they call a tracker and so they can what they do is they look at the tracks of the animals and they can look at them and they can tell you whether that track was from a few hours ago, this morning, last night, or two days ago, just by the track. And I've hunted a lot. I've seen a lot of tracks.

But when I look, I'm like, that's pretty fresh. That's it. Right. That's it. I'm a full clock. They're aging that thing by the hour, essentially. So that's what a tracker can do. And then when you hit an animal, if there's a blood trail, just I learned so much from those guys.

And I would ask, what are you looking at? What's telling you that that's this age? And it's just grains of sand that has fallen in off the edge, just things like that. So I think they've probably killed a lot less than they've hunted, if that makes sense. And they eat lions? Yeah, they'll eat. What they won't eat, hyenas, basically. The buffalo, I'm sure they'll eat, but they'd rather use them for bait because they're just nasty.

But definitely there's animals that they won't eat um i'm not sure i couldn't tell you honestly what how they feel about lions because like i said they're so revered over there it's just like all anybody could think of is you know we're hunting a lot of different things but simba was always the topic it was we're simba and so that was what we were after and i don't really we never killed one so i don't really know what they would do is that because they fear of those lions because those lines will take people out and they do on a regular basis there right they will it's just like there's i heard stories from them over there about um the lions would come into villages and if you didn't act afraid of them they wouldn't hurt you that they they told stories like this that would just walk through the village yeah

and the kids the kids the kids wouldn't act afraid of them so the kids could be around them and what's yeah kids go play with the lions yeah i gotta wash the dishes yeah um wow it's i don't know and lions are different because lions are so dominant i mean i let's see i stalked to within 60 68 or 69 yards and i had a big male lion a shooter and it was quartering to me obviously i just had my bow with the rifle would have been done deal he was a six-year-old mature the kind of lion we wanted to kill as i mentioned and i didn't have the right angle on the shot so i wasn't going to take it so i ended up i didn't shoot he got in the brush i got 50 yards from him but he knew i was there the whole time so they're not like a deer and elk that's just going to take off they're like the thing about it is if you if you get too close and you make that shot with an arrow he's probably gonna get you before he's dead you know what i mean and they

cut they'll you can look at all the videos you want wounded they'll come hard a lot of times at you at whoever at whatever wounded them so what was your plan for that no plan i don't know that's um that seems like flawed yeah I know it's uh yeah you know Ryan Ryan um he was there behind me and he had he had a 416 which is a big gun and uh I trust him so that's the plan I wasn't I didn't ever care about the plan to me. I was never like, are you okay? You got it. You know,

I never would look one time at what the plan was or verify there was a plan to me. I don't even want to say what my mindset is because people just probably just call BS. So I'm not going to say it. No, I'm not going to say it. No, but anyway, that's ridiculous.

You can't say you're not going to say it and then not say it. No, that's what little kids do. They try to trick other kids to tell you. No, what little kids do is they say, I'm not going to tell you. And then they don't. Then they tell you. That's what little kids do. No, then they tell you, though.

When they get called out, they'll be like, okay, but don't tell anybody. No, I'm telling you, man. You can't say, I'm not going to tell you because you call BS. People won't call BS. Just speak your mind. You won't tell anybody? I i won't tell anybody i won't even repeat it it'll never leave this room okay my stupid light thought process is if i go there i'm not worried about the backup plan or being covered or anything like that if i try to kill the lion but instead it kills me that's just the way it goes so you have this mindset you like this is

just your accepted reality of life that's it i mean it i'm trying to kill it if i lose and i'm on the other end of that that's just the way it goes that's like some intense native american talking outlaw josie wales type shit i don't know these are my words of life people are probably just say oh he's he's full of crap this you know but i believe you well i believe you're crazy enough to actually have that mindset you sort of saw it bear hunting i guess a little bit did a couple times he walked down some bears and scared him off yeah you you definitely that's the whole thing about the hunting on the ground nobody's doing that very few people are

hunting bears on the ground but you had that whole camp doing it there's a lot of guys that were doing it there well the thing with the bears and you saw it is there's like this there's like this line and so what they do is they'll they'll stay out there at 15 yards or whatever and we're there and they know we're there and there's like but then they sort of come a little closer and then they'll go back and then they sort of come a little closer and then pretty soon there's this line that it i'm thinking once they get there they're probably just going to come because you've let them get there it's like you have to have a boundary. So as you noticed on those bear, when they would get, I can't remember what,

maybe it was five yards, but I would stand up and I'd be like, no, like that and holding the knife or whatever. And that because once they're past that line, what are you going to do? You can't let them get there. The video, we'll play the video of you shooting this uh bear the one that caused all the controversy but one of the things that's as shocking about it is not just the the arrow going through the bear it's how fast the bear runs yeah once it gets hit it's like jesus that's like some usain bolt shit. Yeah. It's just. No. Oh, they can move, man.

If they want to come, we're in trouble. The bait thing is the big controversy. And you explained very clearly why it's important. Because you have to really identify the sex of the animal and how old the animal is. But the weird thing is that people don't have any problem with using bait for fish no and people don't have any problem with people going trophy fish hunting i caught a marlin you know how many people eat marlins a few hawaiian folks they'll eat them apparently marlin's not that bad it's just people think it's bad yeah i i i killed a marlin i caught a marlin a long time

ago and uh they said they were going to smoke it, the guys who own the boat. They have a weird thing in Hawaii. They give you some of the fish, but they take most of the fish. Oh, I see. Some sort of a weird, unless you make some sort of a previous arrangement. Yeah. Because it's very valuable to them. Okay.

But a marlin, mine was about 70 pounds. It wasn't a big one, but a 70-pound marlin is probably worth quite a bit of money. And it's a lot of meat, you know, they smoke it. But nobody has a problem with that. But if you go and take some sort of an animal, it's like we differentiate between a fish and an animal. If you take a trip to Africa because you want to catch some exotic fish and eat it on the boat, nobody any problem with that like oh you did you eat it yeah it was delicious but if you go and you say one went to africa and shot a kudu and ate it like why the fuck would you go there and shoot a kudu like you're not doing that for food you're not bringing it home to fill you feed your family

they have like very rigid ideas about what you should and shouldn't do with a mammal as opposed to what you should and shouldn't do with a fish like look at these fucking these swamp people shows yeah where they go and they're shooting 500 fucking alligator a season yeah they have five they don't eat one of them they're not eating any of them yeah they're just purely using the skins because it's selling the skin so it's fine it's yeah for whatever reason because it's a dinosaur yeah nobody gives a shit yeah meanwhile alligator is like some of the highest protein lowest fat lowest cholesterol meat you can get yeah like it's really good for you and it's just wasting just boats full of alligator yeah i mean i don't know some maybe some of them eat them yeah

probably but uh you know and it's i guess when you talk about baiting when deer coming into a agricultural type setting that's bait that's bait because you're setting up on a trail they like to use to get there or if you're a lot of people hunt antelope and they're coming to water you're setting up yeah basically water's the bait yeah so not everything fits in a perfect box is i think you know i'm not saying i'm not guilty of it either but uh i mean with hunting especially you know well i could tell you when i first started hunting one of the things that i said i wouldn't do is i mean i would never bait i want i wouldn't do that i didn't want to shoot a bear either those are two things i didn't want to do now i have no problem with it because I became a cell to the devil that too

I became educated. We'll show the video now so people get a this is this is a video They got everybody mad at me and this is the the website is living the dream promotions and this is our friends John and Jen up up there in Canada and Was this on my YouTube? Yeah? Yeah? The shot is only six or seven yards, but I always take a practice shot, so I have the target out there. It's like a Godzilla movie. My mouth isn't matched. Oh, is it off?

I've seen crazy things happen. A little bit. A little bit. To people. See that bear crack back there? Yeah. See that bear crack back there? Yeah, bear crack is this mixture of marshmallows and gelatin and all sorts of smelly things that cam heats up so that the bears smell it.

So that target I'm shooting at is seven yards, six or seven yards. Like I said, I just want to have that confidence that when a bear comes in, I'm going to make that shot. So even though it's a slam dunk chip shot with bow hunting, there's no such thing. And even though you've been doing this your whole life. So look at the size of this fucking bear. Yeah, so that's me back there in the back. Watch the arrow go through it. This is where it's crazy. Oh.

Look how fast that thing moves. And that sound. Yeah, so if it would have just veered to the there i am veered to the right instead of to the left then it would have ran you over yeah yeah i didn't even know you were there or well if it did know you were there it wouldn't have cared it was running full sprint yeah it's uh no at that time just, you know, that was a lethal arrow. It was just going to, it was basically going to die. You know, so what happens when an arrow hits like that is blood pressure is dropping quickly. It's just like your bears, you can be dead in seconds.

They are affected immediately. And I mean, even, you know, you hear about people who they cut their femoral artery. So they do something, cut something in their leg, 30 seconds. Yeah, crazy. But when that happens is their blood pressure just drops. And so that bear, at that point, it's not thinking about, oh, I'm going to identify what did that and attack it. It's just like it's over basically. It's that fast.

You know, death sprint. Yeah. Yeah. I heard a guy recently got killed by a beaver a beaver bit his thigh and severed his femoral artery yeah nothing nuts that can happen fucking beaver took a dude out yeah you could yeah you know that's that's a thing with uh with archery as opposed to guns you know and i had a little video the other day on my website or i mean on youtube and it was just uh you know an arrow kills by hemorrhage uh just by cutting flesh and organs and a rifle

kills by shock generally and generally the if you hit them good with the rifle and break them down you hit bone or whatever else it's pretty it's a pretty grisly type thing but it's effective they're down an arrow going through is more like they're not sure what happened blood pressure dropping they don't necessarily feel that pain so to speak um and they're dead quickly but two totally different things and what that was is i'd shot a bull elk in utah and I wasn't 100% certain of the shot. I was hoping it was in the heart. It was a little lower than I had wanted. I wanted to shoot for the lungs, which is a little higher up on the body.

I hit low. Just I made an error, hit a little lower than I wanted, and I was hoping for the heart, and it was just kind of that process. But in that video, I explained the difference between bow and rifle, and you see it right there. And one thing, when I was hunting Cape Buffalo in Tanzania, I shot the biggest bull in the herd that other animals did nothing. He did nothing.

You couldn't tell anything happened other than he was dead pretty soon. Nobody ran. Nobody, no excitement. And Ryan, who was with me at that time, he's like, I like bowling a lot better because a rifle goes off and you got a stampede. And then that bull that you had just shot, it's just like, it's, it knows something serious is going on. And those bulls are, you know, they call them black death. They're very dangerous. So once they're injured, even with rifles, they shoot them multiple times. I mean, those things are so tough and so full of testosterone, 1,800 pounds of just solid muscle.

But what they do is they go in what they call the tall grass, which is about 10 foot high grass. And so you're on blood and those buffalo will go in there, do a little button hook. And as you're blood trailing them, if they're not mortally wounded, like dead, dead, you'll be trailing that, that, uh, blood trail. And because they did that button hook, they're sitting there waiting, they'll just pound you.

And so they're really, they kill, they kill people every year in Africa. Uh, Cape Buffalo do. and so they're really they kill they kill people every year in africa uh cape buffalo do and uh it's you know tough animals but with the bow uh we you know i'm not saying it was an easy kill because uh there's they're very tough but it was way less dramatic way everything was calm it was just i don't know it's much different than a rifle did you bring both your bows over there did you bring the 90 pound and the 80 pound one i did yeah did you shoot the buffalo with the 90 i actually shot it with the 80 really because uh i did a penetration

test on uh on a hippo when one of the guys i was with killed a hippo there so i'm like hey how often do you ever get a chance to shoot an arrow into a hippo 5 000 pound hippo so i shot both those bows into the hippo and actually the 80 pound carbon spider arrow penetrated neither one of them did a good job because there's big animals their setup the the setup wasn't conducive to hunting a 5,000-pound animal. I would need a cutting-tip broadhead, like on the Muzzy Trokar has a cone tip or chiseled tip, and so that has to push through until you get to the blades. And you need a 1,000-grain arrow with a two-blade broadhead that doesn't have to open that hole before it gets in.

So the point is neither one was conducive to killing a hippo, but I measured penetration and the carbon spider with the smaller diameter injection shaft that we shoot from Easton penetrated as much as the heavier full metal jacket dangerous game shaft. And so I decided, well, I'm just going to go with the carbon spider because I had more confidence in it at longer range and those animals were so difficult to get up on because they're living with amongst hyenas and lions and they're hunted every single day and lots of lions there i mean we saw we probably saw i'm trying to think at least 10 lions i would think and so it was like those and you don't see

all the lions so i mean they're hunted a lot so i was having a hard time getting close so i ended up killing that my buffalo at 62 yards with the carbon spiders 80 pound bow so the the the thinner diameter made a difference in the thinner diameter of the arrow that's yeah that plays a part as well as the weight yeah because uh the thinner diameter as opposed to a thicker diameter shaft, that's just less surface area. So the less surface area dragging through the wound channel, you're going to penetrate more. What was your favorite animal to hunt in Africa? Was it the kudu because you ate it?

No. No, that was cool. I mean, it was a big bull, 54-inch bull. They had never killed a kudu because you ate it no no the that was cool i mean it was a big bull 54 inch bull they had never killed a kudu and the fact most people kill anything over there with the bow is at water when you're talking 54 inches you're talking about the length of the horns yeah the antlers spiral horns so you measure that spiral horn and it's 54 inches but most if anybody's killing anything with the bow it's usually at water and so i didn't kill anything at water i uh i spawn stocked in kudu they call them the gray ghost over there they're their vision they're antelope so they're like antelope here in regard

to vision but they're tall so they can see over everything they're they're as tall as an elk and uh they can see very well people just don't kill them spot and stalk with the bow this is a special kill is uh um 64 yards but my i think my favorite probably i mean i wanted a lion i didn't get one the pursuit of the lion was uh memorable um probably the cape buffalo just because the the notoriety it has is being black death It's one of what people term the big five of Africa, which is the five most dangerous animals of Africa. An elephant, Cape buffaloes in there, lion, leopard, and rhino. And so that's the big five. So to kill one of the big five with a bow, spawn stock in a place that had never been been done very special what what's your goals like

right now like do you have any other places that you really want to go and hunt like africa i want to get a lion i still want to get a lion so this is just some weird thing you got in the back of your head about a lion yeah i don't know why just just the test i don't know why. I just want to. I never even thought about it up until I've just been traveling and doing more. And I don't know. So then I got it in my head. And once I get something in my head, it's just what I want to do. But really, and I've said this before, I don't long to hunt anything. I don't need to hunt.

If I could hunt elk every year, I'm going to be satisfied. I love being in the mountains. I love bull elk. I love the challenge of trying to get in close on a big bull and make a perfect shot. And if that's all I ever did, that's enough for me. But you've got weird things, like you won't hunt turkey. No. Is that weird?

Yeah, it's weird. Steve Rinella loves turkey hunting yeah it's funny to hear you like the last thing i want to do is go turkey hunting well you know i've never killed a turkey and then uh you know in out west turkey hunting just has never had the the draw that it has in the south and the east it's just people live for turkey hunting back there out west it's just like nobody even ever hunted them because we had we had deer elk bear we have all this big cool stuff predators big game animals to hunt and so turkey was like why would you waste your time turkey hunting so that's sort of still my mindset just from that i guess turkey's delicious though yeah it's fine it's just fine it's fine well wild turkey is supposed to be better right

than domestic turkey it's a more darker meat um it might be healthier it's probably not i like white meat personally do you really yeah and it's probably not going to be it's going to be i would assume tougher yeah i don't even know I don't even know if I've eaten wild turkey. But, you know, back east where basically all they have in the south, all they have is deer in the fall and turkey in the spring. Yeah, people are, they want to hunt. So that's what they're going to do. You don't think it's just because they enjoy turkey?

No, no. I'm telling you. You need to get with Rinella. He loves turkey hunting. That dude loves it. I think they, and they always say that, you know You need to get with Ronella. He loves turkey hunting. That dude loves it. I think they, and they always say that, you know, turkey hunting is just like elk hunting. It's just like elk hunting. You're calling them in.

You're coming in. It's just like a bull coming in. I'm like, well, yeah, it's just like elk hunting, except you can't kill a bull. So it's not like elk hunting. Yeah, well, it can't be like elk hunting. You're dealing with a little skittish bird. They say the only difference, they say elk or a bull elk is like a 700-pound turkey.

Well, a turkey is like, what's a big turkey, like 30 pounds or something? Yeah, and yeah. So what I say, you know, turkey hunters out there, like, hey, if you're passionate about it, it's awesome. But what I always have said is, you know, the best thing that's going to happen on a turkey hunt is you'll kill kill a turkey and that's not that good what about like bird hunting like duck hunting and pheasant hunting that kind of stuff i've killed one pheasant yeah yeah that's the only bird bird i've ever

killed you just saw about big animals yeah and i'm like i said i'm not judging anybody that's just me of course you're judging people when you're not on the air. We're going to talk off air, folks. He's going to judge the shit out of turkey and duck and pheasant hunting assholes and quail. If those guys in the spring, if they can't go hunt bear like I do, hunt turkey. It's awesome. Good job. The thing about bird hunting that seems fun is the whole dog thing.

Like the dogs like flush them out like when a dog points and then the the pheasants fly in the air and they blast them out of the sky that looks like it'd be exciting yeah i bet it would be i know people you know that's a whole thing just like uh hunting bear with dogs is they have that connection the training with the dog and that's the same thing with the bird i know people who have bird dogs and it's just like those yeah the dogs are their partners and i totally respect i've been i've been on uh i did one dog uh hunt for bear and the hounds are amazing and then the the houndsmen are just that's an art yeah it's a totally different experience it's like you have like you said partners yeah those are your buddies yeah yeah yeah there's a totally different experience. It's like you have, like you said, partners. Yeah. Those are your buddies.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of mountain lion hunting that they did with dogs. Yeah, I haven't done that either, but I'd like to. Well, in California, we've got some crazy laws when it comes to hunting. And when I say crazy, it's because they're not designed by people who are wildlife specialists. They're designed by people who are more animal rights uh people it's it's like instead of the department of fish and game they call it the department of fish and wildlife and their their regulations about hunting they've completely removed hunting for mountain

lions and hunting for bears the the bear hunting now you can't do with dogs and if you can't do it with dogs and you can't do it with bait good luck you know you essentially have banned hunting yeah and people don't the this idea of baiting is is offensive to some people and because of what we talked about earlier and the idea of using dogs is equally offensive to some people because you're using an animal and sicking it on an animal it seems sort of like a barbaric thing. But that is really the only way to effectively hunt these animals in the type of terrain that we have here in California. So because of that, there's a ton of bear and a ton of mountain lion. And especially the mountain lion.

There's a kid who was just attacked in Cupertino. That's where the fucking Apple campus is. A six-year-old kid was attacked by a mountain lion in front of his parents. It's going to happen. I mean, they're out there. There's a lot of them out there in California. Yeah, definitely. Tohono Ranch, I've said it before, but there's a guy up there.

Cody Banks said that he has a trail camera that's over a pond. They have 16 different mountain lions they've caught on this trail camera. That's crazy. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, lions haven't been hunted here in, what, 40 years? It's been a long time. 30-some years. But, yeah, it's, I no i mean yeah lions haven't been hunted here in what was 40 years it's been a long 30 some years but yeah it's uh i don't know they uh they you know a lion kills they say every three days kill something deer elk hopefully not kids but they're gonna kill know why people would want more lions than deer while you would want more predators

than game animals it's a balance that it's well it's balanced everywhere else everywhere else yeah except california i mean california is just so goofy with some of their laws and again they're not this is not like a rational approach that's based on real fish and and game people that have been doing this and calculating numbers and taking accurate assessments and audits of the area this is all done by people who really don't want anybody hunting at all yeah they they reluctantly grant is a few licenses and look if you keep a lot of mountain lions around you don't have to grant as many deer tags right because guess what there's no fucking deer no and then that's that's the whole thought process behind hunting and the antis with hunting is they want to take away look at that thing whoa what is that there's four of them

uh glendora oh jesus christ back that up i want to see that thing again what a creepy goddamn animal yeah four of them i think oh my god yeah there's you know four of them just wandering around on a trail camera oh my god say that again that's that's gonna cause some problems for deer that's gonna cause some problems for fucking anybody yeah can you imagine if you're out there camping and you go to take a leak and you see eight eyeballs staring back at you like that not good it's a big animal too yeah that's that's what people have said you know the antis they want to take away small chunks of our hunting rights so they'll say well this is just lions and then it's just just just baiting for bear and then it's just this then pretty pretty soon it's all gone

so that's why you know as hunters we i think we just need to protect our lifestyle and just keep preaching the positive aspects of it so but i want to say before i get hate from the turkey hunters i will i will i will somebody does somebody want to take me turkey hunting i'll go i'll kill one and then i'll judge whether it's like elk hunting you wouldn't use your shotgun either you use a bow only bow but i can't really say it's not like elk hunting if I haven't done it. That's true. That's not fair. Well, they do call them in.

They're like... That sounds like a good call. I should make a call, like just a little recording. The Joe Rogan turkey sleep. Yeah, play it on your iPhone. So I got to kill one, then I'll make the judgment on how how much i like it i guess yeah i would imagine well like what other animals are there that are like sort of underrated hunting animals well they always say the blacktail deer back home in oregon those are because a lot of

the country you know blacktail are only in western oregon or western washington up in british columbia a little bit and then down they're down here in california blacktails right yeah columbia blacktail are only in western oregon or western washington up in british columbia a little bit and then down they're down here in california blacktails right yeah columbia blacktail but in oregon it's like more rainforest so it's very dense very dark um those big bucks basically they're nocturnal all year except for when they start breeding and even during the rut still very tough to they don't pattern like a whitetail so to speak like whitetail a lot of guys kill them because they they see these bucks on trail cameras and they know they're coming and they wait for the wind to be right the prevailing winds and then they set in their tree stand and then that buck hopefully comes by and it's it's patternable

with blacktail the uh the the legend is they're not as patternable, and I would buy into that. And so killing a big blacktail isn't on the top of anybody's bucket list, really, or very many people, but it's a very difficult, very tough trophy. You know, all this hunting talk that we've had in the two podcasts, it always leads to people getting excited about it, but beginning the hunting process is extremely difficult yeah where to start yeah i think that that's something that's a gap that we would really uh a lot of people would be really well served if we could figure out how to bridge it and i've talked to ranella about this and we've talked about like possibly setting up a first timers camp where you would take people to a game-rich environment, like maybe say like a whitetail deer place where you know there's a lot of white.

He won't have anything to do with high fence hunting, which is very admirable. So it wouldn't be that, but something along those lines where you're going to a very game-rich environment and he'll set it up for you, bring it to a range first really get you to understand uh rifle safety gun safety make sure you really truly understand how to squeeze a trigger how to you know stay down on a shot and then get you to an animal have you shoot an animal and then teach you how to butcher it and make make a couple of preparations with the meat. And to do something like this, start camps like that. Think about this bear hunting thing that we did in Alberta.

All those guys were pretty much seasoned hunters, but a lot of them were drawn there because of you, pretty much all of them. And that's why I wanted you to go on that hunt for the first bow hunt because it's basically just what we were talking about what we what you were explaining it's it's a target rich environment it's a more controlled setting than if you're up in the mountains after mule deer and then you know we processed the bear you skinned out your bear we cut the meat off so that's exactly what we did you know your first bow hunt was exactly like what you described. And, you know, most of those guys up there that were there, they were seasoned hunters.

They hadn't bear hunted. So that's that. And how much did you learn on that hunt? Quite a bit. Yeah, you learned a ton. And you don't, if you're on a, like a high country mule deer hunt that is so difficult, you're probably not going to kill one for a number of years. A lot of guys get frustrated by that.

They're like, I wasted all this time. I wasted all this money. I just can't get it done. So I like hunts like the bear hunt to get the hunting embers heated up and burning hot. And that's what you're describing is perfect. We should consider doing something like that, like a camp for like a first-timer camp, like figuring out some way to set something up

because I've had so many people email me. I've had a lot of people tweet me and send me Facebook messages saying that they got into hunting because of our podcast, because of the podcast with Rinella, which is great. I don't know how they did it though. I don't know how they got in. I got into it because of our podcast because the podcast with ranella which is great i don't know how they did it though i don't know how they got it i got into it because of ranella

if it wasn't for him taking me and brian callen out into montana i don't know how i would have started i don't know how to start and i think that that is the really difficult for thing for people like you said as a seasoned hunter what you really like to do is go out by yourself but you're a guy with you and years, decades of experience hunting. For a person just starting out, going off by themselves, they're going to make so many mistakes. Well, just you and I sitting on the bear bait. I mean, remember the talks we had about movement?

Yeah, edge detection. Right. They see any movement they see. Right, because like I said, we were sitting there, and so you'd see what time it was or you'd you want to take a photo and i and i said you can do all that just slower you just gotta move like you're not a predator right so but when you're when you don't have somebody there with you you make all those mistakes and then it just elongates that learning curve so i would i would love to take first some first time hunter and sit

there with them just like with you and just you know i know you know i'm not saying i have all the answers or whatever i've just made a lot of mistakes right you know so i've learned i don't want people to have to make all the mistakes i did and uh i practiced for a long time but it wasn't really that long it was only like six months between the time we met and the time we started that camp. But through that six months, I was steady shooting arrows, basically on a daily basis. Diligent. How much time do you think someone would need from being introduced to archery to going in a controlled environment bear hunt like that? to going in a controlled environment uh bear hunt like that um you know if it's just the thing is there's so much more to bow hunting than just shooting paper you know yeah and it's just that

mindset and the in the respect thing but it's so hard to learn that when you haven't done it so it's just like it's like how do you measure all that but with a bow killing an animal with a bow it's the biggest thing for a new guy is just what you did it's just being proficient with your weapon you know being proficient with your weapon knowing where you're going to hit and having the confidence to make that shot because um even though it is close range i mean you saw me take a practice shot at seven yards even though i've done it probably millions of times and killed many, many bear, I'm still diligent in my process. Well, we actually talked about that because the day after we went hunting and I got that bear, we went again.

And you actually put it in my head that it's easy to, once you've done it, then take it for granted. So you have to maintain that same mindset that you had the very first day when you made the perfect shot. And I thought that was a very important point that you said to me because I know that people do go, ah, I've done this before, and then you could screw up and wound a bear. And that's another thing I remember sharing with you was the bear you killed we needed to get a good look at it so it had been in we wanted to make sure it was a boar a big boar like we wanted to kill and so we had it had been in and been in and i said i go and you didn't shoot it but then once we got a look at it and we were like okay that is the bear we want to kill because it can take

a while to see if it's a boar they're not like you know it doesn't have antlers so you have to look at you know basically it's the the hair off the penis sheath is what it is but uh and that's with binoculars so once i said once we decide or once you decide that's going to be a bear you're going to shoot your emotions are probably going to get going because it'd been it'd been from just being just kind of um enjoying it being close or just kind of that moment to all of a sudden now i'm going to kill an animal that changes everything it did too your body just is like okay this is this is a real deal now yeah and so that's yeah just that type of thing having somebody there or having that conversation allows people to process it on their own. And, you know, in my book, Backcountry Bowhunting, that was one of the most popular chapters

that I've had is I wrote a chapter on fear. No guy ever wants to talk about being afraid or being, you know, they're afraid of the dark or scared of being attacked by whatever. But so I talked about that and i said hey when i was first in the mountains by myself i was afraid and so when people read that and they're like they think about it and then they're in that position they're just like this is normal this is normal and so when when we can um talk about things like the experience of okay now i'm going to kill the kill the bear now it's time to get it done and you know what you can kind of anticipate what that's going to feel like you're just going to be

that much more deadly more lethal and uh not to i just one thing is i was in the gym the other day and this this guy was telling me he's like he has one of my old bows just from years ago and he's like he was cam he goes he was i almost got a bull and i'm from years ago. And he's like, he was cam. He goes, he was, I almost got a bull. And I'm like, what, what happened, buddy? He's like 35 yards. He come in, he's bugling and I had your bow and I'm standing there watching him. He's 35 yards and he's right there. And he goes, and I was shaking so bad. He goes, I don't even know how I could have shot it. And I'm like, that's normal. That's how everybody is. So that's where it is, is in that moment, shaking, but still, okay, I need to be in control,

and I need to do everything that I practice and make that shot. A lot of people get that shaking, and then they never get to the other part, the precision part. That's difficult. Well, controlling emotions is very difficult, and almost anything you do that's anything you do that's important to you is going to come with a surge of adrenaline or surge of nerves of anxiety and it's just about maintaining your breathing and staying calm and there was a definitely for me a big difference between like that's the bear like okay yeah but it helped that you had already prepared me for that right right well i'm glad you did great listen brother it's great being

your friend it's great learning from you i appreciate it very much and it's great that we can expose so many people to this well thanks for giving me the the platform i feel lucky to be in la in this mess of a city and talking to you guys for sure oh so for john and jen's uh website it's living l-i-v-i-n the dream productions that is uh that's their website l-i-v-i-n the dream and that's the place we went to if you want to go and if you want to experience bear hunting in that environment you can can do no better than John and Jen. They're great folks, and they have an incredibly bear-rich environment. And if you're a first-time bow hunter, it's the way to go.

It really is. And you can follow Cam. You can follow him on Twitter. Even though he doesn't know his Twitter password, all of his Facebook stuff goes to his Twitter. And your Facebook page is Cameron Haynes, too, right? Cameron Haynes. Yeah. Cameron Haynes on Twitter. Cameron Haynes on Facebook. Thanks brother. Really

appreciate it. Keep hammering! I'll do it. I get to tell you. Alright my friends we'll be back next week. Until then much love. See you soon.