The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 160: Lust and Greed

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Seth Berglee, Ryan Callaghan, Sam Lungren, Ben O'Brien, and Janis Putelis.Subjects Discussed: More on the world’s most expensive fish; disservicing Robert Service; Canadian pride; talking someone on to something; shooting effectively; what good marksmen have in common; being process oriented versus outcome oriented; how to be deadly with a bow; Daniel Boone’s ol' Tick Licker; the origins of getting skunked; the battle of Adobe Walls; big bore pistols; what exactly does “loaded” mean; our penultimate word on Herrera v. Wyoming; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We host the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. I got a bone to pick first off.

You guys remember we were talking about the guy that had the bluefin tuna? Yeah. Right. And he... Refresh my memory. Oh, this is the guy that caught it illegally, buried it in the woods. Drug it into the woods. I'm doing some horrible hosting.

So we got a couple of corrections about the bluefin tuna that are in there. One clarification and one correction. Where you guys misled me and really misled listeners by not knowing something. The story is how the catch season on bluefin tuna had been closed on the East Coast, and a guy caught a 500, 400, there's different weights thrown around, a 400-pound bluefin tuna.. He thought maybe I can hide this giant fish and no one will know I actually boated it because he could legally release it, right? Like you could target it for clients, but you just can't keep them. But he decides to keep the thing because they're real valuable. He thinks he's going to go and take it and sell it in a backdoor restaurant exchange,

which I guess happens quite a bit. He doesn't do it. One of the restaurants reports him for trying to sell this tuna. He panics, ties it to his truck, and drags it out into the woods and then gets all these crazy fines. And in talking about this, we're talking about what is the value of a bluefin tuna, and you boys, I can't remember which you was most guilty. You two were involved in it, and Miles Nolte, who's not most guilty you two were involved in it and miles nolte who's not here right now was involved in it and we're talking about how some tuna

are worth millions of dollars correct yeah we looked it up on the internet yeah but yeah internet guy has to be true okay no oh but a guy is gonna now correct us okay you check this out then check this out i will Check this out. I will. What he's saying, he says, in reference to the story of the poached and discarded bluefin tuna, you misstated the value of bluefin tuna in the Japanese fish auctions as $1 or $3 million. And you even mentioned it was the first of the year, right?

Okay, there's a sort of ceremonial thing with the first tuna they take a nice tuna and sell the first tuna of the year at auction and it's like a dick swinging contest where whoever is kind of sitting on the fattest wallet and this has the best business going will do a symbolic purchase of the first tuna as a sort of media driver. But the same fish, if it was the second tuna, would be 80 grand. It's a thing you do to be like, it's like the opening of the sale.

It's like the Texas State Fair with the Grand Champion Steer and all the oil companies. Tell me more. I don't know this, but I like the sounds of it. This is the voice of Seth Berg's, I guess. All your rural areas, they have your 4-H or your state fairs. And so all these kids usually show these animals. And then when you get to the end, they have the Grand Champion. This is the premium steer. Well, you go to a state like Texas, where obviously there's a lot of oil money. And it happened a lot over like north dakota some of those guys were paying you know thousands of dollars which those kids is a ton of money but i think it's the same

thing these steers go for you know one two three hundred thousand dollars for a beef because it's the same thing it's like oh it's the grand champion you know really gotta have it so yeah that does not so you guys get untrue yeah yes it does getting that man i feel i feel like we're like in special contexts they will be sold for a great deal of money but no here's the problem here's what you guys did that was bad you were saying that the tuna is that a tuna can be worth that amount of money. So the guy didn't pay a million dollars for it? Yes, but it wasn't the value of the tuna.

It's a symbolic ceremonial thing. It has nothing to do with the value of the tuna. Yeah, no, you're completely right, and we're completely wrong for misrepresenting the average value of a tuna. If one a year gets sold that way in the dick swinging contest then it's not the value of the tuna yeah yeah that's all man if you're charging i guess the wholesaler that these dudes on the uh outer banks there that are selling the tuna too they're not going to get that that money

so i guess that's right he's got nothing to do with market price. That's the interesting thing is doing some trickle-down economics to make sure the dude that caught the fish winds up getting $500,000 or something. Yeah. Let's do introductions real quick. I wonder what a backdoor deal at a restaurant will get you, though. This guy that wrote in.

Arrested and fined. Yeah, exactly. It'll get you a $10,000 fine. This guy that wrote in, one of the guys that wrote in about this was very close to this and knew the players involved and kind of explained a little bit of backstory on this on this tuna and it seems as though uh there was some other boats around and somehow this guy thought it's possible to to do this without possible to deal with a fish of this size without attracting attention.

And it seems like he blundered in a number of areas. And people were aware of like, hey, that guy just drove by with a 500, 400 pound tuna hanging out at the end of his boat. Seth, introduce yourself. Seth Burgley. I don't know how much you want me to say, but I grew up. There's no, there's no S in there when you wrote your name down.

Burgs? No, Burgley. Burgley. No S. Yeah. A lot of people call me Burgs, but you know, a lot of nicknames, no S. Um, grew up Northeastern Montana, farmed a ranch up there. So that's kind of my background is agriculture.

Started hunting when I was about three years old. BB gun and sparrows weren't safe and been doing it ever since. What's northeast Montana? North of Brockton. So kind of between Plentywood and Wolf Point. Yeah. Kind of up in no man's land. Dated a gal from Plentywood one time. Go ahead. Wasn't your sister? You got a sister? I don't. Well, I do, but she wasn't in Plentywood. Anyway, yeah. So we moved down to Billings when I was in high school. My dad had some health issues and culture to health care stuff and started college there and then got a scholarship to go to Ohio State

on a shooting scholarship, so shot competitively there. And then the Army picked me up after that to go shoot for them and spent a few years doing that and moved back to Montana and got involved in politics a little bit on the state level. State representative. State representative. Representing the people of, representing the good people of? Carbon County.

So it's the area that basically from just south of Laurel all the way to Red Lodge, Luther Roscoe area, and then south of the border. How many constituents do you have? About 10,000. So it's funny. I was just in D.C. and I was talking to a state representative from Virginia and talking about campaigns and constituents and that sort of thing. And so I asked him, I was like,

what's a campaign like for a state representative in Virginia? He's like, oh, you know, like $300,000 or $400,000. And I was like, well, an expensive one here is about $40,000. So it's a little bit different. That's still $4 for every constituent. That's an expensive one, yeah. The average is probably about $6,000 to $10,000 maybe. $6,000 to $10,000?

Yeah. That's about a buck per. In an election, you're looking at like 500 to 1,000 votes is swinging the whole thing. Yeah, 1,000 votes is a big, big difference. I think we have a high voter turnout in my area. Yeah, it was like 67 67 or something like that and yeah it's about i want to say what we have uh about yeah well registered voters there was probably a higher turnout than that there's about 6400 votes i think so yeah but it can be swung a lot of districts are

handful of votes 20 votes 40 votes really some of them usually there's one or two in the state that come down to five or eight votes and they do a recount and, Oh, he won by three. So you're saying that most like most state legislators, uh, they have another gig. Like,

Oh yeah, you can't make a living at this. I mean, they say we make 1133 an hour or whatever the state wage, but that's eight hour days. So, you know, when we're in session,

I don't know. I mean, I guess there's some days we get out earlier. You have a half day that you work. But generally, if you're involved or you've been around, you're there at 6, 6.30 every morning, and you often won't leave till 8, 9 o'clock. So if you work 6 to 6, that's kind of an average day. So you're not really making that much money. How many? Everybody has a job. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Oh, no. I was just going to say, how many terms have you done?

This is my third term. Okay, cool. So, yep. And then you're only getting paid when you're in session. That's kind of a, people think you're on like a salary deal. You get paid every day that you're working. And then we get a per diem, but you're moving up there and paying rent and buying food and stuff.

So it's not really a money-making gig. You do it for your ideological reasons or to try and help people out. Yeah. Or you could do it as a launch pad, right? Some people might. I don't see that as my projection, I guess. Like life. It's good when you're really,

when you look at the makeup of the legislature, you get a lot of retired people because they have time to do it. You get some younger people that kind of have time on their hands or independent business owners, guys that can do their own thing, take some time off and you get lawyers because they can just shut the practice down. Like, all right, I'm not taking any, I'm not doing any work for four months and then they'll come back. But it's kind of tough for, you know, if you're in the ag world, you know, there's a lot of guys from, you know, out in the sticks that are ranchers or farmers and farmers have a little easier because they usually can't

get in the field, especially this year. They won't be until after we're out but a lot of guys are starting to calve right now so their wives are at home you know calving things out the neighbors are helping them out so it's it's a tough gig if you're kind of a working man how much uh of your job is balancing out all of carbon county versus red lodge like you had a lot of people bitching about like out-of-staters in Red Lodge and second homes. Yeah, it's more of the ideologies, I think. There's some really good people on both sides. I mean, you get people that have lived here

for five generations can be just as one side or the other. Yeah, people in Red Lodge can be everyone's like, oh, they got to be from California and be super liberal. And it's like, well, I know guys from California that are more conservative than anybody else in the county.

So it's not so much where you're from or where you live it's more about just kind of how you think about things and people tend to group together so it is you know the county is a lot more agricultural rural people have been around for a while a lot more farm you know kind of ag production and a base and red lodge is a lot more retirement and then you got the ski hill so you kind of get that aspect to you know get more more people that just kind of in and out feels like to ski and hang out so you kind of get some of that too so it's definitely it's definitely more of montana man it totally is you know that's like i tell people it's like this is exactly like if you took montana and squished into one county it's like that's carbon county because you've got

kind of like this you know everybody jokes like oh it's the hippie town you know all the people that live out there and it's like you know you know the mountain town a little more palatable for some people i don't know and uh but it's like it's kind of like missoula you know you've got that kind of that type of group that dynamic and then you've got the two river valleys in carbon county we have the clark's fork and rock creek which is kind of like miss and the Yellowstone. And then Southeastern County is all just sagebrush, nothing. It's like if you go to Broadus, it's like people live out here.

It's just nothing. And then there's oil. There's oil in Southeastern part of the county. And then we have a lot of coal too, Carbon County. They named it that because of the coal mine there in Bear Creek. So you have some of that industry. So it really is kind of like a little microcosm of Montana. Then you've got the mountains, the western slopes of the mountains. Yeah, and you've got grizzly bears.

You've got wolves, and you've got elk, and turkeys. A lot of turkeys, to be honest. Yeah, just drive to go to Red Lion. I wasn't going to mention it. You guys got any fox squirrels in your district? I have not seen a fox squirrel. They're definitely there. I know for a fact.

No, I'm looking at my retirement home out there and not for the skiing for the squirrels damn it okay then uh so so seth is with us and then uh janice of course ben o'brien ocal 406 sam lundgren uh dude wrote in real quick dude wrote in we were talking about chafing a little bit chap ass chafing guy wrote in that he chafes when he swims that doesn't doesn't even seem possible in salt water or fresh water yeah salt water he says a lot worse chafes when he swims yeah i could see that i can't chase in salt water fresh water yeah i mean you got you got sand mixing around and you know just kind of that abrasiveness of salt water i feel like you know

i've been splashing around snorkeling and stuff it's chafing not about the presence of moisture yeah i don't know man but how do we define like what causes chafing plenty of moisture and water just his skin it depends because you're saying it's a big man's problem because there's a lot of contact. Yes. My legs don't brush. No. That's why most people think when chafing, you think of chap ass

because most people are going to have some skin-on-skin contact in their gluteal crease. Yeah. I was reading a thing. The UP, Michigan's Upper Peninsula peninsula where i live very briefly uh they're just getting walloped there's a deer biologist in the up saying if things continue this this winter keeps humming along like it is he's predicting they will lose 40 percent of their white tail deer this winter that wild. I had our local biologist told me the highline lost 40% in some areas last year. Is that right?

40%. 40%. Man, you think hunters kill deer. Talked about the tuna. Big correction. I was talking about the great poet Robert Service, and I mentioned American poetry, and boy, that got some Canadians riled up. A guy wrote, he says, as a Canadian and a British Columbian, I worry about our culture

being overshadowed by America and our attempts to maintain a distinct identity from our southern neighbors. And he even spelt it that cute Canadian way. Just put that U in there for emphasis he was like real worked up about misidentifying bob service but he was born in england so let's oh so they can't even claim they can't go to school in scotland yeah he moved to scotland when he was five and was born in england so really sorry sorry bro i didn't even hear from any scotsman land so much time in the yukon too. Yeah. And, you know, if you're in the Yukon, you definitely differentiate yourself from those folks down in British Columbia.

Yeah. I guess I think of him as an American poet because I feel like that's where his audience is. Yeah. And it's English. He's a British-Canadian-American poet. And we just kind of appropriate anything Canadian that we like. Sorry, Scott. Yeah, you just pick something in Canada and you like it.

You just act like it's American. And then it sort of is. I think he spent like 40 years, like the last 40 years of his life in Europe, in London, Paris. Bob Service. Robert Service. Bob. Yeah.

I call Robert Frost Bob Frost, and I call Robert Service Bob Service because I think it makes him more. You know the poems of bob frost right like that that thing about building fences oh yeah yeah he was the he was an american poet laureate bob frost he's got that poem where the two dudes are like they spend all their time building the fence between their properties like good fences make good neighbors and like an old stone savage. And you realize all they care about

is like very carefully delineating the line between their properties. And that's like what they dedicate their lives to. I will admit that I definitely disserviced Robert Service because of my impression of him. So I bought a book of collected works from the little airport shack in King Sam

in Alaska. They sell Robert Service books? Yeah. Because they want they're like, oh. I think they want, everybody likes to lay claim. He's Alaskan. You're saying that you're down on, you're saying you don't like his poetry because it all rhymes? No, no, no.

Oh, okay. I just bought his book while I was waiting on our plane out to the peninsula to go hunt brown bears. And it was just like winter would not leave and spent a ton of the trip shoulder to shoulder with three other dudes in a tent. That sounds like a Bob Service poem. Oh, yeah. And so I was super into robert service and just but i had like reading that book front to back 12 different times on that trip i'd kind of come to the conclusion that there's no way this guy got stationed in the yukon because

he was a crackerjack banker. I figured he was put out there because he kind of had some drug or alcohol problems. And then all of his poems, talking about the working class, it just kind of got ingrained in my brain that this guy probably did what a lot of poets and writers do, is die a bad death somewhere destitute yeah drunk under some bridge exactly but that's not the case at all he turned out to be quite quite the straight

arrow really yeah and i didn't didn't learn that until just recently so it made some money off his writing he was the most wealthy writer in paris at one time well what yeah that's saying something i would have rather especially in his time he died drunk under a bridge he's way less interesting he's way less interesting this way right if he would yeah because a lot of poets nowadays are too lazy to rhyme all their poems and that guy had that work ethic that he needs to go into like rhyming that stuff out to the bitter end. This guy, he had a pretty sizable fortune going, and then when World War I broke out, he couldn't join up because of his physical condition,

so he joined the Red Cross. Kind of like Hemingway. Yeah, litter bearer, and won a bunch of medals. He sounds like too good a dude to be a poet. A poet should be under a bridge, drunk. Drunk like Hemingway. Screaming at people. Did you just use the word litter bear yeah have we talked about um tomb the movie tombstone oh not for a long time but i know where you're going with that the um yeah huckleberry so real quick then i gotta get on to some other stuff

then we're talking about shooting with seth so it's okay i don't know if this is true i haven't looked into this but i've heard this everyone knows that that it's in tombstone right yeah the dude ace man from top gun yeah plays uh val kilmer the great actor val kilmer and val Kilmer is also, I'll point out, very good in Heat, the Michael Mann movie. So Val Kilmer says to a feller, I think he's fixing to shoot him maybe, or someone's fixing to shoot someone.

Yeah, they're about to duel. Val Kilmer says, I'll be your, he's like, do it. Shoot me or whatever. Pull your gun. I'll be your Huckle like do it shoot me or whatever pull your gun i'll be your huckleberry okay no what the hell does that mean no one knows what that means someone was telling me and listeners will write in and hopefully clarify this point someone's telling me that he messes that he messed the lineup or someone the writers messed it up or something got messed up. The expression is, he's like, go ahead, you know, pull your gun.

I will be your huckle bearer, which would be a term for, he's saying, try it. I'll be your pallbearer. Yes. Wow. Not I'll be your huckleberry. Have you watched it like 10 times in a row

to make sure that he actually does say Huckleberry? He says it like five times. He says it like five times. I'm your Huckleberry. I'm your Huckleberry. Is that what he says? I'm your Huckleberry. Johnny Ringo.

Johnny Ringo. You look like someone just walked on your grave. I shouldn't have brought it up. You should never bring up stuff you don't know what you're talking about. He was too high strung. Real quick. Real quick. Real quick.

Quick question for you. Guy writes in. I don't really understand this. He's got a bow that it maxes out at 60 pounds. And he's like, man, I want to go elk hunting. Am I irresponsible to elk hunt with my 60-pound bow? I'm guessing compound. Yeah. I'd say absolutely not. Absolutely-pound bow? I'm guessing compound. Yeah.

I'd say absolutely not. Absolutely not. Not? Absolutely not. Dude, my long bow is 52 pounds. Yeah, mine's 54. Yeah. Just understand what your weapon can do.

That's all that matters. Get close. Don't be bombing them at 60 yards. 60-pound compound is like an 80-pound long bow. I mean, how many guys hunt with 80-pound longbows? I mean, mine was like 56 pounds. I just recommend that he has a heavy arrow. Yeah, I was going to say, heavy arrow.

Yeah, you should be shooting a heavy arrow with a 60-pound bow. Any bow. Fixed blade, broadhead, and a heavy arrow. Go to town. Yeah. I'm not a humongous man. I'm not a humongous man, but I pull quite a bit more than that. I was just curious.

But I don't know what his circumstances are. Well, how? What are you pulling? I shoot 70. Okay, a guy wrote in from the military, and he says, you guys are talking about whether you use – when you're trying to explain to someone where something is, so you're looking out on the landscape, and you're like,

you see a deer, and you're trying to explain where the deer is. And we were talking about whether that's described as talking someone into something or talking someone onto something. He says, military feller, he says, it seems like the hegemony, his word, settled on the former. Now, he's a U.S. Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controller, JTAC. JTAC. Our job is to call in air-to-ground fire in support of ground forces. They damn sure talk people on to something.

They do not talk someone into something. You call in fire, though. You don't call on fire. So you're calling them onto it, but you call in fire. So. That's a good point. Yeah. He says, assuming every one of us has more or less the same knowledge base, what really sets a good JTAC from a great one is our ability to get aircraft overhead and talk their soda straw. Do you know, are you following all this? Talk their soda straw sensor onto a target expeditiously and facilitate fire. The term we use is talk on because you are verbally moving the pilot's eyes from the known to the unknown. We work big to small. Also, whichever direction you are facing is 12 o'clock as opposed to changing it

every time you talk on to a known spot. That part I don't understand. So you find your fixed point. It's like on a hillside. All right, the big tree. Everybody got the big tree. All right, the deer is 12 o'clock. So you are the known point because he knows where you are.

Oh, so that's what I was wondering. He knows where the person is. I got you. So then you're designating off of, all right, my 12 o'clock, because otherwise it's changing no matter where he is. And he always knows where the guy's facing then. Now, here's the hottest tip. Laser designator.

Here's the hottest JTAG tip that I'm going to adopt from now on. We were talking about using it as a unit of measure. So let's say you have a thing. Let's say there happens to be a deer by a school bus, and everybody can agree that that's a school bus. Common scenario. Yeah, you'd be like um trying to explain distance what they do is you pick something out on the landscape and make that a unit a distance unit so let's say you can agree on a a lone cedar tree on a ridge top and the deer's somewhere off to the right.

You take the width of that known cedar tree, and that becomes your unit of measurement. That'd be a shitty one, because it'd be very small. So all of a sudden, you'd be talking about, well, 50 cedar trees away. Okay, but let's say you're talking four. A rock band. Sure, but whatever.

He's just saying, pick a known thing, and make distance units off the known thing. So let's say the deer's pretty close. Someone can see it go like okay that's our unit of measurement yes three go three of those over rather than being like a little bit a teeny ways or yards we're always trying to do yards which is like wow at what point your yards are mine we're always like i like 20 yards like i don't know how the hell many you You could go there and wind up, it's 10 yards, it's 60 yards. So make a unit of measurement and march their eyes on that unit of measurement. I've done it with clouds before.

Is that stupid? Yeah. You see that big moving cloud? You see how it just turned into a mustache? Go to the right of the mustache. On the subject of naming guns, a little bit of feedback from people. A guy's saying that you can't name your – one guy says that he has a rifle and he gave it a name

and he feels okay with it because he has a 6.5x68, a 6.5x68, which I didn't even know was a gun. I'm not familiar. I've never heard of a 6.5x68. 6.5x68? That's what he says. Some crazy wildcat. And he even says that he times – since it's 65X68, he times it out.

It comes out to 442. So he calls it the 442. Another guy was saying, the same way you can't give yourself a nickname, if you're going to nickname a gun, it can only be given by other people who name the gun. The same way you can't give yourself a nickname. Somewhat legitimate. Yeah. His buddy has a a gun he keeps too much oil on it and one time he dropped a duck hunting and an oil slit came off it and so they call his shotgun the valdez that's pretty good ask that guy ask that guy if he's got a dog and who named the dog this is the last the last note i'm ever going to give about cheese curds.

So, like, cheese curds, when you buy them, they squeak. If you've been to Wisconsin, you know about this. It's the only thing I like about Wisconsin, except for Doug Dern. That's a joke. But cheese curds, like, when you buy them, they get squeaky. Then you leave them laying around, and they lose their squeak. And Doug Dern feels as though it's like a sin against God and man. He's like, why would you ever let your curds sit around so long that they'd lose their squeak?

And like, if you let them sit that long, you don't deserve to have squeaky curds. And these boys in Elroy, Wisconsin, were telling us that you leave them on the dashboard of your truck in the sun, they'll re-squeak. Someone was telling us that if you microwave them, they'll get squeaky again. This guy's saying the absolute best way to revive your neglected cheese curds is to place them into a colander and run hot water over them for about a minute. They will be not just as good, he says, and he makes a parenthetical, if not better than right when they came out of the vat. Okay. I'll be trying that.

Yeah. A little cheese because Wisconsin turkey season's vat. Okay. I'll be trying that. Yeah. A little cheese because Wisconsin turkey season's coming up. Yeah. Can I? Go ahead. I'm going to start asking Seth questions about shooting. I got one that might be a good way to lead into.

Can you pivot off it? Yeah. I might be able to. I got two. I'll see if we can do this first one quickly. The dude wrote in. This is interesting because it's kind of about shooting shooting but he's got a predicament that he's found himself

in twice i want you guys to all weigh in to see if what you guys would do in this situation he went back country elk hunting in colorado his buddy and on the third year they went back three times they finally got into a bull the last day it was – and they trade days on who gets to be the shooter and who's calling, right? So it was his day to shoot. Bull comes in. He's going to have a perfect shot at – They just haul him back up.

What about the three years? That's just background. Yeah, they've been hunting three years. Unsuccessfully. Hadn't got a shot yet. Okay. Hadn't killed nothing. On the third year, last day his it's his day to shoot and bull steps out and right as he's

getting ready to shoot he hears another bow go off he sees the arrow smoke this bull and he ends up still punching his trigger because it's just like he's like whoa what the fuck and and and shoots an arrow to his arrow hits in the paunch bull goes like 30 yards tips over and dies ends up being a nice 320 inch six point um and he's like dude thought it was my day to shoot right and he's like oh really i i thought it was mine like sorry Like, sorry. And so... Hold on a second. Yeah. Hold on a second. Mm-hmm. This fight. The two guys are hunting together.

Yeah. They call in a bull, and he's saying that both of them almost simultaneously launch arrows. Mm-hmm. Both hit. The one who shot first was in their all-or-a-possession. That seems to me like...

Can you look at over and be like are you oh you're drawing your bows drawn are they with each other are they in different spots because if they could see each other it's not like a subtle thing you're doing there typically a car setup is like 20 to 50 yards spread out one guy in front one guy sure typically tip but i mean i've also called in bulls standing right next to a dude and been whispering in his ears when to draw a bow. Yeah, I don't know. Thick timber. He could have been 10 yards away and definitely could have drawn

and been doing jumping jacks, and the other guy wouldn't have been able to see what he was doing. Okay, let's just take it at face value. Yeah, we'll take it. So anyways, they split the meat like it always happens, and they can't decide on who should get the antlers. The dude who was supposed to be shooting. Yeah.

Oh, but he got a bad hit. He got a bad hit. Might have not killed him. Can he blame his bad hit on the fact that the other guy shot? That's what I was thinking. Yeah, totally. Right now, they alternate years. They swap it out in each other's houses.

It seems like two nice guys. Right? Yeah. I know a lot of guys that would not be so nice. I'd saw it down in the middle and just each have an antler that's what i'm saying the old solomon trick you know you just get half i didn't you know you know what he might not be realizing you can do when you saw something in half he probably doesn't realize how you're supposed to put that to your wall it'd be pretty bitching as half you don half. You don't put it aiming out. You cut it down the skull.

Did they mount it or just have the skull? Didn't say. If they mounted it, I don't know what they're supposed to do. Do a 2D mount. No one wants a sock. No one wants a unicorn. Unless it's the old school. If it's the old school where he's looking, where the mount is a shoulder mount looking dead nuts forward.

So you could put it right on the wall. So then you can split it, turn it sideways, and plaster it against the wall that actually could be cool that'd be really cool if it's a skull you cut it and don't have them looking out you have them plastered against the wall which looks very cool yeah and then you're like kind of artistic maybe an innovator we were space your wife's gonna like it tell me to get a house with the same floor plan too that'd be that'd be helpful we were gonna do that one time we were gonna bandsaw a buck down the middle because it kind of kind of stepped out in a narrow opening and a buddy and i were 10 yards apart and just both pulled up and fired both hit it and what happened who got to keep it uh we split the meat brought it back um and we talked about it,

all sorts of stuff we were going to do, and the skull was lying around for a while, and I did the European mount, and it was sitting in my house. Who tagged it? I tagged it. I feel like whoever tags it. No, that's just illegal. We were going to cut it, but then he never asked for it,

never asked for it back, and kind of got out of hunting. And he kind of blocked his number. No, I still know him. But whoever tagged it took a hit, right? You don't know that they're filling their tag for the team. Taking one for the team. If you took the question to a game warden, the game warden would want it to go to who tagged it.

And if you did a curvy shoulder mount with the deer's looking curvy, and then you split dead nuts down the spine and split the thing, then you have a curvy wall, which is tricky. Yeah. You had to live in a castle. Yeah. Or a planetarium or something. Or a yurt.

Or they have the parapet. Seth, you were telling me, so you kind of walked us through the thing of how you became a competitive shooter. First, I want to ask you another question i want to get into how this all happens how a fellow gets into this okay but you were telling me that that you used to shoot pistols competitively right so that's what i did ohio state with shoot pistol and you're saying that some guys set the trigger so light that if you point

it toward the sky and shake it, it goes off. Yep. So that's an event that they actually just removed from the Olympics, but it's called – Shooting in the sky? Not for that reason. Not for that reason. It's called pew, pew, pew is where you just run around shooting in the sky. No, so some of those guys are running like 50 to 70 gram triggers on those things.

It's called free pistol. 50 gram. And so it sounds super dangerous, but the reality is that – you're in a controlled setting you've got it right you've got your pistol pointed down range and you it's most of them are some sort of falling block you know so you're one explain that to folks so it's uh it's kind of like the ruger number ones if you've ever seen those you've got a little switch on the bottom where you just flick it open it drops a block down you put the bullet in your close it back up the block comes up and locks it in so it's kind of a like a block mechanism behind the chamber and that's how most of them work some sort of falling block for the single

shot so it's 22 you put your round in lock it and then you're aiming down your lane and there's usually you know they have wind breaks or something but so you've got six or eight shooters that you know maybe four that are wide and then you've got your targets outdoor you shoot it's 50 meters away meters yeah so which is like damn hard with the pistol yeah and it's about a two just under two inch bullseye at 50 meters so it's i mean it's smaller than a coffee cup lid so they're small so if you come up and you were to accidentally you know touch this thing off that's a zero and it's 10 10 9 8 out is how it's scored so you drop 10 points on one shot and you gotta count i mean you count it so that's 10 points down is this idpa no it's well it's

international international pistol style so it's olympic they shoot it all over they have world cups and did you ever shoot that competition which one free the more we're talking about yep yep free was one of my events in college that i shot so raising a pistol and shooting something that's two inches in diameter at 50 yards so we shot a lot of indoor your 50 foot indoor targets about the size of a dime for your 10 ring how many shots in a row can you put in there the best i've ever done is like 11 i think out of 60 in a row um for a full match in the 20s somewhere the key with three pistol is not screwing up and shooting sevens and eights so if you shoot a bunch of tens if you can hold the nine ring that's like the world's best shooters

are pretty much holding nine ring with a lot of tens and your nine rings at 50 meters about i don't know four inches probably so it's about keeping a group and now they've changed some of that they went away from if you touch the ring it scores higher to now they do a lot of it on a decimal so if you shoot a center center it's 10.9 and if you shoot just touching the edge of it it's a 10.0 and if you go just outside it's a 9.9 so rather than going you know guys that can shoot super deep shots and then throw an eight you're going to score better than now because it's all just decimal so it's like how close can you keep them to the middle so it's a little bit more fair i guess that way why did the olympics

get rid of this kind of thing well a lot of it is it's not some of them aren't super fun to watch i mean this is like a marathon of shooting so you're shooting at 50 meters it's 60 shots in like two hours so it's super long. And a lot of it has to do with they kind of are going away from sports that aren't men and women together shooting. So you go to some of the rifle events, there's a lot more crossover. You're wearing jackets and you're shooting in a more controlled environment. And some of the ladies out-shoot the guys,

whereas free pistol is more of a uh there's a lot more physical involved you don't get any real supports you're not wearing you know jackets or pants or anything to make your position better like super canvas like right yes canvas like a super thick canvas so you get locked in there and you literally or can't even move so it's super stable so they're kind of going away from sports that can't be both genders, I guess. And it's not super exciting to watch, I guess. So what are the other shooting sports that are in the Olympics? So they have shotgun. That's a big one in the shotgun because you go to the Middle East or some of those countries and shotgun's a huge, huge deal. It's a big money sport in a lot

of places. They do air pistol still. So air pistol, air rifle, and then small war rifle. And then they still do rapid fire pistol which is a 22 event where you've got five big bullseyes which is what i shot when i went to the army it's they're just big giant black bullseyes at 25 meters and your 10 rings pretty big it's like three three and a half inches and that's a more dynamic so you start with your gun at a 45 down they've got lights or turning targets most of the upper class ones are lights and when the light goes off you got to come up in one two three four five shoot your shots and they do it eight seconds for your you do two series of eight second two series of six second two series of four

seconds i've watched that before and it's not boring no at least to me it's pretty cool and they've changed it for the finals to where rather than being scoring if you're a 9.5 you get a hit 9.5 or better you get a hit if you're at 9.4 or lower, it's a miss. So when you come up, you just 1, 2, 3, and then they just, oh, this guy got four hits. So people can just look at that. It's really easy to, oh, he shot a 9.9. It's like, I don't know what that means.

What's a 9.9 or 10.2? I really enjoy watching the biathlon. Yeah. That's got to be my favorite Olympic sport. That's kind of the only one that I think people know is in the Olympics. Right. The other ones, it's like 3.30 in the morning.

Are the rest of them in Summer olympics yeah yeah not when they're doing it those are some olympic games yep summer is biathlon the only winter shooting sport um i believe so i don't think they have any strict shooting sports i think it's just the ski and ski and shoot what countries are the best shooters um america's decent it depends like shotgun like we are kim rody kim rody yeah uh vincent hancock is he's won gold medals at just about every olympics that he's went to so we've got some really really solid shot our most meddled olympians are shooters right yep a lot of them well besides you know swimmers but yeah um yeah the uh so they've got a shotgun's good for us i'd say the big ones are um china is usually pretty good south korea some of those the asian countries put a lot of effort into it russia has

a really long-standing tradition of shooting um super well and that kind of depends rapid fire there's some germans that shoot really really well in rapid fire uh free pistol it's kind of a mix there's like you know kind of the bigger countries. A lot of the European countries are really big into shooting. So the people that just generally kick ass at the Olympics. Generally. China, the U.S., Russia, like kick ass at shooting. Pretty much.

It's not like weird outliers. Not really. Shotgun's kind of one because you get like, you know, Azerbaijan has a shotgun shooter that comes out and is like doing really well. You know, some random stuff. Is there a wing shooting culture in the Arab world? Like I know they're big into falconry. I don't know.

You know, I haven't really paid that much attention to it. But I know when I was on the Army team, they had a shotgun team, and those guys would go over and shoot. And I guess some of the places they go are just super posh, you know, marble trap houses and all sorts of craziness. And talking about hunting, you know, I don houses and all sorts of craziness. Not built out of some time logs. And talking about hunting, you know, I don't know if this is like the sporting side, but one of the things that's big in the shotgun,

kind of almost like the underground is they do pigeon shoots. And so what they do is they have a box with a spring in it, and then they have a ring at like, you know, say 40, 50 yards across. I think it's smaller than that actually, and it's got like a four-inch fence. And so they've got this ring around it. So you sit back at certain distances and they basically push the button and it springs this pigeon out that can fly.

And then you got to shoot the pigeon. If it falls inside the ring, you get the point. And if it falls outside of the ring, then you don't. That's not an Olympic game, though. No, no, no. This is just... I don't see that being popular in America. I will admit to having done that before.

Right. And it's big money. But they still do tower shoots all over the place. Some kid climbs up in a tower and starts throwing pheasants over the rail. I did it in the Dominican Republic and there was five boxes. You say pull. Street pigeon.

Street pigeon comes flying out of one of the five boxes. And it launches them out. It launches them out. It springs them out because they're captive. So they pin their wings and they put them in the box, unpin them, and it springs them out. You shoot them if they fall. But before they get over the fence, you get a point.

What's the diameter of the fence? Well, you know, it's not big. I've only ever done that one time, and I decided, ah, I probably won't do that again. You know how people – Never done it, but it's big money. I mean, people – Yeah, and the tower shoots are huge money.

They bet money on different shooters, and you can buy shooters and Calcutta stuff. I mean, people are flying in on Learjets to shoot these things. Giannis, did we talk about turkey shoots? Like when I was a kid, I grew up by a gun club, a private gun, a twin-legged gun club. And if I'm not mistaken, man, I need to call some folks back home and ask them. If I'm not mistaken, when I was a little, little kid, they would dig a ditch and put turkeys in the ditch. Live turkeys?

With just their heads sticking out, right? Yes. Okay. And if you hit the turkey you got to keep it and bring it home and cook it for thanksgiving oh whoa because that's a long ways out it was like i can't remember it was like i feel like it was like you had to use a 22 and the turkeys were way the hell out and you could just see their heads behind a berm and if you could hit the turkey that's your turkey do you feel like that's the origination of the term turkey i don't think i'm i don't think i'm making this up put it in a box yeah you've heard of this the old school like

turkey shoot turkey shoot because by the time when i was a kid turkey shooting was you you shot a target and then you got a frozen turkey if you want i think that was a pc version that they were like we gotta clean this up we gotta clean this up we did a trap competition yeah yeah i did some work for my buddy ronnie, at a turkey slaughter facility. And if you put me in a turkey, if you made me a turkey, and you said, okay, Thanksgiving's quickly approaching, you can go to Bill Maher, the turkey slaughter facility that we did some work in, and you'll die there.

Or you can go to Twin Lake Gun Club and die there. I would go to Twin Lake Gun Club to die. Can we clarify that Bill Maher, not like the comedian guy? Oh, no. It's like B-I-L hyphen M-A-R, I think. Look that up, Yanni. I was extremely confused for a second. Sorry, HBO.

Type that up, Yanni. These guys slaughter. I was extremely confused for a second. These guys slaughter like – Sorry, HBO. These guys – Type that up, Yanni. These guys slaughter, I think, when they're gearing up. I feel like they're slaughtering 20,000 turkeys in a day or something like that or some insane number. And it's like a – Dude, it's a – A lot of turkeys. There'd be turkeys running around.

Turkeys would get out of the trucks and get away. And once they hit the ground, because they're all in a controlled environment. So we had all the materials. Like like Ronnie, he's a millwright, and we'd have our materials out in the parking lot, and you'd come in in the morning, and you'd find turkeys hiding out in the parking lot in our material, because they'd get out of the truck, and once they got out of the truck, they couldn't mess with them, and so the turkeys would go try to find a place to hide,

and guys that worked with would catch those turkeys, bring them home, and I remember this guy, Rick, he made a little cage at home and would take the turkeys to go try to find a place to hide and guys that work with a catch those turkeys bring them home and i remember this guy rick he made a little cage at home and would take the turkeys he caught out the parking lot and put them in the cage and fatten them up in the cage and make smoked turkeys out of them i'll tell you what dude good old days if it's p if it's more pc if it's more then it's not even political correctness whatever it's if it's regarded as more ethical to have a guy hit a target and give him a frozen turkey, I just challenge that. I have no opinion on the matter,

but my coming up, it had changed, right? It was a turkey shoot, but like, I wrote a turkey shoot, and all the ones I did were muzzleloader based, so it was all black powder open sights. But I won. I remember winning my first frozen turkey was quite the accomplishment. I think I took a picture with it, like grip and grin.

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Do you know during I'm going to pivot back into wing shooting and whatnot. During the Clinton administration, very early on when they first identified bin Laden as a threat, he was out hunting birds in the desert at a falconry camp. And they debated hitting him there.

This is like way back, like 92 or something like that. They debated hitting him there this is like way back like 92 or something like that they debated hitting him there but there was some other high profile saudis who were also hunting out of that same camp and they decided against it so they almost got him hunting a good way to go that that was my pivot because watch i'll wrap it up so since they you know there's that bird hunting culture through falconry there's also a shotgunning culture there and you were a competitive shotgun shooter i didn't really shot competitively well i thought so what'd you do in high school um what'd you do i shot um pistol pistol that's what it was yep and for some reason i thought you you went you were doing like the competitive wing shooting.

Not wing shooting, but skeet. I shot it a little bit, played with it. I had my roommate shot competitively. But yeah, I was always pistol all the way through. How did you first start? How did you get into that? So I kind of started through a local club when I was in high school in Billings. We had on the competitive side and we shot small war rifle, 20 rifle, and then a error rifle. And so I shot that

for a couple of years and then, and I was okay, but there's a, it's a lot of, uh, kind of building up a system of shooting. I mean, you're trying to get your position down, locked down. That's most of what rifle shooting is, is the position. So you're trying to get super stable so that your rifle literally doesn't move. And it takes a while to kind of develop that. So, position. So you're trying to get super stable so that your rifle literally doesn't move. And it takes a while to kind of develop that. Freehand you. Right. So you're shooting three position. You're shooting offhand, kneeling, and prone. And prone obviously is pretty easy. Everything's with the sling and peep sights. So that's pretty easy. And getting into your kneeling and offhand positions takes a little bit more time. So I was decent, but not really great. And then I started shooting pistol as kind of an add-on to that and was a lot better at pistol and i enjoyed it more there's

you know how to put on all the jackets and drag your suitcase around with all your gear so i'm i'm a little bit less structured in that regard so i had more fun with it how good can a person get with a 22 rifle um pretty good like what kind of hundred yard group can you shoot with a 22? Oh, under an inch, like with a sling and a shooting just off a sling prone. Shooting offhand stuff. Um, they don't really shoot a hundred, all their matches are 50 yards. So, but most guys that are good can hold, pretty much hold a half inch group shooting all the way through three position. Yeah.

They'll, they'll drop some points but prone it's to be competitive at the prone level you have to shoot a 60 out of 60 at 50 yards and that's wind call so you're shooting your you know it's about a half an inch bullseye that you're shooting at so yeah if you're at the net even the national level the top two or three guys will all be cleaning them 60 out of 60 shooting peep sights have you hunted squirrels much a little bit or cottontails yeah i was i was stationed in georgia so georgia alabama is pretty pretty much about hunting all that stuff so these guys with a nine mil you could hunt they could hunt oh really so

they could hunt squirrels and just shoot offhand and hit squirrels out of the trees in the head yeah those guys are some of those guys are nuts how well how well they shoot yeah i i shoot a 22 rifle decent i'm not you know some of those guys are pretty good but yeah i i always just messed around take my glock nine all to go squirrel hunting just get g'd up on that and you could get that good with that yeah i could hit squirrels with it okay yeah best uh so funny story uh a buddy of mine who's who's back in the service now he's actually one of the special forces groups now that i was in the marksmanship unit with we were teaching classes because when you're in the service now. He's actually one of the special forces groups now that I was in the marksmanship unit with. We were teaching classes

because when you're in the army marksmanship unit, it's kind of a dual. You have to be an instructor and a competitive shooter. So you do your training and you compete, but you also are on the instructing side of it. And the unit started in 56. And the idea was, is, hey, we need to figure out how to teach people to shoot well.

So what better way to do that than have people compete? And then they learn the best way of doing everything, and then they convert that to the military and then teach all the Joes. So that was kind of the mission statement of the unit. And it's stayed pretty much the same all the way through. And that was the unit you were in? Yeah, the Army Marksmanship Unit. And that's their still, you know, your title is a shooter instructor.

So you're training, but then you're also going and teaching, which I found that to be probably the more rewarding side of it, just because you're working with guys that this could literally save their life and, you know, help them to be effective. So we had a class and we were teaching, there was about 20 guys and it was a close quarters marksmanship CQM stuff. So you're shooting rifle, you know, carbines and pistols out to 50 yards. It's kind of the running gun, if you think action shooting type stuff. So we're at this class and a lot of the guys to qualify, we had a six inch dot at 15 yards. And that was kind of the standard that we tried to get them to by the end of the class. So everybody was kind of shooting and it was lunchtime. And whenever it was lunch, we had

ammo laying around and guns. So we always just kind of kept shooting. So my buddy was out there shooting and we look up on the berm and it's kind of about 80 yards to this berm, and then maybe 30 or 40 up to the top. And there's this fox squirrel that's running along this berm. And so we see this thing, and I was like, hey, hey, there's a squirrel up there. So, of course, you know, it's open season on squirrels, and we're like, all right. So the squirrel kind of comes down the berm a little bit, and buddy walks forward maybe 15, 20 yards. He's not right next to the class. They're all kind of sitting under this covered area.

And this squirrel's maybe 70, 80 yards away, and it's sitting in this tree. And so he pulls out his Glock 34. It's like a long slide Glock 9mm. And everybody's looking at him like, yeah, there's no way. We've been trying to hit this 6-inch dot. So he shoots, and I think he missed his first shot at it. Second shot, he smokes this thing, and it's like hanging from the tree. So he shoots again, missed his third shot, shoots again,

hits it again his fourth time, and it falls. So he runs up there and grabs the squirrel. So it was really funny watching the expression on all these guys' faces. They're like, this guy just shot a squirrel out of a tree like 80 yards away with a 9-millimeter Glock. Oh, yeah, man. So that's kind of where you can get with some of that stuff. Some of those guys that you shoot all the time, it's crazy how accurate you can get, especially with a 9mm Glock. Oh, yeah, man. So that's kind of where you can get with some of that stuff. Some of those guys that you shoot all the time,

it's crazy how accurate you can get, especially with a pistol. We carry pistols for bear protection sometimes, and now and then we'll get around to shooting the pistols. It's embarrassing, man. It's so hard. Well, we took one class from a really well-known instructor by the end of that class we could all hit uh gong at 100 yards with uh 45 1911 yep and it's it's form man

the form and and just and the mental thing it is there's like a mental thing like i can't hit stuff with a pistol and it's like then you watch somebody pull up and shoot a man-sized target at like 200 yards, like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And you're like, okay, it's voodoo. And it's like, no, it's not. You just have to, you got to get your mind right. There's like a certain way of thinking about pistols and triggering and sights.

And then once you get the form, like how to lock it down. Most shooting disciplines are like that, right? I mean, shooting 1,000 yards with a rifle seems intimidating until you lay down and have somebody tell you how to do it. Yeah, it's true. You have a spotter to walk you through it. And you've got control. I think that's the other thing about pistols.

There's no support system where a rifle, you've got a stock, and you can kind of make it stop moving and keep it from twitching. It's like pistol, any little thing, it's all about the mechanics of how you're shooting it. And it goes back to just repetitions but that was kind of our thing in training it's the most boring thing in the world but trying to get your hold super super tight so we would literally hold against a wall for half hour 45 minutes a day and you work on body sway because you naturally sway when you stand so

you're trying to eliminate all that so that you're not moving your sights back and forth on the target when you say hold against the wall you just had your arm up with your thumb yeah but what does that mean like you're pushing so nope you just take a pistol and you hold it about a foot from the wall and you got a dot and you just try and hold it on that dot is basically work through your body and try and get all the movement out and just work on keeping that as still as possible and you kind of build up all your little stabilizer muscles but it's it's crazy how tight you can hold with a pistol once you've if you've trained that for so long because you're shooting at something so small you can't be if you're moving around a lot you know your wobble area you're trying to get that as small as possible and then you just it's like any other

pistol you're just trying to break it inside that little wobble but the smaller you get it the more consistent you'll be and the more you know your score will go up how much do your sights matter to you like if you have all your mechanics down it matters yeah if because you think about it you know if you're off by a millimeter on your side alignment that's throwing you off by inches at even 50 feet so you know it's sights front sight side alignment the target's blurry when we shoot you're just it's literally just locking those sights in and we had a the national coach name is sergey luzov he was a russian shot running target over in russia and then came over was a pistol coach so he had an accent but he's

like you know and i don't know if i can do a good russian accent or not but you have to try he's like ukrainian i think right russia we're pretty we're like what you have to do is like it's man it's like we have uh it's like you got to think about it like this it's like your front sites are not like this uh you're just watching this child walk around the room he's like he's like, you got to think about it like this. It's like your front sights are not like this. You're just watching this child walk around the room. He's like, you have to grab the child and slam him on the table and hold him there. He's like, that's how you work the sights. Sounds Russian. And I was like, oh.

Sir, that seems. He's like, you know, they're not just passive. It's like you need to grab them. I was like, OK, OK, I got it. Sights are important. Is there anyone that makes does anyone make money shooting competitively is there any like paid um well if you're good that's the key and i know some of the guys that i shot within the unit like three guns pretty

a lot of guys get out and they go work for you know some of the guys that were i went to now pop shooter for sig for instance okay so you go, some of the guys that were our winner now, pop shooter for SIG, for instance. So you go get an industry job like that, yeah, you make good money. Or Vincent that shoots shotgun a lot, Hancock, he's a multi-time gold medalist. So he's out of the Army now and does a lot of training seminars. So he'll go and has his own kind of training system and does that. So you can make money on that side of it.

But generally speaking, unless you're really, really good or you get sponsors you get sponsorships there's not i mean you're not going out and winning a hundred thousand dollars i feel like yeah three gun is really the the main one where guys could make i mean because you can get sponsored by right several companies that basically pays and there's some payouts you know explain three gun for people so three gun is uh it's an action sport where you're shooting rifle pistol shotgun so it's a running gun. Anybody that's shot like IDPA, USPSA, any of the action pistol stuff, you're running those guns. There's different classes.

Some of them are race guns with ports and a dot on them. Don't even move. Then you've got limited, which is more, you have to shoot iron sights and you're limited on some of your magazine stuff. Then production is just like a stock Glock. You can change a couple things, but not a lot. There's different classes. Then it's just running through a course. You can change a couple things, but not a lot. So there's different classes. And then it's just running through a course,

and you'll have an AR-15 rifle, and you're shooting targets that are either paper or steel. So you'll have knockdown, fall-down plates, a lot of steel. And it's either two hits on steel or one hit on steel. Knock them over. And then you've got paper targets with rings. So like A-ring, B-ring, C-ring type stuff. So you're just running through a course, and you have it all set out.

Toting all three guns at once? Not usually. Some of them, so there's a match, and I haven't shot a lot of three-gun, but they had a match that MGM, it's like the metal target company, they sponsored out in Idaho, like eastern, southeastern Idaho, called the Iron Man. And so their stages were, I mean, you'd run a stage and it'd be like four or five minutes long and you'd have to drag dummies and like have weights and you'd shoot, I mean, like 60 shots of shotgun. And you're so you're like

loading a shotgun, go through like four magazines on your pistol. And it was just super long stages and you're running through. And so they say, you start here and you got to shoot this bank of targets and you could miss stuff. And, you you know you're trying to keep track of everything and like oh you didn't see that target and so that's those are kind of fun and then a lot of them are more controlled where it's just a tight stage and you just kind of run through and play the game and it's all about speed and accuracy so how fast can you move the guys that are really really good at it can break down a stage and find the least amount of movement. They don't tell you how to shoot anything,

so you can shoot pretty much any order as long as you're not shooting back. It's like a 180 plane that you can't break. People just work through it. It's pretty cool. Like work through it hitting all the targets. Yep, and you're just trying to go through and hit everything as fast as you can in the least amount of movement,

and then it's all time versus hits. Yeah, a lot of times there'll be a shooting house or like to answer your question about where the guns are you'll have like a barreled shotgun right some of them are staged or a ar-15 on the table so you know some of them make you pack them so you shoot it and then you gotta sling it like that's where i go with iron man it's like you gotta sling stuff and carry it sometimes but a lot of them like you said you shoot your pistol drop it in a box grab your rifle shoot your rifle drop in a box, grab your rifle, shoot your rifle, drop it in a box, grab your shotgun, finish it out, clear it.

So that's to keep it safe. Do the military guys dominate this, or are there people who have never been in the military that are good at it? Both. It comes down to training. Obviously, in the unit, if you've got gunsmiths. The cool thing about the AMU is we had a fully functional gun shop with full-time guys that are working on machining. I mean, full-on CNC machines. They could pretty much redesign and build anything you wanted them to.

Full reloading room, guys, all they do is reload and test. So in terms of figuring out the market, you've got guys like that, which is obviously an advantage, but a lot of it's just time on the range and bullets downrange. It's time and ammunition, man. Run through your stages. Everything has to be muscle memory. How do I cut off a half a second on this shotgun reload how do i cut off a half a second on this movement half a second here because that adds up and that's the difference

between first and tenth i tried this some years ago and it was reloading that got me all the time reloading a shotgun shotgun's horrible i was horrible like fumbling everywhere you drop around you're like oh god pick that up and then you know if you don't get them all in there you're just gonna miss one like you just and then you gotta'm going to pick that up. And then you know if you don't get them all in there, you're just going to miss one. And then you've got to keep going. Yeah, but military is good. We shot some of that styled stuff, so there's kind of a competitive side. And when we were in, we stood up a team.

So the last year that I was in the unit, I actually went over, we called the ITG, Instructor Training Group. Usually what we did is we had the pistol shooters kind of teach the close range stuff, the service pistol, international pistol. And then the rifle shooters that were on the rifle teams, they taught kind of the long range wind calling and position stuff. And it worked okay. And what we did, some guys stood it up and then I actually joined the team after they had kind of started working on it, was to develop a curriculum that said, hey, we've got guys like myself and other guys that shot through college and we had, you

know, six, eight, 10 years of shooting experience. And then we had guys that came over from like the third range of battalions at Fort Benning. So a lot of those guys would come over. So you've got guys that have been deployed six, eight, 10 times and spent a lot of time, you know, years in combat. And then you take those guys and say, all right, what's effective in combat? What's effective if you're in houses, if you're knocking on doors, if you shoot in long range, what type of situations do you see? How do you make this effective? And then we took our shooting ability, said, well, I know how to pull a trigger. I know how to run a gun, but how do you kind of meld the two together so that you're running a gun? So it's combat

effective. And that was really, really cool. And then developing programs through that. So we trained a lot of kind of three gun, but it's like, how do you get your kit efficient? How do you get to stuff quickly? Where do you put your magazines? How do you set up your rifle so that you're not, you know, everything's quick and efficient. So efficiency of movement is important no matter what you're shooting, if it's combat or if it's, you know, training. I think I told you this over dinner, but I one time went down, I was the guest of a special forces group in Fort Bragg and i went down to their

compound and i was surprised because i went out to watch them train and they were training on something that seemed like so specific they were spending the day training on how to transition from your rifle to your pistol right basically they're training how to drop that and pull your pistol out so and shoot a target with it and it's and they trained it and trained it it seems small but you got to think about the situation that you're looking at okay you you bust into a building and all of a sudden there's guys popping out with guns and you pull the trigger and you hear the loudest sound in the world click right and then what now it's like well you can try and clear your rifle and get around in it or you know a misfire you

don't necessarily know what's wrong you have some sort of malfunction well we train and it's kind of been a transition in the military away from we'll get your rifle up pistols are just there so you can look good i guess to where it's like no pistol can be an effective tool so that's where you see those transitions it's like and i know a guy can be an effective tool. So that's where you see those transitions. And I know a guy that I did some work with that had a situation where this happened, and it was the same thing as click. He tried to clear it, click, and all of a sudden

the guy's turning around with a gun. It's like, well, what do you do now? It's like, well, I've got a secondary weapon because it's always primary, secondary. That's how they train in the military. He's like, well, here comes the pistol, and basically saved his life. So that's why if you shoot and it doesn't go and you've got a threat in front of you,

it's like you have to get to your secondary as quickly as possible. And if it takes you three seconds to do that, which isn't a lot of time, but it's a whole lot different than second half. That's why that's such an important thing. And, you know, you start from the ground up. That's where every little, you train every aspect. You start with just a gun low, bring a gun up and shoot. And then you bring a gun up and shoot left and right,

you know, transition targets. And then you bring up and shoot close and near. And then you do a reload. And then you just kind of work your way through every aspect. And then that gives those guys the ability to train. And you can do it without even shooting, you know. You can transition. You can do all that stuff, practice movements.

And it's crazy how quick you can shoot transitions and how fast you can move between gear and how fast you do a reload where do you put your kit like you said we spend a whole day doing this the level of detail is fascinating I recently heard an interview with an FBI agent and he was saying in the FBI academy

they teach you how to unbuckle your seatbelt that they'd like you to take your left hand and put it between your body and the belt, slide down to the buckle, reach a finger around and unclip the buckle, and move it so that it diminishes the chances that if you need to get out of your car quickly that you become entangled in your seat belt. And to think about that someone's looking at like that level of specificity yeah

and he was saying once you learn it you never unbuckle your belt another way it just becomes like how you do it aren't there parallels for being in grizzly country though like if you're thinking about having bear spray and a pistol oh yeah and then no one ever talks about it yeah you have to like you should have that transition down and where, how you get your pistol, how you get your bear spray and have practiced that. You would think, Oh yeah,

you don't practice it. So then we, we talked about doing a thing where now and then when you're out in grizzly country, but now and then someone should just clap their hands with a stopwatch and be like, how long does it take everyone to like dig through their pack, find their pepper spray,

right? 32 seconds. You die. we're all dead it's like ah quick where'd i put that stuff you know yeah man it's the same kind of danger i'd you know i don't want to get eaten by a bear or shot by a dude you know well and your chances if you spend a lot of time in the wilderness you know your chances are higher being eaten by a bear in a lot of cases than getting shot in mont. I mean, just reality. Yeah. What makes a good shooter? I know you can't divide them out, but what makes a great shooter?

Is it psychological or is it physical? Definitely psychological. More psychological. We'd say shooting is 10% physical, 90% mental. What is the mental? So this is where it gets crazy, right? It depends on what you're doing. We'd say shooting is 10% physical, 90% mental. What is the mental? This is where it gets crazy. It depends on what you're doing.

If it's a dynamic thing, then it's about training muscle memory, training movements. It's like building up your thoughtless processes. On the more intentional side of it, the stuff that I shot is very slow, methodical. It's all process-based. What you're trying to do is you're trying to get a mental process that is repeatable and then you, or a plan, and then you stick to that and that's what you're doing the whole time. So you work on the physical, you know, the holding the gun, the triggering and all that, but then the rest of it becomes mental. So we would read a lot of, you know, golf books,

tennis books, things like that, because it's the same idea. It's like, once you have your golf swing down, you know, anybody, the top 50 guys in the PGA can all swing a golf club. It's like, what's the difference? It's like, well, where they put themselves mentally, the decisions they make, you know, making good shots, following their process exactly the same way every time. And that's where it's, you know, it's like, it's like a lot of things, I guess it's process oriented versus outcome oriented. So you're trying to keep yourself from thinking about, well, what's the implications of if I do this or that? It's like, no, it doesn't matter.

I'm just going to do my process, and whatever happens, happens. I've trained the process, and I'll stick to it. You're not obsessing over the outcome. You can't. As soon as you think outcome, you're done. That's the thing I found, that over the years, I've become – I hesitate to use the word. I'm not going to say very good. Over the years, I've become good.

Like good as a rifle hunter. Okay. Not like I don't take insane shots, but I don't have a lot of, I don't make a lot of mistakes. Because you just like do this, this, this, this, this, and then it just happens.

But archery, the minute something's approaching all i'm thinking about i'm i'm in what'd you say outcome yeah all i'm thinking about is outcome i'm like i don't want to miss it i don't want to wound it it's like that's all i'm thinking about with my rifle i'm not like i sure hope i i sure hope i don't wound it i'm'm like, I'm very focused. Yeah, I'm very focused with like, I'm very like, I know that I'm going to do what I do and I know that I will be successful. Like, I just know that that'll happen.

So I've developed that confidence. With archery, I can't overcome. It's a major problem with archery. I can't overcome jumping to the unknown, the outcome. It's funny you put it that way because it's just, but it's way because it's just but it's yeah it's in your head man it's in your head i've got a mental image this is from like five years

ago still like crisp as day and it's this it's me letting an arrow go in a bowl it was about 35 yards away and watching the arrow go to do four inches over his back and like i i shoot competitive archery a little bit you know for a while and so i can i can shoot a bow pretty decent and 35 yards is not a long shot and it's wide open nothing between us you know grass and he's standing there and i'm looking and then you have this mental playback and i'm thinking because i was kind of in some low grass i was trying to stay real real low and then And then I remember, and that's like, okay, so your, your mind goes through onto this whole, you know, this whole memory in about, you know, a millisecond. And it's like, you have all these pictures that you can kind of play back. Yeah. And I'm thinking, you know, when I looked at that pin,

there was a triangle that I was looking at that pin through. It was not a circle. That was my peep site. And I know I came back and I was low and I looked right over the top of my peep site through the little you know your little triangle where the string splits to accommodate and I came through and I was like this is perfect and I was like and the arrow goes four inches three four inches right over his back like dead nuts straight up right up the back of the leg right over his back and only in hindsight and I'm like I totally looked over my peep site and it's like something that i don't think i've ever done that before but like you said man you get in that situation and it's like the blood starts pumping in a big bowl and you're like i've recently gone to a back

tension release because i was getting jumpy and once you go to the back tension release if you're not the form isn't right and you're not pulling the right way it's not going off i keep hearing people talk about this man but it's like i can't tell if it's true or trend it fixes a lot it really does if it's a trend people have been talking about for a long time my brother like switched it's it really like what i would when i was practicing with the trigger you know one out of six shots i'd get tired i'd be jumping the trigger when you're practicing what i would do do under the teachings of John Dudley, I would put, I'm focusing on my back elbow, feeling that deltoid muscle pull in the right way, right?

Focus on that muscle, focus on my follow-through, and you almost stop thinking about your front, your sight. You're thinking about it, am I following through properly? Process. Is my process going? I used to put, and I still do this, put a speaker behind me, directly behind me where I want to pull to,

turn music on. With a public speaker? Oh. Put Steve and Arielle behind me. You suck, you suck. And put music on and pull to the music, right? And have my elbow go towards the music and focus on how my elbow is traveling towards that sound.

And you totally forget what's going on in the front half of your body. And I'm more accurate like that than any other way. Would you mind with the back tension? Yeah, I'm going to. I haven't, but I'm going to. See, that's the thing. Mark Kenyon was talking about he's going to finish up the season and then switch. So he's got plenty of time to switch into...

I've thought about that. I've thought about having a thumb release, which is generally the same setup, but you have a thumb trigger instead of a back tension. Yeah, that's what Joe said. Right? So you flip to that, and it's kind of the same motion,

but you have control, right? So if an elk's coming in, you don't have to wait. But I know guys like, I'd say Shane Dorian and a bunch of guys that I've bow hunted with recently who took the leap and said, I'm just going to hunt with this thing. And next thing you know, they're five shots, five dead animals at all different ranges,

all different times. So, I mean, you just adapt to it as being the most sound way to have a process in the woods. I've been thinking about it. It forces you to do it right. Yeah, it forces you to do it right. I just hate learning new stuff, man. Because you know what I mean? After so many years of doing something some way i just would rather it's just easy not easier

it's you just almost want to double down on what you know rather than really changing like if someone said like there's a new rifle out and you put a thing in your mouth right and you just bite down to make it go off which is probably not a bad idea yeah well maybe but i would be hesitant no i was very hesitant when i met with john i'm like that's actually a good idea yeah yeah somebody write that down just like pinch it between your eye teeth release triggers i know i know a guy who got in an accident last year man some like trash compactor thing and he got like squished in it messed up his back while he's hunters and no no on the job dude but he's really he's really on record he's really he's really serious real serious hunter i imagine some of you know some of you know him but he hunted

last year with a with a bow with a mouth release because he couldn't draw with his shoulder no no like a tab with a tab that he was biting and and drawing his bow oh yeah i grew up with a guy like that he'd lost his arm in an accident and shot by holding a mouthpiece yep yeah i think he might have killed a bull doing that this year but i don't remember exactly i think he did did he are you talking about josh yeah yeah why are you guys being all secretive about his name oh no i just just because i couldn't couldn't bring it to mind right away yeah yeah and you just know like how much name dropping do you want to do on the meat eater podcast yeah you want to bring too much the right amount to not be confusing to people

right that's my that's my uh barometer yeah i feel like you're feeling a little high and mighty in your fancy sweater today dude i'm never are we gonna talk about it up are we gonna talk about it well let's talk about it. Listen, man. I either make my wife happy or I make you guys happy. And guess who I'm more interested in making happy? Us. Take a guess.

Man's got to make these tough decisions. My wife commented on how handsome I looked in the sweater she bought me. Yeah, she bought you the sweater. That was intentional. That was intentional. She knew she bought it for you. See if he wears it again. I'm going to start buying you sweaters just so we can have that interaction. It'll bring us closer.

Nice sweater. Pivoting away from my sweater. That was quick. Psychological. What – okay, you hunt. You'll be able to answer this. How much does what you've learned from competitive shooting, where it's just replicating controlled atmosphere,

is hunting just totally different? Yes and no. There's crossover. There's tricks of the trade. It goes back to the process. You've got to put yourself, like I said, and you miss a bull. It's like, how did I do that?

It's like, well, you get amped up and you don't follow through your process. It's kind of the same thing. Even combat's's the same thing guys that go over and they say well you guys are good shooters but you go to combat it's going to be totally different it's like well we used to say you know you will perform at your lowest level of training so your worst day that's how you can expect to shoot now you might do better but a good point you're always going to revert back to your lowest level of training everybody wants to you know peak perform you're going to rise to the occasion it's like that doesn't happen very often you you'll revert back to your lowest level of training so that day when you feel like crap and you're pulling crappy shots and

that's how you're going to shoot when you get a big bullet from you you might shoot better but that's what you can count on you know your lowest level of training so like it does your shittiest day yeah that's the range yeah work on eliminating those that's that's the whole point you know your lowest level of training so like it does your shittiest day yeah at the range yeah work on eliminating those that's that's the whole point you know like talking about back tension releases it's like well maybe it doesn't give you as much control but if it's more consistent like it eliminates those like jerk shots that go off into neverland it's like well then that eliminates that shot that you that might be the shot you pull in a bowl and all of a sudden you shoot him back in the pond or in high liver or something you know the game you play with yourself right is

you're you go you're out hunting and you throw out a target and you make a nice shot the tendency is to be like okay i got this i'm all done shooting because you want to end on that yeah you want to end on that feeling of that you got it dialed if you shoot like a really bad one you're like i'm gonna shoot one more yeah just i gotta i can't let that sit well that goes back you know some of you guys talk about longbows you know i had it with traditional for a long time and it's like that thing that's really where you gotta get your mind right because there's no pin to rely on there's no like oh i'll just pull back put the pin in the right place and squeeze the trigger it's like no it's all process i mean you don't have anything to rely on you're like well i've been

doing this for a long time and i shoot a lot. So I'm just going to come back, follow through touch and that arrow, hopefully it's going to go where it's supposed to and try and get, you know, like five yards away. That helps, but it's kind of that same thing. I think it does transfer a lot for the mental aspect, but I think a lot of it's just the process. What's my process. I get in there and you're thinking about the right thing and think about the first thing. You know, a lot of guys, like, I don't, I don't know how to, to break down it's like well if you get to step one what's step one so say a bull comes in it's like step one is to say like remind myself you know i'm gonna squeeze through the shot or i'm gonna back tension you know whatever works for you sight make sure i'm picking the right pin

or focus on the pin you know let the elk be a little bit blurry or whatever it is that's your first step in that process. And then say, I'm going to do that first thing. I've got five steps or three steps and I'm going to do the first one. And if you do that, it's like your process then takes over. It's when you get there and you're like, I don't know, I'm just going to pick a random step and roll with it.

Well, then your brain freaks out. It's step one and then the rest of them will just go. Like you got to get yourself into that, start your process and then it just just is automatic most of the time. You just said two things that resonate with me. I want to back up on one because I think it's a really interesting point I hadn't thought of is practicing to eliminate your worst, which is like when you're shooting,

if you're out shooting in your yard with your bow, and yeah, one in every six arrows,'s just like what the hell yeah right how did that go yeah and you write it off it's like something but it's like consistently if you throw a bad arrow yeah if you could find a way to like think about that rather than trying you know and of course you're trying to replicate your good shots to make more of them but to isolate like the freaks well it's because i have enough freaks for if you just imagine rolling a dice like if every time if you're in the tree stand every time a deer comes by and you got one in six arrows is just crazy you can never figure out why one in six arrows

is crazy it's gonna be in the back of your mind you're like well is this gonna be the one yeah the bad one well you don't like to train stuff you're not good at either it's like i like to make this you know this is what i'm good at i'm gonna go do that so i feel good about it but it's like the work involved is finding the areas where you're deficient or weak saying, well, what causes that one sick shot? Well, it's this. Well, then train that, get better at that. And then it brings your whole system up. It's not as much fun, but you know, like blank bail shooting, you're blind shooting. A lot of the guys will stand there and just work on form. You know, I used to do that a lot, especially traditional. You just get a big

blank bail and close your eyes and just, what's it feel like? Alright, that's the system and then that's what you do. But it's not fun. It's not nearly as much fun as watching arrows flying to the target. I've tried, I've talked about this before, but my dad somehow got his hands on these stickers when we were kids that said, stay calm,

pick a spot. And you put them on the inside of the limb of your bow. but then you're sort of relying on this idea that you're gonna remember to read that damn sticker but when i'm out i don't i don't do this rifle hunting at all but if i'm out bow hunting i spend a lot of time trying to be like when when a moment when you sense a moment's gonna happen to start going into this thing like like you said to remind to remind yourself, it's a process. It's a mantra.

Yeah. But, but, and you can even be in a situation where you see something coming and you, and you remember, you're like, you congratulate yourself for remembering, be like the process process and just pick some part.

So you're aware that there is a process, but then all of a sudden, like you can't tell. I remember hunting, hunting, uh, so you could deer in Maryland this year. I had all the time in the world because I called this, I called to a stag and he's starting to come.

And I'm like, wow, he's coming. And I'm like, okay, process, process, process, process, process. I'm trying to remember all the things I'm going to do. And then he comes through this area where it's a lot of obstructions. So he passes through this little thicket. And I'm like, he's going to come all the way through and I'll never get a shot. But then all of a sudden he stops in the weirdest little gap.

And instead of this whole thing that I've been telling myself about how I'm going to do this whole walkthrough, the minute he stops, I'm like, ah! Right? And so like right up until the second, and then even though I remembered, I was happy to remember process, but then you get this gap and you're like, well, screw the second. And then even though I remembered, I was happy to remember process,

but then you get this gap and you're like, well, screw the process. Yeah. I think it's a good... I got to shoot this arrow. Yeah, it's like a good hunter who would be like, I'm not going to have an opportunity.

There's an opportunity. I'm going to stick to my plan. And if it doesn't work or he steps away, then too bad. And it's not like I'm now going to throw the whole thing out the window and then shoot over its back, which is what I did. That's like coyote hunting for me. I've been doing a lot of coyote hunting in the winter.

That coyote comes running in, and it's like, I forget. I mean, you forget how to shoot. It's like 100 yards stand at me, and they stop, and you know they're about to rush. You're like, boom, and you miss them. You're like, I'm shooting a sitting shot with back support, and I missed a coyote straight up an eight inch target at a hundred yards yeah it's like oh it'll humble anybody but it's like same

thing it's like i got this plan he's gonna come over here and pop out and all of a sudden it's like there he's about ready to leave and you're like crap shoot that shot takes off running you're like why did i do that i could have taken a half a second actually squeeze line up keep it steady boom and drop it but you're like i gotta shoot now what do you think is the biggest mistake what's the biggest mistake that uh hunters make when shooting you can do it archery and and or archery and or rifle rushing the shot i'd say you know i do it still that's that's the main thing trying to trying to push that shot you know you you break your plan like you said i gotta do i gotta shoot it now i gotta i gotta do this i gotta do that if you just take that and it

seems like forever in your mind but if you actually watch a video of yourself shooting you're like i felt like i took an extra five seconds and it was three quarters of a second that little bit of time to just okay this is what i'm doing and then just do it seem like the deliberate you know that's i try and tell myself that just be deliberate. Like the deliberate, you know, I try and tell myself that, just be deliberate, be deliberate, be deliberate. Because I know the system, I know the process. I've shot millions of rounds, same thing. It's like be deliberate, make a deliberate shot.

It helps me to repeat things like that. It just helps me bring my heart rate and my breathing down a little bit to have that mantra going. I always tell myself slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Yep. And I just kind of repeat that and try to not be like, oh, pow, you know. We used to say that all the time.

You can't miss fast enough. Can't miss fast enough. I do that all the time. I have a five, for archery, I have a five-step process, right? So it's feet, draw, anchor, peep, pull, right? That's all I do. And I line my feet up and I do it all the time. That's good.

Yeah, I like that too. So you see a buck coming and you're like, remember. Feet, draw. So I draw it. And I line my feet up and I do it all the time. That's good. Yeah, I like that too. So you see a buck coming and you're like, remember. Feet, draw. So I draw straight back. And I didn't come up with this. John Dudley did. But you draw straight back. You find your anchor.

Then put your nose down and find your peep. And then pull. And you're not like, you're never like, shoot. It's pull. So tell me the five again. Feet. You line your feet properly. Yeah.

You bring your bow up. You draw. You find your anchor. Feet, draw, anchor. Anch. Yeah. You bring your bow up, you draw, you find your anchor. Feet, draw, anchor. Anchor, peep, and then pull. If you could just remember to do that, man. Here's how I do it. Even just that.

Here's how I generally do it. Feet, draw, anchor. Wow! Feet, draw, anchor. Oh, yeah! But I feel like if the process marries up with your ability to act in the moment, like I read a little bit on flow state and thought I was real smart and then thought I would flow state my way to killing animals.

It didn't really work. What's flow state mean? This is like a state of positivity and action and control, like focusing on your mental state and being positive. I thought, oh, if I meditate. I never meditated. But the idea that i could control mentally like this process and make sure nothing could penetrate it like one two three four five

bam and just have never successfully doesn't work doesn't work doesn't work for you but that's when when you get to the back tension then you start to like control you to make sure that hey man i can i can jump this but i have to be pulling the right way. It doesn't matter. I can try to jump it, but the back tension is controlling me. My brother talks about lust and greed. The preacher? It's compelling. No. He talks about lust and greed and hunting because he's like,

he can shoot targets all day long, but he doesn't lust for them. When you put a big game animal in front of him like he says it's it disappoints him that his like the lust and greed yeah overtake him now like he wants it he's like i want it so bad that it blocks my ability to have it yeah yeah yeah if you could just tell yourself, there'll be another shot. There'll be another animal. If you just treat it like that, it's got to be perfect or I'm not going to do it. If you could somehow do that, life would be a lot easier.

Maybe when I see something coming through the woods, I'll be like, who gives a shit? It's just a big old bok. Who really even wants this stupid thing? It's stupid. It's probably going to taste terrible. I don't care. It's probably going to taste like shit. I don't care. It's probably going to taste terrible.

I'll take a shot, but I don't care. I always think about that pistol course that we took. Paid a bunch of money. Did this accelerated pistol course. By the end of the day, five out of five of us can hit a target with a pistol at 100 yards. And I will guarantee you within a year there wasn't one out of five of us that could hit a target with in 50 yards right because faded will you

lock in the process and you're like well got that i'll just put this on the shelf over here that is a perishable skill that's thinking about well really is a perish oh man perishable but so so is my longbow same thing oh yeah yeah it's because it's process process process muscle memory don't shoot that thing for a week it's like i'm a danger to myself that's the weird thing in the archery space where everybody's gotta have a new bow every year right you gotta have the newest greatest bow you have to i mean if you're gonna be any any kind of good you're like you're switching bows every year i appreciate that nothing by a two-year-old bow for a lot cheaper that's what i'm saying but there's something

you like dude me yeah i'm on year five of mine yeah i mean but that seems to be a better way to go you got a bow you know and you know the mechanics of it you understand what it's going to do why switch yeah i take it pretty seriously to switch like rifles i don't care i'll bounce yeah right with the bow i'm nervous about and i'm not even like a i'm not like a great shot right but uh far from a great shot but i still get nervous about switching but then i'm like maybe i'll be better but it's a good thing that that industry's done is i think i don't know if it's slowing down now maybe yannis has perspective on this but it'd be like it seemed like for a while there's so many advances or else they made you think there were advances and that when you had an older bow you

were like missing out on the party yeah and it's probably like a marketing creation it's still that way i remember there's a particular company that used to have that ata they would have like a dude come in on a motorcycle with the new bow and it would be like fireworks going off and he would drive he would like drive a motorcycle into their booth with the new bow and everybody would be like and i'm like what is this thing like is this thing shooting 500 fps with a smooth draw no it's no different and no motorcycle yeah so it's but that they still every company still you know every company worth worth a salt in the industry still puts out a new model every year. I got a good question for you.

This is like mental versus mechanics, right? Oh boy. Okay. Many, many times I've gone down to the range just to make sure that my hunting rifle is on. All of my rifles are hunting rifles. So I don't know why I put that in there. But like I start out get some

some flyers and then i end up adjusting my scope and then by the end of that session at the range i've then readjusted it back to the original settings mechanics or mental i would say probably mostly mechanical and the reason being is that depending on your rifle and conditions except like i haven't shot a rifle for six months right so you you haven't fired bullets for the bore it's not hot as you go through it warms up and depending on i mean every rifle is different it's like i i've gotten to shoot a lot of long range stuff since i got out just because it's kind of a cool gig and it brings a lot of things together for me and uh you do wonder right because you're shooting these match rifles that are heavy barrels they

weigh 15 pounds or something which is a light rifle now a lot of these guys are shooting 20 plus pound rifles in a lot of the comps and so you get out there you're like all right I'm gonna check my zero make sure you go up there and it's dead nuts and over time you start to see trends like well it's colder out or it's warmer out or whatever. My load changed. Is it a fresh reload or is it one that's been sitting there for two months? Did I change ammo? It's a different lot of ammo. Well, it's the same box.

It's like, yeah, but that's a different bullet lot, different primer lot, different case lot, different powder lot. So it's the same box, but it's like everything's changed. That's why I hate reloading at this point there are way too many variables and you can just like start like spinning yourself as far down the rabbit hole as you want to go and i think a lot of it you know you get into a group you know how you shoot your position plays a part in that so you shoot some rounds through it it gets warmed up you change your position you get used to the recoil you know you're tight start with and then you relax into it so that changes things a little bit yeah and so yeah there's there's a lot of variables i i would say it's mostly mechanical and that's the key you know people have this idea you know like take snipers for example like all these guys they just they're

wizards it's like well there's a lot of trends through shooting it's like where's my cold bore shot go where's my bullet going it's this format where's my bullet going i'm at this elevation so you just track that and we keep you dope charts. You write everything down. And after time, same thing with a hunting rifle. Even when I used to shoot pistol, I would keep a log. Every day I shot, I would write down what I did, what I worked on, what I noticed. And then over time, you could flip through that and you're like, oh, you start to see trends develop. And it's not something a lot of people do, but just journaling. Even you go to the range, okay, go to the range, just have a notebook and say i shot here my gun was shooting three inches high to the left i'm using this box you know maybe mark on your box of ammo or a lot of ammo or if you reload 50 it's easier because

then it's the same let's say i reloaded this on this date so then you go to the range and then you say well it always shoots you know it always starts out shooting high left and then it goes down to the low right and then it goes back to the middle again and so then you know if you're out hunting like okay this round's probably going to go, you know, two inches high and left even though it was zeroed off the last group because that's what it always does. My journal would always be the same, man. Be like, shot some pretty sweet shots. Hit some of them.

Couple flyers, ended on a good note. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew! Our northern brothers

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Welcome to the OnX x club y'all yeah my first question would be what uh define what your flyers are when you say i have a few flyers and so i start messing with my scope man i my my brain is strange because i have like a very very select few things where I get super anal retentive on. One is building arrows and even tuning my arrows to my bows and my groups. I'm like, well, that doesn't look like a tight group to me. Then I'll have somebody be like, well, yeah, but.

You're shooting an inch group. how far do you really shoot you know so um but something that just looks sloppy you know it's like well i got three within four inches uh 200 yards and then i got two at 10 inches you know for an example so your hate those your group goes from four inches to 10 inches. Yeah. For an example. Your group goes from four inches to 10 inches. Is that what you're saying? Give or take. Yeah, just like some sloppiness. And I'm like, nope. I know I did everything right. Everything felt great.

And I can't mentally wrap my head around how one bullet could stray. The best way to deal with that is to say, oh oh a minute of elk and then just walk away do the old the old michigan trick put on a pie plate at 100 yards yep hit it we're good to go shot a five inch group at 100 we're solid yeah yep those do kill deer it's that's something to remember too as i shoot you know you're i want a gun that shoots for shooting a match gun it's like half inch.

A lot of guys get wrapped around it and they'll do low development to the nth degree. And like, I want a gun that shoots quarter MOA. It's like, well, a gun that will actually shoot true quarter MOA for like five shot groups is rare. I mean, you're getting into bench press world. It's like, I got guns that I've gone out and shot and they'll shoot seven eights, pretty consistent. And as long as you're not shooting targets outside of that, I mean, think of how big a target you're

shooting. It's like, I can shoot two MOA targets all day long. It's all about your wind calls and everything else. I don't get too wrapped around that anymore. As long as it's a consistent load and it's keeping to that same thing, it's like, well, it's well under an inch. Half inch is great, but for a hunting rifle, it's like shooting

an inch. That's pretty solid. Yeah, that's good. you know uh chuck christopher he's a big competitive bench rest guy out of idaho i don't um i'd go down he's got a facility built at his house basically like a bunker on the hillside i met this dude i think you should have i I met him at SHOT Show. At SHOT Show, yeah. Flat Tire Ranch. Fitting. And I used to go up there to try to, like, sight my rifles in with him, and it was just the most, it's a bad experience.

Because eggs at 500 yards and stuff like that. Yeah, and he is so dialed, and he's so, he's got his process down, and his process and his process and the hunting equivalency, they just do not meet. It's not real world. Right. It's almost a different sport when you're talking about

some of that bench rest stuff and 20 pound rifles. Completely different sport. It's amazing those guys are shooting four or five inch groups at a thousand though consistently. Their eggs are, they'll shoot like three matches and they're shooting five inch groups, five inch groups at a thousand though consistently like their eggs are you know they'll shoot like three matches and they're shooting five inch groups four inch groups with a little

six mil or something holy cow you know what's funny about when you talk about the consistency and then consistency of the equipment is the way that there's this idea that back in boone's era that these guys are like these expert marksmen you know that they would like shoot and split lead on hatchets and stuff like that it's like you think about that they were hand pouring bullets sometimes making their own gun powder and then having shooting rifles that were that were rifled by hand you're like and then people like to have this thing like this right old tick licker you know it could shoot the tick off a possum or can split bullets on hatchet heads at 200 yards it's like it would be so nice to be able to go back in time to see daniel boone and his compatriots

i remember like if you read of that that account there are accounts that people would complain about um people out in the settlements how they would just shoot all day long, how lazy they were, because if they weren't out hunting, they would just shoot. But to go back and be like, what kind of groups were those guys actually throwing? It would have been interesting. Because the mythology is this like real, you know, these like super accurate heart shot every time.

But when you think about the inconsistencies of all the equipment, it must have been some sloppy ass shooting back then like there's no way they could have gotten good like how good could you get when every shot is just something so different i don't know i in some ways i i'd inclined to agree just because of the the quality but then you had a lot of guys that were true craftsmen that could build i mean that's why who built the rifle mattered because you had guys that you said were throwing stuff together but you look at guys that try and recreate some of that stuff and they're using modern day cnc machines and the whole nine yards and like i'm having trouble

getting to where this guy was consistently kind of making things you know handmade like trying to replicate how they did this it's pretty wild and then if you go back and you look at the civil war you look at some of these some of these different rifles that these guys were shooting. I mean, you had guys that were shooting 800, 900 yards in the Civil War that were taking some of these, you know, Creedmoor rifles and stuff. And they were sniping guys at crazy distances. Or you go to the black powder, the Buffalo rifles, and you look at what those guys shoot.

You know, like they have the Quigley shoots, and they shoot these black powder. It's crazy what, and they're doing the same thing. Those guys are, you know, pouring, those are sabotes, and, you know, they have the quigley shoots and they shoot these black power it's crazy what and they're doing the same thing those guys are you know pouring those are sabotes and you know they're not shooting round balls but it's it's still sometimes i wonder i'm like i wonder if they like did have this figured out if it's you know like how good like the pyramids or like i don't know how they did it but here's the result you know if they were legit or if it's like you know it's kind of oh yeah he was a great shot he could you know shoot the tick off of possum it's like oh yeah there's a thing or a four-inch group at 50 yards, and everyone else was shooting a foot group.

I don't know. There's a thing called the Battle of Adobe Walls. The Battle of Adobe Walls. It was a bunch of buffalo hunters down on the southern plains when they weren't supposed to hunt south of the southern railroad, but they started going down there, and they got into a skirmish. I can't remember what tribes they got into a skirmish with, but there was this legend of this guy making a 1,500-yard shot.

A 1,000-plus-yard shot. And I was like, how much did he walk out and be like, Hale married it and happened to hit someone? And how much did he be like, here's what's going to happen? It seems like hyperbole was pretty prevalent in that culture back then too. This shot was substantiated by multiple sources. The Adobe Walls thing. Yeah, and they credited that shot with ending the battle.

But I'm saying how much did he just go out and wing one out there and he was more surprised than the guy he hit? And I believe those were like, wasn't, because it was like a little trade center, right? Yeah. Like wasn't because it was uh like a little uh trade center right yeah like trading post a little situation yeah and one of the accounts that i read like those were brand new rifles like somebody brought them in to then sell and when um because this was in empire of the summer moon, right? The Battle of Adobe Walls, was it in that? Comanche?

I know it from Dan Flores talking about it. Okay. And the way Dan Flores presents it is, from the Buffalo Hunters' perspective, it was this long shot that so stunned their adversaries. Like, the hand of God is against us. We're just going to go ahead and leave these guys alone from the tribal perspective someone had on the way to the battle

someone had killed a skunk and it was taboo to kill a skunk ahead of a battle or taboo to kill a skunk in general and when that man fell, it was affirmation that someone had violated a taboo.

And that's their perspective on why that battle went south. So I asked Dan Flores, I'm like, who was right? And he's like, both of them. Well, the dude got hit by a bullet. And that's the derivation of of getting skunked, right? I'm not sure, but I like it. But yeah, I mean, I've heard... Could be.

It all plays out the exact same way, obviously, but I've heard there's a very reputable shaman-type character who said, you know, we go do this attack i guarantee nobody will get touched and then at the very outbreak obviously somebody gets touched in a in a big way and it was like well all of our good mojo is is gone the shot yeah could have been a skunk could have been whatever there were two battles of adobe walls yes and it was a very small amount of hide hunters defending like a little encampment from hundreds of adversaries but with highfalutin equipment yeah like big 50 cal uh buffalo rifles and in the one account i read they were were brand new in the box, like trade goods. So then like, break them out, boys.

We're under attack. Yeah. What did we miss, Seth? Is there any marksmanship business that I should have asked you about and never did? I want to ask about Big Boar Pistols. How much experience do you have with them? Not a lot.

I went up to Alaska just then in actually during college i had a buddy that was a little bit younger than me that just graduated high school so i first started college we went up to alaska so i bought a 44 mag put some hard cast bullets like all right we're going to bear country time to get a little bit bigger pea shooter so i shot that a little bit i've shot like 460s and some of that stuff but not a lot you know is it a lot harder or is it still just in your head the fact that you're dealing with this thing that just barks and makes your hand hurt so bad similar concepts you know it's it's definitely different it's like driving a race car versus driving a

you know a i don't know something requires a big truck you know off-road truck yeah dump truck i'm like it's a little different but yeah similar ideas you know, off-road truck. Yeah. I'm like, it's a little different, but yeah, similar ideas, you know, breaking the trigger, keeping your, keeping your sights tight and breaking the trigger. And yeah,

it's similar concepts, but it, it takes some muscle memory to get past blast for sure. Oh, cause like what you're speaking to is like a 44 mag with a four inch barrel. Yeah. Yeah. How uncomfortable

it is and then how stunningly inaccurate one is. Well, they can be accurate but I've always thought of those, you know, like how light can we make a 454 so that it's easy to carry in bear country, right? And then you're shooting over a 500 and it weighs

two pounds versus the four that it should weigh plus. To me, that's what we call a get-off-me-bro weapon. If a bear is right here, it's like it's me to you. I just got to be able to get that thing to bark and get it out and shoot at 10 feet. I'm not going to go out and try to smoke a bear with that thing at 150 yards. I might be getting this story wrong, but someone was telling me about, they had a bunch of guides who carry revolvers,

short-barreled revolvers as bear protection. They did some thing where they put them at the bottom of a hill, and some guy rolls a basketball down the hill. I think I could be messed. Do you know this story? No. You told it before.

No one hit it. And that's the thing you're supposed to hit this bear in the head with as he's coming down on you. Well, and to your point about protection. So if you're shooting a hunting pistol or something, then that's it. You don't put a scope on it or maybe that's different. And I was talking to a kid whose dad used to hunt with a pistol. And he was one of those guys that shot the big bore like the 460 Rolands and all those, the wheel guns. And his dad, I guess, was one of those pistol arrow types

that he's put tens of thousands around to this one gun. And he was telling stories. He'd break cleavages at 100 yards with this thing all the time. A rabbit would come running out, and he'd just smoke this rabbit. And there's tons of stories throughout the frontier days of pistol arrows that could just make incredible. Look at Bob Munden, how fast that guy could draw and shoot. It's like you can't even see him.

It's like boom, boom. It's like, okay, I guess it's legit. He's like, Bob Munden's the Bob Ross of pistol shooting. Well, yeah, but as Bob Ross is slow, this guy's fast, so it's like polar opposites. And he's like, yeah, my dad used to go shoot. He went and shot a brown bear in Canada or Alaska, I guess, and he shot this thing at like 140 yards.

It was standing up. And he shot it right in the center of the chest. But he said they went out with the guide. And I mean, this kid's just telling stories, but I'm sure he can back him up. And the other guy's like, yeah, this dude, I've never seen anybody shoot a pistol like this. But iron sights. He's like, we're going to go sighting our hunting rifle. And his guide's kind of the same way.

Put up a paper plate. Shoot, you know, three shots on it. Yep, they're all on the plate. We're're good to go and this guy's hunting with a pistol he's like you want to hunt a brown bear with a pistol boy you know kind of thing he's like sure so he gets up there offhand shoots four rounds i think on this plate or five rounds on it five rounds goes up there and it's like a four inch group on this plate 100 yards and he's like literally he shot a better group offhand with this pistol than the guy did shooting off the hood and so the guy's like well i guess so there's guys out there and i i've known a couple

that they shoot big bore stuff and they're crazy accurate but for me my the gun i carry is a clock 10 mil hard cast bullets because sometimes volumes volumes better than one i get one out for the 500 to get that thing out i can i can shuck a clock pretty quick so and i got 10 rounds in that thing so if i got a bear that's just start chewing on me i can get three or four off hopefully before i get knocked down and so that's that's where i'm at it's a platform i'm used to and what are you doing this fall you want to get together and hunt where i have a tag and you don't you watch for bears you got it guessing it's going to be somewhere towards the that direction over there over there so that's the thing man bears have been you know there's a lot of areas I've hunted and been around and I've never hunted you know you

get down to like Tom on her basin or some of those areas I have guys that won't hunt there anymore they're like it's not worth it man they're like I I used to hunt there every year but we it's not if you run into a bear it's like what's the situation gonna be like and it's every year they're like it's not worth it you're walking out under a headlamp it's like you know it's always kind of that oh there's something in the night it's like well there is you know and like you're gonna run into them at some point like yeah and outfitters that don't work in certain areas because they're so because they get hammered so bad on feed and it just is hard and the bears just like what are you gonna do about it buddy

yeah you can't help me now nothing you can do about it, buddy? Yeah, can't hunt me now. Nothing you can do about it now. Yeah, and you got any more you wanted to hit? Yeah, well, we had that email coming about the definition of loaded. Oh, yeah. I think that would be a good question for Seth. I've been saving this to talk about. Yeah.

Well, it's a legal question. It is. Well, but no, because I've – I play a lawyer on the weekends. I've posed it to a couple of different people, and everybody's kind of got two answers, really. That's a good question. The guy's a lawyer?

Yeah, I think it's a gal. It's a young lady, right? A gal's a lawyer? Yeah. You want me to spell it out? Yeah, I read this. I actually saved this to talk about. I just didn't get to it.

Yeah. I'll try to do my best here to make it simple for when she was in the courtroom and i think that it was it came down to the definition of loaded because to um for the perpetrator to be charged with aggravated assault the gun had to be loaded so then they came down to, well, what is loaded? Because if it's not, then the punishment is not going to be severe or the charge won't be as severe as if it is. And she says, well, the mag was full. And the other guy says, well, no, it didn't have one in the chamber,

so it wasn't loaded. So it's not, you know, like he was saying, I'll shoot you, but if he actually can't shoot because he doesn't have a loaded weapon, then that's where like the gray area was. So she's like, dude, I for sure thought that, you know, low, you know, in the magazine means loaded. And she went home and has been talking to other people about it. And she seems to be. She wants to argue that it wasn wasn't she wants to argue that her client's gun wasn't loaded because he didn't have one chambered no she's saying that it was

well she wants to argue that yeah whoever everybody else i don't know where she stands on the case but she's wanting to argue that having it having a loaded magazine counts for a loaded weapon i think when you're talking about pointing it at a person, if you're out hunting and you said, is that thing loaded? No. Having some in the magazine, it is not loaded if it's not chambered. The minute I point it at you, like if I point a revolver at you and it winds up that I have an empty cylinder in there

and I got an empty cylinder and you. And I got an empty cylinder. And you said, is that loaded? And I'm like, no. But I'm pointing it at you. I feel that it's a completely different set of rules. Well, what's the definition for what you came up with and how you taught it? I was just looking up the – so we have different aspects, right? So you can carry – you have different methods of carry. So you can carry, you know, you have different methods of carry. So you can carry loaded round in the chamber on safe,

loaded round in the chamber off safe, loaded no round in the chamber. So you've got different ways that you carry in the military. So like you're on a post and like, well, you can't carry one in the chamber, but you can carry it loaded or you can't carry it with a magazine, period. So I don't know. I think it's going to depend on the definition. I don't think Montana Code has anything that deals with that. I was just looking it up.

What state is this person in? She was in Idaho. Okay. I would be surprised if they have a definition of a loaded firearm. It's an interesting thing to challenge, man. But there is some law, and I would have to look it up, that deals with concealed carry because there there's a law that says basically you can like brandishing a firearm is defined and i don't think they've ever

defined whether or not you know what loaded means or if you're branching a firearm if it matters if it's loaded or not it's there's kind of that's the only thing i've ever seen broken down you're saying in the military they use the term loaded for both situations right loaded in the magazine or loaded in the chamber well they they basically color code them so you can carry red or you can carry black and black means this red means this so loaded's too broad right yeah it's just here's the definition for yeah chambered is a better it's contextual it is yeah one makes sense yeah loaded two is too broad in the hunting context as well yeah if a guy levels off let's, let's say go with the pump action shotgun. Okay.

All right. Guy levels off on you with a pump action shotgun, and he's got tube full, none in the chamber. And then someone later wants to be like, well, it wasn't really loaded. Could have been loaded real quick. I'd be like, come on, man. If I was a lawyer, I would say no one's ever been killed by a bullet in the magazine. Yeah.

If there's not a round in the chamber yeah if i was so yeah there's not a if there's not around in the chamber that gun's not going to kill you why could you just say it's loaded or chambered right it's loaded if there's any it's there's one in the magazine it's chambered if there's one in the chamber right that's that's what i would say yeah i'm getting i'm trying to jump into multiple perspectives i'm taking the perspective of someone having it aimed at me yeah who would later be like i don't want to parse hairs here you loaded the aim the damn thing at me like let's i can stop it i could stop it aimed but i could also see the point where in the court like if i was getting if i was in trouble for having done that to someone else i could imagine myself arguing very vehemently that it was in

fact not loaded yeah but you say the level of the threat is if there's if you have to do you know pump a shotgun rather than pull a trigger the level of threat is is different in both of those situations like it wasn't loaded it wasn't loaded it was loaded but wasn't chambered right that's it i think you'd have to you'd have to lawyer that i wonder if someone's life is hanging on the definition of this word. No, not life. They're going to get capital. No? I'd like to think that there was a – He was in the chamber, and they're waiting to give him the drip

depending on what we decide. No, she was just curious more about the common usage in our circles. In our circle, it would be that it was not loaded. I'll say that. It would be that – If there's not a round in the chamber that it was not loaded. I'll say that. It would be that. If there's not a round in the chamber, it's not loaded. I always say to you, is that thing loaded? And you say, no.

I'm thinking it could very well have a magazine in it, but there's nothing chambered. Man, I feel like this was 20 years ago. I took hunter safety, but I feel like I learned it different. I mean, this is in washington maybe the rules are different but i remember being told you cannot have a loaded gun in a car ever you know what in that case you're right yeah in that case it can't have a magazine in it exactly and so i'm so when when yanni brought this up the other day i'm like well i mean like if if you're

coming back from hunting you get pulled over officer asks do you have a gun in the car yes or is it loaded you you better be able to say no and you better have the the bullets around yeah that's a good point i we just got a letter from a woman who went uh her family was all going fishing this is an idaho story too her family's all going fishing, and they go down to a park, and the dad's fishing with the kids, and she's reading her book. Something or another happens where someone's got to leave, and they give her the rod. And so she's just holding a rod on the grass, holding a rod, and someone comes up and checks her license.

She doesn't have a license. She says, I'm not fishing. But I'm like, yes, I'm at a lake holding the rod, but I fish and they give her a citation but she argues it in court gets thrown out oh really yeah she's like i didn't fish yeah i had a rod at a lake because whatever her husband said hold the rod i think she said and he came up she and this is her claim is that this individual came up the second she touched that rod like gotcha oh yeah well that's where you go back to the you know one of the other things i moonlight as a reserve police officer so i get to play with some of this on the other side and then one thing they talk

about a lot when you're looking at how to enforce laws because i mean there's obviously ambiguity in a lot of areas and as a legislator i don't want there to be strict clarity where you're going to go through and define everything down to every level because then you're going to have double the size of code. I would rather live in a state where people use common sense and say, hey, this law says don't do this. So this is obviously what it means. So just don't do that. But that's where you talk about the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law. It's like, what is this law designed to do? And so as law enforcement, whether that's and then you know we had some hits with that like tagged immediately upon kill well that got changed to before moving it because the guy got a ticket

he's like well i haven't moved it we're gutting it but i didn't tag it he's like i sat down and had a what is this actually accomplished if i don't tag this thing now versus five minutes from now it doesn't do anything the idea is that you can't move it around and transport it because then if you get caught you're like oh i was gonna tag it it's like is that you can't move it around and transport it because then if you get caught, you're like, oh, I was going to tag it. It's like, well, but you didn't. So I think that's where you get to this, like you said. Is it unloaded? It's like everybody knows, like, hey, can you shoot me with this gun?

Or is it taken apart and put in a bag? That's kind of the definition where if you're pointing it at me, it's like, well, does it have a round in the chamber? So I think a lot of that comes down to interpretation of letter of the law versus spirit of the law. Just going to have to figure it out. Speaking of letter of the law versus spirit of the law. Just going to have to figure it out. Speaking of letter of the law, oh boy. There's one last thing we wanted to hit on, and this is like a real –

I can already – like if people want to stop listening, they can go ahead. They can go ahead. Sam's about to drone on about some legalese. Yeah. There's something we wanted to – ahead but i want sam's about to drone on about some we're gonna try to leave we're good yeah yeah there's something we want because the reason the reason we have an obligation to talk about this is because we invited we invited it we did from lawyers i'm glad we did yeah i heard from a lot of very very kind and knowledgeable people on this and it really helped my understanding it's good to know there's a bunch of lawyers out there do you hear from any assholes too no no sam got glowing reviews

good good i joe joe mentioned one that was that was a little like maybe distasteful i'm like i don't if it doesn't have anything substantive i don't really need to see it no the lawyers that wrote in and i read a i read a handful of them. The lawyers that wrote in, and I read a handful of them last night, lawyers that wrote in were saying almost unanimously that Sam did a fair job of walking through the Supreme Court case. Without a jurist doctorate. Which people are probably sick of hearing about. I got a letter of correction from Ben Long,

who said that he, in fact, did not tell me not to talk about it. He said just talk about it carefully. But in this, we had a thing. So I'm going to try to bring people up to speed in some kind of efficient fashion because I just want to touch on this correction because this is the most detailed correction we've ever done. Yeah. If it's, in fact, can be counted as a correction.

The Supreme Court is hearing a case. They already heard the case. They haven't decided on it, would be, it has to do with if a tribe, in this case, we're talking about the Crow tribe, the Crow tribe has a treaty with the United States from the 1800s that allows them to hunt on their own reservation, but also on unoccupied lands outside of their reservation. And there's been a lot of ambiguity about what unoccupied lands means. Does that mean any national forest, national park, BLM land, state land? Like, what does it mean? And people felt like this had been settled,

but it's not settled. And then a member of the Crow tribe went out and killed some elk off of his reservation. He got in trouble with a game warden. His hunting companions pled guilty. He's saying, I'm not guilty because my treaty gives me the right to hunt on the Bighorn National Forest because it's unoccupied land. And so it goes to, it elevated up to where the Supreme Court is going to hear this and make some kind of decision, possibly, to upset current understandings of whether or not

the national forest in Wyoming could be regarded as unoccupied land. Fair? Yes. Okay. In this, we were talking about how this individual, when he first gets in trouble for his poaching violation, he goes in front of a court and the court tells him, don't tell me about your, don't tell me about your treaty rights. You're not allowed to argue that you were exercising treaty rights. And I was like,

how can you prevent someone from making an art? Like, how can you prevent someone from like making their argument? And a bunch of lawyers, not about some lawyers wrote in to say like what it is that makes it, that would be a situation where you're not allowed to give your, to, to make the case you want to make in front of a judge. Yeah. And I think we muddled our way through it and I think we were pretty close, but a lot of these, these people wrote in with some, some really helpful corrections just for my own understanding of this. And so how that worked was that Herrera's lawyers prior to going to trial, this is the, the, the would be the convicted poacher. Yes. Or, yes, before he stood trial. They sought to have all charges dropped.

They said, we have this treaty, you need to drop all charges, he didn't do anything wrong. So that is something called want their opponent to present. So prior to the trial, his lawyer said, hey, you can't even try us for this. He's got this treaty to support it. But then the prosecution says, no, that has already been settled. It's already been decided in the Repsis decision that we mentioned from the late 90s. It's already been decided that the Crow Indians do not have a right to hunt on the Bighorn National Forest specifically. The 10th Circuit ruled on that.

That issue is settled. You cannot relitigate an issue that is settled. Gotcha. So we're saying don't bring that all up again. Yeah. We already decided that. If you've got something else to say, go ahead and say it, but don't lay that on me. Yeah. So in court, then because he pled not guilty, he had to make a different argument, which

they decided to go with, didn't know where he was, didn't realize that he'd crossed into Wyoming. And they're like, well, you were a game warden at the time. You should have known you're guilty. But then after that, they appealed to the Wyoming appellate court. They upheld the prior decision. They appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court. They declined it.

And then they appealed to the United States Supreme Court. And it's a little amazing because I've been reading a lot about this. And the United States Supreme Court has something like 7,000 or 8,000 cases appealed to it every year, and they select like 80. And so it's a little interesting that they were able to get there. But one of the things the Supreme Court is looking at— How many cases is the court? About 80. It's crazy that in the same year, because they're also hearing the case about the guy who has the pistol permit in new york he's got a pistol permit for his home that prohibits him from taking his pistol right

out of his home and he's saying why do my second amendment rights end at my doorstep and they're hearing that case too this is big year for hunters in the Supreme Court. Yeah. So the Supreme Court is interested in this very thing. And so they're interested in issue preclusion, where it's this judicial doctrine. They're not really sure if that was the right decision to not allow him to re-litigate a settled issue. And as we know, the problem with this is that there's another Supreme Court, the Mill Locks versus Minnesota decision, that kind of shook the underpinnings of the Repsys decision.

It didn't overturn it, it it uh it undermined it so they're looking they're looking at this this this idea of whether you can relitigate something if uh if you will there's been holes poked into it yeah like like an example i was laying out is let's say you lived in some situation where they said, no one, like we've decided it's never justifiable to kill someone in self-defense. So then you kill someone in self-defense and you go up on murder trial. And you're like, but dude, we need to revisit the idea of whether it's okay to kill someone in self-defense. Like I'm not done talking about that. And this is kind of a little bit of what's.

It is. it is. And so if we covered that, there was one more email that I found was very interesting and provides a, you know, a good perspective on this case and perhaps where it will go. Another thing I learned is that this decision is likely to be issued in June. Oh, okay. We were going like, oh, well, I heard it was this summer. Maybe it'd be later. But the Supreme Court's going to go on recess after that. So they usually issue a lot of their rulings prior to going on recess.

Hold that thought for a minute. Yeah. I'm kind of obsessed with the Herrera v. Wyoming case. Are you familiar with this at all? This is the one you're talking about right here? Yeah. Somewhat. You've at least heard of it.

So I was thinking about this because treaty law came up. So I sat on the Judiciary Committee, and we had the hearing for the CSKT water compact my second, two sessions ago, I guess. And it's huge. And what they argued was that the tribe has... That's Confederated Salish Kootenai. Right, right. So the Confederated Salish Kootenai tribe right so the confederated salish kootenai tribe which is uh the flathead basically area so they had a ruling where they they redid the water

compact so they were going through and water is a huge issue in montana as you guys i'm sure are aware and what they said is that the tribe had primary water rights or were trying to establish primary water rights even back to you know some of these claims are in the 1800s that people filed for their water rights. And they're saying, well, the treaty was like 18, I don't remember the year off the top of my head, but it was prior, the treaty was signed prior to these water rights. So they're saying these should be a higher priority.

And the language that they used in the treaty to make this claim was that the treaty granted the tribal members the right to hunt and fish in common with the population so what they're saying is well you have the right to go fishing on any land anybody else can go fishing on yeah and it you know it gets into the nuances of what does that mean exactly but the argument that they made was if you have the right to hunt and fish on a stream over in like and we're talking like big timber area. So this is how far out the water rights went. They said, if you have a right to hunt and fish,

then you have a right to mandate that there's an appropriate amount of water to protect the fisheries in those areas so that irrigators who might have a priority date that's, you know, in the 1800s for their water rights, then can be argued that, well, the treaty prohibits them from using water that could then affect the in-stream flows,

you know, 200 miles away, because they have the right to fish there. And if you lower the water to where it's no longer beneficial to the fisheries, then you're observing that right. Impacting our right to fish. And so that was the argument that they made, and the treaty went went through and it was compounded with the fact that the montana constitution says the waters of montana are owned by the people of montana and so the treaty the way

that it's written is since the treaty or the the water compact is actually states that the water is held in trust by the federal government so it's not actually owned directly by the tribes it's owned through the federal government so then it's not actually owned directly by the tribes. It's owned through the federal government. So then it's like, well, wait a second. Our constitution says that we own our water. How can the federal government then own our water? So it was a huge issue. And there's a lot of nuances, but it's kind of the same argument.

It's like, well, what does the treaty actually grant you? Does it grant you the right to have this? That's a great lead in. It's a huge, huge, yeah, it's a huge issue. And people are vehement on both sides of it. So. Yeah. And so this other one I wanted to talk about is exactly that. It's like, what did the treaty mean? And this guy, he says he's a recent law graduate and just took the bar last week, but he did study Indian law and wanted to explain something they felt like we missed and so he explains the the idea of canons of construction they're basically rules that like underpin laws and understanding of of laws such that you know later when they're

brought up again you can understand you know understand where where they're brought up again, you can understand where they're coming from. And so the canon of construction for federal Indian law comes from a Supreme Court decision in 1832. So this is even prior to that treaty being signed. But there uh a concurring opinion from justice mclean that says the language used in treaties with the indians should never be construed to their prejudice how the words of the treaty were understood by this unlettered people rather than their critical meaning should form the rule of construction so like the understanding so it's it's it's what they thought it meant at the time what the natives thought it meant at the time is what matters not what our modern understanding of that word or phrase means so this gets at the so we were just talking about

one issue in the supreme Court of issue preclusion. And this is the other issue that they're discussing is unoccupied lands. And so this guy is suggesting. This is interesting too, because we had brought up the context of the time previously, as far as where there are animals. And at that time, there were no animals on those lands. So in that context, what was understood at that time there were no animals on those lands so in that context what was understood at the time and like well that's not part of it because there's there's no alcohol there's no

alcohol yeah it's interesting that they would have thrown that in where they say like you can hunt unoccupied lands as long as there's any game there yeah because it's like why even add that in yeah and and wy Wyoming argues explicitly that they think it was understood in these treaty arrangements that the game was going away, that it would soon be extirpated. And in fact, it was.

And so they saw all these things as temporary arrangements, that this is a transitional phase as the natives as the crow transitioned to an agrarian society so wyoming's like well yeah we saw they yeah this treaty was signed but you could hunt them till they're gone yeah every everybody everybody assumed that the land surrounding would become occupied quickly as states were established and settlers moved in and you can hunt all this area as long as they're still game

because it's going away fast. And in fact, elk were extirpated from the Bighorn Mountains shortly after the signature of that treaty and were brought back through very rigorous restocking efforts. I think another thing that Warren's pointing out is tribal members are obviously allowed to hunt um the same as any other resident non-resident set of laws so this is all it's not like they can't hunt it would be that they can hunt under the same guidelines that

any other state resident or non-resident would come in and hunt but this has to do with like an overlay which is just specific tribal hunting rights. Yes. Specific to tribal members. Yes. And the specific like tribal treaty hunting, it's an important distinction for people to understand because, yes, natives can apply and draw these tags in the Bighorn Mountains in this area but the tribal treaty hunting which which occurs in many states often exists on a different plane than state managed uh you know normal hunting it's it's it's often often uh seasons are often not existent bag limits are different it's it's more. It's more like Alaska subsistence hunting than it fits within our neat little program of state managed wildlife. So are you good on clearing points? I think so. We're going to put it to rest. Let's put it to rest. Then in June,

you're going to come on and tell us what happened and if it's a big deal or not. Yeah. Yeah. And my views continue to evolve. I said, I think I put it as a three or four last time. That it's going to change the world as we know it? Yeah. And I think I might be more of a solid four, even a five or six now. Really? After some of these conversations I've had in the last couple weeks.

This could have major ramifications for game management. That's a precedent. I wouldn't say major, but I would say it could have significant ramifications. All right, man. Interesting. Thank you. Got anything to add, Yanni? I don't.

Got them turkey calls in your pocket? Yeah, I'm getting ready. We're less than a month away. Ben and I are counting down. We're counting down. You're giving me the snowshoes. April 2nd. Not where we're going. On the Rio Grande. Tejas.

Rio Grande. The Rio Grande Turkey. Okay, Seth, thanks for coming down, man. Yeah, my pleasure. We're going to probably have to call on you again for corrections and whatnot. I'll be around. How about some closing thoughts? Oh, you want to hit and whatnot. I'll be around. All right. And thanks to everyone. How about some closing thoughts?

Oh, you want to hit a closer? I don't necessarily have one. But can you present the opportunity? I feel like people have ample opportunities at closers. I know, but I want one for this video. Ben, you got any concluders? That's a lot of pressure. Are you going to film me or film Steve while I conclude?

Yanni. You, for sure. There's an important one on the rio grande yeah because i forgot about that that overlaps with our austin texas live podcast dates oh yeah that's a good one doesn't overlap we go from there to austin for the live show well it's one plane ticket i guess yeah so what's the point that's your concluder i think that's just something to mention like we're doing a big fancy fancy, super fun live podcast in Austin, Texas. Are those tickets for sale yet?

Yep. They are for sale. My concluder is, as we were talking about shooting, I was thinking about all the movies I watched as a kid and all the bullshit shots that were made that were clearly not. I was thinking of Legend of the Fall, Lonesome Dove i was thinking of tombstone tombstone i was thinking of all these movies quigley town under all these like seminal movies that shaped how i think about the west were all there was at least a or a number of bullshit shots in each one of those what i always hated

was when somebody has a revolver and they shoot like 18 times there's a mel gibson movie the patriot where the the red coat the officer he has a muzzle loaded flintlock pistol and a dude is riding a horse like 200 yards down this creek and he just pulls up and boom and the dude falls off his horse i'm like yeah well you ever watch the ballad of buster scruggs there's some good yeah but that's almost a parody of good shooting but that's yeah that's a parody of like what's been done in the world in the realm of like western shooting like a western satire yeah it's like a satire but that's my concluder oh i got a concluder um we've talked over the years a lot of a lot about a documentary that i did with 0.0 production and um you can watch it now go to starsintheskyfilm.com. Let me make sure I get that right.

Starsintheskyfilm.com. And then it's available for streaming and download on Vimeo. You can rent it. You can buy it. So check it out. Full-length feature film available now. How's that for a concluder, Yanni? Good job.

You want to turn that camera around and hit your own concluder? Seth, thanks for coming. We appreciate it. My pleasure. My pleasure. Yip, yip, yip, yip. Cal's got another one. He's raising his hand.

No, he doesn't. He's just stretching. Raising his phone. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.

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