Tim Burnett, bowhunting veteran and Solo Hunter creator, reveals how filming hunts forces him to balance patience with production—nine days on a mountain before spotting a moose, then dragging a 1,300-pound beast through glacial water. He critiques staged shows like Pigman and The Hunt, exposing wasteful practices (e.g., helicopter-harvested pigs) that damage hunters’ reputations while defending ethical predator control, citing wolves decimating livestock and mountain lions threatening children. Burnett’s lightweight gear—synthetic Under Armours over wool—and multi-pin sights improve mobility and accuracy at 63–65 pounds draw weight, contrasting with rifle hunting’s lower risk but higher deer survival rates. Their debate on public perception highlights how misrepresented hunting clashes with liberal policies ignoring ecological balance, while Burnett’s solo approach proves authenticity through raw, unfiltered footage. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Onnit.com.
O-N-N-I-T. We are a human optimization website, and what we sell at Onnit is strength and conditioning equipment, supplements, healthy snacks, all different things that can help improve your body, including, as of today, the new Werewolf Legend Kettlebell.
We have these new Legend Series Kettlebells.
If you've seen the other ones before...
The Great Apes Kettlebells and the Zombie Kettlebells.
We just came out with the newest one, the Legend Bells, and it's pretty fucking awesome.
It's a 28 kilogram werewolf.
So what is that, 54 pounds or something like that?
How does it work?
2.2, 28. More than that.
60 pounds?
Must be 60. It's close to 60. Something like that.
All the kettlebells that we have, though, we have regular ones, you know, if you're not into fancy shit, that are just standard kettlebells.
And then the primal bells and the legend bells, the zombie bells, all those are 3D mapped.
And what that means is they're not just good looking, they're very functional.
They're designed so that they're completely balanced out.
So when you're lifting them, there's no weird balance points.
If you have ever worked out with kettlebells before, it's essentially like a bowling ball with a handle on it.
And it's all about using your entire body as one individual unit to promote What they call functional fitness.
What that means is, you know, like if you just do bicep curls, that's great for doing bicep curls, but it's not going to necessarily help you run up a hill.
It's not necessarily going to help you be able to do things physically, carry things better.
What I'm concerned with and the kind of things that we sell it on it are all things that promote functional strength, complete body coordination strength, things that improve athleticism.
So if you're involved in a sport, if you are doing martial arts or something along those lines, This is, in my opinion, the best strength and conditioning type workout you could ever do.
We also sell all kinds of foods and supplements, including the new Warrior Bar that is organic buffalo.
14 grams of protein, 140 calories, super healthy for you.
No bullshit in it, no MSG, no soy, no lactose, no antibiotics or added hormones.
14 grams of protein in 140 calories with 4 grams of fat per serving.
Excellent.
For runners, climbers, you know, anybody that wants to keep something that's really healthy and small, pack it, keep it with you.
You can't get any better than these Warrior Bars.
I fucking love these things.
I seriously go through a box of them a week.
We also have hemp protein powder, the new Hemp Force bars, which are excellent as well.
All this stuff is available at Onnit.com.
That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and you will save 10% off any and all supplements.
Ting is the official provider, the official cell phone provider for this podcast.
And I have a Ting phone.
I have it right here.
It's the Samsung Galaxy S5. And my bill just came in.
This is the first month of official use.
My bill was $18.
That shit's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
The average bill, mine's below the average bill, because I don't really call anybody, I just text.
But the average bill is $21.
$21 for a monthly bill.
What Ting is, is a cell phone provider that uses a Sprint backbone.
So they rent time on Sprint.
But then they do it entirely their way.
No contracts.
No early termination fees.
No packages or bundling fees or any of that bullshit.
No overage fees.
And you only pay for what you use.
Instead of having like a fixed bill every month where it's like, you know, whatever.
You get 100 minutes or 50 bucks or whatever the fuck it is.
Instead of doing that, it's not that cheap though, right?
Nobody's that cheap now.
Whatever it is.
Instead of having 100 minutes, if you had it like that and you only used 80 minutes, they're not giving you your money back for that 20 minutes that you didn't use.
But with Ting, you only pay for what you use.
If you use your phone call once, I mean if you use your phone once in a month, you're gonna have the most ridiculously small bill ever.
If you use it every day, it'll be slightly larger, but it'll definitely be smaller.
than any other provider you're going to use it with.
98% of people would save money with Ting.
That's pretty crazy.
And again, we're talking about the Sprint backbone.
So it's just like you have a phone on Sprint.
You get the exact same coverage, including 4G.
If you go to rogan.ting.com, they have all the latest cell phones, including what I have, which is the Samsung Galaxy S5, which I like it a lot.
It's pretty fucking dope.
And it's waterproof.
They call it water-resistant.
I think that's legalese.
And because there's a little tab here on the bottom, and if you pop that tab, I guess water could get in there and you're fucked.
But if you close that bitch up, it's not that hard to do, then it's waterproof.
unidentified
Yeah, you can put it in the sink or something like that.
And you go out there, you and I've seen the ones with Remy Warren as well.
And by yourself, just bring cameras, go to these remote locations, hike in, set up the cameras, and you're using your own cameras, you're like setting up the shots while you're aiming.
Like you're getting ready to shoot the animals, and you're setting everything, like you've got little handheld things here, and GoPros, and...
And actually, it makes me a better hunter because I find that I'm a lot more patient and a lot more relaxed about it and more deliberate in my hunting.
So it's not just like, oh, I got a rifle.
All I got to do is get within 400 yards.
It's like, no, I got a rifle and I got a camera and I got this.
So I feel like I hunt better, but the actual success rate of killing and getting it on film and that kind of thing, it's a lot harder.
It makes it more difficult to do, and it's a hassle.
It's not a hassle.
I mean, it's what I do, but it's hard.
It makes it to where it's not just a hunt anymore.
It's a hunt that I'm trying to document, and then now when you look at it and you're trying to actually produce something good that people are going to want to watch instead of...
Is that a whatever?
Then you're putting more thought into producing it than you are the hunting part of it.
And then it's like, well, crap, now I'm not a very good hunter because I'm a good producer.
So you have this constant dilemma.
You can tell I'm already tore up about it, but it's like you have this constant back and forth between yourself.
It's like, screw it.
Today, I'm just going to hunt, man.
I'm not going to touch a camera.
And then halfway through the day, I'm like miserable because nothing's going on.
I'm like, I don't even have anything to show for it.
Yeah, it's funny when you look back at computers that were, you know, five, six, seven years ago.
They were incredibly powerful and much more powerful than for, you know, the applications that most people use them for.
I mean, most people have way overpowered computers.
They're just going online, you know, and clicking on links and stuff.
And they have these ridiculous computers that can edit and crunch video and, you know, do all kinds of massive calculations and they just never use it.
Well, if you haven't seen it, Jim Shockey is this guy who's been around forever, this real kind of legendary, the great white hunter from BC, from British Columbia.
And he goes all over the world, like, I mean, literally all over the world, like these really remote places in Pakistan.
I mean, he's one of the true people that actually grew up in hunting environment, in not just hunting, but harsh country, doing it the right way and building an outfitting business.
And it just happened to evolve into television career.
I remember watching him on Realtree when he would do the little segment in the I think it was Realtree.
I don't know.
That's a long time ago.
But he's really, you know, deserved and earned where he's at and put himself there.
No, you know, and the hard thing that I would like to see, and I don't think it could ever happen, but like, can you imagine going to some of those places with somebody and actually experiencing it?
And that's the thing that the cameras can't show you.
They can't show you the actual experience because inevitably the guy behind the camera or the producer is wanting to bring drama into it.
They're wanting to bring something out.
What's going to captivate the viewer?
Well, I'm going to do this and this.
And he may use a shot that the kid was doing dishes or something.
And use it in a scene where something dramatic happened and the kid's crying because he was cutting onions or something.
I mean, producers have a way of twisting things to make it look more glorified and more glamorous than it might have actually been.
Well, that's one of the things about hunting shows.
It hasn't happened where it has with reality TV. A lot of these reality TV shows are the furthest thing from reality that you could ever imagine.
Everything is completely scripted.
It's calculated.
Every event's calculated from the beginning to the end.
These shows are just drama shows, like bullshit, fake, fiction drama shows, that they don't have a necessary, they don't have a script, but they have an objective.
Like, you and I are going, we're going to go buy Mexican food, and you're like, I fucking hate, but I hate Mexican food.
And we have a conversation, and then, you know, we go to another place, like, how about this place?
Dude, I fucking hate Mexican food.
Like, come on, man.
And, like, at the end, we wind up at a Taco Bell, and you're like, hey, this isn't bad.
Whereas like, one of the things I like about your show and Rinella's show and a lot of these hunting shows is they're willing to show failure too, which is a big part of hunting.
Yeah, I mean, you're doing something that's very difficult to do.
You're going into a natural habitat that this animal lives in.
You're trying to defy all of its natural instincts, its sense of smell, its incredible hearing, all these different evolved instincts that they have to keep them alive, and you're trying to creep up on them, and you're filming the whole thing.
Well, I think what a lot of people may not look at, you know, and I get it sometimes, is like, Everything's wrapped around that moment of impact, that kill, you know?
And especially when you're filming it by yourself, it's really hard to get that moment of impact and that moment of kill on there.
But that's like one moment, you know?
And it's like the most morbid moment of the entire episode or the entire five-week-long journey after that animal.
But everybody focuses on that moment.
And it's like, no, you know?
There's 10 days of planning and preparation and hunting an actual...
When I go on a hunt for elk, the adventure, there's miles, you know.
Hundreds of miles that a person can go on in the west.
And when you get up on some of these peaks, and you may have experienced on some of the stuff in Alaska, but you get up there and it's like, gosh dang, there's a lot here.
There's so much country, and there's no limitation to how far you can go and what you do.
I would go out a lot of times during school and I'd just go up, sleep on the mountain, come back, do chores, milk cows, go to school.
Go to football practice, go home, do chores, go up on the mountain, sleep on the mountain, come back home.
That was kind of how my brothers and I grew up.
I just have a yearning for the wild.
Some of the coolest experiences that I've had in life have been when I'm by myself and go and do something just so totally random that...
That nobody else would really even think about.
I say shit, I shouldn't say nobody, but it's like, you know, in college, I'd drive home two hours to my folks' house, then I'd drive another hour up to the canyon.
By the time I get to the trailhead, it's 11 o'clock at night, hike in for three or four hours, find somewhere to sleep, get up on top of the mountain, and I'm sitting there as the sun's coming up, and three wolverines come up, you know, and circle the lake.
And it's like, back then, you know, in the 90s, there weren't Wolverines in Idaho there weren't supposed to be anyway I mean I was one of the very first or very few to actually see wild Wolverines in Idaho and it's like had I not been there by myself experiencing that in that canyon you know if there's other people or or other things those Wolverines might not have been as comfortable you know but because I was there by myself and I'm the only one there looking down over it I had that experience and there's there's a lot of opportunities like that that When
you have someone else there, you're focused on the group.
You're focused on your conversations, your buddies, your friends and everything.
You're not really tuned in to what's around you.
You're not tuned in to your surroundings.
And so there's certain things that I think you miss out on when you've got other people there.
And it's not that I don't enjoy that sometimes, but I feel like when I'm there Like, there's a connection.
You know, there's a connection to the land.
There's a connection to the environment.
And, you know, you could bring all of it into it.
If you're a hippie, you know, tree hugger, voodoo type person, you can bring in the nature and the gods and all that kind of stuff into the whole element.
But that really and truly is what it is, is you're out there with no one but yourself and God and his creation.
Yeah, you definitely edit things really well, and that's a big part of watching any kind of a show, to draw people in.
But in that show in particular, you're telling a story, and your story is whatever animal you're chasing after, wherever you're going, you're entering into that environment, and then you're explaining your thoughts along the way.
One of them I really liked was you alone.
You were moose hunting in Alaska.
And, you know, you were, you know, stuck in the tent and it was raining outside.
Yeah, and because you're out there like that, because you're in this, like, intense, wild environment, you know, you get to...
When you're talking about it and when you're expressing yourself to the camera, you're getting this kind of insight of what it's like to actually be there.
For a lot of people, that's the closest they're ever going to come to being out there in the wild bush of Alaska chasing after a moose.
So it makes it, there's like the solitude comes across on camera.
And it's an interesting element that you don't get in a lot of these shows.
Because a lot of these shows, it's an expedition.
You got a couple cameramans, you got a guide, you got two hunters, you got all these people there.
You got a fucking ATV.
Everybody's going out into the woods together.
It's a journey, you know.
But the solitude of you being alone in these remote environments.
And, you know, quite honestly, dangerous environments.
Especially like the Alaska one, because there's bears out there, grizzlies.
You're packing a pistol when you go to take a shit.
Have you ever been out there by yourself and had a situation come up where you're like, fuck, I might not be able to get out of here, like being injured or...
You know, fuck your knee up or anything like that?
Yeah, I jacked up my knee pretty good in New Zealand when I went to New Zealand to hunt with Remy.
I had just killed my tar and was coming down off the mountain.
And I mean, I wasn't very far from the bottom.
But I stepped in this fern or something and just jacked my knee.
And I remember falling, and I kind of blacked out there for a minute.
And as I'm laying there, I'm thinking, I'm just like, please don't want to blow my knee out, you know?
And I just laid there for like 30, 40 minutes until kind of the throbbing and the pain kind of went away.
And then I was able to get up and kind of walk it off.
But that's when it gets...
That's probably what's the most dangerous is when you're hauling 100 plus pounds on your back and you're coming down rough country because I'm not going to go back up there and pack my camp out.
So you're going to load as much weight as you can on your bag.
Something could happen at any time.
A guy could step and roll his ankle at any time.
It's just kind of...
By us being out there alone, it makes it that much more dangerous, I guess.
People who have never gone hiking in these remote areas, especially when you're going after these mountain animals, whether it's elk or something like that, they probably don't understand how treacherous some of the tureen is.
And you add into that the fact that you've got 100 pounds of meat packed onto your back...
And you're probably going to have to do it several times, especially if it's an elk.
See, my brothers and I, we had the reputation of breaking horses.
So people would bring the wild Mustangs that they'd catch off the desert and stuff.
Which I know now, living in Nevada, they're not that wild.
But they'd bring us these horses that they'd adopt, thinking that they would make them as kids' horses or something, and we'd have to break these horses.
What they tried to do is shoot it in the neck and hit that tendon.
So with horses, a lot of times, like Western reigning horses and stuff, a lot of times they'll go in and snip a tendon in their neck to get them to keep their head level because I guess it's better for the...
The horse reigns better and acts better and it's not going to flip his head up and flail its head.
So they'll flip this tenon.
So the sharpshooter went in trying to shoot this horse in the tenon in the back of the neck to kind of just break him down so they could catch this horse because it was a big black and white tabino stallion that they wanted to catch.
Well, we were talking about that before the show, that it's a weird thing for people to hear when someone says they're a hunter, but they love animals.
He goes, I do eat meat, but I just think bears are different.
I go, different how?
Because they're not in your neighborhood?
Like, what are you talking about?
It's an animal.
Do you understand that anything that a hunter kills lives an infinitely better life than anything you're buying at McDonald's, than anything you're wearing on your clothes, any shoes, any leather, any belt that you have?
Those animals lived lives of unimaginable suffering for the most part.
Those domesticated animals that are used for clothing or leather goods or couches or shit like that.
Those fucking things live in pens and their lives from birth to death are just for utility.
They serve a purpose.
They're a commodity.
When you're hunting, you're taking an animal that lives an entirely natural life.
You dip into that natural world, harvest that animal, pull it out, and in my opinion, that's infinitely better.
Infinitely better in every way.
First of all, they're not going to live forever.
It's not like you're taking away an animal that was going to cure cancer if you kept it alive.
That animal was on its way to fucking building a rocket to go to the moon, and you stepped in and shot it.
No, they're fucking bears, man.
They're bears.
They're eating each other's cubs, and...
It's really good meat.
It's good for you.
And the fact that people have a problem with hunters, but they don't have a problem with passing by every restaurant you drive down the street.
Every restaurant is filled with meat.
Every one of them.
Every supermarket is filled with meat.
Half of them are driving cars with leather seats.
Half of them are wearing leather shoes.
Probably more than half.
But yet people have a problem with hunting.
And it's this weird thing.
Because they don't see the death of the animal that caused their cheeseburger.
Because society is structured in a way that you can just, without participating in the animal's death at all, you can reap the benefits of it by just giving a little piece of paper and getting a cheeseburger.
Yeah, and people that eat meat have said this to me.
And I'm like, man, you've got to rearrange the way you think.
I've told several people that have a problem with it that eat meat.
I'm like, you should expose yourself to the death of an animal just to decide whether or not you want to continue eating meat.
Because that was a concern when I went hunting for the first time.
I've been fishing my whole life, so I've killed things before and eaten them, but I've never killed an animal.
And I was like, man, a deer is a big, beautiful animal.
Maybe that's going to freak me out.
Maybe I'm not going to like it.
Maybe I'll be a vegetarian after that.
I was really wondering what it was going to be like.
The exact opposite happened.
It didn't bother me at all.
I thought it was great.
There was a moment of sadness that this animal died, but the food was delicious.
The meat was delicious.
The experience was exhilarating.
It was exciting.
It was fun.
It was wild.
It was enriching.
It's the healthiest meat you can get.
I think the most ethical way to acquire it.
You're responsible for what you're eating.
And there's something super satisfying about that.
Whenever I, not all the time, but a lot of times when I tweet photos of like wild game that I cook, And when I'm out there and I'm grilling something that I killed and I chopped up and I'm putting it on the grill and then I'm eating it, it's such a different experience.
The feeling of it is so much better than just getting a steak from the grocery store, throwing it on the grill and eating it.
Pound for pound, it's a hell of a lot more expensive, but that's not...
You know, that's not what it's about.
And it's one of those things where it's like super, super hard to explain to people when they're like, well, why do you hunt?
And even my wife, you know, she's not into hunting.
She never wants to be.
She doesn't understand how I can love animals so much and yet go out and kill them and all that.
But it's one of those things that there's so many different facets that you can go down.
Well, we're doing it for food.
We're doing it for this.
We're doing it for population control.
We're doing it for...
You know, whatever for sport, which I don't look at hunting as a sport, you know, per se.
But there's a lot of different things, elements that you can bring into it to explain to somebody.
And at the end of the day, I look at it, I'm like, I don't know why I do.
I'm just, I'm a man.
You know, like I posted a picture the other day on Instagram that's like, a lot of these hunting groups classify themselves as predators or as, you know, addicts or junkies or, you know, I'm an antler junkie or I'm a this or I'm a that.
And it's like, I'm a man.
You know, God put man on this earth to till and to take care of it.
And he gave us sustenance and he gave us an ability to sustain not only ourselves, but to grow population.
I definitely think that there's a lot to specific religions that are out there.
That there's pieces there that...
You know, if you follow the Bible...
Word for word for what it says, like literally, there's a lot of stuff that's, there's no way.
I mean, it's like, no, those are probably made up stores where, but there's other things that I, you know, I'm a religious person and I believe in God and, and, uh, I think there's a lot of things that people have twisted.
There's something to all religions that I think there's some universal truths.
And there's universal truths about treating people certain ways.
And there's universal truths about seeking the good in life and looking out for your brothers and sisters.
And I think all of that came from understanding that people developed over time, wisdom that people developed over time, and then this connecting to what is universally good about the world, about life.
Yeah, the problem with the literal translations is that it wasn't English.
They're still working on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is the oldest version of the Bible, which is in Aramaic, and it's on animal skins.
They literally have to do DNA analysis on the animal skins to make sure that when they line up the pieces, they're trying to piece them all together, that it's the right animal.
The way they do the Dead Sea Scrolls, have you ever...
Right, but if you want to be a religious person, that's the source of it.
That's the source of almost all biblical stories is the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And what's really unique about it is that it was found in Qumran, I think, in the 1940s.
They found these clay pots.
And inside these clay pots were essentially these animal skins that had been wrapped up and you know these these cylinders and these like wrapped up in rolls and they had to unravel them and a lot of them were broken up and so the broken up ones the way they you know do the DNA test they do a DNA test so they say okay well all animal all the pieces from this animal we'll put over here all the pieces from that animal we're assuming that's a different piece of skin we'll put that over here and then they have to like try to piece it together like
like this ancient puzzle.
Then they have to take Aramaic and translate it into English.
And that's even older than the ancient Hebrew version of the Bible.
The ancient Hebrew, the weirdest thing about the ancient Hebrew version is that apparently ancient Hebrew didn't have numbers.
So letters were also numbers.
So the letter A was also the number one.
And like, if I said Tim Burnett, there's numbers to your name.
It counts in the translation, not the translation, but what the meaning of the word.
The word love and the word God have the same numerical value in ancient Hebrew.
And this is on purpose.
It's like things have value.
And the sentences have like a numerical value to them that our brains, the way we think, the way we talk, because we have numbers separate from words, I don't think we totally grasp what a lot of the meaning of a lot of the sentences were.
Then on top of that, like a lot of those words in ancient Hebrew, there's something like 25% of them, they still don't even know what the fuck it was.
There's a massive amount of interpretation that they have to figure out.
Then they take that and And take it from there and translate it to Greek and to Latin and then from that to English.
So when you're reading about Adam and Eve, who the fuck knows what the original meaning was?
What were they trying to say?
The original human beings that God created or that the universe bestowed upon the earth?
What was that?
Did they really mean that it was just two people?
It's so hard to tell.
And when you add in all the other fuckery, the ones where you know that somebody had a grip on it.
We know about Constantine and the bishops and how they rewrote the New Testament and they left out a bunch of shit.
They chose what was going to be in the Bible or not.
A bunch of people chose what was going to be the Word of God.
People that had no contact with God.
It's not like God came down and he gave them a fucking to-do list.
Like, get all this shit done and then I'll double check your work and then I'll be back.
No, they decided.
So, I'm not opposed to the concept of God, and I'm not an anti-religious person at all.
I think religion's done a lot of good.
I think religion is a good foundation for a lot of people to develop morals and ethics.
Whenever anybody wants to talk about literal translations of stuff, I always want to know, how much did you look into it?
When you say literal translation, Did you go to the actual source of those stories?
Because you've got to go to fucking the Epic of Gilgamesh if you want to really know the Noah's Ark story.
That's the original version of it.
It's 6,000 years old.
I mean, it's written with these little lines and shit, like on clay tablets.
That's one thing that's kind of cool about your podcast is the ones that I listen to and everything.
It's like, what I like about you is when you bring in different hosts and different guests, a lot of them have completely opposite backgrounds of what I have and probably from what you have too.
But I like that you're fascinated by a lot of different things and that you take yourself and just like you're saying there, the research, is you'll immerse yourself into really knowing and finding something out.
You find a lot of different things fascinating.
And one thing that's really cool when you're talking about the hunting, and when you first did a podcast with Rinella, and then you kind of were educating yourself along the way as you got into the hunting part of it, it was almost like, and I don't know if you've gone back and listened to any of your old podcasts when you did those, but it was like a little kid just learning something new.
And I'm like, that's pretty cool, because here you have a grown man asking questions that my 10-year-old's asking me.
Well, my wife would be best able to answer that because she's been mocking me for watching Ted Nugent's Spirit of the Wild for the past 11, 12 plus years.
I watch it for a lot of reasons.
One of it is because it is fucking unbelievably hokey.
I mean, he's just a hokey dude.
He's a master showman.
And if you've ever seen Ted Nugent play guitar, you've ever seen his band...
He's a master showman, and he uses a lot of that showmanship on his show, and some of it is really ridiculous.
Some of it is very repetitive and very over the top.
But I was fascinated by his promotion of this lifestyle, this hunting lifestyle.
At the time, he didn't have the place in Texas.
He had his place in Michigan as a high-fence operation, and he would just go out into, I don't know, any hundreds of acres he has, set up tree stands and wait for deer and shoot them, and that's all the meat that he ate.
He donated it to Hunters for the Homeless and Hunters for the Hungry or whatever it is, and it really constantly promoted how healthy the lifestyle is, how healthy the meat is, and how this is about...
Sustainability.
This is about these animals are providing him with sustenance, and in turn, he is providing, he puts up food plots, he's planting trees, like his whole thing is, it's very balanced in a way that a lot of people who eat Organic food that they buy at Whole Foods and they think they're being all earthy.
Yeah, my wife.
Mine too.
You're not really balanced.
Like, Ted Nugent living in Michigan is more balanced than you.
I know you don't think that, but that's the reality.
The reality for a lot of people that go to the grocery store and pick up their organic food is like, man, you don't know how many people were involved in the creating of that food.
I'm going to do everything these people don't do because I'm sick of seeing the exact same thing every time.
I had a conversation with a big sponsor the other day because they're wanting to produce a TV show and we had a big conference call and everybody was talking about all the things they hate about television and things that they like about television and a lot of these different shows came up and without a doubt they're all like, we hate how hokey it is, we hate how overproduced it is and this and that and that, but at the end of the day something's got to die.
It's like Everything is the same.
The comments that you get from people is all the hunting shows are the same.
For ours, for Solo, what I think makes it unique is the fact that no matter how we film it, it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, we're one man out there.
We're trying to kill an animal.
We're going to kill it.
We're going to bring it home.
And we're just trying to document that adventure.
I think by doing it by ourselves and having that relationship with the camera where everything seems to be so close up, it's like I'm talking to you.
You're watching.
I'm trying to talk to the viewer and communicate that.
And that's really hard to do because sometimes you want to just reenact and restate what's happening or what's going on or what you're going to do.
But what Mark and I are working on with some of these other projects and what we're going to try to bring into Solo is more of that what's going on up here.
What's going on in my head more so than what's going on that you're seeing.
People want to know more what I'm thinking while I'm doing certain things than actually what I'm doing, I think.
And so that's an element as a producer to try to bring into it to where if people really knew what goes on in my head while I'm up on the mountain, I think they'd be shocked.
Because it's not all just complete focus on hiking and hunting and killing.
I may be sitting there one time and I may be thinking, you know, I'm going home.
I've been up here for four days.
I haven't seen a damn antlered animal for the last four days.
I'm going home.
But you have this, you know, all this interaction that goes on in my head.
It's like the guilt.
Okay, if I go home, I've just wasted four days that I've got here that I should have been here to potentially get an episode, you know, or to potentially harvest an animal, bring it home, and to eat it.
You know, I'm wasting that.
If I go home now, I'm a quitter.
If I stick it out, I'm stupid because I'm not going to find any animals or whatever.
So there's just that constant...
Because when you're by yourself, there's nobody to talk you into things, and there's nobody to talk you out of things.
So when you make a decision, it's yours, and you've got to live with it.
You've got to do it.
You know, so if I'm hiking up a mountain and a deer...
Is bedded somewhere, and I know that if I hike around this way two miles, I can get to him without him winding me.
Or, like I did on the last day of my hunt, I said, yeah, it's a gamble.
The wind's blowing here.
If I go here, it's iffy, but if I go here, I can cut off two miles of distance, but I might have a chance to get on him.
But if I go this way, it's two miles, but it's a guarantee I could get in on him without the wind.
Well, the last day I chose the shortcut and what did I do?
People are trying to convince me that that works, and it may work, but there was an instance on that episode, because I don't want to down-talk Nose Jammer, you know, because they're...
They're advertising on the show, but it's a product that I committed to him when I met the owner.
I met John Redman at a trade show in Reno, and he was so stinking passionate about it, and I told him to his face, I'm like, John, I don't believe in that stuff, man.
It's all hokey.
It smells funny.
I don't want anything that smells.
He's like, no, try it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So it turns out he gives me a can of this stuff and I try it there in Oklahoma.
That's the first time I'd ever tried it.
And there was a buck that came downwind and he obviously smelled something.
And that's why for me personally, I've had so much experience in the field and I've had so many times when I've tried different things and times when I've just gone natural, you know, where it's just me and my body odor or that's it.
And ultimately, at the end of the day, my conclusion has been, and it is to date, and that's not to say that it can't change over time as I have more hunting experiences, but right now, I don't want to interject any foreign scent into the air.
I'm going to have a smell to me no matter what I do, no matter what I shower in, no matter what I spray my clothes down with.
Doesn't matter.
I'm going to smell a certain way that is not natural to that environment.
So when that deer walks into his bedroom, because a deer is never anywhere by chance.
He's never anywhere randomly.
He's walking where he's walking for a reason.
He knows that that's a safety corridor where he can move himself from food to bed or whatever safely.
And so he's there for a reason.
So if he smells anything out of the ordinary or sees anything out of the ordinary, he's automatically going to be on alert.
And, you know, there's variations to everything because cropland and where you hunt some of these whitetails, it's farmland.
Where I hunt there in Oklahoma, it's an operating cattle ranch.
So the deer could have smelled people before.
Had to have because there's oil rigs in there where there's people in and out.
So they know what people smell like.
So to me, I use that into my little thinking is that if they know what humans smell like, They want to avoid it, so they're traveling these corridors because they know they can avoid humans.
So they're just traveling where he's traveling because he knows he's not going to have any interaction with anything but a deer.
I'm more of a live in the now, you know, feel how I feel kind of person.
So, you know, I've had experiences where a deer has been 1,000, 1,500 yards downwind and he smells me and it blows me away.
It's like, that deer is 1,500 yards away from me and he smells me and he takes off.
Because in the West, you can see that.
You can see what goes on.
So when you're sneaking around, you see that deer poke his head up, and you know when they're smelling, and they're gone, if they smell you, they're out of there.
But when I was hunting this year, there were several times where I bumped these two big bucks.
I bumped them three different times.
The first two times, they just saw me, and they didn't smell me, and they just kind of moseyed off.
They were like, something's weird over there, so that bush isn't supposed to be moving like that.
But then the one time that they smelled me, they didn't see me.
And that's hard, too, because there's millions of advertising dollars spent in promoting scent elimination products, and some of my sponsors promote scent elimination clothing or whatever, and at the end of the day...
All that stuff can help.
It can eliminate, like you're saying, it can take your scent aroma from here to here, which is good.
Maybe people don't understand how outdoor shows work.
Outdoor shows work a little bit different than a lot of other shows.
A lot of times they get, like say if a guy puts on a show like Solo Hunter, you have a certain amount of advertising space that's for you, for your program, but then the network has a certain amount of advertising space of their own for their things.
I had to tell Rinella about an advertiser that was competing with one of his friends' companies That was on the same show.
I go, do you know that you guys are selling this on your show?
He goes, what?
We're selling that?
I go, yeah, your show had an ad for this, which is a rip-off of another product.
Yeah, that's one thing I tell people, is there's no rule book, but there's no playbook either.
So the networks, there's a lot of variations.
The majority of hunting shows out there, they're called time buys, where we buy that 30-minute block on the network, and then we buy a certain amount of advertising.
And we sell that advertising.
And then whatever advertising we don't buy from the network, because within a 30-minute block, you have six minutes of commercial time.
So it's three two-minute commercial breaks.
So whether I buy any of those commercial times or not, Outdoor Channel is going to put in three two-minute breaks into that programming.
So my 30 minutes turns into 22 minutes.
So what I do is I buy however many 30-second commercial spots I can sell, I buy that from the network.
I turn around and sell at a margin.
Then, within the show content, I get paid to wear somebody's hat.
I get paid to wear somebody's shirt.
If I use a product, I get paid.
And there's different ad placements in there.
People think that it's all about hunting.
Hunting's the fun part.
But for me, the business is the fun part, too.
So you're trying to calculate, in that 30 minutes, how can I maximize my revenue?
Because you have a limited number of advertising spots that you can put in there.
So it's, who can I contract and who can we fit in certain places?
It's cool in a way because there are shows on the hunting television that are more like Discovery Channel where the network pays for them to be produced and they actually own the content.
They're called Outdoor Channel Originals or on Sportsman's Channel.
I don't know what they're called, whatever.
Where the network is invested into these shows or they give them their time for certain...
There's a myriad of ways things can be done.
But at the end of the day, I want to own Solo Hunter and I want to own Timbernet.
I want to own my brand.
I don't want, just because they're buying the show off me, I don't want to have them have any control over me or what I do or what I say or what advertisers I can bring in.
So at the end of the day, yeah, I'm having to front some money and run it as a business rather than somebody paying me to produce a show.
But at the end of the day, there's no limit to what I can make.
There's no limit to the advertising that I can sell.
Are you aware of this whole sort of movement that's going on right now on television, on regular television, like the History Channel and a lot of these other channels, where they're really concentrating on people that are trying to live sustainable lives?
Like the Alaska shows, like Alaska Last Frontier, or there's that other show, Life Below Zero.
The hard thing with that is, like, you know, there's a larger part of society that are non-hunters, non-outdoorsmen than there are that are, you know, outdoorsmen.
But you're starting to see a lot of content, you know, people trying to portray that lifestyle.
Ultimately, society is going to have to bond together and that's where religion and a lot of these groups will come together and that's where it will become valuable for people that don't see it.
That's where little groups, communities, if you don't know your neighbor, man, you should know your stinking neighbor because the guy might be covering your back one night.
Yeah, you're almost like, I was listening to this other show that I listen to all the time called Radio Lab, a podcast, and they were talking about the impact that killed the dinosaurs.
And when they were talking about it, it was like, you're just going over what the original human was, like this thing that allegedly came out of that impact, like what animals, what fossils they know of.
And it's almost like you'd rather get hit in the head by the asteroid than go through all that shit.
I'm a big fan of civilization, but I am a big fan of this...
Well, we were talking about the prepper thing, because I think there's this...
People are sort of realizing, as people pay more attention to a lot of the issues that society has, whether it's environmental issues, like whether it's pollution, or garbage that's being dumped into the ocean, or the amount of fish that's getting pulled out of the ocean, sustainability, and they start looking at the ideas of where their food comes from.
People are really into grass-fed beef now.
Grass-fed beef is a big thing.
It was fucking non-existent ten years ago.
Never saw grass-fed beef anywhere.
Almost every supermarket I go to now has a little section, grass-fed meat.
And people are concerned about animals that are eating what they're supposed to be eating instead of some weird fucking grain.
The news for people is beef, being here in the West, we see a lot of that.
And the majority of its life is grass-fed.
They turn them out on the range.
They pay fees for the BLM or wherever it is.
They're grass-fed up until about three months at the end of their life where they're put onto a feedlot, fed a bunch of fat foods, fattened up, so they taste good when I put them on the grill.
There's a reason why...
In my opinion, why food's been engineered and changed is because it makes them...
We've got a lot of people to feed, you know, for one.
Yeah.
So, in a way, that's good, but as long as I can go out and still obtain a deer tag or an elk tag and go out and get my own meat for myself...
The way I grew up, you know, I mean, you talk about organic, and you talk about raw.
I mean, the way I grew up, It's probably about as organic and raw as you can get.
I mean, whole milk, straight from the cow.
You milk the cow, take it in, strain it through a cloth, chill it, skim the cream off, or shake it in and you drink it.
No pasteurization, nothing.
That's how I grew up.
There was a time there when my dad was a farmer and he lost the farm, so he had to go back to college.
Well, there was a big time stretch in there where we had to sustain off the land or off of the farm.
We had animals to eat and the farmers would come and drop off a sack of potatoes because they knew that those little ruggedy kids, their dad's off going to college and their mom's trying to take care of them.
And so we literally lived off the land for a lot of time.
Well, we lived in central Idaho, you know, because he went back to school to get his teaching degree because we lost the farm.
He was a potato farmer for a long time.
So we're living on the farm and it wasn't unusual.
For mom to go out, grab one of the rabbits that we were raising, and I'll never forget the first rabbit that I watched her kill, hung it up, smacked it on the head, and we had rabbit for dinner.
And there was a lot of times where it's like, Timothy, can you go grab a chicken?
We need dinner or whatever, and you'd go out and you'd get a chicken and you'd take care of it and bring it in.
It's just part of the lifestyle that I grew up that you didn't go to the grocery store and get things.
You went out to the garden and you pulled out a zucchini.
You went and pulled some tomatoes.
What was really cool was the irrigation system that was there, the little ditches.
I mean, asparagus everywhere, wild rhubarb.
I mean, there's all these different kinds of things that...
We probably did out of necessity during that time span, more so than out of, yeah, we're going to live off of our farm, live off of what we create.
But I think that time span taught me a lot about the reality of life and death, the reality of, hey, you can create and be completely self-sustained.
You can create your own food, everything, right here, just on one tiny little farm.
And then also, that's what kind of gave me a love and a passion with animals, because You're raising a calf from the time it's born.
You're bottle feeding it.
You're feeding it all through the winter time, breaking the ice off the water trough and everything else.
The next spring, you're killing it.
And then you're going to eat it.
So there's that whole span where you go from life to death in a five, six, eight month period of time.
And as a young kid...
That could be either traumatic or that could be a major life-learning experience.
And I took that as, this is the way life is.
That's the way things happen.
So when I grew up and you get older and you get to college and people start throwing the, ah, you eat animals or this and that, and the vegetarian stuff, and you start learning the things of the world, that's where it's like, man, you people are the ones that are crazy, not me.
There's just so much ignorance involved in people that live in cities and claim that there's something wrong with people that eat animals.
What's wrong is factory farming.
There's something wrong about factory farming.
There's something wrong about jamming a bunch of chickens into a box that's so small they can't move and they cut their beaks off so they don't peck each other's eyes out.
Yeah, so what they do is they shut down the parks, and they allow you to go in after all the deer season's done, and you're allowed to take up to five deer.
Wow.
And it's so controlled that they want to know at the end of every day, you have to log on a piece of paper, part of your license, what you've seen and how many, where they were.
Just overwhelmed with urban deer or suburban, suburban deer.
Yeah.
It's a big issue also with ticks, because those deer are the ones that are carrying those deer ticks, and those are the ones that are carrying that Lyme disease.
And what's crazy is when, after the animal dies, I brought it back and I caped it out and everything, which is, if you don't know what caping is, is when you take...
The hide for mounting.
So you take it off the head and neck and you bring it back.
You tan it and you have it mounted so you can preserve your...
Whether it's a trophy or you can preserve your memories or whatever it is, but...
Once it dies, and it goes through the cooling process, the ticks don't have anywhere warm to stay anymore, and there's no blood, and there's nothing, so they just start coming out like crazy.
I mean, we used to, when we'd have sheep and stuff, and we'd be on the farm, you'd kind of roll your fingernail over and crush them and try to kill them, but they're...
Just because they're saying that it's acceptable because those people interjected themselves into that lifestyle.
So it's like, okay, so the people that are living a, you know, whatever lifestyle, should I accept that just because they're putting themselves into that lifestyle?
Well, I have no problem accepting any lifestyle that doesn't intrude on mine.
But when I see these reality shows, whatever you want to call them, where these people are living this sustainable life, I find it super intriguing, almost like in a primal way.
I love watching those shows.
There's Life Below Zero.
There's one guy, I think his name is Glenn, and he lives...
Deep in the woods.
He lives right next to this lake.
He doesn't have any power.
He doesn't have a fucking snowmobile.
There's levels that these guys do it.
Some guys have snowmobiles.
There's one guy, Eric.
He has a snowmobile and he traps and hunts and he sells the furs and things along those lines.
He gets some money for that for supply.
Then he also guides.
He's a hunting guide.
But this other guy, Glenn, he's none of that.
I mean, he has some furs that he sells, and with the money he gets bullets.
And that's basically, he has pots and pans and things along those lines for cooking.
But everything he does, he's chopping his own wood.
He makes his own fire with one of those things.
He puts the piece in his mouth with the stick so he can hold it in place and does the whole thing with the fucking...
It looks like one of those things you play the violin with.
So he bites down on it with his teeth, holds the stick in place, and he can make a fire pretty quickly like that.
It's pretty interesting to watch.
But he said, hey, you know, you could lose matches.
Matches get wet.
This I'll never lose.
So he's gone so old school.
As old school as old school gets.
And it's amazing.
It's fascinating.
But for this guy, when he talks about it, he talks about how...
Exciting and enriching every day is for him.
Every day has a purpose.
Every day is, you know, acquiring food, living off the land, figuring out a way to store that food.
He's got this meat cooler room that he's built that's like a sod house.
So he has all this sod over it, you know, to kind of keep it essentially underground, keep it cool.
And he has all his meat hanging in there.
It's just...
It's incredibly fascinating that people are tuned into this stuff and geared...
And a lot of my friends that have never had any desire to hunt whatsoever watch these shows and it sort of sparks that little fascination inside of them.
And I was going to bring up the hunt because I think it is changing.
They tried to get James Hatfield removed from the Glastonbury Music Festival because he hosts the hunt.
And they used a photograph that they said was him standing over a grizzly bear, but it wasn't even him.
It's not him.
But pull that photo up.
You know that photo of that guy who is the actual hunter?
he's been sort of going out publicly and promoting this.
Like, I don't know why these anti-hunters use this photo of a guy who kind of, sort of looks like James Hatfield, but it's not James Hatfield at all.
So it's complete bullshit.
It's not, doing is just narrating it they took into you know this this idea and they they ran with it and they're being really dishonest with it this This is the guy.
See, and they're promoting that as James Hatfield.
Yeah, and well, he kind of looks like him a little bit, but it's not James Hatfield at all.
That's James Hatfield.
I mean, James Hatfield does hunt, but that's not him standing over that grizzly bear, so the entire premise of this thing that they were doing to try to get Metallica removed from this music festival It was just a bullshit photograph.
The thing about being a cage-fighting commentary, you're already doing something so fucked up.
You're involved in what some people think is human cockfighting.
They don't really care if you go out and shoot animals.
But yeah, I've had people angry at me, definitely.
People call me a piece of shit, especially for the bear.
The bear was a bit...
There's a photo of me and Cam standing over this bear I shot.
And I got more heat for that than anything I ever did.
I think it's because people have this, what they call anthropomorphication, I think is the word, where they connect animals with human characteristics, like Yogi Bear and fucking all these ridiculous...
And they have this idea of what wildlife is that's completely alien from wildlife itself Those folks that I went bear hunting with Cameron Haynes and the rivets Johnny and Jenny rivet they run this live in the dream Outfitter company up in Alberta the nicest fucking people you ever want to meet in your life and And they have animals.
They have dogs.
They love their dogs.
They have a puppy.
People who don't understand hunting would never imagine that these people would go out, shoot bears all day, and come home and pet their puppy.
To them, it seems completely contradictory and alien.
How do you decide what animals you're shooting and what animals you're petting?
She'll try to, like, I'll cook up some elk steak or something and I'll be like...
And I got to admit, I'm not a Ranella.
I'm not, you know, Remy's a great cook, but I'm like, I'm one of those guys, I want a slab of meat, I'm going to put it on the grill, it's going to hit 120 degrees, whatever, and I'm going to eat it.
You know, I mean, that's, it's like, I don't want to spend my time preparing food.
I just want to eat it.
And so some of the stuff I cook doesn't taste that great, you know, and that's where it's like, but it's meat, you know, and it's meat that I killed and meat that I brought home, so I'm going to eat it.
But to her, it's like, ah, it's a waste of time.
So, You know, if I spent more time preparing it and aging it and doing whatever needs to be done with it rather than just cooking it and eating it, she might taste it, but who knows?
Yeah, it's a weird thing where people have this connection, but some animals are like your friends, and some animals, like, you should never hunt this.
Like, I have an agent.
She's a very nice person.
She loves animals.
But she told me, oh, I don't mind if you kill pigs.
They're cool, and so when I see somebody who will be named nameless on a TV show shoot one arrow through two pigs, and that's okay, but yet if I shoot one arrow through two deer, even if it's legal or two whatever, it's not okay, and then the very next minute shoot a weanling 10-pound pig in the head with a pellet rifle and watch it sit there and flail on the ground, that's bullcrap.
Just like in New Zealand, when they go in and cull out the wild deer and that in there because there's no predators, they have the resources to go in with a chopper and pull it out and they harvest that meat.
So if they're shooting 450 pigs, bastards better have a way to keep that meat because that's ridiculous if they don't, in my opinion.
Yeah, well, I agree with you because it's a massive waste of great meat, too.
Wild pig is absolutely delicious.
It's really good for you.
It's completely different from domestic pig in the way it looks because these animals are eating all kinds of different natural things, roots and grasses, and they're not just eating grain.
It's not like a white meat.
That was the thing that they had this thing, pork, the other white meat.
You remember that campaign?
Have you ever seen a wild pig, folks?
It's not white.
It's not white at all.
It's fucking red.
I mean, it's not as red as a deer, but it's a dark meat.
We should invest in a barbecue house and just go in, put a barbecue house in Texas and then just go kill all the wild pigs and use that to get all your meat.
But don't you think that wild pigs, if they became a revenue source like that, if they had a restaurant, if they have an animal that is so completely overpopulated and overrun that they don't have any tag limits, which pigs are at right now.
You could just go and shoot fucking pigs all day long and they'll be happy for you.
Including California, which is like one of the most liberal states ever, which has all sorts of crazy regulations on animals that need to be culled and aren't.
Like, there's real issues here with mountain lions, and there's a real issue with people that don't want people to hunt mountain lions, and they don't understand how ridiculously overpopulated these fucking things are getting, and these poor people that are running farms have to deal with these animals coming in and just decimating the population of their calves,
You know, the game animals, like the people that will tell you about when mountain lion hunting was legal in comparison now, and then the deer population levels, there's no comparison.
At Tohone Ranch, where I've been pig hunting before, the guy who was our guide told us that he has a trail camera set up over this water hole, and he got 16 different mountain lions on camera.
It's unbelievable how many mountain lions they have.
And it's because you can't hunt them.
And that is...
When you have a predator that can't...
You can't...
If we're going to be the stewards of the land, which is what most people...
If you're going to accept that we have regulations on game, we have regulations on fish that you can pull for the ocean, we're supposed to be managing...
The population of these animals in a smart, intelligent way, and that's good conservation.
But when you remove some animals from that management simply because of public opinion, non-informed public opinion of people who are animal lovers, that's ridiculous.
You can't do that.
That's contrary to the very nature of conservation in the first place.
Conservation isn't simply, oh, we need to preserve the habitat and give these animals food and make sure their water's not polluted.
Sure, that's most certainly a part of it.
And for people who don't know, hunters have been responsible for way more money that goes to conserving wildlife habitat, conserving wetlands, than any other group by far.
It's not even close.
No tree hugger conservation group has come close They're generating the amount of money that has gone into conservation as hunters have.
But because you're controlling populations of deer, controlling populations of elk, pigs, all that's good, but you've got to control fucking predators too.
And they're realizing that now in a lot of these states where they reintroduce wolves.
And people are fighting against people hunting wolves.
Like, you better fucking go online and research those giant super packs of wolves in Siberia that storm a farm and kill a hundred horses and no one can do a goddamn thing about it because you've got a thousand wolves.
Can you imagine being in a fucking farm and you're looking out the window and you see a pack of wolves just tearing apart horses and no one can do anything about it?
Well, that's what happens when shit gets out of line.
They would send out rather these these parties would like like search parties at two two men at a time And they would never come back and they would go out and they'd find their clothes torn apart covered in blood And they realize oh my god these guys are getting taken out by wolves They were getting targeted by wolves so when they would have small numbers these guys had rifles They were fucking soldiers and the wolves were eating them.
And in times like that, when there were super packs and all that, well, they're just now being reintroduced and there's a whole new generation, my generation included, that we don't know and understand wolves and how they hunt and how they are evolving.
And so to me, there's just so much eerie about them, so much unproven.
I could be that first guy that does get attacked and killed by a wolf that's there because there's more people now too.
So there's more of a chance of a wolf being conditioned to people or public than there ever has been before.
So I think that it's a different animal today than it was 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
And the thought...
Of me or a hunter somewhere in there, you get a pack that's just in the wrong mentality that maybe hasn't been hunted that much or hasn't been pressured that much because you're way back in the wilderness.
They may be a little bit more aggressive than what you would like.
Well, it goes back to what you just said earlier, and it's not exactly the same thing, but you're like, you don't care what lifestyle people lead as long as it doesn't affect you.
Same concept here.
People don't give a crap about other stuff as long as it doesn't affect them.
So it's like we all fall into it a little bit.
We can be hypocritical and say, I don't like this and I don't like this and this because that's going to affect me, but if they want to go out and do this, that's fine.
Yeah, so I was hunting deer, white-tailed deer, actually, in northern Idaho with a bow.
This was in like 2008, 2009, something like that.
And I was filming the hunt, you know, this was before I started the TV show, but at that time I already had the concept of solo hunter in mind, so I'm filming everything.
And it just, the light gets dark, and so I go to take the camera off the arm that I had, and I flip the switch, and the camera went down the bottom of the tree, crushed.
So I was like, crap!
Well, then a deer comes out.
I'm like, well, I'm going home tomorrow anyway, so I grab my bow, thump the deer, and I'm sitting there, and the deer kind of goes over and starts to do the wobble thing.
Well, next thing you know, a bear pulls up, a black bear comes up and takes the deer down and immediately pulls it over this hillside.
And I'm like, that was pretty dang cool.
I was more mad at myself than awestruck because I was like, I dropped my damn camera out of the tree and I could have filmed that, but...
So I was more like just upset.
So I thought, no big deal.
I'll just climb down, go down, spook the bear off, get my deer, go home.
No big deal.
So I go and I'm trailing this deer and all I've got is my flashlight in one hand and my bow in the other.
And I can hear the bear sliding it down the hillside.
And it's a pretty steep grade and I'm like, bear, making noise, doing whatever.
Because I'd have experiences with bears and it wasn't that big of a deal.
But then everything got quiet.
And then I was like...
And where I screwed up was I picked up the phone and called my wife.
Hey, babe, I'm trailing a deer.
I'll be home tomorrow.
What's going on?
I'm like, oh, this bear took it.
And I was like, oh, stupid.
Why would you say that?
Because then from then on, I was like, ah!
And so from then on, my wife's been freaked out about bears.
So I'll finish the story.
So I'm trailing.
All of a sudden, things get super quiet.
I'm like, oh.
Good.
The bear just kind of ran off.
I'm going to go find my deer.
And I stood up on this stump.
It was kind of a logged area.
I stood up on this stump, and I'm looking around with this flashlight, just kind of panning around, looking for the deer.
And all of a sudden, I heard just kind of a noise.
I went...
Right at the base of that stump, that bear was on top of that deer.
So the next morning I go in, no big deal, daylight, the bear doesn't have, you know, he doesn't have bigger cojones during the day, I guess, but he just ran off, I grabbed the deer.
I have that on film, actually, if you look at the first Solo Hunter episode, it's episode 101. It's got that where I kill a deer, but then I do a flashback of the year before when I was filming that hunt, and I've got my little handy cam that I filmed.
You can see all the scratches all over the deer, and you can see where the bear had eaten it out from the hind end and all that kind of stuff.
They always go in through the butthole and through the soft tissue, but you could see where he had scratched it up and where he had drug it down and just ate part of the hindquarters.
But for the most part, the deer was fine, salvageable, so I just cut him up and took him home.
The rivets that I told you about, the guys up in northern Canada, they shot a bear and it was getting dark and so they went back in the morning to recover it and another larger bear was eating it while they got there and they're like, oh great.
We got grizzlies in Idaho that are starting to cause issues.
And, you know, there's all kinds of instances in Montana that grizzly's the next animal to start causing issues, I believe, just because...
For some reason now it seems like nature is at its prime for bear populations to grow.
You look at bear numbers, hog numbers, all these populations of animals' numbers continue to steadily grow massively.
And I think that's just the natural curve of where we're at.
That if we weren't involved in managing it or anything, it had hit that precipice where diseases and cannibalism and all these things would take over and nature would curve itself back down to get sustainable numbers.
If you've ever convinced somebody that hunting is okay, what's the answer?
What's the main thing?
How can we educate people to where it's like, you know, hunting is not what you've been taught or what you think it is or what certain people say it is?
Well, I'm not trying to educate people, but in discussing it and people listening to these discussions, they kind of get a more nuanced, balanced perspective.
Right.
I know for a fact that there's a lot of people that post on my message board that have talked about how they had one opinion of hunting before the podcast and a completely different opinion of it now.
And they also never factored in the hypocrisy of wearing leather, having a leather couch, leather seats in your car, leather jacket, and then complaining about hunting.
We're disconnected, and that disconnection has led us to be like spoiled little kids.
We don't understand where all this is coming from.
We don't have a direct interaction with the food itself.
And when you do have a direct interaction with the food itself, when you've killed the animal yourself, the whole process is a completely different thing.
I'm eating an animal that I... I stocked, shot, butchered, sliced up, put into packages, vacuum sealed it, put it in my freezer, thawed it out, cooked it, ate it.
From A to Z, it's been in my hands.
And that's a completely different experience than 99% of anyone who eats meat is ever going to have.
And I encourage people, I think if you could do it, if you have the time, I think a lot of people don't know where to start.
And you get the tarsal glands all over the meat and smell like shit.
There's a lot of people that ruin meat because they don't understand the proper preparation and how to take care of it once they actually kill an animal.
Yeah, there's a lot to it.
And I think talking about it is real good.
I think it's important to have guys like you on and Rinella and Cameron Haynes and Jim Shockey when he comes on.
So people get an understanding of who these people are that actually are hunters.
That they're not those flannel shirt-wearing yokels that you see in these really cartoonish and character...
Yeah, I think you're smart by having somebody like Shockey because he's at a different...
He's a different person than me or Steve or Remy or Cameron.
We're different than what he is.
He's something special in that even if you took that man outside of the hunting industry and put him into something else, if he was an oil man or say if he was a cattle man or whatever, he's got a personality about him and a philosophical way of speaking and knowledge about him that he's going to educate people just based off of what he knows and how he's going to say something.
He and I could say the exact same things, but the way he says it, you're going to be like, damn.
I get that.
The way I say it, you're going to be like, this guy's a fool.
What I'm saying is I'm glad you're having him and it's definitely a podcast I'm going to be tuning into because I like his philosophy behind not only hunting but life and also behind family and everything else.
Last week in Silicon Valley, a mountain lion viciously mauled a six-year-old boy.
Some kid was hiking with his parents, and the kid was behind them, and a mountain lion came up behind and attacked the kid.
The parents yelled at it and screamed and chased after the mountain lion and just tried to hit it, and it dropped the kid and ran off, but the kid got fucked up.
And it's crazy how people have this idea that there are these beautiful things.
And they are beautiful.
They're interesting.
They're fascinating.
But you've got to keep those fuckers in check.
And that's a real issue with people that don't understand wildlife.
They just have these liberal points of view that's based on no reasoning, no logic, not a balanced perspective, no real true understanding of wildlife.
Their understanding is just based on what they think is right, what they think is...
Leave them alone, these natural animals.
Yeah, and then you go hiking, and you're going to get eaten, you fuck.
Do you understand that?
They're big, giant monsters.
If those were werewolves...
You would be sending packs of fucking military people in the woods to try to kill the werewolf.
Well, a mountain lion's way fucking scarier than a werewolf, because it's not just a mountain lion one day out of the month.
Okay?
The wolfman turns into the wolfman when the full moon comes out.
Mountain lions wake up every morning a mountain lion.
I told Mark, Mark's like, I'm like, Mark, you know, when we get to talk and I have a tendency to dip a little bit, I'm like, you need to keep me on that level plane.
It said it had douchebag with the president's emblem as the O. And then underneath it, the guy was selling his truck, so he had written in soap for sale.
So I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool.
Douchebag for sale.
Click.
And so I post this, not even thinking.
And it's like, oh, is the CIA going to come out?
Because I've seen stuff that guys post or whatever.
And they're like, oh, they shut down my Facebook page or whatever.
If you criticize the president too harshly, or if there's any threat whatsoever of violence, like, I'm going to kick the president's ass, they'll come after you.
The Second Amendment is a funny issue when it comes to Obama because they had this recording of him doing this speech and talking about guns, and he was talking about how people want to keep their guns.
They're never going to let you take their guns.
And I'm like, what a weird thing it is where people, representative government, where people are elected, they get into a position of power, And then they look at people and they say things like, they're never going to let you take their guns.
What are you trying to do?
Why are you trying to take their guns?
If you're just a person, and what you are as a president, yes, you're the leader of the country, yes, you're the commander-in-chief and all that, but essentially you're just a person.
So if you're a person, why are you trying to take away other people's guns?
Do you think that people shouldn't have guns because they're all dangerous?
Because statistically, that's a real tough argument.
Anybody in that sort of a position that has that sort of a point of view, like, if you're going to be the fucking president of the United States, you've got to be able to back up everything you say with logic and science.
And if you look at the amount of people we have in this country, there's 350 million motherfuckers in this country, okay?
Not all of them are motherfuckers, but some of them.
The thing of it is, you could have those people sitting here across from you and you can be explaining to them and you can have the statistical data and you can have the proof and the facts and everything.
Because there's more to it than just doing what's right and doing what is statistically fact.
There's always an agenda behind it.
There's something that they want to push.
Well, is it control?
Do they just want to control people?
Or what is it?
Who knows?
But when you look at everything that the government is doing and even small things, something as simple as giving out 12,000 bayonets to the police force – What are you trying to do?
Create your own army?
Are you waiting for a civil war?
I mean, what's going on here?
Why are you buying...
Yeah, they provided the armies or the local police...
Local police.
And I'm probably speaking out of turn here because I don't know all the facts or whatever, but it's like 12,000 bayonets.
What do you need a bayonet for anyway?
This isn't the World War II or whatever.
But then it's like, well, you bought how many millions of rounds of ammunition?
So it's like, well, there's all the conspiracy theories and all that kind of thing, but you sit back and you think, you're like...
Why are they doing that?
What's going on here?
What are they trying to create?
Why did they decimate the military?
Why did they fire all these commanders that did such a badass job of taking out the bad guy?
Why did you pull out of Iraq?
There's always something more to it than just fact and data and numbers and what's right and what's wrong.
They said potentially up to half of those are illegal or not documented, which to me is like, well, that's one city.
But why would they allow the people to come across the border just so openly and And now it's like, as a parent, I have a kid in school, and if they're putting these people and busing them all across the country and letting these people go into school without even asking their ages or having to go through medical checks like my kids do or any of those types of things, it's like, what's the reasoning behind that?
It's not humanitarian.
If you were humanitarian, you'd block the damn border off and not let people come across and experience all that suffering.
But then, as me, as the humanitarian, little bit of humanitarian that I have, I mean, it's like, man, if I'm in that position, I'm coming across the border, too, and I'm working here.
You know, I'm providing my family with a better situation.
But as a managing government, managing a country, to me, it just doesn't make sense that you would allow open borders.
And I know what you're saying, but I also think that, politically, if you want Democratic votes...
The more lenient you are towards people coming across this border, the more lenient you are towards illegals, Latinos, giving them rights, giving them education, giving them the ability to drive cars or maybe even possibly vote, that's going to be very advantageous if you're a Democrat.
If you're a liberal and if that's what your agenda is, that's what you're trying to pursue.
It's interesting, in Republican circles, Cubans are almost all Republican.
Not all, obviously, but Miami has a large population of very conservative Latinos.
It's a completely different sort of environment.
Very Republican, very conservative.
It's a completely different setup than they have with Latinos or Mexicans in L.A.
And a lot of it is to do with what they've experienced in Cuba and, you know, how the hardships that they encountered in a communist land and coming over to America and realizing the opportunities and what you can accomplish here.
And what's going on with Americans and Mexico, the disparity between California and Mexico is so vast and the distance is so small that it creates this really weird environment.
I was in San Diego a couple weeks ago and I was joking around about how nice everybody is in San Diego.
One of the reasons why they're so nice is because you can walk to a third world country.
They know how good they got it.
If you want to get confused, you want to think that, hey, man, the world's all shit.
No, no, no, no.
You're in fucking San Diego, dude.
This is awesome.
Let's go for a walk.
You and I are going to walk.
It'll take us about an hour.
We'll be in Tijuana.
And then you're going to see something that's not good.
You're going to see this is what happens when you don't have taxes and the United States government and the school system that we have.
This is what these people are trying to escape.
And as a human being, when I go there and I see that environment, I want to say, hey, they should be able to do whatever the fuck they want.
They should be able to come over here.
But they also should be able to figure out how to...
Someone should engineer that society better.
Someone should figure out how to make that culture at least as accessible or as advantageous as the American culture.
And I think that's where I'm talking, is they should be doing that rather than just saying, well, if you can't have it there, come here and do it here then.
It's a compassion issue in a lot of ways because when people are in an undeniably shitty environment like Juarez, Mexico, and they want to get out and they see San Antonio is right over there and everybody's doing great.
It's almost like a fear, adrenaline, holy crap, this is happening, whatever.
I mean, I remember as a kid sitting in a tree stand for elk, and the guys that taught me how to bow hunt, I was 13 years old, and they're like, yeah, best way, just go get in this stand and just wait for the elk to come into the water hole.
Well, shoot, I'm a 13-year-old kid up there by myself.
And you hear this herd of elk coming in.
So you have 50, you know, 800 to 1,000 pound animals coming in.
Screaming, chasing each other.
And you just freeze.
And I was shaking so bad that that platform on the stand was like...
Same thing when you're getting off the ski lift and you strap on the snowboard and you know you're going to go off this one run that you just looked at as you're coming up the hill.
You're like, I'm going down that.
And then you get there and you're like...
Holy crap, this is scary, man.
I don't know if I want to do this or not, but it's that feeling.
Hunting and golf, that's kind of my two things outside of family.
I get excited over that.
You hit just a killer iron.
And you're just watching that thing fall and it's just kind of cutting into there and you're like, you get that feeling a little bit, that could go in the hole, you know, or that's going to get close.
That's kind of the same thing.
But with hunting, it's like that much more amplified because it's a live thing, you know, it's a live event and you don't have any control over that.
But what people don't see too is on TV, you know, I posted a comment on Instagram the other day.
It was like, you know, for you guys' information, hunting's not as easy as it looks on social media and on television, you know?
Which to me is a simple comment, but people are like, oh, that's so true, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, I might be on the mountain for nine days not seeing an animal.
Like on that moose hunt, I saw one moose before I shot my moose.
So you're there for...
10, 12 days, not seeing anything, all of a sudden there's a moose, bang!
Whoa, crap, that just happened, you know?
It's like, wow!
So, that's hunting, that's the reality of it, whereas on TV, you see six, eight minutes of me traveling, and I was like, oh dang, he killed a moose, that's awesome, you know?
Yeah, he wasn't in the river, but yeah, he was in the marsh, so where he was standing, it was like knee-deep, and then he kind of went back in the willows, and so I had to actually go in the willows and pull him out, because the boat, we tied him onto the boat and tried to get the boat to pull him out, but it wasn't happening, so I had to go in and field my waders.
I'm just tugging on it.
It's on the video.
I put the GoPro on my head and I had to just basically just leverage and get this moose broke out of the willows to where the water was deep enough for it to float.
It had to have been adrenaline because the moment we got him and tethered to the boat and floated over the sandbar, people don't realize I was closer to death right then than any other hunt that I've ever been on.
I was so hypothermic that I had to get off the boat and I literally just took all my clothes off and just piled on one dry coat that I had and a pair of pants and I ran up and down the sandbar back and forth because it started out like kind of a hunched over little trudge and it took me about 40 minutes before I generated enough body heat to get myself out of that hypothermic state.
The other thing about hard hiking, too, when you're hoofing it up the mountains, is you start sweating.
That's why wool's so important.
People don't...
Many people who don't go into those environments and don't understand how you can start sweating when it's really cold out don't know how great wool is.
But even them, they've got some clothing that we prototyped this last fall that was kind of a wool acrylic blend that was pretty amazing, pretty good stuff, so...
It's similar texture and feel to the wool, but, you know, you combine that with some of the synthetic base layers and that, and you've just got a really hardy, durable fabric that can be, you know, replicated and printed on and all kinds of different things, but...
We just announced the coming soon of their new Ridge Reaper Baron Camo Pattern.
Remy and I, and there's like six or eight of us nationwide that had these prototype clothings and that wore this Camo Pattern.
Cameron's got it as well.
And they just announced that it's going to be releasing.
I heard September 15th one of the dates was thrown out, but they're going to be coming out at UnderArmor.com, the Ridge Reaper line, with the Baron camo pattern.
Compound bows, that's the one world where 10 years makes a giant leap.
Whereas with rifles, 10 years ago, it's a rifle.
Scopes are a little better, but rifles are essentially a rifle.
Bullets are bullets.
But the bows of 10 years ago in comparison to the bows of today, they are making these little incremental leaps every year where they're getting a little bit lighter, a little bit more feet per second, a little bit more accurate, a little bit better tolerance.
It's really kind of interesting to see the technology that's involved in compound bows, both for target shooting and for hunting.
When you were talking, for folks who don't know what you're saying, you were talking about ranging.
These laser rangefinders are another really cool invention where you look into it, you press a button, it tells you the exact yardage.
And for people who've never been hunting with bows before, never shot a bow before...
They don't understand, like, there's a big difference between a scope on a rifle.
A rifle's pretty good for a couple hundred yards, but a bow, there's a big difference between where it's going to hit at 20 yards versus where it's going to hit at 40 yards.
And all this is sort of crazy calculations on feet per second and where your yardage pins are.
That was one thing that I really got into when I started playing with bows.
How much you have to learn.
Develop a sight tape and arrange things out and figure out sighting in your bow and making sure everything's tuned up.
There's so many weird adjustments that you have to make between 20 and 50 yards and how difficult it is to shoot something at 50 yards.
You don't have a steady rest or a bipod like you do with a rifle.
I mean, the bow, you've got your arm that's not very rigid to begin with holding it out there, and you've got your other arm back here, and so you're trying to anchor it.
I mean, it's just like I'll take a bow and I set up all my own equipment.
I don't take it into the archery shops because everybody has their own way of doing things, but I do it the way I learn, but I'll just put a peep, sight, you know, sight it in.
Guys are all wrapped into these super long-range sights.
Well, I'm a hunter, so I need a sight that's going to go from 20 to 80, you know, and I'm good.
I don't need...
120, 150. It'd be fun to shoot that far, but I don't.
If I want to shoot that far, I go get my MOA rifle and I shoot that far.
So every time I would shoot a bow, it was fingers and it was bare bow instinctive.
Even though it was compound, everything was instinctive.
And so I think it just ingrains into you if you're a traditional shooter or whatever.
When you draw back, your body, just like shooting a pistol, your body automatically gets into that position.
And more times than not, if you'll draw back and get into that position and then look at your pins, you're there.
If you've done it a lot and you're conditioned to that.
And I think that's where your instincts kind of take over.
In those cases, I drew back and you just look at your pin, verify, bam!
You know, and you go.
So you're still aiming, but because you're not thinking about it, it's happening so much quicker.
They say that that's, you know, what some of the sharpshooters, that's why they're so good is because it's just all instinctive with pistols or anything else.
I have had a bow in my hand my entire life, basically, just because of my upbringing.
I'd go out to do chores, you grab your bow off the freezer, you walk out, fling a couple arrows at the carpet target that we had taped onto the haystack, and you go milk the cows, you walk out, you pull your arrows, you do it again.
It was a lifestyle.
It's life for me.
Growing up that way.
I shoot less now just because of the busyness of life and the other responsibilities I have, but it's still part of it.
And it's natural.
So for a guy picking it up, for you to go out and be able to experience that instinctive anchoring and everything is just dialed, it's going to come over time.
And there will be times where you might go out next week and you're like...
Man, I know what he's talking about.
That feels good.
And then the next day you're going to be like, what the hell am I doing wrong?
This just isn't working.
And that's archery.
That's the nature of your bow.
Your wrist is going to tweak.
Things are going to change from day to day.
So don't feel like you have to adjust your bow every time you go out and shoot.
I found that with my arrows and my broadheads and my setup, I take my bow and I max it at 70 pounds, and as I'm sighting in and tuning my bow, paper tuning or whatever...
I back it off a quarter, turn at a time, my limbs.
So you're taking the weight down.
And I found that that 63 to 65 range, for me and my setup, I'm getting bullets.