Cameron Hanes and Joe Rogan defend hunting as a conservation-driven, primal discipline—hunters fund wildlife protection (e.g., $410K mule deer tag) and manage ecosystems like wolves controlling elk, debunking emotional anti-hunting campaigns tied to misnamed animals. They contrast archery’s mental/physical rigor (e.g., 90-yard moose shots) with factory farming’s cruelty, praising bonds like Hanes’ late friend Roy in extreme wilderness. Rogan and Hanes argue society avoids meaningful challenges, favoring dopamine over discipline, framing hunting as a way to embrace nature’s hardships and grow through adversity. [Automatically generated summary]
He's like, population's good, filthy's good, but you're, he does you are.
People that do you are, what do you do with all that extra time that you spend between, like, Y-O-U? What do you do with, you know, you don't have to spend that time working those fingers.
There's such a disconnect going on in this world right now.
We were talking about this today while we're practicing.
It seems like there's some sort of a culture war.
There's a movement of people right now.
There's this whole eat what you kill movement.
And a lot of people are rejecting the idea of factory farming.
And rejecting the idea of buying processed food and buying cows that are locked up in pens and treated like a commodity rather than like a living animal.
And a lot of people love that, but then there's this group of people that are completely disconnected from the way the wild works that are very angry about all this.
And there's some bizarre conversations that I've been having with some very well-meaning, very intelligent people.
They're very nice people.
And this is where there's a big misconception here.
I got into it with a gang of people recently.
I shouldn't even say I got into it, because I've kind of given up on insulting people online, because I don't get anything out of it.
I get it.
If you don't like me, I get it.
I like me.
I like me.
I'm a nice guy.
I mean, if you meet me and you communicate with me nice, even if we disagree, I guarantee we're going to have a pleasant conversation.
I'm a nice person.
So, when someone insults me or says nasty shit or makes a nasty video about me, I don't watch it.
I'm not going to.
And people, why don't you respond?
I'm not going to.
Why would I? I don't have enough time.
I don't have enough time to spend with the people I love.
I don't have time to hang out with you.
What am I, do I have 15 extra minutes to watch a video and then make my own video?
I don't have time.
This world, this life is short, okay?
So, I get that people are upset, but the core message that everybody's getting out, there's one of two messages.
One message is, you should never eat animals at all, and that we should live this The idyllic existence where everyone lives off nuts and twigs and shit and vegetables and that's all you eat.
We're the one that's paying the money for habitat, for all these biologists to tell us exactly how many animals are out there.
They got boots on the ground and they're out there with the animals doing the number surveys, figuring out harvest numbers to try to achieve, carrying capacity.
The guys online who think that grizzly bears are almost extinct and like, how could you kill a bear?
You know, they want to kill me because I killed a bear.
In Alaska that they probably have no clue how many bear are running around Alaska, but somehow they know that I shouldn't have killed it.
They don't know how many are there.
They don't know what the bear with the bear population where I killed two brown bear, which are grizzly bear and a black bear.
They don't know that those bears need to be controlled.
This balance, there's some parts of it that are set in place before you and I were born, and before a lot of these people that are arguing, everybody, before everybody that's arguing about this has been born.
The cities were already in place a long time ago.
The food chain has already been in place.
The market chain has been in place, as far as getting food to supermarkets.
Most of the supermarkets that are in existence were there long before you and I start shopping at them, and that's a part of this equation of human beings.
Another part of the equation of human beings is what you're talking about with predators.
And this is one of the things that I had a discussion about with the guys who I really like.
And there's some misconception I didn't like these guys.
Well, it's a lot about factory farming, and a lot of it is about the amount of waste, methane, that gets into the atmosphere because of factory farming, the actual waste as far as their shit, the cows' shit, and the amount of devastation that does to our environment, and how much...
Actual land these animals need to graze in order to feed them.
These are really complicated numbers and disputed.
They went with the extreme on one end.
And there's some other people I'm having tomorrow.
Anyway, he's in Wisconsin in this really cool area where it's the...
You know they have, it's called the Driftless area, where the glacier's mist, so it's all hilly and gorgeous and beautiful, and that's where he lives, and he raises cows out there, and he's going to come in and give his perspective on a lot of this stuff as well.
But they had this really strange idea about wolves, and that I had to correct them, and this idea about, you know, that we've hunted the wolves to near extinction, and now they're reintroducing people and hunt them again, and, you know, they really have to stop that.
I'm like, man.
Wolves are fucking cool.
This is one of the things that I said to these guys.
Nobody wants to eliminate wolves, but throughout human history, long before we were around, people have had a problem with wolves.
And there's a reason for that.
All the big bad wolf stories, all the Little Red Riding Hood, all that shit.
It's because wolves are fucking terrifying.
They are very, very dangerous.
And I brought up the whole World War I incident where the Germans and the Russians had a fucking ceasefire because so many of them were getting killed by wolves.
They made an agreement.
They're like, look.
Obviously, we've got a real problem that's bigger than us.
Like, team people.
Let's stop killing each other for a little while and kill these fucking wolves.
And they killed the wolves and then went back to killing each other.
And by the way, this guy was suicidal and depressed, like to the extreme, ready to kill himself, and then decided to what he calls rewilding.
He reintroduced himself to the wild, started experiencing the wild, and fell in love with wildlife and nature, and that's what pulled him up out of this, and now it's his mission.
Well, I do want to say one thing, because we've talked about factory farming and the downside of it.
We're not lumping ranchers, regular ranchers that raise cattle.
I mean, my family is a cattle ranching family in eastern Oregon, so I'm not talking about cows that are out with enough pasture out there And then being killed, taking a mark and killed.
We're talking about that animals that don't leave the cage, that are standing in, you know, their own feces and just never move and never have a life and then have a bolt shove through their head and they're dead.
You know, we're talking that extreme.
That's not everybody.
I have a lot of respect for farmers and ranchers.
And I mean, so we don't want to lump everybody into the ranchers are all factory farmers, for sure.
And one of the things that I noticed when I was in Montana, when I first went hunting with Rinella, we went through the Missouri breaks, and there was all these cows wandering around.
And I was like, what is the deal with this?
Well, those cows literally wander free on public land.
And this is what this Oregon nutty shit is about, and what the Nevada nutty shit was about, with all these crazy ranchers that want to...
Fucking take over the government.
Like, yeah, that's not good.
But what do they call it?
Yal-Qaeda?
That's my favorite.
We don't even know.
We never even found out who came up with that description.
Someone was claiming that someone on the podcast came up with that description.
But when we were in Montana, that's when I first got introduced to this, these animals literally roam free and wild.
They sleep outside.
They eat outside.
They wander through.
And then they're corralled.
And when they're brought to slaughter, then they're corralled.
And so for the majority of their life, they live, you know, off the land.
It's a great show that they used to do on Showtime, but one of them they did was on PETA and the Animal Liberation Organization or whatever the fuck they call it.
Pull it up, Jamie, that someone sent me yesterday.
You cannot hunt mountain lions in California.
The reason for it is not logical.
It's all based on people who are animal lovers, who got into a position of power or voted this in.
Well, the study they're finding, because they kill these mountain lions when they start moving into neighborhoods and killing pets.
And it's super common.
What's the number of mountain lions they've killed this year?
Because it's crazy.
Okay, here we are.
107 mountain lions were killed last year, legally, by the government.
So that's 107 mountain lions that people didn't get tags for, which means that's money that didn't go into the state coffers, and it didn't go to conservation.
This is where I think there's a dispute and a misconception.
And the misconception is that hunters are all these evil people that want to hunt these animals to kill them so they can put them on their wall.
Almost all of the money that goes to fish and game, fish and wildlife management organizations that protect wetlands, that protect public lands for camping and for people to use and people to enjoy and go hike, the money to support those comes from hunting.
And there's huge bucks, and I think there's sheep there also.
But the bucks are what draw the money.
So they auctioned one off, and it went for $410,000 for one deer tag.
And most of that money, 90%, 10% goes to funding the auction and doing all the things that's required there.
90% of that $410,000 goes right to habitat restoration on the island, building water sources, enhancing those, relocating animals off that peninsula there because the genetics are so good, the bucks are big.
And the sheep are big.
So they relocate those superior genetics throughout Utah.
So then you might not draw that tag or you might not have $410,000, but those genetics are spread throughout Utah.
So they're spread in areas where general hunters have the access to.
And it's all positive.
It's all positive for the state park.
And anti-hunters will say, well, if you really cared about the animals, you just do the $410,000 and not go hunting.
There's a bunch of problems with all these discussions, and a big part of it is that the people that are arguing against the hunting, they don't regularly go into the wild, into these habitats, into these environments, and see how brutally hard they are for these animals to survive anyway.
It's not like, if you kill a buck, and that buck lived to be five years old, You might be taking a year off its life.
I mean, when you and I were in Colorado, it was one of the coolest fucking things we saw.
Remember when we went down near that little creek area, there was a huge herd of 20 elk together, and those elk were duking it out and slamming it into each other?
Even if we didn't have a bow, even if we weren't there to kill anything, if we just had calls, if we were just calling them in, it would have been an amazing experience.
Because when you were there with essentially as wild an animal as you're ever going to get, I mean, a North American elk is a 1,000 pound, gigantic, wild animal with a tree grown out of its head, and it's living the way it's lived for thousands of years.
And you, you know, you as a person who lives in Oregon, and me as a person who lives in California, we travel onto their land, we hike in to where they're at, and we experience this wild existence that they live in.
And we don't want to stop that.
We're not trying to kill them off.
We want more of them.
And this is the idea of killing a mature one.
You want to take out an animal that does not have much time left, and you help the rest of the animal survive because of that.
You make it so that the younger bulls have a chance to thrive and breed.
It would have been different because if I'm just an observer, internally, I feel a lot different.
I feel like I'm a predator when I have a weapon.
So I don't know if I would have worked as hard, if I would have cared as much, if we were just...
You know what I mean?
Because if you remember that, we snuck down, we were sneaking, or I mean, we were on our butts, kind of scooting down, and the two bulls were jostling around right there, kind of sparring a little bit, and we had a small window through the brush, and I was like, you were right here, and I was looking at him like, I said, Can you see that window?
Do you see that window where you can get that arrow through?
And it was just that and the intensity of that moment.
It's probably one of the worst things you can fucking eat, too.
Filled with nitrites and nitrates and whatever's bad for you.
I understand that they're trying to work it out for themselves.
And working it out for themselves, a lot of times people want to condemn people that are living a lifestyle that's outside of theirs.
They decide, hey, I'm going to live this small carbon footprint lifestyle where I'm going to be humane and I'm ethical and I'm going to be cruelty-free, hashtag cruelty-free, and I'm going to go on.
Go outside and drive for 20 minutes, and I guarantee you, you're gonna pass 30, 40 places that have dead animals in them.
Every fucking supermarket you pass by, every fast food place, every restaurant, every gas station that has Slim Jims at the fucking counter, all of that is animals.
So for you to find a hunter, the one person that you could point to that probably kills animals in the most ethical and humane way possible, And contributes.
He's an author and a guy who used to be a vegan who's not a hunter.
And panties will be bunched.
They will get sandy and tweets will be tweeted.
It's gonna get crazy.
I just think that podcasts like this and conversations like this with a guy like you, like I think what you do is the best way to do it.
I mean I've said this time and time again.
What you do is the best way to do it because what you're doing, first of all, it's the most difficult way to do it and you prepare your body for it in a very fucking grueling fashion.
We worked out before we got here and you work out every day and one of the reasons why you work out every day is fucking going through the mountains is hard as shit.
I mean, and you remember in Colorado when we were huffing it up that ridge, you know, we were at the bottom of the canyon, heard a bull bugling, is the bull you killed?
You basically have me on your back, and you're walking a mile with this, you know?
And there's one.
There's a photo.
I'm sure I have some photos of us from this very trip that we're talking about.
We're packing these things out.
But the point is, what you're doing to acquire, when you have an elk steak, and you sit down with this, and I had this conversation with Remy Warren about it, where he's like, it's almost like a religious experience.
With the food that you eat, even if you grow it yourself.
Like, my wife gardens, and I do as well, and she does it more than I do, but we'll have salad from something that we grew in our garden, and it's awesome, man.
Like, we're chopping tomatoes that we planted as seeds, and we fertilized the ground, and we watered it, and it came up, and we picked the tomato, and now we're slicing into it.
And that's where the hunt, that's where the hunt, where the training and the preparation And the reverence for the animal and the harvest of the animal and the care of the meat.
And you get it to your house and you put it in your freezer and then you thawed.
That whole process is right.
I'll agree with Remy.
There is reverence to it.
And it means so much.
And for a hunter, I think just being a provider and just being, like I always say, self-sufficient and doing it is hard.
It's a lot easier to go to the store and say, hey, here's some of my money.
Can I have that meat?
Thank you.
Somebody else did all that.
All the stuff we just talked about, somebody else did that with no reverence.
And I'm eating it with no reverence.
So to do it on your own is...
I mean, it's...
It's what I prepare for every day, and it just means so much.
Well, it's enriching in a very strange way that I never experienced in my life until I started hunting.
I'd never had this kind of connection with my food, except for maybe going fishing.
You know, this last summer, I took my kids to Hawaii and my kids love fishing.
My little girls love it.
It's fun because, you know, they can put a line in the water and when they catch something and then we're cooking it and eating it later, they're like, we caught this!
And they keep saying, like, mommy, we caught this fish that you're eating.
Like, there's like a primal connection to this thing.
But other than that, I had never experienced this sort of primal connection to your food.
All, you know, nonsense aside, like, there's a difference between a fish and a mammal.
There just is.
And there's a big difference between the reverence that you have for, in my opinion, the most majestic of animals that you hunt, which is elk.
I'd rather even just shoot, we shot at a rubber target today.
It was awesome.
I have a rubber elk that sits up on my hill, and we did a little FaceTime video where we were out there doing it, but just shooting at that rubber elk is cool.
Well, one of the fucking hilarious things in the show was the woman who was saying that the reason why there's not so many grizzlies is because we've killed off all their predators.
And, I mean, well, we are, but they're not really on the same page that we think we are, they think they are, so there's a little bit of a conflict there.
Eva Shockey, you should say who Eva is too, by the way.
She's the daughter of Jim Shockey, who's been on the show, who's an amazing, fascinating guy, who has a show, even if you don't like hunting, there's an amazing show called Uncharted.
And it's barely about hunting.
It's really about different cultures.
Yeah.
And this guy goes to all these...
This guy, Jim Shockey, is as cool and interesting as it gets.
And he travels to these remote places in the middle of Russia, and he went to Afghanistan, and he went to Africa to this remote village that has a massive problem with crocodiles.
He has that talent and right now he's doing it on the Outdoor Channel So that's if nothing else go and watch his work Yeah on the on that show and the new show Uncharted Uncharted which is amazing in the new show Carter's war with Carter's war is all about this guy who's combating against poaching in Africa and And it's all about stopping poachers from killing rhinos and elephants and all these different animals that they're killing in Africa.
And so it's like not really a hunting show as much as it's just a pure conservation show about a guy who's trying to stop poaching in Africa.
And it's amazing and gritty and incredibly well documented and shot and just...
Man, the world of Africa, if you want to watch a documentary, and I've mentioned this before to people, so I'm sorry if you've heard it before, but our friend Louis Theroux, who's been on the show before, who's an amazing documentary guy, documentarian from the UK, did a show on these hunting ranches in Africa, which is very different from what you did in Africa.
What you did in Africa, you went to the actual wild of Africa, not a high fence operation.
But these hunting ranches that they have set up in Africa, it's such a catch-22.
There's so much contradiction going on because on one hand, these animals are trapped in this...
It's usually enormous, like several thousand acre area.
Where they're trapped in these areas and they're hunted.
And people call it a canned hunt.
And a lot of people have a lot of hate for it.
But on the other hand, the animals that they're hunting...
Have never been healthier in higher numbers, and a lot of them were on the verge of extinction until they started implementing these high-fence operations.
And it goes back to the same thing we were talking about.
The money for conservation, the real money that these people are getting in Africa, is coming from hunting.
That's what's paying for these animals to survive, because so many people are going over there to hunt.
And people have an understanding today that they didn't have this several hundred years ago.
Like when people look at the gigantic mounds of buffalo skulls, that's a perfect example why you need conservation.
You can't just have people run out and kill these animals that have value with no consequence or with no monitoring of the herd populations and health.
That's when you get these horrific mass extinction events like what happened with the buffalo.
And the buffalo were basically brought to the verge of extinction.
Now, they're in healthy populations to the point where you can actually, in some places, you can hunt wild ones.
And the same thing can be said of elk.
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has done an amazing job of repopulating areas with elk where they were, at one point in time, completely eradicated.
And probably Rinello would know, so maybe you know if he's been on the show, but elk are, they're plains animals originally.
They're pushed into the mountains because the plains, that's where we live.
We live where there's water and in the valleys, that's where humans set up their cities and that's, you know, to get, use the rivers and we need water.
So they have been pushed and now they're mountain animals.
But now there's elk where there hasn't been elk before, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, you know, places like that.
So maybe they're Maybe there are more places than they've ever been, but I'm almost certain there's even more elk.
In Alaska, which is twice the size of Texas, it's a goddamn enormous state, and they are big, and there's a lot of them.
And they decimate herds of caribou, elk, and they estimate that something around where John and Jen live in Alberta, more than 50% of the moose are killed at birth.
But yeah, so where I was, I was in 16 in Alaska, and a non-resident can kill two brown bear, which are basically salmon-fed grizzly bear, and three black bear.
So you can go up there and kill five bear.
Which I wanted to do.
But don't think that I'm bloodthirsty.
Think that I want to help the moose and I like the bear meat.
But that gives you an example of how many bears there are.
And this is by biologists who are paid and who have went to school and who have studied the carrying capacity of the land and how many animals...
They determine this.
This isn't hunters determining this.
This is Alaska fishing game.
So that's where I have a problem with the people who think they know better than people who, this is their passion, this is what they care about, they have boots on the ground, they're doing it, they're setting the bag limits.
So if you don't live there and study this and this has been your life mission, you don't know more than them.
The whole place was covered in ice 10,000 years ago.
So shut up.
Like, what are you talking about?
Who is they?
What is this?
This is the world we're living in right now.
It's 2016 and a mountain lion ate this fucking dude's cat.
So what are we going to do?
Are we going to just let the mountain lion eat his kid now?
Because it would.
If you leave that kid on the swing and you go in to fucking answer your email real quick and you come back, your kid's not gone, you see that fucking tail hop over the fence.
These bears are overpopulating and moving into these neighborhoods, and they're doing it because they know the people live there, and it's a steady supply of food.
Yeah, when you live in Colorado, and Colorado, they had a big issue with it in this area where I was, where bears would find out that people put their garbage in a certain area.
And once they eat there once, that's it.
They have to capture those bears, and they either relocate them to zoos or figure something out.
But when I was there, we went to this wildlife rescue place, and they had this gigantic grizzly bear that they had gotten because, look at the fucking giant chunks of further tearing off of each other.
All sex, gender, all that nonsense aside, we're joking around here, folks.
What that is is just someone who doesn't understand.
It's crazy ignorance.
And the idea that you want to let these things keep fucking and breeding and overpopulating to the point where they're killing college students just outside of Rutgers.
And they're having these two 400 plus pound bears duke it out on your front lawn.
You know, I think, you know, we're only facilitating this issue right here with naming the bears and humanizing them.
Because if you watch the Super Bowl, it seemed like every other commercial was...
Something, an animal singing or an animal talking.
I was like, I mean, I saw sheep singing like in an acapella group.
I'm like, what is going on?
Well, and so that's where hunters are fighting for our place right now because the kids are seeing that and weak people are seeing that and people that don't get, hey, I want to be part of the food chain are seeing that and they're like humanizing these animals.
The sheep don't They don't care about anything but eating.
Yeah, well, I think we're trying to and I think with podcasts and with conversations on the Internet, at least information is getting to people that they weren't getting before.
I've had many, many people both on Twitter, on my website forum, on Facebook, on all these different forms of social media say I had a different perception of hunters.
Until you had guys like Cameron Haynes on, Jim Schocke, Steve Rinella, Steve Rinella, Remy Warren, these really intelligent people that can talk about Tim Burnett, who can talk about these things in a way where they explain to you their perspective.
They grew up with this.
This is how they've lived their life.
And if you lived your life in a city, it doesn't make sense to you.
It seems alien.
You watch Bambi.
You see these...
Yogi talks to Boo Boo.
They have conversations.
Why would you want to shoot one of them?
Until you venture into that world, you don't understand it.
And we're insulated from it because of supermarkets, because of this bizarre world we live in where we've created these artificial structures that we think are normal.
These cities and this method of acquiring food where you just run a piece of plastic through a machine and you walk away with all this food.
It's not healthy.
No, it's not.
It's like if you could have sex...
With a faceless person where you didn't even get to see their face, like all you saw was like their body from the shoulder down, and that's what you had sex with, and you had a kid with that person, you didn't even know that kid, and you walk away.
It's almost what's going on when you're acquiring food without ever growing it, without planting that seed.
And I'm not saying you should fucking plant all your food, and I'm not saying you should only hunt if you're going to eat meat, but what I'm saying is, if you could do it, It would bring you a little closer to understanding where that food comes from, and it'll give you just a broader view of this world we live in and what you're doing by consuming food.
You are consuming, whether you're consuming salad, and here's another thing, vegans.
I put this up the other day.
I was fucking with a bunch of people where I trolled.
People were sending me all this vegan stuff, so I just started trolling them by sending them all these scientific studies about plants and plant intelligence.
Which is a new form of study, or it's a new field of study, where they're finding out more and more each day that plants can do calculations, that they respond to being eaten, that they have different mechanisms to discourage predation.
That's where poison plants come from.
They're communicating with each other in some sort of strange way.
Mm-hmm.
What you're doing is you're making these bizarre moral judgments.
And they're based on convenience, and a lot of them are based on ignorance, and a lot of them, they don't hold up when you start looking at things objectively.
And people say to you, like, why don't you eat your dog?
Well, I don't want to eat my dog, okay?
Jesus Christ.
But my dog is a pet, okay?
My dog was raised from the time it was a baby.
I've had it since it was young.
I'm not going to eat it.
Right.
If someone does hunt a wild dog and eat it, and it's between that wild dog eating them and them eating that wild dog, you know, that's an unfortunate situation.
Well, and, you know, so we had a real, you know, real life example of that.
What I like as much as that, I mean, not as much as that, because I love being with somebody who's successful and who experiences a hunt, and I'm able to share in that.
And that's a whole other thing.
It's like, I didn't kill anything, but...
I was part of your hunt, and that meant as much to me as me getting my animal.
So, I mean, we have the whole camaraderie, and it's not every man for himself.
We're out there.
We're working together.
We want to be successful in harvest meat and take meat home to our families.
But what I like is people who are inspired.
They're not with me, but they see the training, and they're inspired to up their game.
Maybe they won't.
Run a 200-mile race or run 10 miles a day or do any of this, but maybe they'll run one mile.
My whole thing is, if you're not making a positive impact, what's your point?
What are you doing?
I want to make a positive impact on people, and that's why I love social media and sharing what I do, and hopefully it can inspire others to do more, and that's my motivation daily.
If he's got to work at 7, he's up at 4, and he's in the gym, and he'll show a photo of his alarm clock going off, and it'll show a photo of him in the gym making crazy faces where he's fucking full of sweat, and it makes me realize I'm a lazy bitch, and it makes me want to get up and work out.
I know I do, and I know that you've created a community.
Your Instagram page, in a lot of ways, and I don't want to say it's your community, but you have spawned through your Instagram page a lot of inspirational communities as well.
I've looked at these other people's pages that follow you, and I'll see the hashtag, keep hammering, and they're out doing things, and I see people responding to their posts.
You know, I saw this, and it made me go to the gym, and I wasn't going to, so thank you for that.
And it branches off.
It feeds into everybody, and it's positive.
It's positive for all of us.
And at the end of the day, look, you know, you can make all your fucking angry videos, and you can make all your angry posts and shit on this and shit on that, and get angry about people you don't even meet, but what is the message that you're putting out?
This angry, shitty message that you're putting out?
This angry, negative thing.
Are you pumping yourself up?
You're standing on a moral high ground and espousing your superiority to the world?
If you meet one of those people in real life, I guarantee you the conversation wouldn't be like it is in these one-sided debates or these one-sided broadcasts.
If someone makes a blog, this angry, shitty blog, have a conversation with that person.
Yeah.
Tweets and blogs, especially if they're negative, it's a very ineffective form of communication.
Negative videos, they're very ineffective because this is not a real conversation.
The way people are supposed to communicate is like you and I talking to each other.
You know, even fucking podcasts in a lot of ways.
It's one of the things why people get angry.
Because if someone listening to this right now, you're like, you motherfucker, I got something to say!
And some people, I think, this is a new world we're living in, this world of social media, this world where anybody can start a blog or anybody can start putting things up on Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
It's a new world, and we've got to learn how to navigate it better.
I could put up negative probably as much as positive.
I'm overcoming all sorts of hurdles all the time.
But what's the point?
Like I said, I want to be positive.
I want to inspire people.
And, you know, at the show in Utah this weekend...
I was amazed at the number of people that waited a long time to come up and share their story.
Share their story about losing weight or the success they've had or the impact.
As a hunter, a bow hunter, how would a bow hunter make that much of an impact?
I have no idea, but it happened.
If you ever wonder what's your calling in life, because I've wondered, what am I doing when I was young?
Where am I going?
What's going to happen?
Well, weekends like this weekend where I saw all those people and talked to all those people and had that interaction, that really drives home I'm doing what I'm meant to do.
I mean, I met you through bowhunting and social media.
I mean, your positive message reached me.
And we talked about it on the Gritty Bowman podcast, which we just did.
We dropped in and did a podcast, an impromptu podcast with these guys.
They call themselves the Gritty Bowman.
And it's a good podcast, but good bowhunting podcast.
Right.
And we talked about it.
I was interested in hunting for a long time before I met Steve Rinella.
And then when I was going on different websites and looking at different YouTube videos, I saw your stuff and I'm like, well, okay.
Well, here's this guy that's really into fitness.
He's into fitness and preparing himself to be what you call the ultimate predator, to be your best at what you like to do, which is bowhunting.
I'm like, well, this is kind of crazy.
So then I started watching your videos.
I'm like, what a positive dude.
Look at this guy.
He's working out.
He's giving people great advice.
He's telling people how to use proper technique with archery and how to have a good attitude about this and how it's all good.
And you're like, it's a beautiful day.
We're out here.
We're enjoying the beautiful weather.
We're out here practicing.
This is what we do every day.
And I was like, This is inspirational, and this is positive, and through you, you meet me, I use my, what I've created, this vehicle of social media and podcasting to broadcast it more, and then all these new positive branches spread out from that.
And like I said, when I had these guys from Cowspiracy, and these guys are vegans.
They're vegans who made a documentary about veganism and the powerful message that they had about the anti-factory farming message.
I had a great conversation with them.
And I believe, I truly believe that most of these people That are making angry posts on Twitter or angry videos.
If I sat down with them and had conversations with them, they'd be positive conversations.
Whether we agree or disagree, I have a very well thought out point.
I would imagine they have a very well thought out point too.
Where they're coming from is not a bad thing.
It's just something is lost in the broadcasting of this message.
I think that's a real problem that we're all sort of navigating in this world, is that somehow or another, the messages that get the most reaction are a lot of times the negative ones.
Like today, when we're practicing shooting at that rubber elk, there's something about...
There's a moment when you're at full draw and you're about to release that arrow where everything is still.
Everything is calm and you're not thinking about anything else other than releasing the perfect arrow because it requires so much concentration and so much focus and it was completely unexpected to me.
When I first started practicing archery, I thought it was going to be like, like, shooting a rifle requires a lot of focus.
It requires trigger discipline, you have to, like, steady the gun on a rest, you have to, like, you know, really stay still and squeeze that trigger, and there's problems with that.
You know, you get the shakes, you know, you get nerves, and even at a target range, you know the gun's going to make that kick, and so you get a little flinchy.
It's nothing like archery.
Archery is that times 100. There's no resting.
There's no rifle rest.
You have to hold your arms steady.
And the amount of movement that you make, because the arrow's only going at the most 300 feet a second, 350 if you've got some super bow and a light arrow.
The difference between that and a rifle is so different.
So, any movement translates to a giant amount of movement at the end where the arrow hits.
And it's just, as a discipline, it's cleansing.
Like, for me, I love, after a long day, I do a lot of shit, man.
I got a lot of things going on in my mind.
You know, I have...
Between comedy and podcasting and the UFC and family and business bullshit and it's like so much bullshit going on.
There's so many different things in my mind that for me what archery is is like this is like ultimate meditation this ultimate focus point where I draw back and I see that target And then I release that arrow.
And then when that arrow goes right into that bullseye, like we were shooting that rubber elk today, and when you nail one, it gets right in that small circle.
It's that moment in the impact and seeing where it hit.
So that's just a process of it.
But then when that happens...
Because why are we doing that?
We're doing that to prepare for the hunt.
So when all that work pays off on the hunt, it's just...
I don't know how to...
I see some videos and I see people running around and tackling each other and doing all that.
I never feel like that.
I always feel like...
I feel, I guess, blessed or thankful for the moment and mostly thankful that I made something that's very difficult happen.
You know, I achieved that goal and it's a...
I don't know.
It's so powerful.
And I just, that's what I, you know, I like people to shoot a bow because as you said, shooting a bow is centering and it's zen-like, I guess.
If I even know what zen means, I don't even know if I do, but it is relaxing.
It requires amazing focus.
So that's a good start.
But when you can block everything out, because you say you have to block everything out to make a good shot on that target, on the foam rubber, the Reinhardt elk today.
Well, on an animal, when the animal's moving, there's different factors that...
You know in line he's bugling your hearts going a million miles an hour and then when you can do it there and then Where you take that up another level is hunting the mounds like if you're sheep hunting and Then you have it's such a physical and then it could be dangerous also So you have so many things and when that happens on something like a sheep in the sheep mountains that is to me life-changing I mean experiences like that have made me who I am and people say You
know, bow hunting has made you who, yeah.
I mean, because coming through in crunch time like that is more pressure and more accomplishment than anything I'll ever do in normal life.
You learn more about your ability, you learn more about your faults, you learn about your weaknesses, you learn about your strengths, and you learn how to shore up those weaknesses and get stronger.
And that's why people who have never experienced it don't understand your dedication to fitness, don't understand your dedication to making sure you're in the best possible shape you can be, also that your archery practice is at the best it can be so that when that moment of truth arises, you can steady your nerves, you can keep it all together, and you can execute.
And that execution, that is an insanely difficult test that very few people have to ever do anything in life that's remotely as difficult as shoot an arrow at an elk that's 50 yards away and watch that arrow sink right into the vitals and realize that you've done it and realize that now you have enough meat for a year for your family with one animal, with one animal.
And are we quantifying life?
I mean, are we saying that all animals are worth something?
If that's the case, every pasta bowl that you eat, you eat a bowl of pasta, that pasta comes from grain.
That grain most likely was chopped from a field, from a combine that is 100 yards long, that it's indiscriminate, and it's running over everything, as we were talking about.
Running over mice and rabbits and fawns and ground nesting birds and anything else that might be in its path.
And there's a lot of death involved in that.
So every bowl of pasta that you eat, even though you feel like you're completely immune or completely free of any responsibility of death, it's not true.
Yeah, my friend Chris Ryan sent me this photograph, or Duncan actually sent me, Chris Ryan did too, but Duncan sent me this photograph of his girlfriend made meatballs, elk meatballs, and they were sitting there eating with their friends.
They had a friend over for dinner with some meat from an animal that I shot with a bow and arrow!
Well, it gives you an understanding of that environment that this environment really doesn't care that you make six figures.
It doesn't care that you drive a BMW. It doesn't care that you have a nice house.
It doesn't care.
It doesn't care.
In a lot of ways, I gravitate towards absolutes.
That's one of the reasons why I like martial arts.
It's one of the reasons I like pool.
If that ball drops in the hole, it's because you made it drop in the hole.
If you miss, you miss.
And there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
It's an absolute thing.
And I think in a lot of ways, hunting is similar in that way.
It doesn't care.
If you're playing pool, and you're a millionaire, and you're playing against a guy who's $2 in his The balls don't know this.
They don't care.
And it's the same in the woods.
When you are out there and you're in that environment, that is an absolute environment.
And absolute also in the fact that if you fucking zig when you should have zagged and you run across a sow grizzly and her cubs and she just decides today's your day, they don't give a fuck if you host the UFC. That bear doesn't give a fuck if you're the CEO of your company and you're out there.
He's who got me started in bow hunting, and he is the toughest man I've ever met.
I've shared more experiences with Roy in the mountains, these life-defining type experiences that we've talked about.
And, you know, the bond we've created together has been over a handful of experiences, you know?
And you realize when you're out of your comfort zone like that and when you're both so committed to a pursuit, those bonds form quickly, you know?
And so we've...
Formed a strong bond over a handful of experiences over a couple years.
Well, Roy and I, you know, we went to high school together.
We started bow hunting as, you know, I think 18, 19 years old and had hundreds of experiences, life-changing, life-defining experiences together over the years.
So our bond, naturally, was like brothers.
When everybody doubted me when I was growing up and doubted my dream of ever becoming anything, he never did.
He was always the guy that believed in me.
Well, this year, up sheep hunting.
He was up sheep hunting where we had sheep hunted before together, and I killed a ram.
And it was, you know, it's a tough, difficult, dangerous hunt.
But he's more prepared, or he was more prepared for hunts like that than anybody in the world.
He's done it.
He's done it as much as anyone that I know.
And I've been successful.
I think he had killed nine rams.
And he, one misstep, He fell and died.
Prime of his life, essentially, 49 years old.
Just, you know, a father, husband, three kids, somebody who even the toughest Alaska hunters looked up to.
One step.
Gone.
And that's, you know, that's, so it's not just talk when you say zig, you should have zagged, there's risk.
But that's, I mean, if you're gonna, it just puts everything in perspective.
That's the allure to it, because I can speak for Roy and I, because I know we always have known about the risk.
That was part of the draw is we wanted to go Where nobody else wanted to go or do things that nobody else wanted to do That was the only thing that made us difference and it goes back That made us different and it goes back to you know, the level the playing field Well, we felt like well if we would go and do the hardest hunts in the toughest conditions Nobody else would want to do that, but we would all of a sudden we were calling the shots We don't call the shots the mountain calls the shots
So we had an amazing moose hunt together, and I killed a nice big bull.
We just had just another epic adventure.
Something, you know, a hunt that maybe a handful of people would want to do because we were so far back.
You know miles back and had to haul a moose out over a mountain in the snow very very very difficult hunt but the ones it was just it was perfect because it was our last hunt together he died two weeks later and that hunt encapsulated everything about us it was just hard it was miserable and it was rewarding and and you know we achieved success where not very many people would have and we did it together and uh Yeah,
I mean, then two weeks later, it was his sheep hunting.
That's not what people, you know, people associate it almost instantly with, oh, you're fucking trophy hunting, you know, like, oh, you just want a bigger rack?
Like, they do that specifically because it's for the health of the population of these animals.
Well, listen, I mean, you know, Tim Gillingham, we were talking about on the Gritty Bowman podcast, who is a world champion archer who was talking about routinely shooting animals over 100 yards.
And then he does this because he's a world champion archer and he can do that.
When you're shooting a moose, the distance that you can shoot a moose versus a guy like me who, by the way, I still shoot every day, but I just, I can't do that.
I'm not, it's not an ethical distance for me, but it is for you.
And to have to haul that animal out, sorry to blow up your spot about 90 yards.
And he drops her, you know, one shot, made a good shot, he hit, like, missed her head, but hit, like, right here, and just folded her right there.
And what stands out for me is that...
You know, we were never worried about our lives were at stake.
We're never worried about, you know, like maybe a typical reaction would be like, oh my God, we could have died or something like that.
I was just like, I cussed because I'm like, I was mad she did that and required Roy to act.
You know, so I was just, I cussed and he's like, he's like, dude, I had to.
And so we weren't worried about ourselves.
We were just, we didn't want to have to kill another bear.
And we weren't nervous about the situation.
And I'm like, I said, I know.
And it was like, where else am I gonna have somebody that's on that same page with me that's calm in that situation and not see their life flash before their eyes?
Just do what you have to do to stop the risk.
That's never going to happen.
I'm never going to have somebody like that in my life again.
And I think about, we knew the risks, we're involved in everything that we did, and we embraced it, and we were fine with it, and it didn't consume us or anything.
And that's what I'm going to miss, is having somebody so...
But I would say he's as good as anybody that I know of.
That's why when he fell and I got the news that he fell and died...
I mean I could I could believe it I guess but I was mad and I'm still mad and I know everything happens for a reason and I know you know he has he has a lot of faith and I know you know We want to think everything's gonna be okay and we'll see each other again.
I know all that but it still makes me mad Because you know We missed out on a lot of experiences we'd still love to have, and we talked about, and we were just like, we had these big goals and big dreams, and I'm mad that that's gone.
It's something that very few people could probably relate to the kind of intimate friendship that you would have with someone who's experienced those kind of hunts.
It's been in the wilderness that's done...
Like that moose hunt that you were talking about when you guys were deep, deep in the wilderness like that.
It's something that very few people will ever...
Very few people have ever experienced that kind of danger, that kind of intimate moment in the wilderness.
Just that connection to the wild that you guys had together.
Well, it's very easy to get by in this world today.
It's very easy to get by without being that kind of a person.
It's very difficult to become that kind of a person, to always make the right decisions, to always push ahead, to always show character, to always be someone that you can count on.
It's it's hard for people to gravitate towards challenge, but through challenge you get the greatest reward because through staying in bed like this there's that the call of the bed is strong the warm bed and just oh Let me just hit fucking snooze in this alarm clock and get nine more minutes or let me just shut it off and call in sick to work Let me just not do what I'm supposed to do.
Let me just sleep And there was an article that I posted recently where they were talking about the power that dopamine has and dopamine in memories.
And it's one of the reasons why people have such a hard time kicking bad habits is because we gravitate towards these like...
reward experiences that we have in our head the reward of eating shitty food or of drinking too much or it's your your mind sort of carves these paths towards these uh rewarding like uh almost self-destructive behaviors because those they give you dopamine whether it's eating shitty food or whatever but it's the rare person whose mind gravitates towards the reward of accomplishment
the reward of pushing yourself through a very very difficult circumstance very difficult challenge to get to that feeling of accomplishment like you get i'm sure when you run a marathon or like you get when you get to the top of the mountain when you're pushing when you don't want to and you get to it and you did it and you know that you overcome this weakness inside of you that wants you to quit Right.
That everybody experiences at some point in their life.
And it's a matter of how you react to that experience and how you react to that pull.
It's one reason why, I mean, it seems minor, but, you know, when I get up at 4 or 5 in the morning, I have to be at work at 7. But when I get up early to do my fasted cardio runs, and I'm out, and so I have no fuel, I'm out there, there's nobody out at 4 or 5 in the morning.
And I'm running into the neighborhoods by my house.
All the lights are off.
I just envision people in there comfortable sleeping.
And I feel like, you know, it's...
I feel...
I feel the best then.
It's like when I run the mountain when it's sunny, I don't feel as good as when I run it when it's pouring rain.
Because it's easy to go out and do it when it's sunny.
If I run on a weekend in the middle of the day, lots of people out there.
I don't feel that accomplished.
When I do it at 4 or 5 in the morning when nobody's out there, it's just like that in my head.
My head might not be normal, but I just love...
And people always say...
You know, all that running, you're going to be in a wheelchair by the time you're 60. And I'm like, who's guaranteed to live to 60?
So some people criticize, and maybe I will be on a wheelchair, but I'll know that I lived as hard as I could live and pushed as hard as I could when I could do it.
Yeah, the people that try to knock someone down for working hard and overcoming extreme obstacles, what they're doing is they're responding to their own insecurity.
I mean, there's logical things.
There's people that's, you know, there's people that look at certain types of extreme sports where, you know, there's that BMX guy, what's his name, Dave Mira, who just committed suicide.
Horrible, horrible tragedy, you know husband father the whole deal I gotta think it's connected to head trauma and I think you're talking about a completely different thing when you're talking about head trauma because You know these poor guys that do these extreme sports and they wind up getting really banged up Yeah, and that causes some pretty severe depression so I think In circumstances like that, I think you're talking about a kind of a different animal, but people will criticize people who take chances in life.
People will criticize people who work hard.
You know, like, why do you have to lift weights?
Why do you...
Like, there was an article that we had talked about that some asshole had written in some bow hunting magazine about you.
Yeah, it was just talking shit about, like, why does, you know, he have to, you know, you don't have to lift weights like this guy.
You don't have to, this is ridiculous.
Well, guess what?
Yeah, you do.
If you want to do what you can do, you have to.
Yeah.
What he's doing by writing that is looking at someone who works harder than him, accomplishes more than him, and he's trying to chop you down.
And that's crabs in a bucket, man.
That's what people do.
You ever see crabs in a bucket?
If you don't know what I'm talking about, folks, if you see crabs in a bucket, they never get out of that fucking bucket.
Because if they work together, one crab could stand on another crab, and the other crab could grab them on top, and then they could figure out a way to push that bucket over, and they could all get out.
But nope.
What happens is one crab tries to get to the top, and the other crabs pull them down.
And that's what a lot of people are.
A lot of people are crabs in a bucket.
And it's just a weakness and an insecurity and a lot of times it's because they don't know anybody like you.
They don't know anybody like Roy.
They don't know anybody that can push them.
They don't know anybody that they can look at their friend and they can say, you know, this motherfucker can do it.
I can do it too.
I know what he would do right now.
Here's a funny story.
I was in...
Texas with Aubrey, and we were pig hunting, and we were in this fucking miserable environment.
There were so many mosquitoes.
It was brutal.
I mean, we were just getting mauled.
By the end of the day, I mean, it looked like I had some kind of crazy disease, like my whole body was covered in mosquito bites.
And I thought to myself while I was out there, if Cam Haynes was out here, he would fucking keep going.
He would just deal with the fact that mosquitoes are biting him and he would keep going.
And Aubrey said, how the fuck did you get through all those mosquitoes?
And I said, I thought that if Cam Haynes was out here, he would keep going.
He goes, that's hilarious.
He goes, I thought if Joe Rogan can do it, I can do it.
So you, without even being there, pushed me, and me, because I kept going, it pushed him.
It was fucking miserable.
It was this cloud of mosquitoes we just swarmed on.
Well, you know, I mean, it is a funny story, but...
I do in some way feel responsibility to the people that follow me or look up to me to not give up.
I know people look to me for inspiration and it helps.
It's like when I don't feel like doing something, I think about all the people who expect me to.
I mean, I have a huge drive to do it myself, but it's just like sometimes those little things and thinking about this story with you or people who have lost 100 pounds thinking about, you know, the work I put in.
It's like all those things have made me who I am.
So it's not like I might think about specific stories, but I think about all the people who have been such a positive person.
They've made such a positive impact on me, because I guess I have it on them, you know, so in return.
And it makes me, you know, like the Bigfoot 200 that I'm doing, if I'm just on my own and nobody knows who I am, I'm much less, much less, much, or not as tough, much less resilient as the guy I'm going to be who will line much less resilient as the guy I'm going to be who will line up to run the Bigfoot Because I feel like I'll have an army of people helping me, push me.
And I just think that that's, you know, as a society...
That's a type of things we need to focus on, I believe.
When you inspire people, I do these meet and greets after shows all the time.
And I can't tell you how many people I'll come up to after a show that say, I lost 100 pounds.
Once I started listening to your podcast, I started eating healthy.
I started looking at my body in a different way.
I started realizing I would be happier if I took care of myself.
And then I'm happier when I do force myself to exercise.
Right.
And now I do it every day and I'm drinking kale shakes and I'm eating healthy foods and I stop drinking and all this.
And it makes me feel better.
I mean, I think about it when I work out.
I think that's where inspiration is a two-way street.
And then it's also like we were talking about like you've created a community through your social media and through the positive posts that you make and through...
Through all your actions and all the different things you've done, you've created this sort of sense of community where all these other people, they feed off of that, and you feed off of them, and we all feed off of each other.
You know, people want to be that kind of person, you know?
People don't want to be a lazy fuck who criticizes people for no reason.
They don't want to be that guy that's weak and that talks shit about someone when they're not there because they feel bad that that person is out there working out.
Like, you don't have to do what Cam Haynes is doing.
Like, shut the fuck up.
You know what you're doing, bitch.
You know what you're doing when you're doing that.
While you're doing it, you know what you're doing.
While you're making those, you know, there's a little sneaky voice in the back of your head, unless you're completely obtuse, unless you're completely oblivious to the way you interact and interface with the world, you know what you're doing when you're saying those things.
You're trying to chop someone down because they make you feel weak.
Instead of saying, this guy is out there doing something awesome.
What's negative about someone working out and being healthy?
What's negative about someone who values physical fitness and accomplishing difficult goals?
That is the essence of character.
That's the essence of what's inspirational about a person.
I'm not inspired by someone who sleeps till 2. I'm not inspired by someone who can't not eat shitty food and loves to smoke.
And so in my own little bowhunting world, I just try to live up to that.
And, you know, I guess what I wanted, I want to thank you for giving me this platform, giving me access to all you've created here, because, you know, as we've talked about, that's what feels good, to reach people, inspire people, and yeah, maybe they'll be inspired, maybe even a little by the heartbreak of losing a good buddy, you know, maybe to be...
A better friend or maybe to be somebody who, I don't know, that integral part of somebody else's life, maybe that'll inspire them, maybe the workout part, who knows?
Maybe to be a better, I don't know, more understanding to the vegans and be able to explain it better.
There's so much you can take from this podcast and without you giving me this microphone, it would never happen.
So I want to thank you and I'm so grateful.
I'm so happy I've met you and we've created this friendship.
This podcast doesn't exist if it's not for other people.
I mean, all I am is like an antenna or something, just broadcasting my thoughts and other people's thoughts too.
And without a guy like you to introduce me to something like bowhunting, I would have no idea.
I would have gone to my grave without having any idea how rewarding it is to go and get my own meat Through archery in the woods, how difficult it is to pursue such an incredibly demanding discipline and what that's about.
And for you being inspirational and for you creating those videos, you reached me.
And you touched me with your positivity and with your inspiration and with your dedication and focus.
And I live for that, man.
I live for inspiration.
That's my fuel.
I love it.
I love inspiring people.
I love people that are inspiring me and I love inspiring other people.
I love inspiration.
I think it's one of the most powerful aspects about our newfound ability to communicate with each other.
And through those lessons of failure, sometimes the disappointment you have in yourself when you come up short is the fuel you need to make sure you never come up short that way again.
And maybe you'll come up short another way next week.
Well, that fucking thing's never going to happen again either.
The essence of jiu-jitsu is being comfortable while you're uncomfortable.
Because...
Everybody gets tapped.
There's no way to get good at jujitsu unless you get mauled by another person.
It's the only way.
And, you know, for me, I started jujitsu as, you know, a former taekwondo champion who would spend my whole life...
I was successful at striking.
My whole life I had done, you know...
Different forms of striking competitions, and then all of a sudden I'm doing jujitsu and getting fucking crushed by people of my size or smaller, and they're just beating the piss out of me.
Like I'm a ragdoll, like I'm a grappling dummy.
And for me, I had to realize, first of all, I had to address the fact that I was nowhere near as competent in self-defense as I thought I was.
Like, as soon as these guys got a hold of me, they were just strangling me.
I was like, okay.
Like, my perception of what I could do versus the reality of what I could do, I had to just address it.
I had to figure it out.
And so, okay, now I gotta get fucking crazy and attached to this shit.
And then I became...
Completely obsessed with that, of training.
But that's one of the beautiful things about Jiu-Jitsu.
One of the things about Jiu-Jitsu that I admire most in the truly good practitioners is they have very healthy egos.
I think all very difficult things Are good for you.
As long as it doesn't kill you, it's good for you.
I mean, these goddamn ultramarathons you're running, this crazy fuck, 100 miles is not enough.
You're like, well, I've already done that a couple of times, now I've got to do a 200. So here's the Bigfoot 200. Here's quick facts Jamie just pulled up.
Just under 50,000 feet.
Of ascent.
15,240 meters of ascent.
More than 96,000 feet of elevation change.
203.8 miles, nonstop, point to point.
Six sleep stations with full aid, hot food, medical and crew access.
16 full aid stations.
The race starts at Mount St. Helens in the Cascade Mountain Range of Washington State and finishes in Randall, Washington, traversing point-to-point the Cascade Mountains.
Yeah, right now I am, you know, and I was up 182 or 183, and so I'm trying to, I want to get down, I'd like to get 69 maybe, you know, and I think, I just really feel like I'd be efficient at that, and I just, you know, it's, it's, It's physical, but it's a lot mental also.
So, I mean, I'll prepare my body for it, but it's just whether I can hydrate and fuel well enough, smart enough, and just do everything, keep my feet healthy, that's what's going to determine whether I can finish in 60 hours.
So, I think I believe I have what it takes, but a lot of people probably have what it takes, but to implement it is going to be difficult, but I'm...
If I remember correctly, it's one way up during the day and you come back down during night and then you switch and go the opposite way the next day up and down.
If you can make it to that fifth turn, it's also the same kind of way.
But you know life happened I was born this or that so he was he was a freak in in what what you might Call normal athletic events maybe bow hunting, you know qualifies and it's a hundred percent qualifies I mean look at this fighting qualifies athletics I think it does but it's way more intense and regular athletics something way more Personal and dangerous about the goal of knocking someone unconscious while they're trying to knock you unconscious and if Fighting if that counts
if that's athletics bowhunting is most certainly athletics, but I think we both agree that it's It's a little bit more intense than a sport.
It's more it's almost disrespectful in a way not I mean if you consider it a sport you call it a sport that's fine, but in my view It's so much about the life and the reverence for this animal that you hunt and then take.
It's not, we won the Super Bowl, we scored the goal, the ball went in the hole.