Steve Ranella, Cam Haynes. What's happening? Good to see you guys.

Yeah, thanks for having me out, man.

My pleasure. Cam, explain that ridiculous thing around your neck.

What are you talking about? I. Oh, this. Where am I? What camera am I?

Right there.

Yeah. So this is. How badass is this solid gold mold of. This is my first brown bear I killed with Roy. So they made a mold off this claw. I had this just tanned hide laying around. I'm like, I don't know what's it going to do? Just lay there? So I'm like, I got to have something. And I took it to ski's jeweler, which has been in Eugene for 104 years. So it's kind of a cool little story. And they came up with this crazy necklace. Oh, they wanted me to tell you. What is it? It's not newly mined gold.

It's reclaimed.

Reclaimed? Yeah, so they're not ruining the planet to get it. This is like reclaimed gold, but it's solid. And then there's six carats of rubies on there and black diamonds. This is a ridiculous thing you're talking about.

Yeah.

Okay.

That was it.

That's a lot of pawn shop wedding rings laid up in there, man.

I know a lot of failed marriages.

That's where that came from.

50 failed marriages right here.

And the rubies look like blood. So what they did was, it's pretty fucking dope. They made the rubies. If you could hold it up for the camera, that people could see it. The rubies look like it's dipped in blood.

There's black diamonds, too.

Oh, nice. That's a lot. Dude. You're balling out of control, son.

I know, it's crazy. So the last I had that one from Scooby the ch, he made me never worn it since, but I wore it here. The last time I had. My son had an ivory from a bull I killed in Arizona. He just put it on a leather strap, and that was my last podcast adornment. Now here we are.

Cody. Garbrandt gave me one that has my dog's face on one side.

Yes.

And the other side that has the JRe logo. I'm like, either one of them is too weird.

Carved into an.

No, it's solid gold.

Oh, solid gold. That's some intricate carving.

Yeah.

It's so ridiculous.

Hey, no, there's no limit now.

You got any jewelry? Vanilla?

Come on, Steve. No, nothing? No tattoos? No jewelry, man. The lake, they won't be able to identify me.

Do you have a rubber wedding ring? Do you wear one of those.

Well, I went from regular to silicon to nothing. Yeah, I don't wear one anymore. You ever thought about my wife doesn't wear one very often.

Oh, yeah.

Don't wear one.

I'd yell at my wife.

Yeah.

Where the fuck are you going?

Well, I know, but that leash on, it's not like anyone comes in. It's not like anyone comes and scams on me. Now, beyond that, I smell like a married dude. I don't need that thing.

I get it. I don't know. I don't mind wearing it. And I love these silicone ones. These are great. You can lift weights in them. I do everything in them.

I had a couple of accidents of snagging it and arked it on a battery. The metal one?

Yeah.

And then I got on this thing, and people were sending us all these pictures, too, of what they call degloving sheathing. Yeah. Where you pull it off, man. We got just people sending horrible pictures, like guys catching them on a ladder rack on a truck, and then, like, jumping down. Endless. And that cured me forever, that metal one?

Yeah.

I kept the metal one in a little baggie.

I will wear the metal one if I go to dinner with my wife.

Oh, really?

Or if I'm doing the UFC, I'll wear the metal one if I have a nice watch on, but I never wear it other than that.

Oh, that's cute that you put it on at dinner. I'm going to do that sometime.

We do date nights.

You put your ring on? Yeah, I'm going to start doing that.

Why? I always wear my rubber ring. But the silicone ring. But the metal one I'll put out. We're going out. Nice one on, dude.

I'm going to take that little tip, man.

Good tip. It's a good tip for date night.

I'd use mine for this.

Your wife's like, where's your weding ring?

Wow.

You know, the necklace I got, I still have it.

Just assumed it's final four.

I wear it all the time.

I'm wearing it right now. My budy in Alaska, his wife kept all of her jewelry in this little box, and their house burnt down, and he later went and found all that stuff. Like, it melted into a blob. So she took that blob and took it to a jeweler and had that blob turned into a big old necklace. So it's just like this amorphous glob. Oh, just a glob with no amorphous glob of gold. That she'll put on now. And then it was like all of her stuff in this little pile that melted together.

Been a fucking hell of a fire.

Oh yeah. Oh no, it was for sure. And she didn't wear it, wear it. But she would get out and be like, oh, here's all my.

Lumps.

Here's all my stuff.

Yeah. The jewelry thing is a weird thing. People that get really. One of the things we're going to do for protect our parks we've been talking about doing this is get grills like the rappers wear. We're all going to wear grills during the podcast. So we're going to get fitted with like diamond grills. They take like little diamond dust and you smile like Paul wall and you have a full mouthful of diamonds.

I think it looks badass. That's my next move.

Just fangs.

I have a tooth that got knocked out. It's like one of those calves. And one time we were drinking and I lumped. When I was younger, we were drinking and I was trying to open up. There used to be that company that made tequila that had like a sombrero for a lid and I was opening one of these bottles and broke that fake tooth off. And all night I'm going on about how I'm getting a gold because it's gone and all night I'm like making a plan, talking all this. And I woke up in the morning and looked in the mirror and I just wanted a regular white tooth back so bad.

So you opened it up with your tooth?

Yeah, it broke that tooth and then got fired up about getting a gold one and no, never did it. That'd have been the closest thing I had toward jewelry is my gold tooth. But chickened out.

That would have looked sick.

Yeah. I thought about a gold tooth for brief moments. Generally while drinking. Get one of them.

They have those, they just put a little diamond on it now.

Yeah.

My old man told me that during the war guys would carry around dental picks and he fought World War II. He said during the war they would carry it around and they would get the gold out of germans teeth and save it up in a bag. And there were certain guys was just into it. I remember as a kid asked him like, hey, would they ever get it from an american? He goes, that'd be a good way to get shot. But they dig it out of there, which is a macabre business, man.

Yeah, very macabre.

People used to dig up graves to do that, right? Yeah.

Well, the original fillings, the silver ones, were those lead don't know. Because they used to have fillings that were metal. And I remember people were saying, hey, those are fucking terrible for you. They figured it out years later.

It's like living your whole life with a fishing sinker in your mouth, man.

Right? Have you seen. You saw Shane Gillis last night?

Yeah.

How funny is that dude?

Oh, my God. He's hilarious.

He's so funny. He had a bit about George Washington, and it's one of the funniest bits I've ever seen in my life. And George, it's a whole bit about going to the George Washington museum because he's a real history buff. But one of the things was George Washington's teeth. Like George Washington's wooden teeth? No, no, they weren't wooden. They were set in lead. The fake thing that he had was set in lead. The top was horse teeth and the bottom was slave teeth. So they'd have teeth pulled from his slave to make. Yes. And then that thing was set in lead with springs on it. And that was George Washington's teeth. I mean, how fucking crazy is that? But his whole bit is about how George Washington had lead poisoning. He was a fucking maniac because he was at the front of the line. Horse, donkey, just fucking hack. You have to see the bit. It's very funny. Folklore notwithstanding, Washington's false teeth were not wooden. He obtained them instead from horses, donkeys, cows and human beings. According to his account books 1784, emulating some of his affluent friends, he bought nine Teeth from unidentified negroes, perhaps enslaved African Americans at his beloved Mount Vernon.

The price was 122 shillings. Yeah, I mean, imagine eating with that fucking monstrosity of lead in your. So he's got that in his mouth all the time. Getting lead poisoning.

That's pretty intense.

Pretty intense.

Having another dude's teeth in your mouth too is wild. Yeah, I had a cadaver bone in my jaw for a while, and you'd get little pieces of it, and you're always spitting out little pieces of some guy, some other dude.

For a while they took it out.

Well, no, it just heals up. So they drill a hole in there and they fill it full of cadaver bone.

Whoa.

And I asked who the dude was. They can't figure out who he was. You're like all over your office or whatever. You're like some little chunk of a guy. You don't know.

My right knee is a cadaver ACL tendon, but it's not anymore. What happens is your body reproliferates it, so it just acts as a scaffolding, and then your body just fills it in with its own tissue.

They ever give you info about the.

No. No, I just don't. Get me a viking. Get me some fucking gigantic dude swinging at battle ax his whole life. They actually use the Achilles tendon, though, because it's much thicker than the original ACL. It's like 150% stronger than an initial ACL. I would do that operation and get in a heartbeat. I've always told everybody, I've had my knees done both ways. I had my left knee done with a patella tendon graft, which was the most painful and took forever to recover from. And then I had my right knee done with a cadaver graft. It was way easier. I went to a party five days after the operation with no crutches, no nothing. I just put a brace on and walked, and I was like, this feels fine. I mean, it was obviously unstable. I guess it was weaker, so I put the brace on, but I could walk around. It was not that big a deal. The first one, I was in fucking agony for months, at least weeks, because they have to saw what they do is they take your patella tendon, which is a very large, thick tendon. You don't need all of that.

And they take a strip of it.

And then they like peeling string cheese.

Yeah, exactly. And then they take a chunk of your kneecap and a chunk of your shin. So they pull that out, and then they open you up like a fish, and then they screw it in on the top and screw it in the bottom. And that's your new ACL. So it's a part of your body, so your body accepts it. It's not like another person's tissue, which could be an issue. Your body might reject it. And then it takes a long ass time before you can even get on your knees again. It took like a year before it doesn't bother me to be on my knees. Like, if you're hammering something or something, I couldn't get on that knee. It was just so fucking painful. Because you got a hole there and a hole in the kneecap, but it all fills in eventually. Well, both of them are fine now, but if I had to tell people, if they're going to get the operation, get the fucking cadaver. Get that dead dude.

That's risky. Now, what if you get a vegan that's vaccinated cadaver? Your knee is going to blow out flimsy every day. Every day.

Like flimsy string cheese. Like when your bow string is getting frayed like, damn, should I replace this?

Like, when your d loop is fucking.

Vegan on this ligament?

Yeah. Poor vegans, man. You want to talk about people that have been sold bill of goods?

Not very durable, are they?

It's not just that. It's like there's so much propaganda that that is good for you, and there's so much evidence that it's not. And this mindset that these fucking people have where they're just like, they believe the China study, they believe meat causes cancer. I've had conversations with people. We try to be rational with them. Like, if meat really caused cancer, do you know that 95% of the people on earth eat meat? Look at all the cancer. Yeah, but look at all the other food they eat. Do you understand how epidemiology studies work when they have these arguments? No one ever takes it to this rational conclusion. Do you know how they work, the epidemiology studies? No. If they say there's been a correlation between high consumption of red meat and cancer, people eat red meat five times a week are much more likely than people what are they eating with it? They don't take that into effect because it's not a real study. It's bullshit. What they're doing is just trying to come up with some biased interpretation of data that makes it seem more likely that meat is killing you.

I was trying to explain correlation, causation, all that to my kid the other night. I was telling them about stuff like this, like education levels and divorce rates. Right? I'm like, no one's going to untangle what it is, but you can look at these things and see that there's something going on, but no one knows exactly what. Right?

Yeah.

So with this stuff like that. So did you eat a lot of meat? Yeah, it's like, okay, well, in what form? Where. What were you doing?

It's not even what form. It's what else are you eating if they're only looking for red meat? So they're asking you in these studies, like, how many days a week do you eat red meat? And then you say, five. And they say, well, we've gathered up all the data, and the people that eat red meat five days a week are much more likely to have cancer. Yeah, but most people who eat red meat are eating burgers. And they're eating burgers from, like, jack in the box, where you get this bullshit bun. You get these fries that are made in seed oil. You're probably washing it down with a Coca cola. You're flooding your body with unnatural levels of sugar and these carbohydrates that are all processed with folic acid and bullshit, and they're fucking terrible for you. And your gut is just inflamed and your whole body's freaked out. And then do you smoke cigarettes and do you drink alcohol? And do you live near a fucking power line? There's so many factors that lead you to. If it was just like, I want to see a study on people who eat wild game or grass fed beef and just fucking vegetables.

Those studies, I bet those folks aren't getting, like, high instances of cancer. Cancer is like, there's a lot of environmental factors, there's a lot of genetic factors, a lot of things that lead people to get cancer. It's not just what you eat. But when they say meat, what else are you eating? Why are you blaming meat?

Well, what I used to do is go to McDonald's. So, yeah, I had red meat because in the burger, two plain hamburgers, large fry, apple pie, Diet Coke, and a milkshake.

Just think about all the bullshit.

And they're like, do you eat a lot of meat?

Blame the meat.

Right. It was like, to your point, look at all that other shit. Sugar and carbs.

Exactly.

That oil in that meal right there would probably kill you.

Yeah.

And some people, it's the same people going through McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's every single day getting their go to. Yeah. So those are the people that you're asking about. Do you eat red meat? Yeah, and of course they are. But, yeah, I just got my blood test yesterday from. I get it tested every once in a while, and my numbers are phenomenal. I eat meat five times a day.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm eating meat all day. All wild, gay meat.

Though I found that people also have. I was talking this the other day with my buddy Seth, where people also have a tendency to find there's so much conflicting dietary information that people also will find something aligns with their esthetic or that aligns with their political sensibility. Meaning someone, if your general tendency is to be opposed to meat production, certain agricultural practices, and you see an article where it says high meat diet correlates with cancer, they're going to read that with great enthusiasm.

Yes, confirmation.

Because they're going to be like, oh, this lines up with a bunch of shit, I already think. And so when we were talking about this, I was sort of teasing out, right? Like, I like to have a garden. I like to hunt. And I look with fondness upon data that suggests that eating, like, fresh veggies and meat is really good for you, and it definitely feels good. But I'm sort of like, do I make the same mistake that I tease other people for making? Like, if I read some study that said eating mule deer is the best thing you can possibly do, I'd be like, no, that's my kind of study.

Yeah, but it just makes logical sense.

Yeah, it does.

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

Yeah, you got to get bit.

It's going to take some time.

Plays out the same every time.

It's like, I have a friend, and he was like, my girlfriend's going to let me do threesomes the moment I hear things like that.

That's my kind of article.

The exact same feeling as, like, someone coming up to me saying, hey, man, I started making my own bombs. This is not going to work out.

I know a guy that went through something like what you're talking about. And I remember when he broke it out for me about some deal he had arrived at in his marriage.

It looks good on paper.

Never seen an example once.

I can't tell you how I know, but I could just tell you that this is not a connection.

It never worked. Yeah, if you just sketch it out.

Right here, it might look all right. Yeah. She's going to kill you in your sleep, bro. This is not going to work. This is real.

God.

Get out now. Yeah, but the vegan diet thing, it's so unfortunate that people have been. I get how you could come to this sort of idea where if you just eat vegetables, then you're not as responsible for killing. But one of the real problems is, first of all, there's a real problem of farming, especially industrial monocrop agriculture. Goddamn. They kill a lot of things to get that crop out. They kill everything that's in the ground. When they're using the combines, they use people to kill groundhogs. They're killing all the varmints and gophers and everything gets fucking killed. Right? We all know that. Ground nesting birds, fawns, get chewed up. There's a lot of things that happen. But then on top of that there's emerging evidence that plants have intelligence, that not only do they have intelligence, but they communicate through the mycelium in the ground and that they share resources. Like, they allocate resources towards plants that need it more. There's evidence that they communicate with each other. Like, for instance, like the acacia tree, which there's trees in Africa where when giraffes eat them, if they're downwind, the other trees that are downwind will start producing a potent chemical that makes their leaves taste like shit.

So that they know that they're getting chewed on by, oh, my God, there's a giraffe in the neighborhood, start tasting like shit. And so they release chemicals. I mean, how insane is that? Not only is it that, but they have now shown that they can play recordings of water, of insects eating the leaves. And if they play those recordings next to the plant, the plant will start producing those toxic chemicals that make them taste bad.

I've read that about willows. I never checked to see how valid it is. But a willow will send root tendrils in the direction of the sound of running water.

That makes sense.

That's cool. Sorry, counting me to step over you.

Oh, no, I was just saying. So it's sound. And also, you said before, you said it was downwind.

Yeah, downwind too.

It's scent and sound.

It's a bunch of things that they don't understand because they don't have noses, they don't have ears. How does the sound of caterpillars eating leaves change the chemical structure of these plants? Like, how are they knowing? Okay, time to let loose the poison. How are they getting it? Because they're downwind. But it gets so bad that animals, some animals that try to eat them, they wind up starving to death because they don't want to eat this stuff because it tastes that bad.

I can see where you're going with this, is that sometime down the road there's going to be some tough decisions for people who are looking for general not wanting to harm creatures. And when you have to face the fact that here's this semi sentient, communicative plant that you're yanking, it just can't.

Move quick, and it does move. And if you watch high speed images of plants growing and moving with the breeze, you're like, oh, it's just a different kind of movement. It's clearly growing. It grows forever. It's not even like another animal. It's kind of more fantastic because it'll grow for a hundred fucking years and keep growing or if you go to some of those crazy. In northern California, those trees that have been around for a thousand years, it's wild shit, man.

Yeah, I'll hunt all manner of stuff and I used to work as a tree surgeon and would fell trees. But at our place in southeast Alaska, which is in the coastal rainforest and we're in an area of old growth where our stuff's at, I'm not in no way condemning people to do. I would not be able to put a chainsaw on one of those trees. Yeah, everyone finds their sort of limits and when I'm looking at some tree that's whatever, 400, 500 years old, I personally, I could kill a bear without thinking about it. Not without thinking about it, but yeah, I can kill a bear and be real happy I did, man. Just, I personally couldn't put a saw to one of those trees.

Yeah.

So people, you find these lines.

Well, there's also the renewable resource of bears. If you're going to kill a bear and eat a bear, that bear is nine years old. Nine years is not that big a deal.

Yeah. Ain't 400.

Yeah. I was in Scotland recently and they had this tree like this is the oldest tree that is in Europe. And I was like, how old is this fucking tree? And it's like a 5000 year old tree. I'm like, how is that possible?

Yeah, it's incredible.

See if you can find that like the oldest tree in Scotland. It was a crazy gnarled up looking, fucked up tree. I was like, how old? I might be wrong with the age but it was crazy old. And I was like, whoa, how do you know? How do you know how old this is when you go to Europe? Scotland was amazing. I took this trip with my wife and we went to visit these sites where they have these stone circles that are older than Stonehenge and they're like right in front of this dude's house. Like this dude has a house. And then there's a small street, like a two lane street, 5000 years old.

5000. A U tree.

Google said it's 2000, 3000 years old. Okay, so the sign says 3000. Well, back when they made that sign, what kind of fucking carbon dating did they have?

Some dude said, man, that tree must be 5000 years old. Put that on the sign.

Look at the image of it. That's what it looked like. See the image of it to the right, Jamie? No, slightly to the left of that. Yeah, that's it. That's it. That's exactly what it looked like. That one's 1000 year old. North Downs in Surrey. So that's in England?

Yeah. Fuck that ugly tree.

That tree looks dope. It looks dope.

That's not the tree Steve was talking about.

I think they look cool. That tree looks old. That tree looks like a gnarly old man.

Yeah, like some old dude. I'll tell you what it was like when we rode horses everywhere.

Hey, so, Steve, I was thinking, what's the difference between a person who. You said you wouldn't like to cut that tree or you wouldn't?

But like I said, I don't say that. To cast judgment on a logger. That does. I'm just saying. I personally.

No, I understand that. But then there's some people who take that to. I'm just trying to, I don't know, reason with myself. Because around here we've had people chain themselves to trees.

Sure.

You know what I mean? So would you do that?

No.

So that's what I'm saying.

No, the passion is not that.

Right.

The passion is there, but it's not that deep.

Right. Yeah. It's weird thinking about. I understand what you're saying. I totally get that. I think. I've never cut down a tree. I've never been a tree surgeon, but I would probably feel the same about maybe four or 500 year olds.

I might be like, you know, man, Cam, you cut it down.

When I was in northern California, I.

Don'T want to have to deal with any repercussions.

Right. We were in the redwood forest and there's a tree that you drive a car through.

Yeah.

Cut a hole in the tree. And I was like, why did they do that? But it was like 1920 or something.

When they did it.

Yeah. They didn't care about anything.

They didn't give a fuck. But when you're around those trees, they're so big. It's so crazy how wide they are. And when they're gone, that's it. You just chop down something that took thousands of years to grow so you could make, what, a fucking table? There's a lot of trees that are like 20 years old. Go kill those.

Yeah, it's a tough one, man. It's a tough one, looking at those trees. But it does seem like some of those trees you look at. It's like you're looking at. It almost seems like some approximation of God and look at some of those old trees, man. Just astounding.

Yeah. In Oregon, that was a big thing because we had the spotted owls in late 80s, basically, and spotted owls lived in old growth. So we had whatever timber activists or whoever spiking trees or living in them, they'd like, well, we live here, or we chain ourselves to them, but they were up there, and so the loggers would get there to do their cut. And there's people living in the trees.

Yeah, that one gal spent. Her name was like, Joe's. Probably had her on the show.

It was like butterfly or.

But I mean, I guess my point is, it's like, you got people, whatever their passions are, they will go to the ends. We defend hunting till the end. That's our passion. That's what we love. But, yeah, it's like all these different factions of people that, man, you'd have a hard time saying you're wrong and believing that, because that's just what they believe. That's their passion. So it's like finding that middle ground.

The one thing that I never really thought of until I started hunting was the spiritual aspect to hunting. It's a part of it that it's almost indisputable when you experience it. Like when you first experience it, when you first start eating an animal that you like. The first time you ever took me hunting, when we were in Montana, and I remember when I was eating that mule deer and we're sitting over the fire, I was like, this is so different than any meal I've ever had in my life. It's so different. I feel so connected to this animal. I know how difficult it was to do this. I know how insane their life is that this is this wild creature that is 100% going to die soon. No matter what. If it's next year or the year after or the year after that, it doesn't have much time left. And if you can move in while, dip your toe into the wild and extract that thing out, to me, that was like, oh, this is the best way to eat meat ever. This is 2030 times better than just getting a steak from a store.

I remember when we were sitting around the fire and you're like, what do you think? And I'm like, I'm doing this forever.

Do you remember that? What year was that? I don't remember that specification. That was twelve years ago. Oh, was it really twelve years ago? Ten years ago?

2012.

Okay.

And then you bow hunted in 2014?

Yes.

Okay.

So did you kill?

I have two people in this room that introduced me to hunting. And that's our Montana mule deer right there. That's him. That's the one.

Lost the nosebones.

The ones out there? Yeah.

Well, he's missing his, too.

Yeah.

You need to shake Jamie down. He might have a pocket full of those nosebones.

I think they boil it out too long, I think.

Is that what it is?

Yeah, I always glue them back in, but anyways, sorry.

That guy is very special to me. That guy's very special. First kill, and I remember when we were eating him over the fire, I was resorting my schedule. I was like, okay, how many times a year can I hunt now? Okay, how long is it going to take to eat after the first year? First time, right away. Eating it over the fire. Like, right away, I was like, oh, I'm doing this forever. This is what I do now. Right away, I was like, okay, now I got to really research calibers and rifles and how to do this and how to do that. I got to up my cardio. I got to start hiking hills. I started thinking all these things immediately, and I start planning out, okay, I got to hunt every four months. Like, what can you hunt? I got to get pigs, because then you can hunt them all year round. Immediately, my brain starts spinning, like, okay, this is what I do now. I was like, okay, I found it.

I've taken quite a number of people on their first hunting trips. I've never had probably dozens, maybe dozens. Either way, I've never had any of them regret it. No one's ever said, I wish I hadn't done that. But I would say the majority, definitely a good, strong majority, did not pursue it, didn't regret it, glad they did it, but didn't make it part of life. What's difficult?

It's difficult. And that's the thing. I think that is the impediment for a lot of people. It's, like, time consuming it if you don't have someone like you or someone like you to teach them. I have friends that are like, hey, I want you to take me hunting. Like, oh, christ, I don't have the time. I want to go bow hunting. I'm like, do you know what you're saying? Do you know what you're saying? I just want you to come with me one day and watch what I do fucking every day.

Right now. I'm going through that with my kid where my older kid is very interested in bow hunting, but I'm like, man, you have to appreciate the level of discipline, dude, that you got to shoot, right? Like, I'm perpetually rusty. You can't be like me, right? And I actually pulled the plug on him this year where I said, if you shoot every day, like, he'd been shooting throughout the summer. I said, if you shoot every day prior to this week, we're going to go bow hunt. I said, I want you to shoot every day prior to the week. And he didn't do it. And I said, we're not going, and I'll see if next year that impacts him. But it's, like, the discipline.

It's unfortunate, but I think there's no way to teach someone that. There's no way to really get it into their head how hard it is unless they're in the field and they're drawing on an animal, and then they realize there's some ways to mitigate that. Like, you've had Joel Turner on, which you've had him on, right?

No.

You never had Joel Turner on the shot IQ guy?

No, I'd like to, but never did.

I got to connect to you. Do you have his number?

No, but I'm familiar with that. He's been recommended by many people, and guys I work with are familiar, but I haven't had him on.

He's absolutely got.

And you've recommended him.

A. There's a thing that happens when you're in a high pressure situation that I recognize from martial arts and from a lot of other things where you do not have full control of your faculties, and your body is operating on anxiety and adrenaline, and when it's completely unique, like a bow hunting thing, where you have hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of preparation and thinking about it for seconds of action, and it boils down to this one movement where you're like, yikes. If you don't have a strategy for managing your mental state while that's happening, the ods of you flinching or moving or doing something stupid are really high. And Joel Turner went through that for, like, fucking 15 years. He couldn't kill an l struggle, so he was choking. And then when he became a SWAT instructor, he's on a SWAT team. So he was telling me this one story where he had to shoot this guy that was holding a young girl hostage, and I think it was with a weapon. I forget a knife or something. And so he has a headshot while this guy is holding onto a girl.

And he had to figure out what is the mental process that allows people to flinch and panic during these moments. And he realized it's the difference between open loop systems and closed loop systems. And the open loop system is something like swinging a baseball bat. Like, once you start swinging, you're just swinging. You're just. You're swinging. And unfortunately, with a lot of people, that is the initial reaction.

They just go, yeah, I get it. Like, the final thought you have is that you're going to swing the bat.

Yeah.

I don't know if a friend of mine's a real homer on hitter. I don't know if he would agree. But in my mind, yeah, it's like you've decided to swing and everything else is just nothing.

Well, you're not going to stop it in the middle of the swing. Yeah.

You're not thinking about, oh, I'm going to go a little higher, a little lower. Right.

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

Videos online, dude, I've been there.

Yeah, everybody has. But there's a way to mitigate that with this. So it's not just the practice. The practice is great. You have to practice. I practice constantly. But you also should have a pre shot routine. And I actually used Cam's pre shot routine when I was in Utah because I remember Cam had this thing where he's saying, keep the pin on him, keep the pin on him. And you say that while you're shooting. Keep the pin on him. Keep the pin on him.

I just know if I keep the pin there, arrow is going to hit good.

Yeah.

What happens is people drop their bell arm a lot. I mean, that's what happens a lot is that drop that bell arm, they hit too low.

Right.

So if you keep that pin there.

The bow is going to do.

Oh, you're saying, you're telling yourself, be conscious of keeping the pin on it, through the shot.

Yeah. Not moving. Because the moving thing is like overhead it, things go left, right, fucking three, 4ft.

You're like, how, you know where people realize that they have a problem is after they make a shitty shot. And they're just like, why didn't I practice more? Why didn't I listen to Joel or Joe?

Or.

That'S. Then it's real. Because we have a tendency of making things work out in our head the way we want them to. And then when it doesn't work out like that, because we haven't put in the time, or we don't have a process down, and maybe you hit the animal bad, maybe you miss, maybe just shit the bed, and then you're just like, God, what am I doing? Yeah, but up until then, you're like, you're the baddest person ever. Of course I'm going to make a great shot.

That's the interesting thing between, in talking to people that blow a shot with a rifle and talking to people that blow a shot with a bow, people will blow a shot with a rifle and they'll assure you they did everything right.

Guns on.

No one blows a shot with a bow and comes away saying, I don't know what happened. I did everything right. Because you fall in like you're saying, you fall into this despair and guilt and you're trying to review in your head, I've accidentally landed on a thing. It's not failsafe, but somehow when you say, keep the pin on them, I've landed on this thing. Like, remember your elbow. Remember your elbow. And if I remember to like, because when I'm shooting, just practicing, there's always this thing of sort of consciously being aware of have my elbow raised and that makes everything fall in the line. And so if I know I'm going to get a shot, and I could think, like, if you'll do the part.

The elbow, if you do the part.

And then that elbow goes up and then everything else sort of like takes care of itself. And then if I take a shot, I might review in my mind, like, I never did that thing. I never did the elbow deal, which drives all the other actions. It's imperfect, but it's similar to what you're talking about.

There's something about staying in a conscious state and being able to maintain your composure during that high pressure situation. Maintaining a conscious state where you're talking yourself through it and not just being a reptile.

People black out.

Kind of black out. They really do.

They don't know what.

I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened.

Yeah, I think you use it up, maybe. I felt that, if anything, just a gradual dissipation with age and experience, perhaps experience for sure. I'd be curious if some dude started, like, if some dude at 60 years.

Old.

Some dude at 60 years old started bow hunting. Are they going to wig out like a 20 year old on their first shot?

Depends on who they are.

Or is there something that's like, their brain's already chilled out?

I think there's a part of your brain that. There's a part of your brain that Andrew Huberman talks about. I forget what the exact sexualist. Yeah. That when you force yourself to do things you don't want to do, when you force yourself to get up in the morning and run in the cold and get in the cold plunge and all these different. It literally grows larger. This part of your brain that is able to do things that are uncomfortable that you don't want to do actually grows larger. And it seems to be that that's a muscle just like every other muscle. Not a muscle, but a thing that is more robust with use. And if you're a 60 year old guy that's just been working in an office and listening to the boss and driving home, and there's no stress. Not stress, but no high pressure decision making in the moment choices that you have come accustomed to managing and dealing with and negotiating. If you're a person that's, like, fucking gone to war, maybe you've had some crazy high pressure job and you're 60, you probably got fucking ice water running through your. By the time you're 60 years old, you've seen it all.

So it depends on the human. But for most people, this guy like Derek Wolf, you met Derek Wolf on your podcast. You're talking about a guy that has fucking played professional football at the highest level. And even he says it's the most exciting shit that he's ever done. I've told Cam so many times, dude, I've done a lot of shit. I've fought. I do stand up comedy. I do so many live things that are, like, high pressure. Nothing is like elk hunting. There's nothing like that moment when you're drawing and that thing is, like, in the field, and it drops his head down at 50 yards and starts eating, and you draw back and you got those. Is this happening? Is this really going on right now? It's so pressure filled. It's such a novel and unique moment that unless you have a bunch of those moments, I'm at the point now, ten years into bow hunting, where when I draw on an animal, I can keep my shit together. And now to me, it's just like making sure I'm steady, and the shot's good. There's nothing weird going on. There's no weird wind. And I just go through my process, and I'm very confident now.

But it's numbers. It's numbers. I always tell people, the more things that you can shoot, the better. And you could shoot pigs. You shoot things that people have to kill. If you can go to Lanai where you can get multiple shot opportunities on access deer, that kind of. That's, for me, the difference between how I feel in September during elk season and some years where I feel great and super confident. It's always that. I went on a couple of other hunts. It's always so you get that experience. This is how I used to feel fighting, too. A couple of times I got injured, and I couldn't fight for, like, six months. And then I'd fight, but almost like it was, like, brand new again when I'd be in there. Like, whoa, this is crazy. The first time you see people fight, they're in a panic. It's like you can't believe it's actually happening. You're like, are you ready? And you're like, yes. And they get out there, and if you're an experienced person, it's one of the reasons why champions have such a massive advantage. They have such a massive psychological advantage because they're the champion.

And you'd see guys, when they would fight Mike Tyson, they had already lost by the time they got in there. They look at him like, oh, my God, what is happening? Is this real? Like, their whole world was, like, that big, and they were just in full panic and they just couldn't fight.

That's kind of similar to how people feel bow hunting elk for the first time. I mean, that bull's coming in. Yeah, they lost. When that bull is coming in and it's coming to 20 yards, it's just like, there's a chance. But I remember the first time we had your first bow hunt. We were in Colorado. The two bulls were coming in on this little tight creek. We were in this little draw coming in at the same time, and they were just bugling, and it was insane. Not even big bulls, but just coming in and closing down on us. And you remember that moment. You're just like. It was unbelievable. Even though all the shit that you've done, this high level crazy stuff, there was nothing that compared to that.

The screaming Brit, when you're there and they're like, 30 yards doing that, the sound is so nuts. If you're not a person, that's ever been around elk calling? When they do it, when they bugle, it sounds like Lord of the Rings, man. It's such a sound.

It's so crazy intimidating. If you're not ready for it.

There's a thing Derek Wolf told me, when you're talking about the stress and competitive stress, he told me a thing that had never occurred to me before. Getting in a ring to fight Mike Tyson or whatever is in his. Also, there's a thing where you're starstruck.

Yeah.

Like, picture you're an incoming player, and you're real young, and all of a sudden you're like, I'm supposed to go tackle Tom Brady. I've been watching through my whole coming up through high school, coming through college, and all of a sudden, like, wow, that's him. Yeah.

There's the goat.

You got to sort of put that out of your head, right? Hang tight. Let me get his interview, then let me get his autograph. Then I'll come back and then I'll tackle him.

Yeah. I mean, the goat. You've heard how he's the best ever do it, and then all of a sudden, it's almost like, I'm a big fan. Like, to meet you.

Sorry for having to do this, but isn't that also the case with bow hunters, where you've been hunting your whole life, hoping to see a 200 inch buck, and then one day you're in the mountains, and this mule deer steps out. You're like, this is it. You're imagining taking the photo smiling on Instagram. You're imagining you see this wide mule deer buck. Like, this is crazy. This is a real one. I can make this happen. You're like, everything is just full panic.

Clay Newcomb just did a bear grease episode about a guy, a poacher, and he interviews the guy at length. And this guy played softball on an army base. They had, like, an athletic complex. And a couple of times he sees this giant buck. And the people were aware of this giant buck, and he was trying to figure out if it was possible to kill it, as he calls it. Kill it, right, or kill it legal. And one day he just happens to have his bow in his car and sees it not anywhere he's supposed to hunt. And the way he describes it, he describes it like he was out of his body and he shoots it. And the minute it falls over, he thinks, you'll never get away with this.

God.

But he not only was he not only lost. I think he's in Missouri. Yeah, Missouri.

So was he in the wrong unit or is he on a military.

He was on a military base where you can't hunt.

Oh, wow.

And not only losing your mind as you're drawing back. He lost his mind in the whole thing. Getting his bow out of his thing and kills the buck. And then the minute he kills it, it occurs to what he's done.

So what did he do?

It's two episodes about just horrible. You got to walk a real fine line, as he admits he did a criminal act. And it's not, like, sympathetic of the criminal act, but it winds up being a story of the unraveling of someone's life about just a mistake, but being that sort of lust for that animal.

Right.

I guess we should be thankful that Derek wolf never saw Tom Brady out of pizza then. You know what I mean? Could just frickin'light. Him up, sack him.

Yeah, right. I got him.

I got in front of you at Burger King. You just fucking go for it.

I lost my mind. It was Tom Brady.

I don't know. I've just been programmed to tackle him.

Yeah, but I was thinking back, too, on you said, when you're not ready for it. My first year bow hunting, my first year rifle hunting, I was 15. When I was rifle hunting, we did this drive. We used to do drives, right?

Drives with you all.

Not really hitting pans, but not far from it. So you send the guys and then put whoever the shooters on the stand.

Can I ask you real quick, did you call them? What were the names you use? We debate this all the time.

What?

Okay, what were the terms? You use? Pushers, sitters.

That was it.

Okay. Use pushers and sitters. It's very regional.

Or on the stand. Yeah, you're on the stand, and then we're pushing to you.

Okay.

Yeah.

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

Was, but it looked.

And I was just, like, shot. No clue. I never probably never saw it in the scope. It was like, probably. It seemed like from me to you, and I was just like, had no idea what happened. Was I prepared to kill that buck? Hell, no. So I killed a spike buck, like, the next day. Right. And that's how it works. You're not ready for a giant, right then. Same thing with bow hunting. First day, bow hunting, this giant bull comes out seven by six. Roosevelt, first day, I'm like, sit on kneeling in this logging road. Felt like my arms were asleep, they were tingling. I'm like, I didn't know if I could draw this bow back. He's broadside, head to the right, butt to the left, and I shoot. It's like right at 40 yards, and I miss behind his butt. So I'm off like 6ft at 40 yards and then end up killing a spike bull. So you're just not ready for the giant.

But that's where I think Joel Turner comes into play.

Because I don't know if he could have helped me.

I don't know if he could have.

Mean, at that time, he'd have had.

To be like, give me that bow.

Yeah, it probably wouldn't. You probably weren't totally ready for that at that moment. But if you have a certain level of proficiency and a certain amount of experience in mitigating high pressure situations, then I think you could get right.

Because I've been teaching a lot of people to shoot a bow for the first time on the lift, run, shoot show that I do. Joel Turner isn't going to tell them, like, there's so many basics you have to get before that. But as you said, once you get that routine down and you're kind of more seasoned, then I think that closed loop, open loop, then that would make more sense.

It was so attractive to me when I first started shooting a bow. I was like, God, there are so many. You get lost in this. There's so much going on. Just in your yard when you're shooting at a target, there's so much mental and physical, and there's so many things that have to align. I have a checklist that I have on my phone that before I go hunting, like, when I'm on the plane flying to wherever I'm going, I look at my notes on my phone and I go over my checklist and I bounce it around.

Process stuff.

Yeah.

Not like boots.

No, I got all that. That I'm terrible with, too. I just stuff everything in there. I'm like, I think I got it all in there. I really need to organize it. Like, if I was going to go.

On, like, way more than you need.

If I was going to go on one of those backpacking mountain hunts where you're carrying your whole camp on your back, you're walking in for fucking 20 miles, I'd be the guy that has, like, the 80 pound pack because I threw in extra batteries and extra broadheads in case that happens.

Hiding stuff in the bushes on your way up, two knives.

Meanwhile, like, Adam Greentree has been doing it forever. That motherfucker saws his toothbrushes in half to cut weight. He's got it down to a science.

You would do that one time.

One time, yeah, exactly.

That's how you learn that. Everybody's learned that.

So my process for packing is just fucking shove it all in there. And mostly likely, I always have two range finders and two binos in case I drop something. Remember that time we were hunting in Canada and I broke my rest? My rest snapped. But I had a whisker biscuit. I was ready.

I was like, that's good.

He was being obsessive out there with his rest. Just like, wrenching on it for hours and changing and doing all this and ended up stripping something out because he's like, got too crazy on the rest.

Well, it was fucking up on me. It was fucking up. The rest wasn't dropping all the way. So my arrow was catching it. Like the Fletchings were catching. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on? And then I was like, oh, look at my rest. It's like slightly up above the riser. Like, God damn it. So much fucking getting. But whisker biscuits, man. I know they take a couple of seconds away from your feet percept, but boy, are those fucking easy to tune.

Yeah, it's a lot less little stuff to go wrong.

I know some fucking high level hunters still use whisker biscuits just because they don't want to fuck around with anything.

It's like for that hunt, it's perfect. You're going to be shooting at ten or 20 yards. Or a whitetail hunter, they're shooting at 20 yards. If you're going to be shooting long distance, a Fletch going through with all that contact through the whisker, basically that's going to impact long distance.

Well, apparently really impacts it when you have helical. Yeah, right. So if you have straight. So helical. For people that are listening, there's an angle that the Fletchings are placed in that accentuates the spinning of the arrow, which makes it more accurate. And that's what you want. Right. So some people don't use that. They just have straight up and down Fletchings, which is still good. You could still shoot very accurately with straight up and down fletchings. But most like, really good archers prefer a vehicle. Like, you have a vehicle.

Yeah. Give a little direction to that energy so the arrow won't plane, but that whisker biscuit accelerates.

That spin makes it immediate.

Well, it fucks up the Fletchings because it's twisting as it's going through all those hairs. Whereas if you have a straight fletching, it's just going to pass through. It only takes a few feet. Tim Burnett still hunts with a whisker biscuit. I was watching one of his YouTube videos. I mean, that guy's killed everything. He's been around forever. Solar hunter, Remy's buddy, and he's a really good hunter, and he uses a whisker biscuit. And I was like, this is crazy. I mean, maybe he's only using it on this one video that I saw, but I was like, there's a lot of people that just go, I want to cut. Just like a lot of people don't fuck with mechanicals. Too many things that can go wrong. I'm not going to fuck around with it.

The last thing I did with mine is I put it on my fish bow, but it won't flow to fiberglass arrow. I realized, too heavy. You know what I'm saying? I was like, man, this is going to be genius for fish hunting. But it just. The arrow just goes right through it.

That looks like a lot of fun. Like, bow hunting for fish.

I love it, man. The problem is you just get limited to a fish that you get limited in the US, you get limited to a lot of fish species that are not as desirable.

Right? Like gar and carp and stuff like that.

Down in South America, you're hunting, like, the best of the best fish.

Yeah.

With a mean. You're hunting, like, the most coveted food fish, which is, know, how many carp do you want? We used to do it when we were kids, man. We'd shoot all kind of carp.

But isn't it wild that carp are, like, prized in Europe?

Yeah, I know. It doesn't make any sense. I shouldn't say it doesn't make any sense that they didn't. But I don't know where we went. I don't know how we went so wrong.

Yeah, it's weird.

They put them all over, thinking everybody's going to eat them all the time. It just did not take off.

Well, they ruined lakes where I live on Lake Austin. There's a buddy of mine who's one of my neighbors who's a fisherman, and he said, man, you should have been here, before they brought carp, he goes, there's all sorts of vegetation in here. And the bass were everywhere. But now he goes, if you can get a camera and look at the bottom of this lake, it looks like the bottom of a swimming pool.

There's fucking nothing terrible, man. But the fact that it was intentional. There's so many non native, there's so many invasive species that were unintentional. But the fact that for the most part, the common carp was they were doing everybody a favor.

I think they thought they were doing a favor for rich people on Lake Austin because I think they wanted people to have less vegetation so they could take their boats out.

Got it.

That's what I think. And that's what he thinks, too. I mean, I got this from him. He's like, I think they just wanted to clean up the vegetation because it was unsightly. And they fucked this place up because he was on a boat. And when I met him, he was casting under my dock. And I went out there and I was like, what's going on, man?

You weren't yelling at him?

No, I've seen that on your show. No, I like it when I see those guys and they're always like, a little nervous. So I was like, how you doing, man?

Oh, man, this guy's going to yell at me.

I was telling this guy the other day that there's like this four pound bass that lives underneath my dock. I go, hey, man, there's a pretty good bass that lives underneath dock. And he's like, really? I go, yeah, God, fish it, man. I started talking to him, but my friend Alan shout out to Alan, who's my neighbor. He catches all. He catches his big bass. He goes, I don't even try for. He uses a big ass fucking Rapala. He has like one of those jointed Rapalas and it's like fucking six inches long. He's like, I don't even fuck around. He goes, I just want big bass because there's like 1516 pound bass in that lake. Whoa. And so he catches some big ones. He sends me some whoppers, defenders. The eight year effort to bring vegetation back to Lake Austin. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, they fucked it up. They fucked it up. There's still good bass there. Let me show you what Alan catches. He's catching some big ass fucking bass.

Me and Roy used to be addicted to carp hunting because they'd be spawning in the spring. After we poured concrete, he had a construction company. We'd pour concrete, then we'd go and go try to get carp for bear bait. So before they outlawed at 94 in Oregon, we'd get carp, catch these giant carp, have a wheelbarrow, get them all back, put them in like a 55 gallon drum, put the lid on it, and then we'd make stink. So we'd call. We needed some stink to get the bear bait going because if you got that rotten carp and a gunny sack, you put it way up a tree where they couldn't get it. That stink smell would go for 5 miles down the draw and then all the bear would come in.

Right?

So I just remember this one time we had a bunch of carp and 55 gallon drum. After a while that kind of builds pressure. We weren't really thinking about this. So we go to take that lid off and it freaking explodes. And this shit smelled maggots, carps, rotten carp exploded all over us.

Have you ever seen those videos of when whales explode on beaches?

I see them when they blow them up.

This is what, Alan just caught this in front of my house the other day.

God dang, that's giant.

Yeah, he catches some big ass fish, man.

Yeah, I think that'd get me interested in bass fishing.

Yeah, he gets a lot. Here's another one he just got. Whenever he catches one, he sends it to me. Yeah, we're homies now.

Those are a big fish.

But, yeah, that's the weird thing is the dock thing. I encourage it. I'm happy when I see people. I love all manner of outdoor activities. I would never want someone to not fish near my dock. That's like so stupid.

Yeah. It's a repulsive behavior.

It's repulsive. It's a dock, like, let people fish. You should talk to them. They're your friends. Wouldn't you do it if you didn't have a dock and there was a dock and you knew the fish hang out under the dock, wouldn't you fish there? Yeah. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Yeah. Or it's like, well, you're going to have to move your dock because there's a fish under there that I'm going to fish for.

But this is the situation where. That's where they go. They go where it's shade. They go where they can ambush and they all go under docks and hanging trees and anything they can get because they fucked it up with carp.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, that's weird.

That felt weird. Weirder than, like I said, where you got a house, then a yard, then a dock. That's not weird. But you could get where you could basically awkwardly wave at someone in their bathroom while you're trying to fish.

Yeah. Just don't make eye contact. Sitting there, taking a shit, looking out the window.

Yeah. The dock thing is a weird one, man. It's a weird one because I get it. If you're not a fisherman and you're just some asshole that just doesn't want anybody near your house, what they're going.

To tell you, what they always tell you, is that some guy's going to take a lead head jig and chip the paint. Chip the paint on the boat, ding the dock. That's their claim.

Okay.

Is that they're going to whack your stuff with a lead head jig.

I feel like that's the same as if you're driving off road and you're worried about pebbles. We got to get these fucking pebbles out of here. You're driving off road?

Yeah. Be like, don't put your stuff out over the public water.

Yeah. And what are you doing? A boat is not a car, man. It's a boat. It's supposed to get scratched up a little. You don't want your boat scratched up a little.

Some people don't know what the fuck.

I don't get it. You know what? Like, if you're on a ranch and you got those stripes all down the side of your truck.

Arizona pinstripe.

That's kind of cool.

You break it in.

Yeah.

That's what you do when it's new.

You kind of want that. I kind of want that. I like a car that's been fucking used.

Yeah, well, you have 20 cars.

I do.

But even if I didn't, I'm pretty sure that's how I'd think.

I was thinking about your shot. You know why I think that that helps when you do the elbow? Because when you get that elbow right, you're pulling hard against that back wall. A lot of people creep on their shot. They'll aim, and everything's going good. They're pulling hard, and then as they're aiming, they're kind of relaxing. And then that cam is kind of rolling over. It's called creeping. That'll throw off your shot. So I think when you think of that elbow consciously, it makes you think of pulling hard against that wall, which that's where the bow performs best.

Kyle Douglas pulls so hard that he's made bows break. Yeah, he's broken bows, like, pulling into the back wall.

I thought about what you're saying, but it makes good sense.

I think that's why it helps you.

Kyle Douglas, who's fucking picture? Yeah, I changed my shot quite a bit when I started pulling really hard against the wall. Really hard. I pull fucking hard. I have that locked in. And it also changed when I stopped using a resistance attention release because Dudley had me on what's called a silverback, which is, I think, one of the best methods for learning how to shoot because you have a safety, you pull, and then it's all tension based. So when you have the safety on, you could pull it hard. And then when you release the safety, you just pull a little more and it goes off. And you could set it to, like, two, three pounds, whatever the amount of difference. Say if you have a 70 pound bow, you set it to 72 pounds or whatever it is when you're at a full draw, whatever the drop off is. So they have this resistance setting where you tweak it in your yard at, like, five yards, or you're right in front of the target and you get it to the point where it's at the back wall, and then you just pull a little more and it snaps and breaks, and it makes for a perfect release.

And I use that forever. But then when I really started pulling hard in the back wall, I was making it go off when I didn't want it to go off. And then when I switched releases, then I'm like, oh, that's definitely the most. Because you're much more steady when you're like, when I'm fucking locked out, I'm locked out. Like I'm engaged in my back when I'm shooting at something. Everything is locked out. And I find that to be way more stable.

Is your front elbow locked out?

My front elbow is locked out, Norm. Yeah, I used to bend it. I used to bend it a little, but then I was listening to this one guy, and he said, if you were going to lean against something and want to be totally stable. Wouldn't you lock your arm out if you're leaning against a wall and you wanted to be completely rigid? I was like, oh, that makes total sense.

No, when you want strength, it's bent. Like, if you fall, you're not falling like this. You're falling.

Falling. Right.

Yeah. But when you're benching, when you have strength like that, it's not locked out, though. You're stronger.

Yeah.

Think of trying to push your. When your budy's car gets stuck and you're trying to help him push, you're not locked out.

Right. But that's strength. I'm not looking for strength. I'm looking for stability. I have plenty of strength. The strength is not the issue. The thing is, for me is if I'm locked out, that's less movement. I'm completely locked.

But then I'm not anything but. I'm anything but a. Dudley doesn't agree. Competitive Archer. But, yeah. I've never heard that in my life.

Dudley doesn't agree with just. I know this. Well, I shoot with a bent. We teach everybody to have it a little bit bent. But Wayne always references this poster of these premier Hoyt shooters, and they all have the exact same form and they're all slightly bent.

Yeah. Oh, man. I find. But I find myself better when I'm locked out.

Hey, listen, the thing is, if it works for you, who gives a fuck what anybody else says? Because everybody says I anchor wrong with my thumb behind my neck. Whatever.

Make any sense to me if the.

Arrow is going where it's supposed to?

The problem with the thumb behind the neck makes no sense to me. That seems to me to be way better. Because if you're anchored behind your neck, that's one more part of contact. And that's one more thing that's locked in. You're, like, completely rigid. That thumb only has that much give, and then it's behind your neck. I would do it if my neck wasn't.

So I keep needing to see what all this is. See, that doesn't seem crazy. No.

Well, you see Cam, do it. Cam, he gets his fucking thumb behind his head.

And the reason why.

And your thumb is looking for a little spot probably too.

Yeah, kind of. Yeah.

Now I just know where it's at.

I don't even think about it. But how it used to be, back in the day when we started, everybody, like, there was 30 inch bows, 29 inch bows, and that's about it. Draw length. So mine, 27 and a half, I just had, like, a bow that was way too long. So I'm just like this, and that's where it starts.

Oh, you're just looking for something.

I'm like, God, I'm trying to hold it.

Do that behind the neck and they'll tell you not to do it. I do not understand the logic.

Well, don't do it. We started because the draw length thing, people weren't really fitting bows to the shooter at that time, right? It was just like, here's the bow, here's what we got.

Good luck.

And that's what we do.

It's like your brother's bow or whatever.

Somebody gave it to you. But it's funny harkening back to the old days. I just had Waddell on the show, so me, Wayne and Wadell were shooting at the bow rack. And we all have still trigger. Like nowadays, the cool thing is the handheld, right?

Right.

But we're all old school, still shooting like my index finger, wise guy. Just a trigger release like that. And we were shooting pretty dang good. We had a shooting contest all in the X's. And I said, let's get a picture of these releases because it's kind of a novelty now. It's like just the old guys shoot those.

Well, there's still real good, competitive archers like Gillingham. Gillingham is one of the greatest of all time, and he uses a know and he'll tell you. And the way he says it, he goes, this thing about target panic, he goes, it's all just a mental weakness. He's like, when you're looking at a mean, obviously, he's like one of the best of the best. It's a different animal. But he's like, when you're looking at a target, like if you're practicing in your yard, you can do it right, you can hit it and not flinch. He's like, it's a mental weakness. That's all it is. And he's like, I prefer to command fire. He goes, I know when that pin is over that target and I can stay steady and let it go. But he's got all kinds of wild, wacky releases. He's always tinkering with shit. So he has weird releases that are like six inches long, and then you're like, leaning forward and pulling. He gets it in his head.

Modern stuff.

Yeah, modern stuff. But he adjusts his stuff. He's got some weird ones, man, where you look at the extended releases, he's got a lot of wacky. I wouldn't want to emulate it unless you were him. He's also a fucking giant six foot six dude. And he's got crazy long.

He shot so much, he has a crease in his nose. Swear to God, from the string.

That's good. I know guys that wore a groove and their teeth cut. Fish line.

Yeah, same thing.

He's got that. Just where that string sits. It's like a Crease.

Yeah.

Shot a lot of arrows.

I like a handheld because I've been doing handhelds for so long. But when I'm here, I practice with your release. In my range, I have the wise guy.

I think for hunting, I think for just controlled situations where you got all day, I think the handheld is the way to go. In an animal, you have to do command. Sometimes you do. You have to punch the fuck out of that trigger. I've killed a lot of animals doing it.

Yeah. Sometimes if you can keep it together, there's moments where you're like, you got to shoot now. You can't wait for the hinge to break, right?

Yeah, there's certain things. I remember taking one of those home and messing with it. And I had the same feeling I had when my nephew was trying to explain chess, like the game of chess to me, where I was like, that's pretty cool. Realistically, I'm not going to figure this out, right? I admire it. And I took that attention thing out in my yard, and after a couple of minutes, I'm like, are you honestly.

I'm going back to check.

Are you honestly going to figure this out? And I was like, at my age, as much as I shoot, I'm just not going to. And I went back and so I shoot a trigger, and I'll shoot that trigger till I'm dead.

You shoot the same trigger he does, you shoot the wise guy. Yeah, that's a good one too, because it's hot, you're not yanking on it and pulling it. And there's not a lot of weird movement. Like when you touch that fucker, it's going off.

Yeah, there's certain, there's a type of trap called MB 750 that release. It just seems like really nice little mechanical contraptions. I just like. It's like you pull. It's so clean.

Well, I use a thumb trigger. Now, I've been using a thumb trigger over the last few years, and I still use a hinge, too. I like a hinge too, because there's something about a hinge where I hear that click and I know, okay, here we go. And that keeps me in the moment. So I hear that. I hear that click, and I'm like, okay, everything. Keep the shot process going, and then it goes off. But the problem with that is when it's windy, one of the things that I found especially, like, hunting it to hone. You know how windy it gets up.

There in those canyons when you're trying to punch as it drifts over?

You can't do it. You have to have a trigger. You have to be able to control fire occasionally, but it helps you to have that process of recognizing that a surprise shot is important, at least an element of surprise. Where it's not like now, but it's like, just go to the. With a thumb trigger, you can make it go off, but you can also have it surprise. So to me, that's the best of both worlds.

But that's a strange situation to be in when you're thinking, the next time that pin blows over that target, I'm going to punch.

Yeah, that's what happens to some people. The mind fuck of target panic is crazy. When you hear about people that can't get the pin on the target. They can hold, like, six inches under the target, but once they rise up to the target, like, yeah, everything starts getting shaky.

My body wants to put that pin. My body wants to put that pin just to the left. I don't know why? Because I think I don't want to obstruct it.

Yeah, you want to see that?

When I bring it up, if I bring a crosshair on something, the crosshair is going to go. If I bring the pin up, it's going to want to sit just left so I can still look. And then I got to go, like, now. I'm going to bring it over where it belongs.

You know what's the greatest thing of all time? It has some problems, but it's the greatest thing of all time. And I know they're going to eventually work this out. Is that Garmin release. Do you saw that one that I was using last year? The site I stopped using? Yeah, Garmin site. Excuse me. I stopped using it because I had some problems ranging things. But damn it, when it works, it's a clear window with just an Led dot.

No obstruction.

Just like a red dot with a pistol. It's fucking magic. It's magic because there's no obstruction. You just put that pin right where it is. You can see through the pin because it's an led. It's amazing, but it's just. There's some problems with ranging. Like, when I'm in my yard and I'm at 74 yards. I know it's 74 yards, but I'll put that pin on, I hit the button and then it'll say, 67, 80. I'm like, what the fuck? And I'm like, I can't have this mind fuck. And so last year I stopped using it and I went, oh, I stopped using it because when we went to Utah, they made it illegal. So I hunted a full day with that release and luckily didn't shoot anything. And then we went back and then Colton said, you know, I think that's illegal here.

I don't think you didn't hunt, you just practiced.

Well, I definitely didn't shoot anything.

No.

But I did go out with it. I didn't even go to full draw, but I didn't go out with it. Luckily I found out. I was thinking, imagine if you killed something photo with that and you didn't know. Because the year before I had shot my.

They changed it in April and it's just some little change in the law.

Yeah. That I didn't know about. It's a dumb change because it only makes it more effective and it's not easier. It's just. You're more ethical.

Yeah.

It'S a range finder.

Yeah, but the states are going to have, they have to try to play the technology game because they just have to.

I agree to a certain extent, but if you're going to allow range finders, why do you allow range finders? Because you don't want people guessing. Well, there's a lot of guessing when you're gap pinning. There's a lot of guessing when an animal, you range an animal of 50 yards and then he takes three or four steps, there's a lot of guessing and you're just going to hold high. Are you going to do so with the Garmin? All you do is just press that button again and you get a new pin and it's perfect. And the other thing about the Garmin that's really fantastic is if you can't range, like, say if you're at 20 or you're at 40 yards and you range him and then he walks out and you're pretty sure it's like 50 or 60, you can also press a button and you get a full range of pins, so you get five led lights instead of just one. So there's an advantage of that, too. So if you're in a situation like we were at when we were rattling and the bucks just come running in and you know that's 20 yards or 30 yards, you just pull it up and you got your pins, and you can do that.

Or if you're at 60, like I shot the Neil guy, you can hold it and then you get a pin. That's what it looks like. It's the shit, but it just makes me nervous.

They're just trying to protect what they'll say is the primitive integrity of archery.

Yeah, it's still pretty primitive.

You're still using a range finder. It's just a range finder that's incorporated.

They're also trying to imagine where it's going. Like, you'll see some level of herky jerkiness as they bring in regulations, as they try to get a sense of what's coming, because if you wait too long on certain technologies, you develop a user group, and then you develop a level of resistance. Think the second drones. The second drones became a thing. It was like, immediately, like 13 states. No?

Yeah.

And in the end, you kind of be like, well, why is it even on your mind? In the end, if you look where it's gone, in the end, they made the right call. In open country, they made the right call. Other things, I think that you might look and try to picture where it's headed and then maybe come back and correct. There was a time, I remember the first time Montana came out with anything about two way communications. It was no two way communications in the field the first year. And people are like, Hummer. If I'm hunting with my 13 year old and my 80 year old dad, I can't give them a radio so that they have a problem. They can get a hold of me and like, oh, yeah, I guess we didn't really mean that. And in the next year, there's a modification, and the next year is a modification, as they try to gage what's going on. But I think that as technologies come in, there's a tendency to want to pump the brakes to ascertain what's going on. Like, look how long some states waited on trail cams.

Yes.

Right. When trail cams came out, no one imagined they would be cellular.

Right?

Or that you'd run 40, or that.

Every waterhole would have 50 different dudes.

That have trail camp transmitting immediate information. And so then you develop a big user group and you develop a big resistance, and it just becomes a much different conversation. So I think that in those cases where you see a sort of. You'll see a thing that doesn't entirely make too much sense. I think that's part of the gamble and struggle of getting it right. Another thing is a thing, I think it's winning out is they used to say, well, you can't have dogs hunting deer, of course. And then people have been like, but I want a recovery dog. The dog doesn't do any good until I've already wounded the thing. And once I've wounded it, why would you do anything to impede me getting it back?

Right.

And they kind of are settling in on a. Yeah, you can't run deer with a dog in most states, but they're coming around to saying, but for recovery, you can track a wounded deer with a dog. And so there's a sort of compromise gets struck.

Right. Or even a dead deer where you can't find it, like heavy timber.

That's where it's put use of some states, you had to have it on a leash. But whatever. But coming around being like, yeah, we meant you can't hunt deer with a dog.

Right.

We didn't mean you shouldn't be able to find a wounded or dead deer with a dog. And then they make a gradual correction.

Well, that's also the first step they do to outlaw mountain lion hunting. Right. No, mountain lion hunting with dogs. And as soon as you do that.

That'S coming from a completely different.

Right.

That's coming from a completely different agenda.

Yes.

That's not trying to help hunters out, that's trying to screw hunters.

Some of them I don't understand. Like, lighted knocks. That to me is the dumbest one. It's like, look, lighted knocks allow you to more clearly see your impact and find the arrow so you're not littering. So instead of like an arrow just alone in the woods, you see that green light in the distance and you could find it.

That one doesn't make a ton of sense to me. I wonder if someone, if in defining the legislation, there's a little bit of a. Well, what else is going to be on an arrow that's electronic? I don't know.

Well, they are doing something like that now where there's talk of, like, bluetooth technology.

They have that?

Yeah. Is it utilized now?

Yeah, I mean, that's been out for years.

So you can find the arrow with an app.

And so what they would say that if somebody's just going to shoot an animal in the ass, just get an arrow stuck in it, so you know where it is, then they'll find it. So is it going to perpetuate shitty, unethical shots?

Like, if I can just get a piece of it, I'm good.

Right. Track it like a know like you put a harpoon in a whale.

Oregon was very late on allowing mechanical heads and lighted knocks. I mean, it was just recently. That's why I was like, fixed blade forever, because at home I couldn't even shoot expandable. So Oregon, Idaho, they were pretty late coming to the game on the electronics because they call a lighted, not electronic. And I still don't think Garmin sites are even legal in Oregon.

There's like ten states, so I think they're illegal at least. But Utah, it's interesting that they did it this year.

Yeah, I know they changed, but it might be to what Steve was alluding to. It's like you try to course correct, or they didn't want to get too far down the road before they tried to come back because that user group was established and we'd been doing it, and now they have know they fight back on that.

Yeah, I just think all it does is allow you to make more ethical shots. That's all. I think that a range finding site mean.

But they could say that, well, rifle hunting is more ethical than bow hunting, so why do we need to bow hunt? You know what I mean?

Right. Well, you could also outlaw traditional bow hunting then, because that's just all guesswork.

A large part of it, Cam already alluded to this. A large part of it is protecting a desire to protect archery seasons. You can kind of hold them out as low harvest, limited efficacy, high opportunity hunts. Right. And a state will run a bow season, and then they'll get, then the general firearm, and everybody gets down to the real serious business of killing. And you can look at the archery harvest, and the archery harvest winds up in comparison being. I don't want to say negligible, but in comparison, it's a blip in the harvest. And so the desire to limit bringing in crossbows, certain technologies would be like, let's keep it simple. Traditional low efficacy, low harvest, and then allow for greater length of seasons and greater opportunity. And if you get to, and I know it seems impossible, but if you can use technology to get it up where your harvest rates really start to spike, you're going to have the same thing you run into in other areas where you start being like, hey, we got to limit the opportunity pool. Yeah, because these guys are too good. If you look at a general raw number, just generally an archery elk hunter has a 10% chance of success.

It fluctuates, but generally, there's a 10% chance of success. If that became 2030, you're going to pay for it somehow, right? You're going to pay for it somehow.

That's what a lot of detractors of archery will say. And I don't want to say, I mentioned earlier that maybe you just eliminate bow hunting. If you want to be more efficient with killing, just make a rifle. I believe archery is just as deadly and just as ethical as rifle hunting. I believe that that's the way to go.

It certainly is for you.

But the success rate is lower to Steve's point. And what the guys back home have said, the detractors of bow hunting is that this could just be old boy talk. The bow hunters are killing all the.

Big bulls because I haven't heard that one.

They're rutting. We can call them in. We're getting prime rut time, right? And you kind of get lulled into this trap, especially with social media, that you're thinking, God, is everybody killing a fucking giant bull? Because that's what you see.

These long range shooters, man.

With a rifle, you mean? Yeah.

Long range rifle guys are taking 700, 800 yard shots. Really good at it like that.

Crazy. I don't even rifle hunt. I mean, I haven't rifle hunted since 89.

You're missing out.

But I took Cat Bradley. I know we talked about it before to get her first buck in Oregon. And so my buddy Kevin had this sig gun she was going to shoot and it's all good. But this other guy, he reminded me of God. Remember Mark Wahlberg in that movie where he was like this recluse, lived up in the mounds?

Not boogie nights?

No, not boogie nights.

No, he didn't have. Oh yeah. Damn it. Go on.

Good movie. So somebody was going to assassinate the president. They tried to get him because he was this ballistic expert. They wanted to get him to tell him where they'd kill him from. Anyway. Yeah, right here, shooter. So anyway, this guy down there where we took Cat reminded me of Mark. No, not Mark. This old guy he went to talk to that knew the history of. Anyway, he had these guns set up in this steel out there at 990 yards. And I can shoot, but I never shoot. I haven't done it in years. And I was just like, I go, how far is that far? One, he's like, 990. And I'm like, what do you got here that'll shoot? And so he had this fucking sweet setup, right? Got up, set up, got there first shot out of this gun. Had the wind gage up there. And I'm like, okay, wind's going here. I'm going to hold on the left side of the steel. Boom. 990 yards. First shot smacked it. And I'm like, I fucking never shoot right. I can hit this steel this big at 990 yards. So to your point about this long range thing, that's changing the game too.

People want to talk about archeries evolving and getting too far ahead of ourselves. God dang these long range rifle guys.

My kids can shoot steel at distances that we didn't know when I was a kid. You didn't know you could shoot.

300 yards was a long way. When I was, the farthest shot you.

Could take was across that Cornfield. 300 yard corn was down.

You were like a great shooter if you could hit anything at 300.

Yeah.

Well, now everybody has shooting sticks and bipods and all sorts of different things that they used to set up to make them more stable. What we had were prone.

Oh, yeah. A bipod wasn't even a thing when I started rifle hunting. It was like you had a sling. You could put your arm in there a little. That might help a little bit.

But you're offhand.

Offhand still.

Yeah.

So, I mean, when we kill blacktail, you don't want to be past 100.

You imagine if they said with rifle hunting, no more prone shots, too easy.

I don't think they would approach it a different way. They wouldn't approach it that way.

Well, they would start with bipods, right? Someone wanted to.

No, it would probably come see. I hesitate to say anything because I don't want to give anyone ideas, but if you were going to try to, like, I can't even think if you were going to try to regulate. Well, I'll put it to you this way. So we have muzzle loader seasons, okay. A lot of states have muzle loader seasons. And just very generally, a state's big game hunt would go archery and then general firearm. And then you go into late season muzzle loader. And states will regulate muzzle loaders down to whether you have what? Powder. Okay, so loose powder pellets. They'll regulate it down to open sights or no open sight. They'll regulate it down to whether you have a projectile that's true to boar or encased in a little casing called a sabbath. What other kind of stuff do they throw at you? Meaning they really like, nitpick your gear.

In some cases they're like rifles now.

Ignitions, they'll regulate ignition systems.

In some cases they break it down to completely primitive muzzle.

That's what I'm saying.

There's nothing like.

So they do have the power. Not the power that's not the right word for it. They do have the ability to come in and really nitpick your gear, right. Right down to weird stuff that you could have people not even know what the hell you're talking about when you say true to bore projectile. But that hasn't come into general firearm. And in fact, I can't really think of anything out there. Besides, you can't use anything that projects light.

Like a laser.

Laser?

Yeah.

You see regulations around projecting light, and I think there's some regulations about the scope. Can't have electronics in it, meaning lighted reticles. I think in some states you can't have lighted reticles. But so far you haven't seen a real nitpicking of long range rifle equipment. I don't even know where you'd start, man. I don't know that they would regulate the magnification, that they would somehow regulate laser range finders.

Imagine they regulate distance just so you.

Can'T shoot over blank distance.

Yeah, I don't know.

It'd be a real puzzle if someone was tasked with figuring out how to rein in. I would pay a lot of attention to that because I guarantee whatever they come up with is shit I use.

Well, in that case, with shooting the 990, it reminded me of running. You do all the calculations on your phone and then you set the scope to whatever this says, right. The scope has not just magnification, but also you're changing the zero of it, but you're doing it based on the distance, based on the load, based on everything else. Wind goes into the phone. The wind was not the greatest because you could check the wind at the gun, but when you're 1000 yards. So that's why you needed that flag out there. But to set the scope to hold right on. That's all done on the phone, on an app or something.

Let's go back to talking about bow hunters killing all the big stuff.

Yeah, I know.

I've heard everything. I haven't heard. That's.

Yeah, I get it. The rut.

But again, social media, it makes it seem like for anybody that people are. Everyone's successful, everyone's killing bulls, and it's just not the case. Success rate is still 10% on bulls with a. Well, not even just bulls. Elk with a bow.

Well, social media has just fucked up our perceptions of everything. People's bodies, of people's faces, filters.

Well, God, it does seem like everybody's getting a big mega bull. Don't.

Well, there's so many people with Instagram accounts, and everybody can't wait to post those photos.

Yeah. When I asked what year that was, I've seen some graphs on hunting.

Oh, that. Sorry.

Yeah, that buck. And I've seen some graphs on hunting, and we all get blamed for a lot of ills that probably we don't deserve in regard to hunting. But I saw this graph talking about the hunters 50 years ago, there's this many hunters, and right around 2015, it was plummeting on the graph I saw, the number of hunters was just going straight down. And then I was trying to, like, is that when you started coming in and we talk about hunting here and then. Now maybe there's a little bit of an up. I know there's an uptick from where it was going, but I was thinking.

I think it's a downtick now. Right now, it's a downtick now after.

The COVID now it's going back down. But if you look at the graph that I saw before you started talking about hunting, who knows where the hell would be? If you follow that line down to where it was going, there'd be no hunters from 2015 to 2024. I don't know where this graph was, but I don't know.

Well, it just makes sense. Think about the amount of millions of people that have been exposed to talking about hunting now. But it's never exposed.

So it's not just, oh, yeah, hunting is in a more healthy spot because we do need hunters to champion our cause. Right. But it's not just that. Oh, that's good. But imagine without that, where we'd be.

I once saw a graph. It was not a graph. It was whatever the hell, a diagram or something. And it showed, in Michigan, average age of fur trappers, people that held a fur harvester license. The average age every year of someone holding a fur harvester license actually went up. One year. No one knew. Same people. And they're just.

I mean, how many new people are getting into trapping that have never trapped some God? It's got to be small.

Not like it is when fur prices shoot up, right? Yeah.

Well, that's different. Right?

Yeah. But one of the things you told me. Small, man. No, super small. And then anytime. Yeah. Fur prices skyrocket, then it brings people in. If fur prices are low. It's just no one.

One of the things you told me once that blew me away was at one point in time, the richest man in the country was a beaver trapper.

Yeah. Well, beaver. John Jacob Aster.

Yeah.

That's crazy. That was the most precious commodity was beavers.

Yeah. I mean, you talked about Colorado, man. It's a crazy time right now because there is that measure out there. I think it's a ballot measure, but they want to label lion hunting as trophy hunting and luck. There's a guy there who's very passionate. He's been doing a lot of good work. His name is Dan Gates with Colorado for responsible wildlife management.

For people listening don't know what we're talking about. We should say mountain.

Mountain lion.

Yeah. Right.

Well, all they say mountain line, bobcat. And then links.

They throw in links, which you can't hunt for anyways.

Yeah.

It's not even to create this idea.

That it's not even legal. But they love putting this trophy hunting moniker out there because it's really easy to hate trophy hunting, which isn't even. I read this article from Colorado sun or something like that, where it's like they want to eliminate people who kill mountain lions and just go cut their head off and just take the.

It's like, who fucking does that?

Nobody does that.

But nobody does that.

People who don't know think, oh, my God, that's despicable.

Let's serve them some mountain.

Yeah. What the aim here is that the attempt to create a legal term, the attempt to create trophy hunting as a legal term, when you have a ballot measure, both sides argue about the language. Like when voters going, what are they going to read? Obviously, you could write any ballot. If you could just write the ballot initiative how you wanted to, you'd win every time. But people got to debate the wording.

That's what they did with the wolf thing. Did you read the wolf thing?

I never actually read it.

I couldn't even tell what was for wolves and what wasn't. I don't even know which one I'm against.

It was like forcing. Does the state need to implement a reintroduction or discovery effort or something like that. And the debate comes around to, can you say trophy hunting in a ballot measure? Because if you can set the precedent, if you can use that, what a great tool. Because people are going to say, oh, I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that kind of hunting.

Right.

Which would have widespread implications, because as demonstrated here with this deer here, there's a lot of parts of it that I don't throw away and I keep sitting around.

Yeah.

So is this a trophy or is it an emblem or what the hell is it?

Right.

But if I kept it, does that mean that I'm now captured under your right, right.

Yeah. What is trophy?

Yeah.

Yeah. And then the bringing in the wolves thing is pretty wild because there's no precedent. They really don't understand, like, oh, there's.

Precedent, obviously, with Montana, Idaho's Frank Church, Yellowstone.

But long term, I mean, we've only from since the 1990s. Yeah. There's a reason why they eradicated wolves. I don't agree with it. But when you have ranchers and you have all these people that their living is based entirely on the stock that they have, and whether or not they make money enough to keep their farm running or not is depending upon how many animals they bring to market. And then you have wolves, and then you just bring in wolves.

Yeah, well, if I got the tinfoil hat on. They want to eliminate hunting. I mean, they want to eliminate hunting and ranching. So they don't care about ranchers losing their animals. They would love people just to be 100% consumers, relying on the government so they can control them. They say, here's your food. Here's what you're getting. You're getting it from us. You're not out there hunting it for yourself. They hate hunters. If I was thinking, know, the governor of Colorado, which is Polis, his husband is anti hunting.

Yeah. He's an animal rights activist.

That's where all this is coming, so. But if you look at the bigger picture, hunters, they cannot stand. Hunters are usually capable, confident, they have a skill set. You can't control people like that. GOvernmeNt wants people they can control ThAt'll be afraid when they're supposed to be afraid. Wear this mask when we tell you get this shot. When we tell you you get your food from the store. Here it is.

And hunting, there's certainly an element of that.

Hunters are the opposite of that.

Yeah, I think there's certainly an element of that. But I think it really all boils down to people that love animals.

Yeah, I definitely detect that there's a complete disinterest in what hunters think about it, and they think that for someone to come in and argue by doing this wildlife measure, you're impacting. You would like this animal on the landscape for viewing pleasure. I like certain animals on the landscape for hunting, consumption, eating, whatever. And there's a conflict here where by doing this, you're going to lower, by increasing your likelihood of habitating viewer pleasure, you're having a potentially really negative impact on my use of natural resources. I think that they would look at YoU as Though that you're ridiculous or evil or don't have a point in saying that. You want to limit predation on a resource you rely on, and they don't accept that as a reality. I haven't encountered a lot of really forceful wolf advocates that are serious hunters. There's a trend there. The thing that bothered me about the, bothered me most about the CoLOrado reintroduction is that while the ballot measure was going forward, wolves showed up on their own. I would have imagined even if I was on, and I'm not anti wolf, but when they showed up on their own, I don't even know if it's legally possible, I would have halted that whole thing because the social friction is so much less if they walk in on their own.

Yeah.

Diane Boyd, who is the MOnTAna wolf Specialist for many years, she even came to believe in hindsight, that the Idaho Montana reintroductions ultimately were unnecessary and that you would have gradually achieved the same thing with wolves walking in on their own and had a very different societal perception of what was going on. People would look at it as a natural dispersal, a natural occurrence, and not a government action. Right.

Yeah. But I think they wanted that pomp and circumstance, like, polis was there, I think when they released the wolf with.

A big stupid smile on his face.

Yeah.

Everybody else, all the biologists all had this, like, what are we doing? And he was like, yay.

Yeah. They wanted. Right? They wanted that. And if they knew the truth of how nature balances itself, it doesn't really balance over. Predators kill way too many prey animals because there is no tag limits. They're not like, for example, they talk about trophy hunting lions, mountain lions. To hunt in Colorado, you have to take, it's very regulated. You take this test, so you learn how to identify a Tom and a female. You learn how to age a little bit based on the coloring. You learned what size attract. So you have to go through this before you hunt.

And the whole quota system.

Yeah.

So the quota where I was in the unit I was hunting was 34 lions. Every night after five, you call in to see where we're at. When I got there, it was at 31. I was there for six days. It was 34 was the limit. It was up to 33. So one more lion could get killed and then it's done. So it's not like what happens if.

You kill at the same. You're in the woods, no signal, and someone else kills, too, until it hits 36.

It could. That's why you check.

There's a window after five. Usually click in like a 24 hours clock or maybe they might have been immediate.

I don't know, you have 48 hours to turn it in there. But anyway, point is, you're not over harvesting. The estimate goes up to as high as 7000 mountain lions in Colorado, probably maybe 5000. But in the whole state, hunters are allowed to kill 450. And they've been doing this, and it's not like they're out there killing mountain lions, cutting their heads off, no regard for the numbers, wiping them out. It's so regulated, you don't have to call and report your deer and elk, but lions are like a whole nother level as far as control.

And think about that quota system. If you have a horrific snowstorm that pushes all kinds of deer and elk out of high country, and like, everybody and his brother, like a perfectly timed snowstorm and everybody, his brother is just piling up deer and elk, they don't go, uhoh, shut it down.

Yeah.

They sit back and they'll go like, wow.

Yeah, mother load.

What a harvest.

Yeah.

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

It's under 10%.

This is the thing that we should talk about when it comes to these reintroduction of predators, which, listen, I fucking love wolves. I mean, if you look out here, I have all these photos of wolves. It's long distance photos of wolves. I'm happy that they exist. I think they're fucking amazing.

I got probably my favorite on my wall in my living room.

They're probably my favorite animal. I just think they're the fucking coolest animal of all time. I really do. I just look in their eyes, photos of them. If I come across photos on my instagram, I'm always like, holy shit, look at that thing. They're majestic, but their numbers have to be managed. And as uncomfortable as that sounds for people, wildlife biologists, they have an understanding of the carrying capacity and the resources of the land. They understand how many hunters there are, they understand how many. That's how tags are allocated.

It's not a guessing game.

Yeah. It's the way people need to understand this. It's like they've done this for a long time. These people have painstakingly researched these numbers. They know exactly what they're doing. But when it comes to this game of reintroduction of animals, the first step is they say there's a carrying capacity for the amount of wolves. This is the number. When it gets to that, we will agree to open up a season on wolf hunting. But every time that happens. There's lawsuits and there's lawsuits to try to stop that hunt. And then the wolves get larger and larger, and then you have larger and larger populations. I was looking at a graph the other day where they showed reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, the amount of elk that existed, and now the amount of wolves versus the amount of elk. And it's pretty shocking. It's a giant drop. And they're so good at hunting. They're fucking amazing. But hunting wolves is insanely difficult. It's really hard to do. They're really fucking smart. They're really aware their senses are light years beyond what we could even physically imagine an animal to be capable of doing in our minds.

We know that deer could. I remember I was watching an episode of your show where bear winded you guys like fucking 500 yards or something. It's incredible. Their noses are fucking amazing. Their senses are amazing. I don't think we really. It's almost like looking at the size of the universe, like, you know, it's 13 point whatever billion light years across. You don't fucking. That's just going in your head. The kind of power that the senses of a wolf have, I don't think we could even really fathom it. So our thought is people are just going to go in there and wipe out the wolves like they did before. That's just ignorance. The way they wiped out.

At this point, you can go and say that that's not the reality. Because after the delisting in the northern Rockies, after the delisting, that didn't happen.

Right? Did they ever reach their quotas?

Yeah, they reach quotas every night. Not every night. Many nights. I'll check. And you all get notifications like the orna. I got a notification. Whatever the hell, 313. Whatever it was, unit had hit its quota. Region five had hit its quota. I'm talking about in Montana. Whatever region hit its quota at this point, we've hit at. There is a stable population of wolves across a big chunk of range that are managed as a renewable natural resources that were managed as a big game species. There is no problem. It still gets litigated all the time. But the whole idea that they're going to be pushed back onto the ESA on the endangered species list, the state doesn't want that. That'd be the worst thing that could happen to the state.

Right?

They're not going to shoot them into oblivion, right? It's like we have wolves on the landscape and you could have the extremes of people that want to live in a world where there aren't any. That's not realistic. Like, you lost that fight. You have extremes where people want to live in a world where there's as many as possible and there's no regulation on them, which isn't extreme because we could live in that landscape, but right now we're living in a landscape where there are wolves on the ground, there's a healthy population, there's hunting for them, there's an equilibrium emerging, and it's very livable. But in Colorado, it's like you got hunters that are. If hunters saw that there was a pathway to finding the extent of it, they would probably feel a lot better. But right now, they're like, we're going to lose 50% of elk, we're going to lose 75% of elk. This is going to get litigated. It could be 100 years from now, we could have 90 years of full recovery. Objective. There's still no regulated harvest on wolves, and they're apprehensive.

And it's also for high population areas, which is the ones that vote the most. I mean, that's where the people are that are voting. These are generally urban areas that don't have any understanding of what they're even voting on.

Yeah, they're hoping to see one.

Like, exactly what's going on in BC when they made it illegal to hunt grizzly bears. And the people that live up in BC, like my friend Mike, who lives in northern BC, is like, jesus Christ. First of all, this is a way that a lot of people make a living, is by having these Bear hunts. This is a part of their lifestyle. They're guides. They guide people to hunt grizzlies, and it's important to maintain their population, because if you don't, nothing is. And these people in these urban areas, they think of it as trophy hunting. But at least people know that you eat bear. Nobody's eating wolves. So that is like one of the most difficult to defend. When you say, I'm going to go wolf hunting, like, what a piece of shit you are, you're going to hunt wolves? The fuck is wrong with you?

You mentioned, steve, that it's kind of at a stable level with the wolves. Now. You call and check in and wolves are introduced, they're still being hunted. So that works in Montana and Idaho, I think.

Wyoming. Idaho. Montana.

Right. So I sent this to you. I was just looking this up.

And Alaska, of course, right.

In Idaho, Lolo region. In 90, 512 wolves were introduced. In 2005, 512 wolves were present. In 2011, 800 wolves are present. So the elk from 95, there are 16,000 elk in this region. In 2016, there was 1000 elk. So it went from 16,000 to 1000. So that's what wolves can do, and they can hunt them in Idaho, in Colorado, when there is no wolf hunting, and now these wolves are back, and there won't be, not under this, their governor now. And that's what I say. It's like once these prey animals get down, then they can say, well, we don't need hunters. There's nothing to hunt.

Well, that's the objective in California.

That is a regulated objective in California. It's a state objective.

And I've heard they want to turn Colorado into almost like a viewing state. Like, you know how they do the safaris over in Africa where there's no hunting? You're just out taking pictures. That's what they want Colorado to be. So they want low numbers of elk and deer, so there is no hunting. So then they can say, well, we don't really need hunters. And by the way, do you guys need guns now? I don't know if you need guns, because you said you needed them for hunting. So that's a big portion of some people say, yeah, we want our everyday carry for protection. A lot of people say, we want to hunt. With no hunting, you don't need guns. So there's this big diabolical plan. You could say, is this what's happening? But all I know is that where there's wolves, there's way less elk.

It's openly stated on this wolf conservation website that that's their ultimate goal. Their ultimate goal is to remove firearms because you won't need them if you don't need them for hunting.

You wind up with this attitude about it that a lot of people that are just really stuttering here, because.

I'm.

Not an anti wolf person, right? I'm like pro hitting a recovery objective and then having a managed resource. But you'll find that a lot of wolf advocates will really try to, in one breath tell you that they don't actually do that. They don't actually cause the decline of elk numbers, like when elk numbers collapsed with the coming of the wolf in the northern Rockies. There's other factors that could have explained that, right? They don't actually do that, but at the same time, they'll say, oh, but they would be a great tool for controlling wildlife diseases which populate among overpopulated ungulates. So you wind up getting this cross talk on one hand, oh, it's not that catastrophic for big game herds, but it really lowers big game herds and helps the disease transmission, and it's part of that. That kind of stuff really frustrates people. Yeah, you're getting all this. They, like, shit, rainbows.

Right.

And it pisses people off.

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

But you could say, I take the thing of. I harvested an animal and took the thing of highest relevance and value to me on a deer. I didn't keep the hide. I didn't retain the hide, but I kept the meat. On a wolf, I didn't keep the meat, but I retained the hide. I took the thing of highest value to me.

Wasn't there, like, some trappers, you were telling me that, like, wolf meat was their favorite meat.

Oh, there's an arctic explorer, Villemer Steffenson, and he had a book, my life with the Eskimo, and he made first contact with a lot of eskimo Inuit hunters in the canadian high arctic. And he always claimed that was his favorite game meat.

Well, why, if they eat mountain lion and mountain lion? You told me it's delicious.

Yeah.

Why don't they eat wolves?

It's weird, man. I've never gotten a wolf.

You ate a coyote once.

Yeah, I've never gotten a wolf and I've never eaten a wolf, but I know people that have eaten it, but it's not a lion. Hunters eating mountain lions is very common. I believe there's some people that eat some wolf meat, because I've heard of it and seen it. I don't think it's widely practiced.

Have you ever heard it? Do you ever talk to someone who's eaten wolf?

Yeah, I do know a couple of guys that have eaten wolf. My friend Buck Bowden's eaten wolf.

That's the guy that makes the bowls?

Yep. He had eaten. Think. Didn't randy Newberg eat a wolf? He might have, yeah, I think he ate a wolf.

What did Buck Bowden say taste like?

There's a story about Buck Bowden where someone's talking to him and he's cleaning a skull.

Okay.

When he was trapping wolverines, he's cleaning a wolverine skull with a knife at a counter and someone's talking to him, and as he's talking to him, he's eating the hunks of meat that he scrapes off the skull with this knife. But I don't remember what he told me about the. I remember him telling me the one thing he can't get that he's tried every which way is brown bears eating salmon. I remember him telling me that was the one food that he had a hard time with.

Well, you were telling that story about how you borrowed your friend's smoker.

Yeah. Coastal blackberries.

Yeah. And you were like, man, you got to clean your smoker. Smells like fish. He's like, I've never cooked fish on that smoker.

Yeah, I didn't use that for that. And I was like, oh, that's my bear. My bear ham did that, too.

How did the bear taste?

Oh, I don't mind it. You know, it's funny, you know, dirt, right? Dirt on a really liking that. He liked that bear that tastes like smoked salmon, because he's like, well, I like smoked salmon.

Right?

And I like meat, and this is the full. But I'll just eat. Know, I don't just. If I have it, I'll eat it.

Well, if you do it. Right. Like, one of the things that we learned when we were hunting with Jesse last year, like diver ducks, which people normally say they taste like shit because they eat the stuff on the bottom of the lakes.

Now, when he cooks, Jesse Griffiths can.

Cook some diver duck. That makes it, like, literally one of my favorite foods I've ever eaten in my life.

You can figure anything out. You can figure anything out. Just depends how much work you want.

To put into, you know, obviously it doesn't hurt being an amazing. You know, he's got it down to a fucking science. Those diver ducks are sensational. But if you talk to the average duck hunter, they're like, if I got.

A wolf, I would definitely want to have a couple of chews off it. But I could tell you that you'd never separate me from the hide off that thing, but I would go into it, be like, I'm going to try it just because I want to see what it's all about. But it wouldn't be my primary objective in getting one.

Some of those animals just need to be killed, that's all. They're like coyotes, wolves. They just need to be killed. And whether you eat them or not, I don't know. Their numbers need to be managed.

The wildest thing about coyotes is it doesn't work. Has the opposite effect.

Well.

Depending on how good you are.

At it, done in a very surgical fashion at the right time, the right place, with the right level of intensity, they have found that is effective.

We got to bring in a fucking special ops unit.

No, man. If you have imperiled populations of pronghorn or imperiled populations of mule deer and you go in during calving season in the right areas at the right time, you can move the needle on recruitment. Does you now and then, if you have a ranch and you now and then see a coyote and get it, are you doing, like, effective predator control? Probably not. That does not mean that you cannot done in a timely fashion. Like I said, surgically a timely fashion with the right approach at the right time, you can absolutely move the needle on wildlife recruitment. You see it in Alaska. They see in Arizona, all over the place.

But the issue is statewide or locally. That might be the case, but they will then spread will now they're in every state. They're in every city in the country because of that, because people have hunted them.

So I put this to someone the other day. You know how you don't do media? You don't like doing interviews.

Yeah.

I now and then get suckered into doing an interview, and I did an interview about a contentious issue. It was about states banning. I knew the mint. The journalist called me, and he's talking about banning wildlife killing contests. And I said, can we please say hunting contests at least? Do we have to say wildlife killing? I'm like, you know, my buddy Doug has a dough derby where they're in an area where they're trying to lower deer numbers for issues of disease transmission, habitat improvement. And he has a little derby where you win some prizes because the state is explicitly trying to encourage dough harvest. Is he having a wildlife killing contest or is he having a derby as a management tool? Right. Anyways, I do this interview and shouldn't have done it because the quote they pulled for me was not the right quote. Now I'm so mad about that guy. Came here, what point I was driving.

At, you were going to say that they tried to lump it in as a killing contest. Oh, the outlaw the contest of killing animals, basically.

But I had some broader ass point. I can't remember now what it was. Apologies got so riled up about talking to that guy.

Yeah. I do want to revisit one thing, because I said, for me, anytime I see coyote, if I got a license and it's legal, I kill it. I killed one this year. My personal thing is I kill so many prey animals a year, whatever that number is. I'm going to try to kill a number of predators also. I feel like that's doing my part to whatever.

To balance it.

To balance it. But I did want to say one thing about the mountain lion hunting. As I say that I will kill just a coyote just because I think to kill. I didn't kill a lion in Colorado, because one of the biggest benefits to using dogs is identifying if that's the animal you want to kill. What happens now, like in Oregon, where they outlawed running lions with dogs, is if you kill one, it's just one you saw, and you don't know what it is. You don't know how old it is, you don't know male, female, because you don't have time.

Right.

But that's the only way you can hunt them. So now they have. The season is open all year. It never closes. In Oregon, there is no dogs. So lion numbers are going way up, deer numbers going way down. That's kind of what happens where dogs are allowed, or baiting for bear is allowed, or even hunting black bear with dogs is allowed. You're killing the animal that should be killed, the older male generally, and you're identifying it, you're taking out the right one. Without those measures in place, those hunting a dog is a tool. Without those measures in place, it's not nearly as controlled. And it's not like people are just going out there just going to kill any lion up the tree, just like I didn't kill one because I didn't see an old male lion.

Houndsmen are the one that originally pushed for lion regulations. Yeah, they were pushing for lion regulations when no one was paying any attention to lion conservation. Okay, I finally remember my point.

Okay.

Am I allowed to go back? Yeah. We were having this conversation where people say that coyote hunting actually increases coyote numbers. And I see what you're talking about, because it disrupts pack dynamics and can lead to animals shooting off in new directions and starting packs and also leads.

To them having more offspring.

But I said, well, if you're super pro coyote, why would you not encourage that?

It's true.

And I was just throwing out there as a rhetorical question.

Well, it is a rhetorical question, but it actually does have know Dan Flores'book Coyote America, which is an amazing book. Fucking incredible book. When you realize how wild those things are and when they get killed, when they do their roll call and there's a coyote missing, the female coyotes will produce more. Just. That's the reason why they're everywhere.

Yeah. I'm friends with Dan. I studied under Dan. I have massive respect for Dan. I have Dan on the show. There's certain little tidbits of this debate that Dan and I don't see eye to eye on, and this is one of them.

Yeah, but the effect.

Love him.

The effect is hard to argue. They literally have gone from a hundred years ago where they were primarily in the southwest and in the west, to everywhere in New York City. They have coyotes in fucking Central park.

Yeah. You got to realize, too, wildlife dynamics can play out very slowly. So in some ways, it's possible they're still responding from the elimination of the wolf.

Right.

Some of this stuff takes so long. Just look at. Why does this very gradually. Why do raccoons and possums keep going north and west? It's just so weirdly gradual. Havalinas. Right. Move over time. So you see these things that happen so slowly that you can't picture them playing out. But with the coyote, it seemed like there was a gradual movement and then just an explosion. I remember them coming into our area. Like, I was a red fox trapper and we didn't have coyotes. I remember the first coyote I ever saw, and now it's like, for the most part, red fox are gone and coyotes are there. And that was part of the. Not just a gradual increase. That was like the explosion in the 90s where they just, like. I don't know, they suddenly figured something out. Something clicked. I don't know what it was, man.

I was in this conversation with some guy in the Hollywood hills. People up there terrified of losing their dogs. They lose their dogs all the time. Dogs and cats get killed by coyotes constantly. And he was telling me about this, and it's like, fucking hate them. They're everywhere I go. Yeah, I get it. But you love rats because if it wasn't for coyotes, rats would be everywhere. They'd be everywhere. They also keep the population of things down that you don't want. I mean, they're an essential part of the ecosystem. There's a reason why, like, where I used to live in California, it's not infested with rats because it's got a lot of coyotes. They're fucking everywhere. And, yeah, don't leave your dog out. Yeah, don't let a kitten roam around your backyard and you're not looking because they'll get it. They killed all my chickens, but they're a very important part of that system.

Again, I don't dislike them.

Yeah, I love them.

I like them. Every year I flesh and stretch a few and send them to the tannery. Someday I'm going to have a big, giant bed spread out of coyotes.

How many do you have now?

What's that?

How many do you have? How many?

I got saved up now. I mean, I used to sell them, now I got saved up maybe ten of them.

How many do you need for a bed spread?

I haven't done the math yet. Me and my buddy sent in and we had 50 beavers and we did two blankets, two big blankets out of 50 beavers. Oh, wow. Beautiful.

Fur thing is a fascinating one, too, because there's people that are really anti fur, but yet they're wearing leather.

And they probably don't like the oil.

Industry that they drive.

They drive a car. Well, that was my favorite. I talked about that on stage last night. The fucking stop. Oil. People that block the highway with their fucking paint on their sign that's made with oil, wearing shoes that are made with oil, wearing clothes.

Unless they're dressed in fur.

It's made out of on antidepressants that were made from oil. They use oil for everything.

I know that.

Oh, yeah, man. That's something that happened in the early 19 hundreds. They figured out how to use petroleum based things to make medicine. Yeah, oil.

They got their fingers into everything, don't they?

Everything.

Not fur.

Not fur. Yeah, everything. But it's like, the weird thing is people don't like animal skins that have fur on it.

That's crazy part.

Like, if you have fur boots, people are like, oh, you piece of shit. But if you have leather boots, like, oh, guys got boots on.

Yeah, it's almost over noticed, but it always drives me crazy. Why has it become bad? Why is it so much better to take the fur off?

It's weird. It's weird. The skin itself is leather, and that's fun. But if you leave the fur on. Oh, you fucking creep. It's weird.

Yeah. That's one argument that people like to lump kind of an aside, but lump hunters into trophy hunters or meat hunters, which I think we would all agree, you can be both. I take every ounce of the meat from the animals I kill. Every ounce. It's like it's more valuable than gold to me. And I take all the antlers, the hide. I got claws. That's all part of that memory of that hunt, and I'm honoring that memory and that harvest, essentially, but I'm also sharing that meat. We eat the meat every night or every day, and it's like we're both we're not. Just because I meet people and they say, well, you're not a trophy hunter, are you? I'm like, yeah, I am.

I'm all kinds of hunters.

Yeah. Well, here's what's interesting. It's like we're so separated from the idea of animals and just the wilderness itself being a resource in order to sustain you. But during COVID there was a bunch of people that reached out to me and wanted to start hunting because they had this thought. Because when my friend Duncan went to the supermarket and he sent me a picture, he's like, dude, there's no food. He sent me a photo of the meat shelf, and there was literally, like, a package of ground beef left. There was nothing left because the supply chain got interrupted, and people started thinking, oh, my God, we could get to a part where I don't have any food. That's a real reality.

Yeah. People felt vulnerable.

They felt vulnerable. So two things started happening to me during that. People started reaching out, asking me about hunting. And then when the George Floyd riots.

Kicked in, people wanted to borrow guns.

People asked to borrow guns. How many guns do you have? Can I have one of your guns?

Yeah.

I was like, that's not legal. Because in Texas, I could just give you one, which is wild. Like, in Texas, you don't even have to fill out paperwork. Like, if you were a Texas resident and I was a Texas resident, I'm like, you like that gun? You can have it.

Oh, yeah. I shouldn't say most places, but that's the norm.

That's the norm. But in California, I was like, I can't do that. It's absolutely illegal. I could go to jail for giving you a. Like, you have to go through the whole process. And then the lines outside the gun.

Stores were wild, because what you can't do is you can't go down to the FFL. You can't go down to a dealer gun store and buy it and say it's for you and then give it to someone, but it's actually your budy buying it.

Right.

That you definitely can't do.

Right? You can't do that.

But in terms of, you legitimately went and bought it for yourself, and then you decided that you did not want it. You can gift that to a friend. What they're trying to prevent is your budy saying, hey, go down and buy it for me. I'm a felon and can't.

Right, that makes sense.

That's your ass. So they don't though. Odly. They don't really? Prosecute people for lying on FFL statements. Interesting. It's a real issue.

Well, yeah, that could be definitely an issue if someone's a felon. I mean, but then there's also the.

They'll reject the purchase and not go after the person.

But when they have those gun fucking conventions, when you can go. And just. What do they call those things when they.

Gun shows.

Gun shows where people just. That's a weird one, right?

Yeah.

They kind of can skirt around some regulations. That was part of things that people didn't. Like.

When you hear in the gun control debate, people about trying to close the gun hole loopholes, they're trying to put it that they should be subject to FFL transfers. But, like, when my dad died and I got my dad's guns, we didn't do an FFL transfer.

Right.

How does any kid get their first deer, right? Or your grandpa? They're like, here you go, son.

Right?

That's just how it works.

Wrapped up under the tree, man.

Yeah. There's a lot of regulations that make sense, and there's a lot of them that don't. And most of the ones that come out of California don't. I mean, the limiting magazines, that's a fucking insane one. Like, down to ten rounds or certain guns you can't even buy, they're trying.

To do in Oregon, five rounds.

Oh, my God.

That's a lot. Washington already did that. Right.

Maybe so. Maybe that's what I'm.

That is so crazy.

Yeah.

So what do you do if you have a glock 16?

You don't?

Yeah, I'm not sure.

That's fucking insane. Yeah.

I can't remember. I shouldn't speak to that, but I know that. I don't know about. On long guns. There's a restriction, a magazine restriction. What's interesting is for hunting waterfowl, federally regulated migratory waterfowl, there's always been a magazine restriction in the field, three rounds. And then as they're trying to lower snow geese numbers to protect arctic habitats, they've gone in and undone. They've made an exception to allow unlimited capacity magazines to hunt snow geese. So it's one of those weird areas where you see a real reversal of, like, a time honored tradition, which is three rounds in your gun to make it that people can kill more snow geese.

That's an animal that I want to hunt with you one day. The ribeye in the sky.

Oh, the cranes. Yeah.

Sandhill cranes. I've heard those are insanely delicious.

Great.

It's crazy when you see a bird that has, like, a dark red meat? It's like, what is this? This isn't a chicken. What the hell kind of bird is this?

A friend of mine, he's right where he said it's. Watching one of those come down out of the sky is like watching a folding lawn chair hit the ground.

It's just a wild bird to know. I asked this question to Waddell the other day. What do you guys think would end hunting? If anything does, do you think it would be anti hunters politics or fellow hunters causing division and infighting and whatever public referendums?

Politics.

Politics, yeah.

Urban centers. Urban centers where people vote and they don't have an understanding of what they're voting on.

You don't got to wonder about it. It's happening.

Yeah.

It's not theoretical.

Well, why would you say hunters, though? Hunters? In what way?

Well, they stop hunting because I see fellow hunters. There's so much infighting, whereas you look at the anti hunters. They're so aligned.

They're not, like, parsing out to this and that.

This guy is the number one anti hunter in the United States. No, he's not. He's a piece of shit hunters love.

Like, tearing each other.

He ain't a real anti hunter.

Yeah, no.

He'S a fucking private land anti hunter.

He's ruining it for all of us. Anti hunters.

He's a wolf in sheep's clothing.

It doesn't happen. They are so aligned.

Right?

They have the lobbyists working for them. Meanwhile, hunters, fuck. We can't get out of our own way on half the shit.

Yeah, but I have a long history of being a public person, and I understand it from a different dynamic, because there's just a thing that happens with men where they become jealous of other men and hateful of other people's success, and then they look at other people for whatever reason, as anytime they do something, it takes away from them. Or they look at someone getting attention, and somehow another, it takes away from them, and they focus entirely on that person's success or who that person is, and they try to find flaws with them. It's a natural thing with jealous, weak minded men.

Right. So we have that in hunting.

Yeah, you got to have that in everything, though. We have that in comedy. It's a real issue with stand up comedy. We have that in fighting.

Nobody's trying to ban Comedy, but they are.

You're wrong. Yeah. There's shitty comics that try to tell people what they can and what joke. Yes, they all suck. There's one thing they have in common. They're all not funny. 100% of them. Every single one. There's not a single one that's exceptional. There's not a single one that is anti comedy about controversial subjects that people are excited to go to see them, that are real comedy fans, that are really good comics. There's not a single anti controversial joke comic that other comics seek out to go see.

What's interesting is half your guests are your competitors.

Yeah.

Half your guests are comics.

Yeah. But I don't think of comics ever as competitors for sure. They're my tribe. I try the best I can to get them more famous. I want them to be huge.

My daughter had a book that described, she had a book about jealousy, and it described jealousy as a hot, prickly feeling.

I've heard it as a vessel that poisons the thing that carries it or a substance that poisons the vessel that carries it. That's the best way to look at it. It doesn't do you any good, but it can do the opposite. It can do the opposite. If you have a good mindset, if you have a good mindset and you see someone and you're envious, that can be fuel for your success. As long as you manage it in your mind. Like almost everything else that's complicated, you have to manage it in your mind as, like, this can fuel me and be a fantastic resource. When I see someone's success, I get inspired to work harder. I get inspired to do more. So I am happy that that person is success.

So if you saw a comic coming up and they were kind of in your wheelhouse and nipping on your heels, you'd be like, I'm going to have that some bitch on the show 100%.

Every time. I do it all the time, I'm going to shine a spotlight on 100%. That's why I used to take Joey Diaz on the road with me, because I couldn't follow him. I was like, he's so funny. He was the funniest guy alive. And people are like, you take Joey Diaz on the road with you, you're out of your fucking mind. And I'm like, yeah, but if I.

Can ride that, set yourself up to be that one guy that wasn't as funny as the other guy.

Oh, I would hear it all the time. People would say, your opening acts funnier than you. I'm like, yeah, he's the best.

You have a unique mindset. That's all I worry about, or not all I worry about. But with hunters, we have a hard time giving other people credit, being supportive of each other, some of us. And so with this disjointedness, that's what.

I get worried about. But you know how that changes these conversations.

Yeah.

This gets out there in the zeitgeist. People hear it. They recognize their own failings, their own shortcomings, and their own thought processes, and then they realize, this is not admirable. Some people never will.

We can't afford mean, we can't afford know. So I'm thankful for outfits like Dan Gates is in Colorado. And then there's another one I wanted to mention called Howell, and I think, is it John Stallone?

Man, I know we had Dan Gates join us at a live show, and we got him scheduled to come on the podcast. As voting starts heating up, as voting starts, the. We start nearing the date for the initiative in Colorado. I'm familiar with Howell. I was introduced to Howell by my colleague Yanis, who's a supporter. And we've done some things to support them. But, man, that name, I probably met him, but just right now, I'm spacing it if I am so apologies to him.

I believe it's John Stallone. But anyway, they are helping keep us organized, make it easy to send letters to legislators.

Yeah, they're leading the fight on the hunting bands, right? Especially in that arena right there.

That's a positive. That's a big one. They're still, like, in the grand scheme of things, small. Like, if you look at numbers of followers or things like that, but they're making an impact. And so I want to support them and help where we can. It's just you're unique. When you look at a comic, hot comic coming up, and you want to celebrate them. I wish hunting could be more like that.

It can be. These weak people have to understand that we know what they are. We see right through them. And you're not admirable. Not only are you not admirable, you're not respected by your peers. Everybody knows you're a bitch. Nobody likes a bitch. And when you're a man and you can't recognize another man's success or you see a man and you measure yourself up to him, and you fall short, and so you start shitting on that person. Everybody knows what you're doing. Every man knows what you're doing, especially every exceptional man. They know 100% what you're doing. So you have to live with that. And that's how. It's a poison that ruins the vessel that carries it. It's not good for anybody. And it's just a thing that people do. People have always been jealous of other human beings throughout time. But you got to understand for your own personal benefit, that feeling can be changed inside of you to fuel, and it will make you a better person. It'll make you better at what you do. It'll make you understand that competition is critical and vital in order for you to reach your full potential.

You don't reach your full potential if you're the king and everybody else is a pussy, because then you're like, well, I'm the king. Everybody else is just a bitch. I don't have to be any better. But if you're a king around other kings, you realize, wow, these guys are all fucking getting up earlier than me, working harder than me, thinking smarter than me, being more effective, recognizing their shortcomings, fixing them, talking about it with other people that do the same, and growing from each other in the mothership, the comedy club that I own. When we get together in the green room during the shows, we're always breaking down bits. We're talking, we don't hold secrets. We don't have trade secrets. I don't want to tell anybody how I write. I tell everybody how I write. I tell everybody how I correct things. I'm like, this is a thing that I've noticed that helps me. Here's a thing that I've added. I started listening to my recordings and doing this afterwards when I get home. If you just do that 1 hour every night, just think over time how much. And then my other friends have said, I started doing that, dude, you're right.

I just sat down for 10 minutes. I had a new bid. I wouldn't have come up with that bid if I didn't do that. Yeah, now we all learn from each other, but if you see this one guy that's out there that's putting in all this extra work and succeeding, and you just start shitting on him, everybody knows what you're doing. You know what you're doing, motherfucker. You know in your heart of hearts, you know you're being a bitch, right? And you could live with that if you like, but I can't. I'm allergic to that feeling in me. I hate that feeling. I've experienced it. I know what it is. It'll still bubble up every now and then if someone's killing it. I'm like, wow, that guy's doing so good. Well, fuck him. That fuck him. Part of you is always there, but you got to go, oh, you little bitch. I know what you are. You're a little bitch. But if you can do that, this.

Is in the mirror.

Generally never gets the mirror. It's like, I try to squat that fucker. As soon as it comes up like a weed, I pull it out right away. But if you don't do that, it's not good. It's not good for you. You never change people's opinions. If someone is doing exceptional work and doing an exceptional job of being very unusually successful, and then you start picking on all the little flaws in that person, and people are going to look at you, they're going to go, but you're kind of fat and lazy, and you fuck up all the time, and you're always drunk, and you got this problem, that problem. And how come you're not looking at your own self with the same scrutiny that you look at this extremely successful person? It's because you're jealous. That's all it is. It's a natural human instinct. But that feeling can be repurposed. That thought can benefit you. That feeling of comparing yourself and coming up short. What you're supposed to do is going, what do I need to do? So I don't have this feeling anymore. Well, I need to work harder. I need to work smarter. I need to do some things that I'm not doing that maybe make me uncomfortable.

And that's what I need to do.

To get, you know, to your point, last night I saw two of the funniest people I've ever seen. Shane and Tony, both putting notes in their phone from comments that were made in the green room.

Yeah.

Oh, really?

Oh, we always do that. Yeah.

So they're like, just like, oh, that's okay. I'm going to put this down so I don't forget it. Trying to grow. That's exactly what you're talking about. They're almost at the top of the game, still trying to get better based on feedback from other comics.

We always do that. We workshop constantly. We're always in that green room. And I was trying to explain that to one of the managers. I was like, the reason why we have to, when comics get together, like, we're at the comics bar and we're all just talking shit. If someone is sensitive and they get in that and they start complaining about jokes that are being told, hey, you've got to leave now because this is literally how we spar. This is what we do. If you're complaining that someone is making fun of this person or picking on that person, creating an unsafe work environment. Okay, well, you can't be here. If you go to the gym and you're trying to be a boxer and you're like, everybody's trying to hit me. That's what they do. This is how you get better. You hit each other. You don't like being hit. You can't be here. You can't fucking be here. And this is, like, just the reality of what we do. And the only people that really, truly know that are the practitioners, the ones who are doing this very difficult thing. Look, with stand up comedy, there's a lot of hunters.

There's 1000 of us on earth that are worth a fuck. It might be less. I'm being generous. It's probably 500. It might be 250 that I want to see on planet Earth. 250 comics that I would go out of my way to see. That's not a lot. Like, we got to fucking stick together. There's so few of us. For you to be shitting on this guy because he's selling out arenas. Why do you think people like him? What is it? What's he doing? Well, he's doing something. Fucking figure it out. Get better.

I'm curious. Does comedy have the same in hunting? It was a big deal when the girls started coming in, right? So a lot of guys would say, oh, she's just getting this because she's got her tits out or whatever.

Right? Which is true.

But I could see comedy being the same because there are women comics. Did you guys look at women and be like, she shouldn't be up there. She's only up there gets a stage time because she's hot.

Well, comedy is a meritocracy. The thing about comedy is if you're not funny, we find out real quick, nobody laughs at you just because your tits are out. Well, the thing about hunting, though, there's gals that become very popular online that are just hot wearing camo.

But how I looked at it is, if I can't be more, whatever, stand out more than this girl just because she's hot, I must not be that fucking good.

I think of it in terms of effectiveness. Like, if a girl is really hot and she's got big tits and camel, but she's also a beast and she's out there really killing a lot of things.

Okay. That's not very many.

Right. So what are you worried about?

I'm not.

I know you're not.

A lot of guys are.

But what do you worry about? They're not effective. Like, if there's a girl that's hot. And she gets on stage and she's bombing all the time. No one's like, yeah, she's only up there because she's hot. You don't care if she's bombing. If someone bombs all the time, you're like, get away from me. You don't want to be around them. It's contagious. Someone's good. Like Whitney Cummings. Whitney Cummings is hot, but she's also really fucking funny. And so when Whitney's just a real comic, when we're around Whitney, no one thinks, oh, here's that hot chick. That's like, it's just like, oh, it's Whitney. What's up? It's like, she's one of us, but she also is hot. It's hard to be that person. It's very fucking rare, but it's doable. But she had to go through all these ladders to get there because it is preconceived notions. When you see a woman go on stage, you like immediately. A lot of men I've been guilty of know, what are the ods? She's funny. She's too hot. You almost immediately can't have it all. Well, it's not that you think, how did she ever, like Richard Christopher Hitchens, rather, wrote a long piece for Vanity Fair once called women aren't funny.

I remember that.

It was brilliant. He was so fucking smart.

Who wrote that?

Christopher Hitchens. Okay. Because he could attack things from a level of intellectual introspection. Like, he has looked at this in a way, like, analyzed his own thoughts on funny, how he feels, how other people feel. He broke it down so clearly that female comics really couldn't even say anything about it because what he was saying was true. He was like, the ones that are funny are kind of dykey. They're kind of like.

He's like, no, I'll go back to attacking religion. Another safe subject.

But it's that thing. It's like, why are men funny? Men are funny for a lot of reasons. To impress women. That's how they learn to do it, to impress their friends. It's a part of the natural banter that men have when they get together. Women don't necessarily have that same banter. Some do, but most don't. And women don't have to be funny to attract men. They just have to look good so they think they're funny because guys are laughing at anything because they want to sleep with them. They're like, oh, you're so funny.

I remember when we were young, someone pointing out that for a girl to say a guy was nice is not good.

All right?

They're like, dude, she said you're nice. They're like, if she says that he's funny, that's a real good sign.

Yeah, it's true. It's true.

Because you don't want the nice thing.

There's less funny women, but the women that are funny, I respect the shit out of them because it's so hard to do. Especially. First of all, your subject matter is limited because nobody wants to see a woman talking about politics on stage. Very few men want to see a woman with very strong political opinions on things. Shut the fuck up. They get mad. And then if you talk about sex, you talk about sex too much. Oh, she's a slut.

There's all these thoughts that's always struck me as the unfair thing is how much guys get uncomfortable by that.

Oh, totally unfair.

Yeah, totally unfair. Guys get real.

Like, oh, but it does create a situation for a woman comic that if a woman comic can navigate, that they become undeniable. If you can navigate all those preconceived ideas that people have about you before you go on stage, but yet you still succeed at making them laugh. That's black belt shit. That's high level comedy. That's what Whitney can do. I've seen people look at her when she gets on stage, and they're like, whatever, she's hot. And then she starts killing, and they're like, God damn it, she's fucking funny. And then after a while, you just give in. You're like, wow, she's fucking great. And then you're laughing. You're just enjoying yourself, but it's much more complex. Whereas a fat guy gets on stage and he's already funny. He's funny looking, big, fat, stupid looking guy, and he starts talking about himself being fat. And then you got a lot of people eat a lot of leeway. Yeah.

I want to return for a minute. You're talking about after comics being in the green room workshopping if in Colorado, they lose this ballot initiative about hunting bobcats and hunting mountain lions around this definition of trophy hunting, and America's hunters get together in the green room and workshop what went wrong. I think they're going to determine that what went wrong is not identifying with and fighting for people who are engaged in activity, a specific segment of the activity that you're not engaged with.

Right.

And needing to come into the awareness that as this plays out, this will get around to impacting you.

Yes, but you have to have that.

Ability to do that, this is going to get around. The next thing that comes up is going to be something that is going to strike at you near and dear. It's going to be, bow hunting is cruel, unnecessarily cruel.

Right? Yeah. There are people that have that perspective, that are fonters.

And then you're going to be like. You're going to freak out.

When they start coming.

This is going too far. And you'll be the one that, you'll be ignored when other traditional use practices were getting eliminated because it didn't affect you, and then now here it is on your doorstep.

There's also a thing about hunters where they're competitive in a different way than, like, say, in comparison to stand up comics. Because stand up comics, you have that audience to yourself. It's not like they killed the audience. The audience doesn't exist anymore. Like, I had a great audience. Did you kill them all, you fucking piece of shit?

Used them up.

Yeah, but if you go to the mountains and you kill a 400 inch bull, that's a 400 inch bull that's gone now. I can't kill that bull now. He fucking kills all the big bulls. No bulls left. Audiences are always there. And the more comics that are really funny, the more it makes comedy grow and you get more audiences. You're not assassinating them, but you could.

Be competing with them. On any given night, though, you're both in Toledo on Monday, sort of.

But when it's your opportunity, it's your opportunity, and it's just your own shortcomings that are allowing you to fail in comparison to them. It's not them doing something. It's not like they're yelling at you from the side of the stage, trying to fuck up your routine. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, but it's like, when you have your time, that's your time.

I think with a bull, there's more bulls, though. It's not like they're just hard, but.

There'S not a lot of 400 inch bulls. No. And if you're a public land hunter and there's a specific unit, and it's allocated 150 tags for this specific unit, and everybody's in there hiking out, and one guy shoots this big ass bull, that's a big ass bull that you're not going to be able to kill. And so there's a different level of competition because even though it's a renewable resource, it's a limited resource, and there's also exceptional aspects of that resource, like an enormous animal, a very unusual, rare outlier of an animal that if someone kills it now, you can't. So there's that competition, and then there's also the fucking dick measuring thing where guys are taking grip and grins. One of the things that's really disturbing to me is the numbers thing. I was talking to a friend of mine who was a guide, and he was furious because this guy, who is this well known hunter, shot a mule deer. And it was a beautiful mule deer, but it was only 189 inches.

He wanted a 190.

He wanted a 200 inch. And he didn't think of it as like. He's like, it's just a buck. And this guy was like, I would cut off my left nut to shoot that fucking buck. And this guy is this rich, famous hunter who goes in and he's complaining about it. He's not even appreciating this thing.

It's buck. Just a buck. That's a giant buck.

It's a giant old seven, eight year old deer.

Giant.

Yeah. But it's funny. I'll get something. I have a lot of stuff that I've never measured, never will. I got a really nice moose this year. I shouldn't say pretty much no one measures moose. You tell about how wide there and you leave it at that. But I will have stuff where now and then someone's, like, around me that likes to do that. And I'd be like, dude, measure that thing. I'm just curious about it.

Right?

It's a point of reference.

Yeah.

I don't hate the number system. I get curious about, like, I'm curious about all aspects of all aspects of hunting and wildlife. And the boone and Crockett system is of interest to me. I don't live and die by it at times. I'm not curious what that is, but if someone shot a real stomper, I.

Might be like, what is that?

What did it tape?

That's what I do, too. I don't necessarily care about what if I kill something just because I just was there.

Mature animal.

I'm not thinking about, is this 400? Is this anything? And I said this the other day in talking to Wadell. It's like, people talk about that you get great opportunities to hunt. I mean, that's just all there is to it. But I said, joe. I've never heard Joe talk about a score of something, or he didn't want to kill it because I said, he doesn't care. There's been one antlerd elk that he's like, he would kill it. Right?

I tried to.

Yeah. And you're fine with it.

Pulled me off. I don't care. I'm going to eat that.

Right?

And he's a big bull. I think it's kind of cool when they have broken antlers, right? It doesn't bother me at all.

People will take shots at you because you killed a giant bull and this and that, and they've been hunting their whole lives. It's like you don't give a fuck. You just want to hunt. You're hunting and you don't care what it scores. You're not after, like, the biggest bull on the mountain. You just love hunting. And that's the truth. People can turn it into whatever they want. They're wrong.

I'm like Daniel Boone, man. I go to the best hunting place I can.

Yeah, yeah, you should.

I don't know many people wouldn't. I don't know many people that. If they said, like, hey, man, we're going to go on family vacation, and we found this sweet spot, but then we got to thinking we should actually go to family vacation in a shitty spot.

Yeah, well, it's also, it's the same thing that we were talking about with jealousy. If those people had the resources that I have and if you didn't do what I do, you're a moron. You don't go to the places where there's elks screaming all over the place and it's awesome.

I'm always looking for good opportunities. I mean, I'll take the shitty ones too, because I'm looking to get out all the time. So I'll take the shitty ones, I'll take the good ones. But I'm going to generally, like, if I'm at a fork in the trail and one side is like good and one side is bad, I'm going up.

The good 1100% of the time. Yeah, it's just a resource thing. Do you have the ability to do that? If you don't, you might criticize people to do.

Oh, ever since I was a little kid, I did the best thing. I went to the best spot I.

Could get, my best fishing hole, always, whatever it looked.

Yeah, you're right. It's a resource thing. Because when I started where I killed that spike bull that I talked about earlier, that was warehouse or timber company land. Anybody could go there. Everybody could go there. Freaking hard hunting. To kill a bull with a bow so hard up there, that was as tough as it got, right? So then I'm like, well, God, we could go to the wilderness. It's more open. It's on the east side of the state where I was hunting. The west side of the state, the bulls are more vocal. It's the high country that's better hunting. God, but that cost. We got to drive all the way, 8 hours across the state. We need gas money, we need food. When we're there, we're not just going home every night. But it was better hunting. So, yeah, Roy sold a gun, we got some money, we drove over there, better hunting. Then it was like, shit. Oregon sucks hunting wise compared to other states. It's like, I wonder if I could hunt Wyoming. Put in for a general tag in Wyoming. Drew it, killed a six by six bull. Next time I drew it, killed a seven by six.

I'm like, God, this is so much better than Oregon. But it's $100 for this premium milk tag that I was putting in for. Got to work a little harder. Got to come up with some more resource. You said it's a resource that you're allocating. Worked a little harder. That was better hunting. It's just that process I started with the shittiest hunting. You can get in the shittiest state to hunt. Maybe Washington's about as.

No, my state was way shittier than your.

Exactly so. But you keep working.

Don't you give me shitty state.

Michigan.

Is that where I had it? Quite good. Honest joke.

But that's how people think.

No, it's true. You're right. But anyway, the point is, you keep working. You keep moving up the ladder to get to better hunting.

Yeah. Now it crosses the line. And I do understand when people are killing high fence animals in small properties and they're making it look like this is a wild animal, there comes a line. And that line gets crossed all the fucking time. Right here in Texas. Yeah, I know a guy who has a 200 acre high fence property, and.

I'm like, that's rough.

Go there.

That's rough.

I can't go there. If you have a 15, 20,000 acre high fence property. I'm like, okay, what are the odds those animals? Unless it's a mule deer, it's a migratory animal. What are the ods those animals would ever get out of that 15,000 acres in their normal natural life. As long as you're not feeding them, if you're not like, I'm standing over a feeder waiting for them to show up at 05:00 p.m. As long as it's not that, it's just hunting. And when people start talking about private land versus public. I understand the appeal, and I understand that public land should be available to everybody. And I agree. And I think it's an amazing thing that we have here in America where we have these resources where any person can go to a place where you can get a general tag and go to public land and hunt. I think it's amazing. But you're also dealing with animals that are acting in a very unnatural way because they're highly pressured. So if you have a lot of hunters and a lot of pressured animals, you're dealing with an animal that's not acting like a wild animal.

You're dealing with something that's being constantly harassed, and that, to me, is unnatural.

Well, then you get into, like a history debate because you're on landscapes that have been hunted. But I would agree that high pressure absolutely changes everything about how they conduct their business.

You're also competing with other guys. Like I've talked to guys that have had situations where they know that they are downwind or their upwind. Rather, their wind is going to come down on an animal, but they see someone stalking that animal and they try to get to it first and they know they're going to bust it. They know it and they don't give a fuck.

They would rather bust it than have the other guy kill it.

They'd rather take a chance. And there's so many morons that are doing it. I think the best case scenario is human beings interacting with absolutely wild animals in a way where these animals aren't acting as natural as they would be, as if human beings didn't exist. That's best case scenario. And if you can get to the most remote places, that's where you can get that in the most wild places.

I will say your example about you didn't want somebody else to kill it, so you're going to go down. I've probably done that before when I was hunting. It's like every man for himself.

Yeah, I've raised people. I've also backed out of race. Yeah, it just felt too weird. And I'm like, I'm not going to do this.

Because I remember here's how much I wanted to protect in that same logging country. I would go out and the road would end. Maybe I didn't want to drive out to the logging unit because that's going to spook all the deer, especially in the headlights, before it's light and you're out there waiting. So I'd park like half mile back and walk out there, but I didn't want anybody else driving out there. So I'd park in the middle of the road sideways, leave my truck there. It's like, I'm not saying you can't come out there, but you're not driving. People lost their shit. I would hear gunshots going off of my truck. Then I'm like, are they shooting my truck or are they going to shoot me? So I did a lot of this crazy stuff. I mean, I'm very competitive. I did want to also clarify one point, because you said animals on 15,000 acres wouldn't be reacting. They wouldn't know they were in a fence type thing. Because I've seen people say crazy shit about our hunting, but the bulls you kill are not in offense. I've never been in offense. Always been fair chase.

I've even said, oh, these bulls run beta blockers. Some crazy bullshit.

Beta blockers. Beta blockers on bulls to limit their drug.

I don't even know what the hell it do.

I guess athletes can't use them and they're not scared. Yeah, it kills your adrenaline.

People say crazy shit. I don't want them turning in that. You are validating a big, high fenced area.

No, I've never done that.

No, don't do that. The bulls you're hunting are wild, fair chase. There's predators around. There's lions, there's bears. This is wild elk. I just want to make that clear because people, they say crazy shit.

Maybe even 15,000 acres is not a good example. So let's say, like, the four six ranch that my friend Taylor Sheridan owns, it's 270,000 acres. Wow. Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

He hasn't fenced that?

No.

That would be a lot of money in a.

But even if he did, that's like, fuck, yeah. That's where they live. You just put a fence to keep other people from going in. Really? Not. You're not stopped. That's like natural habitat.

Yeah. I mean, the whole country's fenced in by oceans.

You could look at it that way.

But I've never done it and I've never done it. And I've had occasion to debate people about it, but maybe I used to be a little friskier about arguing about all the finer points, but it's just I haven't done it. I don't really think about it.

It's not the same thing when I talk to guys who hunt out here, and most of them are pretty honest about it, the way they do it. Like, they'll hunt over feeders. These are not people that hunt a lot. They don't practice a lot, but when they get a chance, it's essentially like a kind of harvesting animals. It's almost like a type of farming, because if you're hunting over a feeder and they'll put you in a tree stand and say, all right, the feeder goes off at 05:00 you're like, what?

Yeah. It's a collision of husbandry and animal husbandry, of hunting and animal husbandry, where you're using the sort of harvest tactics of hunting, but you're employing a lot of the principles of animal husbandry.

Yeah, it's not the same thing. It's not going into the mountains like we do. We're hunting in Utah or you're going to Colorado. You're going in the mountains. Yeah, well, they're wild animals.

They're unfenced, and to that point, it's not guaranteed. When we were there this last season, it's great property. Nobody could argue that. It's incredible elk hunting. But there was hunters the week we were there who didn't kill. The week after we were there, seven guys did not kill.

Well, the week we were there, only three. Did only three guys.

People make it sound like it's just shooting fish in a barrel and guaranteed 100%.

It's like, how many hunters were there the week we were there?

I'm not sure.

There had to be 30.

I don't know.

It's a big piece of property, and it's fucking hard, man. And you got to be in shape.

You got to be in miles. Miles, 10 miles a day.

10 miles a day through the mountains. The end of the day, you're fucking exhausted. You're eating everything you can get in your face. You're so tired, and then you're getting up in the morning, and you're doing it again. And the idea that somehow or another, that's cheating, you could think that if you like, but if you do it and you go there, you won't think that. If you go there, you're like, oh, this is just an amazing opportunity. In a beautiful landscape where wild animals live, know there's still lions. Mean, the one that we saw, that was the first time I ever saw a full grown, big ass cat in the wild.

Like, wow, I got to watch one miss a deer down in Mexico this year. It was really cool. Oh, wow. Watched him come in. It was a dough. She was traveling. I watched him come in ahead of her, and he kept looking down and trying to guess her trajectory and got and laid down and then missed.

Her.

Did he go after her and missed.

Her when it was like a ball of fur, dude. And she comes squirt. Well, I'm kind of simplifying it. Where there was a forky I didn't know about, and she got up right next to this forky and then the lion blew out and kind of first tried to roll that forky and then sort of sprang out of that and tried to get the dough. But it was like he was flock shooting.

He didn't have a target.

If you asked him, he probably had a target. But man, they ran like hell. But it was cool to see. Dude, that was the second lion I saw that night. Yeah, that was a rarity. Yeah.

When I was in Colorado this year, in the week that I was there, I killed a bull buck and a bear. In that week, I saw four lions. Wow, so many lions in that country.

That's a lifetime supply for seeing them without dogs.

It was insane. But yeah, I was going to say that story reminds me of, you said, the flock shooting. I remember this old guy who come back from to hunting camp when I first started, I was like, you see anything? He's like, yeah. So I got on a good herd. I said, did you get a shot? He's like, yeah, what happened? He's like, well, I shot over some and I shot under some. I could just envision that there's the herd and try to get an arrow in one of them.

But yeah, you imagine being a Native American with a fucking handmade bow chasing after those things.

I bet shit didn't spook 200 yards away back.

Yeah, that's true.

I'm trying to think, man. The first three or so deer I got, I got on when I was a kid, I killed the first deer when I was 13. The first three or so deer I got, I got all on private property. And then I went into the White river, kind of the. We used to call it the White river swamp, but down on national forest land and killed a fawn 1 October with my bow. And you didn't hear, people didn't celebrate public land hunting then. It was like you were slumming it. You were there because no farmer was going to let. You didn't know any farmers. If you went out on public land in Michigan and you went to anybody that was on public land and said, hey, do you want to hunt the farm over there? No one is like, out of principle, by God, I'm staying. Just. They would go to the farm. But when I did get that fawn deer, which I killed, over a bait pile in the White river swamp. It felt good, man. You know what I mean? I was aware of having did this thing that I would have.

Yeah.

They haven't did this thing that I would have regarded as almost, like, semi impossible.

Right.

To pull that off.

I have a deep respect for people that can shoot mature animals on public.

Sure, man.

That is very hard to do. And I get that you would have a higher sense of pride. I totally get it.

I've gotten, like, four big mule deer. Nice mule deer. I've never killed a mule deer on private property, and I got four good mule deer on public property. And I can't deny that that sort of means a thing to me. Yeah. Not that I wouldn't, like if someone. Tomorrow, if I drew some tag in some area and some guy's like, oh, hunt my ranch. I'd go hunt their ranch all day long. But it sort of happens that that's true. And I don't look at it and think differently of it the same way. All kinds of factors plan to know. But every year, I've gotten some big cooz deer, and all the coozer I've killed on big, private ranches in Mexico, except for Arizona, but gotten nice deer on big, private ranches in Mexico. And love the experience. I'm into all that stuff, man.

Yeah. I get why people would think a certain way, because it's very similar in a lot of ways to bow hunting versus rifle hunting.

Yeah, a little bit more.

Someone that kills a big bull with a rifle, you're like, yeah, that's a big bull, man. That's awesome. But if you see someone that kills a big bull with a bow, you're like, whoa, that's a bigger deal. And it feels way different. As someone who shot bulls with rifles and shot bull with a bow and arrow, you cannot compare the way it makes me feel when I make a perfect 52 yard shot and I watch that arrow go into the crease behind the shoulder, and you watch that bull buck up, and you know you got them. You're like, whoa. It's like, there's nothing like it. There's nothing like it. There's nothing. I was hunting with Evan Hafer from black rifle coffee this past October. We were both elk hunting at this ranch, and I shot this bull, and it was like, on the fifth day of a six day hunt, it was a lot of huffing. There's a lot of fucking missed opportunities. A lot of getting of shit went down. But when I finally snuck in, and it was a long ass stalk. It took me an hour and a half to cover about 40 or 50 yards because the elk was bedded and I was barefoot.

I was just in my socks, and I was just slowly creeping, slowly creeping. And every time he'd move his head, I'd stop. And I was slowly creeping. When I finally released that arrow and it hit that bull and I heard that whack. And the bull literally ran 30, 40 yards and piled up the woo that I let out. You could have heard it a fucking mile away. They heard it on the other side of the canyon. They were watching with binoculars and they heard, whoa. Because it's so different. If I shot it with a rifle, I'd still be pumped. It's a beautiful bowl. It's meat. I'm psyched. I got all this food now. This is incredible. This is what I wanted. This is what I was working for. But it's harder. It's harder to do on public land. It's harder to do with a bow.

There's all these little factors, any accomplishment, there's all these little factors that wind.

Up.

Accentuating, elevating experience or some other thing. And then you get into where I'm at now in life, where for, like, the most elevated experience is to have to witness my kids do something. Take my kids hunting.

Yeah, well, Cam always talks about that. His favorite experiences are when he takes people for their first time. Like, you were telling me about the time you took that woman.

Yeah, cat.

She shot that deer. And you guys are eating it. Like, is this getting any better than this?

No.

You introduce something to this thing that you love, you have deep passion for. They get to experience. You see them get lit up. I mean, you've done that so many times.

I'm sure I wanted to take Steve on that hunt. I think I mentioned that.

Yeah, we did text about. Just so I missed out.

You missed out. You're done.

That's it.

But no, I just. Especially that one because that's Oregon blacktail, which I grew up hunting in western Oregon. So I really love know the small little logging community, the badass loggers there that are tough as hell. Just that little western Oregon Vibe. I love sharing that. But then she also killed a big four x four buck with the eye guards. Just this old, big old buck. And then we, of course, packed it out as a steep logging unit. Then we cooked it up the next morning. Definitely the highlight. I killed quite a few animals this year. None better than that.

That was the highlight.

I didn't kill it. Yeah, but it was just that experience. Yeah, there's nothing. And my kids, I took Truett the same. He killed a buck down there, too, this year. So, yeah, you get to where. And I said I was very competitive, very tunnel vision. It was all about, you know, with age, that changes, and then you're want to. I want to share this with a.

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

I got to be here in case he plays Fred Bear.

Yeah, well, when you whackmaster, when I first saw your original show, the wild within, right? That was what it was called. When I first saw that show, I was like, oh, I want to talk to that guy. And that was before meat eater even started. And then when you invited me to come hunting with you, I was like, oh, finally. Now I can figure this out. But if it wasn't for that, having someone like you to show me how to do it and to take me out and have you be my guide, like, fuck, what are the odds?

I'll see people making young hunters or people just starting to hunt now? I'll see them make this horrible decisions. We're like, oh, I think I'm going up there in the morning, and on one hand, I'll feel, like, bad. I'll be like, oh, my God, it's a horrible idea. On the other hand, I'm like, dude, yes. That's all the stuff that I had to do when I was figuring anything out. Hats off to you, dude. Yeah, you're going to get up and go like, you don't know it, but you're getting up early. You're going to go try something. I recognize it as the dumbest thing you could possibly do, but that's how you do it, man. That's how you learn. So that barrier to enchi, some people have the mental fortitude where they're just going to take it on, and then some people are going to sit and be like, I don't have it in me to really figure this hard ass thing out.

Well, until you've experienced success, it's very difficult to justify the work, and it seems insurmountable. And for a lot of people that don't have someone like you or someone like you taking them out, it's almost insurmountable because there's so many things you have to learn. It's not intuitive. It's something that you have to figure out through trial and error, or you have to read a lot or watch a lot of videos and absorb all that information.

Yeah, mostly you have to learn it yourself because reading helps, watching helps, talking helps, just as you said. That's how they learn. They get out there, they do it themselves, and then they're like, well, that didn't work. Now what? And that's how you learn. That's what's hard about hunting with that barrier to entry, is that experience accumulates slow for most people. When I was hunting back home, I would get a week for elk. So a week? A year, and that's it. So I had to go out, take photos, try to be out there amongst them, learn body language, learn what they like to do, and that takes years. So when somebody comes in late, they can't shortcut that experience part. We were lucky to grow up doing it, and now we're in a position where we can share it, but it's tough if you didn't grow up doing it.

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

Edition, not the new school, but that's in.

Has. Jamie will pull it up, but he has a program where he'll take you. He'll teach you how to shoot, he'll teach you how to hunt. It'll teach you how to butcher, teach you how to cook, the whole thing. He'll take you through the whole process. That's so valuable. There's something that you can do, and especially with a renewable resource, like pigs.

New school of traditional unemeritors, like a somewhat contradictory new school of traditional cooking.

But that's so valuable, where someone can take you through the whole process, and there's not a lot of that available, unfortunately. And even if it was available, it would be very difficult to screen applicants to make sure that it's even worth taking your time, because if you got a guy and he's 50, 60 pounds overweight and got a bad knee and you want to take him on a mule deer hunt in the mountains, we can't really do this. You're going to have to lose weight. You're going to have to get in shape. You're going to have to figure out a way to be able to get.

To where animals get into something different.

This is not an easy task.

I think the true, and I don't think everyone needs to get there. There's an area of expertise or a level of expertise that I think is admirable. And you learn how to hunt some particular spot, and that's great, right? You learn how to hunt some particular spot, and that's your hunting spot, and you get it really figured out. And that's a wonderful journey, and that's really good. I think that getting to the point where you get that place and thing that you're comfortable at and then you go and be like, okay, I'm going to take whatever it is I learned there and try to apply it to something totally different and figure that different thing out. Right. And get where you're good at these spots and these things, but you become good at deciphering, figuring out, and being able to move into totally new things and carry that accumulative knowledge into these new spots. That becomes pretty fun. I regard that as being not better, but a high level of expertise.

Well, there's also variables that maybe some people that are successful in other disciplines don't recognize as they enter into this new world that there's different parameters. Like, for instance, if you got someone who's a successful whitetail hunter that hunts out of a tree stand, they're a really good archer, but they're used to shooting a 65 pound bow with like a 350 grain arrow. And they're used to shooting these animals that are fairly small. And then you take them on an elk hunt and you're like, hey, that setup with this three blade, mechanical, with a 60 pound bow, and you're shooting a fucking enormous animal with huge bones. You might not even get through the ribs with that thing. You might center a rib and that's a wrap. You have to recognize you're dealing with a totally different thing. And you can't just be weak. You have to be physically strong. You have to be capable of making it to. You're not going to sit in a tree stand. Like, you've got to change everything about the way you approach it. Yeah, you got very successful with this one aspect of this thing, but you've got a whole new thing now.

You have to apply it to. And if you don't, you're going to wound animals, you're going to have problems or you're going to just not be successful at all.

I remember the first time I went out with a guy deep dropping for swordfish. So I watched the guy catch a couple of swordfish in 1300ft of water and I realized I knew nothing about fishing.

That's so specific.

Oh my God, man. Like all the shit you think you know that you go out there and you're like, you're not going to catch a fish out here.

You can't do that nowadays with know Steve, I sent you that thing the other day where the guy, he had a screen on his phone and there was some sort of a camera attached to his line.

Oh, that guy. Yeah, that was crazy wild.

So this guy cast out and he's looking at a screen with like a lid over it to shield the sun on his rod. As he's reeling, he's seeing the fish coming towards his bait.

Yeah. Not like ice fishing with a camera, but he's like, he has a camera. He's casting and has a camera watching fish interact with his bait while he does a retrieve. That was cool.

Never seen that before. I was like, this is great. But the things that I sent you, the ice fishing guys, that's nuts, man. They got fucking cameras down there and like a fully heated shack where they're watching television.

I'll tell you, my kid don't want to ice fish without the camera.

Well, it's an added element. You see the fish like this is so cool. You can watch them sneak up to it.

It reminds me there's something new in hunting now, which I don't like, but it's that. The heat seeking binoculars. I think it's heat seeking.

Oh, thermals, thermals, thermals.

And to me, you can't use it.

For big game hunting.

No, there's some states where it's not regulated. It's not regulated. They don't even mention it.

No. Yeah. You can't get outside illegal shooting hours.

No, but to find them.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Are there states where you're allowed to find game with thermal?

I think it's just not disallowed.

Yeah, I got it.

It's not addressed.

Well, there's an issue now where they're banning drones that use thermal for recovery.

Because the argument is your scout.

Of course you could be if you're a piece of shit.

But what guys could conceivably do, like in Oregon, as I'm talking about in western Oregon, glassing those big huge logging units and finding deer is an art. I mean, it is hard to pick those things up. But if you could just know and find the thermal register of it.

Sure.

Oh, it's right there. And that's, like, a big part of killing a buck. I don't like that. That needs to be regulated.

Yanis was just hunting in Latvia, and in Latvia, they get out in a clear cut mill of the day, whatever. They're going to get out in a clear cut and put a thermal up and be like, nope. Hop back in the car and roll out.

Yeah, I don't.

And he's like, I can't believe you guys know. I can't believe you guys do. Like, I can't believe you don't do.

Yeah, right.

It works, stupid. Yeah, well, I was in Scotland. There's stag where we were at. I was like, this is amazing. And they had a hunting ranch out there, and they said, do you want to hunt? And I said, do you guys use rifles? And he goes, yeah. I go, can you use a bow? Can I bring a bow? And they go, no, we don't allow it in the country. And I was like, what? Can you watch me shoot first?

Got to talk to the governor, set.

Up a target at 80 yards, and show you I know what I'm doing. Let me do this. You can't.

Yeah, I think. Was it South Africa? There was, like, quite a lobbying effort to allow archery equipment.

Really? Wow.

Yeah. There's some countries over there that didn't have can't. I think Ted Nuget was involved in something about having to show how lethal it was before they would allow.

Yeah. It was a lethality concern, and I.

Don'T know what it was for. I don't know if it's for elephant or something like that.

But isn't that always the case when people just don't know and you think of a bow and arrow, you're like, well, that's not as if you use a gun, stupid. It's so much more effective. When I have that conversation with people that are non hunters, and they're like, why do you use a bow and arrow? I go, you're more connected. It's quiet. There's so many things about it that are just more difficult to do. It requires more discipline and concentration. It's more rewarding when you do it. Isn't a rifle better, though? Oh, yeah. Are you trying to get meat?

Yes.

Do you support spear hunting? I have zero problem. Zero problem with spear hunting. I don't think it's going to be a thing that impacts game numbers.

Impossible. I 100% support it with pigs. But I think when I say supported.

I mean, I feel that if you had a regulation, I feel that if someone wanted to say, we'd like to open it up, that people could hunt with a spear, I would probably. Generally, I just. Because I don't think that this is going to be a thing that reduces opportunity.

Well, you remember the thing that happened in Canada with Josh Beaumar? They banned spearhunting because this one controversial moment where it was totally legal. Everything he did was totally legal.

Just the thing no one realized because there's things that are legal and they're legal because they're not illegal. Right.

That's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to hunt with a spear, but I get it. But I always feel like it's a gimmick. Like, when I see someone hide in a tree and they spear a pig.

They'Re showing that it can be done. Yeah, it's kind of a gimmick. I haven't done it. I can't picture getting into it by any stretch, but I think it hits, like, traditional, for sure. And then I don't think it's going to throw off population levels and lead to decreased opportunity.

No.

I don't think anybody's going to be like, the spear guys got them all, right?

They got all the big bulls because they can hide in trees.

Yeah. I mean, even if they wouldn't have made it illegal, who the hell was going to spearhunt a bear besides Josh up there, right?

You need a real psycho.

It caused such a stir that they had to address it, but, yeah, it wasn't going to have an impact on the population.

Well, it caused a stir because it was discussed publicly, and then it was a social media thing. And it gets into this weird area where some people have a really hard time with people exploiting hunting on social media because they say that you're kind of, like, bastardizing this beautiful thing and you're making it just like showing things on Instagram. Just like all the other things that you show off on Instagram. Your private jet or your big house or your fucking yachts and shit. You're cheapening this beautiful moment.

When I was a kid, you had to go down to the local sporting goods store and staple your picture up to the brag board, man of the community brag board. And you had to go down there to see what all was happening.

Well, it's essentially just a limited version of what Instagram is, but it's a global brag board. Yeah, but that's the thing, too. You're not getting people that come into that local sporting goods store that don't understand that.

I think that is a big deal because I think in, a big deal in that we need to think about how we're presenting, know where, whatever. If you're down at the local sporting, that's only hunters pretty much seeing that. Just like when you'd write an article, like when I wrote for Eastman's journal or whatever, that was just hunters. Or if you're an outdoor channel, it's just nobody. Nobody besides hunters is watching that now. Everybody's on social media. So I think we just need to be very cognizant of what we're putting up there.

Well, you do a fantastic job of that, and you have a very specific protocol you follow where you'll show photos of the hunt, then you'll show the meat, you'll show harvesting the meat, cleaning the meat, and then eventually you'll show a photo of the animal that you killed.

Sometimes I don't even do that. Sometimes I just show the whatever, just because the grip and grins for some people, and I have a lot of people that follow that don't hunt, they have a hard time with those pictures. And I'm just like, I get it, whatever. You haven't grown up around this. I have to me, and people like me, this is part of it. But I understand.

I've never had anybody get mad at me for cooking an elk steak.

Exactly. And it's just not going to. So it's just like, do we need to put the grip and grin up? I mean, is it necessary? I don't care if people do it. I just want them to think about what they're saying when they put it up, how they do it. To me, I lead up to it. I show the country, the animals, the journey. Like on this lion hunt, I actually also showed a lion killed beef. Calf didn't eat any of it because they killed it in the creek. The lion wasn't big enough to drag it out of the creek, so really left it and went and killed an elk.

That's interesting.

Followed the tracks for 3 miles and I would see the lion go and was sitting behind a tree. All the deer tracks were there. So the lion was hunting and I shared all that. That's all part of the journey. That's all the cool stuff, people. So I say share things like that. And also you can share your kill shot. It's great. But also share what else stood out from the hunt.

There's also a problem with hunting tv shows in that you're condensing something that might be seven days of ten hour days.

22 minutes.

Yeah.

You want to pick the interesting 22 minutes.

Yeah.

It's like you randomly pull out segments out of your 100 hours of footage.

Right.

Yeah. I think that's been a big benefit to tell more of the journey now that Steve's on YouTube. His videos on YouTube have tons of views, so he's able to explain why the hunt's important. What stood out to you? It's more intellectual approach to it. Whereas you didn't really have time on an outdoor channel show, you didn't have time to get into that.

Some of my favorite shows of yours on meteor, you're unsuccessful. And I love that you have those. I remember that one where you're getting real introspective about your father. That's like one of my favorite episodes you ever did. And it was just you. Unsuccessful hunting. And it's like, yeah, that's also a part of it. This is not easy, and it's often unsuccessful and.

Always bummed to not get something too. Like, I'm trying. But back in the early days, we were making 16 shows. So if you went and spent a week busting your ass and you didn't get something, the option wasn't there to ditch it. Like we were going to make something out of it. And in the end, that was great. Glad we did it. But I've never gone in the woods hoping to be unsuccessful.

Right.

It definitely happens, but I always wished it was otherwise. Of course.

Yeah, but it's just editing it down to 22 minutes. It gives people that are on the outside a completely different perspective. They think it's so easy. Well, I mean, how many times have you heard that if you were a real man, you'd go hunt it with a knife or something like that? Something stupid. You're, oh, what a coward. You're shooting it from a distance with a rifle.

And in that 22 minutes, too. There's also sponsor obligations when it's on tv, so it's not even 22 minutes of hunting. You have to have this. Tips and tactics brought to you by Osler.

Whatever.

So it's like you get down to the hunt. You can't really say why the hunt is important to you, almost. It's like it doesn't give you time to develop that story. So it's a big benefit to us with social media now. We don't need approval by an editor. We don't need the channel to approve how long this thing is. We put it on YouTube, and then we can tell the story of the hunt in a more honest and relatable fashion, hopefully, and explain why it's difficult and people understand it.

What kind of restrictions does YouTube put on hunting videos now? Because I know you can push it.

A little far and get dinged.

What is it pushing far? The kill shot?

No, it winds up being. No, like, blood and skinning shots. Any kind of graphic. The first ding you hit is you hit a demonetization thing, right? And then you can hit other levels of dings and there's like a little scorecard. But oddly, we had something like, just like examples of doing a knee cropsy on something just too graphic. Organs, things like that. Disassembly. That'll get you dinged. You can get demonetization. I believe there's levels of demonetization. You can get around certain firearms issues, but the primary thing is just like gore, right? But even put in terms of a knee cropsy. So I'm sure at some level, I'm sure it begins as an AI thing, right? Scouring all this footage and find something that's, like, bloody and graphic and at some level it gets elevated. We've argued and gotten our stuff back. If you can get someone's ear and you can get it tested by a person and gotten it back. But that is the primary thing is gore.

There was talk of them eliminating kill shots.

That could be.

I haven't heard that. I think that got rescinded, but I think there were some issues. Here it goes. You can turn on ads for this content, hunting content where there's no depiction of graphic animal injuries or prolonged suffering. Hunting videos where the moment of kill or injury is indiscernible and no focal footage of how this dead animal is processed for trophy or food purposes. Boy, that's pretty fucking limited.

Yeah, well, for me, I had one that was limited in age restriction, so people 18 and under couldn't watch it.

Was it a firearms infraction or.

No, it would have been firearms, just archery. And I don't monetize any of my hunting videos because I just don't even want to deal with, oh, you're killing for fucking profit or whatever the hell. So I'm like, I don't make any money off you.

Don't turn monetization on?

Not for hunting. I do it for my lift run shoot and my podcast. But for just the hunting, that's a good way to. But I still got that age restriction because of, they said the gore. Then there was an outfit that. What's his name? Jason, I think sportsman's alliance maybe. But anyway, they wrote, they appealed it for me. They got it in touch with YouTube and appealed their decision and got it overturned. So for people like me or for like us creators, they will go to bat for us.

Yeah. Oftentimes I've seen cases, I remember our senator in Montana got dinged on one of the social media platforms for having like a picture of him and his wife with a pronghorn and his account got taken down. And the minute humans became aware of this or like the right humans became aware of this, they did like a very quick reversal. So the way we'll generally look at it with putting up video content is we'll try to avoid demonetization. Being demonetization mean you cross some line. Right. But the thing is, I haven't found it to be like, it's not like an onerous process. I feel that it's pretty. If you compare it to other channels of distribution, I have not found YouTube to be dramatically over restrictive, especially compared to any kind of like network parameter. They might be bad, but they're not bad compared to anybody else.

And that was Jason quick who helped me with that. I just remembered his last name, but that one. I killed this bull on San Carlos and I think I showed the lungs or where the arrow, and that's what got it. And it wasn't. Once I appealed it myself, they said, no, we're upholding the restriction. And then they did get it overturned. So it took a couple of times, but still it was reasonable. And they had age restrictions on other ones that I didn't even know about, but I didn't notice that the viewership was down and so they lifted all those.

It's kind of a weird situation where although there are many, many video platforms, YouTube essentially has an overwhelming majority of people into the point where it's almost a monopoly. And if you have things like that that are very valuable to people, like, I want to see where the arrow hits. I like when I see blood pouring out of an animal because I know that that's a lethal shot. That's what you want. It might be graphic to some people, but if I see a rage hit behind the shoulder on a deer and I see that blood squirting out as soon as the deer starts moving, I'm like, that guy got that deer. That's a dead deer. That's what you want. It doesn't seem awful to me. It seems better because that's a lethal shot, that's a successful hunt. That's what you're trying to do, to pretend that's not what you're trying to do. Boy, that seems insane. And if you're doing it only to protect the ignorant, that seems insane, too. It's like you don't have to watch those videos. And if you're going to allow those videos on the platform, you should allow those videos to be a realistic depiction of what everybody's trying to do, which is a lethal shot on an animal.

And if you hit a lethal shot on an animal and you hit it in the vitals and you use a strong arrow with a great broadhead, you're going to get blood squirting out of it because that's what you want. The last thing you want to see is an arrow hit an animal and no blood comes out, and that's okay.

Well, and meanwhile, they show people getting killed, I think, on YouTube, don't they?

I do not know, but they show them being pull those. I think they injured.

Well, you see it on the war videos. You see it blocked out or obscured. Yeah. Some of the hunting networks used to have self imposed restrictions that they felt were cleaning up hunting for the sake of non hunters looking in. And it was counterproductive because they would have a restriction that they didn't want to see raw meat. They didn't want to see bare bone. And so it created this sense of, when I say counterproductive, if you were looking in on it, watching it, there was no acknowledgment of what happens to it later, which created the sense that maybe nothing.

Right.

And then that eventually corrected itself. And they're like, oh, some level of gore right in parentheses. Like, some level of gore is helpful in explaining the process. But the instinct early on, the instinct was to not have any of that.

Right.

And people would get dinged for raw meat. They'd get dinged for, like, a bone sticking out of a backpack.

One of the things I really appreciated about your shows, particularly early on, is that you have a lot of segments where you cook the meat, and there's a lot of shows where they don't cook the meat.

That was our trademark.

Dude, big difference. Big difference. It's much more enjoyable. Like, one of my favorite videos is you, when you shot that black pear, that the blueberries.

Sure.

And you're watching like, you're explaining, look how purple this fat is, because this thing's just been gorging on blueberries. Then you're cooking it and eating it. That to me is like, that's a full range of what the experience of hunting is about. I wish more people would do that.

I find now, looking back on those days, it's like I sometimes look back and it'd be like. It was just shocking that. It's shocking that that wasn't out there more.

Yeah.

At the time, it was like something, like, so simple and elemental, and it was just surprised people.

It was almost nonexistent.

Yeah.

You did people on those outdoor channel shows, you very rarely saw someone cooking the animal that they killed.

I think it was kind of assumed just because of how we grew up. And in magazines, they never talked about that. You never read an article where they talked about how they processed the meat or ate it.

They'd have a recipe, a finished. Finished, like a recipe with shit you take out of the freezer. But there was an ignored part.

There was the old Fred Bear videos. Fred Bear was making videos way before we ever started hunting. The meat was never shown. So it was just kind of like. That's just how we learned then. Steve, brilliant idea. Meat eater.

Yeah.

I mean, meat eater right there. You got the forks on the frickin'moose. So it's like, that was the best decision ever because it addresses that part of it, which was kind of like, it's impressive that you foresaw what might be a challenge for us explaining hunting. So that was just, like, brilliant to come up with that. But to our defense, that was never a thing. We just knew. I mean, I read this old article, my first deer, I killed that spike that I said when I was 15, I wrote this little thing for the school newspaper and said I got 37 pounds of hamburger from it.

And.

I don't know why I said that.

That's a great school newspaper entry.

Yeah. Because nobody ever talked about it.

But it was like, that's hilarious.

Yeah, it was funny. I said something like, my mom was happy because we got 37 pounds. It's probably all we got off that deer. It's pretty small. It has changed.

It certainly opens people's eyes up that are non hunters. And I think it's a very valuable addition to this whole video depiction of what hunting is all about. And also, you're a really good cook, so you would get really involved and make some pretty cool recipes. And you cook for your staff, and you got episodes like that where you cooked all these different preparations of different wild game. It's cool. Yeah, it adds to it.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Well, listen, let's wrap it up. Let's bring this bad boy home. Meat eaters available? It's essentially only online now, right?

Yep.

Yeah.

Well, we know, like, the fast channels, but, yeah, you can find everything we do on YouTube.

So I just want to say to me, huge honor. You guys are the voices of hunting.

You're the voice of hunting.

No. You guys are so well versed in how to discuss it and how to explain it, as are you. It's like, I am honored to be here and have a podcast with Steve. We've done a lot of podcasts, but to have all three of us here, it means a lot to me. So thank you.

That's great. Thank you.

It means a lot to me. You two are the main reason why I got into hunting, 100%. And without you taking me out to shoot that one mule deer that sits proudly on that table, it's changed my life.

Both. Thanks, man.

Both you do.

Appreciate you.

Love you, too. All right, bye, everybody.